Confessions of a repentant cynic

By Barton Wong
web posted November 26, 2001

It has become increasingly clear over the last few months since
September 11th that my generation is facing a reckoning; a
reckoning that will ultimately involve a shift in our fundamental
moral values. It seems that the ever-so-superior cynicism that my
generation grew up with and which it adopted as its attitude
toward great geopolitical events and toward life in general just
isn't adequate. To the horror of this most fashion-conscious
generation ever, their cynicism just isn't very fashionable
anymore. We are adrift in uncertainty. Could it be that the naïve
schmucks we use to mock, those who stupidly believed in God,
country, patriotism, and defending "Western values" be right? It
is possibility that we can't even face right now.

Pundits say that the World Trade Center bombings killed the
"Age of Irony," but I feel that they're using the wrong term, since
irony will always be with us in so far as events will always turn
out contrary to all our expectations. The entire history of the
world is one long "Age of Irony." No, the period of 1989-2001
which depending on who you talk to, is either celebrated as one
long party unprecedented for its prosperity and peace for us in
the West or dammed as an never-ending period of complacency,
hedonism, and moral decay was the "Age of Cynicism," and
those of us who came to age in it, took in and eventually, came
to embody its easy, glib values. I was one of those young
people.

After all, if we had plenty of money, well-paying jobs awaiting
us, an unprecedented amount of leisure time on our hands, and
no threats, what ideals were left for us to defend and fight for? If
we were really at the end of history, where our values, those of
liberal democracy and capitalist prosperity had triumphed once
and for all, what harm would one long wallow in self-indulgence,
self-absorption, and moral nihilism do?

Even the conflicts that did come up in this period seemed unreal
and far away. The Gulf War? That was less a war than a video
game waged against a scarecrow of an enemy all in the noble
name of cheap gas prices. The half million dead in the genocide
in Rwanda? Something that happened in some jungle of the Dark
Continent. Chechnya? Yugoslavia? The Middle East? Well, if
those ignorant people insist on killing each other, why should we
bother to waste our time and resources caring about them? We,
the enlightened cynics in the West knew better than any of them,
didn't we?

Up to September 10th 2001, if you'd ask what attitude I took
toward the outside world, I would have proudly proclaimed
myself a cynic. Why would have I done this? Well, the short
answer is that everyone I knew, those who were popular,
intelligent, and well-respected had, to a person, the exact same
perspective on life. Cynicism was intellectually fashionable
among those in the know and like most of my generation, I was,
if anything, a great follower of fashion. When a few months ago,
a correspondent wrote in to declare that my pronouncement that
"Social Conservatism Is Dead" and that traditional values were
irrelevant was the encapsulation of the life views of "an aspiring
yuppie," he cut deeper than he knew. At times, it seems like my
entire generation's highest goal in life is to aspire to be happy and
wealthy yuppies or bobos.

Not that anyone around me seemed surprised that someone so
young was so worldly-wise. I remember well that my parents,
sisters, teachers, friends, and acquaintances all remarked that I
had developed an extremely negative view of life very early on.
No one particularly minded this or even noticed. After all, it was
the de riguer attitude. The older generation seemed to almost
expect that we'd all inevitably turn out to be profound moral
nihilists.

I was also a cynic because I was lazy. It is an extraordinarily
easy way to be feel superior and above-it-all toward very
complicated subjects. It made you feel like a true intellectual,
when in fact, our cynicism made us simplify and stereotype both
everything and everyone relentlessly.

For us, politics was not a civic forum where our society groped
its way through a minefield of ethics, economics, and other
tiresomely complex issues; it was a grotesque black comedy
where vicious, lying opportunists all tried to scramble for the
pork, the bribes, and the interns, as quickly as possible while
trying to stab everyone else in the back as best they could. Not
one of them really meant what they were saying. Everyone was
either Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton. It was no wonder then that
voter participation went down and the public discourse
correspondingly coarsened, but we cynics expected this from the
very beginning, even though we were the ones who were causing
it. We thought only a fool would listen to all the lies and then go
out to actually vote for one of them. We cynics just couldn't be
bothered to take the time to examine the issues and/or exercise
our democratic rights. Nothing really mattered and nothing really
changed, so why should we care?

Our cynicism made us feel that we were more perceptive and
had sounder instincts than the common herd.

Underneath the shield of worldliness, it was just reinforcing our
glib self-esteem. Ultimately, it became a mask for both our true
ignorance and a justification for our refusal to participate in
society. In this way, cynicism is really nothing more than a lazy
man's "intellectualism." The true intellectuals however, were off
laboring away in obscure corners on topics that would make us
cynics yawn and turn back to our cappuccinos and
cosmopolitans.

