How many times have you heard somebody say, “Amurrica!” in the past week? Did you ever consider that that little utterance has a disastrous impact on the country, that it signals the erosion of our national character into nihilist, Eurozone emptiness?
When we make fun of things that are, if we are honest with ourselves, truly great, like the American republic, capitalism, and a free society, we get an internal thrill of being scandalous. After treating the Bill of Rights with atrocious levity, for example, one feels a childlike rush of having crossed some invisible line. We think, “Oh, did I really just say that? I’m bad, real bad.” On the surface, being a cynic is pretty fun, reducing pressing social concerns and problems to the butt of a joke.
Unfortunately, the thrill behind making crafty cynical remarks does not end there. Over time, as we get used to cracking cynically at big, great things — “But who cares about Wall Street anyway?” “The South is full of hicks and yahoos; who cares about them anyway?” — our cynicism becomes a way of putting ourselves above the things we mock. We mock Southern culture, or big banking, because we want those big complicated things to be beneath us, so handily understood that we can dismiss them with a witty little quip. After these cynical senses of humor become widespread, they harden into real attitudes and turn apathy into a political position. I have certainly seen this take place, having heard “Amurrica!” about a hundred times as much as I hear anything genuinely patriotic.
Some might say that those jokes are just harmless fun, and that I am reading too far into them. Further, those same people might say that it is our civic duty to laugh at our governing institutions. Doing so is a big part of being critical and living in a society with free speech, right? Is not what makes the United States great the ability of its citizens to critique their society and government? It sure is, if you have a legitimate criticism to make. Cynicism is something entirely different from legitimate criticism. Cynicism seeks to tear down sacred institutions and beliefs just for pleasure of seeing the ruins. It offers no constructive alternative; it does not propose how to make things better or how to correct flaws. Cynicism is ultimately and entirely negative, sucking the positive energy out of society and turning its citizens into a bunch of jaded misanthropes without values, commitments, histories, or identities.
The next time you find yourself about to make cheap banter out of the Constitution, Thomas Jefferson, or the president, ask yourself if you are really helping anything. Ask yourself if you would rather live in a society founded on revolutionary ideas of freedom and individual liberty (surprise: you do!) or a dismal cesspool of self-loathing. The latter society is what I call a cynical one.
