A Dog We Kick: A Review of Ansgar Allen's "Cynicism"
In this review, Roberts gives a surprisingly positive review of a rather cynical book; that is, Ansgar Allen's book "Cynicism", which Roberts wishes to praise.
Hi, I am R.C. Roberts, and I'm a cynic.
There is something about a confession that is like shitting out guilt; it is relieving, even when you confess what everyone already knows. No wonder the Catholics and the Freudians made such intricate, mystical systems based on this axiom. And yet, I do not confess to you, dear reader, in the name of guilt. For me, this is about making a point; the cynic has long been the dog we kick. From Diogenes to Rabelais to Mencken, our society has long used the cynic as a cr
eature of abuse. As E.K. Hornbeck responded to the charge in the 1960 movie Inherit the Wind:
"[I seem so] cynical? True, true, that is part of my fascination. I do hateful things for which people love me, and I do lovable things for which they hate me. I'm admired for my detestability. Now, don't worry little Eva; I may be rancid butter, but I'm on your side of the bread."
Like Hornbeck, I have spent my time being rancid butter, smeared on this or that side of someone's bread and butter issue. This is how it has always been, historically. More often than not, the term 'cynic' has been bent, turned, expanded and contracted to fit the people who oppose the ideas of society. The mutation of the word 'cynicism' has turned an ancient philosophy with something to say into a label or purported insult against someone who utters--in one form or another--the words of Timon of Athens: 'Spare your oaths. I’ll trust to your conditions.' Given the paltry state of our conditions, we balloon our oaths as a disguise, and few people enjoy being unmasked.
Nowadays, as the postmodern era winds its way down, its infinity exhausted by our anxious appetite, we have begun to try to--for lack of better words--repent. Many of us have embraced some notion of truth, even if it is a capitalistic 'my truth', as though we can own such a thing. Others have returned to God and religion, shivering and scared, willing to accept an abusive authority over none at all. Some of these sorts will delude themselves into a form of spiritualism, learning new vocabularies that, like hallucinogens, make the world appear different for a while. The rest of us give ourselves to temporary authorities--politics, science, football teams--that give us that small edge to push us through the drudgery of our lives as the Last Man, racked to a wheel of entertainment.
We began this change the way all change begins; we found ourselves a scapegoat. One of the name of this scapegoat? Cynicism. From positivity culture and the cyber-concept of 'haters', cynicism has become the dog we kick when the world appears in a guise we dislike. A situation turned against what you wanted? You were just being cynical, and caused things to 'manifest' this way, as the spiritualist would say. Somebody thinks that your dreams do not make sense? Scoff! They are just being cynical. The politician you dislike gets into office? They 'cynically' appealed to the baser instincts of the individual. People believe in these far-right nuts? They are just being cynical.
There has been a philosophical assault against Cynicism as well, each performing some version of a revenge project for Plato, the first victim of the Cynics. Recently, one finds this in Peter Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason and Slavoj Zizek's The Sublime Object of Ideology. Sloterdijk, the bubble-blowing Heideggerian of the global village, wrote his book with a sort of balance; it is, of course, the first and last book he wrote coherently. He turns towards a familiar sort of conservatism, idealizing a form of cynicism from the Ancient Greek agoras. Slavoj Zizek, the Hegelian jester, threw cynicism into his Lacanian blender and thrashed it about, giving us a Hegelian version of part of Sloterdijk's criticism, leaving out the idealizing as well as any historical considerations. I can forgive Zizek for his disdain of cynicism; after all, one requires a bullet proof naivety to believe Hegel is right about much.
So, in the face of a historical hostility and a recent theoretical animus towards cynicism (or what people call cynicism), I find myself wary of reading books or articles about cynicism. It is like watching reruns on a VHS with ever thinning tape; the arguments are usually the same, often slowly running together while they are falling apart from overuse.
Which is what made Ansgar Allen's Cynicism such a surprise, and such a good read.
