All of the pundits I mentioned in Monday’s post — David French, Cheryl Rofer, and Josh Marshall — are or have been NatSec people, students or scholars of America’s “national security” establishment. And that means they’re all at least somewhat familiar with my guy Reinhold Niebuhr.
Niebuhr is a favorite theologian of the NatSec crowd, with his “Christian realism” often cited and helping to shape various ideas also described as “realism” in the realm of foreign policy, national defense, and warfare. So most NatSec folks have read a little Niebuhr or, at least, read a little about Niebuhr, but not usually the parts of Niebuhr’s writing* that can best help us to understand what’s going on with QAnon and the 21st-century blood libel and the MAGA/white evangelical obsession with “child trafficking” and pedophilia.
To understand all of that you need to read Niebuhr’s profound reflections on the cardinal sin of pride, which he doesn’t regard as a form of arrogance as much as it is a form of anxiety. For Niebuhr, pride isn’t about having an inappropriately inflated self-esteem, it’s about our compulsive need to maintain our self-esteem — our sense of ourselves as good, as good people or as the good people — and the way that prevents us from choosing repentance, and from opposing injustice, and how it ultimately turns us into self-centered, self-obsessed, little monsters who wind up even more anxious than we started. Pride is the cardinal sin, Niebuhr argues, because pride (and its corresponding moral anxiety) is how sin works and how it works on us. Pride drives us to identify as good people, which keeps us from ever becoming better people. Pride lures us into asserting our identity as innocent, thereby assuring that we remain guilty and complicit.
So I’m tempted here to dig out my copy of The Nature and Destiny of Man and to type in some huge chunks as block quotes and then to recommend that everybody drive over to the nearest seminary library and check out both volumes of that to read the whole thing for themselves.
But that’s a lot of work for all of us, so instead I’m going to talk about Dolly Chugh. Chugh is a social psychologist with a PhD from Harvard and she has serious academic and intellectual chops, but she’s also very good at popularizing her work to make it accessible for those of us who are not social psychologists. Some of her work has been published as “business” books geared toward that market, and if you can express your ideas in simple enough terms that even a CEO can understand it, you’re pretty good at popularizing what might otherwise be heady stuff.
Chugh’s name is pronounced like “chug,” but with the “oo” sound from a word like good or book. Chugh recognizes that phonetically ambiguous or unfamiliar names can make us anxious in much the same way that the cardinal sin of pride does:
As the person who often has made the mistake of flying by names that I don’t know how to say or, frankly, avoiding people whose names I don’t know how to say, we are really setting ourselves off from a lot of people, because most of us don’t know how to pronounce most names in the world. That’s just the function of how we grew up and where we grew up. As the world becomes more global, as we travel more even within our own country, as the demographics change within the United States, if we avoid people whose names we don’t know how to pronounce because it makes us uncomfortable and we don’t want to look stupid or offend them, we are shutting ourselves into a very small corner.
It’s a little thing, but as she says, we don’t want to look stupid or offensive — to ourselves or to others — and so we take evasive maneuvers that can wind up cutting us off from other people in ways harmful to both them and us.
That, in a nutshell, is the core of Chugh’s research and her findings. Our biggest obstacle to being good or to doing good is our defensive need to identify as good. We tend to be at our worst when our self-identity as “good people” feels threatened.
And so, Chugh suggested in a popular book and TED talk, we’re better off surrendering that identity of “I am a good person” and shooting for, instead, just being good-ish. That sound like a lowering of standards, but it’s really just humility — letting go of our pride to recognize our finitude and fallibility and be more realistic and, well, realist about who we really are.
When we can’t or won’t do that — when we, instead, cling to our determination to always think of ourselves as The Good People, and how dare anyone question that? — we sink deeper into that cardinal sin of pride and take another step along the path that, as C.S. Lewis put it, “will make monsters of us all.”
In other words, if we cannot embrace the humility of being, at best, aspirationally good-ish, then we will be forced to defend our wounded pride and our claim to goodness by comparing ourselves to others.
And to make that comparison as flattering and beneficial as possible, we will need to compare ourselves against the worst possible others — some superlative, indefensible, monstrous evil whose wickedness will, by contrast, affirm our saintly virtue. We will focus on and highlight the most depraved outliers we can find and then pretend to ourselves that everybody who isn’t us is like that. This leads us to bear false witness against our neighbors, which further threatens our self-concept of innocence and virtue, heightening our moral anxiety and forcing us to double-down, again and again.
In other words, Satanic baby-killerism.
This is the dynamic that accounts for all of the observations from French and Rofer and Marshall.
Why, as French notes, are MAGA evangelicals so obsessed with “child trafficking” conspiracies? Why, as Rofer notes, is the QAnon reaction to Epstein so different from that of “normies”? Why, as Marshall observes, are these witch-hunters seeking license to wreak unconstrained vengeance on their foes?
It’s all about pride and moral anxiety and Satanic baby-killers.
* I don’t know how much of Reinhold Niebuhr’s theology David French has read, but given that he is a white evangelical who’s roughly my age, I’m certain he’s read a lot of C.S. Lewis. He’s surely read both Mere Christianity and Screwtape, two books in which Lewis’ thoughts on the cardinal sin of pride and its pernicious effects on all of us are very similar to Niebuhr’s, which is why I’ve quoted from the former book dozens of times here when writing about Satanic baby-killerism.
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