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BRITISH IRONYA quiet joke at your expenseDec 16th 1999From The Economist print edition

Is the British penchant for irony a cause or cure of national decline?

WHILE working as The Economists man in South-East Asia, your correspondentnoticed something peculiar about British diplomats. Their briefings about the

countries in which they were based had a common characteristic. They wouldstart with a more or less lucid account of the political and economic situation,

followed by a few anecdotes. And thenas often as notour man, in Manila orBangkok or wherever, would say of the locals: You see they have no sense ofirony.

The Victorian forebears of todays British diplomats might have remarked on the

absence of other traits in foreignersChristianity perhaps, or a sense of honouror diligencebut for todays diplomats, it is irony, or the lack of it, which seems

to be most noteworthy. Indeed Robert Cooper, one of the Foreign Officesbrightest sparks and currently head of its Asia department, has gone as far as

suggesting that irony is at the centre of modern foreign policymaking.

In an article in last Decembers Prospect, a high-brow British magazine, Mr

Cooper wrote: What else is there left for the citizens of a post-heroic, post-imperial, post-modern society? Provided it is tinged with humanity, irony is notsuch a bad thing. It suggests a certain modesty about oneself, ones values andones aspirations. At least irony is unlikely to be used to justify programmes of

conquest or extermination.

Todays British diplomats and officials maintain an instinctive suspicion of grand

projects and aspirations, one reason perhaps why they have had such difficultycoping with the vision of a united Europe which has so entranced Britainscontinental neighbours. The British urge to puncture grandiose visions is capturedin a (possibly apocryphal) story about Sir Oliver Franks, when he was Britainsambassador in Washington after the war. A journalist asked leading ambassadors

what they desired in the coming year. The Russian ambassador mentioned theliberation of colonial peoples; the French ambassador spoke of a new era of peaceand international co-operation. Sir Oliver expressed a desire for a small box of

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crystallised fruit. But what exactly is irony, and why do the British appear to prizeit so highly? It is important to distinguish irony from sarcasm (which isnotoriously the lowest form of wit). Both irony and sarcasm involve saying theopposite of what you mean. But when someone is being sarcastic, there is nodoubt that the listener is intended to understand this. I suppose you think thatsterribly clever, says the sarcastic teacher to a stupid child. Irony, however is

different. Many people, when hearing an ironic remark, may not realise that it ismeant in jest. So irony is much more subversive than sarcasm, and also much

more funthose who realise that an ironic remark has been made are instantlycomplicit, and they can enjoy the fact that there are others who have missed the

joke.

Perhaps this is one reason why irony is a particularfavourite among British diplomats. It allows them totease foreigners, without the foreigners realising theyare being teased. All the diplomatic proprieties can beobservedbut the Brits can still feel quietly superior. Indays of yore British superiority was proven by force of

arms. Now the point is made with a joke, and a quiet, knowing smile.

For as Mr Cooper points out, irony is a distinctly post-imperial quality. While ironyaimed at foreigners may seem unpleasantly supercilious, much of the Britishsense of irony is directed at themselves. Irony is particularly good at puncturingpretension, and at exposing the gap between appearance and reality. Both areuseful ways of coping with what might otherwise be a painful processwhat oneBritish diplomat once termed the management of decline.

But is irony a cause, as much as a palliative, for British decline? The people whobuilt Victorian Britain and the British empire were characterised by their

earnestness, not their sense of irony. Gladstone did not spend much time

laughing at himself. Nor was irony a strong suit for Margaret Thatcher, whofamously pledged to reassert Victorian values and to reverse British decline.

By contrast, the ironists who made the first breaches in the walls of Victorianearnestness were outsiders or dandies, who had none of the macho, empire-building virtues. Oscar Wilde titillated Victorian London with his subversive wit,and then scandalised it with the homosexual affairs which ultimately ruined him.George Bernard Shaw, another Irishman, used his plays to satirise and

undermine Victorian attitudes to everything from grammar and pronunciation tothe arms trade. The French-born Hilaire Belloc punctured imperial triumphalism in

1898 with a brilliant parody of jingoistic verse called The Modern Traveller.(Whatever happens we have got/The Maxim Gun, and they have not, his

languid hero observes of the mutinous natives.)

Lytton Strachey, the great debunker of Victorian earnestness, wrote aniconoclastic but telling study of 19th-century heroes, Eminent Victorians, andwas also a homosexual and a conscientious objector during the first world war.When he was asked what he would do if he came across a German soldier, rapinghis sister, Strachey replied: I would endeavour to interpose my body between

them.

