In Defense of the Philosophical Smartass

There is a particular species of human being who regards the solemn pronouncements of his fellow man with something less than reverence. Suspicious of fashionable wisdom, allergic to pretension, he is inclined to greet the latest proclamation of moral enlightenment with an arched eyebrow and a question calculated to make the enlightened wish they'd stayed home.

He is the philosophical smartass. Not to be confused with garden-variety smartasses, who can be found in great numbers wherever two or more people have gathered and someone has mistaken an opinion for an accomplishment.

The distinction matters, because the philosophical smartass is not necessarily opposed to authority, tradition, or virtue. Indeed, he may hold all three in considerable esteem. What he opposes is their counterfeiting, particularly by people who insist upon being congratulated for the effort.

I have a recurring cartoon character on social media. He’s named Leopold, a sardonic leopard sporting sunglasses and a preoccupation with observing the human condition and finding its management wanting. He has little patience for fashionable nonsense and those who manufacture it. His observations are generally brief, occasionally merciless, and delivered with the air of a gentleman who has already heard quite enough, thank you.

Leopold is hardly a philosopher. He's a cartoon character, for heaven's sake. But he belongs to a distinguished tradition of those who have discovered that a well-placed wisecrack can occasionally accomplish what a hundred earnest lectures cannot.

The tradition is considerably older than Leopold. Indeed, it goes back at least as far as Diogenes of Sinope, the fourth-century B.C. Greek philosopher who elevated the art of making respectable people uncomfortable into something approaching a religious vocation.

Diogenes was a Cynic, a term which carried a very different meaning in his day. He rejected artificial conventions, ostentatious wealth, and the elaborate social performances through which human beings persuade one another of their importance.

He lived in self-imposed extreme poverty, from which station he delighted in his freedom from the demands of wealth, possessions, and conventional obligations. He once reportedly wandered Athens in broad daylight carrying a lighted lantern, searching for an honest man.

When Alexander the Great visited Diogenes and offered to grant him a favor, the philosopher reportedly asked the conqueror to kindly move aside because he was blocking the sunlight.

Consider please the delightful economy of that response. Here stood one of the most powerful men in the world, offering practically anything within his considerable means, and Diogenes requested only that he cease being an obstruction.

This wasn’t just a cheap insult. It was also a philosophical proposition delivered with exquisite timing. Because power, wealth, and reputation are not necessarily measures of human worth. Sometimes the emperor is merely standing in the way of a perfectly good afternoon.

Centuries later, Mark Twain brought a similar sensibility to American letters. He possessed that rare ability to recognize the ridiculous without losing sight of the tragic. His humor was frequently savage, but it was rarely purposeless. Beneath the laughter lay a profound suspicion of hypocrisy, cruelty, vanity, and the peculiar human talent for wrapping self-interest in robes of moral righteousness.

Twain understood that foolishness becomes considerably more dangerous when it acquires a title, an office, or a committee. Equally important, he knew that the observer might sometimes be part of the spectacle.

I've often imagined humanity as an endless parade of fools, marching confidently toward destinations unknown, waving banners proclaiming their superior judgment. While my natural inclination is to stand along the sidewalk and provide commentary, there are times when I find myself leading the parade, baton in hand.

There is one essential distinction. Not every smartass is a philosophical smartass. Some people are inescapably disagreeable, while others enjoy humiliating people because it gives them a fleeting sense of superiority. And some mistake perpetual contrarianism for independent thought.

Sarcasm is not evidence of intelligence, and irreverence is not evidence of wisdom. A man can ridicule everything around him without understanding a bloody thing about any of it.

The most insufferable people I've encountered in literature and public discourse are those who mistake their capacity for lobbing spitballs for an ability to discern truth. I've written about this phenomenon before, under the heading of Spitball Conservatism. It is hardly confined to conservatives, of course. Spitballing is an ecumenical enterprise, enthusiastically practiced across the ideological spectrum.

