A Model of Cynicism

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Like millions of others, I’ve gotten hooked on Netflix’s House of Cards. In last season’s finale, Frank Underwood, the politician who has schemed his way through a twisted plan to advance his political career, enters a church, gets on his knees and looks skyward.

 “Every time I’ve spoken to you,” he says to a God he claims not to believe in, “you’ve never spoken back, although, given our mutual disdain, I can’t blame you for the silent treatment. Perhaps I’m speaking to the wrong audience.”

He then looks down, presumably to Satan. “Can you hear me?” he asks. “Are you even capable of language or do you only understand depravity?”

Praying to oneself, for oneself
Finally, Underwood, looking at the camera, concludes: “There is no solace above or below. Only us. Small. Solitary. Striving. Battling one another. I pray to myself, for myself.” As he exits the church he lights a votive candle in an array of lights, then blows them all out.

Underwood, played so convincingly by Kevin Spacey, is the model of cynicism, the epitome of the Machiavellian politician. In fact, most characters in the series are cynical, selfish and opportunistic. In the world of House of Cards, the end always justifies the means.

I sometimes feel guilty about watching it. Is the audience influenced to act similarly? I hope not. Then I recall that art traditionally shows not only the beauty of humanity but also its depravity, and both provide valuable lessons.

The show also reminds me of the differences between cynicism and skepticism – an important difference to recall. Cynicism, according to the dictionary, involves “distrusting or disparaging the motives of others…showing contempt for accepted

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standards of honesty or morality by one’s actions, especially actions that exploit the scruples of others.” Cynics are also “bitterly or sneeringly distrustful, contemptuous or pessimistic.” Cynicism, by the way, derives from an ancient philosophy of the same name.

Skepticism, on the other hand, is “an attitude of doubting the truth of something, such as a claim or statement.” It can also be “a disposition to incredulity either in general or toward a particular object.”

My view is that cynicism fails to lead to happiness. House of Cards’ Underwood may take pleasure in his manipulation of others to get his way, and enjoy his nighttime smoking bouts with his nearly equally cynical spouse, but he doesn’t come off as a happy guy. With such a view of life, and of fellow human beings, how could you be?

On the other hand, God made us skeptics and intends for us to be skeptical, in my opinion, and that skepticism is the natural human reaction to a world that continuously and consistently surprises us. I can imagine the skepticism of the earliest humans about a wild animal that appears to be pacific but attacks unexpectedly, or about the harmless appearance of the ocean surf that they knew from experience can be deadly.

I believe, in fact, that we should approach God and religion with skepticism, seeking the answers to the mysteries of God and faith with patience and persistence, trying to be open to the possibilities.

Science fiction but not faith?
To me it’s ironic that today’s culture is so open to science fiction. You can’t go to a movie theater or watch TV without seeing two or three trailers about films of the imagined future, such as Hunger Games, or about the imagined past, such as HBO's Game of Thrones. The shows and their kind are themes for innumerable video games. People are able to suspend their unbelief to get into these themes, but many are unable to believe in a God who invented humanity and works in surprising ways.

Fans of those movies, TV shows and video games know that they’re fiction, you might say, but faith asks you to actually believe the unbelievable. But is religion really unbelievable? Is it possible that we’re so immersed in our age, our culture, our materialism, our habitual ways of seeing things that we aren’t open to God?

Frank Underwood and the characters in House of Cards shows us how not to live, similarly to the way faith shows us the opposite. The big difference? Faith leads to happiness.