I spent last week with my family in the mountains of Colorado. If it’s true that there are mountains people and beach people, while the beach is growing to me, I’m a mountains person. The clean, crisps air, hiking and biking and slow morning with coffee reading give me life.
This year’s vacation read was Richard Beck’s Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering an Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age. While the book centers on enchantment (obviously), Beck touches on myriad other, important touch points in contemporary, Western culture. I found this passage about self-esteem particularly compelling, and in harmony with a line of thinking that has been banging about in the back of my head.
We all need the eccentric gift of worthiness. Trouble is, our culture keeps turning us inward, telling us that self-esteem is the pathway to mental health. We’re told that cultivating a healthy self-esteem is critical to emotional well-being….What’s gone wrong is that the marketed cure is a poison. Our problem is self-esteem. Because at it’s heart, self-esteem is an evaluation: How am I measuring up? We answer this question inn one of two ways. First, we compare ourselves to others. Am I as thin as Mariah? Do I make as much money as Anthony? Is our marriage as happy as Blair and Jordan’s? And so on. This is why social media is such a curse. Through Facebook and Instagram, we compare our sad lives to the curated images of happiness Fromm friends, family, and coworkers, triggering massive amounts of envy and dissatisfaction. Our lives don’t measure up….William James defined self-esteem as the ratio of our successes to our aspirations.1
The Myth of Self-Esteem
What strikes me about this is not a denial of self and self-esteem, but, rather, how it relativizes the self in connection to mental and emotional health. If pop-culture and Twitter are to believed, nothing is more important than the self. But it’s more now than self-esteem people are now exalting; it’s self-affirmation, the idea that the greatest good you can do for yourself is affirm yourself— race, gender, sexuality, politics, identity, ethnicity, nationality, political party, and so on. Furthermore, your only real friends, the only people who truly love you are those who offer their full-throated supported of the self you currently affirm. If someone — even someone close to you — pushes against the self you affirm, even in the most mild forms, such as asking questions and offering counter narratives, they become a type of antagonist because we have made the self sacred. How dare they?
But the self is sacred…in a sense.
The self is sacred insofar as each of us is made in the image of God and that self — it’s life, dignity, worth — are inherently worthy. God knows there are enough forces of degradation and shame at work in the world that we could use a dose of buffeting the self. Knowing that selves are worthy is a fundamental good.
Searching For Susan
But, as true as that is for your self, it is also true for all the other selves. What is also true for you and all the other “selves” is that the self is multifaceted, layered, and changing. One of the more humorous ways this has been captured is a recent Zillow commercial called “Susans.” A woman, Susan, walks into a conference room to consult herself about a home purchase. She starts with “Negative me,” only to regret beginning with her. Susan moves on to “Spontaneous Me,” who is already ordering drapes, then on to “Anti-Social Me,” “Lazy Me,” and “Stressed Me,” before landing on “Helpful Me.”
Susan isn’t suffering from a disorder. She is us. Our selves are diverse and, yes, sometimes even at odds with itself. Obviously, not being able to decide if we want to eat a salad or pizza is a far cry from more thorny issues like those listed above, but it’s different in seriousness, but not in kind. Each of us is constantly growing and shifting, and, at the very least, we might want to deal more seriously with the reality that when we seek self-affirmation and self-esteem we are grasping for vapor, for in a few years, if not a few months, the self we fought so hard to affirm is a different self and that different self, now grown dependent on the aphrodisiac of affirmation will ask our souls and our friends to affirm that self and recast them as enemies when they don’t.
All to say, self-affirmation is not enough to lead us to health and wholeness. Our selves don’t actually know ourselves, much less do our selves know what our deeper truer selves — our souls — need. We only know what we think we need. What felt authentic and affirming years ago for many of us, has no revealed itself to be emptying and a journey of folly. Our selves keep changing!
Affirming the Sacred Self
The sacred self can only be affirmed by something that is both fixed and outside of our selves. This will come as sour news to the folks — both Christian and unchristian who buck against them reality that a more objective and definable other, outside of ourselves is the one who defines reality and created to become. If the telos of our true, authentic shelves is not fixed, we will both fail to know when we’ve achieved it or even gotten close, and are bound, like an untrained dog, chase each shiny car as it passes by.
For Christian people, those who have received Jesus and entered God’s in-breaking Kingdom, those who have become walking, talking temples of the Holy Spirit, the only parts of us which can be truly affirmed is our soul which houses the Holy Spirit. That Spirit gives rise to its own fruit — love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. As we embrace and welcome this fruit, we experience deep and real authenticity, an authenticity which can and should be affirmed. All other affirmations of the self, are shifting targets, quicksand which promises solid footing, but delivers trouble and struggle which only results in sinking us.
This is obvious. The self-esteem and self-affirmation project currently at work in the world result in drawing us away from our true selves. It is the embracing the fruit of the spirit and the practices and postures which deepen is the primary path to self-realization. The require self-observation and reflection, but more than that, they require de-emphasizing the self and an elevation of the practice of particular virtues. And on the far end of those practice is where we begin to discover who we are…and why they makes us great.
Beck, Richard. Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering an Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age (Braodleaf Books, Minneapolis, MN, 2021), 107.