Irony

Following up on the humour/ satire angle, here is a classic statement of irony against the 'protest poets' (skip to between 1:16 - 1:31).

This is from the 1970s, bang in the middle of a load of postmodernism - Mutual Assured Destruction, the Sex Pistols and punk rock, swearing on TV, striking industrial workers protesting the transition of the industrial economy to the service-based economy (the objectivity of the machine workplace gives way to the subjectivity of language-based service workplace), Foucault, environmentalism, mass tourism, etc, etc. (someone could perhaps suggest some more factors?). The irony of 'Clive's' attack is that it reduces even the most well-meaning sentiment seen here - of the human yearning for freedom and equality - to ridicule. The implication is Nietzschean: the rights-fighter is just a crap version of someone who exercises rights; he desires power just as much as the one who possesses it, but seeks to obtain it not by 'open combat' of the virtues that that society recognises, but through appeal to the supposedly objective conditions that apply to man's nature itself, rather than to the 'external' customs of the society of the rights-fighter, the roots of which are arbitrary and enforced through social rules and codes. Whether these factors are in fact objective is another discussion entirely.

There are many examples of this kind of scepticism and opposition to the Enlightenment - a hidden history, in fact. It's a subject that captivates me, because we are still in some senses living in the discourse of Enlightenment.