BY Dr. Agonson
A friend once told me that I was prideful, but considering how much better I was than him, I didn’t listen. However, I’ve recently realized that there may have been something in what he said. In all seriousness, though, I keep butting my swollen head up against the obstacle of my own conceited self. I once joked with my sister that, “God made me so prideful to humble me,” for there is a certain way in which, if my pride were not so humorously enlarged, it would perhaps go unnoticed. Because I am so very prideful, I wish I possessed the dignity of humility. Because I am so very prideful, I often have to repent of my pride. However, I was somewhat surprised when my sister agreed that God had done the same for her.
The truth of the matter is, we are both smart, and intellect has a strange habit of looking down on others. I suppose it’s the old proverb, “Knowledge puffs up.” There is a terrible retreat, a sort of instinctual and unreflective stoicism, to which we have access. We are above the petty, human squabbles going on around us; let us shut out the world and contemplate from the vast storehouses of our memories some favorite song or movie or book. This little foible, this humiliation of pride my sister and I share, is imagined to its utter extreme in the character of Hannibal Lecter.
Which is why, in part, I so despise the latter books: The character of Lecter, as presented in the first two books, is really very pitiful: He cannot love. That is the other end of the proverb: “Love builds up.” It is in the relationships my sister has with her husband and her close friends that she frames this issue. (Being a man, I have nothing close to those intimate interdependencies women build among themselves.) It is by love that she challenges her pride and flees from the safe and lofty prison of the mind.
If pride is love so twisted towards oneself that it eclipses all love for others, real love, I think, is a great antidote, though there is certainly still a danger of a corporate pride developing among the society of prideful people.
I had an autistic friend in high school. I was about the only one who could compete with him as regarded mental arithmetic. One day, he proclaimed in his loud voice that he and I were the only intelligent people in the class. The fact that the entire class could not help but to hear him when he all but shouted his revelation seemed of little to no consequence to him. (He was always perplexed as to why the other students treated him so abhorrently.) What proceeded was a somewhat repetitive conversation where I intimated that there might, just maybe, be other virtues (what I then called other forms of intelligence), such as, the example I gave, a social intelligence.
At a certain point in this intercourse, I realized that the entire class was silently watching us, that the clock suggested that he and I had been at this for fifteen minutes or so, and our teacher was sitting there staring at the two of us. I, who had some social intelligence, felt this keenly; On the other hand, my friend was like a man born without a leg, more aptly, like a man born blind, for in his simple way, I truly believe, he had no notion that he insulted everyone around us (daily), that there was any significance in the rapt attention of the class, or that class should have begun ten minutes ago.
That is one of the instances in my life that is etched deeply into my memory. The capstone of the whole affair resounds even today in my ear: I looked to my teacher and apologized for disrupting class. He looked at me (it’s the tone more than the words which remain) and said something like, “No, this is a conversation that needs to happen.”
One day, I hope someone will be able to explain to me what I failed to explain to my friend: How to be human.
Tale Told 