Three (Not Very) Easy Steps to Becoming Less Cynical

A couple disclaimers up front:

1. I'm going to make a few assertions of alleged fact in this post. I'm not going to defend them thoroughly, because that's not my point. If I say something you disagree with, I encourage you to do your own research, but defending those points isn't really my aim here.
2. If you're upset by mild profanity, sorry. Feel free to skip by this post.
3. I cited an article at one point. I didn't vet it carefully. The general premise seems reasonable, but some specifics may be off.

And now, without further ado...the post. My first in three years, actually. But I had a random thought while heading home today, and I felt like sharing.

Much has been said about the increase in cynicism over the last few decades. There would seem to be good reason for it. After all, our lives are full of bullshit, and cynicism makes excellent armor against bullshit.

When an advertiser insinuates that Coca-Cola will make your problems evaporate in a paradise of bubbly Christmas cheer, that's bullshit.

When your company's executive tells you that their key strategic objective is to "enhance cross-functional synergy and deepen investment in a wide variety of verticals," that's probably bullshit.

And when the head of the Environmental Protection Agency tells you that the jury is still out on human activity as a primary driver of increasing global temperatures? Yeah, that's definitely bullshit.

Cynicism is really helpful in these situations. Cynicism tells you that Coke probably won't cure your depression, that you probably shouldn't bother researching what your exec is talking about, and that the EPA head is probably speaking more from his cozy relationship with energy companies than from any particular scientific understanding.

But yet we have this feeling that cynicism is somehow bad. It makes us angry, makes us depressed. It's bad for your health (http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/28/health/cynical-dementia/index.html). At the end of the day, we need our defense against bullshit, but most of us are also looking for some reason not to be cynical. We may even feel resentment towards those people who just seem to be happy all the time: "Why are you so irrationally happy? We've got a lot of problems here!"

I want to share three simple decisions that I've made recently that have made me less cynical (but hardly less skeptical).

1. Decide that you matter.

I don't know what percentage of people have trouble with this one, but it's not zero. There are all kinds of reasons why we may not think we matter, even though the deep instinctual part of our brains seems pretty dedicated to keeping us alive.

I'm naturally prone to depression and harsh self-criticism. My nature is to put my internal judge in the driver's seat, always to reflect on what I do, and typically to find a lot of things that I did wrong. I tend to be out of touch with my emotions and desires and instincts.

Low self-worth is a natural partner of cynicism--in many cases, it's basically cynicism directed at oneself. "You criticize everything else; what makes you any different?" And if you're being honest with yourself, it's easier to start picking up on your own faults.

There are lots of possible reasons for deciding that you matter. For me it was largely a matter of learning the proper place of my internal judge. Reflection is important--else we never learn--but the judge doesn't need to drive all the time. At some point, I realized that I had these emotions and desires, and that often enough, it was OK to act on them even if I couldn't give a complete rational justification as to why. And that less rational part of my brain thinks I matter. So OK, I matter.

2. Decide that how you live matters.

Cynicism tends towards inaction. It's a distant stance that criticizes but doesn't build anything unless coupled with an equally strong notion of what is good and valuable. And if you don't think that how you live matters, then nothing really is good and valuable, and sure you might decide to keep living and try to be comfortable or achieve something or just mix things up, but it's all a little absurd.

I started struggling with this when I lost my belief in Christianity (the conservative, American kind). That launched me on an internal struggle that started in 2007 and was pretty intense until just a few months ago. So much of my sense of self-worth was predicated on a certain understanding of the Christian God that it evaporated when I lost hold of that.

I'm not able to be a satisfied humanist. Some people are, and fair enough--I'm not willing to say (and honestly don't believe) that they're all deluding themselves. But the way I see it, I can live a lot of ways, but in the end I'll die. And some people may remember me, but eventually they'll die. And even if I'm the most famous person there ever was and my memory lasts as long as life itself, eventually the sun will consume the Earth, eventually the universe will die in entropic heat death, eventually all traces of everything I ever did will vanish from existence.

For me, my willingness to decide that how I live matters came from a very simple assertion: I believe that God exists (whatever that means) and that he(/she/it) will always remember me (whatever that means). It's a pretty ambiguous notion of God that's at play here, but I can hold to it when all else fails. And the fact that God will remember me--and, I hope, remember me perfectly, in a way somehow more substantial than human memory--means that I want to be a person and live a life that will be remembered positively.

