Misanthropy Read online

  The major sources of and influences on Western misanthropic tradition have been various. They include the Stoics, especially Seneca, and the Bible, notably the Old Testament prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah) and St Paul, and Eastern influences like Manichaeanism. But three in particular stand out: the Cynic philosophers from Antisthenes to Bion, inventor of the diatribe, and their legacy as far as the era of the Emperor Julian, the key figure being Diogenes (412–323 BC); Roman satire, chiefly Persius and Juvenal, in the first hundred years of the Empire; and St Augustine. I shall focus the discussion on four themes that will repeatedly be present in what follows: saeva indignatio; total depravity (as rooted in original sin); the exception; and the méchants and the complaisants. Two pairs of terms are common in misanthropic writings. First, the world is composed of knaves and fools: gull, swindle, cozen or be the prey of those who do. That is the way of things, which means that one either plays an unappetizing role and prospers, or plays another and becomes a hapless victim. The second is less of a binary, because the opposites partly coincide: in Alceste’s terms – according to Erasmus, they were in fact originally Timon’s17 – there are two types of people in the world, the méchants or malfaisants, and the complaisants (LM, 1.1 119–20, p. 53), those who get up to wicked tricks and those who fail to resist or are complicit with them. In misanthropic discourse at large, this equates with wealth (the ‘vomit of fortune’, said Diogenes),18 power and fame on the one hand, and those who placidly go along with them or acquiesce in their operations on the other.

  Misanthropy as such was not one of the most prominent themes of the Cynics. But it was a predictable consequence of other aspects of their thought (and their practice; what the Cynics did was in some ways at least as important as what they thought). In one of Diogenes’s supposed letters, the philosopher declares:

  Well, I wish that everyone would turn to philosophy and be purged of stupidity. As it is, though, it may be that only people of our persuasion will die out, while the rest of the world, unconverted, will go on breeding. But if the human race were to die out, would that be any more lamentable than if wasps or flies became extinct? Such scruples only show the failure of people to see things for what they really are.19

  The first-century Bithynian Dio Chrysostom, who adopted the Cynic regimen and is one of the best sources of information about the Cynics, is especially clear about one particular ‘failure’ (or irrationality) in question. Indeed, he helpfully grasps it as ironically fundamental to most human life, just as, for Molière, the irrationality of misanthropy is to misanthropy itself. The trouble with humans is that they endlessly multiply the very evils they are seeking to escape. They cannot stay still. They have just as much compulsion to proliferate, to complicate and add to things, as they do to increase, to reproduce. But that weakens as it strengthens them, continually causing problems even as it solves them; indeed, the solutions themselves breed more problems. Take medicine, for example:

  Humans … clung desperately to life by resorting to various means of cheating death; and all the same few managed to reach old age. They lived with a host of complaints the majority of which don’t even have a name. Since earth does not produce medicinal plants to cure them all they are forced to submit to cautery and the knife. Chiron, Asclepius and the sons of Asclepius, for all their powers of healing, could not offset the ill effects of their patients’ pleasant vices. … Men crowded into the cities for mutual defence against outsiders, but then turned on each other and committed the foulest crimes, as if that were their real motive for congregating. … The fact is, all man’s ingenuity and advances in technology were at best mixed blessings in the lives of later generations. (CP, pp. 96–7)

  Dio applies this kind of logic to various aspects of human life. The paradox is, he thinks, the very origin of all our disorders, as it is of all the disorder we create, of ordinary, universal human unhappiness. One should categorically distrust human beings precisely because they are thus disposed, but will not grasp the fact. It is therefore appropriate enough that, in what is almost the most famous anecdote in Cynic annals, Diogenes is patrolling the sunny streets with ‘lighted lamp in hand’, saying, ‘ “I’m looking for a man”’ (CP, p. 35). A real human being – the Cynics included women, notably the remarkable Hipparchia – is extremely hard if not impossible to find, since humans are almost invariably disabled by Dio Chrysostom’s founding double bind.

