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Faking It
FA K I N G I T

William Ian Miller

University of Michigan Law School
  
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo

Cambridge University Press

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Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
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© William Ian Miller 2003

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First published in print format 2003

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For my mother, Shirlyn Miller, and my wife, Kathy Koehler
 Should he by chance a knave or fool expose,
That hurts none here, sure here are none of those.

Congreve (Way of the World, Prol. vv. 35–36)

N’as-tu pas honte de vouloir être philosophe plus que tu ne peux?

Chamfort (Maximes xliii)

 Contents

Acknowledgments page xi

1 Introduction: Split in Two 1

2 Hypocrisy and Jesus 9
Ostentatious Alms 11
Motes and Beams 13
Stoning Adulterers 14
Hypocrisy and Formalism 16
3 Antihypocrisy: Looking Bad in Order to Be Good 20
Of Hairshirts 20
Non–Self-Tormenting Virtue? Et in Arcadia Ego 24
Putting Vanity to Good Use 26
4 Virtues Naturally Immune to Hypocrisy 31
Courage and Faking It 31
Politeness 35
Self-Command: Sense, Sensibility, and Shallowness 42
5 Naked Truth: Hey, Wanna F***? 48

6 In Divine Services and Other Ritualized Performances 58

Staying Focused during Prayer 61
The Amidah 68
Cynical Ceremony 73
7 Say It Like You Mean It: Mandatory Faking and Apology 77
Accidents versus Intentional Wrongs 78
Regret versus Remorse 81
Making Faking Hurt 83
Forgiveness and Punishment 90

vii
 contents

8 Flattery and Praise 96

Tainted Praise 98
In Small Praise of Flattery 104

9 Hoist with His Own Petard 109

Talking to Hamlet 110
Ironists 115
Experience: Becoming What You Pretend to Be 118

10 The Self, the Double, and the Sense of Self 121

Stripping Off the Layers 128

11 At the Core at Last: The Primordial Jew 132

A Bowdlerized Jewish Joke 132
The Jew at the Core of Christian Identity 135

12 Passing and Wishing You Were What You Are Not 141
An American Tragicomedy 143
Passing 148

13 Authentic Moments with the Beautiful and Sublime? 154

Phoniness by the Sea 154
Anxious Experts 158
Faking It in the Museum 160
Postcards and Memories 161

14 The Alchemist: Role as Addiction 167

Elster’s Alchemies 167
The Canon’s Yeoman 170

15 “I Love You”: Taking a Bullet versus Biting One 178

It’s the Word “Love” 179
Winding the Clock Once a Month 182

16 Boys Crying and Girls Playing Dumb 186

17 Acting Our Roles: Mimicry, Makeup, and Pills 195
Diderot and Actors 195
Pretending versus Faking It 200
Making Up Is Hard to Do, or Masking for It 202
Surgical Masks 207

viii
 contents

18 False (Im)modesty 211

False Modesty 214
Self-Mockery and Frank Confessions 216
19 Caught in the Act 220
Faking Sleep 221
Facing Those Who Know or You Fear Might Know 224
Did You Know How Big You Blew It Back Then? 229
Afterword 232

Notes 239
Works Cited 266
Index 279

ix
 Acknowledgments

The acknowledgments vie with the bibliography for falseness and

fakery. I have thus undertaken, in a spirit of authenticity and re-
form, to limit my public proclamation of gratitude to people who
actually deserve it. (Excuse my gruffness; it is a pose meant to sell
the genuineness of my gratitude. Thus does fakery assist the cause
of truth by making truth look truthful as well as merely be truth-
ful.) Annalise Acorn, Don Herzog, and Larry Kramer read the whole
manuscript in various stages with great care and to my great benefit.
It seemed that at times they were more inside my head than I was.
I cannot thank them enough for friendship and colleagueship beyond
the call of duty. So too Daniel Halberstam and Kyle Logue. Others
who provided more than a few helpful inputs are Anne Coughlin,
Dedi Felman, Ellen Katz, and Ed Parsons; three student assistants:
Bill Korner, Lena Salaymeh, and Susannah Tobin; and several anony-
mous reviewers who generously got into the spirit of the book.
My mother and my wife are the dedicatees. One has so much
charm that she manages, to the dismay of those around her, to get
away with never suppressing the unvarnished truth. The other’s grace
and equally great charm lie in her genius for making people feel that
she really means it when she says she wants them to stay. One takes
no prisoners, the other invites them in. Both are indomitable and have
squared off only two or three times in the past twenty years.
Parts of chapter 13 appeared as “Of Optimal Views and Other
Anxieties of Attending to the Beautiful and Sublime,” Journal of
Visual Culture 1 (2002), 71–85, which is reproduced by permission
of Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, London, and New Delhi.

xi
 one

Introduction: Split in Two

It happened again today: I was bluffing my way through some

material in my Property class about which I knew no more than what
the teaching manual told me, it being the extent of my researches on
the topic. On such occasions I present the subject in the pompous style
in which professorial banalities are often uttered, meaning thereby
to prevent student questions by elevating myself to the regions of the
unquestionable. God forbid one of them should start thinking deeply
about the stuff and expose the limits of my knowledge.
Then it hits: all of a sudden my voice transforms itself into a parody
of my father’s voice, an imitation of the voice he used when he was
doing his best to assert pompous authority. How does this happen?
My voice seems to have acquired a will of its own as it seeks to
lower itself into the resonant ranges his had as a gift of nature. My
sisters and I would often burst into giggles when our father assumed
this style of dominion. The students at least won’t giggle, having
been beaten down by myriad professors into resigned acceptance
of – nay, into slavish respect for – pompous authority. And even if
I were to revert to my natural voice I wouldn’t succeed in getting it
back to normal. Compared with the phony version of my father’s it
would sound like a whine, and I would find myself correcting it into
something utterly alien. Better stick with Dad’s until the class ends.
Twenty minutes left to fill, and I have said everything I have to
say. Still there is this me standing outside me watching me talk in
someone else’s voice. Do not look at the beautiful babe sitting over
on the right; you will lose all authority if you do that; meet only the
eyes of the guys. Is she really that much of a bombshell, or is it that at
my age I have lost all discernment, mistaking youth for beauty? Kill

1
 faking it

that kid over there who is nodding off again. Don’t turn to write on
the blackboard because Ms. Simmons, the bombshell, will observe
the thinning of your hair in back, the beginnings of your tonsure.
While all these thoughts are going on, the me standing outside the
me going through the motions of lecturing gets a metathought of won-
derment: how remarkable human consciousness is that it can have
all these distracting thoughts while split in two and still let me speak
coherently on easements. How do I know the lecture is coherent?
Because as soon as I split in two the students dive for their pens and
the keyboard clacks increase to frenetic rates. They inevitably think
I am delivering the goods when they hear my father’s voice.1 When I
actually know what I am talking about they occupy themselves play-
ing solitaire on their laptops, or they ostentatiously look back at the
clock on the wall behind them (spiting their wristwatches) to make
sure I know how impatient they are for me to have done with it.
Funny how easy it is to do mental tasks with all the voices inside
your head critiquing you while you continue the performance, but
how hard it is to act convincingly when you become self-conscious of
your physical movements, such as whether you are walking naturally,
or blinking too much, or looking like a law-abiding driver when the
cop pulls up next to you at the stoplight. So though I feel that I am
faking it and fear the roof might come caving in on me at any moment,
since the physical demands are minimal and there is a barricade-like
lectern to provide cover for most of my body, the roof (almost always)
stays put. Within seconds the me standing outside me remerges with
the me putting on the show, and time is up and I am safe for another
day, unless, that is, I should overhear a student grumble to another
about what an awful class it was. But you never hear complaints after
a day of bluffing. You know you get your highest approval ratings
from the students when you keep it easy and falsely authoritative; as
long as they can take good notes, most of them feel they got their
money’s worth.
Is it the case that my experience of seeing myself as if outside myself
was generated by guilt over faking it? Is that me outside me, in other
words, my conscience? Or is it the form my conscience takes when
it really means business? That hardly seems right. For often that me

2
 introduction

outside me simply looks on in contemptuous bemusement. Unlike the

conscience, it seems to take the performing me less seriously than a
truly moral policeman would. It cares less that I am a moral failure
than that I may be a social failure. It will suffer my being a knave but
will not suffer my being a fool. It shares much with Adam Smith’s
impartial spectator, whom we shall meet again, except the me outside
me is not really impartial; he is too hard on me most of the time,
determined to unnerve me. In truth, sometimes that me outside me
appears when I teach Bloodfeuds, where I know my stuff, and there it
is elicited not by anxieties of fakery but rather by my being so much
into the subject, so excited by the material, that the students, I fear,
must think I am a total nerd. That me outside me wants to make
sure I am maintaining a certain level of dignity, and it doesn’t seem to
matter whether I am about to lose respect by being exposed as a fraud
or simply by not having properly modulated my sincerest enthusiasm.
Besides, why think that that me on the outside isn’t faking also, or
playing a false role by playing me as an ever so self-tortured being?
As I am sure you know, the anxious feeling of faking it can arise in
almost any setting. It can harass you in routine polite conversations;
it can disrupt what you thought had been an authentic emotional
moment in matters of mourning or love. You see yourself suddenly
as a phony, a hypocrite, when until that intrusive moment you were
blithely at one with your role, with words, deeds, and thoughts all
united in service to the cause at hand.
I have often felt myself to be a hypocrite for paying lip service
to pious views I do not quite believe, some of which I downright
don’t hold at all. I have feigned sorrow at the departure of guests,
faked joy at their arrival, simulated delight at a colleague winning
a MacArthur so-called genius award, shammed grief at the passing
of the neighborhood self-appointed policer of leash laws, assumed a
façade of concern for a student’s bad grade or interest in stories of
other people’s children. And I fear others will repay my shamming
by exposing me as a fake, a fraud in the roles life has assigned me:
as dad, son, spouse, friend, law professor, writer, Old Norse scholar,
Jew, citizen, decent human being. Why is it that I cannot help feeling
foolish at times going through the motions of playing the roles I have

3
 faking it

to play to pass for a properly socialized and sane person? And why,
when I happen to immerse myself joyously into a role, do I later –
not always, mind you, but often enough – wonder if I haven’t made
a fool of myself by overdoing it? And how do I manage to escape
being exposed as a fake as often as I do, unless it is all a setup?
To be a proper person behaving properly we must engage in a cer-
tain amount of self-monitoring. Most of such monitoring is routine
and hardly the stuff to generate great anxiety. I thus automatically
modulate the volume of my voice to the level appropriate to the occa-
sion (though my teenage girls are constantly shushing me in restau-
rants); without an anxious thought, I engage in minor gestures of
grooming to make sure my nose isn’t about to humiliate me, my nails
are clean, my zippers zipped and buttons buttoned. More anxiety-
provoking are the demands to display proper emotions at the right
time and place. Tears are a problem, often failing to appear when they
should and showing up when they shouldn’t. Just trying to display
interest when it is polite to do so, or to suppress signs of it when it
is impolite to show it, can make us uneasy about how poorly we are
playing it. It does not help, for instance, to let the fact that I cannot
take my eyes off the big zit on the chin of my interlocutor serve as a
substitute for my not being able to maintain the faintest modicum of
interest in his conversation.
But I must confess, and I would bet you could confess it too,
that I have found myself feeling quite pleased or relieved in the
midst of some emotional turmoil – a lover’s quarrel, a funeral, a
moving moment – that tears actually showed up. I cannot quite re-
press the “Thank God” of relief, or the “Way to go, Miller” of self-
congratulation. And who is saying that “Way to go”? Me? Or a fake
“me” that I pretend to be when I am trying to please? Or is it the voice
of a stranger, a father, a conscience, an intruder? Or all of the above?
Those internal conversations that make up much of what we think
of as thinking – are they monologues, dialogues, or sessions of the
Israeli Knesset?
This book is unified by the intrusive fear that we may not be what
we appear to be or, worse, that we may be only what we appear to be
and nothing more. It is about the worry of being exposed as frauds in

