I see that the Minister for the Environment, Mr Dempsey, recently joined the National Youth Council of Ireland in celebrating that their survey of the attitudes of young people towards politics indicated that "cynicism" about politics did not register highly among the stated reasons for not voting.
But I would have thought it unlikely that cynicism would lend itself to self-confession. (The survey was an attempt to explore why two-thirds of young people did not vote in this year's local and European elections, giving Ireland the lowest turnout of first-time voters in the EU.)
We may be confused about the true nature of cynicism. There are two popularly accepted, and somewhat different, working definitions of the word: one, a tendency to believe the worst about others, that all acts are selfish, and two, a contempt for accepted standards of honesty and morality.
The first is a kind of resigned cynicism, scepticism really, which arises, presumably, from a hard experience of life. The second is a more pro-active dispositional response, a knowing disregard of what is right and good.
I propose a third: the state of being conscious of the extent to which honesty and morality are, in the public life of a modern society, no more than convenient constructs with which to maintain power and stifle free thinking. A "cynic", in this sense, might be someone who insists on thinking for himself.
By this definition, a cynic might not be someone who scorns and belittles morality and decency, but whose high expectations of such values has been damaged by betrayal. Cynicism, by this light, is not an indicator of a disinclination to believe in what is good, but the product of too great a tendency to do so.
The political establishment is infected with the second of the above-mentioned strains of cynicism, and the public with the first and third.
HERE is a cynical statement in the third category above: I often think that politics, almost of necessity, must imbue its practitioners with a deeply pessimistic view of humanity because, when people say that they wish their politicians to be above clientelism and patronage, what they mean is that they want a politics which bestows favour on nobody except themselves.
To observe the clamour for the satisfaction of selfish interest which is the daily lot of the working politician must have a chastening effect on any idealistic instincts. Invariably, the same people who regularly seek assistance from politicians are the first in line to kick them for bestowing such favours in a general way. To attempt to survive and hold on to power in the midst of such a conflicting, insatiable babble requires both a hardening of the heart and a forking of the tongue, all of which create a negative symbiosis whereby the public's faith in politics is reduced by virtue of the very forces by which public hypocrisy corrupts politicians.
All the same, the notion that people have become "cynical about politics" trips too lightly off the tongue. It is said, for example, that the younger generation of today is the most cynical about politics since the foundation of the State. I would say that, while this generation clearly has little interest in politics, this condition derives not from cynicism, but from something much closer to boredom.
In Cynicism and Post-modernity, Timothy Bewes advances the theory that "the rapidity and sheer overwhelming density of modern linguistic, commercial and rhetorical traffic . . . has a deadening or decelerating effect upon society . . . The relationship between the individual and objective culture has become one of absolute alienation, such that the critical faculty has given way to stupefaction, a failure of engagement and, finally, a defensive strategy of cynical indifference."
You can observe this by watching the way young people cross the road. Older people perform this function in a studied fashion - watching for traffic, obeying the rules and remaining alert for any changes in the prevailing conditions, scurrying across when the coast is clear.
But people under a certain age just drift across, frequently in front of oncoming traffic, which must stop or take other evasive action in order to avoid calamity.
IT IS NOT that these young people are blind or dazed - quite frequently, when you have screeched to a halt just inches from their shins they will turn and look at you with a mixture of puzzlement and tedium.
For a long time I believed that these young people imagined they owned the public highway, but I no longer think this is true. Neither are they oblivious of the dangers of mechanically-propelled vehicles. It's as if experience tells them that if they walk in front of it, a motor car will invariably stop, albeit sometimes with some difficulty.
This suggests an utterly paradoxical view of the world, which on the one hand bemuses and alienates them but which, on the other, they trust to keep them safe. My generation, by contrast, believed the world to be a dark and dangerous place, and that your safety within it, whether personal or political, was entirely a matter for yourself.
I would say that this perspective lends itself much more to cynicism. We had faith in specific people, which was quickly replaced by disillusionment. The youth of today do not even know the names of their leaders, but seem to have a blind faith in the capacity of their State to run on automatic pilot.
It is fallacious also to insist that the alleged cynicism about politics has its roots in the crop of scandals currently being investigated by tribunals. Most of the tribunals relate to the period of office of Charles Haughey, a time of optimum public interest in politics.
Two things therefore strike me as challenging the simplistic view: one, that since Mr Haughey left office, voter apathy has skyrocketed, and two, that we are still dependent on Mr Haughey to breathe life into a comatose political organism. If anything, apathy and ennui have their origins in the blandness of the generation which followed Mr Haughey, and in particular in its smug, pietistic, life-denying view of political life.
The roughage, the fibre, the organic lifeforce have gone. Complan Politics makes for bad box office.
John Waters can be contacted at jwaters@irish-times.ie