  At the heart of this line of thought lies the Cynic valuation of nature and simplicity as opposed to luxury and complication or sophistication, which ‘twist everything from its natural use’ (CP, p. 9). This was partly founded on a philosophical decision, a question, for the Cynics, of living in truth and, in Diogenes Laertius’s phrase, of defining ‘the goal of man as life in accordance with virtue’ (CP, p. 12). As such, it involved a rejection of solemnly grandiose ideas and philosophical quibbling alike. Diogenes refused to take theoretical debates seriously, even showing his disrespect for Plato. But it was also political, a question of social misery and violated justice: ‘Consider at what price they’re acquired’, says the Cynic in Lucian’s dialogue ‘The Cynic’, of luxury and ‘unnecessary complication’,

  in terms of trouble, pain and danger – or rather in terms of blood, death and shattered lives, not just because many people die at sea searching for these luxury goods or ruin their health manufacturing them, but because they are the source of so much conflict among you, setting friend against friend, child against parent, even wife against husband. (CP, p. 7)

  Given so much social disaster, it was important to resist its stupid obfuscation, the justifications for such a world that everyone else seemed automatically and thoughtlessly to rehearse. ‘Nature [phusis] is mighty’, says one of the letters of Diogenes, ‘and, since it has been banished from life by opinion [doxa], it is what we restore for the salvation of mankind’.20 Hence the Cynic motto, ‘deface the currency’: defile general opinion whether social, political, philosophical, religious, ethical or just as expressed in ordinary, run-of-the mill, conventional chatter.

  For the Cynics, scorn of doxa, the everyday notions that, more or less placidly, incessantly do the rounds, what George Orwell called ‘the smelly little orthodoxies which are [forever] contending for our souls’,21 was an absolute principle. This went hand in hand with ‘the Cynic model of a naturally free and autonomous self’.22 As Mikhail Bakhtin expressed the point, the Cynic refused ‘to be incarnated in the flesh of existing sociohistorical categories’, those by which other people organized their lives.23 This partly involved παῤῥησία, parrhesia, freedom of speech, in a sense little known to us now, though it was one of the crucial sources of the satirical tradition (Juvenal, Lucian, Erasmus, More, Rabelais and Swift are merely some of those who refer back to it). The Cynics said what they felt it was necessary to say, irrespective of any and all social shibboleths. They were also notoriously shameless. Antisthenes declared that they ‘welcomed’ ignominy (CP, p. 17); theirs was a will to scandal. They behaved in public without forethought, using ‘any place for any purpose’,24 and barked at their fellow human beings without forethought, too. They entertained a complete disrespect for public norms. According, at least, to his most eminent early biographer, Diogenes farted, urinated, masturbated and shat in public.25 He refused ‘the ontological basis of social conventions’,26 says Derek Krueger (if in a phrase Diogenes himself might have laughed to scorn). His body ‘was out of step with the world as a whole’.27 As A. A. Long puts the point, Cynicism was not just a philosophy but a radical practice, without which it was mere pretence.28 This is nature, a defecating Diogenes in effect said, whereas the dirty stuff that other men get up to is not. People found Diogenes revolting, but he equally found them so. It was precisely because he or she was happy to be disgusting in public that the Cynic became known as such, κυνικός, cynikos, the dog sage, dog-like. For some, it meant being incapable of proper humanity. But the Cynics were calling in question what being properly human meant. As Antisthenes said, f
rom a Cynic perspective, the ‘few good men’ had to fight ‘all the bad ones’ (CP, p. 17). Their public performances were part of how they did so.

  It was no accident that the Cynics emerged when they did. The Greece they knew was a society whose increasingly affluent and luxurious culture existed at the apex of a pyramidal social structure that reflected gross and alarming social inequalities.29 Yet the fact did not appear to disturb those who had not reached the apex. This, as much as anything else, is what charges Cynic misanthropy and aggression. On the one hand, the philosopher has to show his contempt for eminence, obscene riches, sheer power, empty fame. The classic Diogenes anecdote as related by Plutarch tells of his encounter with an almighty Alexander otherwise feted by ‘statesmen and philosophers’:

  But when Diogenes took not the slightest notice of him … Alexander paid the man a visit himself. There he found him lounging in the sun. … The prince greeted him and put to him the question whether there was anything that he could do for him. ‘Yes’, said the philosopher, ‘shift a bit out of my sun’. (CP, p. 31)

