I think I ensured my immortality today, and I want to publicize it here, just to make sure I get full credit.

“Trzupr” over at Threedonia, posted this interesting piece today, about the irony of Disney building a “Tree of Life” in its Animal Kingdom, to teach the sacred value of natural things, and actually building the object out of man-made materials, on the frame of an oil rig.

I pointed out in comments that this was similar to using the most technology-heavy movie in history to preach the evils of technology. And then I wrote, “We have reached the Post-Ironic Age.”

The more I think about it, the more I like that phrase.

People have been calling our present intellectual generation the “post-postmodern age,” but that’s kind of convoluted, and doesn’t really communicate much.

“The Post-Ironic Age” describes our times to a nicety, it seems to me. We’ve reached a point where statements are made by public officials and institutions which, only a couple decades ago, would have gotten the speaker laughed off the stage. But today such pronouncements are unremarkable.

Statements such as “The system worked,” when an explosives-carrying terrorist gets onto a Detroit-bound plane and actually begins detonation.

Statements such as, “And as horrific as this tragedy (the Fort Hood massacre) was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”

Statements such as, “We need to spend our way out of this recession.”

Statements such as, “There is nothing in the hacked e-mails that undermines the science upon which this decision is based.”

I think we live in the first age in history in which such nonsense is possible on a worldwide scale. There have always been totalitarian societies where the subject of the emperor’s clothing deficit has been dangerous to bring up, but only today is such delusion acceptable everywhere. And not merely among the “ignorant masses,” but most especially and vociferously among the intellectuals.

This could only happen (it seems to me) in a culture where education has been almost entirely abstracted. Within the liberal arts and “soft sciences” (the hard sciences are different), it has become possible to receive an entire undergraduate and graduate education without ever learning how to actually do anything that works in the real world. Higher education has become almost entirely (there are, of course a few exceptions) a course of ideological indoctrination, totally separate from the lives people live on planet earth.

And so I dub this generation “The Post-Ironic Age.” You are welcome to use the term freely, so long as you give me credit.

Oh, and buy my book.

(Cross-posted at Mere Comments)