Welcome friends!
I was just contemplating once again the contemporary conservative tendency toward egotism, which I’ve discussed in many previous posts (including the last one, for example), and I’m now wondering if a certain pathological form of egotism might underlie such significant social problems as nationalism, racism, ethnocentrism, ancestor worship, and what I’m calling in this post “religious identity disorder” for lack of a better term (I considered “religism” but it’s such an awkward construction). Indeed, I’m starting to suspect the global rise of egotism inspired no doubt by conservative philosophies and theologies of all sorts may be one of the most dire social issues of the day. How can that be? Don’t all the issues I just named involve more than one person? So why link them to egotism? Sounds like a blog post to me. In fact, sounds like too much of a blog post to handle all at once, so let me just take up egotism and religious identity this time. I’ll do a follow-up post on egotism and nationalism in a future post, probably next time unless something gets in the way.
Let me start by just clarifying that I certainly don’t abhor every expression of the ego. I actually don’t have any problem at all with people thinking about themselves or standing up for themselves. I do it all the time and I expect other people to do the same. You may have noticed that in my many presentations of the liberal ethos in which I’ve mentioned the important distinction between the realm in which one does not significantly affect other people, in which personal liberty should prevail, and the realm in which one does significantly affect other people, in which one needs some sort of ethical theory to resolve interpersonal conflict, I’ve never suggested one should just defer to the wishes of other people in either realm. So please don’t get the impression I’m arguing against the expression of a healthy ego. No, what I’m talking about in the context of conservatism is more like pathological egotism.
Now when I’ve discussed the problems associated with conservative egotism before I’ve usually discussed them in the context of people ignoring other people. For example, I’ve suggested economic conservatives often seem to be very concerned with their own interests but don’t seem to really care a huge amount about what’s happening to anyone else. Similarly, I’ve suggested social conservatives often seem to be very concerned with their own ability to express their religious views but don’t seem to care a huge amount whether other people have the same opportunity. And I’ve suggested the fundamental problem I see with so-called libertarians is they typically pretend we can solve interpersonal conflicts through appeals to their own personal liberty when we know the presence of more than one person and the consequent countervailing claims to personal liberty means that cannot be the case. All of these familiar forms of egotism run amok involve what I consider an undue fascination with what I’ve jocularly referred to before as the Great I that I think underlies and forms the subject of much of conservative social and ethical philosophy.
However, there is another expression of pathological egotism I haven’t really spent much time on but is arguably equally or perhaps even more important than simply ignoring other people. That’s the form of egotism that does not so much ignore other people as just the opposite, show a great deal of interest in other people but, and here’s the kicker, only because other people are thought to reflect back upon the Great I. It’s a weird sort of idea, so maybe a simple example involving a typical domestic manifestation of this type of egotism might help. Consider a parent uttering the stereotypical refrain, “No son of mine is going to wear a shirt like that!” Now that’s a funny sort of statement isn’t it? It certainly demonstrates both an awareness of other people and an interest in what they’re doing. And, yes, I suppose it might even demonstrate a concern for other people. Maybe this parent thinks someone might laugh at the kid or whatever if he wears the forbidden shirt. Or maybe this parent is thinking about people other than the kid and trying to shield their delicate sensibilities from the brutal onslaught of the offending shirt. But there’s another possibility, isn’t there? It might be that this parent is not really thinking about the welfare of the kid or other people at all. It might be that this parent is simply very egotistical and views the kid as a sort of appendage or accessory to himself or herself. The parent doesn’t like the shirt and won’t wear it and since the kid is simply an extension or reflection of the parent the parent determines the kid is also not going to wear it. The latter possibility represents what I think might most accurately be termed a sort of hyper-egotism: a situation in which the ego grows so monstrous it breaks free of the normal confines of one’s own personage to roam about gobbling up other people. I think it’s the difficulty of distinguishing the interest in other people that flows from this sort of pathological egotism from the normal interest in other people that is the hallmark of someone with a healthy ego (i.e., the ego that leaves room for a genuine concern for others) that makes this issue so elusive and interesting.
