We by Ronald Aronson

Author:Ronald Aronson [Aronson, Ronald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-226-33483-7
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

Cynicism versus Hope

Sloterdijk embraces “kynicism” in the face of a sweeping cynicism that denies the very possibility of social hope. At around the time he published his Critique of Cynical Reason, the slogan “There is no alternative” entered history as the watchword of a successful right-wing and authoritarian dismantling of gains won by generations of popular struggles. One major response from the left today calls itself “Podemos; We Can,” and an international left battle cry against neoliberal globalization is “Another world is possible.” Indeed, Sloterdijk admits that the immediate source of his book was “the pervasive sense of political disillusionment in the wake of the 1960s and the pained feeling of the lack of political and social alternatives in Western societies today.”13 The 1960s activist generation faced a time of “political disillusion, cynicism, and atrophied trust in the future” that led him to search widely and deeply for the origins and meanings of contemporary cynicism.

Revealing the underlying relations of power and interest—critiquing the society’s lies, errors, and ideology—now has little effect. Today, in Sloterdijk’s phrase, the dominant frame of mind is “enlightened false consciousness.” This oxymoron points to the fact that people think they know the score about how the world operates, but simultaneously delude themselves. Sartre’s “bad faith” is another way of characterizing the same phenomenon. The point is that people in some way know the truth about how wrong things are, yet are unable or unwilling to act on this awareness, and so wish to hide that awareness from themselves. Perhaps people do not really care anymore that millions are undernourished, that money dominates politics, that the economic and political systems are fundamentally undemocratic and starkly unequal. Slavoj Žižek, who unlike Sloterdijk still protests against this condition, sharpens the “enlightened false consciousness” formulation: in our cynicism, we continue to cover ourselves with the ideology of freedom, democracy, opportunity, and equality even while knowing that it does not depict reality.14 If so, we live within the “capitalist realism” described by Mark Fisher, concluding that there is no alternative to our society and its practices even while no one really believes in them anymore.15 Starting by renouncing any sense of possibility, people conclude that ours is the only reality. This is a lie, and we know it, but it eases our discomfort.

When being “realistic” is presented as his or her main claim, the cynic stresses that we live in a terrible world, but goes on to insist that this is somehow because of human nature, or the very essence of movements or institutions, and that we have no alternative to going along because change is impossible. Each step of the argument trots out as evidence some corrupt individual or practice, or some dreadful historical catastrophe, and the entire attitude mocks those who refuse to accept this reality. Compare this to social hope, as described in chapter 2 of this book. Social hope begins with the determination to take action. By seeking to discourage people from political and social activism, cynicism is not simply an argument; it is a practice.

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