Today, while wait­ing for the another Demo­c­ra­tic sub-​advisor to make his or her next stupid or insen­si­tive public gaffe–oh, whoops–I found my inter­est piqued by this post from Harry Brig­house at Crooked Timber. With­out going too much into the meat of it, I can tell you that the post is a response to a response to an essay in which Simon Black­burn writes:

We can respect, in the min­i­mal sense of tol­er­at­ing, those who hold false beliefs. We can pass by on the other side. We need not be con­cerned to change them, and in a lib­eral soci­ety we do not seek to sup­press them or silence them. But once we are con­vinced that a belief is false, or even just that it is irra­tional, we cannot respect in any thicker sense those who hold it—not on account of their hold­ing it. We may respect them for all sorts of other qual­i­ties, but not that one. We would prefer them to change their minds.

Brig­house (like Lind­sey, his imme­di­ate respondee) wants to defend his abil­ity to have a “thicker sense” of respect for people whose beliefs he does not share. It’s a thought­ful argu­ment, con­ducted with a seri­ous­ness appro­pri­ate to one of the most impor­tant ques­tions about lib­eral society.

But what struck me read­ing the pas­sage today, with thoughts of irony riding high in my mind, was just how much the whole line of think­ing depends on words like “sincerity” and “honesty” and “good will.” An exam­ple, from Brighouse:

It is pos­si­ble to respect someone’s hold­ing of a false belief if you believe that the person is some­one of good will, and who has delib­er­ated care­fully, and hon­estly holds the belief given their non-​irresponsible reflec­tion on that delib­er­a­tion and their per­sonal experience.

Which raises a ques­tion that I’ll pose in the form of a quasi-​syllogism: if the abil­ity to respect a person who holds beliefs that we feel, believe, and/or know to be false is one of the nec­es­sary con­di­tions of a lib­eral soci­ety; and if that abil­ity requires that the hold­ers of those beliefs be people of sin­cer­ity, hon­esty, and good will; then what is the place (if any) of irony in a lib­eral polity?

One easy but unsat­is­fac­tory answer is that irony is possible/permissible as long as it serves some higher order of hon­esty and good will, as many satires are said to do. But what if the irony is not so easily sub­sumed? Should Beau Brum­mell have a home in the Republic?

In the back of my mind here is some­thing I read last week at the inim­itable Isola di Rifiuti, a post in which John Latta talks about the open­ing chap­ter of Maggie Nelson’s new book Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstrac­tions (Uni­ver­sity of Iowa Press, 2007):

Nelson points to both Mar­jorie Perloff’s and David Lehman’s refusal to accept O’Hara’s non­cha­lant stance as gen­uine. If Perloff admits that he “refused to care in the con­ven­tional sense [and] would not fight for pub­li­ca­tion or scram­ble for prizes,” it is only to deliver home more deter­minedly her assess­ment that “he knew, all along, that we would indeed be look­ing.” Lehman, too, in Nelson’s words, argues “that this ‘not caring’ stance was pri­mar­ily a put-on—that under­neath it all, the New York School poets cared deeply about poetry, about fame, and about cre­at­ing last­ing and com­plex works of art that would rise to the top of the heap in pos­ter­ity.” (As Lehman put it: “they did not con­fuse the new with the ephemeral.”)