4
 introduction

our profession, as cads in our loves, as less than virtuously motivated

actors when we are being agreeable, charitable, or decent. Why do
we so often mistrust the motives of our own good deeds, thinking
them fake good deeds, even when the beneficiary of them gives us
full credit? And why do we feel that even our bad deeds might be
fake? Remember how as a teenager you tried pathetically to show
how tough and fearless you were by shoplifting, drinking yourself
senseless, and other things still unconfessable?
And related to all this is the question, who is this you that is being
so hard on you? Is it just plain you? Or is it you in a specific role and,
if so, what role? You as a fairly hostile observer of guys like you,
you the hanging judge? Or is it nothing more than you the ironist
with regard to roles you must play? We know that many roles are
supposed to be nothing more than fakery of a sort, playable with one
hand tied behind one’s back; we know that virtue itself cuts all kinds
of deals with a benign form of hypocrisy that keeps us polite, kind,
and acting properly. Yet we still feel a bit tainted by what we think are
our own half-hearted commitments and our uncertain or unverifiable
motives, about our less than full-hearted performances in the various
roles we must play. Or perhaps it is not so much a unified self that
feels thus tainted; maybe it is something foisted on the part of us that
remains behind by the part of us that stands outside ourselves.
Much of the book deals with self-consciousness – not self-
consciousness in the sedate sense of being aware of ourselves as think-
ing beings with a past, present, or future but rather self-consciousness
in the sense of that unpleasant emotion that interrupts our blithe and
unself-conscious “naturalness,” which, however, may be no more
than “acting naturally” and not knowing we are. It deals with being
watched and judged by ourselves and by others as we posture and
pose. It treats of praise and flattery, of vanity, esteem, and self-esteem,
false modesty, seeming virtue and virtuous seeming, deception, and
self-deception. It is about roles and identity and our engagement in
the roles we play, our doubts about our identities amidst the flux of
roles, and thus about anxieties of authenticity.
These topics are as old as the hills, having been treated many times
by poets, novelists, moralists, philosophers, and theologians. God

5
 faking it

Himself seems to worry about these kinds of disorienting moments,

long before He ever felt it necessary to split into Father and Son
and watch Himself perform. When Moses asks God what name he
(Moses) should give the people as his warrant for a claim to lead
them, God tells him to say to them that “I am who I am” sent him
(Exod. 3.14). God is playing games with His name, giving it as a
kind of riddle, a riddle that suggests that He, not He mind you,
has absolutely no anxieties about His unity of being, of being fully
immersed in Who He Is. No anxieties of faking it for Him. He, by
fiat, is One unified self. But the fiat shows Him protesting too much,
for the refusal to fix His name may be because He cannot get a fix on
it either. He is posturing when He answers Moses, playing it up, for
He is deeply embattled in an only middlingly successful struggle for
the hearts and souls of a stiff-necked people who frequently disobey
His commandments and who prefer statues of calves to Him when
the going gets rough.
Though most English translations of the Bible prefer the present
tense, the Hebrew of God’s answer supports equally the future tense –
“I will be who I will be” – which results in a dramatic shift in meaning
as to the kind of character God is claiming to be. “I will be who I
will be” presents us with a God who takes His mightiness to be
manifested most in arbitrariness, and moreover in a particular type
of arbitrariness about His own identity and continuity of character,
claiming for Himself an infinite right and power to be a shape-shifter,
that He Is Never What He Appears To Be, all signs and wonders,
masks and veils. The future tense seems better to accord also with
the riddling way of naming Himself.
Shape-shifting and name changes: deeply anxious about his iden-
tity and role, Saul becomes Paul; and Augustine claims for himself a
wholesale change from false to true, but he is so vain of his anxiety
as not to be anxious at all. For recognizable proto-modern anxiety –
I skip over many a fearful epic warrior who covered his fear with
bravado and, for the moment, ignore Jesus, wondering about his
own full immersion into his role in Gethsemane – there is Hamlet,
the grandest of poster boys for feeling that he is faking it. I am drawn
to Hamlet too because his worries about roles and feelings of falsity

6
 introduction

or inadequacy take place in the context of revenge, my scholarly

fixation.2 It might be the case that the avenger is the most dramatic
of all roles,3 the lead role, a role God is eager to reserve to Himself –
vengeance is mine – and what is drama but Faking It, putting on
shows, enacting reality, so that the word for the doer of a deed and
the word for a theatrical performer mimicking a deed merge and are
the same: actor.
This book is possibly best seen as a quasi-novel, “quasi” because
it has no conventional plot other than the one every book has of
“how many more pages to go” and only the vaguest sense of char-
acterization except for the narrator’s voice with its stream of self-
consciousness. Don’t think me paranoid either; most of my life is
spent in sluglike unity of soul, pleased to be drinking a beer, lost in
a hockey game on TV (liquid bread and virtual circuses). I honestly
believe myself to be a fairly reasonable example of l’homme moyen
sensual, forgetting for the moment that no American l’homme moyen
would use that phrase to claim he is Joe Average or the man on the
street.4
This is a book about moments that spike out of the much-to-be-
admired ho-humness of daily life. These moments invite Comedy
to attend, though Tragedy sometimes crashes the party. Fakery and
comedy go hand in hand, says Emerson: “The essence . . . of all com-
edy, seems to be . . . a non-performance of what is pretended to be
performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of
performance.”5 Sounds good, but it is not true of all comedy. The
comic does just fine with brute miserable unadorned reality, with
stripping veils and masks as well as donning them; in fact, if we sub-
stituted the word “tragedy,” or Hamlet, for “comedy” in Emerson’s
quote it would work about as well. No genre escapes posing, masking
and veiling, and anxieties about authenticity. Ask Hamlet, Othello,
or Odysseus. In short, the risk of my faking it is considerably less
likely in the lighter moments that follow than in heavier discussions
maintaining the dignities and forms of academic disputation.

Th e t e r r a i n o f fa k i n g i t is vast. Virtually all social interac-

tion and much psychic life lie within its bounds. The path I follow is

7
 faking it

not linear, for the goal is not a particular end point of an argument or
a thesis but a descriptive travelogue that intends to give the traveler
a feel for, an expansive familiarity with, the custom of the country.
Some of the views are scenic, others will make us lament the lot of the
natives, but the pictures are all identifiably about some aspect borne
by the notion of “faking it,” as we employ that term colloquially.
At the beginning of William Langland’s Piers Plowman, Will, the
narrator, has a vision of a fair field full of folk going about their
chicanery and hypocritical fourteenth-century existences; the William
who narrates Faking It offers a twenty-first-century revisitation of
that vision: a world of posing and shams, anxieties of exposure, and
a fear that the genuine may be just another sham whose cover is too
tough to be blown. The first stop is a logical one: the vice of hypocrisy.
The next three chapters show how falseness and fakery lie at the heart
of many of the nice things we say and do, and how inextricably vice
and virtue are bound together in their eternal pas de deux and not
necessarily in a bad way.

8
 two

Hypocrisy and Jesus

Faking it is a domain not completely congruent with the vice

of hypocrisy, though there is so much overlap that we must face
hypocrisy at the outset. Not all hypocrites experience the anxieties at
the core of the faking it syndrome. And not all types of faking it raise
a serious issue of hypocrisy. I am not a hypocrite, unless most teachers
are, for pretending to find interesting what is dull, or for engaging in
the various falsenesses that constitute cajolery. Nor am I a hypocrite
for putting on a somber face at the news of the untimely death of a
person I didn’t especially care for. Says Trollope: “Will anyone dare
to call this hypocrisy? If it be so called, who in the world is not a
hypocrite? Where is the man or woman who has not a special face
for sorrow before company? The man or woman who has no such
face would at once be accused of heartless impropriety.”1 Were we to
blame the mere donning of a role that our hearts weren’t totally into
as hypocrisy, we would be hypocrites all the time, except perhaps
when asleep.
Even in sleep there is a trace of role-playing, of self-monitoring so
as to maintain certain proprieties and a sense of responsibility, though
not enough to give rise to hypocrisies.2 Thus I do not wet the bed,
nor roll over and smother the toddlers who are sleeping there too,
nor fall out of it, nor face toward the door, where I still expect to see
those dead twin girls from The Shining come waltzing in. Contrast
the care that you take to sleep inoffensively with that of the man
(they are always men) next to you on the airplane whose head lolls
over onto your shoulder as he snores, snorts, drools, who awakens as
the plane lands with no awareness of offenses given nor received, as
when you finally overcame reticence and delivered jabs and shoves in

9
 faking it

desperate disgust to no avail. I never cease to be amazed that people

are either so cavalier about their dignity, or else wrongly confident
of their ability to self-monitor while sleeping, that they could be so
daring as to let themselves fall asleep in public spaces.
The feeling of faking it forces upon us a recognition of a split
between something that we flatter ourselves is our “true” self and the
role we are playing. More modestly, it is the feeling of our incomplete
immersion in the role, with impious thoughts intruding about the
role. Sometimes, it is merely a vague sense of dislocation that takes
the form of worrying where we are amidst all the roles we must play:
I worry about who I am; therefore, I guess, I am. Anxieties about
faking it seem a necessary and mostly unpleasant byproduct of the
fact that we must play roles, some of which come easier than others
and do not necessarily involve us in any kind of moral failure; yet
even these manage to give rise to social and psychological discomfort
and disorientation.
In contrast, hypocrisy, at least by one account, though often in-
fecting certain roles, is less about role than the propriety of motives
you bring to the role. The fear that you may be a hypocrite may not
even mean that your motive is bad, only that it is not the perfect one;
or that you are unsure of your motives and fear they are a mix of
good and not so good; or that you simply cannot get at what your
motives are but suspect the worst. And when are you to make your
most informed judgment about what your motives are, anyway? In
the heat of the moment? Upon reflection that night? By observing
what others think your motives to have been and then adopting their
views as your own? Or by reexaminations and reconstructions done
years later via memory?
We can be hypocrites and know that we are. Judith Shklar de-
scribes such a one as a “naı̈ve hypocrite” who “hides acts and beliefs
he knows to be wrong” and may even suffer a guilty conscience.3 Or
we can be what she calls the “new hypocrite,” who thinks himself a
paragon of virtue. The new hypocrite does not feel himself to be fak-
ing anything; he may be blithely or smugly delighted with the role he
has assumed, experiencing himself as sincerely what he is purporting
to be, but be culpably deluded as to the sincerity of his sincerity.4

10
 hypocrisy and jesus

In Shklar’s view he “simply adjusts his conscience by ascribing no-

ble, disinterested, and altruistic intentions to all his behavior.” The
naı̈ve hypocrite is a conscious deceiver; the new hypocrite a seamless
self-deceiver.

