Something that I never become accustomed to hearing in my classes and in conversation with other students here at UCLA (and which I imagine is applicable to most American youth) is the sarcasm, irony and cynicism that dominates their language. For example, we were discussing Coleridge’s Fears in Solitude the other day and people were making claims about the ending of the poem which presumed that Coleridge was being ironic and sarcastic when he returns to his cottage after having had a conflicting meditation on his country’s destructive and immoral behavior. Despite these thoughts that plague him, he ends the poem with, “By nature’s quietness / And solitary musings all my heart / Is soften’d, and made worthy to indulge / Love, and the thoughts that yearn for human kind.” People had trouble with this seemingly happy ending because it makes him look like a hypocrite who has just advocated for change and now returns to everyday life, content and thus they conjecture that his intention was irony. Couldn’t it possibly be that the speaker enjoys meditating on the world’s problems and to avoid going mad, has to return to his usual daily customs and appreciate the good he does have in his life? Is that so difficult to believe? In his theory on the sublime, Kant said we gain pleasure from the knowledge that we have the ability to reason, even if our reason cannot grasp sublime experiences like the Holocaust or the size of the Universe.
Our rationality and pragmatism has led us to over interpret, to label traditional symbols and thoughts cliche and unoriginal and to reject feeling anything which might soften us or make us vulnerable. We are hardened, numb robots. We act as a teenager does when he has been bullied for years and is forced to take on a negative view of life because he has no escape. Our culture has become one big defense mechanism. So what happened to us? Who bullied us into becoming so cynical and unbelieving?
This is a theme that has been running through my three courses (Earlier Romantic Lit, Political Theory and American Poetry after 1945). This problem, as far as I know, is a national one. To be American is to be suspicious. What we don’t realize is that this cynicism is blinding us rather than enlightening us. Our minds have become so closed to everything that once meant something to people.
I think the problem might be that we have been given too much liberty and too much diversity exists as a consequence of it, to the point where we have all begun to blur into one big mass of people and ideals. Everyone has the ability to express an opinion (I’m doing it right now) through technology and contrary to what Mill believed, that liberty has not led us to progress. Instead it traps us in the ideology of freedom, that everyone should be granted equality, erasing any standards for who we should be or what we should believe in. I think that irony and cynicism that is so prevalent in our minds comes from the chaos the future represents to us now that we have been “liberated” by post structuralism and have deconstructed traditional binaries (male vs. female, white vs. black, good vs. evil etc.). However, instead of being empowered by these deconstructions, we have become ambiguous characters that don’t believe firmly in one thing or another but instead always float to a moderate stance.
People are made fun of for pursuing a moral character in this country. There’s something tragically beautiful about the self-destructive person who can only drink or smoke his sorrow away, apparently. Humanity is at the risk of being seriously undervalued and it may already be too late. Even as I write this, I feel that the conventions for the way literature should be written, for the beliefs I should hold and the way I should live my life have already been engraved deeply into our culture. I guess we’re trying so hard to escape the harsh reality of life that we have resorted to complicating our words and distrusting even the most genuine of notions. But why can’t someone be straightforward and sincere? We used to aim at clarity and understanding one another but now the more mysterious one person appears to another, the more entertaining or challenging it is to “figure out” that person.
We’ve strayed so far from just trusting our intuitive emotions that I can’t even envision society in the future. Rather than feeling like I am in control of my life, I’ve begun to notice all the rules and structures that are steering my decisions and cutting off possibility. I feel extremely vulnerable to life itself, which doesn’t function through the power of a higher order or sense of justice but just is, in a very matter-of-fact way and it seems that it will be random chance that will determine whether I succeed in feeling self-satisfaction and happiness in life or whether I get lost in the chaos, ambiguity and injustice of it.
