Cynicism: it depends
Ann Althouse wonders whether the result of the recent tsunami of scandals will be that “Everyone becomes cynical and dismissive and won’t even listen to the explanations or pay attention to any specific facts and answers that might emerge.”
But when did people used to pay attention? It seems to me that, at least in the last few years, whenever there have been allegations of a sequence of behavior that would tend to discredit the Obama administration (Benghazi back in the fall comes immediately to mind, but the pattern actually goes back to the 2008 campaign), I’ve seen the shrugs and heard the waves of dismissal and rationalizations, and sometimes the cynical: “they all do it.”
Part of this reaction is the human tendency to want to shut out bad news, and to a liberal anything that reflects poorly on Obama and the left is bad news. In addition there seems to be a fairly rampant inability (or unwillingness?) to make distinctions of degree or type between the “its” that “they” (politicians) do. Not all offenses are of the same magnitude or kind, but to see the differences takes attention and the motivation to be willing to sort it all out beyond a kneejerk defense of one’s own party.
The political effect of all of this depends on what people end up getting cynical about. If their reaction amounts to “all politicians are crooks, so a plague on both their houses,” the probable result would be apathy and a lot of people giving up and staying home on election day. Fanatics of either party would still be likely to come to the polls, of course. Still another group of voters likely to continue to show up would be people on the dole who want to keep the gravy train running, and who are far more likely to be Democratic voters.
But—and it’s a big “but”—if people become cynical about big and centralized government in general, that would be likely to benefit conservatives because it is one of the basic principles of conservatism itself. It’s not just that the perpetrators of these particular scandals are liberals. It’s that the subject matter of these particular scandals should have a natural tendency to reinforce the idea of the benefit of smaller and less intrusive government.
But the dots need to be connected more and more explicitly so that word reaches the largest number of people possible. To the extent that the focus remains on personalities it would tend to obscure that. To be sure, “Impeach Holder!” and “Fire Lerner!” have a certain ring to them, and both would be great ideas, IMHO. But they risk making Holder and Lerner the issues rather than the abuse of power inherent and inevitable with big government. Impeaching Holder and firing Lerner don’t even begin to address the problem, which is deep and systemic. There are plenty more where Holder and Lerner come from willing to do the same as their predecessors.
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/340598.php
Yes. Along those lines Ace comments on a good piece by Jonah Goldberg. The message here needs to be something like “Gov’t can be dangerous and dysfunctional, it can’t be a major part of your life. Live a real and free life.”
IMO, liberals are not going to become cynical about big and centralized government in general until it directly and repeatedly affects them. Even then, an increasingly greater percentage of American’s are incrementally and repeatedly proving Franklin’s maxim; “Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
It pains me to say it but the left appears to have won the culture war and both legal and illegal immigrants favor socialism. Long term, the demographic tide favors the left.
Some lessons, especially the hard ones, people have to learn for themselves.
If half the population have already become ideologically committed enemies of the liberty and prosperity of the productive half of the citizenry upon whom they impose for their own economic well being, how would it follow that the class of bureaucrats and their clients would in fact care about anything other than the effective management of what is to them a mere economic resource?
You are still looking at this in terms of a moral dynamic and expecting that the left might be capable of being roused on matters of principle. They have evolved well beyond a belief in any such thing.
DNW –
“…evolved…”
I’m going to riff on this and take it in the direction I played around with yesterday. Just want to be clear I’m not implying you’d agree with where I take it.
So: I was toying around with Sartre’s notion of bad faith, and while you are certainly right that the left has evolved (love that you chose that word) beyond belief in principle, they have not, I think, evolved to the point where they’re comfortable acknowledging the fact.
The self-aware leftists who spin the wheels of culture won’t acknowledge it publicly for obvious reasons – it’s bad politics, bad “messaging,” bad for business.
The majority of objective allies, fellow travelers, and unthinking partisans, however, don’t acknowledge it to themselves. The value of Facebook (which I never use, just occasionally peruse) for me has been its confirmation that what we treasure today is not virtue or principle, but the display of sentiments thought to be what virtuous or principled people would display.
I sometimes call it the Gyges Syndrome, or, altering Veblen a bit, “conspicuous presumption.” The Culture of Stupid, the Gyges Culture, the Culture of Conspicuous Presumption is one in which the atmosphere is overlain with liberal nostrums and their attendant philosophical nihilism, while at the same time holding on to those traditional bugbears Nietzsche was so insistent nihilism implied we had to abandon.
