When I was a student, I found the names of the Hellenistic philosophers beguiling: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics and Cynics. I suppose I put Stoics and Epicureans into a boring bracket, to be taken out later, if necessary. (Scholars still engage in amusing dispute about whether this or that 18th century thinker was a Stoic, or an Epicurean, or both, or neither.) But the words “Sceptic” and “Cynic” were great: both ordinary words in English for someone with critical insight, and yet also Greek words for philosophical schools. When I went to Athens aged 19 I had enough money to buy only one statuette of a Greek philosopher. I ignored Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and bought Diogenes – the philosopher I increasingly resemble in body – Diogenes the Cynic.
I read Russell’s History of Western Philosophy at the time, but, for some reason, it has required decades of turning and returning to these subjects to acquire my own sense of what distinguishes sceptic from cynic. I doubt I would have recognised the name of Pyrrho or that of Sextus Empiricus, the great Sceptics, when I was young. It was 20 years before I had reason to think seriously about scepticism. Now the way I think about it is this.
Scepticism is what we might call a hermeneutic, a critical trick. It requires us to do something very simple, which is to doubt everything one hears on the basis that the opposite might be true. Someone says: here is a hypothesis. Some scientists have found evidence for it. (Paid to do so, probably.) So we say: Go and find an equal and opposite hypothesis. (And pay someone to find evidence for it.) The Greek Sceptics were the philosophers who found, again and again, that everything questionable could only be as true as it was untrue, or as true as its opposite was true. They did not disdain the search for truth: they refused to be dogmatically sceptical, in the sense of rejecting every hypothesis. On the contrary, they considered every hypothesis, also its opposite. At one level, they were irritating casuists – and, for this, read Sextus Empiricus. But at another level they sought ataraxia, or tranquility: and they thought this came from not believing in the rubbish told to them by scholars, experts, busybodies, SAGE.
Scepticism is very useful. But no one can be a sceptic universally, except as a sort of dandy display of independence: going down every rabbit hole just for fun. Most sceptics, in practice, have been reasonably practical men of the world, like Montaigne, or Hume, or Oakeshott, who tried not to concern themselves too much with the world, just enough, and otherwise spent their time on Plutarch (that’s Montaigne), or chafing dishes of spices and roast dinners (that’s Hume), or chasing women (that’s Oakeshott). They tried not to get too involved in politics. But it is with politics that cynicism comes in.
Cynicism was originally a much simpler sort of philosophy: a philosophy of enacted opposition. This was not about handling propositions in calm and playful equal-and-opposite manner, but, on the contrary, going around forcing people to face the arbitrariness of their goings-on by going on in a different way: hence Diogenes with his provocations: living in a tub, propositioning statues, eating raw fish to distract audiences from a boring sermon. One of Diogenes’s followers went so far as to burst into people’s houses to tell the occupants that they were living unnaturally.
But here is the clear difference.
Scepticism is not directly about politics.
Cynicism is directly about politics.
We are sceptical about beliefs, about what people believe. This is not directly political, since we take things at face value.
But we are cynical about assertions, about what people want us to think they believe; and about acts, about how people behave. This is directly political, since we think there is something going on behind what we see.
Beliefs and behaviour are different. Beliefs are, we assume, sincere. Now, one may hold beliefs insincerely, or pretend to hold them. But as soon as do this we have abandoned scepticism and entered the world where cynicism applies: exactly because we have subordinated belief to behaviour, and twisted belief for some behavioural advantage. We have become political.
So, behind, or below, scepticism is cynicism.
Cynicism is especially necessary for assessing politics.
I was fortunate in having as one of my teachers a great man. This was Maurice Cowling, the Cambridge historian. Years ago I bought a copy of an obscure interview he made for the Institute of Historical research, and by accident decided to watch it again a few days ago. In this interview he said something which reminded me of some of the things I have been trying to say in recent articles for the Daily Sceptic.
