Want Wisdom? Choose Irony/Zakou Ismael): Impression formation in social psychology refers to the process by which individual pieces of information about another person are integrated to form a global impression of the individual (i.e. how one person perceives another person). In psychology, a first impression is the event when one person first encounters another person and forms a mental image of that person. Impression accuracy varies depending on the observer and the target (person, object, scene, etc.) being observed. Here’s the trouble with life: We often face choices in which each of the available options could save or screw us, tough-judgment-call situations in which it’s not obvious whether to go with plan A or B either of which could be just the ticket or just the ticket to hell. Irony calls attention to, and embraces this problem. Originally, irony meant saying one thing but meaning the opposite (more like sarcasm) but irony has come to mean calling attention to two opposites at once, exposing the potential for good and bad in both. 1. Ironic stories and situations: Poor tragic Oedipus goes out of his way to avoid his dreadful fate and falls face-first into it. It’s ironic. It just goes to show: sometimes the right thing to do turns out to be the wrong thing to do. 2. Ironic puns: In arguing that true love sometimes requires deception, Shakespeare says “Thus I lie with her and she with me, and in our faults by lies we flattered be,” which exposes the challenge in long-term partnership, since your can’t afford to lie and yet your disappointing truths can cast a long terrible shadow. You’ve got to decide what’s worth sharing and what’s worth keeping to yourself, and it’s not always easy. 3. Ironic sayings: I like to say, No matter how hard I chase the truth it will never catch me. Sure, it makes me sound like I want the truth and don’t, but I love it because it points ironically to the choice about truth I face and not just in partnership. After all, I’m in a long-term relationship with myself, so there will be times when I better face even harsh truths, and times when I can afford to ignore them, and might do better by doing so. I believe in optimal illusion, kidding myself where it’s helpful, but not where it hurts, and this aphorism keeps the ironic choice alive in me. Likewise, my dad used to say, I haven’t lived my life in vain for nothing. Like me, he found such irony delightful. He called such sayings, “Escherisms” after MC Escher’s optical illusions, staircases that ambiguously go up or down so you can’t tell which way to go. Should I think of my life as lived in vain or not? By chanting such ironic mantras and delighting in them, we ease ourselves into life’s hot water of choosing between options when the best option isn’t obvious. 4. Koans: People who aren’t settled into life’s hot water often claim to embrace formulas for always choosing right, which to my ironic ear sound self-contradictory: Don’t be judgmental (a judgment), commit yourself to flexibility (a commitment), do not be negative (a negative statement), be intolerant of intolerance (an intolerance). I love these not as formulas but as ways to tease out the dilemmas we face, difficult choices about when to be judgmental, committed, negative and intolerant. 5. Liar’s paradoxes: Syntactically these hypocritical formulas are described as “liar’s paradoxes” based on the 2,600 year old self-contradictory conundrum “I am lying” which is true if it’s false and false if its true. The liar’s paradox has fascinated philosophers, logicians and even mathematicians over the millennia, but it has bearing on our personal lives too, for example when someone says “Hey I was just kidding. Can’t you take a joke? Man you are so sensitive!” after attacking/teasing you, and you can’t tell whether to laugh or assume you were just sucker-punched, a terrible, yet popular abuse of irony as a way to attack and duck the fallout. Or when people say “no, really” which translates as “I know you don’t believe me but believe me, you can believe me.” When should you hear someone’s argument sincere and credible? When should you hear it as a manipulation? Again, it’s not always easy to know. (See Liars Paradox Moral Litmus Test) 6. Antimonies: In philosophy that’s the term for two valued and embraced truths that are at odds with each other. Freedom and safety, for example. We embrace both but they’re often in conflict so we have to decide, situation by situation, where to emphasize which. We like liberty but we worry about anarchy, we like the safety provided by civil society’s laws but we don’t like to be oppressed by them. 7. Oxymorons: The “United States” is an ironic oxymoron with deep wisdom implications. Which are we, one united country or a bunch of states? US history can be read as a debate over just this question. Once, when doing trainings on critical thinking for the US Army, I highlighted the ambiguity expressed by the oft-cited oxymoron, military intelligence. The critical thinking trainings were designed to make individual soldiers more intelligent, more able to think on their own, yet most military training is designed to teach soldiers to act as a unified force, that is as a military whole in which individual intelligence is subordinated. Again when to be united and when to act individually, a familiar tough judgment call for us all. 8. Spin-plexes: When we think devotion is good we call it love; when we think it’s bad we call it addiction. When we think that sticking to our guns is good we call it conviction or faith. When we think it’s bad we call it being stubborn or pigheaded. All such loaded or spun terms invest positive and negative connotations into the description of a behavior. Mostly we use these as though we’re just calling a spade a spade as in “You’re just stubborn” but if you combine opposite spin-terms into pairs or spin-plexes of opposite spins you get a taste of the difficult choices we all face: When is perseverence a good thing? When is it bad? Not always easy to tell. 9. Contranyms: Sometimes opposite meanings show up in a single word, for example “think” which means to not know as in “I’ll have to think about it” and conversely, to know as in “I think he’s an idiot.” Likewise, “wonder,” means both inquiry as in “I wonder” and a lack of inquiry as in “Just dig the wonder of it all.” Again, when to inquire further and when to accept that you already have the answer or that there is no answer? That’s a question we all face. A lot of people think wisdom is a matter of applying those simple “Always do X” formulas. Love is always the answer. Always be mind full. Stick to your guns. Think for yourself. United we stand; divided we fall. I think such formulas express mere half-truths. Embracing them as whole truths distracts from the genuine dilemmas we all face. I think they stunt growth toward wisdom. The better formula is the famous anti-formula, the Serenity Prayer which lays out plan A and B and invokes the quest for wisdom to know when to go with which plan, serenity to accept as un-improvable vs. courage to try to improve things. Either plan can be the ticket: You accept what isn’t improvable and it free up all sorts of energy; you try and succeed in improving things. But both can be the ticket to hell too: You give up on improving what could have been improved; you try to change what, in the end couldn’t be changed. Here I list several variations on the serenity prayer that capture some of the other tough judgment calls we all face. Zakou Ismael: Want wisdom? Stay away from those hypocritical self-contradictory formulas and focus on the dilemmas those formulas fail to solve. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
Posted on: Sun, 28 Dec 2014 00:15:23 +0000
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