Ostentatious Alms
Hypocrisy comes in all sizes and shapes, and I am not about to spell
them all out.5 I will organize the discussion around Jesus’ use of the
term. First:

Beware of practicing your piety before men in order to be seen by

them; for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in
heaven. Thus, when you give alms, sound no trumpet before you,
as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they
may be praised by men. Truly, I say to you, they have received their
reward. But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know
what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be in secret;
and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. And when you
pray, you must not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand
and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may
be seen by men.”
(Matt. 6.1–5)

In this theory of hypocrisy, it is not the hypocrite’s deed but his

less than virtuous intention that is faulted.6 The paupers still get their
alms either way. The hypocrite’s show of virtue does not come cheap;
the less than pious motive of desiring public glory for his pious giving
may even prompt him to give more than if he gave secretly. I doubt
paupers want to see this kind of hypocrisy driven from the face of the
earth. From the paupers’ point of view, it may be less psychologically
demanding to be an insignificant prop in the giver’s pageant designed
to impress his social equals. Shows of gratitude may not even be
required in the paupers’ script; their job is to crowd close and then
scramble and fall to fighting amongst themselves for the scattered
coins. But to receive from a nonhypocritical almsgiver secretly will
exact a more stringent recompense in the form of a convincing show
of gratefulness.7

11
 faking it

Each of the two examples Jesus gives – ostentatious alms and pub-
lic prayers – presents a different issue. The alms do not, it seems, help
the soul of the giver, yet they are of considerable use to the bodies
of the recipients. But the prayers said for the purpose of impressing
people with piety, unlike the alms that help the poor, are apparently
useful to no one. Jesus elsewhere is explicit about it: “You hypocrites!
Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, when he said: ‘This people honors
me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they
worship me . . .’ ” (Matt. 15.7–9; Mark 7.6–7). I wonder, however,
whether God doesn’t credit these hypocritical prayers to a certain
degree. From His perspective they are better than no prayers at all.
Hypocrisy is not apostasy; the hypocrite may not be honoring God
with his prayers, but he is honoring those who believe that honoring
God with prayer is a good thing. He is paying some kind of homage
to a social and religious order that believes in the virtue of prayer.
Jesus is well aware that it is no easy matter to keep your mind
free of the reputational and other advantages gained by doing good
deeds. He thus counsels self-deception: keep the left hand ignorant of
what the right is doing. But how do you blind yourself to the honor
that comes from good deeds or from a reputation for piety? How
can giving in secret, as Jesus urges, keep you from feeling the pride
of eschewing public recognition? If you insist that the pauper keep
quiet, might you not mistrust your motives for so insisting? It will
be considerably easier on your purse if he keeps his counsel about
where he is getting his goodies. And if the pauper keeps your secret,
does that mean you have chosen to give to an unworthy beggar who
himself lacks sufficient generosity to share his secret with other needy
folk? Is your generosity thus working to decrease rather than increase
the amount of generosity in the world? Yet if you think it a good idea
that word about your generosity gets out in a discreet fashion so that
other paupers can benefit, can you trust that you will not delight in
the fact that you now have a reputation for genuine unhypocritical
generosity? Or do you fear you still may be letting Jesus down, that
your left hand was peeking?8
Jesus knows he is not asking for something easy to achieve if the
right motive does not come naturally in the first place. He gives

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 hypocrisy and jesus

no guidance as to how to make the left hand blind to the actions

of the right. One can give a conscious command to certain thoughts
to descend into the unconscious, but then the very command that
orders the descent will also have to descend and erase itself in the
process of carrying out its orders. OK, left hand, do not dare look at
what right hand is doing, and forget I ever told you not to look so that
you will not suspect the right hand is up to anything suspicious.9 And
forget I told you to forget, and so on ad infinitum. Later in the same
chapter Jesus backs off the command to self-deceive, preferring small
pious deceptions of others. Do not, he says, fast like the hypocrites
who disfigure their faces and put on a good show. Fast in secret and
in public look as if you are not fasting, be clean and neat, anointed
and washed (Matt. 6.16–18).

Motes and Beams

Jesus’ second kind of hypocrisy involves blaming others when you
yourself are blameworthy:

How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of
your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite,
first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly
to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.
(Matt. 7.4–5)

Pardon the Revised Standard Version with its logs and specks, rather
than the King James with its motes and beams. The latter is unfor-
tunately more likely to befuddle the modern reader as to why Jesus
would be so uncharitable to a twinkle in your eye, to say nothing of
a whole fortification system in the eye of the other.
In the first type of hypocrisy Jesus counseled self-deception: com-
partmentalize your knowledge so that half of you does not know what
the other half is doing. In the case of specks and logs he is arguing
against self-deception, albeit of a different sort. We deceive ourselves
incessantly, flattering ourselves as to our virtues and blinding our-
selves to our faults, while at the same time fancying ourselves to be
ever so astute about the faults of others.10 Jesus is not addressing here

13
 faking it

the hypocrisy of blaming others for sins we know we ourselves are

guilty of but will not confess to; this is not the case of casting stones
at the adulteress when we too are adulterers.11 The log/speck image
focuses more narrowly on how our partiality to ourselves fouls up
our judgments about the moral merit of others. The hypocrisy here is
unconscious and does not give rise to anxieties about faking it; your
motives may not be bad, it is just that cognitive bias prevents you
from getting a disinterested view of the truth. You fall victim to a
false but sincere belief that you are seeing the world objectively and
seeing it whole.12
There is another aspect to the blindness – its mutuality: the other
person whose specks you are magnifying is doing the same to you,
but there is good reason to believe he is not magnifying your faults to
the same extent that you are understating them. La Rochefoucauld
pinpoints the phenomenon with the observation that somewhere not
quite in the middle lies the truth: “Our enemies get closer to the truth
in their judgments of us than we get ourselves” (M 458).13 We are
not inventing faults in our enemies; they really are there. True, our
self-love and self-interest lead us to exaggerate them, but we are con-
siderably more trustworthy in our negative judgments of others than
we are in our positive judgments of ourselves. The entire psychother-
apeutic industry is built on the supposition that other people are often
in a much better position to read our inner states than we are, the
belief being that even the obscuration wrought on the therapist’s vi-
sion by his desire for lucre and by his not being inside our heads is
not as distorting as the mayhem self-love wreaks on our ability to see
ourselves very clearly.14

Stoning Adulterers

In contrast to the mote/beam problem, the hypocrisy of casting

stones at the adulteress when you yourself are an undiscovered adul-
terer is conscious hypocrisy. (Jesus does not call this person a hyp-
ocrite, but we do.) You are engaging in a knowingly false pretense
regarding your true legal and moral condition, and you are especially
culpable because one suspects that your concern to conceal your own

14
 hypocrisy and jesus

sin may be driving you to be not very particular as to the guilt or in-
nocence of the person you are stoning. But be careful not to be too
zealous a stoner, for the type who would seek to deflect suspicion from
his own guilt by aggressively hunting down similar sinners is himself
suspicious. Be somewhat reserved when you stone adulteresses.
It is not even clear that such conscious hypocrisy is morally worse
than the mote/beam situation of merely being blind to one’s own
faults. Take the ever-present anxiety regarding racism and accusa-
tions of it. Is the person who fears that deep down she might be a
racist, and aggressively blames others for their racism, worse than the
person who does not know he is one and blames others for theirs? The
academy is filled with the latter (I could a tale unfold . . . that would
harrow up thy soul), who sport giant I-beams protruding from their
eyes. The former, the person who fears her own racism, comes al-
most as a breath of fresh air. We can reasonably believe that her
blaming the speck in others’ eyes is, in part, a way of chastising her-
self. She is faking nothing. She hates racism in herself and in others,
and she knows that she is no less guilty than they; that she prefers
not to blame herself in the presence of others may only be because
the chances of such self-blame being read as sincere rather than as
a form of self-serving fakery are not very high. One would mistrust
such self-castigation as so much ingratiating herself with the victim
group, and also as trying to give herself a better warrant to blame
others.15 The truth is that there is almost no tasteful way to proceed
in this domain that does not subject one to doubts about posturing,
favor currying, and camp following.
To the cases of the person who is unaware of the beam in his own
eye and the adulterer who is painfully aware but casts stones anyway,
add this: suppose we have bad desires, but through force of will we
do not act on them. Do we then have a warrant to blame the lecher
for his lechery, or the glutton for his gluttony, without being called
a hypocrite when we are dying to do the same but use all the self-
command at our disposal to refrain? Perhaps our own bad desires
should incline us to be charitable to the person who gives way to his
bad desires. Yet all too frequently we are inclined to blame him with
special energy because of his having cashed in:

15
 faking it

Why dost thou lash that whore?

Strip thy own back; Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind
For which thou whip’st her.
Lear 4.6.161–163

Don’t we wonder whether our self-control is two parts cowardice –

the fear of getting caught and rendered ridiculous – and one small
part virtue? And what of those who have weak bad desires, or strong
ones but are physically impotent, or who are so unattractive that
opportunities for unchasteness are few and far between, captured
nicely thus in the fourteenth century by William Langland:

Ye have no more merit in mass ne in houres (prayers)

Than Malkyn (Maude) of hire maydenhood (virginity) that no
man desireth”?16

It is not unusual to find such people hinting, hypocritically, of their

own triumphs over temptation, faking the virtue of self-command
when they never had any seriously disobedient desires or were with-
out means of cashing in on the ones they might have had.
We tend not to be all that charitable to reprovers or rebukers of
others’ vices. We excuse parents because it is their job; so too teachers
and clergymen – though to a lesser extent – because rebuking also
comes with their role. But volunteer rebukers are not cut much slack.
They are so many tattletales or fun spoilers; we think of them as
officious meddlers motivated meanly by envy, or vainly by showing
off their virtue, hypocritical in the manner of the noisy almsgiver.
This may be why Jesus, after rebuking the glory-seeking almsgiver
and not quite unaware of the ironies of his own position, is soon
moved to rebuke rebukers by warning them to make sure they do
not have telephone poles stuck in their eyes, for the rebuker is asking
to be blamed as a hypocrite in both ways we have seen Jesus employ
the term.17

Hypocrisy and Formalism

Jesus also uses “hypocrite” as a hostile epithet to hurl at adherents of
certain formalistic practices, who are not as willing as he is to adopt

16
 hypocrisy and jesus

his more expansive readings of the Law. Thus when Jesus heals a
crippled woman,

the ruler of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had healed on

the Sabbath, said to the people, ‘There are six days on which work
ought to be done; come on those days and be healed, and not on
the Sabbath day.’ Then the Lord answered him, ‘You hypocrites!
Does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his ass from the
manger, and lead it away to water it? And ought not this woman,
a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen years, be
loosed from this bond on the Sabbath day?’ As he said this, all his
adversaries were put to shame; and all the people rejoiced at all the
glorious things that were done by him.
(Luke 13.14–17)18

