Curmudgeonry: Toward a Definition

My Webster's New World Dictionary of the American language defines "curmudgeon" as follows: "a surly, ill-mannered, bad-tempered person; cantankerous fellow". While there is much to be said for that, especially since being bad-tempered and cantankerous would seem to be a necessary condition of being a curmudgeon, it is clearly insufficient. Plenty of people are surly without being curmudgeons.

So what is a curmudgeon in the fullness of the word? First, we must distinguish a curmudgeon from a cynic. While the two share a disdain for many of the ways of the world, the former does not doubt people's sincerity, while the latter does. The curmudgeon is all too aware that people can be perfectly sincere in their meaningless and futile pursuits. While the cynic has profound doubts about the motives which lie behind actions, the curmudgeon knows that in their shallowness, short-sightedness, and dull-wittedness, people are strongly and ingenuously motivated in their pursuit of the vain.

Vanity lies at the crux of a definition. A curmudgeon has seen through, or at least so he thinks, the vanity of the world, and wants nothing to do with it. However, perhaps even more crucial to the curmudgeon's outlook is an abhorrence of sentimentality. For example, the curmudgeon generally dislikes children, not so much for what they are in themselves, but for being the cause of so much sentimentality. Here is Philip Larkin:

"It was that verse about becoming again as a little child that caused the first sharp waning of my Christian sympathies. If the Kingdom of Heaven should be entered only by those fulfilling such a condition I knew I should be unhappy there. It was not the prospect of being deprived of money, keys, wallet, letters, books, long-playing records, drinks, the opposite sex, and other solaces of adulthood that upset me (I should have been about eleven), but having to put up indefinitely with the company of other children, their noise, their nastiness, their boasting, their back-answers, their cruelty, their silliness. Until I began to meet grown-ups on more or less equal terms I fancied myself a kind of Ishmael. The realization that it was not people I disliked but children was for me one of those celebrated moments of revelation... The knowledge that I should never (except by deliberate act of folly) get mixed up with them again more than compensated for having to start earning a living."

Larkin obviously has a realistic view of childhood. His quote also illustrates another characteristic of curmudgeons: they hate noise and disruption. Another arch-curmudgeon, Arthur Schopenhauer, had this to say in his essay "On Noise" (and I note that that link is from another curmudgeon):

Kant wrote a treatise on The Vital Powers. I should prefer to write a dirge for them. The superabundant display of vitality, which takes the form of knocking, hammering, and tumbling things about, has proved a daily torment to me all my life long. There are people, it is true -- nay, a great many people -- who smile at such things, because they are not sensitive to noise; but they are just the very people who are not sensitive to argument, or thought, or poetry, or art, in a word, to any kind of intellectual influence. The reason of it is that the tissue of their brains is of a very rough and coarse quality. On the other hand, noise is a torture to intellectual people. In the biographies of almost all great writers, or wherever else their personal utterances are recorded, I find complaints about it; in the case of Kant, for instance, Goethe, Lichtenberg, Jean Paul; and if it should happen that any writer has omitted to express himself on the matter, it is only for want of opportunity.

It helps, if one wants to be a true curmudgeon, to be sensitive to intellectual influence. But, I admit, probably not totally necessary. For example,
Mr. Wilson from the Dennis the Menace comic strip. Mr. Wilson is one of curmudgeonry's lesser lights, who likely just wants to spend his day watching televised baseball games, but without whom the state of curmudgeonry would be immeasurably impoverished. Many of history's great curmudgeons have demonstrably been intellectuals however, for example the aforementioned Larkin and Schopenhauer, as well as people as gifted as H.L. Mencken, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Samuel Johnson (this last being a perfect example of the non-cynical curmudgeon). Among living curmudgeons I would name Lawrence Auster, Joseph Epstein, John Derbyshire, Anthony Daniels, Philip Lopate.

Being male would seem to give one a good leg up into curmudgeon status, but there are female curmudgeons. Ann Coulter comes to mind. And I wonder what Marie Curie was like in person.

Conservative politics would also seem another requisite, as it is characteristic of the curmudgeon to be wise to the ways of the world, and so to cast a jaundiced eye on fantastic schemes for its improvement. The conservative, as well as the curmudgeon, sees people as prone to all sorts of evil notions, and thus is skeptical of many human aspirations. But even here there are exceptions, for the curmudgeon may direct his gaze at the idiocies of the world as it is, and want to change it. An example here might be G.B. Shaw.

A curmudgeon must be an introvert. When intellectuality, scorn for sentimentality, and a wise rejection of the world's vanities are combined in one person, he finds the greatest delight in his own mind, and in quiet activities like reading or chess-playing or walking, which allow him to commune with other great minds, including his own, or with nature. Socializing usually takes place one-to-one, for parties and other large social events will bring him into contact with too many people whom he feels a waste of his time. If larger gatherings are sought, they will be only those in which the curmudgeon can interact with a select group of like-minded people.