| Vanity, part the first |
[Nov. 15th, 2004|08:15 pm] |
I've been musing a little more about last night's conversation about vanity, and thought I might try to explore some of the ideas with you, dear readers.
One of the most striking things that was said it that there is a belief amongst some people on livejournal that "if you show evidence of not hating yourself then you're evil". Now on the face of it this is clearly absurd; hatred is pretty much de facto a bad thing, but nonetheless there does seem to be this rather spurious and presumably subconscious idea that a) if you don't deprecate yourself at every opportunity then you must be arrogant, and b) being arrogant is simply the worst thing ever.
Now clearly the first statement is incorrect, but it's quite easy to see how people can react to a desire not to be arrogant by going as far in the other direction as possible, and even if they don't do that, there isn't really a clear dividing line which we can point to and say "This is the ideal level of self-assurance to have". But that's not really the interesting bit; what I want to look at is this question of why arrogance is seen to be such a terrible thing.
As far as I can tell there are two problems that can arise. The first is a social one; that thinking highly of oneself is a fairly small step away from thinking that you are better than some, most or particular other people. Turning this around, it means judging other people to be worse than you, and I think that really, this is what is considered unacceptable behaviour. But it's pretty much indisputable that some people are better than others at some things; I don't really think it's unacceptable for me to say that I'm better at mathematics than the vast majority of people (although a much smaller majority of my readers here). Similarly, I think that nearly everyone I socialise with on a regular basis is considerably more intelligent than the population at large, and that therefore the population at large is relatively speaking quite stupid.
But that sort of thing can be dismissed with the argument that everyone had their strengths and weaknesses, and it's good to be aware of them, but that it all balances out in the end. Doesn't it? And this is where it becomes tricky, because try as I might, I can't really accept that everyone averages out the same. If there is any objective standard by which people can be judged*, then it is phenomenally unlikely that everyone is at the same point - in fact, if we have any ability to improve or degrade on the scale (which surely we must believe if we are to have any hope for the world), then it is impossible.
Now if I'm honest, I tend to think that both I and my favourite people are better than average at nearly everything. I'm very poor at being industrious and at saying no to something which is fun but bad for me, and I'm a lousy singer. Apart from that I do struggle to think of things that I'm actively bad at (well, okay, modesty, I could probably work on that), but there are really quite a lot of things I'm good at. Similarly, I'm aware of a couple of flaws in most of the people I'm close to, balanced out by a whole host of wonderful qualities.
I can think of four different ways of explaining this viewpoint, and tend towards one or the other depending on mood. The first, and in many ways most appealing, is that I am lucky enough to have been born, or grown into, an exceptional person, and that as like draws to like, I have become surrounded by other exceptional people. The second, which I like least, and tend toward when I'm feeling depressed, is that the flaws I have are sufficiently serious that they do balance out against my virtues, which I probably over-inflate anyway.
The third, and probably most accurate, is that my values have been formed around the things which I'm good at, and that in fact there are many things which I can't do, but forget about and disregard as unimportant, failing to realise that /somebody/ needs to be good at them, and that it's quite likely that someone in another group of friends who have these skills and qualities is sitting there wondering how they got so lucky as to be, and be surrounded by people who are, good at everything important (except that that particular skillset probably doesn't include this kind of philosophical self-questioning).
The fourth, and the one that I think should be the most appealing, even if isn't quite so ego-stroking as the first, is that many of the qualities one which I am basing my judgment are pretty much irrelevant to the objective scale on which I should be judging them. That things like cleverness and charm and wit and being good company and so on aren't really that relevant when it comes to being like Christ (I am of course compelled to take this as my objective standard for goodness, although the non-Christians amongst my readership may wish to interpret this as acting through Agape whereever possible, which I believe is the same thing), and that qualities such as generosity, loyalty, selflessness and tolerance are really what matters. There is still a great abundance of these things amongst my friends, but it may well be that this is fact truer of the population as a whole than my blinkered judgments based on the sparseness of said cleverness etc. has lead me to believe.
There is a second part of this to follow, in which I consider the danger that vanity can lead to stagnation, but I have a meeting to go to now and it will have to wait until I get home.
*If there isn't then I suppose the whole question becomes a bit moot, but that's a whole other discussion, and I don't want to get too distracted. |
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