A RESPONSE TO SOME COMMENTS

The responses to my interim book report have persuaded me that it might be worth spending a few minutes expanding on this notion of the intelligence of supposedly “primitive” peoples. Especially among people like us (by which I mean formally highly educated people who place great store by book learning), the term “intelligence” is so freighted with evaluative significance that it requires a genuine effort to step back from a consideration of SAT scores and academic performances and think about intelligence in a broader and more interesting fashion.

 

It takes a good deal of thought and knowledge to fix a car engine or to select just the right piece of wood from which to make the body of a fine violin or to decide when and on which side of the hill to plant a crop, but save when we are being self-consciously condescending, folks like us do not have that sort of activity in mind when we talk about intelligence.

 

For the last 2500 years or so in Western philosophy, one of the most valued marks of intelligence has been the capacity to use and to understand ironic discourse. That is what lies at the heart of many of Plato’s dialogues, as well as the writings of Kierkegaard, to name only two of my favorite philosophers. So let us talk about irony for a bit.

 

Irony rests on the distinction between appearance and reality, a central idea in Western thought for the last 2 ½ millennia. Ironic discourse presupposes the existence of a double audience – a real audience, to whom the ironic remark is actually directed and an apparent audience which mistakenly believes that it is the true recipient of the remark. The speaker in ironic discourse knows that there are two audiences and says something which is intended to be understood by the real audience and misunderstood by the apparent audience. What is more, the speaker relies upon the real audience to know about the existence of the apparent audience and to know that the apparent audience is mistakingly interpreting the utterance. Thus, the ironic utterance is a kind of private joke between the speaker and the real audience at the expense of the apparent audience.

 

Rather than citing a classic example from a Platonic dialogue, let me give you the example I invented to explain this notion in a college philosophy textbook that I wrote almost half a century ago. For reasons that will become obvious, the editors got nervous after the example appeared in the first edition and had me substitute a less provocative example for subsequent editions. Here is the original example that I thought up.

 

A young man and young woman are having a hot affair, something they must keep secret from the young woman’s parents, who are very religious Protestants who would be horrified at the thought that their unmarried daughter was sexually active. One evening, the young man comes to the young woman’s home to take her out, ostensibly to a church social but actually to his apartment for sex. The mother is waiting for him at the door and as they leave, she says to her daughter “Now young lady, be home by 10 PM and be a good girl, do you hear?” “Yes, mama.” the daughter replies. The couple go off to the young man’s home and make passionate love until it is time for him to bring her home. The mother is waiting at the door when they arrive and asks the daughter, “Were you a good girl?” “Oh yes,” the young man replies for her, “she was good. She was very good.”

 

The young man’s reply is an ironic utterance, misunderstood by the mother who thinks that it is directed at her and is an assurance that they have behaved themselves properly, but correctly understood by the young woman as praise for her sexual prowess. It is a private joke between the young man and the young woman at the expense of the mother.

 

Irony requires a complex and completely conscious self-awareness of social situations, their meanings, and the various ways in which they can be understood and misunderstood. It is arguably one of the most sophisticated modes of discourse and a mark of mature deliberate conscious self-awareness. In my YouTube lectures on Ideological Critique, I spent some time talking about two examples of ironic discourse engaged in by individuals whom white Westerners mistakenly considered naïve or unintelligent or lacking in the sophistication acquired at Oxford or Yale. The first example came from Edwin Wilmsen’s fine book Land Filled with Flies. The second came from Henry Lewis Gates’s book, The Signifying Monkey. Gates mocks his sophisticated former literature professors at Yale University by showing that West African peoples had a complex elaborated self-conscious literary theory that the slaves brought with them to the New World and that took up residence in the various forms of verbal play and their musical analogues that are called “signifyin’.”

 

Graber and Wengrow, in their effort to refute the claim that domesticated agriculture is the necessary precondition for the development of city life, political structures, and a variety of other marks of cultural sophistication, offer many examples from the anthropological literature of peoples who either deliberately reject agriculture as a way of getting their food or else routinely go back and forth between agriculture and foraging, all the while exhibiting playfully self-aware attitudes toward rulership that, in the the authors' view, demonstrates a thoughtful self-conscious awareness of the significance of rulership and its benefits and drawbacks.

 

Now, necessarily these examples come from the relatively recent past although they are supplemented by archaeological evidence of societies dating back 10 or 15,000 years whose remains suggest similar sorts self-awareness. The principal purpose of the authors, as I understand it, in presenting this mass of evidence is to demonstrate that even today we have options and choices and are not locked into the present political structure of developed states by some law of social evolution. But along the way, their evidence also supports the hypothesis that human beings 10,000, 50,000, or 100,000 years ago possessed a conscious self-awareness which, although they do not make this point, would support the belief that those people were among other things capable of ironic discourse.

 

Now, it strikes us as odd to think of a small group of Homo Sapiens 100,000 years ago sitting around the fire speaking ironically. But that is probably because we have never met people in the year 100,000 BC. I remind you that it struck men who had recently been slaveowners equally odd in the years of Reconstruction to imagine a group of black men sitting in a state legislature passing laws.