I have come to realize that my cynicism was not just ignorant and
lazy, it was moral idiocy on a grand scale. Reading over my
"Social Conservatism Is Dead," a product of only a few months
ago, I was struck not only by the sheer pompousness of a 19-
year old college student attempting to sweep away hundreds of
years of accumulated moral tradition in only a few pages, but by
the profoundly shallow view I took of that tradition. I realize that
I dismissed traditional morality mostly not on its own merits, but
because I thought young people took it to be "uncool" and
because I thought it was not politically viable. This seems to be a
quintessentially late 90s, almost Clintonesque view of morality; I
discard what many take to be eternal values because I thought
they were vote losers. In the end, though I think I made several
valid points in declaring that social conservatism is dead, I think
that I am now just one in the endless line of young people who
go out of their way to prove their cleverness and ability to break
the "chains" of traditions by rejecting the values of their parents.
Yet those values seem to last far longer than the clever glibness
which seeks to replace it. I have realized that there's a good
reason for that.

My oddly conflicted attitude toward President Bush was another
example of my moral nihilism. Now, I greatly respected the
President and all that he's done so far, but since he was after all,
in my cynical worldview, just another power-seeking politician, I
could never really take him at face value. I just couldn't
comprehend how someone with a BA from Yale and a MBA
from Harvard could say that Jesus was his favorite philosopher.
It had to be either naiveté, a failed attempt at wittiness, or a ploy
to get votes from the Religious Right. And despite all the proof
we have Bush's genuine and transparent religious integrity, it
shames me to confess that I actually thought that his
pronunciations of faith were just catch phrases designed by
White House spin-doctors to raise his popularity in Middle
America. The fact that Bush might actually have meant what he
said never occurred to me.

My cynicism was born in the 1990s through my experience of
watching politics, especially Bill Clinton. Politicians don't get
more cynical and corrupt than that. While I do not believe that
political leadership is the sole cause for cynicism and moral
decline, (President Reagan, that great defender of traditional
"family values," presided over an era which gave us coke-
snorting yuppie Wall Streeters, junk bonds, and Michael
Jackson) the horribly fascinating spectacle that was Bill Clinton's
America had to be a special case. The untold wealth that was
made and spent now seems to only add to the stink of moral
corruption of those years. That unprecedented prosperity
allowed us all to indulge in making everything small and petty.
Programs such as Survivor, Temptation Island, and Who Wants
To Marry A Millionaire? were not inherently damaging, but their
sheer popularity tells a lot about the era we've just gone through.

Even apart from mere television shows however, on matters of
life-and-death and national importance, the cynicism and the
rampant celebrity culture that accompanied it made everything a
spectacle to be consumed. News broadcasts seemed less like
information and more like scurrilous versions of Entertainment
Tonight. Liz Grubman ran over people she considered white
trash, so we get swamped with New Yorker-style profiles of her
and her family. Chandra Levy disappears, Gary Condit
stonewalls, and all everyone can talk about is the sex. The fact
that a young woman is quite possibly dead and that an United
States Congressman is impeding the course of justice never
seems to occur to anyone. The OJ Simpson trial was, in the end,
less about justice and more about the entertaining spectacle of
watching millionaire lawyers grandstanding for press notoriety
and book endorsements. Simpson's guilt in the murders of two
people was a mere subplot. And so on. Worst of all was the
impeachment trial of Bill Clinton, where everyone, both
Republicans and Democrats, from the press to Kenneth Starr,
seem to gravitate and linger over the endless details of Clinton's
unusual sex life, while conveniently forgetting the fact that the
leader of the free world was a nauseatingly mendacious creep
and a man who had repeatedly committed gross abuses of his
power. That proved more than anything else to me, that this
society had lost its sense of priorities and that since I couldn't
change a thing, why not join in with the flow? This was the
culture that produced an entire generation's cynicism.

If eternal values such as patriotism and loyalty to your country no
longer mattered or were the purview of only naïve ignoramuses,
than actions such as Clinton's alleged sale of American military
secrets to the Communist China in exchange for campaign
contributions no longer seemed to matter a great deal either. The
fact that Clinton got away with this and a whole lot more, ending
up with a 69% approval rating at the end only seemed to prove
to me that you could have your cake and eat it too: you could be
a manifestly corrupt and immoral person, and the public would
love you for it. But cynicism cuts both ways as it turns out. After
the cave fell in for Clinton with the revelation of the pardons
scandal, his former supporters, with even more astonishing
cynicism, manned the lifeboats and steered clear of the sinking
boat of his reputation. Ironically, Clinton's destruction at the
hands of his former defenders only reinforced my cynicism and
my increasing feelings that the world was morally empty.

