ISMED Newsletters

» Return to News Gram Archive Main Menu

News Gram™ April 2005

April 2005 ~ Volume 11, No. 9

[Editor’s note: This is the first of a series of occasional articles on character as a psychiatric, literary and philosophical concept]

There are those among us who stand out by virtue of their moral outbursts, their insistence that they impose on themselves — and, by extension, others — only the highest moral standards. They may strike people as strong, principled and uncompromising. In more pronounced form, they are often demanding, tyrannical and harsh personalities in whose presence only masochists would want to be. Judges, politicians and, surprisingly, actors, can strike us as being of superior moral stock, often cruel and driven to make right the wrongs of the world. Martin Luther, John Calvin and, yes, Hillary Clinton are good examples of self-righteous personalities. In the Old Testament, Isaiah’s harsh pronouncements and dire warnings gain their power from his profound commitment to transcendent moral ideas. Interestingly, the character of Jesus, while righteous, does not seem self-righteous; he seems humble and without the authoritarian streak that runs through so many other judgmental individuals for whom he would have a few words.

Of course, religion is the place where the self-righteous hang out. It is, after all, the court of moral deliberation whose magistrates animate history with resounding regularity. Take Luther and Calvin, for instance. Both had severe, harsh, austere parents who insisted their children hold to the mark without fail. In their minds, a single slip was sufficient to propel one’s soul into eternal damnation. Luther internalized all of their proscriptions, rebelled against the church he believed was controlled by the devil and offered little moral leeway for his flock. Calvin was similarly harsh and constructed an even more rigid religious and moral framework for salvation than Luther. He believed, for instance, that very few people born into this world would ever see the gentle fields of heaven. Even worse, good works weren’t going to yield salvation since no earthly creature could move the will of God one way or the other ? and anyway, one’s fate was already predetermined.

Hillary Clinton, while not overtly religious, has strong Calvinist features. She is driven to offer utopian schemes in order to make the world a better place. Her health plan in 1992 was, if not an attempt to save souls, an effort to salvage the bodies to which their souls were hinged. It turns out that her parents demanded enormous effort and accomplishment from her, regardless of what she did. When she presented very high grades to her father expecting a smile or some other reward, he remarked that he had sent his daughter to a school whose grading system was far too lenient. It isn’t hard to see how a young girl might try to neutralize the harshness of her father’s repeated denouncements of her by internalizing his opinionated disposition toward people around him. In Senator Clinton, the result is, in the eyes of many people, a brittle exterior and a carefully scripted public persona meant to avoid the liabilities incurred by her proclivity to condemn those with whom she disagrees. At heart, though, she covers over a strong depressive core of self-hatred derived from the repetitively nasty discernments of her father.

In literature, we can look to Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield to find a repugnant, though not obviously self-righteous, character in the figure of Uriah Heep. Uriah, a clerk, who constantly presents himself as ?umble,? diminutive and unworthy, is, in reality, a scheming, ruthless and dangerous character. His moral stature is a perversion of Christian humility, replete with insistent claims of his insignificance and servility while he plots to gain power at the expense of those around him. We might say that Uriah is the internal counterpart of many self-righteous people. Corrupt, immoral and bitter, he portrays himself as unimportant while plotting his future. Luther and Calvin presented themselves as moral stalwarts while they struggled to overcome the natural predilections of human beings to indulge in more colorful, though less morally elevating behaviors.

It’s important to bear in mind that the man who posted his 95 theses on the church door, his Genevan parallel and the wife of an ex-president with her own ambitions, are far more complex than a few paragraphs can convey. In Senator Clinton’s case, for instance, her harsh upbringing does not mean she is morally corrupt or frighteningly obsessed with acquiring political power. Rather, knowing something of her history helps to explain the strength of her motivation to place herself in the public light, to expose herself to the inevitable abuse such striving will bring home to her and to relinquish whatever privacy she may have enjoyed prior to her husband’s political success. Perhaps, her desire for her own victories derives from the little girl whose father never expressed his admiration and love for her. Maybe he will receive a posthumous gift as she ultimately ascends to the presidency or, even if she does not succeed at achieving that ultimate goal, leaves a mark on history that no one could deny.

Certainly, Luther and Calvin gained considerable strength from their respective parents, despite the privations and punishments meted out for their benefit. Somehow, they were not so punished as to be terminally demoralized, bereft of motivation and without imagination. Instead, Luther founded a church, wrote hymns to God that millions sing today and initiated one of the most profound upheavals in the history of the world. Calvin, whose historical imprint does not enjoy such dimensions, left a mark in ? of all places ? the fabric of early American life that persists today. Whatever small remnant of domestic Puritanism that survives today owes its provenance to Calvin’s efforts.

We can see, then, that history remembers the self-righteous characters that have graced its stage. The lesser ones, though, the ones who occasionally bump into us, do not often illuminate our lives in soft, pleasing hues. Still, understanding them may help us to smile in spite of their intrusions.

•   •   •

» Return to News Gram Archive Main Menu