Mastering Irreverence

Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays explore common topics from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.

Today's topic explores the value of irreverence in highlighting the absurd things we may hold dear. We then transition to understand true reverence and how that adds meaning, beauty, and awe to our lives. Weaving it all together is the power of Stoicism and how balance helps us master irreverence and see the world more clearly.

Introduction

I love the philosophy of stoicism and its pragmatic application to the chaos of our world. For a philosophy that values virtue, you might be surprised that irreverence is not only valuable but an essential behavior when appropriately balanced. To do this topic justice, I’ve collaborated with Andrew Perlot who writes the valuable Substack, Socratic State of Mind and writes regularly on Stoicism. Without further ado, let’s dive in and let Andrew introduce stoic thoughts on irreverence.

Irreverence

Socrates managed an interesting balancing act. He revered Athenian religion but infuriated his countrymen with an irreverence toward societal mores and the opinions of authority figures. When push came to shove, he staked out his own path.

The later Stoics considered their school a branch of Socratic philosophy, so it’s no surprise that many of their exercises have irreverence at their core. Art and philosophy were often intertwined. The plays of Seneca were designed to entertain the masses but also wake them to certain truths.

By zooming in on things and observing them warts and all, we can, as Marcus Aurelius suggested in Meditations, “strip away the legend that encrusts them.”

“Like seeing roasted meat and other dishes in front of you and suddenly realizing: This is a dead fish. A dead bird. A dead pig. Or that this noble vintage is grape juice, and the purple robes are sheep wool dyed with shellfish blood. Or making love—something rubbing against your penis, a brief seizure and a little cloudy liquid. Perceptions like that—latching onto things and piercing through them, so we see what they really are. That’s what we need to do all the time—all through our lives when things lay claim to our trust—to lay them bare and see how pointless they are…” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6.13

Our culture weaves a powerful spell insisting prestige, riches, and possessions are what we should live for; it’s hard to see straight. Marcus’s exercise breaks the spell by reminding us that these externals aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. In many cases, they’re ugly. Great art can do the same.

Banksy’s Napalm took the horrifying Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of a burned girl fleeing American napalm during the Vietnam War and added the capitalist icons Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald, creating a sickening juxtaposition. It suggests the horrors of war are inextricably linked to the consumerism, materialism, and profit our society is built on.

It’s meant to shake us and make us examine our choices. The artist has a perspective, but the art asks us to apply the same philosophical tool as Marcus’s exercise. It’s a way to zoom in and examine an inured status quo in a new light, seeing that even “good” things can be quite ugly.

Analyzing Irreverence

Andrew’s insights here are really important. Irreverence is an incredibly powerful tool that can unshackle thought from the stultification of traditional meaning and authority. It liberates minds and erodes mores and societal values. It helps us see straight through our b******t-filled world, making it valuable and good. Dogmatic thinking makes us stupid, and irreverent art and philosophy can free our minds.

Now that we’ve introduced the value of irreverence, we can re-establish the foundation of true reverence. When faced with something vast and sublime, or even terrifying, we can feel reverence, admiration, or interconnection in a way that shakes us free of gloom and reductive thinking. It elevates us. Back to Andrew:

Reverence

With an expanded perspective, a single blade of grass pushing through a concrete sea can generate wonder. The vastness of space and time suggests our own troubles are pretty minor. The Stoic philosopher Seneca thought nature zoomed out our perspective and generated a useful sort of awe:

“Nature raised our faces to the sky, and wanted us to look up to everything splendid and wonderful it has made: the rising and setting of the heavenly bodies, the swift turning of the firmament, which reveals to us the earth by day and the heavens at night…” — Seneca, Epistles, Letter 94

In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius utilized “the view from above” to mentally watch the world’s hubbub as if from the heights of a mountain. How small even an army looked from those heights, he thought, and how insignificant one man’s life was amid the vastness of time. It brings peace and an expanded peaceful perspective.

Reverant art may look different depending on your theological or atheistic lens, but nature can be something of a universal, as Walt Witman suggests:

“To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,Every inch of space is a miracle,Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,Every cubic foot of the interior swarms with the same;Every spear of grass—the frames, limbs, organs,of men and women, and all that concerns them,All these to me are unspeakably perfect miracles.”— Walt Whitman, Miracles

Artistic depictions of virtue and selflessness are another generator of awe. The Burghers of Calais is a statue depicting six prominent men of Calais who’ve surrendered themselves to the English King Edward III for execution after he offered to spare their city and people from utter destruction in return. It’s a moving sacrifice.

The night sky is another common subject of reverential art. Vincent van Gogh painted The Starry Night after he had lost his faith, yet he wrote to his brother Theo, "Hope is in the stars."

The Balance

Andrew laid out an excellent foundation for the value of reverence and irreverence. To challenge our hubris, we need to be able to stand in awe of things that call us to a higher meaning or even a glimpse at the infinite. We also need to poke at everything and zoom in to see if it truly deserves reverence or is a thin veneer. Both have value.

However, our world today is profoundly out of balance between reverence and irreverence. We flounder in dogma or nihilism, and sometimes, we do both at the same time. We engage without subtlety, nuance, or respect, and we see fractures emerging in our societies.

We have groups that over-revere certain things. It gets messy quickly because, whether it’s theistic or atheistic belief structures, humans can turn anything into a religion, and that’s a great way to look at over-reverence… It’s religious. Whether it is Christians protesting abortion, Muslims attacking cartoonists, the religion of intersectionality and ‘woke,’ or even the incuriosity and unquestioning loyalty of the “I F*****g Love Science’ crowds, humans are coded for this reverence. It doesn’t take more details to see the problems those simple examples are causing.

On the flip side, we also gleefully skewer anything our opponents hold dear. People on the political right in the US memes the Left while the left tries to rip down the sublime of the past as racist, colonialist, etc. Everyone loves killing a sacred cow that isn’t their own. We tear down everything in this battle, leaving us empty, angry, and without beauty.

This misapplication of reverence and irreverence leads to fragile and divisive echo chambers that help no one. It’s a topic we explored in Triggered:

Being triggered is a powerful and healthy tool when contextualized. It’s one of the best ways to identify your limitations and fragilities. It’s a perfect chance to flip the script from feeling attacked to introspecting about why you’d react with such sensitivity to begin with.

Irreverence is an amazing tool that forces us to pause and consider our triggers, helping us identify overreverence. Reverence is essential for grounding ourselves in meaning, so it's essential to balance the two.

Thankfully, the Stoic philosophies teach us how to balance ourselves and see the world in both its sublimity and its absurdity. Irreverence is just one of two critical lenses humans have at their disposal. It’s the zooming in and zooming back out th