David Egan Philosophy

At the end of each newsletter, I list an assortment of odd or interesting facts I’ve learned in the previous month. In last month’s newsletter, I linked an article that purports to show that cynical people tend to be perceived as more intelligent than average but that in fact they tend to perform less well on tests of cognitive ability. I haven’t gone through the article with a fine-toothed comb, nor do I have the expertise to verify the experimental data with any rigour. But I find the conclusion suggestive. On April Fools’ Day, it’s worth reflecting that there are worse things than being foolish.

Cynicism, as the authors define it, is a negative appraisal of human nature: a tendency to mistrust altruistic gestures and to see cold self-interest as the guiding motive in most circumstances. You probably don’t need to be convinced of this, but the authors give evidence of increasing cynicism in recent years.

You can see why a professed cynic might come off as clever. The cynic poses as someone who knows the score, has seen through the bullshit, and won’t be fooled. You can imagine the face that goes along with this stance: head turned askance, eyes narrowed, lips pursed, perhaps with a slight smirk. It’s a stance of knowingness.

But it’s a very specific kind of knowingness. It’s the knowingness of not being wrong. The cynic will never mistakenly overestimate a person’s goodness or decency. As for underestimating it, well, you’re not going to get gulled or conned by someone who actually turns out to be a good egg.

Not being wrong is one half of an epistemic equation. When faced with the question of what to believe, a responsible cognizer has two goals: believe all the things that are true and disbelieve all the things that are false. Achieving both these goals requires discernment and it’s possible to err on either side of the right balance. If you believe too many falsehoods you’re branded as credulous or naïve. But shouldn’t we also criticize the opposite vice, of disbelieving too many truths?

In philosophy, the aspiration to avoid holding any false beliefs, whatever the cost, goes by the name of skepticism. It finds one its most famous expressions in René Descartes’s First Meditation. Descartes’s meditator reflects that he’s often been wrong about things in the past and that, as long as falsehoods creep in, the edifice of his knowledge will rest on faulty foundations. To establish firmer foundations, he subjects his beliefs to a skeptical stress test.

Is it possible, the meditator asks, that any of the things he takes to be true could turn out to be false? In the past, he’s taken the deliverances of his senses—what he sees, hears, smells, tastes, and touches—to be reliable. But what about dreams? In a dream, you imagine you’re seeing things that aren’t in fact there. And, in the dream, you don’t know you’re dreaming. So for all you know, you could be dreaming right now and everything you think you see is mere fantasy. It’s not enough to say you’re sure you’re not dreaming—in a dream you’re sure you’re not dreaming as well.

Or suppose an evil demon is playing tricks with your mind. Maybe the demon is conjuring up the illusion that you’re sitting in an ordinary room when in fact nothing of the sort is the case. You see a modern sci-fi version of this fantasy in The Matrix, where our dreary reality is an illusion foisted on us by intelligent machines. (It turns out the actual reality is a lot sexier, with a cyberpunk aesthetic and a lot of black leather.)

Eventually Descartes’s meditator comes to the view that almost everything he thought he knew can be doubted. It might be highly unlikely that he’s dreaming or under the power of an evil demon but that’s not the point. So long as it’s possible that he’s deceived in some way, he can’t be certain in his beliefs. His beliefs fall short of knowledge.

(In the Second Meditation, he finds a sliver of light: so long as he’s doubting, he can’t doubt that he’s thinking. And so long as he’s thinking, he can’t doubt that he exists. That’s where the famous dictum cogito ergo sum—“I think, therefore I am”—comes on to the scene, and then we’re off to the races. But that’s a story for another time.)

Descartes is often credited with inaugurating a modern version of philosophical skepticism based in systematic doubt. The term derives from the Greek word skeptikos, meaning one who inquires. For the Greek skeptics, doubt was a method of inquiry: if you remain unsettled in your views, you’ll investigate more closely. For Descartes, too, the method of doubt in the First Meditation is a tool for working toward a more reliable picture of the world.

Compare these methods of inquiry to the “won’t get fooled again” stance of the modern cynic. The cynic’s reflexive mistrust of others’ goodness isn’t a spur to investigate further. It’s a hardened carapace that won’t risk letting falsehood in.

