The Examined Life #1: Pride and Arrogance

Let's talk about pride and arrogance.

Arrogance is when I assume that the other person doesn't know what I know, or as much.

Arrogance is when I assume that the other person agrees with me about every point, or that my opinion is correct and/or obvious.

When someone I'm collaborating with asks me to do something differently and I assume their need is unimportant, or I take their request as an attack, that's probably arrogance.

Arrogance is the destructive expression of pride. Pride can be a positive emotion in small or temporary doses, to keep us striving, carry us through difficulty, or overcome shame. It feels good to acknowledge our achievements. When we stay stuck in pride, it begins to hurt the ones around us.

Arrogance is not meant. If I know I'm lording it over someone, it's more like aggression or cruelty, and that is another discussion. Arrogance is an unconscious state, and that's its greatest danger.

Arrogance is a disease found in the accomplished and the educated. Arrogance is not about achievement itself – it's about a psychological need in the achiever. Ironically, when you meet a true master of some discipline – someone who has been working at it for a long time, been tested, struggled, and overcome frustration, failure and even humiliation – that person is often quite humble and easy to talk to. A true master always wants to learn more, and knows that she knows nothing. Stumbling through the pitfalls of pride is part of the path of a student, and getting stuck in pride stifles one's ability to learn. A true student is constantly learning humility.

Arrogance seems to come from a need for “freedom”: freedom from. Freedom from having to work hard, freedom from having to do the work of considering another's opinion or reality, freedom from having to stretch outside of one's comfort zone. Arrogance is a disease found in democracies, where “liberty” is the common currency. Healthy democratic constitutions establish a balance of liberty and responsibility, and consider both the individual and the community. 

If I think my mind is free from arrogance, it's probably out of arrogance. 

Remembering Humanism

I'm a humanist. I mean I aspire to be.

A friend once responded that she is a “being-ist.” I understand the idea, but it's kind of like responding to Black Lives Matter with “all lives matter.” Humanism doesn't mean “valuing humans over other beings;” it's the effort to retain our “humanity,” and fierce humanism often (maybe always) emerges in times when we're seeing cracks in our humanity, or the horror of its opposite.

The word “humanity” is by its very nature hard to define – it's a work in progress, and it's taken a whole human history of trial and error to build a definition. The halls of humanism are populated by minds who love the gray area: Montaigne, Primo Levy... and millions of others who will not reach fame because of their lack of sensationalism or absolute adherence to an idea.

Some possible aspects of Humanity: compassion, reason, self-examination, self-critique, willingness to change, moral courage in the face of one's peers (never mind one's enemies – that's easier,) willingness to consider another's point of view (especially an unpopular point of view.) Maybe its main characteristic is a love of those aspects that make us human, such as our curiosity, creativity, sense of wonder, and consideration of the world beyond the tip of our nose.

Looking up formal definitions of “Humanism” will give you a good sense of how humanism is moving forward – old definitions of the word, blindered by Western masculinist academic myopia, imply that classical booklearning is necessary. While education is valuable to the expression of humanism, and humanism teaches us to value well-rounded education, booklearning itself is not a prerequisite of a humanist mind, and plenty of learned people don't pass the test of being humanists. 

Humanism is not necessarily secular, either, though there are those who identify as “secular humanists.” Humanism asks a person to reflect on and question one's beliefs, and is antithetical to fundamentalism or evangelism, but there are many humanists who also follow a religious faith. Many of the most illuminating humanist thinkers of the 20^th Century West were Jewish, for example, and for obvious reasons. 

When I say “for obvious reasons,” I'm coming to the heart of the definition of humanism. We are currently honoring the 75^th anniversary of the end of an event that exemplified the exact opposite of Humanity – the Holocaust. While the Nazi's main targets were Jews, and “Others” of various kinds, the Nazis also feared and murdered liberal intellectuals in general. And many of the Jews and others who escaped death went on to become dedicated, devoted scholars of the questions, “What makes us human?”, “What causes us to lose our humanity?” and “How can we create a more humane world?” See Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, or any of the founding scholars of the New School for Social Research.

Arguably, 1945 was the year that a trend of particularly modern inhumanity reached a climax, from colonialism and slavery, through the commodification of labor and its abuses, to systematic genocides, peaking in the blinding light of the bombs dropped on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Our species has always had brutality, and in some fundamental ways we are always improving, but the above events had to give 20^th Century humans pause in assuming we were becoming more “civilized.”

