The Evening Redness in the West
The enduring allure of cynicism
Today, to be a cynic means to believe that a base human nature is behind all things. In that way, it is a narrow breed of pessimism. The condition differs from the paranoiac’s, who suffers from a solipsism assigning themselves an outsized role in the world. It differs too from the misanthrope’s, who detests humanity, but does not need it to have a flawed nature, only one at odds with their own.
The character of human baseness differs across cynics. Comedians, the apotheotic cynics of modernity, often lampoon a latent insincerity. They point out the lies we tell ourselves and the ones we are told, catch us in our hypocrisy and catch others.
A degree of this variety is present in most of us, and comedy’s resonance makes that plain to see. Cynicism is often hidden beneath the surface, for good reason. Without the skill to make it art, the pessimist about human nature is not like the pessimist about the economy. Their way of seeing other people provokes our disgust reflex.
Judge Holden, the learned imp of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, is a cynic who locates our baseness in competition—the drive to establish our worth in a world which must be forced to yield it.
It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.
To whom do we owe this outlook?
Cynicism as a body of thought began in Athens around the time of Socrates with Antisthenes, a non-citizen sophist who became attracted to the former’s pursuit of virtue and indifference to material comforts. To be one of the earliest Cynics was to embrace the idea that the good life was one of courageous deeds and principled asceticism.
The strength and the courage to accomplish this was held to be humanity’s natural inheritance, obscured by civilization’s artifice. In this way, Cynicism was born not as a strand of pessimism, but of optimism. It represented a hope of return.
Antisthenes attracted Diogenes, history’s most famous cynic, after he was exiled by his father for defacing his city’s currency.1 Having committed one sin against artifice, it was perhaps unsurprising that he took in with the most radical and least social of Socrates’ followers.
Diogenes skewered every custom on the books, carrying out every conceivable bodily function in the public eye (as he did most else). This sense of ‘seeing through’ everyone else has carried forward, giving modern cynicism a veneer of intellectualism.
In the sources writing after Diogenes’ death, the association between Cynicism and a nihilistic outlook began to take hold. His philosophical opponents alleged that he claimed the non-existence of natural value, meaning all is permitted—including cannibalism and incest. This makes little sense; the claim that the natural is good does not entail such consequences, as the behaviours in question are contrary to how our closest animal relatives (monkeys) behave.
Crates took up Diogenes’ mantle, abandoning his riches to live on the streets of Athens with his wife. There he became teacher to Zeno of Citium, who ushered in a major evolution in Cynical thought: Stoicism. Nature remained important to the Stoics, imbuing courage, moderation, and strength with goodness. However, they refined their understanding of the natural to include concern for the community, reinforcing civic duty rather than trashing it.
It is in the tradition of Diogenes, not of Zeno, that cynics see themselves today. Where the Stoics inherited the belief in a simpler good life from Antisthenes, they inherited the notion of piercing the social veil to reveal the true, disappointing workings of the world.
Social structures, then, are not a product of some universal brotherhood, but a widespread effort to suppress our dark impulses. When a relationship goes wrong, it is not the cynic’s own failings, but the at last revealed true nature of the counterparty which is to blame. They have not failed to forge a lasting bond, but lost a gamble that was always beyond their control. In the Holden view, such gambles are the means by which we force the world to acknowledge our worth.
The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for her that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.
How was the legacy of Diogenes perverted into its modern form?
The rise of Stoicism precipitated a decline in Cynicism’s philosophical relevance, the palatable social democracy to its communism. Speeches by the likes of Cicero helped to attach (well-earned) notions of abrasiveness to the label of Cynic, which came to indicate that one was on the philosophical fringe, so to speak.
In the fourth century, the emperor Julian penned two orations addressed to his contemporary Cynics, lamenting that while their progenitor “allowed himself to act only as the light of reason shows us that we ought to act,” his latter-day followers had become “rapacious and depraved and no better than any of the brute beasts.”2
With stunning prescience he wrote: “In our own day, however, the imitators of Diogenes have chosen only what is easiest and least burdensome and have failed to see his nobler side.”
In the late Roman eye, Cynicism had become a fallen order, plagued by those using it as a guise to act contrary to norms. Its final true adherents shuffled off the mortal coil in the fifth century, leaving the Church to dictate the perception of their movement. Excoriated as irreverent skeptics, this period recentred the memory of Cynicism around its distrust in received knowledge.
Later Enlightenment thinkers would pick up on this thread, reframing the life of dogged questioning as a virtuous template. Gone were the prescriptions about how to live, and with them the impetus to adopt a bodily poverty. The new cynics, like La Rochefoucauld, viewed themselves as exposing the true drivers of the social order, hidden beneath our manners and niceties. Here, pessimism finally won the day—for no serious mind would be caught out attributing human action to altruism, honesty, or affection.
As the new cynics so fashioned their self-image, their popular perception as “philosopher(s) of the snarling or currish sort” continued to deepen.3 These facets gradually merged into our modern understanding, which took shape as much in literature as in real persons.
Today’s cynic sits above the fray, sneering, for they know better the root of all problems, and are disgusted by the resources expended in treating their symptoms. As the cultural status of disillusionment waxes and wanes, so does its appeal, with its promise of a debunking skeleton key.
But the cynical way out is illusory, devoid of guidance about how to live. Those who take it as a way of life condemn themselves. It is a fatalism; a resignation of everyone’s (and thus one’s own) life to the dictates of a base nature.
For once, like Judge Holden, one accepts the cynic’s truth as the most fundamental, there is nothing to do but recognize life as a competition to establish one’s worth. This is the difference between applying selective cynicism and being a cynic.
Insincerity, hypocrisy, and manipulation are the tools used by others in the rat race, and the committed cynic, who wishes to test their theory, knows that as the stakes are raised further and further, more and more will the true nature of others be exposed.
The ultimate test is that which presents the ultimate stakes and thereby promises to expose everything. The ultimate test is war.
Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to this moment which will tell if he is to die at that man’s hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a man’s worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one. In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.
Most of the account of Diogenes’ life is owed to the eponymous chapter in Examined Lives by James Miller.
From Julian’s Oration VI
From Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary