That Hideous Narcissism

As I was writing my book, I was exploring the nature of Christian history. Christian history is not just the past, though it encompasses that. It is the meeting of past and future in the present. Eliot captured this well in "The Dry Salvages" from his "Four Quartets":

Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;
You are not those who saw the harbour
Receding, or those who will disembark.
Here between the hither and the farther shore
While time is withdrawn, consider the future
And the past with an equal mind.

For many, this is untenable. We only want the potential of the future — the better job, the better car, the better partner, and more. The present is where we situate our lives. It is the all-encompassing base from which we operate.

In my reading, I stumbled upon a quote by Joseph Ratzinger. In his book In the Beginning, he sets out to ground the creation narrative in its proper context as a story of all existence — naturally the origin, or pre-history, from which we draw. He writes: “Past, present, and future must encounter and penetrate one another in every human life.” In other words, a Christian view of history and reality must take into account the past, the present, and the future. He goes on: “Our age is the first to experience that hideous narcissism that cuts itself off from both past and future and that is preoccupied exclusively with its own present.”

Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy, in his book The Christian Future, writes that the Christian is “the founder and trustee of the future, the very process of finding and securing it, and without the Christian spirit there is no real future for man.” For Rosenstock-Huessy — and I find myself convinced by his argument — the Christian life is lived at the crossroads of four fronts.

The first front looks backward, toward the past. Christians look back at what happened in order to understand what is, and what is to come. The second front looks forward, into the future — and this is the uniquely Christian contribution. The past met the future at the Cross, transformed reality, and set humanity on a trajectory toward something more. The third front looks inward, among ourselves: this is the front of personality, of our dreams, feelings, and wishes. The fourth and final front is outward. This front presses in on us from all sides — the external world with all its demands and pressures.

To neglect any of these fronts is fatal. Rosenstock-Huessy calls this intersection the “Cross of Reality” — the crossroads of all four fronts — and argues that it keeps us rooted and guards us from what he calls “complete contemporaneity.” This is what Lasch hints at as the permanent present, and what Frank Furedi, in his book The War Against the Past, refers to as “presentism.”

It is painfully obvious that modern man has detached from the past, but he’s also removed any means of thinking about the future. Limitations are viewed not as reminders of the fragility of life, but of the need to transcend reality. That hideous narcissism that Ratzinger talks about reigns supreme. Of course it would help if we did a bit of work on what we mean by the term itself. Narcissism is a term often thrown around. “He’s a narcissist.” “That person is a narcissist.” But Christopher Lasch, the culture critic and writer of the mid-twentieth century, found that narcissism isn’t just a personality trait. When psychoanalysts talked about narcissism they were often referring to self-love — a person so obsessed with themselves that they are incapable of thinking about another. For Lasch, narcissism was a cultural force, not just a personal character issue. He noted that the writer Tom Wolfe had highlighted—in his essay “The ‘Me’ Decade”—the mid-twentieth century as akin to a Third Great Awakening, an outbreak of “orgiastic, ecstatic religiosity” — the worship of the self.

The self is something of a loaded term. Thinkers like Taylor, Ricoeur, and MacIntyre view the self as narrative: who you are is a thread of meaning derived from the story of how you got here and where you are going. Others view the self as a social construct. George Herbert Mead understood the self as derived from social engagement — you come to know yourself by how others see you, the “looking-glass self.” Some New Age thinkers posit that the self is an illusion, not a coherent core but individual fragments that, when assembled, form something like a cohesive unit. Phenomenologists like Husserl and Heidegger pushed back against all of this and tried to ground the self in existence: the self must be embodied, located in a place, in a world, with others, and in a language. It is specific and particular.

But what about the self today? As I read the Ratzinger quote, and as I’ve been reading Lasch and reflecting on his work, I can’t help but think we are at a time where the “narcissism” they spoke of, has not only expanded, but it has morphed.