(An aside: I personally choose to continue engaging with the Christian tradition because it's what I know and it's meaningful to me. That said, I've come to hold a lot of elements of it more loosely than I used to, and I feel far less anxiety than I used to about the fact that lots of people don't care about or reject Christianity.)

The point is simply this: To be anything but a cynic and an absurdist, you need a reason.

3. Decide that the results don't matter.

This one's tricky. But let me explain.

In any human venture, success or failure is predicated on three basic things:

1. Your advantages. This includes natural talents (intelligence, athleticism, etc.) and privileged circumstances (family wealth, social stability, etc.).
2. Hard work.
3. Dumb luck.

We go off the rails when we forget any of these three. Forget the first, and we start looking down on poor people because they're clearly not working hard enough. Forget the second, and we slack off and then blame our failures on not being smart enough. Forget the third, and we forget that no matter how many advantages we have and how hard we work, sometimes life throws curveballs and it all goes to hell anyway. Sometimes, you work hard in school, you work hard on your sales pitch, and you lose the business you were angling for because a snowstorm hit and your flight got cancelled.

One defense against cynicism is to ignore the role of luck. We just decide that if we're good enough and work hard enough, success is guaranteed. But it isn't. And in my opinion, this viewpoint usually leads either to a lot of stress and perfectionism, or else a very fragile worldview that crumbles in the face of catastrophe.

And so we have to acknowledge luck. Which means that no matter how hard we try, we might fail. And not only might we fail, everyone might hate us for it and we might die in rejection and squalor. And that feeling of vulnerability is where cynicism comes rushing in. It says, "Yes, life really does suck after all, doesn't it? It's not fair. Best to reject the real world and laugh at all the poor lemmings who keep trying to make something of their lives."

The key to overcoming this, as I see it, is not to reject the premise, at least not entirely. Life can be terribly random, and it seems uncompassionate to deny that. But that means that if the worth of my life is judged by the results, then my life is judged by something fundamentally out of my control.

The alternative is that the results don't matter. The only things that matter are the choices you make the and person you choose to be.

As for me, I decided that how I live matters because I want God to remember me well. And so the results don't matter because no matter how things turn out, God will remember me for who I really was.

Maybe that doesn't work for you. But I think lots of us have an intuition that "good people" are defined not by how things worked out for them, but by their desires and their character. So I hope you'll also find some way to define your worth based the choices that you can control, and not the results that you can't.

And then, sure. We can be a little cynical when someone tells us that because you're a Gemini, this and that and you should definitely do this today. But we can also smile, and recognize the person's potentially good intentions, and take to heart anything in that advice that might actually help with the lives we're trying to lead.

Stephen Colbert as a Religious Icon

A few months ago, I found myself at the American Physical Society March Meeting in Baltimore. The week was a bit insane: I arrived late Monday night due to a delay in the arrival of my baggage, and I was entirely unable to fall asleep that night. I was then treated to three and a half days of technical talks: more than nine hours of talks a day with no scheduled lunch break. (To be fair, almost no one actually attends three entire three-hour sessions in a day, though I went to more than most.) The point of interest, however, comes at the very end of the conference, when I decided to attend a session oriented on the teaching of physics.

One of the speakers during this session made a very interesting comment, which I paraphrase as follows: Most (college undergraduate) students are very good at criticizing ideas, but much less good at arriving at and accepting ideas as truth. Although the speaker apparently meant only to say that students seem reluctant, unwilling, or unable to accept the best scientific theories as stable ground for reasoning about nature, her comment intrigued me in a broader sense. It has struck me that one of the defining characteristics of our culture is that it has tested the old structures and ideas which once gave purpose to our lives and defined our roles in society, and found them wanting. Having tested enough of these schemas and found them all deficient in some way, it has moreover become largely unwilling to settle on any new overaching system (since such a system would certainly have its own flaws). This movement is due in part to the fragmented nature of society (or, at least, Western or American society) with its increasingly diverse cultural influences, but it seems to me that it is also in large part due to an inherent suspicion of “systems.”

