exouthenismos and the Corrections

Political incorrectness is the logical end to the long American campaign against etiquette, a campaign that takes pride in ignorance of silverware. Announcing that you “don’t have time for political correctness” is like saying “I use whatever tool moves the food to my mouth.”

Premised on a warped sense of equality, the incorrect are confused over the difference between 'no etiquette' and 'new etiquette'. The dislike of etiquette stems from a Puritan desire to define the New World against the Old and all its royalty. That project has carried forward in the ordinary address we use for occupants of the nation’s highest office:

Mr. President.

America thought it could dispense with the elite’s stuffy rules when in fact it tasked itself with building the world’s most complicated system of manners. American etiquette, consequently, suffers from poor design.

Above all, Americans hate strict social codes. The notion of royal highnesses and supreme leaders clashes with the American psyche. We think no one else is any better than us. We take offense when others fail to address us as equals-who-pay-taxes. We disapprove of specialized language; we have a sixth sense for conceit.

That egalitarian ethos often turns to exouthenismos, or expressions of contempt. Living an ordinary gracious life is easy enough until being no better than anyone else means I don’t have to extend you simple courtesies. Then, through the tortured logic of incorrectness (always masked as brave frankness), we lend neighbors ladders to hang decorative lights while refusing to learn the names of holidays we don’t celebrate. Beer drinkers scoff at wine drinkers. The monosyllabic scorn those who propose more syllables.

The contempt goes in all directions. Corrections really happen. One-upmanship reduces ethics to grammatical rules.

If the incorrect confuse rudeness for equality, the offended fail to appreciate the difference between an offense and inexactness. (Is it always an offense? Or is it sometimes just an incomplete statement? And what would it accomplish to at last say everything?) Some feign inclusivity while ostracizing those who fail to speak properly. A 2018 survey of the American electorate by More in Common found that “political correctness” leaves many people feeling “bewildered” and beholden to rules they have “not learned to decode.”

The corrections are not reserved for the offensive. They also serve as purification among the like-minded. Watch a room full of otherwise inspiring people take turns correcting one another and see the bright designs of critical reflection turn to musty drapery.

The corrections forget, or deny, that choosing words carefully is about constructing livable spaces. We bend grammar, add syllables, turn Serena into a verb, and adjust our relationships with pronouns because the old language is uninhabitable. These modifications issue invitations to a shared expanse of open sky. They serve the same basic function as please and thank you. They recognize the occasion. They lay claim to a new world and to the next world that follows and to the one after that. 

Welcome the Age of Irony

An outraged acquaintance of mine spent 2016 circulating examples of political correctness —each one an act of silencing and bureaucratic cruelty done for the sake of a protected class.

What were once annoying social media tropes have become for many evidence that the excesses of political correctness are to blame for the 2016 election upset. The Democrats lost, the argument goes, because they privileged identity politics over economic and social stability for all. The conceit of liberal hypocrisy is the supposed moral of the story.

But that argument confuses irony for hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy is an internal contradiction. It is the result of trying to occupy two opposing positions at once, such as campaigning on an America-first platform while investing primarily in businesses overseas.

Irony is a split perspective. Kenneth Burke calls irony "the perspective of perspectives." In ironic moments, we hold a single position but suddenly see how it leads in two opposing directions. If hypocrisy takes us off course, irony spins us around in place. It is disorienting, and, unlike hypocrisy, it cannot be repaired. We can't un-see multiple perspectives once we have seen them. 

Irony is often unintentional. An animal rights activist interviewed by the Guardian did not intend to be ironic when he argued that asking him his opinion on human rights and human suffering was "a form of deflection." 

One essayist years ago declared September 11th the end of irony. Cool distance, he believed, had given way to moral clarity leaving us only one way of seeing everything. After the 2016 election, Christy Wampole again declared the end of irony, which she defined as apolitical hipsterism. Those arguments, likewise, confuse irony for cynicism.

Irony is not the result of distance. It is the product of intimacy. A statement feels ironic when it folds back on itself and we come up against the full implications of our position.

I once thought the show Modern Family reflected a permanent movement away from crude bigotry until I suddenly saw the resemblances between it and the new first family: an older man remarried to a trophy immigrant wife with a thick accent, an Orthodox Jewish son-in-law, a daughter who converted to Judaism, and a blended family of kids from different marriages.

It is tempting to cast them as a family of hypocrites (as they will do to those who do not embrace them). Doing so misses the irony. Look close and all the differences look the same. Discrimination becomes a lack of discrimination. Rembert Browne put it best: “For over a year, their hatred was a revolving door. They did not discriminate: They hated black people, they hated women, they hated immigrants, they hated Muslims, they hated Jews, they hated gay people, they hated Hispanic people — and if you could be white and any of those things, they hated you, too.”

Irony is unsettling. To wish its end is to vote for sanity. But it would be a mistake to retreat from irony. It is our best defense against an unprincipled, indiscriminate force.

Irony’s lesson is that no statement ever necessarily leads in one sure direction. That lesson should be of some comfort right now. The challenge is to invite irony’s split perspective. Being ironic requires us to press up close against arguments that repel us so that we might see in what other directions they might go.