I had not heard of Ansgar Allen before reading this book. This is mostly my own fault; good writers, as I like to maintain, are bad readers. We let pleasure pick the books we read, because compulsion picks what we must write. That said, Ansgar Allen is a prolific author: he has written 10 books, with novel The Wake and the Manuscript upcoming, to be published at some point in the future by Anti-Oedipus Press. He has written a number of articles for various outlets, including the New Humanist. He edits Erratum, a publishing house whose claim is that it 'publishes books that confront the dead end of educated, literary culture, and deploys that culture against itself'. This is a mighty fine motto, which , perhaps, reveals that this publisher cares about culture and literature, making it unique in a world of publishing houses that offer positive, warm mottos and goals--they ask writers to come on in and take a seat by the fire, just so they might throw them in.
But my ignorance aside, Allen's book is, as he notes, 'a short history of Cynicism'. It is organized by a historical chronology in support of this pithy descriptor; Allen starts us with the Cynicism of Ancient Greece and takes us all the way to the Renaissance, through the Enlightenment, and to the Soviet Union. Each chapter has pit stops, like any good road trip--albeit, these pit stops are more like collecting hitch hikers, as Allen quite brilliantly illuminates C/cynicism (his portmanteau) through its various practitioners and critics. He even incorporates Peter Sloterdijk into his work, as well as people like Michel Foucault and Donald Dudley. Each hitch hiker, be it Lucian of Samosata or Francois Rabelais or Symeon the Holy Fool, acts as a way to give a definite view on a philosophy that avoids definite dogmas as much as Diogenes avoided private masturbation.
Yet, it is not quite a book that is mere history, to which I am thankful. Before we are presented with the history of C/cynicism, the book is prefaced with a chapter or two of honesty from the author. Allen notes that, for example, his very act of writing about C/cynicism is not going to be all-knowing and objective. As he writes:
"Arguably, any book about Cynicism--and certainly a book of this length--can give a sense of its object only through an act of unavoidable distortion, just as it can give a sense only of what, according to recent scholars, might be key points in the transformation of Cynicism from a brave and deliberately countercultural practice, to an in-built and pervasive modern condition. It is written nonetheless with the view that some distortions can be more fruitful than others." (p. 15, my italics)
Reading this, as well as Allen's other prefaces in the face of writing this book, gave me pause--that is, it made me think. The honesty is appreciated, but what it made clear to me was that Allen's book, while described as a history of C/cynicism and organized as such, was a study of the mutation of ideas. I realized that the hitch hikers one picks up in his book are not presented as disciples of a philosophy that tragically loses its vitality, but are carriers of this viral idea, and who--as hosts--mutate the ideas. In other words, the people Allen picks as focal points are not examples meant to pin down C/cynicism's secret principles or decode it. They are picked as being the most fruitful distortions of a philosophy which is only a distortion--that is, a philosophy of deviance. As Allen notes of Ancient Cynicism:
"Both ancient and modern C/cynicism can be understood as deviant--each entails some kind of departure from accepted principles of public and individual conduct. These principles provide the framework within which C/cynic deviance is understood and furnish the rationale by which it is rejected or denounced." (p. 3)
This focus on C/cynicism as a philosophy of deviance (for better or worse, as Allen reminds the reader constantly) is expanded beyond a mere history and even beyond a study of C/cynicism as deviant mutation of ideas; Allen makes the case for C/cynicism as a philosophy of education, or more precisely a philosophy against the philosophy of education we see now and have seen for centuries. In the Prelude, Allen makes note of the Cynic as 'rooted in the experience of the body', as opposed to 'Plato's dialogue the Phaedo, in which the body is conceptualized as a distracting source…' He expounds on this point, arguing:
"For the Cynic, the body operates very differently [from Plato], in relation to a radically altered understanding of truth and how it is produced. Cynic truth appears as a product of scandal, as a 'scandal of truth', in Michel Foucault's words, an event that is mediated by the body and its emissions." (p. 38)
We are surrounded by, Allen notes, educators who are completely unaware or disregard the body. But in disregarding the body, the educators of our time--and since the Ancients--have disregarded the aggressive nature that education takes, pretending or fully believing that education is some kind of civilizing process where the educated are freed from ignorance and dysfunction. It claims, as Allen puts it, to give students 'the true life'. To this, Allen notes:
"And this is where Cynicism intervenes. By drawing attention to the violence of its own philosophy, and by holding all rivals in such low esteem, Cynicism points out that if we are able to doubt the philosophy, we must be able to see its aggression. Cynicism makes the point that the philosopher who gives kindly advice, who perhaps 'adorns' humankind with the beautiful example of his presence, is also aggressive in promoting his version of the good. The Cynic is unique only for openly declaring his or her aggressive intent.
