The Big Me

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I recently observed my 74^th birthday.

On one level, I feel it. My wife and I joke about our “pain of the week.” Being retired, I have limited contact with people in the “real world.” My memory is not as sharp as it was (although people who know me may say it was never that sharp), and I know that like everybody, I’m a product of my age and see things as someone of my age would see them.

Still, I’m grateful to have good health, a great family and a greater level of peace and joy than I had at an earlier age. I try not to let my age define me, and I am not one to think that mine is the greatest generation. I admire young people of today and don’t yearn for “the good old days.”

As New York Times columnist David Brooks in his new book, The Road to Character, writes about the mid-twentieth century in which I grew up: “It was a more racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic culture. Most of us would not have had the opportunities we enjoy if we had lived back then. It was also a more boring culture, with bland food and homogeneous living arrangements.

“It was an emotionally cold culture,” he continues. “Fathers, in particular, frequently were unable to express their love for their own children. Husbands were unable to see the depth in their own wives. In so many ways, life is better now than it was then.”

That’s how I remember it, too, but today’s culture offers other challenges to people who are searching for God. Not the least among them is what Brooks calls the culture of “the Big Me.” It is, he writes, “a culture that encourages people to see themselves as the center of the universe.”

Indeed, there’s been a big shift in this regard in the last 50 years or so, but some of it is good. Social workers, educators and psychologists – especially those working with youth – can testify about the harm caused in the past by people’s low self- esteem, the lack of their sense of self-worth. It was said to have led to depression and anti-social behavior, and I believe that was often the case.

But the antidote may be a bit of an overdose. Brooks writes that in the last 50 years or so, we have gone “from a culture of humility to the culture of the ‘Big Me.’ He cites what psychologists have called the “narcissism test.”

Narcissism, according to Wikipedia, “is the pursuit of gratification from vanity or egotistic admiration of one's own attributes. The term originated from the Greek mythology, where the young Narcissus fell in love with his own image reflected in a pool of water.”

Anyway, the testers ask people to say whether certain statements apply to them. The statements include ones like, “I like to be the center of attention…I show off if I get the chance because I am extraordinary…Somebody should write a biography about me.”

David Brooks
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I believe we’ve come full circle in encouraging people’s self-esteem. In his research, Brooks said he kept finding the same messages everywhere. “… Trust yourself. Movies from Pixar and Disney are constantly telling children how wonderful they are. Commencement speeches are larded with the same clichés: Follow your passion. Don’t accept limits. Chart your own course.”

He cites celebrity chef Mario Batali, who advised graduates to follow “your own truth, expressed consistently by you.”

Brooks calls all this the “gospel of self-trust.”

My favorite comedian, Jim Gaffigan, has a great routine about people who frequent gyms and like to look at themselves in mirrors while working out. In one of his funny voices, he mimics: “I want to look at something…like myself. I want to look at myself while I work on myself. I should do a recording so I can listen to myself when I look at myself as I work on myself as I leaf through my Self magazine to see what’s written about myself.”

I mentioned in a previous blog a story I heard about an elementary-school teacher who had a “You’re special” stamp that she used on every single piece of paper handed in by students.

So what’s the point here?

This blog is meant to help people in their search for God, and egoism and self-centeredness is the antipathy to openness to God. As I’ve written in a previous blog, humility is not a favored virtue in our society, mostly because it’s misunderstood.

It doesn’t mean being a wimp or having a tendency to put yourself down. In fact, I would call it another form of honesty. It means trying to see yourself as you really are, no more, no less.

Searchers for God, of course, need to focus on more than that, recognizing not only our rightful place among the earth’s other billions, but trying to see ourselves as God may see us. That’s hard when doubt is stronger than faith, but something to work toward in any genuine search for God.