  The philosopher was telling Alexander that there were better, simpler things to care about than endless conquest. But equally, it was necessary to oppose all those who, simply through their inertia, underwrote the Alexanders. Hence Diogenes walked into a theatre as everyone else was coming out, and when asked why, said, ‘This … is what I practise doing all my life’.30 The determination to head in the opposite direction to everyone else was a Cynic habit: Sinope condemned Diogenes to exile. When someone mentioned it to him, he replied, ‘And I them … to home-staying’.31 As Lucian’s Cynic says, Diogenes despised ‘the moral coin of the masses’, because they nursed ‘ambitions’ that were not ‘worth emulating’ (CP, pp. 9, 29). He ‘disapproved of all that they said and did’.32 This, the face to face with power on the one hand, and complicity on the other, the méchants and the complaisants, is integral to Cynic misanthropy.

  By the time of the Roman Empire, Diogenes was another figure of almost mythical proportions, his asceticism and his shamelessness both the stuff of legend, yet Cynicism had lost some of its interest. Not surprisingly, the ways of imperial Rome sparked the Cynic tradition back to life, but in circumstances that made its existence much more precarious. Set alongside the great leviathan that was the Empire, and the extraordinary opulence that pumped into Rome from its hinterlands, the Cynic concept of the natural life was likely to seem merely negligible. Furthermore, in Imperial Rome, political circumstances were more extreme than in Diogenes’s Athens, and the condition of Cynics was correspondingly riskier. This was the case, not least, because they associated themselves rather closely with aristocrats who still harboured Republican sympathies, in effect constituting a ‘philosophical opposition’.33 Whatever Diogenes’s seeming indifference to Alexander’s greatness, Alexander had admired him. In Satire XIV, Juvenal actually reminds us of this, as he holds Diogenes’s asceticism up approvingly in contrast to the Roman nouveaux riches.34 But under the Julio-Claudian dynasty (Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, 27 BC–68 AD) and the Flavian dynasty (from the Year of the Four Emperors through Vespasian and Titus to Domitian, 69–96 AD), the Emperors routinely banished Cynics (and Stoics). Nero drove the Cynic Demetrius from Rome. Vespasian did so a second time, after which Demetrius disappears from history. Vespasian also had Cynics flogged, and even one beheaded. Given a series of often brutal, paranoid and tyrannical rulers who presided over a world of purges, tortures, conspiracies, assassinations, arbitrary cruelties, mass executions of suspected enemies, poisonings and other suspicious deaths, sumptuous debaucheries, outlandish and barbarous practices of many descriptions, sexual and other, and a vast squandering of money and resources (under Caligula, gladiators’ lives were auctioned to save Rome from bankruptcy), no sincere Roman Cynic could hope to survive very comfortably, supposing he or she survived at all. When power had assumed such monstrous and unscrupulous forms, the Cynic principle of speaking truth to it seemed irrelevant. This was hardly a world that Diogenes could have foreseen.

  Thus, in Imperial Rome, misanthropy takes on a more ferocious form than the reflective and sometimes ironical modes of Greek philosophy could accommodate. It appears as wholesale and explicit moral denunciation, and its tone is that of saeva indignatio, the savage indignation of the satirist. The Cynics tended to be provocateurs. By contrast, Persius and Juvenal are lacerators of what they take to be a universal corruption. In The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, without referring to them, Edward Gibbon provides a superb account of why they might have felt they had to do so:

  It is almost superfluous to enumerate the unworthy successors of Augustus. Their unparalleled vices, and the splendid theatre on which they were acted, have saved them from oblivion. The dark unrelenting Tiberius, the furious Caligula, the feeble Claudius, the profligate and cruel Nero, the beastly Vitellius, and the timid inhuman Domitian, are condemned to everlasting infamy. During fourscore years (excepting only the short and doubtful respite of Vespasian’s reign), Rome groaned beneath an unremitting tyranny, which exterminated the ancient families of the republic, and was fatal to almost every virtue, and every talent, that arose in that unhappy period.35

  In line with the contemporary ‘revisionist’ tendency to help us lead untroubled lives by making our history easier to live with, recent historians have occasionally striven to make one or other of the early emperors, if not exactly cuddly, then less luridly Satanic figures, dwelling on Nero’s theatrical talents and his knowledge of Roman history and mythology, or presenting Domitian as an efficient, if ruthless and despotic, administrator with very considerable managerial skills.36 But whatever the period in question, the revisionists tend to grant only a limited weight to the relevant imaginative literature. Persius and Juvenal saw matters rather as did Gibbon, recognizing precisely a political logic ‘fatal to almost every virtue, and every talent’ – but homing in, above all, on the question of what a society looks like when both virtue and talent seem dead.

