On Smugness
“When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross,” Sinclair Lewis probably never said. Regardless of its provenance, the snippet reflects the Nietzschean insight that power always disguises itself; it’s a play of masks so complex that even the actor wearing the mask loses track of the person beneath.
The more power is at work, the more assiduously it disguises itself.
Such playfulness shouldn’t blind us to the dangers and temptations beneath the disguises, nor should it deprive of us the pleasure we experience when the actor is unmasked and we get a glimpse of the genuine “who” beneath.
I’ll confess to the frisson of excitement I feel when organizations and public figures get publicly undressed. Part of my schadenfreude results from a fairly noble source: Jesus’s admonition in “The Sermon on the Mount” that we should “be careful not to practice [our] righteousness in front of others to be seen by them,” and that furthermore “when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others.” I have no serious truck with hypocrisy – it is, after all, the homage that vice pays to virtue – but neither would I encourage it. But ostentatious displays of virtue give me the willies -- even if, and maybe especially if, I am given to them myself -- and make me suspect the worst. Keeping your left hand from knowing what your right hand is doing seems like sound advice.
We live in an age where virtue is signaled more than understood or rightly performed. Social media gives us a platform to demonstrate our virtue to ever-larger audiences. Too often such demonstrations contain no small germ of pride in them, and thus tainted by self-interest and self-importance. I suspect we believe that such public displays exculpate our sin, indulgences that clear our slate. Whatever wrongs we have committed, now erased, pale in comparison to the good we draw attention to. This requires, of course, a confessional element in our virtue-signaling, excoriating ourselves publicly so that we may now extend to ourselves our own forgiveness and invite others to do likewise.
It is a mode of self-baptism, a public cleansing of oneself not for the purpose of actually being good, but for appearing to be good. It draws attention not to God’s atoning love and our membership in Christ’s body, but rather to ourselves and our own liberality (learning to love yourself is, after all, as Whitney Houston assured us, the greatest love of all). Only the accepted sentiments of dominant conventions -- the party that controls the contours of discourse -- set the parameters of the confessional. In this sense, public displays of virtue both shame and propose themselves as an answer to shame: don’t perform this act of confession and contrition and you are a broken individual, but perform it and you shall be made whole. You are "made right" with the world of accepted beliefs. You become one of the "right-thinking" people. It smacks of Nietzsche’s proposal: “Then you look upon your love for your neighbour as a grace? Your pity as a grace? Well, then, if you can do all this, there is no reason why you should not go a step further: love yourselves through grace, and then you will no longer find your God necessary, and the entire drama of the Fall and Redemption of mankind will reach its last act in yourselves!”
We busily rid the world but not ourselves of evil, because in externalizing virtue we have also externalized evil. Our new baptism elevates and but does not eradicate our latent narcissism. Our charity, now corrupted by pride, draws attention to itself in such a public fashion that the act of giving becomes an accessory to our public self-fashioning, which is how we ritualize grace in the Facebook age.
St. Augustine well understood the ways in which our self-understanding and our sense of virtue would be corrupted by the sin of pride. The only way to see ourselves truly, he argued, was to see ourselves as God sees us. Puffing ourselves in front of our fellow men would make us little better, to use St. Paul’s words, than “a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” We are noticed, but we have no love.
For love takes no notice of itself. If it were to do so, it would fall prey to self-promotion, to self-interest. Thus Christianity makes humility an essential virtue. Christian theologians have understood Christ’s words in Matthew 6 to attend to the motivation involved in almsgiving, for the motives for an act are an intrinsic part of that act. In order for almsgiving to be authentically liberal, it cannot be motivated by demanding public acknowledgment for itself.
Charity never seeks the easy path. It doesn’t celebrate itself by writing a check. It doesn’t bring comfort to the sick simply by donating money to organizations for indeterminate purposes with unknown effects rather than doing the difficult work of sitting down and spending time and wiping the spittle of an actual person. And it takes no measure of itself nor posts itself on social media. Neither does it simply ride the wave of the cause of the moment only to descend back into neglect and forgetfulness. Most importantly, it doesn't understand its demands to be satisfied in a voting booth.
But we live in a world determined more by power than love. To return to the beginning of this essay, I am interested in the ways in which congealing power, whether in government or in nonprofits, and directing its energies toward abstractions, requires a certain disposition that can only be described as “smug.”
