Cynicism With a Capital ‘C’

Commonplace Newsletter #40

Alexander and Diogenes by Gaetano Gandolfi, 1792.

Way back in Issue #12 I made reference to the fact that cynicism, before it became a shorthand for an attitude of jaded and scornful negativity, used to refer to a particular school of philosophy- one that was deeply rebellious, ascetic, anarchic and radical.

And given that this present historical moment seems to be particularly marked by the triumph of bureaucrats and technocrats and rules and sleepy conformity perhaps it is high time we take a look at capital C cynicism and see what we can learn from the man who became a dog.

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The Cynicism of Performance Art

It seems like a strange fever dream now, but it happened. In late 2003 illusionist, performance artist and professional weirdo David Blaine lived for 44 days suspended in a plexiglass box that hung from a crane above the South Bank of the Thames river in London. 

It caught the public imagination, this stunt. England being England, the press ran scores of scornful, mock perplexed, agitated articles day after day after day (Blaine calls himself an endurance artist but if forced to chose between enduring 72 hours being frozen in a block of ice, say, or a lifetime of being made to read a tabloid every day I would probably opt for the ice). 

And my people being my people, there were of course golf balls, paint-filled balloons and eggs pelted at our mans glass house throughout. One punter taunted the starving Blaine via a McDonalds hamburger and a remote control helicopter. Another was arrested for attempting to cut the cable that supplied water to his glass box. The land of hope and glory strikes again.

In the end our man Blaine survived the self-imposed ordeal. He lost 25% of his starting bodyweight and tearfully said ‘I love you all’ before being carted off in an ambulance. And that was that.

At the time I was 16 and I remember it quite well. I was at the zenith of my own personal rebellion against anything and everything. Blaine seemed to be one of the few to my mind who ‘got it’. Everything was BS, from Bush Jr to The War on Terror to The War on Drugs to School to my hometown on down. A never-ending fractal arrangement of nonsense seemingly designed to provoke the ire of the all-seeing I.

Blaine in his glass house, though not saying or doing anything, was indeed throwing stones at the whole sorry spectacle that was the modern world. And you could argue that with the advent of the smartphone (don’t forget to mark that one off your ‘Tom’s weekly essay references’ bingo card) the modern world has become worse still in terms of its hypocrisy, lockstep conformity and nonsensical, unquestioned norms.

It’s enough to make a cynic of the best of us. Which is arguably what the world needs more of. And if also arguably what Blaine was doing, as his starving in a box in public was clearly a direct homage to the original Cynic and the original punk performer Diogenes of Sinope.

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I Wanna Be Your Dog

‘I wanna be your dog’

~ Iggy Pop, on The Stooges debut single of the same name.

They called him Diogenes Kynikos, Diogenes the Dog-like. That’s where the word cynic originates from. Etymology is always enlightening.

According to (the unrelated) Diogenes Laertius in his Lives of The Ancient Philosophers, our man was asked one day what he did to deserve the name ‘dog’. He replied: ‘I fawn over people who give me alms, I bark at them if they refuse me, and I snap at scoundrels.’

‘He who makes a beast of himself’ Samuel Johnson remarked many centuries later ‘gets rid of the pain of being a man’ and maybe that was part of what was at play with Diogenes of Sinope, with Diogenes the Dog-like.

(Diogenes was a pretty common name in the ancient world. That the primary source on Diogenes’ life is written by some other guy called Diogenes is not doing me any favours here, to be honest.)

Diogenes wasn’t always a dog. He was the son of a banker in the Black Sea city of Sinope, and the story goes that either he or his father ‘defaced the currency’ of the city which led to Diogenes being run out of town. He entered Athens, then, as an exile and an exile he remained all the years he lived in the great city. He never assimilated, he never made strides to fit in, he remained a homeless, vagabond outsider to the end.

Defacing the currency, this time metaphorically, continued to be his task, which meant he ‘scorn[ex] common opinion and value truth over the moral coin of the masses’ as the Byzantine encyclopaedia of the ancient world The Suda phrases it. His whole life was a living refusal of a populace he considered insane for heeding to the crazy, ignorant, greedy and corrupt set of customs that governed their society. 

While other philosophers quietly lived a life of inward independence from the values of society (the Stoics) or retreated from said society to live in communes with friends (the Epicureans) Diogenes remained in the thick of city life, a taunting, mocking, barking reminder. He considered this to be his duty. 

‘Other dogs bite enemies, I, by comparison, bite my friends, in the spirit of correction.’ He said, showcasing the punks flair for a good soundbite.

He challenged the rich and famous of his day, and in his dog-like distinguishing between friend and stranger he gave light, jesting, criticising conversation and moral instruction to those who had the capacity to hear it and understand it. For this he gained scraps of patronage, hospitality, food. 

Alexander The Great was famously fond of Diogenes. ‘If I were not Alexander, I would like to be Diogenes’ he said and held the man who wanted nothing (while he himself could not be content with having everything) in great respect. The anecdote of how Diogenes replied to Alexander, the most powerful man in the world’s question of ‘is there was anything I can do for you?’ with ‘Yea, shift a bit out of my sun’ quickly became legend.

Happiness or misery were choices, then. You could do useless busywork and chase status and conform to nonsensical rules, or you could live according to nature and be happy. All you had to give up was being accepted by polite society. It was up to you. All you had to do was let go of the mask of civility and the need for approval and acceptance and join Diogenes out in the streets. 

For anyone who has ever felt truly stuck on the Rat Race treadmill, for anyone who has become trapped in the farce of ‘Spend(ing) money we don’t have on things we don’t need to make impressions that don’t last on people we don’t care about’ in economist Tim Jackson phrase, the Dogs Life begins to take on a certain appeal. The glasshouse suddenly doesn’t seem so bad. 

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The Performance of Cynicism

But there’s a problem. Not everyone can do this. And I mean practically as well as temperamentally. In fact many of us would probably benefit from trying a few of the milder Diogenes-like public spectacles to remove our deeply embedded fear of public shame and embarrassment.

But all of this, from Ancient Greece to the River Thames is dependant on their being an audience present. To rephrase the ancient Koan: If a protest happens in a forest and no media are around to record it, did it really make a sound?

We need a bit of Cynicism in the ancient sense, and at the moment we probably could do with a good dose more of it. We need mirrors and signposts and critiques and examples of alternative ways of navigating this world of ours. Bland orthodoxy could stand a bit more stress-testing, and not in the corporate-approved, astroturfed, pre-packaged offerings that seek to intensify rather than mitigate and remove shame. 

Personally, I think pranksters and performance artists and online shitposters perform a useful public service in this regard. They help you to orientate yourself on where you actually stand and what you actually stand for.

Those on the margins, whether through choice or otherwise, remind us that comfort should not be taken for granted. That society and civilisation themselves should not be taken for granted. Everything is in a sense provisional. And further, you can only discover your own place in the world by being able to consider examples from its extreme edges, and gratitude is mostly fostered by doing without. Counterpoints are reminders. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Many an aphorism plays on this dynamic.

So it may be that practicality, restraint and decorum are important to you (it was said of St Francis- an Anarchic mendicant who had a little of Diogenes about him- that his one luxury was indulgence in the good manners of the court). But even then you sometimes need a counterpoint to act as a reminder. Sometimes you just have to let the dog off the leash.

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