The ruler of the synagogue may have given up too easily, or Jesus
was better at making sure he argued the case before a friendly au-
dience. The woman had been crippled for eighteen years; she could
have waited until Sunday. Or if I am being too cavalier about her
suffering, then the ruler of the synagogue might have emphasized
that Jesus do his healing a day earlier, on Friday; otherwise Sunday
would be fine. There is some suspicion as to Jesus’ motives; he wants
to make a point not about healing, but about healing on the Sabbath.
The woman’s sufferings are not his chief interest; they take a back
seat to his desire to test the Law. He cannot really complain that those
who adhere to the customary understandings of Sabbath observance
should object; that is precisely what he wanted them to do. Nor is the
animal analogy apt, for there is no glory in feeding and watering an-
imals on the Sabbath, but plenty in healing the sick.19 And Sabbath
work prohibitions were never understood to include not eating or
not feeding those who could not feed themselves. You can’t make the
animals work on the Sabbath, but you can feed them within the rules
of Sabbath observance no less than you can set food out for humans.
There may be crazed amounts of fussiness and persnicketyness in
the rabbinic rules as to what is work and what not, but there is no
hypocrisy. If anything, the vice in the rules is the obsessive concern
to get it exactly right. The problem is one of having to draw the line
somewhere when you make a rule, and the rule that distinguishes

17
 faking it

between feeding animals and healing non–life-threatening disorders

is hardly irrational. This is not a case, which Jesus seems to want
to make it, of saying one thing and doing another that exposes the
Sabbath work rules as so much hypocrisy. If there is any hypocrisy it
may indeed be that of Jesus, who cannot see the beam in his own eye
and who is doing pious deeds (healing) for less than pious motives
(political advantage and glory). His left hand may be peeking.
It is not as if Jesus would not have an answer to such a charge
of hypocrisy. He is a teacher, a moral and religious teacher, and the
techniques teachers use involve them in testing appearances, putting
on shows, shocking their students, forcing them out of complacen-
cies, playing devil’s advocate, teasing, conning, insinuating, pleading,
feeding, entertaining, faking, and, surely, testing. To test Jesus’ good
faith one would have to suppose that he would equally support any-
one else healing on the Sabbath: that would get any suspicions of
his own self-promotion out of the picture and would focus the argu-
ment on the proper interpretation of the Law and the status of ritual
observance.20
The terrain of religious observance is the ground upon which
hypocrisy first grows. Well into the early modern period, hypocrisy
is understood to be a vice of false piety, and accusations of it played
a major role in battles between letter and spirit, form and substance,
inner and outer forms of devotion. Hypocrites were those who pre-
ferred letter to spirit but could equally be those who feigned spirit to
avoid the harsh compliance with the letter of ritual forms. In other
words, a charismatic Protestant could be as much a hypocrite as a
Catholic, though in Jesus’ view hypocrites were more likely to be
sticklers for form.
Ritual is especially problematic, because in much ritual the form is
the substance, as in eating fish on Friday or, among Jews, of obeying
Sabbath and purity rules. It is about obedience and conformance.
Just do it, in other words. But that knowledge is never quite suf-
ficient to assuage anxieties about the mental state that is properly
to accompany the observance of the rules. What motives are safe
from hypocrisy? Does Jesus mean to suggest that rote, automatic
observance of such ritual acts and prohibitions is hypocrisy, merely

18
 hypocrisy and jesus

because they have become habit and custom?21 Or that because not
doing them would bring blame? Or that the doing of them would
bring approbation?
Subject to some major anxieties I mean to expose in a later chapter,
one might argue that the function, if not the purpose, of successful
ritual is to finesse the issue of motives. The point of ritual is to have
as an acceptable motive nothing more elaborate than “that’s what
we do.” And that is satisfying in itself.

19
 three

Antihypocrisy: Looking Bad in Order

to Be Good

“Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue,” says La

Rochefoucauld (M 218). Hypocrisy is a parasite, operating by mim-
icking the attractiveness of virtue, appropriating its rewards. Most
other vices are more particularly associated with specific traits and
feed and sustain themselves. Vices such as avarice and fractiousness
are not parasitical on their opposing virtues: generosity and amia-
bility. Other vices exist in a kind of symbiosis with their opposing
virtue, but parasitism is not at its essence, as it is with hypocrisy.
Thus lust and gluttony charge their batteries by occasional regimens
of temperance and abstinence. The glutton and the lecher may self-
servingly think their abstinence is virtuous; they may sincerely believe
themselves to be turning over new leaves, but by the time they are
turning over the hundredth new leaf surely they must know that their
attempts at virtue are only so much foreplay to their vice, an enhanc-
ing of its deliciousness.

Of Hairshirts

Once people suspect hypocrisy, many start to mistrust all appearances

of virtue as so much glory seeking and shamming. Montaigne goes so
far as to claim that virtuous deeds done openly are ever more compro-
mised the grander they are: “The more glittering the deed the more
I subtract from its moral worth, because of the suspicion aroused
in me that it was exposed more for glitter than for goodness.”1 Be-
cause virtue looks good, it looks bad. What are the virtuous to do?
Pretend to vice? In fact this antihypocrisy strategy is often tried –
recall that Jesus counsels it with regard to fasting: pretend that you

20
 antihypocrisy

are not fasting when you are (Matt. 6.16–18) – and it immediately
gives rise to its own styles of hypocrisy, vanity, and playing at virtue.
In one of Mark Twain’s burlesques of Heaven we find Sir Richard
Duffer, a butcher from Hoboken who died with a carefully cultivated
reputation for meanness; he was awarded a baronetcy in Heaven for
having secretly furnished the homes of “honest square people out
of work” with meat.2 Take the more famous cases of St. Thomas
à Becket and St. Thomas More, who secretly wore itchy hairshirts
underneath their sumptuous robes to punish themselves for the vanity
of their rich clothing and high office. Better to appear completely
given over to unapologetic luxury than to appear virtuously dressed
in unostentatious habit and be suspected of ostentatious piety. Yet it is
hard not to suspect Becket and More of smirking to themselves, vain
of their hairshirt secret, or congratulating themselves on the brilliance
of a move that turns their showy sumptuousness into fake showy
sumptuousness, all to get around the stricture against trumpeting
one’s virtue.3
Similarly, it is hard not to imagine the simpler Richard Duffer
undertaking considerable extra labor to keep his generosity secret.
We can see him delighting in his reputation for meanness, precisely
because it is false, taking no small pleasure in a smug contempt for
those fools who fall for his perfectly engineered deception, who are so
wrong in their opinion of him. The townspeople’s false blame purifies
his virtue and shoots him straight to Heaven, at least according to
this theory of obsessive hypocrisy avoidance.
There are certain false fronts that are not part of the niceties of
politeness and decorum but instead turn the people who are their
objects into fools: this is the sin of Frank Churchill in Emma, who by
keeping his engagement to Jane Fairfax secret is assumed by others,
namely Emma, to be available for flirtation. The unknowing are thus
entrapped into humiliating themselves by fancying they are being
attended to by Frank in ways they are not. When the sham is revealed
people resent it, and with good reason. It is not likely that the denizens
of Hoboken who disliked the falsely mean butcher will feel much
more charitable toward him once his secret is revealed. No one likes
being made a fool of, even (or especially?) in the interests of someone

21
 faking it

else’s trip to Heaven. It is not as if Duffer’s strategy doesn’t impose

costs on the unwitting others; they have had the vice of censoriousness
thrust upon them against their will.
With Becket and More, two very sophisticated actors, the sus-
picion of hypocritical antihypocrisy is stronger. They are not being
vain of their virtue in the vulgar sense of parading holiness about,
literally trumpeting it, but instead are being vain of their virtue for
their internal audience, for the benefits accruing to their self-esteem.4
Their secret self-mortification, however, eventually gets noticed. That
is why I can write about it. When Becket died it was apparent when
they stripped him, and we know of More’s too. They, I suppose, knew
we would know, for by playing to their internal audience they were
also, just maybe, playing to a future earthly audience in addition to
the one in Heaven.5
Wearing a hairshirt, even in secret, is ostentatious in a way that
other, less lurid kinds of devotion are not, especially back then, when
the competition in matters of holiness was a political as well as a
social and religious issue.6 Even if the motives for wearing hairshirts
for mortifiers of the flesh such as Becket and More were untainted
by competitiveness or glorying, they would know that others might
suspect that their motives were tinged with saintly ambition. They
surely struggled with incessant temptation and could not always keep
the pride of finery and high office at bay. The hairshirt is a testimony
to that. But did they not also indulge in some self-satisfaction in
knowing they were enduring itching silently, ever so patiently, while
suffering the additional punishment of being blamed for their pride
of office?
Unless, that is, hairshirts had already become a fad and you could
not trust that the people you encountered were not also wearing one.
Various ways of mortifying the flesh followed the rules of fashion-
ability; in the early centuries of Christianity, stylites – pole sitters –
were in vogue; in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries pus drinking
had its day.7 One can imagine a group of wags, all with hairshirts
under their brocaded doublets, querying in their cups: tell me Philip,
where do you go for your hairshirts? Do you order the lice separately?

22
 antihypocrisy

It might be that the real cross to bear was not the hairshirt but the
suspicion, your own as well as that of others, that you were thought
vain no matter how hard you tried not to be. And for all your pride
in your self-mortification, in the end you fear that the actual suffering
too is a sham. If the hairshirt was hard to bear at first, it gets easier
with time, and eventually you may even come to find it pleasurable.
As Trollope says of Mrs. Prime: “Nice things aggravated her spirits
and made her fretful . . . She liked the bread to be stale . . . She was
approaching that stage of discipline at which ashes become pleasant
eating, and sackcloth is grateful to the skin. The self-indulgences of
the saints in this respect often exceed anything that is done by the
sinners.”8
In such a moral regime anxieties regarding the purity of motive
behind otherwise virtuous-looking deeds arise with aggressive insis-
tence. You become anxious about doing good; you start to question
your motives. Even when you satisfy yourself on that score you are
not sure that others will not see you as motivated by vanity. Should
you employ Duffer’s or Becket’s strategy of playing the part of a sin-
ner so as to avoid the imputation of being vain of your virtue, you
hardly feel yourself more authentically and purely virtuous. Instead
you worry that the very charade of hiding your virtue has become en-
tirely too self-conscious to be authentic; your last hope is that all your
self-torturing and labor will themselves serve as sufficient atonement
for whatever imperfections may stain your motives. Or, as in the case
of Benjamin Franklin, you throw in the towel on matters of humility:
“For even if I could conceive that I had compleatly overcome [pride],
I should probably be proud of my Humility.”9
That you find yourself canonized doesn’t settle the matter either,
for it will be suspected that you were angling for that honor, especially
if, as in Becket’s and More’s cases, you made sure you were martyred.
There is as much earthly (though posthumous) as heavenly glory in
sainthood, rivaling in every way the glory of conventional military
heroes who die in battle. The old Vikings made no bones about it:
posthumous earthly glory was the best we could hope for, a kind of
Heaven on Earth:

23
 faking it

Cattle die, kinsmen die;

You yourself shall die just like them;
But words of praise for him
Who does great deeds never die.10