Perhaps humanism is, most simply put, the response to inhumanity. Hence humanism has more questions than answers, because it is trying to make sense of the senseless. Humanism's home is in the uncomfortable middle ground.

Following WWI, the Far Right took political control of Germany through democratic voting, and subsequently attempted to take military control of the rest of the world. It failed. The fascists attempted to crush humanist thought out of existence, and instead an explosion of humanist thought prevailed in the decades after. Now, the Far Right is succeeding in taking political control, through democratic voting, of many of the most powerful nations in the world, and military victory doesn't even look necessary any more. The gains that we made toward a more just world in the late 20^th Century are being eroded. Will humanism survive this wave?

When times are dark, there are always those who will passionately rail against the wrongs of the world and promise fast and sweeping solutions. Humanism longs for a humane world, and yet understands that “the arc of the moral universe is long.” Humanist politicians don't last long in populist political climates, unless they have enormous charm and are masters of compartmentalization... and then they could still be brought down in an instant. 

Humanism, to me, has a feeling to it. It's hopeful and sad, proud and appalled, full of wonder and alarm, and completely alive and engaged in life. It rises above the fray to reflect, but it can't exist in a vacuum or a bubble – one must feel the pain and discomfort of involvement to feel how we could do better; one needs the moral compulsion that comes from being part of the fray. 

Humanists are the first to be torn apart by mob mentality. Humanists are hated and feared by extremists on either end of any scale. And the life of a humanist is the most marvelously alive of all lives.

Today, humanists are writing beautiful essays about the sadness of Brexit. 

Humanism is the canary in the coal mine. 

Lest we forget the feeling...

Lest we forget the feeling…

During the last few months leading up to the 2008 election, I was living as a graduate student of Political Science (Theory focus) in Toronto, Ontario. I am a citizen of the United States. For the four days leading up to November 4th, I went south of the border and worked for the Obama campaign in Erie County, Pennsylvania. The day after the election, I rushed back north to attend that week’s seminar in a class called “Race.” All aglow with the magic of the night before, I had brought campaign stickers and other souvenirs with me in case my classmates wanted them. I sat bubbling with excitement like a little kid, waiting for someone to ask. As the seminar began my classmates, along with our Black professor, decided that the Obama election was not worth discussing, and immediately moved on to the week’s readings. With my heart in my throat I stormed out, ready to pack up my truck and drive back to Arizona that very day. A classmate called me on my cell phone and barely was able to coax me back. (By the way, that class turned out to be one of my all-time favorites, once I’d gotten my frustration out of my system. I will never forget some of the perspectives I heard in those seminars.)

I’m writing this because I feel I had a valuable perspective on the Obama election as an American living in another country at the time, and that from this perspective I could remind us of a few things.

Though I had friends, Canadian and of other nationalities, who were excited about Obama, I don’t think any of them could fully relate to the significance of the campaign or election. The palpable thickness in the American air that is the pain of race dissipates the moment one crosses the border north (Canada of course has its own historic hurts to heal, but they are qualitatively distinct. As all hurts are.) I never knew I was breathing such a stench until I smelled its crisp, clear absence. That lightness moved me to tears many times. The thought of it still does.

Also, my friends and colleagues had not been through the humiliation of eight years of Bush presidency. I don’t even know where to start in describing that.

In addition, the Canadian people have a different (read as “non-myopic”) perspective on world issues, a notable example being the War in Afghanistan. Over there, Canadian soldiers are serving in some of the most dangerous capacities (read as “doing the shit jobs”). Young Canadians are being sent home in body bags, unacknowledged in the U.S. news, for fighting a war opposed by the majority of Canadian people. My other international friends and colleagues in Toronto of course came from countries variously on the receiving end of U.S. hegemonic adventures and policies. Most of the people I knew up there were at the very least skeptical, often completely cynical, that even a brilliant and noble U.S. president would be able to affect much change in this country’s policies in relation to the international community. And of course their skepticism has proven correct. I intend only the deepest respect and sympathy for the people affected by the continued violence of U.S. policy; all I can say in that regard is that a Republican president and/or Congressional majority would be doing much greater damage, and with poisonous belligerence to boot.

What happened on November 4th, 2008, defies all rational accounting. Yes, I am talking about the level of the spiritual. Let’s go back to that moment, shall we?

Millions of Black Americans and White Americans wept in each other’s arms. If only for a moment, if only for a nanosecond, we were healed. Do you remember?