What I mean is that today the self is dominated by narcissism — though it has shifted back into being a personality trait rather than a cultural diagnosis. This is driven by social media and psychology, which through therapy helps people identify how their boss is a narcissist, their roommate is too self-focused to help clean the apartment, or why their last relationship failed. We have moved the narcissistic trait back from a social diagnosis (where Lasch situated it) to a personal one. One major effect of this is that relationships and work become inundated with attempts to escape the trait in others, and we operate as if our problems come from outside ourselves, not from us. For instance, if our boss is too demanding, if any form of discomfort is introduced, we quit.

The modern self desires many things, and we can trace several defining features. I hope to offer a sketch here of what makes up the hideous narcissism of the modern self and some of the key things missing from the modern self. I’ve already written a bit on the “self” before. So I apologize if you are “selfed out.” However, I do think Ratzinger’s warning is important for us today. That hideous narcissism threatens all aspects of life, including my own. If we don’t understand what it is, and how it plays in our lives, it’s much harder to fight against it.

So here are some ways the narcissistic self is expressed today.

Authenticity

The person seeks their true self within themselves not from without. “Be yourself.” “Find your truth.” “Live authentically.” Lionel Trilling, in Sincerity and Authenticity, observed that authenticity has come to mean moving against the current of conventional moral authority rather than with it. To do what is expected is insincere; to transgress is to be truly oneself. Part of this is the effect of Critical Theory, which views even self-expression through the lens of power dynamics. The self as authentic interior dominates conversations around gender and identity — the true self is hidden within and needs to be expressed outward.

Consumer aesthetic

Modern identity goes hand in hand with lifestyle and trend. What we wear signals status. As American culture grows more complex, subcultures multiply, and identity becomes a matter of curation. If you spend all of five minutes on Instagram, you’ll see what I mean. Every other video is a person showing off style. Style is class and class is status.

Psychological interior

This is evident in the enormous popularity of books like The Body Keeps Score, which affirms the trauma-informed development of the modern person. The language that dominates this version of the self is therapeutic: trauma, attachment styles, triggers, boundaries. Each of these terms conveys that the self is developed by what happens to us, not what we commit to, or what we believe about ourselves and the world. We often mistake therapeutic language for self-knowledge, and self-knowledge for growth. If we are moving so far forward in our understanding of our trauma, why are we more miserable than ever? Rosenstock Huessy writes about “suburban man” but it seems apropos here: “there is a paradox about suburban man: he lives amid too much peace, but he knows little peace within.”

Performance and recognition

The self is not only authenticity-seeking but audience-seeking. We post online to give meaning to the self through recognition — the self is performed in the theatre of modern opinion. Mead’s looking-glass is prescient for social media. Lasch found that the self is empty at the center and requires constant external input to feel real. The metrics of recognition — likes, follows, engagement — become proxies for self-worth.

Identity category

Here again Critical Theory shapes the field. The self is understood as a constellation of categories: gender, sexuality, race, and more. When we identify with a category, that category must be affirmed without qualification. Any divergence from this expectation is treated as a social infraction akin to soft murder. Community forms not around growth and productive tension, but around affirmation.

Autonomous will

Running through all of this is what Michael Sandel called “the unencumbered self” (his essay is well worth reading when you have the time) — a self whose defining feature is not the ends it chooses but its sheer capacity to choose them. Sandel wrote this in the 1980s during the Reagan years, but his words feel more urgent now. No matter the consequences of certain decisions — gender reassignment surgery, MAID — the modern self demands the freedom to make them. The choice itself is sacred; the result is tertiary.

So what is missing today?

Obligation and commitment 

Obligation is increasingly experienced as tyranny. We dislike being bound to someone else’s time or needs, preferring instead to be our own autonomous agents. And yet commitment is not a cage — it is the very condition in which character and love become possible.

I’m reminded of a job I had out of college. I was juggling seminary alongside three part-time jobs, trying not to go into debt. One summer, at the pool store where I worked a third of my hours, I was tasked with interviewing a few high schoolers for seasonal work. One of them sat down across from me, and I asked the standard question: “So what does your schedule look like?” He thought for a moment and said, “Well, I’d like to have weekends free to hang out with my friends. Fridays too.”