In its educational engagements, Cynicism embraces quite explicitly 'the forms of battle' or war, 'with peaks of great aggressivity and moments of peaceful calm'." (p. 45-46)
Between the establishment of C/cynicism as a deviant philosophy, while cementing it through a focus on its interventions in education, Allen's book is one that puts history to work. Particularly, Allen is able to develop a list of the 'types of cynicism' that have come into existence in our own time through the distortions and mutations that have befallen C/cynicism since Diogenes. At the end of his work, in the glossary, Allen notes the following types:
Ancient Cynicism
Idealized cynics
Insider cynics
Master-cynics
Modern-cynicism
Nihilism
Paternalistic cynicism
Progressive cynicism
Strategic cynicism
Street Cynics
Now, I won't go through this assortment of types--that would be tedious, and discourage the curious reader from reading Allen's book themselves, and I would never take away a revenue stream from a fellow writer. That said, the interweaving of Cynicism as a mutation, the tracking of the 'strange traces' of Cynicism in modern cynicism, and the understanding of C/cynicism in relation to education allows for Allen to brilliantly track, illuminate, and interrogate the various types of cynicism that, he posits, exist today. He is able to show, for example, the way that cynicism can be almost completely inverted in the service of the philosophy of education that it used to throw plucked chickens at.
In Chapter Six, "Unchain the Sun", Allen brings this to a head in relation to the cynicism of Rousseau through his treatise Emile or On Education, writing:
"Though Rousseau was attacked for abandoning his own offspring to a foundling hospital, his thought on education burdened all subsequent children with bourgeois hopes for "another world". As Sloterdijk argues, unlike aristocratic hopes and ambitions, which are directed at lineage (and in relation to which the child drawn secondary significance), bourgeois ambition is attached directly to the child, with parental love and personal investment forming a sometimes pernicious amalgam. As a mainstay of subsequent progressive thought, Emile helped frame what I call the cynicism of modern progressive educators and their love of education…[j]ust like the liberal, academic cynicism discussed above, this cynicism is again hard to draw out because of its insistent positivity." (p. 138-139)
While this book is, impeccably, placed in a historical chronology which brings the reader along for a ride from the Ancients to now, it uses its focus on particular people and the way they distort the ideas of Cynicism to give a frame to topics that appear, on their face, to not be relevant to the thesis. But, after digging into it, using its main thesis as an anchor, one sees that these topics are not only relevant, but indispensable to understanding C/cynicism and, further, our own understanding of C/cynicism.
