Cynicism, Faith and the Battle of Experience

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.

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Hermeneutical Headaches or, Why Libraries Make Me Dizzy

I love to read. I also find reading excruciating. I'm usually reading a number of books at a time which is nothing unusual, but what might be different about me - and which my wife, Marie, at least finds insane - is that I usually know how many pages I have left to the next chapter and to the end of each book. It's a cliché for avid readers to say they're sad when a good book comes to an end. I do have that experience, but usually I can't wait until I finish a book so I can start another one.

The root source of my impatience (let's call it what it is) arises from the combination of my wanting to read every beautiful, informative, clever, important, in short: every worthwhile book, while, having worked in bookstores for seven years, being pretty well aware of just how many worthwhile books are out there. It's a lot. But this is only the beginning. The main reason libraries (my shorthand for the sum of human knowledge) are prone to having deleterious effects on me is that not only do I want to read so many books, but I want to already have read them.

Mark Twain said that "A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read". I take his meaning to be that people want the cachet of having-read the classics: showing off a degree of education, name-dropping esoteric authors and making highfalutin literary references (I think 'highfalutin' is the language Huck would use - [that was a shameless ploy to show I've actually read Twain]). I may be as guilty of this literary snobbery as the next person but that's not the real reason I want not just to read, but to have-read, well, everything.

The first reason is that what I enjoy even more than reading a book is discussing an already-read book with another. The opportunities for that are few and far between these days though, so that's not really it either. More than anything else, what makes my head spin around stacks of books is the hermeneutical circle involved in making one's way through them. The hermeneutical circle as applied to a particular work is the idea that one understands the work as a whole in terms of its constituent parts, and understands each part in terms of one's understanding of the whole. If we take a book like the Bible for example, we would obviously say that one doesn't understand it until one has read the whole thing. The concept of the hermeneutical circle would add that one can't have a full understanding, even of Genesis, till one has gotten through Revelation. But once we've done that, we have to re-read Genesis in light of our new understanding, which changes our view of everything else, and so on and so forth ad infinitum. Suffice it to say that if we read through a book once, we've only just begun.

If this picture isn't daunting enough, we have to add in all the knowledge outside of the book that is required to read (understand) it more fully.( Notice I didn't say outside the text! [Oh shame on me, another "look-at-how-smart-I-am" reference.]) So let's say I want to read a certain novel I've heard great things about. So I read it. Then I read it a few more times, studying all angles, the beginning in light of the ending and vice versa etc. Then I think, I should read it in the original French. So I learn French and read it again. But the novel is set in the Sixteenth century, so I should read everything I can about that period. But the author wrote it during World War II, so I should read everything I can about that period to understand the author's context. But what if I'm not sure how this whole reading and learning thing works at all? I need to read books on linguistics, hermeneutics, the philosophies of language and interpretation, learn those work's original languages, historical contexts etc. etc. The rabbit hole goes pretty far down.

Tentative Conclusion:

Perhaps if one were able to fully read any one text, one would by definition have read every text; one would be - omniscient.

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