Non–Self-Tormenting Virtue? Et in Arcadia Ego

Not all moralists in the Christian world were so hard on vanity. Some
began to celebrate it for all the good consequences that flow from it.
What’s wrong with wanting to look good, especially if it means you
have to cultivate virtues to do so?11 People still, thank God, went
on being vain of their virtue; others tricked themselves in the way
Jesus suggested they do, and still others in a slightly different style
saw virtue as their duty and were virtuous because duty demanded
it. Yet others were simply virtuous, good because they were good,
and, yes, they knew they might be praised for being good. But they,
except perhaps when challenged by some misanthropic moralist, did
not torture themselves about it. They were confident that they were
primarily motivated to do good because they were disposed to do so,
and not for the approbation of others, though they might not mind
that they got it.12
But is our belief that such simply virtuous souls exist motivated
in some small way by wishful thinking? We want to believe in the
fantasy of innocent simplicity in which we do not suffer from what
Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin called “double thoughts,”13 his term
for that self-torturing and rather unfair questioning of our own good
motives. Did I really help that person out of generosity of spirit, or
because I would feel guilty if I didn’t, or because some good-looking
person was watching and would think me something special and fall
in love with me, or because I could finally show Miss Hoeffs, my
junior English teacher – who said I would never amount to anything
and gave me a D to help her prophecy come true – that she had been
wrong about me? How do I keep the thoughts of a nice inheritance
and life insurance proceeds from intruding on what I thought was my
sincere, gut-wrenching grief? Can I convince myself that the reason I
don’t carry much life insurance is that I want to make sure my family

24
 antihypocrisy

doesn’t feel guilt for reveling in the proceeds and can really sincerely
miss me when I am dead and gone?
How to escape such miserable thoughts! Thus the fashion of the
pastoral, with its central theme that in Arcadia the shepherds were
uncomplicatedly innocent and authentic in their desires and deeds; or
the cult of children; or the belief in the patient, humble peasant pure
in virtue, a belief that was quickly discounted because that virtuous
peasant never seemed to reside on your manor but in the next village,
or in literature as Chaucer’s plowman or poor parish priest.14 Why
weren’t those poor as meek and blessed as advertised?
The occasional vogue of the pastoral – Marie Antoinette dress-
ing up as a shepherdess at Versailles or suburban rich kids joining
hippie communes – speaks to the desperate need for the possibility
of unself-conscious virtue. The shepherd is conceived to be too sim-
ple to entertain the ironies of appearances and reality. But maybe
the shepherd has his own doubts: “Damn, I can’t seem to feel as
authentic as I’m supposed to. Am I just going through the motions
because some jaded aristocrat expects me to sport innocently with so
many Daphnes and Amaryllises in the shade? Am I motivated in part
by putting on a show for these rich guys who come around during
the spring and paint me? These people don’t understand the moral
paradoxes of shepherding and the complexity of maintaining a life
of simplicity and authenticity. Being authentic is hard work. It takes
so much effort I have dropped into last place among my comrades in
sheep-stealing.”15
We know that when the sophisticated try their hand at shepherd-
ing they make a mess of it, as the failures of Brook Farm attest.16 The
rustics with whom they hobnobbed thought them phonies or merely
comical; and the sophisticated came to suspect each other of hypo-
critical posturing. Truth be told, actually living with those crude and
constantly bickering soulful shepherds had even fewer charms than
tea and crumpets in Concord. Adding drugs or gurus from India, as
in twentieth-century versions of Brook Farm, doesn’t seem to work
either. And when someone insists his new brand of the authentic life
really is working, we often mistrust his intelligence or sanity, as with
adherents of new age spirituality.

25
 faking it

If not shepherds, surely children must be full of innocent, uncom-

plex virtue: Dad, I missed you so much, did you bring me a present?
A Victorian girl, rather than call into question whether virtue could
survive the benefits of the publicity of it, wondered whether good-
ness itself could survive actually wanting to do good deeds. Part of
her problem flows from her definition of goodness; good deeds, in
her view, must be unpleasant. But as inadequate as we know that
definition to be, it is hardly an unrecognizable view of what children
and a more than a few adults take it to be:

If you wanted to do it, then it wasn’t goodness. Thus being kind

to a person you liked didn’t count at all, because you wanted to
do it; and being kind to a person you didn’t like (like poor Old
Betsy at Down) was no use either; because – as I thought then –
the person always knew perfectly well that you disliked them, and
so of course the kindness could not please them . . . Goodness never
made me feel nice afterwards. . . . [It] simply made me feel mean,
hypocritical and servile.17

Children are no more likely than shepherds to find virtue a simple

matter; what could be worse than being labeled a Goody Two-shoes?
It is not that their virtue is innocent, but that their vice is. Even that
is false, for they are the most charming and skillful of operators.

Putting Vanity to Good Use

By no means, as just noted, was everyone a rigorist, nor were all rig-
orists crabbed, joyless souls. Even St. Thomas Aquinas cuts hypocrisy
some slack. He rightly distinguishes between the lack of goodness and
the pretense of goodness. The person who intends bad things puts his
soul in much greater jeopardy than the person who merely wants to
look better than he is.18 There also arose a satirical aphoristic tra-
dition that took mischievous delight in exposing human virtue as so
much vanity. According to this tradition, virtue was nothing more
than the end result of our desire to look good to others and to our-
selves; it was an attractive and useful byproduct of our quest for es-
teem and self-esteem. To this end we engage in all kinds of deceptions,

26
 antihypocrisy

donning masks of virtue and using veils to cover our honest feelings,
and then disguising from ourselves our less than honorable decep-
tion of others by various tricks of self-duping; thus in the end we
honor virtue, not by being errant hypocrites, but by coming to be-
lieve that our hypocrisies are virtuous. And as long as our hypocrisy is
of the first type Jesus exposed – of being moved by the desire for being
known as virtuous for the sake of self-advancement, for honor’s sake –
the poor get their alms.
This kind of hypocrisy is very sociable. It cares greatly what people
think, and, for the most part, to be well thought of one must do good
deeds. It means having to be reasonably respectful of others, engaging
in small acts of civility, cultivating tact, sparing others the pain of too
much truth whose only virtue would be to hurt them needlessly and
feed your own vanity for being a tough truth teller. Though at times
you may actually feel like a hypocrite, that confers larger moral stakes
on most of these routine matters than they deserve.
Some took the argument about the benefits of our vanity one
step further; if the vanity of wanting to be thought good could pro-
duce good, then, it was both seriously and satirically argued – most
famously by Mandeville in the early eighteenth century, but quite
frequently in the century before him – that our plain old vices them-
selves produced good even if we took no care to gloss them over.
Forget about working to appear virtuous. Vices created demand in
the economy that prompted virtues (in others) of hard work and en-
terprise to meet them. The vanity of wanting sumptuous clothing and
a fancy equipage did an inadvertent good. Never mind giving alms for
suspect motives. Why, lordy-be, spending it on yourself was a form of
almsgiving; it was the virtue of trickle-down economics.19 No need
to waste energy being a hypocrite: vice is one kind of virtue, though
surely Mandeville’s argument about the virtue of vice is its own form
of hypocrisy; it provides shameless spendthrifts and gluttons a con-
venient rationalization for why it is good to be as disgusting as they
are.
The usual hypocrisy of false good appearances thus gives way to a
new hypocrisy of shameless redescriptions of undisguised vice as gen-
erators of virtue, prompting in these new, complacent sinners what

27
 faking it

the sixteenth century called the sin of security: namely, a culpable

sense of self-satisfaction, of invulnerability, of spiritual and moral
obtuseness. As Thomas Nashe, writing in the late sixteenth century,
beautifully puts it: security is “forgetting mortalitie; it is a kind of
Alchymical quintessensing of a heaven out of earth.”20
That however removes us from faking it to the in-your-face pur-
suit of one’s own desires and interest: errant, undisguised egoism. But
as Jon Elster and others have pointed out, and Mandeville notwith-
standing, people were ashamed to avow bad or selfish motives openly.
In Adam Smith’s words, “Though it may be true . . . that every indi-
vidual, in his own breast, naturally prefers himself to all mankind,
yet he dares not look mankind in the face, and avow that he acts
according to this principle.”21 People would claim fake virtuous mo-
tives, and then, by mechanisms Elster seeks to disentangle, magically
generate self-deceptions that succeeded in transmuting their initial
selfishness into more virtuous motives.22 If you want to appear vir-
tuous to others (and to yourself, too) you might actually have to do
more than entertain a few pious thoughts and paste a perpetual look
of pitying concern on your face. You might actually have to do some
deeds that qualify as good. And lo, by hook or crook, with the very
help of that pasted look, you end up doing good deeds with a proper
motive, having fooled yourself into goodness.
It was a simpler matter for the people sounding trumpets while giv-
ing alms who so annoyed Jesus; they were not trying to pretend their
almsgiving was not also glory seeking. They had no anxiety about
imperfect motives because to them there was nothing wrong with
glorying. Faking different motives than the ones you have becomes
necessary only once glorying gets a bad name. The Greeks held the
desire for honor to be a noble motive, as did many an honor-driven
culture. Obviously the Jews trumpeting their almsgiving felt there
was nothing to be ashamed of in openly professing a desire to win
praise for displays of generosity. Of course you were in it for honor;
what better motive could there be worth owning up to that doesn’t
sound presumptuous or self-satisfied or hypocritical to allege? Per-
haps the motive could be simply obeying the Law, though that would
be susceptible to a charge of being falsely modest. But Jesus offers

28
 antihypocrisy

the motive of salvation, heavenly glory for an eternity. How isn’t that
the ne plus ultra of glory seeking?
I cannot help suspecting that the claim Jesus is making is as much
an aesthetic one as a moral one. He dislikes the aggressive posturing:
too noisy, too much trumpeting and chest thumping. Jesus prefers
the look of modesty, the decorousness of private almsgiving rather
than public spectacle. To obtain a more tasteful form of almsgiving
he is willing to offer a bribe: a reward from the Father, much better,
because less evanescent, he claims, than vain earthly glory. Such an
open offer of a quid pro quo is itself, however, rather vulgar. Could
Jesus possibly believe the reward, the payoff of heavenly bliss, should
be the motive for giving alms?23 If so, almsgiving becomes no less
selfish than it was when it was being trumpeted about. This must
be why Jesus counseled keeping the left hand ignorant of the right
hand’s activities. The thing to be hidden from yourself is not just the
knowledge that your virtue will get you praised in the here and now
but the reward the Father is holding in escrow for you. I hope that
that is what Jesus means, for I cannot shake the belief that the truly
virtuous soul, one I would want to gain a Heaven worthy of housing
him, would be moved primarily by an honest desire to help a person
in need. He saw something that needed to be done and he did it.24
Neither did Calvinism’s doctrine of predestined salvation and
damnation resolve the problem of double thoughts, those worries
about the quality of one’s motives. In Calvin’s view you had already
been paid off in either gold or lead long before you did your good
deed – long before you were born, in fact – but that did not prevent
you from worrying about the moral status of your motives for do-
ing good. Wouldn’t a person predestined for salvation do good deeds
with the purest of motives? Could a soul predestined for Heaven be
so corrupt as to want praise for his virtue or for wanting to have the
reputation as one predestined for salvation?25 Mightn’t your less than
perfect motive be, God forbid, a sign of your predestined damnation?
We are conflicted, but not always. Sometimes we just do good and
don’t worry that it may be good business to do so. Yet at other times,
in a plague of self-conscious scrupulosity, we doubt our motives and
desperately want to have our doubts assuaged. We may find some

29
 faking it

solace before the next inevitable attack of scruples in amiable winks at

our endless vanity, especially when they come from a soul as perfectly
good as David Hume’s:26

It has been found, that the virtuous are far from being indifferent
to praise; and therefore they have been represented as a set of
vainglorious men, who had nothing in view but the applauses of
others. But this also is a fallacy. It is very unjust in the world, when
they find any tincture of vanity in a laudable action, to depreciate it
upon that account, or ascribe it entirely to that motive . . . Vanity is
so closely allied to virtue, and to love the fame of laudable actions
approaches so near the love of laudable actions for their own sake,
that these passions are more capable of mixture, than any other
kinds of affection; and it is almost impossible to have the latter
without some degree of the former . . . To love the glory of virtuous
deeds is a sure proof of the love of virtue.27

Next, consider that hypocrisy has an easier time suborning some

virtues than others. It unrelentingly harasses virtues such as piety
and sincerity, but some virtues develop pretty strong immunities to
hypocrisy. These immunities are of different kinds, and it is the job
of the next chapter to set the matter forth.

