Kristor writes in response to my comment about the need for praise:

I wouldn’t worry too much about getting attached to compliments. Let them register. After all, their ultimate effect in a basically duteous person will be to raise the bar you set yourself to hurdle every day. Am I right? Plus you’ll never give yourself credit for them anyway, never leave them on the plus side of your personal balance sheet. Right? You’ll say, “Oh, it wasn’t me; all I did was interfere with the Lord less than usual.”
 
What counts, what makes the difference, indeed all the difference in the world, is the direction of one’s ultimate orientation. For those who are oriented horizontally, along the plane of the mundane, the world’s effects will affect them by pushing them about therein, to no ultimate relief. For those whose orientation is even a little bit angled up toward Christ’s pure orthogonal to the mundane, the world’s effects will affect them by pushing them about in the world and pushing them up a bit on their diagonal. The closer we approximate to Christ’s orthogony to the world, the more profound this effect, and the more delightful it will be. At the apotheosis, we will see that every worldly experience is radiant with uncreate light; we will enjoy creation as God does. 
 
A purely worldly person, if such there be, refers everything to the world, and is entirely entrapped. Such perhaps is the fate of say Richard Dawkins; it is the Hell C.S. Lewis describes in The Great Divorce, a shadow world of deficient actuality. But almost no one I think is purely worldly; almost all of us want to get out of this shadow world, and into the high bright solid light at the top of the mountain, where our world is no longer obscured, but able at last to be fully itself.
 
I can’t figure out whether Numenius thinks we should be on the peak looking at the boat, or vice versa. Either way, one would be far from the hurry, noise and commerce of the shore. Having spent a lot of time in both situations – wave-tossed and perched on high scarps – I can say with confidence that both are fit places to open and cleanse the doors of perception.

Laura writes:

Yes, Numenius was unclear. I think whatever he meant it involved extreme isolation.

On the subject of compliments, I come from a long Irish tradition of treating them with embarrassment or sarcasm. According to this worldview, which is genetically transmitted, it is presumptuous to see any truth in them. They must be doled out and received sparingly for fear of creating an even minimally self-supporting ego. For instance, if someone tells you have made a great meal or they like what you are wearing, you just sort of shrug your shoulders and grimace. That means, “Gee, thanks!”

I think there are some who are purely worldy in their waking hours. Only at night, in their sleep, do they escape what you call “the shadow world of deficient actuality.”

James McDonald writes:

Your response to Kristor on the subject of compliments has cast light on something about myself that I’ve been struggling with for a long time. My last name is McDonald, and when a compliment comes my way I can never muster up anything that feels like the socially correct sort of response. Seemingly by instinct or reflex, I always react in just the way you described; it’s nearly uncontrollable. I always thought it was my own odd characteristic that I needed to work through but now that I think about it I realize that my father is the same way. I’d never heard that this was an Irish trait.

Your assertion that this is genetically transmitted is very interesting to me. Is this your own conclusion? I’d like to read about a book about this if one exists.

Laura responds:

Through personal observation, especially from growing up among a mixture of WASPs, Jews and Irish Catholics, I have no doubt this is an Irish trait. Whether it is inherited or culturally transmitted is up for dispute. I am convinced by the genetic argument because my own children, who have had their egos continuously burnished since infancy, exhibit some of the same dismay with compliments. Ditto with my husband, who is of Irish descent.

There is at least one book that explores the subject directly, leaving aside Irish literature. Andrew Greeley’s That Most Distressful Nation: The Taming of the American Irish looks at the habit of ridicule and ego-busting in Irish families and the general horror of thinking well of oneself. He does not believe Catholicism is the cause (it does not leave the same trait in other countries), but rather blames an inherent frigidity of personality and wariness of intimacy. He thinks the phenomenon of self-loathing is exacerbated in Irish-American families by a fear of any loss of hard-won respectability. I think it comes from inherited personality with cultural factors adding incentive. The Irish form of clannishness dare not let anyone stick out from the crowd, but the Irish individual prefers it that way.  Perhaps many of us are growing out of it in this Age of Narcissism. But, I know at least one extremely successful and powerful Irish-American lawyer who reacts to the slightest compliment with blistering sarcasm. It’s his way of saying he doesn’t deserve it. It’s not an act. He entirely believes it.

Please follow and like us: