CYNICISM
1 Cynicism
Most satire turns out to be as trivial and ephemeral as its object. And most cynicism cuts no deeper than the shabby pretences that it mocks. But the world is so blunt that it bludgeons cynicism into silence.
Most of us know when we have found the truth, since it makes us feel more at ease. Gadflies know when they have found it, since they think it should make others feel less at ease. When they lie, they trust that they are sparing us. And when they are cruel, they trust that they are paying off their debt to the truth. A simpleton confuses truth with illusion, a cynic confuses it with disillusion.
The heart too has its reasons, as Pascal said. Too bad few of us have any other. The crooked heart in collusion with the world dreams more deviously than the head ever could.
The heart may seem to get straight to the truth by leaps of faith, but only because it calculates more rapidly than the head.
Sceptics tell us that we can’t know the truth. Cynics show that we don’t want to.
When the profoundest thinkers start affirming things, they show that they can be as stupid as the rest of us. Witness Nietzsche with his drivel of the Dionysian and the eternal recurrence and superman and the meaning of the earth and will to power.
To affirm is to be blown up with lies. And to hold to the truth is to be deflated by despair.
2 Among the cannibals
‘Philosophers,’ as Rivarol said, ‘are anatomists and not doctors. They dissect, but do not heal.’ The thinker poses as an anatomist, is revered as a surgeon, but acts more like a cannibal. Yet cannibals are more considerate than inquirers. They eat none but their enemies, and not till they are dead.
The thinker has a gift for reasoned but passionate disillusion.
We mistake the dagger of psychology for a scalpel, since revenge has sharpened it to such a keen edge. The unkindest thing you could do to some people is to lay bare their motives. ‘Vivisection,’ as Flaubert says, ‘is a form of revenge.’
Thinking is as easy as fishing, particularly if you’re using gobbets of your fellow beings to bait your rod. You need a small spark of native adroitness, a good deal of practice and then years of waiting. But look out that you don’t eat what you hook. The streams run so foul.
A thinker hunts not like a lion but like a lone spider, which spins its web out of its own guts, and then waits in the patient dark for thoughts to tangle themselves in it.
3 The self-vivisection of cynicism
Raw minds make their truths out of their own woes. Ripe ones make them out of the woes of those they love or hate.
If your aim is to grasp their true nature, you must have committed all the crimes that you indict, be a prey to all the diseases that you diagnose, and dote on all the follies which disgust you. ‘There are,’ Wilde says, ‘poisons so subtle that to know their properties one has to sicken of them.’
4 The cynical world hates cynicism
The cynical world dotes on displays of sentiment and disavowals of cynicism as much as it is scandalized by unblinking statements of the plain truth. Having treated cynics to such shows of its own cynicism, it’s shocked when they unmask it. It wants them to act after its own example, but not to lay bare its ploys. But they betray it by divulging its double-crosses and desertions, and it chastises them like a slighted deity when they do so. ‘Few things are more shocking to those who practise the arts of success,’ Logan Pearsall Smith wrote, ‘than the frank description of those arts.’ The world will make a fool of your cynicism either by outdoing it or by allowing it to undo you.
You must be very shrewd to see through to the true value of things. But you must be very naive if you dream that the world will put up with your exposing it.
Cynicism and despair may have truth on their side, but optimism has self-interest and sentimentality. And the wily contriver knows that these have all the credit in this world. Enthusiasm is paid so much more than cynicism, that only a fool would dare to play the cynic. And so the most calculating cynics learn to act like the most beaming enthusiasts.
You can tell the confidence man by his mealy-mouthed denunciations of cynicism, and by the trust that he triggers in the ruthless and gullible.
Like a sitter for a portrait, the world gripes whether observers dare to paint it just as it is or as it is not.
MALICE
5 The spur of rivalry
Intellectual passion resembles rancour more than love. It is fanned by rivalry, contrariety and spite. ‘My fury,’ said Isaiah, ‘it upheld me.’ Even those who love truth to their own detriment may not love it with a pure heart.