Now this phenomenon of people seeming to have an interest in other people but only because of an excessive or perhaps even exclusive concern with themselves doesn’t arise only in the context of bad parenting. If one’s ego is sufficiently out of control it may reach out and encompass any number and variety of other people including, for example, people of the same race, people living in the same country, people subscribing to the same religion, and so on. Of course, one cannot usually control these other people in the same manner the egotistical parent in our example may have been able to control his or her kid. But the ego has defense mechanism other than control and I suppose the chief of these is probably denial, which in this case appears as a determination to not acknowledge any moral failings on the part of the people who share the characteristic in question in order to avoid the unacceptable affront to one’s dignity that would presumably result from sharing that characteristic with people who are less than they ought to be in some respect.
Let’s have an example of this sort of conservative hyper-egotism in a religious context. Consider the latest in the string of Crazy Muslim Attacks (CMAs) that have been making the news recently: the one in London a few weeks ago now that involved a couple of regular English blokes named Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale. (Lest you get the wrong end of the stick, I certainly don’t mean to imply every Muslim is crazy or apt to attack someone or named Michael. That would be ridiculous. Most Muslims are lovely people and I’m happy to report I know a number of them. However, every now and them someone acts a little crazy and attacks some people and subsequently relates it to the fact he or she is supposedly a Muslim, resulting in what I’m calling a CMA. Go figure.) Anyway, in case you’ve already forgotten the story, these two English gents made the evening news for running over some guy with their car, then attacking him with knives and meat cleavers, then running up and down the street posing for pictures like two lunatics recently escaped from a mental asylum. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. England isn’t the place it used to be, is it? Seems to have gone a little ... how shall I put this in a polite way ... down the toilet? Well, no, I suppose that’s not entirely correct. It’s actually a tribute to the victim in this case, a young soldier named Lee Rigby, that these two miscreants felt the need to first disable him with their car before emerging to hack away at him as he lay injured on the pavement. Seems they didn’t relish the thought of going man to man or I suppose more accurately men to man with the fellow. So Mr. Rigby is looking pretty impressive in my book. I suppose in some sense of overall national accounting that cancels out the lesser two, doesn’t it? And what about the lady one of the murderers accosted in the street after the attack who reportedly asked him, “Would like to give me what you have in your hand?” You know, the bloody meat cleaver. I’ve heard of keeping calm and carrying on but that just takes it to a whole new level, doesn’t it? Now that I think more about it, England seems to be doing just fine.
Anyway, the two true believers who carried out this particular attack, apparently former gang members who were previously into drugs, thievery, and miscellaneous street crime (which I must say fits into my overall thesis rather nicely) explained after the murder it all made sense because they are Muslims, they consider an attack on any Muslim to be an attack on all Muslims, and the UK had recently been fighting some people in the Middle East who were Muslims. Thus, they were perfectly justified in killing random people walking down the street in whatever barbaric fashion came most naturally to them, such as hacking at them with meat cleavers. It sounds rather similar to what those two ostensibly Muslim fellows who blew up that little boy in Boston said after their little blood fest, isn’t it? According to their assessment, murdering some random kid was a perfectly reasonable and just response to the US fighting some violent terrorist groups in the Middle East. Having trouble seeing the link? Well, the murderers were Muslims and so were the terrorists.
