Seeing through Cynicism 1 (Jonathan Storment)

“It’s time to be skeptical of our own skepticism.” –N.T. Wright

“No matter how cynical you get, it’s never enough to keep up.” —Lily Tomlin

One of my favorite stories in the Hebrew Scriptures is also one that haunts me. It is the story at the beginning of 1 Samuel, where Hannah comes to the Temple to pray for a child. She is childless in a world where that means she’s worthless and so she goes to the one place in the world where she thinks someone might care. She breaks down praying for God to give her a child, and Eli the priest, the person you might expect to help the most, condemns her.

He actually tells Hannah that she shouldn’t be coming to the Temple drunk, which I think either tells us more about Eli’s inability to get in touch with his own emotions, or maybe his own relationship with alcohol, but to be sure, his cynical response says more about him than it does her.

The story ends with Hannah telling Eli that she is not drunk, she is only pouring out her soul to the LORD, and then Eli offering an awkward apology for his rash assessment.

This story haunts me because I am relatively sure I do something like this a few times a week. It is much easier to write off that email or criticism if you are able to see through a person’s motives. I am a pretty intuitive person and so it is easy for me to make quick assessments, but it is also very possible that I am wrong.

I live in a university town.  I work in a church where people from three different Christian colleges attend and serve regularly, and recently, one of those professors told me something that I found helpful:

“Criticism is a helpful tool, like an acid, but like an acid it becomes incredibly dangerous when it oversteps its boundaries. When it oversteps the bounds of appropriate suspicion, it becomes cynical, jaded, and something quite unlike the Christian faith.”

I think that’s right.

In his great book, Seeing Through Cynicism, Dick Keyes points out that to be cynical actually requires great faith. In order to be cynical, one has to assume near omniscience.

Take this example from Keyes book. Imagine a young married couple with kids living in the suburbs.  Each night they have a similar routine, they play, read stories, bathe and dress the children for bed, and then afterward they talk, watch tv and go to bed.

They know they live in the suburbs on a street with many other people in their same life setting. Their day is filled with work which they may or may not find fulfilling. Their life is exhausting, and a tiny little voice in the back of their mind continues to remind them that they are incredibly similar to everyone else on their block.

But here is where cynicism makes a deal with us. This couple learns not to take it all seriously, they become “self-aware” of the meaninglessness of it all, and then irony (the post-modern taste of cynicism) begins to help them deal with the soft despair that a routine can bring. They continue to parent, and work, but at the end of the day they smile to each other, knowing that they at least see what the other people on their block do not. They (and they would never say this) are somehow above it all.

They see the whole thing as a game not to be taken too seriously. They learn to distance themselves from the other co-workers, and neighbors. They at least know how futile this is. But cynicism, even the most basic forms of it, requires much faith.

Little does this couple know that in the very next house over, other parents have made similar deals with cynicism. They too are special, because they too see through the life they have, and the emptiness of it all. Their cynicism has allowed them to feel above it all as well, without acknowledging the reality that they are actually assuming some position of perspective that they don’t really have.

All the while, the life they have suffers because the meaning that just might be possible is ignored because, in order to feel special, it must be agreed that it can’t even exist.

The problem with cynicism is that it has some prior commitments that it often doesn’t tell you about, it is cloaked in humor, or plausible deniability, but cynicism tends to be deeply rooted in values like truth, or freedom, or justice. It just doesn’t stick around long enough to be interviewed.

It is the whisper that helps us write someone off that we disagree with, because they only care about money/power/sex, assuming that what we know about them, must be all there is to them. It goes beyond suspicion to a form of certainty that we don’t normally associate with cynicism, but one that has quietly attached itself anyway.

Cynicism is the ninja form of certainty

It is interesting that in the Bible, the idea for cynicism is something like a “scoffer.” They are the fool. This is not what we normally associate with cynics. Cynics, in our world, are more likely to be seen as the only ones who aren’t fools. The person who is able to quickly deconstruct is the wisest in the room, and maybe they are…but not if they don’t know what they don’t know.

Cynicism makes the subtle leap from maybe to certainty, from some to all. People can’t be trusted, bankers do it for money, politicians do it for power, and God is just a word people use to feel better about death, impose their will on others, or get their Aunt Betty to die without freaking out.

In his book, God in the Dock, C.S. Lewis points out that the definition of the modern world is that we no longer have a profound awareness of sin. I would change that to we no longer have a profound awareness of our own sin, specifically the sin of over-reaching faith that no longer calls itself faith.

Cynicism is so toxic, because it tends to presents itself as wisdom. The Bible calls it what it is…foolish