Nice people, smart people, good people, buuuut…
Just the teeniest bit smug. Is that bad?
I’ve been struggling to write about smugness. I have this inkling that it’s a real problem, but it’s hard to prove it because, well, it’s literally not killing anyone.
Smugness is a “good person” problem. Good people typically don’t beat people up at political rallies or troll female reporters on Twitter. So what’s the harm?
I fancy myself a bit of an expert on smugness these days, because I am an American, and I live in Canada. I love Canadians — so much so that I’ve applied to become one — but boy are they smug.
It’s a natural byproduct of being so awesome — I get that. But if I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard a Canadian say, “I just can’t understand why (Americans like guns) (Americans were happy when Bin Laden was killed) (insert something Americans do here)” with a sense of smug superiority, I’d have a nice little toonie collection by now.
They kind of redeemed themselves with the Tell America It’s Great campaign, but smugness is still a national bugaboo.
Not that I don’t fit in well here. I’ve spent a lot of my life being a know-it-all, and it’s the one bad habit I’ve found the hardest to break. Because truly, smugness is a bad habit. One we should all be trying to break.
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Here’s the key: Smugness reveals an inability to enter into the narrative of another person.
We know this is important. “Walk a mile in their shoes” is one of our most cliched cliches. But why is it so difficult?
The other day, my husband and I were out to dinner. We were talking about art and politics, and at one point I said, sheepishly, “I know it’s bad, but sometimes I just want to be an elitist.”
“That’s because elitism is easier,” he said. It was a perfect and devastating reply. So often I want to do the easier thing, not the better thing. It’s just easier to be smug.
Smugness guards us from having to acknowledge our own blind spots and weaknesses. Because I’m obviously better than them, I’m good enough. But self-inquiry and acknowledgement of our own vulnerabilities is much more powerful than pointing out the flaws of others (hence my “I’m the Problem” series).
Smugness also assumes that the categories we create to make the world easier to understand are airtight and universally true. I see it all the time when someone is genuinely surprised when, say, a pro-lifer is also pro-free birth control, or an evangelical Christian supports gay marriage. It’s almost impossible to understand all the potentialities of belief within every individual; but it’s worth accepting that people we disagree with are more complicated than we assume.
Smugness actually inhibits growth and change. When I’m smug about my own belief, I am unwilling to learn from those I don’t agree with. But who’s to say I have nothing to learn?
Most importantly, it inhibits the empathy that will allow us to move forward in a pluralistic world. I I was a big fan of the March for Science in a lot of ways, but the smugness displayed by many at the rally only served to undercut their message. As I wrote in response to an article about it at the time,
It’s astounding to me that people don’t see how that kind of approach [smug superiority] never helps a situation nor solves a problem beyond comforting the distressed ego. Can we love our neighbors even if they are ignorant of what we know? Can we learn from our neighbors even if we hold fundamentally different views of reality? These are the urgent questions that should be obsessing us right now, instead of insisting on a [different] kind of tribalism that does nothing to heal division.
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On a recent episode of WNYC’s “United States of Anxiety” podcast, the hosts revisit Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 work Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. This seminal work traces the roots of American distrust of elites and intellectuals from our founding days. Then they quoted something that struck me:
“Intellectuals, in particular, need to be humble.”
According to the hosts, Hofstadter’s thesis was that “Intellect among elites without a certain kind of humility [i.e. the smug] can be just as dangerous as no ideas with a lot of power behind them.” Why? Because intellectuals, by the very nature of their work, deal in ideas that are rife with “doubt and disagreement.” In other words, intellectuals should be the very ones most aware of their capacity for getting things wrong, or at least to way our understanding of “the truth” evolves over time. Having more information should make you less prone to an unshakable grasp on truth.
Without this humility, intellectuals are likely to fall headfirst into the smugness traps I’ve already described, but they also often have the power and position to Blindly insisting on rightness is fundamentalism, no matter which end of the political, intellectual or “values” spectrum it appears on.
From Hofstadter again: “The very possibility of civilized human discourse rests upon the willingness of people to consider they may be mistaken.”
We live in a world where what we “know” is constantly being rewritten. As Marilynne Robinson writes in The Givenness of Things, “We [humans] are unique in nature for our ability to be consistently, even catastrophically, wrong.” The best antidote for smugness I’ve found is considering the times when we’ve been wrong. Like how quantum physics is messing with everything we thought we knew about the physical world. Like when I go back over old writing and am shamed by the certainty with which I held opinions now drastically changed.
We are often wrong. We constantly change. And even when we’re right, smugness encourages us to apply what we do know without a compassionate context. Instead, it leads us to a blind insistence on our rightness — to fundamentalism (liberal, conservative, or otherwise).
Damn, it’s hard not to be smug. But I could stand a world with a little more compassion.
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