Science is an interesting bird. In some ways, it is the grandest system of them all, purporting to explain—at least in principle, at least in light of potential future discoveries, and at least on a material level—the whole of the universe. The motions of some fundamental particles give rise to energy and matter; specific arrangements of matter give rise to chemicals, which in some cases organize into living things; and so on all the way to Paris Hilton, the Apollo space program, and the 1985 Chicago Bears. In my opinion, science has “saved face” in an atmosphere of skepticism and multiculturalism for two reasons: 1. Its basic precepts—that we exist in the universe, that our senses deliver reliable information, and that we can use inductive and deductive reasoning to determine truth about the universe—are essentially universally agreed upon, as to disagree upon them is in some ways to deny oneself the ability to interact in society. 2. Its scope is limited to material explanations of material events; it does not without extrapolation provide any answers to the questions of who we are, what purpose (if any) we have, how we ought to behave, or what we ought to value.

Yet, I believe that there is a general tendency in the human mind to desire to use as uniform a set of criteria as possible when seeking truth. (Incidentally, I believe that this is one of, but certainly not the only, reason why scientists seem to be a bit more likely to become atheists. Religions are not in general testable or defeasible things, and it is easy for the scientist to become dissatisfied with such merits as a religion might have in light of this perceived lack of intellectual rigor.) I wonder, then, whether the observation of the Physical Society speaker was not betraying just this: that we (meaning at least the bulk of my generation) have become so suspicious of “systems” as such that we approach them (even science) not as possible sources of insight, however imperfect, but as targets for criticism, and little more. This holds particularly for systems which have historically been embraced by our culture—Christianity, patriotism, and “the American dream,” for instance. It is important for me to point out here that this is simply what I perceive to be the movement of our times from the media and from the (more or less) well-educated; the old ideas still hold much of their sway.

All this has led me recently to ponder the question of whether today’s society (so far as I can meaningfully speak of society as a single entity) actually wants to embrace any sort of system. Against this conclusion are all the reasons cited above, plus perhaps some observations about the past results of widespread cultural acceptance of or debate over “systems”—for instance, the Crusades and wars between Catholics and Protestants, Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, and so on. On the other hand, many in modern culture cling onto religion, and it is not hard to perceive that many others aim to fill the void left by religion via astrology, political activism, work for social justice, etc.

This latter point was driven home for me recently as I watched an episode of “The Colbert Report” while preparing my lunch for the next day. For those who are somehow not familiar, Jon Stewart (full name Jon Stuart Leibowitz) and Stephen Colbert host half-hour shows on Comedy Central during which they humorously recount recent news and generally make fun of everyone involved. Stewart is unabashedly quite liberal, whereas Colbert satirically assumes a ridiculously conservative persona. A final point to note is that the base audience of these shows has sometimes been made out to be a bunch of pot-smoking hippies (notably by—drumroll, please—Fox News).

If I wanted evidence that our culture was moving towards a universal criticism of “systems,” where better to look than at the well-educated (I presume), liberal, pot-smoking audience of a TV show on which everyone and everything who purport to be anyone or anything are subjected to criticism? (Sure, Obama being a Democrat may earn him less criticism than Bush, but I certainly don’t think he’s excluded from criticism.) But then I considered in a new way the meaning of a ritual that goes on at the beginning of each episode of The Colbert Report: a relentless chant of “Stephen! Stephen! Stephen!” by the audience until the host thanks and quiets them repeatedly. One could argue that this is solely mock-worship of a mocking figure, but this does not seem to me to be the best explanation of the lengths to which “Colbert nation” is willing to go to support the causes of its sponsor, from raising 300,000 to support U.S.Speedskating to prodding his viewers to bump his book “AMERICA AGAIN:Re-Becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t” back to #1 on the bestseller list (after some weeks out of that position) in response to antagonism from Bill O’Reilly, then above Colbert on the list.

After some reflection, I concluded that Stephen Colbert is, in a limited capacity, a modern religious figure. Or, to say that a different way, the audience of his show was not just jokingly cheering him, but in some respect worshipping him. My speculation is that this is a fundamental tension in our time: We long to be a part of something bigger, and we long to worship, but many of us have become skeptical of everything that might take that role in our lives. So we try to fill it with things that simply can’t be the answer—because our destinies aren’t really written in the motions of the stars and planets, because smoking weed doesn’t actually make our problems go away, and because Stephen Colbert cannot save us from our sins (from our boredom, perhaps, but not our sins). In such ironical turns, we aim to fill the void left by traditional structures, while retaining our skepticism of anything that might really and truly fill that void. It’s OK to worship Colbert, because we can be certain that Colbert isn’t a proper object of worship. True religion is more dangerous—we might actually buy into it.