We all had the feeling of true victory. Not for our team, but for the whole human race. For our sense of humanity. Our dignity as Americans was restored in that moment, and amplified as actual pride – something we had not felt as a nation in a long time, maybe never.

It’s kind of like the experience surrounding “falling in love,” isn’t it? There are moments when our connection with that other person gives us a glimpse of eternity. It’s like the concept of spontaneous healing: in the moment we have the opportunity to know that we are already healed.

A friend in Tucson described the moment the announcement came; he said the sound that erupted from the crowd was like a jet plane taking off. He had never heard anything like it.

What kind of power can produce a sound like that from human voices? Faith can. Hope can. Love can.

People partied all over the world. Traffic stopped in U.S. cities. For a moment, or for an evening, or for a few euphoric days, people felt something new and truly glorious had happened. It was magical. Do you remember?

Please remember. Because while you all were enjoying that buzz, I had to go back to Toronto and face the cynicism of my sophisticated-worldly-political-science-grad-student classmates. I wanted more than anything to be back home bouncing shit-eating grins back and forth with my homies. But the contrast did me good, because I had to think hard about what made this election so special. I couldn’t articulate it to my classmates in terms of policy, critical race theory, quantitative analysis, poststructuralism, or any radical or traditional theoretical prism I could pull out of my trick bag. What had happened was magic. A miracle. One can be laughed out of a seminar for that sort of irrational talk.

That feeling that we shared was so radically new that it was subject to immediate disbelief and denial. You know how that works, right? You see something, such as a UFO, or a sublime work of art, that is outside of your conceptual universe of possibilities and that you perhaps have no language for, and it produces a moment of wonder, and then your rational mind kicks in, most likely cannot cope with the new information, and uses its old language and conceptual tools to either box the new experience into an old form or deny it altogether. (This is not an attack on the rational mind. I love my rational mind. I just need to use some discernment to know when it is and isn’t being useful.)

This mental backlash is what the radical Right banked on. It seems to me that the little group of perverted ideologues, and their morally bankrupt corporate sponsors, who are bent on trashing our democracy can only think in that boxy, disbelieving way. Theirs is the ultimate cynicism. It’s the cynicism that was threatened by Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Thomas Merton, John Lennon, and everyone who ever stood up boldly and spoke inspiringly about the political and social possibility of our Oneness.

Remember that moment. It is eternal. It is yours. It is ours. Just like that eternal moment you shared with your lover, or with your mother as she passed out of this world, or in the presence of some natural wonder that left you breathless, it is still here, inside of each one of us, to draw on anytime we need it. It’s how great relationships last through the hard times. You can call it faith. But it’s not a blind faith in someone else’s words – it is a faith in something, though “only” a feeling, that we all experienced. And we really, really need that feeling now.

If we allow ourselves to be browbeaten into cynicism, we will lose much more than an election. We will lose our soul. We would quite literally become our own enemy. Because our cause is not the policies we believe in. The policies we believe in are rather an expression, or manifestation, of the humanity, compassion and life-affirming creativity that are fundamental to our actions. Please reread those last few sentences.

So when we critique Obama’s policy decisions, let’s remember that we’re doing it from that fundamental place. Our frustration over his compromises and those of the Democrats in Congress comes from our ethical bottom line, and from remembering that hope that we experienced, and feeling it betrayed. But that ethical foundation of humanity and compassion is what in fact unifies us with those officials. Think on that for a moment. Dream on that.

They get scared, the Democrats. They get distracted, hoodwinked, and browbeat themselves. It is our job as democrats and human beings to keep them on task and support them to be brave and wise. Recall the relationship metaphor – when hard times hit, do we get a divorce, or do we have faith? It’s our call. There is great possibility for growth in working through the betrayals of life and love.

Just one more thought on the magical fall of 2008… How did the Obama campaign pull off victory? It was powered by young people, many of them too young to even vote themselves. I myself didn’t even think it was possible to elect someone of Obama’s quality as president, and any of my friends can tell you I am very strongly in the Pollyanna camp. But I’m in my 40’s, and I’ve had my heart broken a few too many times. Ultimately it took the clean, innocent, relentless hopefulness of youth to make it happen. Young people still have enough kid in them to believe in miracles and magic.

And so do you. If you choose. It’s in there, in that moment you experienced. Remember. Just remember. Feel it. We need it now.