Even now, there are those who will not learn. Right after the
attacks, an aide to Prime Minister Tony Blair sent out an e-mail
saying that it would be a good day to bury disconcerting news
items. After her discovery, the predictable public outcry, and the
equally predictable apology, Blair ended up retaining the spin-
doctor's services. Charlotte Beers, the new undersecretary of
state for public diplomacy, a career advertising executive, whose
new job is to improve the image of the United States and her
people in the Mideast recently declared that American foreign
policy was "definitely the most elegant brand I've ever had to
work with." Such are the consequences of turning government
and the state into one giant PR firm whose sole goal is keeping
up popularity ratings.

There are those who will argue that while cynicism has certain
negative aspects, it still isn't as bad as idealism. After all, idealists
were the ones who gave us the bloody massacres of the French
and Russian Revolutions, and the social disruptions of the 1960s.
Cynicism, they will argue, is not at fault for September 11th, but
idealism is. After all, what are those Islamofascists, other than
particularly misguided and fanatical idealists, yearning, as all
idealists do, to improve the world? By putting such arguments in
this way, I hope to make clear their repulsiveness and playing at
moral equivalence. Yet, in my more cynical phase, I might very
well bought into such arguments.

When Susan Sontag wrote in her infamous New Yorker essay
right after the bombings, that we could not call the suicide
bombers cowards, because she defined "courage [as a] morally
neutral virtue," my first instinct was to agree. After all, that little
phrase had everything a superficial, glib, and clever, but not wise
cynic could want. It downgraded a traditional moral value and
attributed it to terrorists. It had all the force and precision of a
memorable aphorism useful at cocktail parties whenever you had
to sound well-read. And it had the stature of being a product of
one of America's most respected and formidable intellects. Its
moral repulsiveness simply didn't occur to me at first. Perhaps,
this is because I've never known or experienced what real
physical courage is. I've only got it secondhand through news
reports or else, witnessed it in its debased form through
Hollywood movies. As Mark Steyn has pointed out, most of my
generation hasn't experienced what real courage is, since our
society has deliberately shielded us from having to put ourselves
in any situations where we might actually require it. If such
traditional moral virtues are not experienced, then it becomes all
too easy to dismiss or distort them, as Sontag does.

Cynicism isn't about partisan party allegiances (though the hate-
America Left has proven remarkably cynical about our motives
so far) nor is even about playing the great game of moral
equivalence. A cynic ultimately doesn't believe in morals or
which side is "right." In his or her view, every side is equally
degraded, opportunistic, and treacherous. The side that is "right"
is the side that wins, nothing more. But in degrading morality, the
cynic ends degrading himself. I used to put a stop to any
conversation by mischievously saying to people who upheld
traditional morality that if Hitler had won the war, we'd all be
sitting around saying how great he was and how horrible the
Jews were. I thought I was being clever.

But there is one thing that my cynicism could not survive and that
was the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center. All the
superficially clever witticisms in the world cannot answer the
eloquent silence of the thousand of dead bodies lying in that
rubble. There is simply nothing adequate to say. To remain
cynical even after that, is to leap into a realm of such
heartlessness and moral nihilism, that even I was not prepared to
go into.

Yet even now, when I've come to realize that my previous
cynicism was slowly destroying any sense of right or wrong I had
left, I cannot help but be glibly cynical about things. Cynicism has
infected me to the core. How am I to explain that when
President Bush was giving his stirring speech to the joint Houses
of Congress right after the bombings, I found myself not listening
to the words, but wondering whether he'd poll-tested his speech
beforehand or not? When Rudolph Giuliani promoted several
firefighters after entire companies of the Fire Department had
been wiped out in the collapse, I actually said out loud that I
thought at least some of the men must have been glad that the
bombings has occurred since they got their promotions early.
This was entirely unconscious on my part. The words just came
out. It was only later that I realized what a truly horrible thing I
had said. A lifetime of cynicism has given shape to such views. I
realize they cannot change overnight.

Will cynicism make a comeback? I have little doubt that it will.
After all, it is trying, yet idealistic times such as these when we
set out to vanquish our enemies that let us have those long years
of peace and prosperity which allow us all to be self-absorbed,
glib, and cynical. When the "War on Terrorism" is over and the
economy picks up again, it'll be back to business as usual. You
might think this a sad, pessimistic or even a cynical kind of view,
but realistically, I honestly believe that a long self-indulgent
splurge might be the best way for Americans to forget the horrific
events of September 11th.

Finally, I do not think you can fight the true cynics. If they are
really are cynical as they profess, they will simply hold their finger
in the air, realize that post-September 11th, cynicism is no longer
fashionable and that idealism and patriotism is, and like the
opportunistic trimmers that they are, will set themselves up as
idealistic patriots. You cannot win against such people. The best
you can do is watch and learn never to trust them. But hopefully,
a few young people of my generation, have learned once and for
all, that the glib, easy answers of cynicism are no answers at all

Barton Wong is a regular commentator at the Texas Mercury
and studies Literary Studies and Philosophy at the University of
Toronto.

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