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 four

Virtues Naturally Immune to Hypocrisy

Hypocrisy, as has been noted, started its career in the area

of assumed piety. It was a matter of feigning holiness before it was
anything else. In the secular sphere everyone expected an endless
cycle of cons and deceptions, lies and cheats. Look at the world of
Chaucer or Langland or Ben Jonson, in which everyone is an operator,
everyone has a scam. That wasn’t hypocrisy by their understanding
except to the extent that assumed religiosity was part of the scam.
But once we extend hypocrisy to be a risk of all virtue we find that
it is drawn to some virtues more than others. I examine next the
intersection of hypocrisy, in the sense of the divorce between virtuous
intention and the virtuous appearance of our deeds, and three virtues:
courage, politeness, and self-command.

Courage and Faking It

Here is the bald statement: courage is not susceptible to Jesus’ first

kind of hypocrisy, the hypocrisy of the trumpeting almsgiver and
the ostentatiously pious. Consider this vignette, which represents a
rough amalgam of many accounts that appear in soldiers’ memoirs:
you have been ordered to charge the enemy position. You are scared
out of your wits, scared of dying, of being mutilated; but you are just
as scared of being seen as a coward, that you will curl up sobbing,
cringing, and sniveling, that you will befoul your pants. You also fear
that everyone can see your cowardly soul written on your face. You
want to get a nice safe wound and get carried to the rear. You swallow
your ration of rum; the order is given to charge, and, incredibly, you
charge, motivated partly by sheer conformity – everyone else is doing

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 faking it

it – partly out of terror of shame, partly out of fear of being left

behind alone, partly out of bewilderment, partly to get a reputation
for courage so that people will cut you some slack, and most of all
so that you will cut yourself some for being so damn scared. You
charge ahead, too scared, too confused by the noise and mayhem, to
have any real insight into your motives. Later you are written up for
a Military Cross or a Bronze Star.
Among all the motives that pushed you forward, not one of them
is prompted by the perfect prompting to virtue in Aristotle’s sense:
being courageous because you are disposed to do courageous deeds
by cultivating a disposition that seeks to do virtue for its own sake.
Yet you charged ahead. But you feel yourself a fake. What business
did you have getting a medal? Had they read your thoughts or felt
your fears they would have court-martialed you for your cowardly
mind and bowels. It can’t be true, you think, that a hero and a coward
have the same overpowering feeling of fear and confusion. You feel
a fraud; you mistrust your motives.
But you are not a fraud: courage, perhaps more than any other
virtue, has to be more accommodating to the inner states that mo-
tivate it. Most of us think of courage, even more than of temper-
ance and continence, as the virtue par excellence of self-command,
of overcoming contrary desires – not of not having bad desires. The
stakes are so much higher and important in facing death and dan-
ger or in avoiding mutilation and pain than in saying no to another
orgasm or piece of cheesecake. Yet no matter how reasonable the
desire to escape pain and death may be, that does not mean we
blame the coward less than the lecher or glutton for giving in to
the desire to scratch his itch. The sins of these seekers of pleasure
are comical, but the sins of the coward might get him lined up
before a firing squad and shot, or forever treated as an object of
contempt.
Courage is also a virtue that is properly motivated by the desire
to have a reputation for it. Are we going to call Hector, Achilles,
Beowulf, and others like them hypocrites for wanting to be known for
their courage, for being infinitely vain of their courage? Not to have
such a desire was to refuse to take the steps necessary for cultivating

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 virtues naturally immune to hypocrisy

the capacity to deliver when the crunch came. Honor societies knew
that. In them, modesty was suspect. Keeping modestly in the back-
ground looked more like excessive prudence, which was mistrusted
as so much cover for fearfulness.
So hard is it to be courageous that we are willing to let people
engage in all kinds of precommitment strategies to raise the costs to
themselves of failure if they fink out. We wink at most all the tricks of
self-deception they might employ to fool themselves into fearlessness,
and we still deem them courageous if they come through. We thus
understand why they make boasts and vows, why they drink them-
selves into confidence, why they work themselves into rages, why
they shame the coward. True, some people did have the option of not
boasting and vowing: those who had already proved unambiguously
their mettle or who were so big and strong that no one doubted they
could win any fight they got into. But most needed to buck themselves
up by whatever means necessary to feel they might actually have a
chance of delivering when the time came.
Courage is thus courage even if the doer of brave deeds trumpets
them about, or does them so that others will trumpet them about.
Courage is not like almsgiving and praying.1 We may prefer that
courage be motivated for the pure sake of the virtue, as it sometimes
is, but if we hold out for that we will get very little courage. We cannot
be so persnickety about motives when a person is knowingly risking
life and limb. Though courage is not immune to being faked, it is
often the case that faking legitimately qualifies as the real thing.2 Of
course, not everything goes. A person too stupid to perceive the risk,
or too insane to have any awareness of danger, is not courageous.
One must recognize the risk, even if that level of risk does not make
one fear.
A common sentiment expressed in war memoirs of combat sol-
diers, manifestly brave men, is that they felt themselves cowards de-
spite being cited for courage, felt they had faked it.3 They knew they
had done deeds that are commonly thought to take courage, but
these moral rigorists were hard, too hard, on themselves; they felt
more like cowards who were lucky that they had not been exposed
for their false seeming. They were not just being modest, though they

33
 faking it

were that too. They really were puzzled by the praiseworthiness of

what moved them to deliver.
Even in the case of bluffing, when you are trying to get out of a vi-
olent confrontation by feigning aggressiveness or fearlessness, when
you intend no courageous deeds whatsoever, fakery and courage con-
verge. You must make the other believe you will deliver, and that
raises the level of risk in your own world: the risk that you will fur-
ther provoke the other to run you down when you turn and run or,
worse, the risk that you will have to deliver if your threat fails to
work.4 Thus to increase your risks is itself a kind of courage. It takes
guts to fake it in a rough world.
Jesus asked that the right hand and left hand turn a blind eye
to each other; he counseled faking yourself out. How this was to
be accomplished he did not say. Over the centuries, fighting men
and armies have developed techniques designed to do just that. So
much of training is instilling techniques of tricking the mind into not
fearing. Drill, rum rations, shaming, exhortation speeches, boasting,
vowing, good luck talismans – all these are meant to distract you, to
delude you into optimism or into not thinking about the risk you are
running, or into separating your body from your fears if you cannot
get rid of your fears. A large part of military science might be reduced
to this: deceive both the enemy and yourself regarding your courage.5
How are you supposed to forget that you intentionally hood-
winked yourself, so that you will be able to believe that you have
conquered your fear and not that you are just pretending? It is the
same old issue: how can you fake yourself out intentionally? How
does the dupe not see through the con, given that the dupe and the
con man are the same person or at least occupying the same body?6
Not all the techniques are of the bootstrapping type: some – drill,
training – work by turning you into an automaton so that no matter
what your inner state your body will do what it has been ordered to
do by rote. Others replace one kind of fear with another: boasts and
vows increase your fear of the shame of not fulfilling them to balance
against the fear of death. Still others use chemicals that aid the mind
in its bootstrapping efforts. The optimistic energy provided by alco-
hol, for instance, has its own eraser built in to help you forget that

34
 virtues naturally immune to hypocrisy

you drank it in order to forget why you drank it, and also of not car-
ing very much even if you don’t forget where your newfound courage
has come from; you will take it any way you can get it. Much boot-
strapping makes great use of the emotions to obscure rationality: the
exhortation speech, the rebel yell, the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Except for congenital optimists, who need no rum to delude them-
selves into believing this is not their day to die, most of us need all
these techniques and more to find our courage, to fake ourselves out.
And, though imperfect, such courage is not, by reason of its imperfect
motivation, hypocritical.

Politeness
If courage is largely immune from hypocrisy, if because of the sheer
difficulty of being courageous we allow the courageous act to com-
pensate for or obviate its less than perfect motivation, that cannot be
our excuse for politeness. Politeness doesn’t need an excuse; fakery is
openly admitted to lie at the structural core of the virtue. Politeness is
immune to many forms of hypocrisy because a certain benign form of
hypocrisy is precisely its virtue. Thus politeness gets one of the very
few of Ambrose Bierce’s definitions that could almost be called sweet:
“the most acceptable form of hypocrisy.” An evocative eighteenth-
century definition – “Politeness may be defined a dextrous manage-
ment of our Words and Actions whereby we make other people have
better Opinion of us and themselves” – could serve equally well for
the vice of flattery as for the virtue of politeness.7 Dextrous manage-
ment indeed.
Politeness need not be so cynically construed. We could give it a
nicer spin by noting how, at relatively little cost, it saves people from
unnecessary pain in social encounters. It is a certain willingness to
disguise our true beliefs and engage in small flatteries, small pleas-
antries, and white lies. It is to pardon or ignore small annoyances
and inconveniences. It means having the tact to cover for the faux
pas of others or to state your own claims in ways that will not make
for discomfort. It means responding to the cues people give you to
reaffirm their self-esteem as regards variously their appearance, taste,

35
 faking it

general competence, and importance, despite your diverging opinion.

It means making a show of attention, veiling boredom, wearing a
mask that manifests amiability or routine concern for their concerns.
It means making the interaction safe for others, with the expectation
that they will return the favor.
By describing politeness in this manner I am loading it with a little
too much niceness and demanding more from it than it need deliver. I
have moved it in the direction of the more seriously grounded virtue of
graciousness. Graciousness makes its object believe it emanates from
a truly generous spirit, not from a merely polite one, from a spirit
gifted in making one feel welcome and at ease, especially in situations
in which you have reason to feel you are incurring a debt that may
not be completely dischargeable. Politeness always has something of
a ritualized predictability about it. That is why it works; it is not rare,
and it is usually not very difficult to manage. Politeness can be “mere”
politeness, and it can be cold, whereas graciousness cannot be cold
or “mere” without ceasing to be gracious. We count on politeness as
by right, whereas graciousness is by grace; it is more than we have
a right to. Not that graciousness can’t be faked, but that faking it is
such a demanding chore that only the truly gracious would have the
wherewithal to pass off a fake as the real thing.
Politeness keeps small-stakes events small stakes, nondescript en-
counters nondescript. A polite person does not pull an Icelandic saga
stunt and kill another guest who gets assigned the seat he wants. He
is committed to forgo revenge or to postpone it in the interests of
sparing those present an embarrassing scene. The redressive moves
that are allowed must preserve their deniability and must still em-
ploy the forms of politeness. We know the ways: by being “perfectly
polite,” namely, by calling attention to the unfeltness of the polite-
ness by exaggerating its formality; or by “begging to differ,” though
this takes careful management to make sure the aggression remains
passive and hence deniable. A third, raillery – pointed jesting that
entertains the company more than it unnerves them – actually works
against the grain of politeness. It is in fact a safety valve and a so-
cially acceptable revolt against the constraints of politeness. Raillery
allows for aggressiveness that is meant to be laughed off and provides