  *

  When W. H. Auden wrote, in 1939, that ‘intellectual disgrace/stares from every human face’,37 he was thinking of a state of shame that was deeply moral, political and intellectual together. He was also asserting that it was not simply explainable in terms of an evil few manipulating an innocent or at least misguided many in spite of the alarm of the good. Everyone was involved, and it showed in everyone. That is how Persius, who was writing in the age of Nero, and Juvenal, who seems to have begun writing under Domitian, but only completed and certainly only published his satires during what both Machiavelli and Gibbon thought of as the ‘golden age’ of the Roman Empire, the century of the Nervan-Antonian dynasty that began with Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian, saw their Rome.38 The great source of Roman satire was Lucilius, in the second century BC. Alas, only fragments of his work survive – but enough of them to show that Lucilius thought of satire as taking the whole of the human scene on board:

  But as it is, from morning to night, on holiday and workday,

  the whole people and the senators too all alike

  bustle about in the forum and on no occasion leave it.

  To one and the same pursuit and artifice all devote themselves:

  to be able to cheat with cunning, to fight cleverly,

  to struggle charmingly, to pretend to be a good man,

  to lay a trap, as if everyone is everyone’s enemies.

  ‘Oh the cares of human beings! Oh how much emptiness there is in things! [quantum est in rebus inane]’.39 We are not far from the world of Ecclesiastes – and Hobbes.

  ‘Lucilius crunched the city’, writes Persius.40 Both Persius and Juvenal pay homage to Lucilius, invoke and inherit from him. Persius attacks the general decadence in Roman morals in the Neronian era. The Romans have subordinated every other value to money. Furthermore, the lust for gold joins forces with the compulsion intrinsic to the ‘guilty flesh’ that ‘drives us to gouge pearl from shell and rip/the veins of glowing ore out of the
raw slag’ (Sii, 66–7, p. 144) in a quest for ever-increasing luxury, with disastrous consequences. Persius particularly dwells on what the flesh thus makes of itself. His satires drip loathing for the grotesquely indulged body. Take Natta, for example:

  Vice has made him insensible; thick fat has surrounded his conscience; he has no feelings of guilt, no notion of loss.

  Lying on the bottom, he has ceased to send any bubbles to the surface.

  (Siii, 32–4, p. 145)

  But virtually all will choose the sybaritic life, given half a chance, because this is what the guilty flesh urges upon us. The result, however, is that ‘EVERY MAN JACK HAS AN ASS’S EARS!’ (Si, 121, p. 141; Persius was clearly thinking of Midas’s association with gold, as well as his punishment by Apollo).

  Juvenal shares many themes with Persius, but his is a later age sunk deeper in a more profound and various moral slough, and he has an appetite for particulars that is worthy of a novelist like Joyce. He follows Persius in excoriating wholesale bribery and corruption and condemning a rotting ruling class. He shares Persius’s disdain for a society besotted with money (‘Of all gods it’s Wealth that compels our deepest/Reverence’, SSi, 112–13, p. 6). But, above all, he inherits and vastly extends Persius’s contempt for social trash on the make, prospering as the tiny minority of more decent Romans do not because it understands money, but also because it is not impeded or distracted by any other considerations. It is heedless of the fact that money corrupts personal relations, and content with undifferentiated forms of pleasure. Meanwhile, the Roman slums and their abject poverty continue to spread, thugs roam the streets, illegally constructed buildings collapse and fires rage. But one can hardly expect better of Rome. The aristocracy have abandoned such virtue as it could ever muster, the people roar only for bread and circuses – and in between them come the forgers, informers, gigolos, bent lawyers, pimps, con men, malingerers, astrologers, adulterers, wheedling courtiers, greedy freeloaders, flash-git shysters and gladiators (sportspersons) favoured by power. As he walks or rather scurries apprehensively round Rome’s streets, Juvenal indeed sees disgrace on every face. The decent few – the exceptions – writers, scholars, teachers, principled advocates, honourable military men, can scarcely struggle on.