Zaretsky and the Cynics

 

Cynicism is the operating mode in my office. Every day people visit with their problems and their hopelessness, asking for help from a system they fully expect will disappoint them.

When I tell them there's a drug prescription I can write which would likely help a lot, but the computer software tells me their insurance won't cover it, they smile bitterly and say, "Yeah, what a surprise."

Zaretsky

Not long ago a man who had type 1 diabetes from age 6 visited. He had over the prior three years achieved not just excellent blood sugar control using a new version of an insulin pump. His HbA1c, the measure of his average blood sugar had not just got to an excellent range, but to a normal range. Of course, we were both delighted. He was healthier than he'd been in years. 

Then his insurance company notified him it would no longer pay for his insulin pump supplies, effectively cutting off this therapy. Why? Well, his HbA1c's had been normal for 3 years so they were not going to pay for normal. As far as the 20 year old clerk in front of his computer in Minnetonka, MN was concerned, this patient was normal, and no amount of appeal helped. We spent 3 hours that day in the office, with my medical assistant progressing on her computer and by phone up the ladders of appeal to no effect. 

"So, my blood cholesterol and my blood thyroid levels and my blood pressure are now normal owing to my cholesterol and thyroid medication and my blood pressure medication. Are they going to stop those medications, too?" he asked me.

"What a surprise that would be," I said.

But that is not that sort of cynicism I worry about.

That sort of cynicism is what Robert Zaretsky describes in the Boston Globe Sunday Ideas section of December 15.  Zaretsky begins with the arresting observation that cynicism afflicts us all, "like an odorless toxic gas."

He then launches into a visit to the original Cynics of ancient Greece.

Diogenes

Now, I have to admit up front, anytime I hear someone jump back to ancient Greece my antennae sizzle and start to combust: Oh, here we go, trying to act all scholarly by referring to Socrates or someone who lived so long ago, surely we have no real idea of what he said, thought or lived, but every Oxford don loves to go there, because it makes them sound, well, you know, scholarly. Hey, this guy can read Greek on tablets--he must know something I don't.

But in Zaretsky's case, he actually makes this all relevant, alive and engaging. 

Diogenes, the original Cynic it turns out, is a guy I recognize. "In their eyes, civility equaled hypocrisy and conventions corrupted our nature."

Oh, that I know from way back. 

My father was like that. 

We lived in Washington, D.C., the ultimate place for parsed speech, for hypocrisy hiding behind every euphemism. Washington, D.C. was then a distinctly un-cosmopolitan, Southern town, where people always began with a "Bless your heart," and lots of Southern blather. "Why, Bless your heart, I understand why you might be upset about my insistence that no Negroes be able to use a Whites Only bathroom, but you know it's only about hygiene and it's best for everyone, the Negroes as much as us."

My father got to the point where he hated the mindless rituals, like saying, "Nice to meet you," or "Thanks for coming by." He just launched into people.

Polite Company

I saw the same thing in European immigrants who flooded suburban Washington after the second world war--they had no time for civility. The former fighter pilot up the street was like that. He had heard the colonel sending him out on another mission say stuff like, "We are all so proud of you," once to often. I can only imagine how he would react to that "Thank you for your service," thing.

But modern cynics, who orbit Mr. Trump do not insist on shoving aside the hypocritical to speak the truth.

"Unlike the modern cynic, the ancient Cynic insisted upon truth-telling. Not to be cruel for the sake of cruelty but to be blunt for the sake of our common humanity," Zaretsky notes. 

My father was a huge embarrassment to my brother and me because whenever we had to go somewhere social with him, he stood out, much as Diogenes, as uncultured, hostile and unsophisticated.

In a social world where people from South Carolina and Georgia, where lynching happened daily and the Whites just smiled politely, there were plenty of hot button issues everyone stayed away from, the third rails prevailed, even at a cocktail party of my mother's friends who taught at the high school where she taught. My curmudgeonly father could start a fight if we weren't minding him, and bottles and furniture might start flying.

Modern Day Cynic at his Lynching Trial

But now, that's what Trumplings want to happen. As if the fight, the provocation were all that mattered. Truth is irrelevant. The 2020 election was stolen; vaccines cause autism; COVID was a Chinese plot; climate change is a Chinese plot; wildfires are caused by Jewish space lasers; separation of church and state is not constitutional--the First Amendment is unconstitutional. Doesn't matter. Truth to power is no longer a thing--it's now the middle finger to power. Truth is irrelevant.

The story of Diogenes sunbathing and Alexander the Great walks up to talk to him and commands, "Make a request!" And Diogenes says, "Move out of my sun," is a splendid parable. "In effect, he reminded the hegemon-to-be that he was nothing more than a man."

I really don't care if this parable reports a real event any more than it matters whether Biblical parables are true. The point is, it is a relevant story for today.  This is why Musk is so topical: He's telling everyone to move out of his sun. He may be a weird reactionary but he's not wrong about everything. As Musk has pointed to a multibillion dollar fighter plane saying that sending up a man in an airplane, when a drone could serve the purpose better, has more to do with getting the pilot laid when he goes to the Tail Hook party later, than with national defense. 

Truth there, even coming from a nasty self serving source.

Zaretsky's article is worth a read. I was a science major in college but I did get to take the occasional non science course, even one in philosophy, but as soon as the professor started talking about how some word or concept actually goes back to the ancients, and all the other dons started smiling because they wanted to believe their mastery of ancient Greek mattered, my mind shut down. Zaretsky makes this stuff modern, makes it live.

My cynical patients,  care nothing for the truth; they just want to burn everything down, and they are as happy to embrace untruth as truth. 

Discovering truth is often a lot of work. 

Vaccines? Oh, horrible, more harm than good, better to have polio and measles abound than to risk a vaccine. 

Yikes. 

I presume Diogenes would not be amused.