Touchy self-regard
There are many scholarly vices, but the two that stand out most prominently to me are defensiveness and self-pity. We all know academics who fall prey to these. What’s unfortunate is that, far too often, they seem to be positively rather than inversely correlated to one’s status, fame, renown, and success. Attend a conference, observe a well-known master of a sub-guild on a panel, and you’ll be shocked (or not) by his sheer touchiness. The mere mention of a minor dissent from one of his many ideas will call forth a thunderstorm of wrath and emotion worthy of a toddler tantrum.
But it’s not just the intemperate. Follow a scholar or writer on Twitter. It should be clear to all of us by now that social media in general exacerbates these vices. For the voices we’ve heard in our heads our whole lives—you’re a fake, everyone knows it, you don’t know anything, your writing isn’t worth a damn, why do you even waste your time?—are given quite literal and insistent and incessant expression in one’s replies, DMs, and emails. This is why every writer and scholar should get off every form of social media, Twitter above all. It trains the psyche (and the ego) to categorize any criticism, however legitimate or gently phrased, as falling under the genre of “reply-guy mentions.”
The other vice I have in mind is an exaggerated self-regard. This manifests in a reflex that wonders why it is that one writes in the first place—after all, no one reads my work anyway, so what’s the point? But then, such a cri de coeur is invariably in print, meant for others to see. Even when it’s honest and not just fishing for compliments or protestations, it’s an emotional and scholarly trap. How many people today are writing in English for a public audience, whether in books, journals, magazines, blogs, newsletters, or on the internet? Surely the number is in the tens of thousands. It boggles the mind, to be honest. Unless you’re selling millions of books, or you’re one of a handful of super-scholars like Charles Taylor, the truth is the only impact you can or will have is on a very, very, very small audience of readers, one that is necessarily vanishingly minuscule in absolute terms. Which means, in turn, that the overall effect of one’s work is in all likelihood going to be almost nil.
It seems to me that we have a choice: accept this as a fact on the front end or doom ourselves to inevitable melancholy, self-loathing, and despair on the back end. That I am not going be a Saint Augustine or a Bucer or a Barth, an Austen or a Trollope or an Eliot, a Taylor or a MacIntyre or a Jenson—this is a certainty. Does it mean I ought to stop writing? I don’t think so. I write, among other reasons, because I must. I can’t not write. But I also write because I might, within a very circumscribed range, affect or inform or educate or edify a few souls in my orbit. I call them souls because that is what they are: souls. Having even a tiny impact on a single soul isn’t nothing. It’s not much by comparison to the big leagues, but it’s something.
If you can accept that, you can be a writer without driving yourself crazy in the process. If you can’t, well, at least have the decency not to draw us into your circle of self-regard.
