Cynics and our lack of Joy

I love reading about how typical feelings and thoughts are actually very, very old.

Cynic, where we get all our ideas about being cool and cynical of everything, began with a man named Diogenes ... Plato called him "Socrates gone mad." From my Dictionary of Philosophy: "He took 'deface the coinage!' as a motto ... and refused to live by them. He ate scraps and wrote approvingly of cannibalism and [worse things]. One story reports that he carried a lighted lamb around in broad daylight looking for an honest human ... intending to suggest that the people he did see were so corrupted that they were no longer really people. Because of all this he was known as a Cynic, from the Greek word kuon (dog), because he was shameless as a dog." He and his band had a reputation for barking at the rich and respectable.

Of course by the next generation his successor was softer and more accepted by society. This always seems to happen. So what does that mean for us today ...

Cynicism, today, is either a disbelief in persons or a disbelief in any sort of good end. It makes sense that it has become in vogue as of late. Most people have also been taught that nothing will ever really turn out that great in the end ... best to have the fleeting joy made possible to us through television, shopping and sex. And it seems that much of recent philosophy, is really just about seeing through everything (seeing the holes and brokenness in everything) and ultimately seeing nothing. All that means to the typical indie-rocker is that the only connection possible to even another indie-rocker is through sneering and seeing through the same bullcrap.

And how we got here makes sense. All of this is just the cool exterior of people who are desperately lonely and afraid of believing in love or relationship or life, only to be disappointed that it was a lie. We are the most advertised to people ever ... film itself sells us a way of life and a world of things every time we sit down to be entertained. I highly doubt that Shakespeare's set was elaborate enough to convince any peasants of the high-life, but our world is different. Everyone is trying to make us believe, and our only defense is to become cynical long before our time. And most of us are far to young to properly wear such a role ... we lack the long road of experience to properly discern what is false and what is true.

And there lies the dilemma, we don't let ourselves believe there is anything great in our world so we don't do anything great. We don't even look for it.

But the truth is, from God's point of view, this world was still shot through with enough beauty and goodness for him to descend into human flesh and give up his own life (exposing that the world was truly wicked ... just like Nieche said, we would kill God if only we had the chance), but something crazy and wonderful happened. The people around Jesus were forever changed and God descended again in the Holy Spirit ... that until the end of the world and unto the ends of the earth God would be at work among men and women through the church ... which is the Body of Christ. No matter what we see with our tired pilgrim eyes, God is at work in the earth. That is our foundation truth and we work from there always. And so the good news goes forth.

We see death and evil and sin like everyone else ... perhaps better because we know what to call it (the creation-killer), but we are always looking for how God is at work and asking him to show his face or at least his hands ("he's a workin' man") and we know he will. And joy means that we know all that. Not that we know it in some kind of constant vision rolling before our eyes, but deep down in our way of thinking. We know that God is good. We know that God is at work in the earth. We know that we and others like us (other human beings) can be part of that work. And so we have joy.

But sadly, youth culture today is connected to cynicism. Youth is typically connected to hopefulness and it seems a very sad thing that in our culture it is not. The opposite of joy is despair and despair is "the perverse anticipation of the nonfulfillment of hope: 'to despair is to descend into hell.'" (Pieper Hope) "Against all reality, they transform the 'not yet' of hope into the 'not' ... In despair, that which is genuinely human--which alone is able to preserve the easy flow of hope--is paralyzed and frozen."

But we have God at work and so we have hope. And because we have hope and belief in reality, we have joy. We have joy toward the end and we have joy whenever the end comes into the present (which happens a lot actually). We can also have joy in those spots of earth and humanity that are still blessed and shot through with glory (even if a shadowy one).