“One who abandons Christianity has no right to Christian morality” (something like that, it’s in Twilight of the Idols).
It never occurred to Nietzsche that Judeo-Christian morality was not, in the final analysis, an arbitrary convention. If it isn’t, if it’s instead an expression of our teleological center of gravity, then to abandon the Judeo-Christian metaphysics and morality in theory puts us in something like a state of bad faith. That is, the Last Men are all there will be, the end of the evolutionary line – no Ubermenschen, no New Morality of Free Men, no Zarathustra. Just the Camusian fallen ones who fornicate and read the funnies (or, today, watch gonzo porn).
We’ll do precisely what Nietzsche thought we would one day “evolve” beyond – abandon the Christian God while disingenuously clinging to the notions of what He sanctions – conscience, principle, virtue, etc.
Consequently, it’s very important to the leftist canaille to appear to themselves to be going through the expressive motions of the principled – and indeed they really think they are in possession of principles as firm as the stone tablets handed down on Sinai. The twilight of the idols has turned out to be their apotheosis. Everyone a golden calf, and to each his (or her!) own.
What I’m having trouble wrapping my head around – and this is why I’m appealing to mauvaise foi – is the cognitive predicate of this Gyges Syndrome. It really is as if the left and its cohorts believe concurrently in absolutely nothing and in their own exemplification of Moral Truth. You see it all the time I’m sure – I certainly do, not only on Facebook, but in the academy. A certain fellow you barely know but somehow is on your friends list posts some drivel about some political thing or another, and in the span of a two or three paragraph rant will go from absolute nihilism (“do what you will” = Moral Truth) to absolute proclamations on principle and “it’s simply a matter of right and wrong.”
Say what now?
None of this is incompatible with what you (DNW) said. I just think it’s curious, to say the least. There’s a scene in Blade Runner when Tyrell tells Deckerd that Rachel doesn’t know she’s a replicant. Deckerd replies incredulously, “How can it not know what it is?”
That’s my problem here. How can (so many) leftists not know what they are? Do they really not know? As of now, I have severe doubts about that.
I think the underlying reason for all the cynicism (and from what I’ve heard, there’s quite a bit of it out there) is that everyone understands these scandals will change nothing. Does anyone really expect the balance of power in the government to look any different a year from now? Unless something comes out that’s so terrible that two thirds of the senate will vote to force Obama out of office, I think a big “meh” is entirely warranted.
kolnai:
Orwell, who certainly understood the leftist mind, called it doublethink (which I’m sure you’ve heard of):
Of course, some people are on automatic pilot anyway. They just mouth the party line talking points and don’t think much at all, much less doublethink. Smarter and more thoughtful folks have to use doublethink.
And then there’s Hilton Kramer on the same thing (although he didn’t call it by the same name):
And Whittaker Chambers wrote:
“How can (so many) leftists not know what they are? Do they really not know? As of now, I have severe doubts about that.”
They know, but they are invested. Without the agenda they are less than zero. They fear the empty kool-aid cup.
“… in a series of mental acrobatics..”
Pretzel logic!
Only a fool…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyZXVhneB3c
It just can’t be that their rose colored glasses are not reality.
neo –
Excellent selection of quotes. Of course I’ve read Orwell, Kramer, and Chambers, but for some reason Doublethink never occurred to me – Orwell pretty much nailed it, as he nailed most of the leftist mind (despite his own idiosyncratic leftism).
I’m starting to think there’s something here I might be able to work on. I think what began my engagement with Sartre recently was his attempt to explain the (as it were) condition of possibility in human consciousness for such attitudes of bad faith to exist. This accounts for a lot of the difficulty of Being and Nothingness – it’s hard to understand how a mind can twist itself in such knots, how one can be “consciously unconscious.”
I’ve got to think about this more.
neo-
One more thing. Reading my blogroll today I was reminded of Caplan’s Myth of the Rational Voter:
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/06/the_myth_of_the_8.html
I’ve discussed it here before, but it’s not been at the front of my mind lately. But that experiment he reports really does – or can be construed as – supporting his theory in the book.
This ties into the Gyges Syndrome (bad faith, conspicuous presumption, Doublethink, ketman, call it what you will) via an analysis of incentives. Caplan’s thesis is that with respect to intellectual matters, JUST AS for everything else, if the costs of self-indulgence are low or inscrutable, then what we will get is more self-indulgence. And more self-indulgence generally means more error (because our axiom becomes “do what feels good” instead of “do what is right”).
