The Politics of Self-respect 1

I’ve worked on this one for a few weeks recently. As you see by the caricature, however, I’ve been working on it for a lot longer than that. The Politics of Self-respect is a course I designed and offered as part of my doctoral program in 1973.[1] So as I look at the topic, I see that I’m going to have to take it in two parts. This one will be about what “self-respect" is. The next, about how our need for self-respect affects our politics and, of course, how it affects us.


Self-respect. What is it? Particularly, how is it different from “self-esteem?” Let’s start with the etymologies, although there are only about one and a half to work with. Scholars are wary of saying what the roots of esteem are. The OED doesn’t even try. My old red Webster’s says it comes from a hypothetical root *ais-temos, “one who cuts copper,” so someone who mints money. The meaning given for the noun is “favorable opinion, high regard.” Respect is a word that is not about the value of the object; it is about the process of looking. The past participle respectus is formed from respecere, “to look back on, to look at.”

I think it would be easy to take “looking” as fundamental, when it is, in fact, a metaphor, but let’s take it seriously for just a moment. I recently posted a celebration of this year’s return to school and called it “The Eight Answers.” The conversation I am about to recount occurs in the same movie (Born Yesterday) just a few minutes later.

Billie, the Vegas dancer, has learned “the eight answers” and has used them very well at a party. As they are walking out, Paul, who taught her those answers, is giddy at their success. Billie is not giddy. She knows she is not the person she seemed to be when she delivered those answers, but in doing that little bit of theater, she had an experience no one could have foreseen. Here’s how it goes.

Billie: But, Paul, there was a time right in the middle when I was sayin'
something and everybody was lookin’ at me like I knew what I was talkin’ about
and I liked it so much.

That’s not respect, certainly, but…pardon me, briefly…it is “spect.” The looking at her as if she knew things, as if they had “a high regard” for her, is a way she can not look at herself. She knows she’s a fraud. But the simple experience of being looked at like that raised in her mind the faint possibility that she could come to look at herself that way; that she could have that respect for herself. Which is what the rest of the movie is about, but we will have to leave it here.

Self-respect is a respect, a high opinion, you have as a result of “looking at yourself.” It is, in the beginning, an inference drawn. It isn’t “feeling like you are a good person,” so much as it is thinking you have done something well or, more generally, that you do that kind of thing well. You might value knowing how to repair a car engine or knowing how to project yourself at a meeting so that you will be listened to or knowing how to hear those wonderful dissonances that English-speakers produce, often accidentally, and how to enjoy them. If you value those things generally, and perform them well, you will have respect for yourself in that area. If there are other such areas, you will come to have respect for yourself generally. You will have self-respect.
I know there’s more to it, but sometimes you can’t say it all at once.

Clearly, you need to get enough distance from yourself to see what you are doing. You need to have a framework that allows you to evaluate your work in the same way you would evaluate the work of anyone else. All that seems clear to me. But how to do you get that framework in the first place? You have to choose a framework that enables evaluation and you aren’t competent to build that framework yourself. We turn here to Alisdair MacIntyre’s notion of “practices.”
I’ve hyperlinked a section from his best-known book, After Virtue, here, but I can summarize the point he makes. Then, after, a simple application and a modest little rant about the rage for self-esteem, and I’ll bring this part to a close.

MacIntyre says you have to value “goods internal to the practice.” It seems a very powerful argument to me. Here are three pieces of it.

A practice involves standards of excellence and obedience to rules as well as the achievement of goods. To enter into a practice is to accept the authority of those standards and the inadequacy of my own performance as judged by them. it is to subject my own attitudes, choices, preferences and tastes to the standards which currently and partially define the practice.

I asked earlier how you can get far enough away to “look at” yourself, potentially to “respect” yourself. Here is the beginning of the answer. You accept “the standards of the practice” as right and your own performance, where it diverges from those standards, as wrong. You stand where the standards are; that’s how you get the distance.

Practices…are not themselves immune from criticism, but nonetheless we cannot be initiated into a practice without accepting the authority of the best standards realized so far.

Notice that questions of authority precede questions of respect. They do not precede questions of esteem. You can be taught that your performance is good because you are a good person or because you tried really hard or because, despite all the other things you might have done, you simply showed up.

If, on starting to listen to music, I do not accept my own incapacity to judge correctly, I will never learn to hear, let alone to appreciate, Bartok’s last quartets. If, on starting to play baseball, I do not accept that others know better than I when to throw a fast ball and when not, I will never learn to appreciate good pitching let alone to pitch.

This series of examples is what clinched the argument for me on first reading. Bartok and baseball. There is also an extension of the argument here. Not only will you never learn competent performance without accepting the authority of the practices; you will also never learn to appreciate the competent performance of others. And you know he’s right about that. How many times have you had to suspend your own initial judgment—you called it “my own judgment” at the time—to really hear a piece of music or really watch a ballet or fully appreciate a quarterback draw?

If you can accept the standards, which may make no sense to you at first, then you can look at yourself from the vantage point they give you. And as you play up to the standards, you can appreciate your own work and value yourself—value your self—for doing that work. You value yourself by the same standards that you would value in anyone. It is the judgment of the standards, not of the insatiable inner “me first,” that are valued.

The question this raises, in the model of a “politics” of “self-respect” is this: can we have a politics that enables, recognizes, and rewards the development of self-respect by its citizens? Yes, I think we can. But the trip is going to lead us into some unfamiliar territory and it’s a trip we will have to postpone until next time.

[1] This caricature was drawn by Kathy Kriara, who was supposed to be taking a final exam, but who couldn’t remember anything at exam time. This is what she turned in instead of an exam paper. It’s a little odd of me, but the fact is I can’t remember anything about that exam except that Kathy gave me this picture.