Poetry, Pascal's Wager and Why I Am a Christian

There comes a time in the life of many a man when he will attempt to write poetry. For some, this is the result of an at-worst harmless infatuation (for instance, for a girl), and while the poetry may, perhaps, be rather bad, no one is likely to care overly much. It may chance, however, that the man writes from a movement of the soul that inclines him to take himself seriously as a poet. If the poet is good, we get our Edgar Allen Poes and our James Joyces. If the poet is bad, however, it is up to the rest of humanity to pray that he either realize this to be the case, or else not unleash himself on the public. No matter how much I may enjoy an entertaining evening of reading the poetry of William McGonagall, that sort of thing becomes tiresome rather quickly.

Happily, I realized that I am a dismal poet. (I offer my gratitude to the one or two of you who may have read one of the one or two poems I penned, and read it for the thought behind it rather than my execution.) It occurred to me, however, that I am both more skilled and more trained as an essayist, and that there might chance to be a few who would be interested in reading what I have to say. (And when I say "essayist"...yes, this post is very long. You've been forewarned.) That brings us to this blog, and this inaugural post. My thought is to occasionally (once a month-ish?) take time to share my thoughts on some topic of more or less general interest. I do not intend to put any great amount of research into these posts, but I do hope that by sharing my thoughts and feelings openly, I might at best benefit or interest some number of people, and at worst make my mother proud.

To give only the briefest necessary background on me, I am currently a graduate student in Chemistry at U. Wisconsin -- Madison. I received bachelor's degrees in Chemistry and Philosophy (two areas of study so well-connected that I had to invent the framework for the interdisciplinary double major myeslf) from Wheaton College in 2009. I am also a Christian (currently attending an Anglican church), and a number of my thoughts are likely to draw heavily from this aspect of my life. This first post (as the astute among you will have already observed from the title, and probably by now begun to sigh at my long-windedness in addressing) is no exception.

So, without further ado, Pascal's Wager. I start with this topic because it is actually one of deep personal concern to me. For those not familiar, Pascal's Wager (in my paraphrased form) runs thus: Let's imagine that I am inclined to believe that Christianity is not true, and that instead some form of materialism is true in which I die, and that's the end of me. (The same, naturally, holds for everyone else.) If, however, I afford Christianity any chance of being true, then by believing in Christianity, I give myself a chance (however small) at eternal life in heaven and in perpetual fellowship with God and with other believers. That degree of good trumps to an essentially infinite degree any joy that I may derive in my life from work, friends, or my Magic: the Gathering hobby. Thus, if I afford Christianity even the slightest chance of being true, I ought to take Pascal's Wager and become a Christian. It's worth the risk.

On a personal level, I raise this topic because for the last 4-5 years, I have, to a large extent, been living Pascal's Wager. For various reasons--which I won't be going into in detail in order that I may at least appear to be attempting to keep this post to a reasonable length--I have come to believe that Christianity, taken as a body of statements concerning actual historical facts and truths about the nature of reality, is probably false. Before going on, I would like to nuance this last statement a bit.
In his book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins (who, for my part, is not much of a philosopher but is certainly a fine rhetoretician and raises points well worth considering) describes the so-called "cargo cults." In short, these cults arose in the islands of the South Pacific in response to the coming of European explorers and soldiers in ships bearing significant wealth. After the Europeans left, religions developed on the islands in which the islanders awaited the return of the Europeans with great weath (sometimes centering on their leader as a Messianic figure), along with an ensuing apocalypse. The comparison to the second coming of Christ is too tempting to resist.

There are, of course, key differences between Christianity and the cargo cults. We know about as well as we know anything that the European explorers were not godlike figures; history is much less clear on the question of whether Jesus did, in fact, rise from the dead, at least if one will even admit the possibility. The survival of Christianity after the death of Christ and the persecution of his followers makes the story fairly compelling, in fact. Moreover, Christianity possesses a much more well-developed body of claims concerning the nature of reality and the best way of living than do the cargo cults. Nonetheless, the truth remains that people have a tendency over-interpret patterns and to invent religions of their own accord (after all, not all of them can be true), and for this and other reasons I personally remain somewhat suspicious. I feel ill-at-ease because even though Jesus said to be "as shrewd as serpants (and as innocent as doves)," the attitude that would make me most easily accepting of my faith (which, I freely confessed, I was raised in) would also make me most easily duped by a dishonest used car salesman. If Christianity is indeed true, I can't believe that the attitude God wants is one of blind naïveté. For this reason, on purely intellectual grounds, I maintain skepticism concerning the historical and metaphysical claims of Christianity. I cannot bring myself to believe that the non-Christians are just natively worse at separating truth from falsehood than the Christians.

