Or maybe not. I have been pondering why people so often want to be seen as good, or even great, but in any case better than their neighbors. It seems to me that we are trying to push to one side our inevitable reckoning with God. Muslims are supposed to train ourselves to know that the final evaluation of persons comes only at the Day of Judgment; a human life has so many ups and downs that none of us can be sanguine about our ultimate moral position. (I wish more Muslims practiced that inner discipline. I wish I were better at it myself.) And Jesus said to his followers, “Do not call me good, for only God is good.” Even Jesus! But boy, do we want to call ourselves good, and call the other guys bad. It feels so much safer that way.
It’s notorious that Donald Trump said, of Charlottesville, “…you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.” We were outraged that he would so easily include white supremacists and neo-Nazis among the good guys, but about his division of the world into bad guys and fine people we barely said a word. We only dispute who is on which side of the moral line. Yet what we are actually talking about here are bad actions and bad attitudes, not bad people.
Progressives have popularized the excellent and subtle habit of not identifying a person with a condition. We speak of “enslaved people,” not “slaves,” of “people with autism,” not “autistic people.” Perhaps we should learn to speak of ourselves and others simply as people with actions, both good and bad. That would not stop us from aspiring to the good or condemning the bad, either.
The problem starts when human beings need to keep thinking of themselves as very fine people, despite a dawning awareness that they have done some terrible things. It is we who have done them: we, or our ancestors, or our friends, or their ancestors. People we care about, pasts in which we have taken pride. Our status begins to teeter and suddenly everything threatens to cause us shame.
Every counselor knows from experience that shame is by far the most difficult emotion to endure. People will go to great lengths to avoid fully experiencing it, tell ourselves the most extraordinary stories. And we will be absolutely furious when somebody questions a story in which we have invested our self-respect, no matter how thin and dubious that story might be.
I often think of a time when I was 11 or 12 years old, playing a “let’s pretend” game with a neighbor girl who was a little older and more sophisticated than I was. I was being a nurse, a people-helper, and she was being the patient. I was very pleased with our game, with the role I had taken on of being an especially good person. Then all of a sudden the other girl decided that she was going to be a prosecutor, and I was going to be the defendant. “Aha!” she cried, “I’ve got you! You were only pretending to be a nurse, and all this time you were poisoning people. You have killed patient after patient, and now you must come to trial.”
Down through the years I’ve remembered my horror and dismay at this sudden corruption of my pretty story. No! I wanted to be a good person! I never agreed to being a bad person! This isn’t fair! You’re so mean. Why do you want to make me feel this way?
I felt disoriented. I felt devastated. I felt betrayed.
And it was only a game. I was only a child. Imagine if my terrible acts had been real. And imagine if the role of “good person” I was trying to protect was one to which I had committed my life.
Many people in the world whose control over their own lives feels suddenly precarious to them have this problem now. Of particular concern to us is the fact that many white Christians in the U.S. have it. When the adequate teaching of U.S. history leads to a public outcry over the dangers of making white children feel bad about themselves, you can be sure it’s not the children who feel endangered. What’s intolerable is that the grown-ups are losing their pretty story.
But then how can they hold their heads up? Who can they possibly be?
One immediate reaction to the threat of shame is to close ranks, deny the painful facts and project like crazy. It’s you! You’re the bad person! It’s all your fault. You are the one who should feel ashamed.
This is much easier to do when there are loud voices around you egging you on, telling you how right you are, how awful the other guy is. A shared lie makes group identity into a particularly strong sort of glue. This, of course, is why a particular kind of politician finds it very useful. Clever manipulators of the fear of shame have a powerful force at their disposal. Perhaps the most powerful of all.
Unless, of course, you profess the religion of love, in which case you may have encountered something stronger. And you won’t ever need people to call you great again.