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Communities and self-esteem
In passing yesterday, I remarked on the formation of something like communities here in cyberspace among bloggers. It's interesting to me to contemplate how our ideas and realities of communities have changed.
A few hundred years ago, the community was awfully static. More than likely, you would live your entire life in one community. Along with this comes an intense knowledge of your community and connection to it, for better or worse. Another interesting thing about this community of yesteryear is that most of us living in it wouldn't have left it very often. Our world would be fairly circumscribed by the boundaries of a day's walk with occasional longer forays out for some.
Let me clarify here that I'm not making a better/worse argument; I just want to consider some things. One of those things is that oft-bandied-about "self-esteem." In the community I'm imagining, it must have been fairly easy to come by, at least in one sense. Now, I believe firmly that self-esteem comes from real achievement, not from being coddled and told how good you are. Ultimately, the latter won't withstand the test of reality. With that in mind, I'll make that assertion again: self-esteem was relatively easy to come by, because just as the boundaries and members of your community were circumscribed by its insularity, so too was your frame of reference. Probably you would either naturally be the superlative something in your community or be able to become that. The prettiest or most handsome of your generation; the fastest; the best hunter; the strongest swimmer; the most intelligent; the best craftsman; the most skilled musician; the best speaker... the best something. Because you just didn't have that many people with whom to compare yourself. There might be some rivalry with neighboring towns, but the fact is that you could carve out a place for yourself. Call it your fame of reference, if you will.
Compare that to today. You think you're smart? Go off to a good college and you'll find peers at least as smart if not smarter. It's amazing that any of us feel good about our looks considering how many beautiful people we see on screens and magazines. Star quarterback in your hometown? You'll be lucky to amaze anyone at college, much less make the pros--to say nothing of being a star there. You think you're pretty fast or a good swimmer? Tune in to the olympics, my friend. The fact is that there are over 6 billion people in the world and chances are that there's someone better than you at everything it is you do, and we all know this because the world is so interconnected that we can find that person. Even if you're in the upper eschalon of your field, it's pure hubris to say you're "the best" because on any given day someone is probably better.
I'm trying to figure out what the ultimate effect is here. As the only experimental subject I have direct access to, I'll start with myself. I was pretty hot shit in my own high school when it came to academics. No, I wasn't the valedictorian and I wasn't even second (I was third), but I knew I could have been if I'd cared to work at it. Looking at standardized test scores (and yes, I know the pitfalls of those), there wasn't much competition (I know this sounds like bragging, but I've got a point here). And then I went off to college and discovered a whole new world. Most of the people I met were every bit as smart as I was and mostly better than me at something. I hated the idea of not being the best, and that was enough to make me work harder than I ever had in high school. I acquitted myself fairly well in college, I think. There were still people better than me in all sorts of things, but I was successful in many ways. As it happens, I know that other people came in the same way I did, saw what kind of league we were in and slid by on B and C work. At the same time, it's interesting to me to compare myself to a friend I know who came in with similar standardized scores as I did, but went to a much better high school than I did. This person had fewer illusions about where she stood in the grand sceme of things, but I think it was actually an advantage to have a few illusions--I didn't know what I couldn't do. I still had a sense of my own greatness, and though that couldn't last, I'm fairly certain it carried me further than it might have if I'd already accepted that I wasn't the best. It's bad enough that I've accepted it now. :)
My point here isn't self-aggrandizement. I know about as well as anyone how great I'm not. My point is that self-esteem, as long as it's at least mostly earned, is a good thing. It can take you places. When we feel good about some part of ourselves, we tend to emphasize it and cultivate it. I see that tendency when exercising too: I'd rather do certain things in the weight room than others, and I tend to favor the things I'm good at. It's a double-edged quality: on the one hand, it's good to develop something you're really good at; at the same time, the weight room is an instructive metaphor for life: you'll look pretty silly if you just do bench press all the time and have little stick legs and other undeveloped muscles. Oh, and health problems. I think the same thing is true in our lives: one strength and a lot of weakness is a recipe for unhappiness (yours, those around you, or both).
Back to my hypothetical community. One of its strengths was the way it allowed real self-esteem to develop. The flip side of it is that to be really great you need to get our of your village and seek bigger challenges--there are a lot of stories about that, of course, of heroes going off in search of greater challenges, ways of proving themselves. Beowulf. Gilgamesh. All sorts of Greeks.
Maybe what's needed is to re-evaluate our perspective. Being "the best" is a goal that is unreachable. Being better isn't. Sure, we're always going to measure ourselves against others: that's human nature, or at least the environment in which our thinking has evolved for probably as long as there have been humans or something like us. Communal beings. But we have to remember that there's value in being better than we alreadyare , whether we're looking from the perspective of fearing that we can't measure up or from the confidence that we're already pretty good.
And speaking of being better... I'll try not to be so didactic. I go a little nutty when I don't have students to work on. If you read this far without getting tired of me, I'd like to nominate you for some secular sainthood or something.