Cynicism and Authenticity

Some Thoughts about "Culture"

Maarten van Heemskerck, Momus criticizes the works of the Gods, 1561.

I find myself having less and less time for so-called “cultural criticism.” When every day brings real horrors in the realm of politics it’s hard to sit still and read some airy abstractions that purport to explain, but only rationalize, implicitly justify, or obscure, what’s going on in actual fact. Thus my frustration with with the entire discourse surrounding the “vibe shift:” it seems to me like a way to manufacture consent or passivity with a welter of clichés about the zeitgeist and neo-romanticism. What’s the point of reading another op-ed or essay that just says “This is the way things are now, get used to it?” I think the thing that offends me most about so much of this discourse is the way it asks you to take what is manifestly absurd seriously and then to be glib about what’s serious. When we’re faced with a constant spectacle of corruption and idiocy, it’s far too much to ask us to pretend something spiritual is happening, some kind of sublime release of vitality. That seems akin to dancing in an explosion of sewage as if it were a cleansing rainstorm.

It also reminds me of something Hannah Arendt said in her final interview on TV with Gunter Gaus:

…“friends “coordinated” or got in line. The problem, the personal problem, was not what our enemies did but what our friends did. In the wave of Gleichschaltung (coordination), which was relatively voluntary—in any case, not yet under the pressure of terror—it was as if an empty space formed around one. I lived in an intellectual milieu, but I also knew other people. And among intellectuals Gleichschaltung was the rule, so to speak. But not among the others. And I never forgot that. I left Germany dominated by the idea—of course somewhat exaggerated: Never again! I shall never again get involved in any kind of intellectual business. I want nothing to do with that lot. Also I didn’t believe then that Jews and German Jewish intellectuals would have acted any differently had their own circumstances been different. That was not my opinion. I thought that it had to do with this profession, with being an intellectual. I am speaking in the past tense. Today I know more about it …

“GAUS: I was just about to ask you if you still believe that.

ARENDT: No longer to the same degree. But I still think that it belongs to the essence of being an intellectual that one fabricates ideas about everything. No one ever blamed someone if he “coordinated” because he had to take care of his wife or child. The worst thing was that some people really believed in Nazism! For a short time, many for a very short time. But that means that they made up ideas about Hitler, in part terrifically interesting things! Completely fantastic and interesting and complicated things! Things far above the ordinary level! I found that grotesque. Today I would say that they were trapped by their own ideas. That is what happened. But then, at that time, I didn’t see it so clearly.

To be clear, as much as I think the lessons of fascism are relevant today, I don’t think we are witnessing an exact repeat of 1933. This is not as severe and virulent. It’s more ridiculous, but therefore there are fewer excuses for taking it to be something great and admirable. What strikes me here is Arendt’s observation that people “made up ideas about Hitler.” They made it part of their intellectual dreamworlds. They could not see the actual obscenity of the situation because were “trapped by their ideas.” Arendt was obviously thinking of her former lover and teacher Martin Heidegger, who for a time lent his notions of “authenticity” to support the Nazi regime. Perhaps she was being too generous with the conceit that “they were trapped by their own ideas.” But this resonates. We may not have anyone in America today on the level of Professor Heidegger, but I can see this kind of voluntary spiritual Gleichschaltung happening at the edges of the intelligentsia. But perhaps people are getting shaken out of now when they can see what the everyday reality looks like.

One piece of cultural criticism I did appreciate recently was written by Evgenia Kovda on Yasha Levine’s

NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS

Substack. It’s an overdue polemic against the aptly named Red Scare podcast, charging that show with spreading a poisonous nihilism. You might call it a critique of “cultural Putinism:”

As a person who grew up in Moscow in the 1990s on the rubble of the Soviet Union — a cynical vibe surrounded me. It became dominant long before I could be cognizant of it. This vibe was the only thing I knew: pervasive cynicism, apathy, and a mockery of anything that wasn’t just about making money. There was the widespread belief that anything that sounded like a “do gooder” slogan had a hidden agenda behind it…that any politics that even vaguely tried to help people was a scam. Everyone is for themselves — that’s just how the world works. That’s how people thought. Meanwhile, the country was looted by top Soviet apparatchiks and industrious upstarts who became billionaires almost overnight, privatizing the natural resources of the 1/6th of the earth.

Kovda’s essay made me think of Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason, where he defines cynicism as “cheekiness” or “impudence” that has “switched sides,” gone from being part of the process of Enlightenment, critique and satire of power, to join the reaction, the side of the powerful:

The cynical master lifts the mask, smiles at his weak adversary, and suppresses him. C'est la vie. Noblesse oblige. Order must prevail. The force of circumstances often exceeds the insight of those concerned, is that not so? Coercion by power, the compulsion of "things"! In its cynicisms hegemonic Power airs its secrets a little, indulges in semi-self-enlightenment, and tells all. Master cynicism is a cheekiness that has changed sides. Now it is not David who challenges Goliath, but the Goliaths of all times —from the arrogant Assyrian military kings to modern bureaucracy —who show the brave but doomed David who is on top and who is on the bottom. Cynicism in public service. The wittiness of those who are in any case on top assumes some strange forms. When Marie Antoinette inquired about the reasons for the unrest among the people, she was told: "The people are starving, Your Majesty, they have no bread." Her reply: "If the people have no bread, why don't they eat cake?"

Another example he gives is the Roman satirist Lucian: “[a] cynical ideologue who denounces the critics of power to the powerful and cultivated as ambitious lunatics. His critical activities have turned into opportunism trimmed to the irony of those in power, who want to make fun of their existential critics.” Sounds all too familiar.

And so does the section on Heidegger’s notions of “authenticity” and the Nazis, which references Arendt’s comments to Gaus:

National socialism—"movement," "uprising," "decision"—seemed to resemble Heidegger's vision of authenticity, decisiveness, and heroic being unto death, as if fascism were the rebirth of authenticity out of habituatedness, as if this modern revolt against modernity were the real proof of an existence that had resolutely decided for itself. One has to think of Heidegger when one cites Hannah Arendt's sublime remark about those intellectuals in the Third Reich who, to be sure, were not Fascists, but "let something occur" to them on the theme of national socialism. In fact, Heidegger let many things occur to him until he noticed what the case "authentically" was with this political movement. The delusion could not last long.

The Nazi movement was supposed to clarfy what the populist Anyone has up its sleeve—Anyone as Master Human, Anyone as simultaneously narcissistic and authoritarian mass, Anyone as murderer for pleasure and official responsible for killing. The "authenticity" of fascism-its sole authenticity —consisted in transforming latent destructiveness into manifest destructiveness, thereby participating in a highly contemporary way in the cynicism of open "expressedness" that no longer conceals anything. Fascism, especially in its German version, is the unconcealment of political destructiveness reduced to its most naked form and encouraged by the formula of the "will to power." It happened as if Nietzsche, in the manner of a psychotherapist, had said to capitalist society: "Basically, you are all consumed by a will to power, so let t out openly for once and confess to being what you are in any case.”

In a more attenuated and Americanized form, that is also what Trumpism says, “you live in a brutal, competitive society, you are a striving atom of self-regard, drop the humanitarian pretenses, live without hypocrisy, express some well-deserved sadism, and enjoy it.” But, of course, this demand for absolute self-assertion is also a demand for absolute conformity, for doing what everyone else does. Back to our friends in the commentariat, perhaps the most typical character of the age is “the non-conformist conformist:” someone who says what everyone else says while flattering themselves that they are telling a bold truth that no else one has the courage to say. Well, it’s easy to be courageous in a crowd.