Arguably, in fact, it was the horror of the first world war which completed the

transformation in the tone of upper-crust British life, from Victorian earnestnessto irony. Of course, irony had been well deployed before the war, as Wildes work

showed. But it was the reaction to the horror of the trenches which made it thedominant tone of the post-war British literary scene.

Irony is moresubversive than

sarcasm, andmuch more fun

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The Victorian ideal stressed honour, duty, self-sacrifice,patriotism. Inspired by those ideals, millions of youngmen signed up to fight in Flanders, and thenencountered four years of mass slaughter. Some 30%of British men aged between 20 and 24 in 1914 werekilled in the war. Noel Annan in his study of 20th-

century Britain (Our Age: The Generation that MadePost-War Britain, HarperCollins), argues that: The

shock of the losses stunned the British; and the lesion of trench warfare and itstoll never healed.

Lord Annan argues that the reaction of the post-war generation was to seekrefuge in subversive irony and humour. Irony, which replaced that [Victorian]innocence, reflected the way men remembered the events of the Great War. Thisirony served a double purpose. On the one hand, the bright young thingscelebrated by Evelyn Waugh in the 1920s, wanted simply to be diverted andamused, and to forget the war. But irony also served as a means of attacking theVictorian culture of duty and imperialism which people like Strachey felt had led

to the slaughter of the trenches. Stracheys work, as Lord Annan puts it, wasdesigned to undermine the Victorian establishment and its culture. It did so bytreating life as a comedy.

Stracheys humour was pointed directly at the staples of Victorian imperialmythology. He wrote of General Gordons campaign in the Sudan: It all endedvery happilyin a glorious slaughter of 20,000 Arabs, a vast addition to theBritish empire and a peerage for Sir Evelyn Baring. Even after the second worldwar, British authors and humourists continued to apply a touch of irony to thehorror of 1914-18. A 1960s musical, Oh What a Lovely War, portrayed first-

world-war generals as blimpish idiots. The Cambridge undergraduates who puttogether Beyond the Fringe in the 1960s had a famous sketch in which an

upper-crust military officer approaches a soldier and informs him: We need apointless sacrifice, and I think youre just the man.

To this day, many in the British middle-classes find overt displays of flag-wavingpatriotism faintly embarrassing. The singing of old imperial anthems like RuleBritannia and Land of Hope and Glory, at the annual Last Night of the Promsconcert, regularly provokes condemnation and handwringing in the press. ButSimon Hoggart, a columnist in the Guardian, Britains main left-of-centrenewspaper, has argued that critics are missing the point. Havent those whiners

noticed that these songs morphed into irony decades ago? Does anybodyseriously think we hear them and want to take back the Suez Canal? In other

words, patriotic display is acceptable to many British people only if it is suitably

coated in irony.

These attitudes die hard. The ironic tone has become a staple of British literarystyle, but can still cause considerable confusion overseasas writers for thisnewspaper occasionally discover. A recent article on Paul Gascoigne, a footballerwho had been caught beating his wife, began: It could happen to anybody,really. Go out for a meal with the wife, have a few too many, she starts to nag,and before you know whats happened, shes lying on the floor covered in

bruises. It did not occur to the author that anybody might seriously regard thisas an endorsement of wife-beatingat least not until the outraged letters began

arriving from the United States.

In large parts of the British intelligentsia, irony has survived, indeed wasbolstered by, the Thatcher period despite (or perhaps because of) the Iron Ladys

The horror of thetrenches made

irony thedominant tone of

the post-war

literary scene

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resolutely unironic attitude to national affairs. In Tony Blair, Britain now hasanother prime minister who seems to be a stranger to irony. His eagerness to setthe worlds wrongs to rights and to turn Britain into a model country for the nextcentury could not be more Victorianor Thatcherite.

Perhaps it is significant that Lady Thatcher represented the first generation toreach national leadership which had no personal memory of the first world war.

Harold Macmillan, a prime minister of the 1960s who was famous for his foppishmanners and wry wit, was a veteran of 1914-18, and had seen many of his

contemporaries killed. Lady Thatcher regarded the Macmillan generation of Toriesas people who were prepared to accept gentle national decline.

She reserved her fiercest disdain, however, for theForeign Office, which she regarded as institutionallyincapable of batting for Britain. It would come as nosurprise to the Thatcherites that a Foreign Office man,like Robert Cooper, should recommend irony as thesoundest basis for national policylargely because, in

Mr Coopers view, not taking things too seriously is a good way of avoidingbloodshed and conflict. Or at least thats what he claimed to believe.

Tony Blair seemsto be a stranger

to irony