However, I must now make another set of admissions: I am both frightened and thoroughly depressed by the idea that this life is all there is. On the first point, many would probably claim that my fear is in large part a product of my Christian upbringing (with its promise of eternal life), and that there is no need to get bent out of shape by the concept of an absolute end. To this I can only say that it's not only Christians who feel this way, and that I feel that on a purely pragmatic level, Pascal's analysis looks about right--if there's any real chance that death isn't all there is, it's worth going after! On the second point, I can say only that all of human existence seems (to me) like about the most sad and pathetic thing ever if the day will truly come when no one--not us or anyone else--will ever care whether I freed hundreds of innocent people from the slave trade, killed hundreds of innocent people with a bomb, or didn't do any of that and just spend my time playing Tiddlywinks. I see the argument that in that case, we should just live in a way that makes us happy--and for most of us, it seems that all things being equal, we'd like the people around us to be happy, too--but the whole idea makes my life seem purposeless and any real exertion on my part not worth it. That's just my intuition; feel free to disagree.

Anyway, all this leaves me in the following state: I can't honestly claim to believe Christianity is true, but I do find in it a compelling and beautiful description of reality as well as a way of living that gives both my actions and the world and all the people in it value. I love how Christianity balances good sense with apparent contradiction (isn't reality bigger than us, after all?) and how it balances conventional morality with the unconventional demands of genuine love. But on a purely intellectual level, do I honestly believe it? Well...not really. Still, I'm not about to give up on my Christianity, and I'm attempting to live as a Christian, to the best of my ability. But through this effort, I've learned some things about belief, and about Pascal's wager.

I think most everyone will agree that it's roughly impossible to just up and believe something that you don't actually think is true. If I told you that I'd give you a billion dollars to believe that 1+1=3 (and could somehow test to see if you'd succeeded), I doubt you could, unless perhaps you underwent an intensive session of torture and brainwashing. That hardly seems like a good way of going about believing in Christianity, though. So, I thought, I'd do the next best thing--I'd try to perform all the same actions that I would if I really believed in Christianity. What I've learned after a few years of this effort is that it's really, really hard to live consistently with a belief you don't have.

It's hard to sacrifice sleeping in on Sundays when you're not deeply convicted that it's at least somewhat important to be at church. It's hard to resist imbibing an unhealthy degree of pornography when you're not deeply convicted that what you do in this life matters beyond this life (even when you find the majority of pornography at worst disgusting and at best kind of boring). And it's really, really hard to pray to God when you think it's probable that the only one you're actually praying to is the fly buzzing around your ceiling fan. If it came down to it, would I be willing to die for my faith? Probably. But it can be very hard to live for it.

And now for the last part of this essay...why I am still a Christian. Most simply put, my reasons for wanting to remain a Christian are still roughly the same, and although I haven't thoroughly researched the alternatives, none of them has yet convinced me to throw in the towel on Christianity. (The most likely alternative in my mind would be some form of Buddhism or Jainism, but again, my understanding is very limited, and I do tend to find the Christian concept of redemption more full-bodied and compelling than the Eastern concept of liberation.) One might ask, however, in view of what I said previously about the necessity of some kind of real belief--for while I don't think that faith simply is intellectual belief, I do think that faith involves belief in some way--why I don't just give up in the face of my persistent (well, 5-year-old) doubts and spare myself the trouble. Some time ago, I would have told you that I didn't have a good reason aside from the fact that other Christians have gone through long dry periods, and that I was hoping my perspective might change one day. More recently, however, I have begun to have another queer experience: The simple fact that I've carried on struggling and honestly grappling with my faith for this long without giving up on it has helped me to own it, to accept that for better or for worse, this is my faith and I'm sticking with it, at least as far as my day-to-day existence goes. I can never be sure if I've made the right choice, but I've made the choice the best I know how. Through this, I've come to admit that faith (taken as a commitment to and a dependence on my Christian belief, from which corresponding actions flow) is, indeed, not something that I can drum up on my own, so long as I'm being honest with myself. And I've become queerly accepting of the notion that as much as I hate the idea of being duped, belief--that is, genuine conviction--is something that humans really need in order to live most effectively, and that one day, God might just give me that gift. And whether I like the idea or not, that belief probably won't have much to do with how smart I am.