Be that as it may, Caplan thinks that there is no double-consciousness, no Doublethink – he thinks it’s just intellectual laziness pure and simple, due to unfavorable incentives that reward such sloth. The experimenters themselves opt for a version of double consciousness as an explanation (“insincerity”).
Caplan’s explanation is certainly the simplest, and there is undoubtedly truth in it. But Occam’s Razor is just a guide, not a law, and if something is inadequate then it’s just inadequate, regardless of how simple or elegant it is.
To decide this, we really need to have some idea of what is going on with consciousness, and that is what brings me back to Sartre. What Sarre would say is something like this:
“Yes, the people are intellectually lazy, but that laziness is a choice, and you cannot consciously choose to not pursue something unless you are, in some basic way, already conscious of what you’re opting not to pursue.”
Caplan is a ferocious defender of free will, so in the end I’m not sure he’d disagree with that too much. But then, isn’t the deeper explanation insincerity rather than perverse incentives, which becomes, on this reading, surface manifestations of the underlying bad faith/doublethink?
I don’t think believing in evil vs good is cynicism per say.
But from the Left’s viewpoint, if you don’t believe their Utopia works or is on the way to being cooked in the bread oven… maybe that is cynicism to em.
Systems of government can be efficient or inefficient, but all have advantages and pluses. Even totalitarianism, in the pure dictatorship model.
Put a strong, kind, compassionate, wise man in charge, and you have a Golden Age or aka Benevolent Dictatorship. Or at least a Rational Utopia.
Put the wrong person in charge and you get something else.
Until the people learn to accept, through changing their own hearts and emotions, that evil will always produce evil systems, they won’t understand why things are the way they are.
No matter what system of government humans use, the good will always make the best of it and the evil always the worst.
Thus America will become evil when run by Leftist Democrats. Thus Cuba, Iran, China, and Russia will become good when run by patriots and allies of justice/humanity.
kolnai:
Note that I wrote in my comment yesterday:
Some people are indeed intellectually lazy, or even just not all that intelligent. But others are performing doublethink or something very much like it. And someone like Freeman, in the Chambers’ passage, whom he describes as exceptionally brilliant, is certainly not intellectually lazy or unintelligent. He is more like O’Brien in 1984.
Doublethink can be done with computer programming is as well. At least on a theoretical, AI level.
Just run two concurrent programs, that are not aware of each other. One changes a sequence of 101 into 666, and the other searches out the 666 and changes it into 101.
In a railroad analogy, a person goes along the tracks and lays them in a direction. Then someone else comes up behind him to clean the tracks. Then someone else behind that guy comes up to destroy and dismantle the tracks. Then the last guy comes up through the tracks and puts more of the railroad tracks down.
If a computer or humans did that, it would take a lot of cpu cycles and a lot of sweat.
And what would they accomplish? 2 or 5 or 10 mutually incompatible things, that work perfectly well together.
That is the Perfect Utopia. 100% work, 0% work, 100% effort, 0% effort = Perfection.
Great exposition here, but it needs a definition of “intellectually lazy.” What does it mean to be intellectually lazy? Is it merely the difference in intent as in doublethink requires willfulness and IL does not?
But how does intellectual activity not have intent? The term demands intent.
And why would IL result in statements of unreality or immorality. I think the opposite is more true. It takes great feats of intellectual activity to countermand the obvious truths of God and his creation.
Intellect. What’s it good for?
When I was in the military, getting the GI bill, I trained with the infantry: straight leg, dog face soldiers. Troops.
One troop, I’ll call him King, was just barely there. So, for diversion, in the field when we were training, I started, “ask King.” There are often long periods of nothing in the military and that nothing is quite spectacularly boring. Hence a need for diversion.
And so sprung up the daily “ask King.”
And these were two of his answers to the question of “why are we here.”
I don’t know.
Someone told me to.
I figure that’s about as good as it can get.
I would think the term “intellectual laziness” would apply only to intellectuals who accept a doctrine without any thought of its rationality or investigation into the credibility of the supporting evidence. But, seeing as how most of the social progressive intellectuals are anti-rational (at least in the sense of their motivation) then they can’t really even be called intellectuals. For instance, social progressives will gulp at this one:
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/06/04/Daily-Beast-Nominates-Ted-Cruz-for-Craziest-Member-of-Congress
I’m pretty sure intellectual laziness can only be laid upon those who engage in proper intellectual activity, which naturally eliminates the whole progressive academy.
sharpie –
I think I agree with you.
