ParisTampaBlog

The thinker and writer Roger Scruton says, in a winter 2009 City Journal article, that if we want a simple definition of the West as it is today, the concept of citizenship is a good starting point, but it’s only a starting point. It’s not enough. John Locke’s social contract, bringing about responsible cooperation between the governed and the governor, doesn’t by itself explain the strength and staying power of the West.

There are other qualities, two of them in particular, gifts, according to Scruton, originating in our Judeo-Christian tradition and providing the responsible citizen with a heart, which more than the head is the source of our civilization’s strength. These gifts are forgiveness and irony.

The first of these gifts is forgiveness. … And in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the primary act of sacrifice is forgiveness. The one who forgives sacrifices resentment and thereby renounces something that had been dear to his heart….

[Then there is]  irony. … a new kind of irony dominates Christ’s judgments and parables, which look on the spectacle of human folly and wryly show us how to live with it. A telling example is Christ’s verdict in the case of the woman taken in adultery: “Let he who is without fault cast the first stone.”

Scruton says that the late Richard Rorty saw irony as a state of mind intimately connected with the postmodern worldview—a withdrawal from judgment that nevertheless aims at a kind of consensus, a shared agreement not to judge.

The ironic temperament, however, is better understood as a virtue—a disposition aimed at a kind of practical fulfillment and moral success. Venturing a definition of this virtue, I would describe it as a habit of acknowledging the otherness of everything, including oneself…. [Irony] simply recognizes that the one who judges is also judged, and judged by himself.

I would agree with Scruton, that forgiveness and irony are essential virtues, no less than, say, justice and courage, but are they more important than the other 5 cardinal virtues, or the other 52, or 118?  And are they the gifts of the Judeo-Christian tradition? I would say no. The virtues exemplify what we are capable of being at our best, not necessarily what we are. And their origin is from within our nature, more than from any tradition.

And I would define forgiveness and irony slightly differently than Scruton. Forgiveness for me is a kind of acceptance, an acceptance of others as they are, with no thought of making them into what we would like them to be. We “forgive” our own children by loving them as they reveal to us who they are, even if what they reveal is not what we would have liked them to be.

And if we’re large souled we forgive the other person, who does us wrong, in much the same way. An interesting question, can we forgive the suicide bomber? Or rather the handler who made that bomber? Forgiveness is now being tested severely.

Irony has almost as many definitions as there are people making them. For me irony reveals an awareness of how different things are from what they would be, might have been, could be, from what they were meant to be. An awareness that things are not as they might seem to be.

I liken irony to the quality of being able to laugh at myself, because in my life things have never been what they were supposed to be, and the disparity was more comic than tragic. Things have nearly always turned out differently from what I  had expected.

The disparity could be tragic, when the woman you marry is your own mother, or when you kill the woman you love through a mistake, or it could be comic, when you get run over by a truck while standing properly on the sidewalk, or when the person you tried so hard to avoid is the very first person you bump into as you leave the gathering.

I would point out the quality or virtue of irony is the enemy of all true believers, and as such could be our most successful weapon in our on-going struggle with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and other failed states. But so far we haven’t found a way to deliver it. And instead these people go on believing that their reality is the only reality.

The ironic temperament, if we could ever introduce it into these lands, would not permit that.

This entry was posted on April 20, 2009 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Idle Thoughts. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.