By never allowing themselves to be seen getting things wrong, cynics can maintain a sheen of cleverness. But if they were in fact clever, they’d investigate further. They might even discover that, in some cases, people aren’t so bad after all.

Like skepticism, cynicism has ancient roots. The name derives from the Greek kunikos, meaning doglike. It’s not clear why the early cynics were likened to dogs, but it’s generally thought that it had to do with their aggressive, churlish nature. Diogenes of Sinope was notorious for his stunts that challenged the complacency and hypocrisy of his fellow citizens. Ancient cynics lived simple, austere lives that gave them a kind of security. If you expect very little from the world, the world has few opportunities to disappoint you.

But maybe it’s worth putting up with a bit of disappointment from time to time. If you want to get things right, you have to be willing to get some things wrong. There’s an essential vulnerability baked into the search for truth. You’re always stepping outside your comfort zone and groping about in the unknown. Getting things wrong can bring its bumps and scrapes. In the human realm, misplaced trust can leave you feeling foolish, or worse. But ensuring that you never get wrong-footed also has its cost. It means you also rarely get things right.

Modern cynicism is maybe most pronounced in our politics. At all points on the political spectrum, there’s a strong tendency to mistrust the people you disagree with. The people on the other side don’t just hold principles you happen to disagree with. Those people are some combination of wicked and stupid.

This pervasive political cynicism isn’t politically neutral. Democracy is built on the principle that we’re all in this together. The idea is that we can disagree—in fact, we should disagree—but as long as we disagree openly and honestly, we can fumble toward an arrangement that works tolerably well for everyone. Think of it as the secular analogue of Christ’s admonition not just to love your neighbour but also to love your enemy. Democracy doesn’t call on us to love our enemies but it does call on us to trust them. To trust, that is, that they speak in goodwill and that they have principled reasons for disagreeing with us.

If your politics lean toward an “every man for himself” ethos—or as Martin Luther King, Jr., described the American political arrangement, “socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor”—cynicism is a great tool. If people can’t trust one another, they can’t work together toward mutually beneficial solutions. If you suspect the people you’re negotiating with are deceitful and corrupt, any compromise will feel like capitulation.

If you believe in political solutions that require cooperation, pervasive cynicism is corrosive. To take just one example, people routinely underestimate how much their fellow citizens are willing to sacrifice in order to slow or reverse climate change. Government policies reflect that cynicism: they fall far short of what most people think they ought to do. If we don’t trust one another’s goodwill, there’s no point in making sacrifices for the greater good.

Unfortunately, it’s a lot easier to erode trust than to build it. Building trust, like growing in knowledge, requires openness and vulnerability. It runs the risk of getting things wrong and looking like a fool. You have to live with the possibility that things might not work out. But that’s preferable to the cynical alternative of making sure that they won’t. 

1. Hibernating turtles breathe out of their butts. (source)
2. Domesticated chickens are the most numerous vertebrates in the world. Domesticated poultry have three times the biomass of all wild birds put together. And 99% of the world’s chickens are produced by just two corporations. (source)
3. When an image or film clip enters the public domain, that doesn’t mean it’s freely available. It just means that it’s no longer copyright protected. Getty Images and other commercial archives are the sole repositories of vast troves of uncopyrighted images and film clips that they then license out for exorbitant fees. (source)
4. John Keats was just five feet tall. (source)
5. The amount of land used globally for producing meat and dairy is equal in area to the entirety of the Americas, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Despite using 77% of all agricultural land, it produces only 40% of the world’s protein and just 18% of the world’s calories. (source)
6. If William Herschel, discoverer of Uranus, had had his way, the planet might have been called George. (source)
7. The third largest exporter of scripted TV series, after the United States and the United Kingdom, is Turkey. (source)
8. There are 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. For every star in the Milky Way, there are 200,000 ants on Earth. (source)
9. In Argentine Spanish, “che” is a filler word, like “um” or “like” in English. The nickname for Ernesto “Che” Guevara derived from his overuse of the word in conversation. (source)
10. Websites registered in the Caribbean island of Anguilla have a .ai domain name, in the same way that Canadian websites have .ca and French ones have .fr. Because there’s now a rush of AI-based companies wanting a .ai domain name, more than 10% of Anguilla’s GDP in 2023 came from domain name registration fees. (source)