What I’ve been trying to pin down is the level of intentionality at work in doublethink. In other words, I’m beginning to cash out of the account of the dupes and followers of the left that paints them as merely manipulated sheep. I think they are willingly manipulated sheep, and the ones who manipulate them ultimately don’t see themselves as manipulative (ends justify the means).
You make an interesting point when you say that it perhaps stands to reason that the less intellectually sophisticated we are, the more we will tend to affirm the common truths we’re inherently directed towards. That way, there is less fog generated by the old cogito.
I think Caplan’s assumption is the assumption of a rational choice economist – all else equal, when incentives don’t punish irrational behavior, people will act/think irrationally. Why? Amour propre, basically. Putting this view starkly, we like to feel good more than we like to know and act on truth.
So, again on what I think is Caplan’s view, intellectual laziness takes us away from basic truths because of its predicate, which is self-indulgence, or, in economic jargon, the dominant urge to maximize one’s own utility (understood as “feeling good”).
In his book, Caplan’s argument is that our bad voting decisions don’t produce individual costs sufficient to outweigh the felt benefits of lazy indulgence in feel-good nostrums. So we vote what makes us feel good.
Interesting, that. It dovetails, possibly, with a point I made in another comment a few days ago, concerning praxis. One way of construing Caplan’s argument is that democratic politics in pretty much any society aside from a tiny one (and maybe even there) has built-in landmines that virtually guarantee the thing is going to blow eventually.
The government gets too distant but at the same too tethered to its interest groups; the people do not feel immediate or palpable enough costs to their ignorant decisions, so they keep electing people whose decisions drive everything down, down, down; and the whole thing is large and unwieldy that responsibility can always be shoved off to whatever “enemies” one wants to “punish,” to borrow a phrase some guy once said.
That, to me, sounds like a situation where political praxis is well-nigh impossible. It conspires to make everyone into play-actors, identifying with feel-good “roles” (like Sartre’s waiter) that fill up the void of meaning which praxis vacated.
And then it’s all downhill. When praxis is first replaced and then identified with correct feeling and role-playing, we are equating intentions or will with reality, and whether we know it or not, are conceiving of ourselves as gods.
This does help account for some of the deeper roots of the explosion of narcissism we’ve seen in the past two or three decades.
kolnai Says:
June 4th, 2013 at 4:35 pm
Agree.
I obviously agree with the analysis of the logical implications, and agree that there is something radically incoherent seeming in comparing their announced worldviews with their rhetorical behaviors.
The big question for all of us is how much of the population evincing this trait is a, brazenly engaged in self-consciously cynical manipulation of language for political effect; and what part of the offending population is b, “genuinely” deluding itself; and if so “b”, then just how.
I think that your notion that it is an issue of radical bad faith in the case of the latter, the less guilty residuum, has some merit.
And I think that in positing the issue in that way, we can still find room to rotate the phenomenon around and inspect the various facets of the process.
My guess is that the act of bad faith will reduce, finally, to a kind of moral choice too (and by that I mean an undeniable existential choice as to what kind of being the choice-maker decides to make himself into).
Let’s pretend here. Let’s pretend that we believe in a God. Let’s pretend that we don’t have this God in our dock, but we find ourselves in his. And, that we find ourselves literally incapable of lying to a being to whom everything is transparent.
What then does bad faith as an interior psychological process amount to as a phenomenon, as it is compared and contrasted with a more ostensibly overt and “conscious” form of socially manipulative cynicism?
Even placing aside any issue of an intrinsic teleology or teleonomy which one is constructively ignoring in order to advance an agenda or quell a feeling of disquiet, there is the issue of radical honesty, and the psychological motivation for choosing to not be honest or to “think too much” about the contradictions one is purportedly unconscious of. I am suggesting that the “go alongs” the “I never thought of it that way” types, have in fact, at some subliminal level, thought about it, and made their own choice and alignment, confirmed through repeated acts of recommittment.
I don’t like coming to this conclusion. It implies something almost spiritual as afoot, even though I am merely using a (very roughly) phenomenological lens to examine it.
Acts of the will may be a bit more mysterious and portentous, even for presumptively two dimensional, completely material, mortals like ourselves, than we are accustomed to think.
I will agree with the conclusion that you will probably find yourself willy-nilly forced to: “They can’t, not know.” Not really.
I shudder to think of what the implications of this conclusion would be if there really were a God.
Some intriguing reasoning, DNW.