It is competitiveness and not curiosity that finds its way to the richest lodes.
Impartiality may guide you in the right way to think. But it is rivalry that will launch you on the path.
Self acts like a magnet, disrupting the delicate compass of the mind and drawing all our thoughts to it. It may spur you on to seek out the truth, though it will hold you back from discovering it.
Thinkers such as Schopenhauer who deride the cult of progress still don’t doubt that the light is advancing, since they trust that their own dogmas will soon have eclipsed those of their rivals.
6 Truth, cynicism and revenge
To inspect your specimens of life, you have to stain them with malice and place them under your glassy disengagement.
Spite may give the jolt to hot-wire cold intellects. ‘What we need is hatred,’ said Genet. ‘From it are our ideas born.’
Malice is a volatile gas which you can ignite to bust out of the narrow corral of your polite platitudes, though it may poison you first.
Deprivation makes us spiteful, and it’s our spite that keeps us on the watch. So the spur that alerts us makes us unjust to what we see.
If vengeance did not fire our minds, how would we have brought to light so much of the truth? Revenge may lie to others, but it keeps a sharp lookout for all that might help it to fillet its victims.
You need the dark energy of malice and cynicism to keep your mental world expanding.
Where there is no treachery, there will be no truth. And where there is loyalty, there will be a lot of lies. Thinkers are turncoats whom we can’t trust to acquiesce in the congenial lies by which we thrive. They work, as Blake says, by ‘the infernal method, by corrosives.’ They aim to bring to fruition the work that the serpent began.
Only a bad angel, shorn of all but pride and spite, is free to spy out the truth.
Every poet is inspired by a secret muse. And each thinker is incited by a secret adversary.
7 A waste of hate
Few people are worth all the malice that you lavish on them.
Our enmities and antagonisms arise as accidentally as our amities. And few of them are rich or deep enough to last very long. There are a horde of people whom I might hate more reasonably and fruitfully than the ones that I do, if I but knew them.
Polemics are a waste of hate. Better to use it to fire a path to the truth than to set your enemies ablaze. The only dragons worth slaying are the ones that spring from our own entrails.
8 Great thoughts are great crimes
Great thoughts are the crimes that cravenly good people lacked the courage to commit. ‘Each work of art,’ as Adorno points out, ‘is an uncommitted crime.’ A questing mind is blessed with a boundless capacity not just for taking pains, as Buffon said, but for giving them as well, and for not caring how much it gives both itself and others.
‘He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence,’ as Blake said. But a grand idea may be the most productive pestilence of all.
Truth is the choicest of the flowers of evil. It may be that all the books make up one satanic bible, the testament of hell, a savage encyclopaedia which logs each brutal truth that mortals have gleaned since they thieved the apple.
Love may do as much damage as hate, and hate may bear as much fruit as love.
God must know so much less than us, since he can neither sin nor die. As Butler said, ‘no one can know much till he has sinned much.’
SUSPICION
9 The cunning cynicism of rectitude
Life is a dispiriting pilgrimage. And only the naive and devious reach the end with their faith unscathed. These are the true believers, who are urged on by their hunger for gain to lodge their trust in the most venal schemes and creeds.
What novice intriguer could not ‘set the murderous Machiavel to school’? The pure and upright who take offence at his sleights and gambits use far craftier ones each day. ‘The cynicism of life can’t be outdone by literature,’ as Chekhov says. ‘One glass won’t get someone drunk who has downed a whole barrel.’
The young can afford the luxury of ideals. They have not yet learnt what rich prizes there are to play for. They dream of dismantling the world and rebuilding it in a better form. But then they grow up, and they just want to break off a piece of it for their own use. We pawn our youthful cynicism to pay for our adult hopes. We seldom make such a cynical bargain. How cheaply our desires buy off our discontentment. And how promptly our habits and vanity oust our disillusion.
