It’s kind of remark­able to hear the person who was—and maybe still is—the fore­most crit­i­cal advo­cate of the Amer­i­can poetic avant-​garde appeal to taste, and not the de gustibus kind, in her recent attempt [PDF] to take down Fred­er­ick Seidel:

[T]his poet is also given to…responding to the radio news of an Amer­i­can being beheaded in the Congo with the words “The down­pour drum­ming on my taxi gets the Hutu in me danc­ing,” and soon he is imag­in­ing him­self “on all fours eating grass / So I can throw up because I like the feel­ing. / I crouch over a car­cass and prac­tice my eating.” Is this a daring rev­e­la­tion of one’s inner demons? I sup­pose so, but when we note that the poet who has these fleet­ing thoughts is com­fort­ably inside his taxi, most often on the Upper East Side where he lives so well, the admis­sion seems merely tasteless.

I’m pretty cer­tain I can under­stand why some people don’t like Seidel’s work, and I can cer­tainly under­stand why one would want to would resist the hyper­bolic enco­mia that have come his way. What I cannot under­stand is how a critic of Perloff’s evi­dent abil­ity can pre­tend that the poet’s being “comfortably inside his taxi” is a bug and not a fea­ture of the poem.

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?