Ironically, the Christian doctrine of not judging applies. The prohibition does not anihilate the Law; it does annihilate one man knowing the full intent/cause of another man.
I wonder if the Spartans “knew” their whole way of life was “immoral” in that it was completely dedicated to war and supported by slavery.
There is an underlying topic which is too much to go into here, but it is the valid use of stereotypes or other’s people’s conclusions merely because we don’t have the time and resources to investigate and validate every damn bit of information or claim or doctrine.
I follow Neo precisely because I think she is one of the least intellectually lazy persons on earth and I can trust her more so than most anyone else.
Is that intellectually lazy?
Oh, thanks for the thoughtful reply, Kolnai.
sharpie –
Back atcha 🙂
And DNW –
Thanks for your thoughtful reply as well.
People focus too much on these intellect games.
To the forces of evil, man’s intellect was nothing more than a useful tool to make man convince himself that evil was good. The heart and soul were far more difficult propositions and had to be won over, conquered, or destroyed, for there will be found humanity’s true resistance.
Kolnai,
A remark, and admission as to what I have done with the concept of bad faith you broached.
Strictly speaking, I have inverted the concept to some extent. Rather than asserting or agreeing that X has made a false choice which he attributes to the necessity of social pressure, some Das Man habit which is not authentically his own but which he enacts, I am suggesting that the bad faith is in the form of a self-deception as to reasons and the interpersonal, and even more radically, self-justifications, deployed.
These persons are in my description then, not engaging in an X which proves to be an inauthentic or harmful modality because they are mistakenly or in cowardice trying to conform to a pattern (altrusim for example) they don’t really embrace, but rather I am asserting that they know that they are not really altruists, and are deliberately if somewhat less directly than the outright manipulative cynic, using social opportunities to realize their real choices while pretending to conform to a higher “standard”, or, perhaps, feigning a kind of naivete.
The overlap is there, but I should acknowledge, as it occurred to me later, that if you are following Sartre very closely and narrowly, then my remarks will be somewhat off kilter. I will appear to be addressing only a kind of slightly more buried kind of hypocrisy which people try to believe themselves innocent of. Which is what I guess I am in fact doing.
DNW –
Well, Sartre or no Sartre, I like the way you put it better, and it’s closer to what I was getting at. I am no great Sartre scholar (I’ve just been re-reading Being and Nothingness recently for other reasons – fun not being one of them), so I was just extrapolating anyway.
But to the basic point:
1) “they know they are not really altruists” – yes
2) “…are deliberately…using social opportunities to realize their real choices…” – yes
3) “…while pretending to conform to a higher ‘standard…’ – bingo
4) “…or, perhaps, feigning a kind of naiveté.” I’d say that’s pretty much bullseye.
All I was trying to get at, I suppose, in my application of bad faith here was the basic idea of a consciousness somehow rendering itself quasi-oblivious of its own CONSCIOUS activity – a self-knowing unknowing, a purposeful choice to alienate purposeful choice in order to “excuse oneself,” as Sartre so often puts it.
I’ve always admired Sartre’s ballsy effort to try and understand that.
On a personal level, my thoughts have drifted this way because I’ve started to encounter it way too frequently, to the point where it’s starting to look like everything is that kind of “nail.” It seems everyday I meet someone who obviously thinks ONLY when thought is required, on the fly, to justify (excuse) the very personal failings they are so obviously ashamed of.
I’ve nearly come to the conclusion that all of modern thought has turned out to be one prolonged effort to rationalize bad character. It seems that the worst thing – the thing that really sets people off – is any sort of suggested rebuke or criticism, and that includes self-rebuke and self-criticism.
One of my favorite moments in all of classical literature is in Xenophon’s rendition of the Apology of Socrates. He’s just been judged guilty and will get the death penalty, and his acolytes have gathered around him. Among them is that histrionic follower, Apollodorus, weeping profusely. He wails to Socrates,
“How can you be so calm? I cannot bear to see you die unjustly.”
Socrates smiles,
“My dear Apollodorus, would you prefer that my death were just?”
We don’t understand that attitude anymore; try to be decent and virtuous and let the rest take care of itself. Instead, we’d prefer to be the weeping, wailing one, the public displayer of right sentiment. We are, one might say, all Apollodorus now.
}}} “Everyone becomes cynical and dismissive and won’t even listen to the explanations or pay attention to any specific facts and answers that might emerge.”
… and we get, as with Watergate, a new generation of conservatives with a healthy distrust for “the government solution”.