Now of course I realize these people may simply have been terrorist operatives or sympathizers of the conventional sort and all their babbling about various people being Muslim was just so much hot air. Maybe they were just a little embarrassed to say, “Yes, I support terrorist group X,” but they felt they really ought to say something. In that case I suppose these cases wouldn’t really be examples of what I’m talking about in this post. And I previously discussed these types of incidents in terms of a sort of pathological religiosity, which is another possibility and which I think must certainly be present at least as a supporting cause, particularly given all the related stories in the news recently about radical Islamists beating, shooting, and beheading youngsters in various Middle Eastern locales. (May 2, 2013.) You know, people with normal healthy moral senses just don’t do things like that, do they? However, let’s consider for a moment the situation if we take their own justification at face value. What if they really accepted the proposition that an attack on any Muslim is an attack on every Muslim? What sort of thought process might underlie such a belief?
Well, first of all, it should be clear that in that case these people would be seeing the world very differently from your average liberal humanist. A liberal humanist would hardly be likely to come out with a comparable expression regarding other liberal humanists because it just doesn’t express a very plausible moral proposition. He or she would first want to know a little more about which other liberal humanists we’re talking about and what they’ve been up to. Because anyone can consider and call himself or herself a liberal humanist including people who are thoroughly screwed up in certain respects and who have gotten up to who knows what. So if you accept other people as independent entities then it’s obviously insufficient to know you happen to share one particular characteristic with them, such as that you both consider yourselves liberal humanists; you need to get the whole picture before you can make a proper assessment. I think it’s basically the same story for reasonable Christians. You know, in countries where most people are Christians, such as the US, you’ll find a great number of people who consider themselves Christians in prison for robbing, stealing, murdering, and so on. How can that be, you ask? The Christian religion doesn’t condone those sorts of things the last time I checked. Well, don’t ask me, I guess the religious mind works in mysterious ways some time. I’m just telling you the fact of the matter. Knowing that someone considers himself or herself a Christian in the US is just not going to get you very far if you’re interested in any sort of serious assessment of his or her moral character. And I’m sure it’s the same story for reasonable Muslims. I suppose pretty much everyone living in many areas of the Middle East identifies himself or herself as a Muslim of one sort or another but some of these people get up to all manner of unfortunate activities, don’t they? Some of them end up in prison for the same sorts of things Christians end up in prison for in the US, plus some of them hide out in camps in the countryside and periodically behead little kids and so on. I have trouble believing any reasonable Muslim would be intellectually and morally satisfied to just lump together everyone who considers himself or herself a Muslim and let it go at that.
So how might one arrive at the conclusion that one doesn’t really need to assess what other people are doing as long as they profess to hold the same religion as oneself? Well, one possibility that comes to mind is that one simply does not recognize those other people as independent entities that require ethical assessment but only in the more restricted terms of accessories that reflect back upon oneself, which is what we were describing earlier as conservative hyper-egotism of the religious subtype. For a person with this disorder, assessing a person professing to share one’s religion and finding them morally lacking in any respect would constitute an unacceptable affront to one’s own character.
Fortunately I’ve thought up an antidote I think might work for this particular form of hyper-egotism, if that is indeed what was involved in these recent cases. I would humbly recommend anyone in danger of developing this disorder perform the following daily ritual: stand outside, preferably in a parking lot but anywhere is fine, in the bright light of the noonday sun, and solemnly declare to oneself ten times, “I’m not as special as I think I am.” Well, OK, don’t get all angry about it. You’re not that special. Neither am I. Sorry. We both might share a religion or general moral framework or ethical theory with someone who is up to no good. But, hey, there’s good news too! Even if one manages to rein in one’s ego to more conventional and manageable dimensions and recognize other people as independent entities who require ethical assessment one can still be proud in some way of whatever one has personally done that one feels is consistent with whatever one feels one ought to have done. Yes, I’m saying I think one can be perfectly reasonable and still get all lovey dovey with oneself from time to time. So let’s all stand and salute the healthy ego! Now wasn’t that special?
References
Woolwich murder: Who are the suspects? May 24, 2013. BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22636624.
Syrian opposition condemns killing of boy in Aleppo. June 11, 2013. BBC.http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22861571.
Afghan Taliban ‘behead two boys in Kandahar.’ June 10, 2013. BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/22842512.
