meaningful direction to our aspirations to live freely? But my project departs from these
familiar accounts and indictments of cynicism, in part because I take cynicism so
seriously as one of the pressing problems of our age. If we are to be fully aware of what
it is we have to contend with, I think we must forestall our final verdict regarding
cynicism. And we have good reasons for wishing to proceed more cautiously when
assessing cynicism and its implications for democracy.
One reason for caution is that the familiar accounts of cynicism indulge in
nostalgia. They forget that cynicism is not a new phenomenon. Admittedly, it may be
more pernicious and prevalent in modern mass society. But by recognizing that it
plagued previous generations, we temper the yearning for an earlier, less cynical, less
contentious politics – a yearning which intensifies despair about our present condition by
indulging in a comparison with a lost golden age. Indeed, part of what I like about
Galston’s formulation of cynicism as pernicious – because it uproots all beliefs, indeed
even threatens to incapacitate our ability to believe at all – is the familiarity of his
complaint. It seems all ages have been anxious that their beliefs are not firmly enough
held, and that, if lost, they will be replaced by nothing but unbelief. Bertrand Russell, in
a 1930 essay entitled “On Youthful Cynicism,” similarly depicts the sad state of children
of liberal democracies. The sophisticated youths he speaks of “are firmly persuaded that
they have seen through everything and found that there is nothing left remarkable beneath
the visiting moon…Their modern cynicism cannot be cured merely by preaching or by
putting better ideals before them.” In 1841 Emerson diagnoses a “new illness fallen upon
the life of man” that sounds very much like the cynicism that besets us today.
15
15
Emerson, Introductory Lecture on the Time (1841).
Convention