36
 virtues naturally immune to hypocrisy

a marked contrast to those perfectly polite jabs that are no laughing

matter; these latter send impulses that clench the jaw and thin the
lips.8
So much of politeness is by rote. You can be polite without great ex-
penditures of spirit, except in those scrambling emergencies in which
demands are made on your resources for tact and poise.9 But it isn’t
always easy to play it by rote. Why is it at times such a chore to tell
those white lies? Why is it not an uncommon experience to find that
the amount of effort it takes to be polite does not seem trivial, but
a true imposition, leading us to wish desperately that we could, as
Jane Austen would have it, draw back from “the toils of civility”?10
In those moments in which our politeness is being produced labori-
ously, it is hardly surprising that we are inclined to feel as if we are
faking it. In fact we want, subtly, to let the other person suspect we
are faking it. We want him to sense the pawing of our truthfulness at
the door of its cage.
Perhaps even more painful are the unwelcome appearances of the
feeling of faking it when we would much prefer to be lost in the
role of making polite conversation. Instead we experience a vague
dissociation of the kind I noted in the introduction. We see ourselves
in a critical way; our utterances sound especially inane, our facial
expressions feel unnatural. We fear that our very self-consciousness
about the superficiality of the polite performance will interfere with
the role we already worry we are botching; we struggle against the
urge to apologize for how badly we are playing it, the urge to beg
forgiveness for our especially inane polite inanities, for our general
awkwardness in merely being polite – you have to pardon me, I got
only three hours of sleep last night.
Our shows of politeness are not directed merely to the specific
person who is the object of them, nor to our inner self, nor to the wider
audience, but also to others who are not quite separated from our
identity, what Goffman calls members of our “team.” Team members
collude; they also pay for one another’s failures. Collusion among
friends and spouses is common fare, as when you show engagement
in a story you have heard your spouse tell a hundred times before but
that you also know is a pretty good story for those who have not yet

37
 faking it

heard it. The engagement may not even be feigned, for the interest of
the audience energizes you to reexperience your pleasure in the tale.
Suffering for the faults and failures of team members is sometimes
a simple matter of corporate liability or guilt by association, but it can
be more complex. I offer this homely example of my wife playing –
to borrow from Jane Austen again – Elinor to my Marianne, for
whom it was impossible “to say what she did not feel, however triv-
ial the occasion; and upon Elinor therefore the whole task of telling
lies, when politeness required it, always fell.”11 My wife feels that
part of her role in being associated with me requires her to engage
in what I feel are excessive gestures of politeness to compensate for
what she feels are my failures to meet the minimum standards of
inoffensiveness, whereas I view my “failures” in this regard as ef-
forts to compensate for what I feel are her excesses of politeness.
The more penetrating of our guests must suspect that her displays of
excited interest in their tedious tales or her sympathy for their petty
disappointments are partly to compensate for my having wandered
out to do the dishes in the midst of the conversation. Most are not
so penetrating, but those who are give her credit for caring to make
atonement for my failures.
It’s disgusting, she says to me later, that we fall into such predictable
gender roles: politeness feminine, failures of it – certain scripted fail-
ures to be sure – masculine. How can you write about this stuff, she
says, pick it apart in such tedious detail, and then get it all wrong in
the flesh, and not see how rude you were to Mrs. Z? That is more
domestic revelation than it is permissible here to indulge, except to
say that when I get the vacuum cleaner out while a guest is still seated
and tell her not to mind me but to please pick up her feet for just a
second so that I can get the inordinate number of crumbs she has
dropped, it is really only a function of my compulsive disorder. It has
nothing, I assure her, absolutely nothing, to do with my wanting her
to decamp.
If the demands of politeness can cause occasional anxiety among
homogeneous suburbanites, imagine what adding class, race, and
ethnic difference to the mix does. Big-time faking is on the menu.
How do we get our attempts at politeness understood as polite rather

38
 virtues naturally immune to hypocrisy

than as an offense? Should I use a lot of cuss words talking to this

working-class guy? Does it make any difference if I am pretty nat-
urally foul-mouthed anyway? If he is cussing, is that a sign of his
refusal to make any concessions to my class and education, or is he
too dim to know the rules, or is it his way of outmachoing me? Or
is it that he is engaging in that heavy male refusal to engage in the
niceties of feminized politeness, a refusal that is itself a form of manly
politeness? No, no, try not to talk about basketball with the black
guy, but then what if he brings it up? Is he doing that because he is
graciously conceding that that is all we might have in common? Or
is he parodying some role he expects I will expect him to play, thus
making a fool out of me? How is one to avoid self-consciousness in
this setting, when not faking it can itself be so easily construed as
fake?
Every time I talk to people with southern accents, I notice my vow-
els moving in their direction, without willing them in that direction
(as I notice my consonants moving in the direction of working-class
guys). I am not aware of consciously trying to mimic their accent; but
I am aware that trying or not, it just seems to happen by some over-
powering urge, perhaps fear, to show myself to be a real regular guy,
to indicate a willingness to meet halfway between my way of talking
and theirs. It is thus a bit cowardly. They may think it is mockery of
them, and it may contain some small element of that. Yet I do not
feel I am mocking them – rather the contrary. I am honoring them,
deferring to their way of talking. But will they read it as such? Is it
merely the infectious musicality of their way of talking? I sure don’t
hear them imitating my northern Wisconsin vowels. Even in the
phonological domain I am being outmuscled.
I struggle, out of a minimum of self-respect, to get back to my
own vowels, but they seem to elude me. I try to mimic the vowels of
a factory worker from Green Bay, which is pretty close to how the
real me talks, but they end up distorted by the Southern vowels still
wanting to form themselves. I seem to be unable to recover the way I
talk normally. Not only do I lose my vowels, but I also lose the thread
of the conversation as I begin to worry more and more whether I will
ever recover my accent, whatever my accent is. How the hell do I talk

39
 faking it

naturally, anyway? If I know, then why am I always shocked to hear

what it is when I am forced to listen to myself on tape? Nevertheless,
I keep that silly grin of conversational engagement on my face and
forge ahead. No matter how fake it is and how cowardly it feels, it
is harder to prevent that grin from appearing than it is to paste it on
and keep it there.
Goffman quotes Santayana, who claims that the polite role played
in these small interactions presents an authentic us, at least a truer us
than would be revealed if we acted on urges to blurt out the “truth,”
whatever that may be. But implicit in his tone is the force of the
contrary sentiment he wishes to deny – that we experience much of
our politeness as hypocrisy:

Under our published principles and plighted language we must

assiduously hide all the inequalities of our moods and conduct,
and this without hypocrisy, since our deliberate character is more
truly ourself than is the flux of our involuntary dreams.12

Truth, it is admitted, is a relative matter here. Our deliberate char-

acter is not completely the true self either; yet it is truer than any
momentary desire to blurt out some hostile statement, truer than an
evanescent anxiety that it is cowardly or hypocritical not to blurt
out the hostile sentiment. Why think the real you is suffering from
Tourette’s syndrome if only you had the nerve to display the symp-
toms? Part of being a truly polite person means carrying on politely
when one feels like a fraud for carrying on politely. La Rochefou-
cauld exposed the same bias in our thinking: “Most young people
think they are being natural when really they are just ill-mannered
and crude” (M 372). We hold a biased view that somehow vulgarity
is natural and authentic, but those who have witnessed frat guys en-
gaging in yahoo behavior see that it is forced and contrived, needing
the assistance of Bud and buddies. One must train no less to be a
yahoo frat guy than to be a person of politeness.
Though La Rochefoucauld has other intentions, Santayana’s mis-
sion is to assuage us, to tell us that we should not feel false for being
polite. He rightly asks why we should think that a whirl of hates and
peeves is to be credited with more truth than putting on a pleasant

40
 virtues naturally immune to hypocrisy

front. Those hates and peeves are true only in the sense that we have
them at this precise moment. But why give those passing vexations,
annoyances, irks, and frustrations so much moral and social force by
giving blustery vent to them, thereby letting them create a state of
affairs that will endure long after the impulses have subsided?
Backed now by Santayana’s assurances, I should feel less anxious
about faking my politeness. But he helps only a little. His tone does
not quite disguise his own inability to banish his feeling hypocritical
for suppressing some of these urges. Part of him, it seems, like part of
me, still feels that politeness, like prudence – both surely praiseworthy
in their proper place – are to be suspected as a way of giving a virtuous
name to our cowardice.

Wh e n o u r p o l i t e n e s s fa i l s in conversational settings, it sel-

dom fails because we blurt out a hostile truth or because of meddle-
some anxieties of being exposed as not meaning our hollow niceties.
It fails because unless the other is unusually interesting or talking
about us, we find it hard to pay attention. Thus La Rochefoucauld:

One of the reasons why so few people are to be found who seem
sensible and pleasant in conversation is that almost everybody is
thinking about what he wants to say himself rather than about
answering clearly what is being said to him. The clever and polite
think it enough simply to put on an attentive expression, while all
the time you can see in their eyes and train of thought that they are
far removed from what you are saying and anxious to get back to
what they want to say.
(M 139)

La Rochefoucauld, in general, and my account part ways only on

emphasis. My actor is motivated to play his part, to play it well.
He may feel he is faking it, but he still wants to fake it well, not
to be praised but to escape without making a fool of himself. In La
Rochefoucauld’s world, people are moved more to seek approbation
than to avoid shame.13
I should be a little more relaxed given that my rational self knows
that the other person has no strong motive to expose my shamming;
his self-esteem intervenes to make him believe that for him the show

41
 faking it

is sincere. In typically mordant fashion La Rochefoucauld, as usual,

has two appropriate maxims: “Social life would not last long if men
were not taken in by each other”; a more particular application of the
same idea yields this: “However skeptical we may be of the sincerity
of people who speak to us, we always believe they are more truthful
with us than with anyone else” (M 87, 366). The second is truer than
the first, for it is not clear how much we are taken in by the other.
We don’t believe the other so much as “believe” him with a belief
of convenience, a belief for the occasion; it is still a belief, but not a
deep belief. The second maxim, wonderfully insightful, captures the
feeling of disbelief in the sheer effrontery it would take someone we
pretty much know to be a liar to lie to such as the likes of us, not
because he should be able to see that we are on to him, but because we
are more deserving of the truth than anyone else. We flatter ourselves
that he wishes to flatter us with truthfulness, so much more flattering
because we see he rarely treats anyone else with this distinction.14
If we are mistrustful of him it is nonetheless polite to take his
show of sincerity at face value. Our cowardice has an interest in
sustaining our politeness, for without it we might feel obliged to call
him on it and make a scene. In low-stakes matters, it is safer and
lazier and more polite to trust his sincerity. Besides, the nastiest of
soul-destroying conversations, the most vicious displays of contempt,
and some of the most delicious revenges, take place not in spite of
politeness, but in using its forms to a precise T.

Self-Command: Sense, Sensibility, and Shallowness

Politeness must often employ the virtue of self-command or, as we

would now say, self-control. Routine politeness needs little if any
self-command, but when we need to suppress rather overpowering
transient urges to nuke or “love” (dive on) our interlocutor, we make
demands less on our capacity for politeness than on our capacity
for self-command. Unlike politeness, which is hypocrisy gone good,
self-command is not blamed as being hypocritical, though it is about
donning veils. Paradigmatically, self-command is understood to be
more about omission than commission, about not revealing or acting

42
 virtues naturally immune to hypocrisy

on feelings and motives rather than overtly misrepresenting them.