10 Cynicism and suspicion
We descend through the hell of mistrust by three circles. First I keep on guard against my foes, and I grow self-righteous. Then I’m betrayed by the chillness of confidants, and I start to doubt them. And at length I sense that I have colluded with bad faith and roguery, and I view my own motives with a jaundiced eye and squirm with shame. First I learn how fraudulently the world behaves. And then, if I’m honest, I learn how fraudulently I do. I look askance at all facades, once I see that I have gained or lost by some of them.
Mistrustfulness is an intellectual duty but a personal disgrace, and a moral flaw but a mandatory excellence of mind. You live most comfortably by relying on others. But how can you think stringently, if you don’t doubt their heart and your own and all the shows which the false world takes for truth? In daily life you save most time by giving in to credulity, but when you think you save most time by exercising contempt.
Knowledge is a mocker, which reverence would gag.
Contempt whets the intellect, admiration dilates the imagination. ‘Damn braces. Bless relaxes,’ as Blake notes. Suspicion sterilizes like a mental disinfectant.
SCEPTICISM
11 Cynicism and scepticism
Most of the things that people believe are not even worth doubting.
Most scepticism is an amalgam of ignorance and presumption. Few of us know enough to have the right to be sceptics. But we still take pride in challenging notions which we lack the acuity to grasp. And most of us will doubt an idea sooner than our own capacity to gauge its truth.
Most so-called sceptics judge that they have thought enough about a an idea when they have found an excuse for thinking no more about it. They don’t suspend judgement so that they can give it more thought, they reject it out of hand so that they won’t have to think of it at all.
Some people boast that they are sceptics because they judge the truth of a new idea by the test of how closely it aligns with their own idle preconceptions.
What is our scepticism but our smug common sense patrolling the cordon of our entrenched convictions, to halt interloping facts from making a breach in our self-assurance?
A lot of people use scepticism as a rug to muffle truths that they don’t want to hear.
12 Suspicious credulity
A doubting philosopher such as Descartes fasts like a glutton before a feast of credulity. ‘If a man will be content to begin with doubts,’ claimed Bacon, ‘he shall end in certainties.’ But how could he be so sure? How do they skip from diffidently admitting that they don’t know a thing to confidently propounding what no one can know, such as the immateriality or immortality of the soul? They’ve no sooner razed the rotten foundations than they’re at work rebuilding the same old castles in the air to house the ghosts of their God, their free will and their moral prejudices.
We don’t think in order to reach certainty. We jump to conclusions that we call certain so that we won’t have to think.
Those who refuse to take the real cure are prone to put their trust in quacks.
13 Unthinking freethinking
People now, as Colton said, are born freethinkers who feel no need to think freely. They hold a miscellany of fashionable prejudices in lieu of their herd’s inherited ones. They are proud to have won their freedom from the tutelage that told them what to think. But they still have no wish to think for themselves. Their glib pyrrhonism is as automatic as their antiquated faith, and their new scepticism is as lazy as their old orthodoxy. In an age of faith they conform by believing. And in an age of doubt they conform by doubting.
When grey orthodoxies die a natural death, scorners bluster that they are giant-killers.
It costs us less trouble to doubt a thesis than to investigate it. And we would rather believe an idea than reflect on it. But we are quick to doubt any idea that might clash with our unreflective beliefs or customs.
Most people don’t want to think. And they don’t want to be free to think. But they do want to be free to choose who will think for them. Or more often they want to choose those who will choose who will think for them. And whom do they choose? Those whom they trust. And why do they trust them? Because the interest of these has always coincided so closely with their own, that they have caused them few pains. Evidently they choose well.
14 The cunning credulity of scepticism
Sceptics trust in their own doubts as proselytes trust in their own dogmas. They cling to their incredulity with the same certainty that others cling to their convictions. They can’t so much as doubt without dogmatizing. Like Montaigne, you should mistrust your misbelief too much to be a sceptic.
