Perhaps the most important question posed by Mad Max: Fury Road was found scrawled on a couple of walls in the movie’s bleak landscape: who killed the world?  And while it’s obvious in the movie that man and his greed did the deed, there are other possibilities for the world that we know.  Based on Jedidiah Purdy’s For Common Things, irony could be a likely culprit.  Consider:

Irony has become the marker of worldliness and maturity. The ironic individual practices a style of speech and behavior that avoids all appearance of naivety— of naive devotion, belief, or hope.

What has so exhausted the world for us? For one, we are all exquisitely self-aware. Around us, commercials mock the very idea of commercials, situation comedies make being a sitcom their running joke, and image consultants detail the techniques of designing and marketing a personality as a product. We can have no intimate moment, no private words of affection, empathy, or rebuke that we have not seen pronounced on a thirty-foot screen before an audience of hundreds. We cannot speak of atonement or apology without knowing how those words have been put to cynical, almost morally pornographic use by politicians. Even in solitary encounters with nature, bicycling on a country road or hiking on a mountain path, we reluctant ironists realize that our pleasure in these place has been anticipated by a thousand L. L. Bean catalogues, Ansel Adams calendars, and advertisements promising a portion of the rugged or bucolic life. So we sense an unreal quality in our own words and even in our own thoughts. They are superficial, they belong to other people and other purposes; they are not ours, and it may be that nothing is properly ours. It is this awareness, and the wish not to rest the weight of our hopes on someone else’s stage set, that the ironic attitude expresses.

Purdy wrote this at the end of the ’90s, when shows like Seinfeld epitomized our ironic, self-aware culture.  Since then, we’ve settled into a kind of wink-wink, nod-nod relationship with our ironic reality.  Maybe we embraced it and came out the other side mostly undamaged.  Mostly undamaged, perhaps, but definitely not stronger.  We live with the hope that a well-documented life will result in a meaningful one.  We’ve taken pictures of our moments and sold them to more accessible versions of L. L. Bean and Ansel Adams.  The world is no longer a stage for our devotion, belief, or hope.  Now it is an endless photo-op, a planet-sized photo booth with all of the ancient props we can handle.

Purdy has a lot more to say about irony and its effects on public life and civil discourse.  He will also contrast the way of irony with the way of real and solid things, the kind of “common things” worth our attention.

(image from youtube.com)