Never Trust the Unironic

You're blind if you're not laughing

Alfred Nobel dreamed of a safer way of blowing things up, and millions wept because he made it a reality. The Swedish chemist knew controlled explosions radically shortened construction times and made harvesting metals from the earth easier. But control was often in short supply, and he lost his brother in an accidental nitroglycerin explosion in 1864.

After much experimentation, Nobel learned how to stabilize nitroglycerin with inert materials: dynamite was born. Ironically, his safety invention was soon used to slaughter humans by the thousand. Armies adopted it for grenades and artillery. Anarchists and revolutionaries loved the expansive destruction dynamite brought to their causes, resulting in hundreds of dynamite attacks in the 19th and 20th centuries. By the time he was an old man, newspapers called Nobel, “The Merchant of Death.”

I just said this twist was ironic. Nobel aimed at preventing deaths and caused them instead. Are you not entertained? Where is your wry chuckle? Can’t you manage even a huff of appreciation for this magnificence?

No? What about these others? I can keep examples coming all day because reality never stints in juxtaposing assumption and reality, intention and outcome.

• Eli Wittney invented the cotton gin in 1793 to make clothing affordable. It did. It also made slave-operated cotton plantations incredibly profitable, which drove the US enslaved population from 700,000 to 3.95 million by 1860.

• The internet was supposed to foster human connection and smash information roadblocks. It did. It’s also eroded local relationships, created a mental health crisis, and allowed an epidemic of misinformation to flow unimpeded.

• Thomas Midgley Jr. wanted to improve engine performance and reduce engine knocking. His leaded gasoline did the trick. But it also poisoned the air, water, and soil worldwide, causing neurological damage and premature death.

Do you see it? Irony is a wisdom-laden thread running through reality, and if we can’t savor it, or even spot it, we should assume our understanding doesn’t approximate reality; there’s a very good chance we’re deluded.

If you think this sounds dark, it works the opposite way too, the so-called silver lining:

• The Black Death killed half of Europe. But the masses flourished economically for generations because wages skyrocketed as job competition plummeted

• The Cold War’s constant threat of nuclear annihilation was terrifying, but drove a massive investment in science that led to space travel, computers, satellites, and the internet.

• The Turks captured Constantinople in 1453 in a bloody siege that ended the Roman Empire, but it drove Greek scholars with lost classical texts to take refuge in the West and ignited the Renaissance.

The degree to which assumptions differ from outcomes varies among humans and the phenomena of our world, but it’s always there. If you don’t see irony all around you, there are three likely reasons:

• You’re not looking closely and reading the fine print.

• You haven’t waited long enough. Ironies often take decades or centuries to play out and become obvious.

• You’ve been captured by a label or identity that’s stolen your cognitive flexibility and humor.

I’ve sometimes been mauled by fate so badly that I start to lose my sense of irony, particularly about myself. I stop thinking clearly and the world assumes a black-and-white finality. When encountering people in this state we should be sympathetic. We should help them. But we should absolutely not trust them; they’ve lost something critical for interpreting reality and have probably embraced delusion.

Fanatics of all kinds are famous for their inability to appreciate irony; they’re too literal-minded. They struggle with ambiguity and complexity. HR departments and bureaucracies seem oblivious to the ironies and absurdities their policies create. Tyrants murder those daring to deploy irony and satire against them, for they understand that nothing undermines a foundation as forcefully as laughter.

Can dyed-in-the-wool Republicans and Democrats laugh at their presidents’ follies? Do communists, libertarians, and socialists smirk at their ideologies’ absurdities? Why do the devout never seem to chuckle at the inanities sprinkled amid their admirable beliefs?

Most can’t without experiencing the painful sting of cognitive dissonance because they’ve let those labels into their identities. They are their labels. Acknowledging the ways their identitarian beliefs differ from reality undermines who they are and hurts. And so they try to block out the dissonance and the many signs that reality isn’t adhering to anyone’s ideology.

We can see Socrates’s whole project as a public-service exercise in irony spotting, of helping people develop an eye for it. We hear about his Socratic Method of asking questions, but often miss that it was in the service of irony. Socrates claims to know nothing and asks self-proclaimed experts to explain things to him. His adroit inquiry exposes experts’ ignorance, thus revealing ironic situations: a man without knowledge being wiser than men who claim to know.