This stable juxtaposition of such dizzying perspectives brings us to conclusions that are, to my mind, brilliant. For one, while working in tandem with works by Donald Dudley, Peter Sloterdijk, and Michel Foucault (to name a few), Allen writes in a way that makes this work stand out on its own. It not only acknowledges, say, Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason, but it achieves what Sloterdijk attempted to achieve, before becoming dizzy in its own acrobatics and missing the bar. Allen makes his criticism clear, noting that 'Sloterdijk's alterity as a critic of cynicism' does not stop 'his critique of cynical reason [from falling] in with all other critiques…insofar as it finds modern cynicism deplorable'. (p. 169)
Allen is also one of the few people, as far as I am concerned, to give a sympathetic view to modern cynicism instead of trying to distill some sort of au fond of Cynicism and save it from what it has become. He respects Walter Raleigh's injunction that there is nothing exempt from the peril of mutation; the whole world and all its ideas are subject. And thus, so is C/cynicism and all attempts to formalize, adjust, and define it. As he notes early on, which plays itself out through the book:
"Arguing that traces of earlier Cynicisms persist nonetheless--necessarily warped, of course, since the genesis of Cynic tradition is based on a foundational distortion--this book follows these strange traces of earlier Cynicisms in order to reconsider the place and function of modern cynicism in contemporary society." (p. 13)
Allen states his conclusion, after using Nietzsche's analysis on nihilism, to state that the problem with cynicism is that it is not cynical enough. Or, as he puts it:
"...[the] present-day cynics are borderline melancholics because they have not yet entirely submitted themselves to cynicism, just as those who suffer the most from the effects of nihilism, in Nietzsche's sense, have not yet come to terms with their predicament. They remain 'more or less able to work' not because they keep an otherwise raging cynicism under control, but because it has not yet made its presence fully felt." (p. 184)
We are not fully cynical, we are only cynical 'in private, as a grievance', expressing our cynicism as a 'I hate to be so cynical, but…'
It might be butter, but it isn't rancid.
It was Henry Wotton, in Will Self's Dorian, who said that a naked body requires no explanation, unlike a naked intellect. And as I turned the cover of this book and began to read, I expected nothing but a naked intellect--and a lot of explaining on the part of the author.
This book, however, never strays from its thesis; from presenting the reader with information about Diogenes and the ancient Cynics--both fragmented fact and unifying chreia--to exploring the unknown Holy Fools like Symeon the Fool and further to Renaissance cynics like Francois Rabelais and John Marston, one is taken on a journey that clocks somewhere between a leisurely wandering and a brisk speed walk. That is, when one reads Allen's book, one's brain should feel a quickened pulse, as though it has had an exercise, however light.
In a book that is two-hundred and two pages, this is impressive, like drowning during a baptism. One learns about Diogenes, Epictetus, Lucian, and John Marston, to name a few, without being dragged through long histories. Every C/cynic you meet is met with the line of thought that Allen is pursuing. His introduction of philosophers, schools of thought, history, literature, and events are always situated like truck stops on the highway; not so far out of the way that one must go out of their way, but situated where they are best utilized. One is never left wondering why this bit of information or that reference to a writer was inserted, and by the end of the book, you merely take it for granted. If you leave Allen's work and pick up another book on history, you might as well throw yourself out of a moving car--it feels about the same.
This is not even to mention that in this baptism of C/cynicism, Allen pulls a lot of his reasoning and approaches from dense and interesting sources; Michel Foucault, Peter Sloterdijk, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, to--again--name a few. One gets the sense that Allen's grasp of philosophy and history is like that of a veteran gunfighter; loose but confident. That way, every shot he takes, he is not running the risk of firing into the air--or blowing off a toe.
From the simplicity of the organization, the minimalism of Allen's style, and the steely adherence to carrying out and expressing the thesis of this book, I found myself in admiration. If it were up to me, this book would be printed in the thousands and sent to every academic from Harvard to Oxford with a subtle note taped to the front that would say: Write like this. Perhaps, given how small the book is, I ought to just give it to college freshmen, advising them with great prudence to chuck in through some professor's window.
There is a lot to learn from Ansgar Allen's book, from the history of C/cynicism to its prevalence and half hearted, incubated existence in our society, and so much more. The only thing I could think of asking Ansgar Allen to add—or, at least, emphasize—is what I call the tradition of the ‘literary cynic’, which I would argue is my tradition. This tradition goes from Bion of Borysthenes in the Ancient world to Rabelais in the Renaissance to H.L. Mencken and Gore Vidal in the modern era. They used writing, like parody, satire, and diatribes, to make their points and push the world towards rioting. It would be a mutation that I would like to have explored; or perhaps, when I re-read this as I inevitably will, I will see that Allen covered it already.
And I leave you with my positive esteem for this book and a quote from the one and only H.L. Mencken:
“The cynics are right nine times out of ten.”