After I wrote an article for this newspaper's Travel section, a friend in North America e-mailed to say he had enjoyed its "nice irreverent tone". Which got me to thinking: why is irreverent a term of praise in the West, while in the Middle East it would be damning (and there's another word that morphs as it travels)? A headline in The New Yorker refers to "Young Jean Lee's irreverent take on racial politics". A Canadian newspaper encapsulates "the irreverent moments of Wimbledon 2010". The BBC reports that a new cartoon based on Star Wars will adopt "a more comedic and irreverent tone". An art gallery's show is called "irreverent: contemporary nordic craft art." (Seriously: irreverent chairs!)
More widely the word also seems to be a default description for slightly sassy ad campaigns pitching everything from running shoes to rice pudding. This is one of those cases where West and East can learn from one another. The West can learn that the lack of a fixed viewpoint makes meaning elusive, and the East can learn that strong societies can easily absorb criticism. Irreverent is a term of praise in the West because of that society's tradition of reform, which is especially strong in North America. The western media do not attempt to build social consensus; they look for the flaw in an institution's logic, and attack that flaw. If a committee issues a report with 99 good ideas and one really stupid one, the western media jump all over the really stupid one.
This has worked for the West. The questioning, even doubting, mind-set does lead to change and progress. The West follows René Descartes's method: use doubt as a tool. But that is a reactive logic, one that fosters, as a means and then as an end, a cynicism that bites but does not nourish. It creates by tearing down; it is the creative destruction of capitalism rendered into thought. It does not value permanence and has reached its summit in the rise of "snark" as a critical voice. And so irreverent can be a term of praise.
In the East, to call someone irreverent would be understood in the word's traditional sense - godless. The East values traditions and permanence. And while this might not be a mind-set that encourages scientific innovation, it does preserve meaning. Having lived three years in the East now, I see the value in this method. There is a calm and a consensus to fixity. The more you think of serious things, like faith, the less you think of trivial things, like gossip. Which is the richer life? And what does richer mean to you, reader?
Before I moved to the UAE I was a television critic in North America. I spoke in an irreverent voice. I once thoughtfully opined of a programme hosted by a full-figured cook that "it's like they gave Miss Piggy a talk show", "even during the credits you get a sense it's going to reek" and its broadcast schedule was surely "24 hours a day on closed-circuit TV in Hell". It might be fun to write such things, but really, what is the point? If I were to review The Rachael Ray Show now, I could not be so mean-spirited. Might want to be, but could not be.
At some point life will probably send me back to the West. It's where my parents are. Yet like a traveller punching the return ticket of the journey taken by TS Eliot's magi, I will return as something of a stranger: "But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation / With an alien people clutching their Gods". Or I'll just go back to normal in about two months.
rmckenzie@thenational.ae