The technique requires little preparation. Identify a target, launch a projectile, and bask in the admiration of those who already agree with you. No coherent alternative is necessary. No serious engagement with the opposing argument is required. Indeed, understanding the argument might interfere with the festivities.

It is criticism without responsibility, cleverness without comprehension, and occasionally stupidity with excellent timing. It might even land you on the opinion page at The New York Times.

The philosophical smartass operates under a different obligation.

He must understand what he is attacking. More importantly, he must possess some conception of what ought to stand in its place. Here we arrive at an interesting distinction between cynicism and moral clarity.

The cynic, in the modern sense, often dismisses virtue itself as a fraud. He assumes that everyone is corrupt, every noble sentiment conceals an ulterior motive, and every expression of principle is merely another advertisement for self-interest.

This is a tidy and convenient philosophy. It requires no aspiration, excuses every personal failing, and allows its practitioner to regard disappointment as proof of superior intelligence.

The philosophical smartass, however, may recognize virtue's absence precisely because he believes in its worth.

Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, argued that virtue is cultivated through habit and demonstrated through action. We become just by practicing justice, courageous by acting courageously, and temperate by exercising restraint.

Notice what is missing from that formulation: Public relations.

You see, virtue is not established by announcing one's possession of it, any more than courage is demonstrated by purchasing a particularly aggressive bumper sticker. The person who quietly performs a difficult duty may possess more genuine virtue than a dozen public moralists congratulating themselves for having identified the duty in question.

And this, I submit, is where the philosophical smartass earns his keep. He recognizes the distance between profession and performance, between the advertised virtue and the genuine article. His ridicule is directed not at goodness, but at its imitation.

Michelangelo reportedly conceived of sculpture as liberating the figure already concealed within the marble. The artist's task was to remove the excess stone and reveal the form.

I rather like that image as a description of philosophical irreverence. The philosophical smartass sees something worthwhile obscured beneath layers of vanity, hypocrisy, fashionable nonsense, and institutional self-congratulation. His sarcasm becomes a chisel, striking away at the accumulated debris.

The spitball merely leaves a stain. The chisel reveals a form.

Of course, a chisel can also destroy. In unskilled or malicious hands, it becomes an instrument of vandalism rather than creation. So it is with ridicule.

There is nothing particularly admirable about mocking the vulnerable, humiliating the unfortunate, or treating another person's honest mistake as an opportunity for public entertainment. Cruelty does not become wisdom merely because it arrives wearing a clever hat.

Thus, the philosophical smartass must possess something that the ordinary heckler often lacks: restraint, humility, and a willingness to submit his own convictions to the same scrutiny he applies to everyone else’s. Otherwise, he becomes another pompous ass demanding applause for having exposed the existence of pompous asses. A profession that could fill stadiums.

We live in an age in which almost every institution possesses a mission statement, every public figure professes noble intentions, and every fashionable absurdity arrives accompanied by an impressive vocabulary explaining why ordinary people are too unsophisticated to recognize its brilliance.

Sometimes the appropriate response is a careful, reasoned argument. Sometimes it is a raised eyebrow. And sometimes, when pretension has inflated itself beyond all reasonable dimensions, the most useful contribution is the application of a very sharp pin, even if wielded by a cartoon leopard in sunglasses.

That is the philosophical smartass at his best. Not a nihilist. Not a professional malcontent. Not a man who mistakes his own cleverness for a moral achievement. Simply someone who believes that truth deserves defending, virtue deserves respecting, and nonsense deserves considerably less ceremony than it generally receives.

As for Leopold, I doubt he'd appreciate being enlisted in so elevated a philosophical enterprise. He would probably regard the entire discussion as an extravagant expenditure of words to establish something perfectly obvious, and wonder why anyone needed Aristotle, Diogenes, and Mark Twain to explain the proper handling of a pompous ass. Which is precisely why I keep him around.

Someone has to remind the sculptor that, however noble his intentions, he's still standing in a room full of rocks.