Socrates does not mock. He does not preach. He creates a vacuum where assumptions implode and irony shines brightly against the emptiness.

This is why Socrates’s student Xenophon taught his lessons through irony. Take The Education of Cyrus at face value — which many people do — and you’ll come to the wrong conclusions. But close readings reveal how Xenophon spends the book juxtaposing ironies from which his true lessons can be derived. This is akin to teaching a man to fish instead of handing him a sandwich. The irony-spotting training can serve us throughout life.

Of course, no one needs philosophers to see these lessons. We’re swimming in them, and anyone paying attention notices. Some respond by crumpling or adopting cold-eyed cynicism — a nihilism they often project on the world with acerbic sarcasm. The Stoics recognized this tendency as a cover for emotional disorder, cynical detachment, and a misunderstanding of how reality works.

The Stoics embraced irony, but not to cultivate despair and nihilism, but laughter and virtue. The Stoic Seneca said:

“…we should imitate Democritus rather than Heraclitus. For the latter, every time he went out into public, used to weep; the former used to laugh. One saw everything we do as wretchedness, the other as absurdity. Things should be made light of, and taken more easily: it is more civilized to laugh at life than to bewail it.” — Seneca, On Tranquility of the Mind, 15.2.

No one can be just and wise if they can’t see how unpredictable things are, and how little control humans often have. The most well-founded plans go awry. Embracing black-and-white simplicity makes the world seem legible and friendly, but the world is complex. Its oversimplification makes us stupid, injustice-prone, and cognitively stilted.

The poet John Keats wrote to his brother about the need for “…negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts…”. He wasn’t chasing nihilism, but rather cognitive flexibility. Negative capability requires disciplined restraint and holding contradictions and ironies in tension with each other without collapsing them into simplified dogma and identity.

Our world is filled with the opposite of negative capability. A thousand ideologies vie for loyalty. NIMBY vs YIMBY. Free traders vs protectionists. AI doomers vs singularity prophets.

If humanity had a long track record of dogmas leading to utopia, this might be justified. But we see a different pattern — strategies work in some situations but backfire in others, leading to more ironies. Others work at the outset but mature into headaches. Doubling down on ideology leaves us inflexible and fragile when unpleasant ironies show up.

I recently read Theodore Rex, which covers Teddy Roosevelt’s time as president, and the ironies are everywhere. A big-game hunter who pioneered environmentalism, a patrician championing the nation’s workers, a warrior — and sometimes warmonger — who earned a Nobel Peace Prize and worked to defuse conflicts. He not only endured these ironies, but embraced them and turned them into strengths. He easily pivoted amid uncertainty when old ideas failed to get the job done.

His enemies criticized him as an inconsistent flip-flopper, someone who was confused or trying to play both sides. Attending a rally, he’d give a long speech that began praising capitalism for lifting people out of poverty, but ended with a diatribe against corporations seeking monopolistic tyranny over the American public. Well, which is it, his critics asked. Is capitalism good or bad?

Roosevelt became increasingly annoyed that people couldn’t see that the answer was yes. Capitalism — and individual companies — are good and bad, often at the same time. His approach to anti-trust regulation tried to preserve the former while limiting the latter with as light a touch as possible. Today, we could use a bit more of that Rooseveltian nuance.

Look around social media or Substack and you see the pattern: ironic remarks about controversial topics get hijacked by the literal-minded, who can’t laugh at their own positions. When things are only black or white, every utterance is a test of moral rectitude, which much of humanity fails.

Irony prevents ideas and philosophy from hardening into dogma. It’s a solvent for the intractable, and a lubricant for getting through life.

I think Xenophon and Socrates spent so much time playing with irony because they felt truth couldn’t be handed over, but only earned and uncovered. If you don’t learn to see the irony, philosophy is just instruction and not a way of life. With it, it becomes and endless inquiry that never ceases to bear fruit.

So look around, chuckle at what reality has juxtaposed, and set yourself free.

If You're Not Laughing, You're Probably Doing Stoicism Wrong

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