I was dumbfounded. Growing up, my parents had drilled into me that in an interview you say: I will work whenever and however long you need. This young man had apparently received different instruction entirely.

It would be easy to chalk this up to one kid, but it isn’t one kid. Our lives are increasingly organized around fun and pleasure, and obligation is recast as an obstacle — a limitation on our freedom to pursue what we actually want. Commitment, in this frame, is something you tolerate until something better comes along.

Suffering and limits

Pope Leo recently wrote: “Our relationship with life seems to be in crisis today. Everything that appears as a ‘limit’ — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. And yet we must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them.” This is one of the great ailments of modern society. Constraints are viewed as impositions, roadblocks on the path to happiness. When we see a path that may have them, we don’t turn around but instead try to go off roading and find our own way. But they—limits—are in fact what enable us to flourish as finite beings created by an infinite God. To accept limits is to accept our nature as created things. We despise them, perhaps, because we secretly wish to be like God. I’m reminded that Eve was tempted to transcend the limits of her present situation. To become “like God.” This temptation is ever calling and ever more appealing to the modern self.

Similar to Pope Leo’s comment, Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy writes that:

“The greatest temptation of our time is impatience, in its full original meaning: refusal to wait, undergo, suffer. We seem unwilling to pay the price of living with our fellows in creative and profound relationships. From marriage to teaching, from government to handicraft, man’s relation to man has become segregated, impatient, non-committal in the machine age.”

We are unwilling to suffer for through suffering we are reminded of our own limits and finite reality.

History and tradition

Lasch found that the tyranny of the present leads us to view the past not as a resource to mine and learn from, but as a reminder of an inferior time. Lasch writes that:

“The narcissist has no interest in the future because, in part, he has so little interest in the past. He finds it difficult to internalize happy associations or to create a store of loving memories with which to face the latter part of his life, which under the best of conditions always brings sadness and pain. In a narcissistic society—a society that gives increasing prominence and encouragement to narcissistic traits—the cultural devaluation of the past reflects not only the poverty of the prevailing ideologies, which have lost their grip on reality and abandoned the attempt to master it, but the poverty of the narcissist’s inner life.”

Yet as Christians we are called to hold a faith deeply rooted in history — it is from the past action of God in Christ that we draw present and future hope. To remove the roots is to down the tree. Christians must be at the forefront of the valuation of history — that those who came before us matter and have much to teach us.

The self in relation

Online life thrives in part because within its confines the self is rarely confronted. We choose our relations and remove those who impact us negatively. Dating apps extend this logic: we swipe away who we don’t want and meet those we do, but only momentarily. To settle down is to place yourself in genuine relation to another person — and that is precisely what the modern self resists. Yet the creation was declared good, and the only thing that was not good was for man to be alone. We were made for one another. The church as body is meant to invoke this reality: each person needs the other, and the other needs each person.

A telos

When we remove the beginning — history — we also remove the end. Time collapses into the present: our present desires, present wishes, present dreams. But the self cannot flourish without knowing it is for something beyond itself. We live not for ourselves. Paul writes that “you are not your own” but belong to God. And yet we fear death. MAID is an egregious blight on modern life — the destruction of persons because they choose it. The self wants no part in the uncertainty of the end, so it seeks to control and harness it. We try to give life, and we try to choose when we leave it. Foucault, for all his faults, made an interesting observation about asylums: by removing the impaired from society, we created a space where we defined sanity — and those who didn’t conform were cast out of sight. We suppressed what we didn’t want to see. Modern society does the same with death. The more that the limits of life — and its end — are moved from our sight, the more the self imagines it can flourish. Instead, we are left ungrounded. We are all going to die, and those who have been most shielded from this reality will have the hardest time accepting it.

All in all, the modern self is remarkably free and remarkably miserable. Liberated from limits and boundaries, we find we are not walking toward anything — only away from something. The hunger we feel for meaning, purpose, permanence, and recognition points beyond the self, revealing what it is missing. And ultimately, it is the good news of Jesus Christ that can fully root and give the self what it so desperately needs.