This site is now something like a year and a half old. As I look through the “irony” category, I notice there have been few postings there for a while now. So maybe it’s time to say something about why this site is named “MyIrony.”

The inspiration for MyIrony comes from the young World War I era intellectual Randolph Bourne. A Bourne quote runs along the bottom of the left sidebar, and you can read a few more quotes here in one of my first posts. Different from cosmic or literary irony, Bourne’s “lifestyle irony” seems to fall out like this:

• It is an alert mindfulness to lived contradictions
• It is personally disruptive and rarely peaceful.
• It assiduously avoids religious/spiritual complacency.
• It is life-giving and resilient.

Then there’s contemporary philosopher Richard Rorty, who urges we practice “private irony” within the bounds of a commitment to democratic ideals. For Rorty the private ironist is always aware that her “final vocabulary” (sacred story, meta-narrative, etc.) is not really final but a good hunch. She remains open to better stories and actively seeks them out, whether in literature or religion.

That’s all well and good, and I’m pretty much in agreement with both Bourne and Rorty. But I’d like to go further still. What do I mean by “irony?”

What I don’t mean to do is equate irony with introspection. I’ve explicitly argued against introspection here (understood in a post-fundamentalist context). You don’t have to be a (recovering) fundamentalist though to commit the sin of introspection: pietism (religious or secular) will do the trick well enough.

The religious ironist believes, simply, that irony is the human condition. Going a bit beyond Bourne, it is the belief that making peace with life’s ironies is the path to peace. Going a bit beyond Rorty, it is the embrace of democratic idealism not because there is something like “human nature” that must be protected, honored, and exalted — that would be closing your “final vocabulary” — but because there might as well be something like “human nature” even if we made it all up.

My reluctance to believe in something like “humanity” or “human nature” — I still haven’t seen one in the wild — puts me at odds with most of my fellow UUs. But I can suppose there is something like the “inherent worth and dignity of all humanity” —and advocate for it — without insisting that it really really exists. Jesus said, “By their fruit you will know them.” If the tree bears good fruit, it isn’t because we believe in it.

My ironic suspicion also deters me from the sins of romanticism and sentimentality, which with pop theologian Matthew Fox I judge to be the roots of consumerism. When you’ve given up on ideas like innocence, purity, naturalness and authenticity, you can no longer be persuaded to go out and try to buy them. (Or at least not so often.)

The ironist doesn’t need to believe — and doesn’t need to disbelieve. For the ironist, life is countless intersections of power, habits, choices, and luck (both good and bad). The challenge, then, is for the ironist to figure out how to promote full human flourishing in the midst of all that. Not because she believes there really is something like “full human flourishing,” but, again, because there should be even if we made it all up.