The Ironies of Political Reality

Philip Damon taught writing and literature at the University of Hawaii for 34 years, and his fiction, non-fiction and social commentaries have been published widely. Among the mystic and holistic traditions, he has followed many practices. His “Sacred Democracy” columns appear monthly in readthedirt.org.

We live in a world of opposites, and it occurred to me several decades ago that one of two basic human mindsets is starkly in evidence whenever a person responds to a situation that exemplifies this duality. The most common type of response — more like a reaction, really — is what I came to think of in the ‘70s as the “sentimental” one, while the rarer, I concluded, was born of an “ironic” frame of mind. It became clear that the ironic and sentimental are temperamental attitudes, and while one reflected a healthy (holistic) outlook on reality, the other decidedly didn’t. That attitude was unhealthy, to say the least.

To clarify my terms, I turned to the Taoist model of yin and yang, which not only emphasizes the ubiquity of opposites, but also the idea that each set of them is actually a whole in itself, comprising twin qualities that are essential to the existence of each other. Thus there can be no such thing as heat without cold, soft without hard, left without right, or conservative without liberal. Insistence upon one over the other I called “sentimental,” whereas acceptance of the interdependence of both I called “ironic.” Whether anyone else adopted these terms was unimportant. All that mattered was that they got the principle.

Concrete examples of this idea abound in our everyday world. How often do we hear always and never describing actions when the reality, even if unbalanced, is a less absolute proportion? It simply isn’t fair, which to the sentimental (ideological?) mindset is irrelevant, yet to the ironist is an affront to reality. There’s always an although in there somewhere, and it can’t be sentimentally wished aside. Think of the black and white dots in the depictions of the yin and the yang. But finding (and connecting) those dots in the opposites is a difficult task indeed — most especially in areas of bipolarized public policy.

Among current dualities is the “right to life” and “right to choose.” In our state, Attorney General Bob Ferguson has pledged to uphold 1991’s Initiative 120, affirming a woman’s right (unless she’s a PeaceHealth subscriber) to choose. AG’s and legislators in other states, however, are contriving to shutter virtually all Planned Parenthood and affiliated facilities, which serve three million women (and also men) per year. 71 percent of those served receive contraceptive assistance only, half a million receive Pap smears and breast cancer screenings, and three percent actually receive abortions. Talk about the little black dot.

I doubt that many of those supporting the right-to-choose option are ideologically cavalier on this topic. Abortion can never be an easy choice to make — or even to have an opinion about — because it is so rife with painful ironies. Yet unintended consequences are also ironic, as shown by the tragic and comic reversals of literature. Thus the impact of Roe v. Wade on violent crime, beginning almost twenty years after 1973, is an astounding case in point. In their groundbreaking book of 2005, Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner statistically demonstrate that the ballyhooed lessening of violence in the 1990s — commonly attributed to “get tough” criminological approaches — resulted on the contrary from the termination over those couple of decades of millions of unwanted pregnancies.

Levitt and Dubner do point out that aborting fetuses to curtail violence is in itself a solution fraught with irony. Nonetheless, their statistical correlation of children born to unready mothers and the likelihood of felonious futures is convincing to a point that some might second-guess their own opposition to abortion from any single-minded perspective they've bought into. Especially if they have also been inclined to view capital punishment as a perfectly moral application of justice. Anyone for a taste of self-irony?

Mixed emotions are never fun. But don’t they say something about who we are, when we are able to summon up the ironic complexity of our humanity to feel them?

Just thinking….