*JB, I would let you have this (awful) title if you updated your blog more than twice a year. Still available (and much better!) – The impotence of being earnest.
During a raucous dinner involving three-quarters of The Tessellations tonight, the topic of earnestness came up, along with our spaghetti marinara. Earnestness has been much discussed on Jelly’s blog recently, and in effect on fourth-quarter Seb’s, re: the painfully po-faced state of much left-wing political writing.
There’s not really much to add to Jelly’s concise analysis of the state of Kids Today, but it’s something that’s been on my mind recently, apropos of a few strangers (none of whom I have a particularly high regard for) accusing me of being cold and unfeeling because I have failed to immediately pour my heart out to them. Well, excuse me. Obviously I’m not the most painfully open person around. I like to maintain an ironic distance, partly because when everything falls to shit you can just have another gin and say “darling, what did you expect?” but mostly because – well – I just feel it’s polite.
I fucking hate it when someone I’m not particularly close to starts confiding it me, or asking advice, or generally being just a little bit emotionally slutty. You know – earnest. Constant, consistent sincerity always feels a little bit insincere, in that going-through-the-motions kind of way. It also has that drunk-in-pubs kind of quality, a little bit seedy, a little bit invasive, generally excruciatingly boring.
Moreover, earnestness – evangelistic, heartfelt, tear-wringing sincerity – always comes off as more than a little condescending to me. So backpacking in Nepal really made you see things clearly. So living an ‘activist’ lifestyle makes you feel morally superior to the rest of the plebs. So your soggy (and unmetrical) poetry expresses how you really feel. So the fuck what?
I get the impression with a lot of earnest people that they feel that being uncritically impassioned about something – a book or emotional state or social cause – is somehow morally superior to taking a critical and detached view of the world. It’s more emotionally honest, that honesty being weighted against the idea that all of us cynics are using our gin and irony as a way to, like, distance ourselves from really feeling. It’s a value system that privileges feeling over thinking, Dr Phil-style, and judges those who aren’t willing to wear their every emotional fluctuation on their sleeve as somehow missing out on the beauty of the world.
And you know what? It’s tiresome. It’s also extremely rude to foist your every over-sensitive reaction to the world on passers-by and expect them to have nothing better to do than pore over your own masturbatory – and fundamentally false – moment of self-realisation. People live in the world, they react to it, and not all of them need to announce their every moment’s sadness or joy. It’s basic manners, is what it is.
It’s polite to allow people live out their own value systems. It’s polite to refrain from bailing them up for long, boring conversations about how you intend to change the world with your totally radical politics. And sometimes manners, my friend, take precedence over self-righteousness. You’re not actually better than me because Kafka changed your life, you know.
I might be undercutting my argument a little to mention that I’m typing this a little tipsy. After dinner we went downstairs to the bar, sat in a dimly-lit corner, and drank. We made revoltingly politically incorrect jokes and still told each other the real things, the things you (should) only tell your close friends. I’d like to think we were sincere without ever making each other want to vomit with dismay. And if that is the measure by which I live my life, so be it.
7 Comments
June 17, 2008 at 9:25 am
Hear, hear. The family strikes back!
My motto re: masturbatory epiphanous moments: If I’m not getting off, then you are wasting my time.
You’re right — self-righteousness cloaked in earnestness is still self-righteousness, and it reeks of a misguided moral superiority. They might as well just come out and say, “I’m better than you”.
Where’s the decorum?
June 17, 2008 at 11:08 am
I’d like to reiterate (as the Cynics Brigade closes ranks …
) that I think a happy medium is possible, as you hint at in the last paragraph of this post, Jess. I truly believe it’s possible to be a person who feels sincerely, who looks at the world through a rose-coloured filter and whistles on their way to work, without having to inflict that on other people or imply to them that their value system is broken and the way they live their life is fundamentally bankrupt.
Anyway, that’s the way I see myself (apart from the rose-coloured glasses, perhaps). So maybe I’m just in denial.
June 17, 2008 at 11:36 am
I get the accusations of coldness or emotional unavailability because I don’t tell the whole world about my private life. Because it’s just that, my. private. life.
It doesn’t mean that I feel less, or that I don’t talk to anyone, it just means I choose those people carefully. As one should.
Heartily agree with yer, lady.
June 17, 2008 at 11:49 am
Fuck the haters, Yosh. Do your thing, player.
June 17, 2008 at 11:15 pm
I agree with Yosh – it’s a mistake to conflate being earnest with being selfish and irritating, just as it’s a mistake to conflate being critical with being alienated and detached. We need joy in our lives and we need to connect with other people; the problem arises when we think ours are better or more authentic joys than everyone else’s.
June 18, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Right on, Jane and Mel. Riiiight on.
June 18, 2008 at 8:04 pm
True, Jess.
Political earnestness at its worse is something like three parts ego and one part self-righteousness, topped with a dash of naivete and a squeeze of veiled condescension.
Transposing deeply-felt personal truths into everyday conversations can be dreary and uncomfortable — especially when those ‘truths’ are flimsy, ignorant, dogmatic or otherwise didactic in nature. We all have our joys and epiphanies — but true insight is self-contained, and doesn’t require an audience to passively absorb and validate it.