Reflections on Self-Righteousness
I’ve been thinking more about what keeps us from being in dialogue with those we disagree with. One cause that stands out: Self-righteousness.
What got me thinking about self-righteousness was listening to a podcast based on the popular TV series, Brooklyn 99. The podcast features the show’s creators, writers and cast members as they reflect on their experiences filming some of the show's more memorable scenes. One of the scenes they discuss features the African-American actor Terry Crews. Terry plays a cop on the show, and in one episode his character is subjected to racial profiling by another cop, who’s White. Preparing for that scene, said Terry, led to a surprising insight:
The terms “racism” and “hate” get thrown around a lot — you know, “they hate me, and it's racism.” But then I read a quote from Winston Churchill – who was often accused of being racist himself – who said that when people do something heinous and violent to other people, we may think it’s because they hate them, but really all of the intense violence and callousness comes from self-righteousness.
And that blew me away. That was a whole other thing. And I was like, wait a minute! The common belief is that you're abusing me, you're hurting me, because you hate me. But really, it’s not hate at all. It's the fact that you believe that you’re right. You believe you are so right, that you can do this to people…you have the authority to do it.”
That changed the whole picture…it gave me a different perspective. Because hey, it's hard to imagine yourself hating people. But you can imagine at some time in your life being self-righteous. You know what I mean? Because everyone at one time or another has felt like, “Hey, I am right. I am right, here!”
Like Terry, I find this a helpful and revealing insight. It connects what might appear to be an incomprehensible, hate-filled act of violence to what is a very comprehensible, and ubiquitous, human attribute: self-righteousness. Suddenly one root of a large and overwhelming social ill is found a little closer to home. As Terry says, everyone at one time or another has felt self-righteous – when our certainty of being right justified dismissing or mistreating another human being, even if only in subtle and indirect ways.
I know I’ve had many such experiences. Usually it involves an encounter with someone who believes something I judge to be egregiously ignorant, harmful, insensitive, privileged, wrong. In those situations, being so sure of my rightness made it easy for me to treat that person with disdain and disrespect.
Now some people might say this is all a false equivalency, that behaviors that lead to violent atrocities are not the same as behaviors that lead to, say, merely being rude and dismissive. That’s certainly true.
But to take a lesson from nature, everything big is an aggregation of things that are small. All life is built on that pattern. So too is culture – an aggregation, ultimately, of individual human interactions. So if we want to solve society’s large-scale problems, we can start by establishing the small-scale patterns that, as they build and multiply, will allow us to do so.
Compassion and understanding, rather than self-righteous judgment, are two such ‘small-scale patterns,’ and the ones most likely to emerge when we fully embrace the notion that “as I am, so the world is.”
So what can we do when we find ourselves in the grip of our self-righteous impulses? One way I’ve found helpful is to not feel I need to “own” my beliefs, but rather to regard them as I would a beautiful work of art: from a distance. I can value it, I can let it influence me, I can tell others about it. But what I’m not going to do is grab it off the wall and bang it over someone’s head until they see it the way I do.