The etymology of the word “smug” is from the middle German smücken meaning “to adorn,” in particular reference to dress. It involves a “sprucing up” or a cloaking of the self, as something that we “slip into.” It is to present oneself as “trim and neat” and indicates the kind of pride someone might take in his or her appearance. It is in many ways the opposite of modesty.
Smugness is the predominant air of people who are in power or at least crave it. It involves their conviction that they can be trusted with power because their motives are pure, their causes are just, and their missions are noble. They’ve been purified by the very public ritual of confession and penance. In contemporary parlance, it’s the attitude of someone who knows she is on the right side of history. The smug operate off and reinforce with one another their conviction of their rightness; that they are more rational, more compassionate, more just, more concerned, and simply better people than their fellow citizens, many of whom they'll simply dismiss as "deplorable."
The flip side of this, as Emmett Rensin discussed in his fine essay on the topic, is the failure of those who are skeptical of such claims, those consigned to the “wrong side of history,” to realize what is good for them. The smug look is the countenance of someone who knows better than you do what you ought to think and how you ought to live. It’s a profoundly anti-democratic impulse that, if too obvious in the smug countenance of someone, will cause people to recoil, even if they don’t know why. Rensin's essay (in Vox, no bastian of conservative commentary) argues that liberals are especially prone to the "condescending, defensive sneer toward any person or movement outside of its consensus, dressed up as a monopoly on reason," and that one of the main reasons for this was because its center of gravity shifted out of union halls and into the academy and press where it "could dominate elite decision-making." They now assign themselves the task of educating the rubes who don't know what's really good for them, and then are shocked -- shocked! -- to discover the rubes respond not with gratitude but disdain.
Smugness results from people being too full of their own virtue, too full of their own sense of infallibility. Like a cloak they slip on, the virtue remains largely external. They don’t need to be good people so long as they’re doing good things and publicizing them. “Clothes make the man.”
Market economies tend to commodify everything, even virtue. Companies can make a lot of money off “ethical shopping” and eating. People who work in these companies get to feel good about themselves because they produce “ethical” products and eliminate injustice and poverty at the same time. Same with their consumers. They walk out with that self-satisfied grin. But the smirk disguises the fact that those in charge know they aren’t doing what they claim, that too much of the money goes toward buying themselves new clothes rather than clothing the poor. I confess to a morbid fascination with the Met Gala and how all the celebrities and politicians (I’m looking at you AOC), each on the right side of history, show up in their $40,000 gowns with their $75,000 tickets in hand, each trying to outdo each other in how absurdly they can dress, spend an evening preening for “the good cause” of raising $26 million for the museum’s Costume Institute. And if any evidence were needed that America’s new aristocracy would possess “all the vices and none of the virtues” (Tocqueville) of the old landed one, observe how eight servants are needed to carry the train of a star’s dress. But the stars do get to feel good about themselves.*
Their sense of superiority – smarter, more beautiful, more important, more right about more things – only intensifies under the pressure of such displays. Most of us, when encountering someone with a smug look on his face, can barely resist the urge to “wipe it off.” Their air of superiority is as false as it is unearned, and we suspect we know what’s really going on underneath the carefully dressed appearance. We see clearly in the smug look how power disguises itself. And so we harbor our resentments. Our anger builds against the smug. Eventually, this anger and resentment boil over and you end up with a Donald Trump as your president, whose sole task is to wipe the smirk off the smug face. Only thus can we understand why he is so reviled by some and beloved by others. Once slapped across the cheek, we might be advised to turn the other rather than double-down on our smirk.
It’s a basic lesson for individuals as well as organizations: don’t become too full of, or too convinced of, your own virtue. Most of us as individuals have spouses or friends who undress us, who keep us from being costumed clowns; but in the case of feel-good organizations and celebrities and academics and those who wield power, the stripping down, if it ever comes, comes too late.
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*In a particularly jarring and revelatory moment -- the 2021 Met Gala, held during the COVID outbreak -- many of the stars were not wearing masks while the servants tasked with carrying their trains had to don masks. When your figurative masks require that your subordinates wear literal ones, we have descended to the nadir of power playing with masks.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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