Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.
Interpretation
Irony serves a purpose in critical moments, but if overused, it can lead to complacency in unfavorable situations.
In this quote, Lewis Hyde suggests that while irony can be a powerful tool in addressing or reflecting on harsh realities, relying on it too heavily can result in individuals becoming comfortable in their constraints or unfavorable circumstances. People may begin to accept their limitations as part of their identity, mistaking the irony of their situation for genuine contentment, thereby losing the drive to seek change or liberation.
In practice
In a seminar discussing coping mechanisms, one could use this quote to highlight the dangers of irony in dealing with serious issues.
All that we make and do is shaped by the communities and traditions that contain us, not to mention by money, power, politics, and luck. And even should the artist or scientist think she has extracted herself from the world to stand alone in the studio, a tremendous array of faculties and mind-states may well attend her creativity.
Unlike the sale of a commodity, the giving of a gift tends to establish a relationship between the parties involved. When gifts circulate within a group, their commerce leaves a series of interconnected relationships in its wake, and a kind of decentralized cohesiveness emerges.
Better to operate with detachment, then; better to have a way but infuse it with a little humor; best, to have no way at all but to have instead the wit constantly to make one's way anew from the materials at hand.
But neither money nor machines can create. They shuttle tokens of energy, but they do not transform. A civilization based on them puts people out of touch with their creative powers.
An essential portion of any artist’s labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received; and we cannot have this gift except, perhaps, by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves that ‘begging bowl’ to which the gift is drawn.
For the slow labor of realizing a potential gift the artist must retreat to those Bohemias, halfway between the slums and the library, where life is not counted by the clock and where the talented may be sure they will be ignored until that time, if it ever comes, when their gifts are viable enough to be set free and survive in the world.
He who does not at some time, with definite determination consent to the terribleness of life, or even exalt in it, never takes possession of the inexpressible fullness of the power of our existence.
I belonged to the generation that grew up under National Socialism, and was blinded and led astray - and allowed itself to be led astray.
Religion isn’t about believing things. It's ethical alchemy. It’s about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness.
That's what kept us going - a sense of absurdity, rather than humor.
A hostility to modernity is shared by ideologies that have nothing else in common - a nostalgia for moral clarity, small-town intimacy, family values, primitive communism, ecological sustainability, communitarian solidarity, or harmonies with the rhythms of nature.
He threatens many that hath injured one.
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