In a review of a new Library of America collection of journalist A.J. Liebling's work, Fresh Air contributor Maureen Corrigan relates the following intriguing quote taken from one of his WWII pieces. He writes:
"Cynicism is often the shame-faced product of inexperience."
I found this line immediately striking as a succinct counterpoint to the overly relied-upon assumption that level of cynicism equates with quantity of experience.
We are all acquainted with that kind of world-weary skeptic who is always telling us that if we only knew what was really going on in the world, how truly nasty people consistently are to one another, we'd give up on our faith. This line of thinking will often present any religious faith in a good God as a holdover from the naive infancy of our species whereas now we should all be too grown up to get on with that kind of nonsense. As if human beings in centuries or millenia past were somehow less acquainted with suffering and death than is modern man, or too dull to realize that continued suffering in the face of God's goodness and power was difficult to comprehend. Not so the new enlightened man. We are all so very adult now.
When Liebling says it is inexperience that leads to cynicism, he seemingly says the exact opposite of the above assumption, but I think I know where he is going with this. The cynic usually assumes that the optimist has just led too sheltered a life. This is sometimes the case. But our experience of an event involves both the event itself and how we interpret it and the cynical interpretation is never just a strict conclusion from analyzing the facts.
What seems clear to me is that our interpretations of events, which we will have at least some control over, has much more to do with our overall level of cynicism than we might like to think. We all know that there are those who have lived through the worst humanity has to offer - think holocaust survivors - with their faith in God or maybe a general regard for humanity intact just as we have come across those who seem ready to resign themselves to a jaded view of all life has to offer simply because a girlfriend dumped them. The mere possibility of these two types existing side-by-side shows the lack of causation.
We need to keep ourselves open, whatever the events we live through, to interpreting, and thus actually experiencing life, otherwise than cynically. This openness to re-interpretation does not constitute a diminished experience but an alternative experience and offers a horizon vastly wider than that of the cramped complaints of the cynics.
Thursday, March 06, 2008
Cynicism, Faith and the Battle of Experience
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
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