Cowling wrote books on politics, ‘high politics’, as it was called: the politics of the Westminster elite. He wrote books on Disraeli and Gladstone in the 1860s, Labour in the 1920s and the British response to Hitler in the 1930s. In the interview he said that there were two things he had wanted to say about politics in those books. One is that no one knows the future, so the historian has to overcome hindsight and indicate the structure of the situation as it actually was: as a situation in which a limited number of groups agitated for power in the face of certain predicaments. The other thing is more about politics than about history. He said:
Democratic politics are not really ever what they seem. That there is usually some other purpose, or some other intention, involved in the democratic politician’s actions, than appears on the face of it. It is not corrupt. It is simply the way in which democratic politics works, because a democratic politician has not only to make decisions, he has also to make decisions in the light of the wishes and ambitions of other politicians, and he also has to justify himself to a public which doesn’t necessarily like the language which would describe the reasons for his actions. A democratic republic on the whole prefers a comfortable, liberal, problemless language, except from time to time. And democratic politicians, in order to keep power, in order to recommend themselves to the public, have to speak in a language the public wants. Now, it isn’t always, or only, liberal and comforting language. Sometimes it is challenging language, sometimes it’s reactionary, sometimes it’s nationalistic language. But the tone of English politics is liberal, even when the politician is not really himself in his private action thinking liberally. He is thinking either about how you present a policy to the public, or he’s thinking about rivals within the political system, or friends within the political system.
And he called this view of politics cynical.
I’m partly a cynic, partly a pessimist, and partly, I think, if I can use jargon which isn’t really mine, a deconstructionist. What I’m saying is that you cannot understand democratic politics by looking at the surface, by looking at the rhetoric, by looking at what politicians say… Democratic politicians are only understandable within a cynical framework.
What he was saying is what I find I have been saying in slightly different terms recently, which is that politics in modern times is necessarily conducted at two levels, or in two languages. There is a language internal to politics: the language of private disclosure, the language in which things are done. And there is the language of public disclosure, the language in which things are displayed to the public. As Cowling says, “This is not corrupt.” It is not corrupt because it is a necessary feature of the system.
Cynicism is the only way to understand politics. But it forgives the politicians for what they do. We may even forgive politicians for what they say. But there are limits to cynicism. Cynicism would have allowed us to tolerate Covid and other assorted political songs. (Co-vid! It’s got me in my mask!) By being sceptical about the Covid claims we were perhaps forced to be naïve about politics, and take political utterances at face value: but this was because politicians had come to use the language of ‘truth’ and ‘evidence’ and ‘science’ more than they have ever done before.
We have to be sceptical, therefore, about things said, and also cynical about things done. But we should perhaps not be entirely cynical: because then we will always forgive the politicians for what they say. Hence the importance of scepticism: of taking the things said at face value, and arguing with them by holding open other hypotheses as at least thinkable.
I have to finish by adding that Cowling’s account of the nature of modern politics is still not well understood. For instance, Rafael Behr was prating in the Guardian recently about how we live in an “era of cynicism and mistrust” about politicians. What a shame! No, this is not a shame. (Behr here engages in the misunderstanding that politics is as liberal and unchallenging as it pretends to be. Pull the other wooden leg, Behr.) Nay, this cynicism and mistrust indicates that the public is coming to understand the trick rather better than has been usual: or that politicians are becoming more inept in how they present themselves, and are perhaps engaging too stupidly in the pretence that what they are saying is sincere. If they were insincere, we might consider trusting them; but, alas, if they are sincere, and this seems to be the case, then they are fools. And in the last 10 years – with Covid, climate, DEI, immigration etc. – politicians have managed to suggest either that they take us for fools or, worse, that they themselves are fools.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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It is truly disturbing how utterly ugly some people’s minds have become in this fake “be kind” era. At what other time in history would people sanctimoniously and viciously attack others just for behaving like human beings?!!!
It blows my mind that there are some people out there who are obeying these restrictions!
I think students need to engage in some old fashioned rioting, to teach these fucks a lesson.