Credulity bolts down all that is offered to it. Scepticism vomits it all. Neither gains much nourishment from ideas, because they don’t digest them.
Most believers believe much less than they think they do. And most doubters doubt much less than they think they do.
People boast that they stand by science, till they find that science runs counter to their ideology or to their interest.
Sly proponents of a dogma, such as Pascal, know that in order to woo us to their faith all they need do is cast doubt on our doubts. ‘With most of us,’ Lichtenberg says, ‘disbelief in a thing is based on blind belief in some other thing.’ So they lure us by a temperate suspicion to yield to a fanciful yet flat-footed credulity. As Bagehot showed, they alternate between ‘an appeal to the coarsest prejudice and a subtle hint to a craving and insatiable scepticism.’
Few people are so gullible as those who have been supplied with a pretext for their scepticism. Those who boast of their own doubts are apt to fall for the grossest hogwash.
Watch out when someone bids you be sceptical. Most of them have a mind to diddle you.
15 The wisdom of superstition
Superstitiousness itself, as Montaigne insinuates, may be a madcap cynicism which has a shrewd feel for the limits of mortal power and perceptiveness. It may be to accept our own weakness, and to see that all we do is subject to the power of chance. Napoleon said that the first qualification for a marshal was luck.
The theoretician scavenges like a jackal amidst the giant carcasses of myth and saga. Philosophy, as Montaigne wrote, is ‘nothing else but a sophisticated poetry.’ Myths have an antique wisdom which is both greener and riper than gaunt philosophy. They keep fresh and unfaded the old truths that it has lost the taste for.
The sole use of an established orthodoxy should be to incite the mind to restless heresy.
As ‘the fool by persisting in his folly would become wise,’ so cynics by persisting in their cynicism would turn back to enchantment. They sigh for the luxuriant credulity of superstition to sweep away the parched calculations of the faith-starved present. Better the vivid and breathing faith of an age of magic than our own passionless instrumental rationalism.
Reason acts like a heartless bailiff, coldly evicting views which have lodged in the one spot for generations.
16 Too great to be true
Some thoughts are too great to be true, but far more are too true to be great.
Aren’t most of the great puzzles of philosophy, such as whether we exist or not, too fundamental to be worth brooding on? ‘There are some questions,’ Hardy said, ‘that are made unimportant by their very magnitude.’
The dream of fame may drive you to seek out the truth. But it’s those who have left off the quest for fame that have more scope to find it. You may get glory by craning for a high hope. But you reach truth by submitting to a great despair.
Flightless minds, who know that they can’t soar high enough to snatch an indelible renown, are free to forswear the sonorous and ingratiating lies which the eminent are obliged to deal in. A minor writer, such as Lichtenberg or Butler, Renard or Porchia, may introduce you to a few unostentatious truths, which the illustrious must stand aloof from, who are too randy for praise to render faithfully the flatness of our lives.
Time yields up its best clues to those staid enough to wait on it. And the years disclose some of their most abstruse mysteries to the second-rate.
The most honest seekers win fame just where they turn false. We seize on their glossy fibs and flummery, but are wary of their unembellished truths.
17 The drabness of truth
Life is all the time tempting you to make large and false responses to its small and false challenges.
The last confession of one who lived to think. I aimed to astound you with new and strange observations. So how could one line that I wrote be more than half true? Behind each glittering word you could glimpse the dreariness of truth. But that was what I had to hide, though I didn’t hide from it. And am I now in the grip of an impulse to act as if it were all more dramatic than it was, to amaze with one last flourish, and to savour the satisfaction of expiating a guilt which I did not quite feel?
A ghostly double haunts all thinkers. It flutters at their back and looks on, and is less susceptible to style, and cares a shade more for truth and a shade less for glory. So it’s a good thing both for them and for us that it is no more than an apparition.
The truths that you grasp after the most gruelling struggles are not quite true. A moment’s more thought would tell you this was so. But whose good would such a moment serve?