Unlike politeness, self-command seems to mobilize itself more on
one’s own behalf than on behalf of others. Those who praise it, such
as Jane Austen, Adam Smith, and many others, are not unaware that
people who show great self-command leave themselves open to being
suspected of deception, of playing their cards too close to their vest,
of always taking care to be one up, of being too well defended; or
simply of being cold fish – affectless and insensible.
Certain cultures put demands on a capacity for self-command
we now would find nearly impossible to maintain. Thus Lord
Chesterfield, in the mid-eighteenth century, claims never to have
laughed in public: “I must particularly warn you against [laughing],”
he writes to his son, “and I could heartily wish that you may often be
seen to smile, but never heard to laugh while you live . . . it is the man-
ner in which the mob express their silly joy at silly things” as when
everyone guffaws because someone pulled a chair out from under a
man about to sit down. (The example of the chair is Chesterfield’s and
is a useful reminder of how enduring certain forms of broad humor
are across time and space.) “I am sure that since I have had the full use
of my reason, nobody has ever heard me laugh.” And again, “A man
of parts and fashion is therefore only seen to smile, but never heard
to laugh.”15 A most extraordinary self-command this is, mobilized
not to spare others’ feelings, to suppress anger, or to muster courage,
but to maintain an air of being above it all, an air of hauteur, an air
of putting on an air.
To serve virtue, the veils (and the masks) employed by self-
command are not to be used to set up a betrayal; the deceit must
always be in the service of propriety. You must still make others be-
lieve that you are not operating nefariously, or that you are not a cold
fish or becalmed on the soft surges of your daily dose of antidepres-
sants. If self-command is not presented just right, it can by degrees
shade into what Jane Austen coolly blames as “cold insipidity,”16
a mere quiet decorum brought about by having nothing to say and
being lost in posing as self-possessed to cover up one’s utter vacuity.
Smith says that the virtue in self-command is in controlling
and subduing our strong passions to the point where an impartial

43
 faking it

spectator can sympathize with them. It is not about ridding ourselves

of our passions in either the Stoic or the Buddhist style. Let the pas-
sions roil inside as long as your actions and expressions are consistent
with the demands of propriety. In fact by not expressing your emo-
tions you will at times actually be able to dampen them, not because,
as in our folk wisdom, feigning calmness calms you in the end, but
because by acting properly calm when vexed, you will win the ap-
proval of impartial spectators; and that approval will firm up your
resolve to keep yourself under control (TMS VI.concl.3-4).
Self-command raises different moral issues depending on which
passion needs to be controlled. Not showing your fear, according
to Smith, is always praiseworthy. The refusal to display your anger
also calls for praise unless, he says, you control your anger out of fear
(VI.iii.10). Controlling your fear is primarily about maintaining your
honor; controlling your anger, on the other hand, is primarily about
conferring the benefits of peace on those around you. And where do
controlling and suppressing the expression of love fit?
In Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen puts the issues of propriety,
authenticity, and posing with regard to emotion display, especially
as regards love but also of peeves and annoyances, at the core of
the drama. Elinor, the woman of self-command, of prudence and
sense, is contrasted with her emotional and impolitic younger sister
Marianne, the woman of sensibility. Each (with the narrator weighing
in mostly on Elinor’s side) thinks the dominant trait of the other – self-
command and spontaneous emotionalism – is a sign of shallowness,
whereas neither can quite suppress the vanity of thinking her own
style to be the one most in accord with true inner depth. Marianne
suspects that Elinor doesn’t feel things very deeply, for if she did, she
would be no better at disguising her loves and hates than Marianne
herself is: “The business of self-command [Marianne] settled very
easily; – with strong affections it was impossible, with calm ones it
could have no merit” (ch. 19).
Marianne divides the emotions into two classes: those we can con-
trol and those we cannot. In her view, if you can control them, then
you are not feeling them with the same force as is the person who
cannot control them. In her psychology the faculty of self-command

44
 virtues naturally immune to hypocrisy

is constant across people; what is variable is the intensity of their

passions.
If Marianne suspects Elinor of having little or no feeling, then
Elinor thinks Marianne’s emotionalism to be playing at emotion, to
be shallowness itself. Emotionalism is not about having and then
expressing deep feelings, as Marianne would flatter herself into be-
lieving, but about bad manners. Why should there be any necessary
connection between the display of emotions and their authenticity
or depth? Emotions come and go in a moment; their very lability,
their mercurialness are signs of the fundamental shallowness of most
of our emotional experience. Marianne is simply overdramatizing
these passing feelings in the name of a phony theory of authenticity –
pilloried, as we just saw, by Santayana – which seems to hold that
whatever hasty view we form as to the state of our feelings of the mo-
ment is some kind of truth that must be outed. Elinor and Austen join
in suspecting Marianne’s emotionalism to be a pose, the pose being
only partly that it poses as the authentic unmediated expression of
her emotional nature. The other part of the pose is that she is a fash-
ion follower, caught up in the trendiness of the romantic movement,
all the vogue among the young in the early nineteenth century.
If self-command is a pose, a putting up of false fronts in the inter-
ests of propriety, it at least owns up to this kind of posing as precisely
its virtue. It openly approves of not revealing certain inner states that
it would be best not to impose on others or, for prudence’s sake,
would be best for oneself to keep in reserve. Marianne’s position,
in contrast, though it ostensibly rejects veils, still must be packaged
to sell. Marianne cares to appear authentic, not just to be so. Her
feelings must be displayed, and that gives her all kinds of choices as
to how best to present them. Besides, many of her feelings are had in
solitude as when wandering lonely as a cloud, and to get credit for
these, she must confess them after the fact, thereby making much of
her emotionalism a report of her emotionalism.
One comes to mistrust displays of feeling that attempt to get one
credit for feeling oh-so-deeply. Who strikes us as the bigger phony –
the free-spirited flower child dancing barefoot to music only she can
hear, or the quiet person, very conventional, who locks her thoughts

45
 faking it

and feelings inside? Back in 1968 it took a very stoned and unself-
critical hippie to forget that he was acting, posing, and living life
as theatre. What was being a hippie except self-consciously putting
on costumes that one was not entitled to wear: the army surplus
clothing, the pea coats, the Indian – both North American and Indian
subcontinent – outfits. It was not, as I recall someone once saying,
about being against the war or getting back to the earth, but about
having Halloween 365 days a year. Only a few were aware that it
was not authenticity that was being sought, but an inauthenticity so
overdone as to play up the falseness of all poses. Any real feeling of
authenticity tended to be chemically induced.
Not all phoniness, of course, is on the side of emotion display and
letting it all hang out. When the style of sober gravity was in vogue
among Puritans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, merry old
souls lampooned it mercilessly as phony and fashion following, as
errant hypocrisy and humbuggery.
Marianne’s style is also criticized as parasitical. It can be indulged
in only because Elinor is there to smooth things over after Marianne
gives offense, as my wife is there to let me behave less than graciously
to guests who are overstaying the limited duration of my welcome.
But Austen also hints that the parasitism is mutual. Elinor shines
because Marianne is there to make the scenes that put Elinor’s ex-
traordinary poise and tact on exquisite display. Each provides a foil
for and relief from the style of the other. They even encourage each
other to play out their allegory of sense and sensibility by taking such
clear delight in each other’s mastery of her particular defining trait.17
They know that they make a good team.
Marianne’s impetuosity and imprudence turn out to be not that
imprudent (she marries better than Elinor), whereas Elinor’s prudent
reserve almost costs her her dear Edward, whom she gets only by an
improbable marring of the plot. As properly as she has behaved, there
seems to be a lesson here. Her self-command needed more leakage
so that sufficient glimpses of the passions being hidden were still dis-
creetly discernible.18 Sometimes you need to let on that your disguises
are disguises. One needs to keep reminding people, too, for they for-
ever fall right back into believing the disguise. Your four-year-old can

46
 virtues naturally immune to hypocrisy

watch you put on a monster mask and then be terrorized when you
say boo to him immediately after putting it on.
In sum: don’t think that because hypocrisy is a disgusting vice that
dissimulation, imperfect motive, and the feigning of views and opin-
ions are not necessary to the cause of virtue. But because virtue must
cavort with such suspect company, can we be blamed for mistrusting
the moral state of our soul when we are being little more than polite
company? And suppose you decide that you will damn all dissimu-
lation and pretense in the interest of unvarnished truth. I give you
next the ugly sight of naked truth. And when I have finished I suspect
we will all admit the virtue of those small hypocrisies – call them
reticences if you will – that make us civil.

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 five

Naked Truth: Hey, Wanna F***?

So you think there are times when the demands of politeness, the
burdens of restraint are more than you can handle? You think it is
easy to shed the trappings of civility? Then why does it take alcohol,
exhaustion, or a dare to get you to let the truth about your desires
and feelings all hang out (for the daws to peck at)? Norbert Elias
would have us believe that it was the work of centuries to make us
think politeness was easier than directness. It took a lot of time, a
shifting of political and social arrangements, he argues, to make our
self-restraint feel more natural than our lack of restraint. But I doubt
there was ever a time when it was easier to be truthful than to put on
masks and veils, even if the kinds of masks and veils in other times
strike us as crude and vulgar now.
Yet there are some who chuck all veneers of civility, claiming
(though this is often a pose) to be under the sway of a strong emotion,
such as anger, or a strong desire, such as a sexual one. Others do not
offer the excuse of a strong desire as long as they have pals, drugs, or
booze urging them on to be more vulgar than mere “nature” would
ever let them be.
Suppose two people take one look at each other and immediately
desire to do the deed. Though it has been known to succeed in cer-
tain cultural settings and though it types me as a middle-aged hetero
white male of puritanical, uncool, and conventional propensities to
be revolted that it does, it usually is not (or at least was not) the
case that one says to the other by way of introduction or within min-
utes of being introduced, “Hey, wanna f***?” I know it is phonily
prissy of me not to write “fuck,” but it strikes me as even phonier
to assume fake boldness or a fake flip casualness and write it. That

48
 naked truth

The New Republic, The Nation, and other respectable organs use
“fuck” hardly indicates that it does not involve its user in pretense:
the pretense of the weenie feigning coolness. No way to avoid pre-
tense either way. God knows, “Hey, wanna f***?” gets said more
than I want to believe, and I would guess the lumpenproletarian
biker or bathhouse visitor no guiltier on this score than upper-middle-
class affected hip types or any average – I cannot, father of teenage
girls, bear the thought – high school junior. If as an empirical matter
such directness has become common fare, then let what follows
stand for a piece of history rather than a discussion of contemporary
mores.
Few (I hope) have the nerve to cut to the chase like that even on
a dare. You may have misread the other’s desire; nor do you want
to think of yourself as that vulgar, even if you have the excuse of
doing it on a drunken dare. So problematic is the allure, and the
corresponding contaminating power of sex, so holy in a bizarre way,
that one must assume all kinds of lengthy ritualized behaviors that
avoid directly avowing the desire. So what do we do? We talk, we
perform, we engage in elaborate rituals. In short, we rewrite the three-
word question into pages and pages, reconstructing it as one elaborate
periphrasis.
Nor is the word “f***” to take all the blame. Were you to say,
“Would you like to fornicate with me?” you would do no better.
In fact you would instead decrease substantially your already low
chance of scoring by revealing yourself a vulgar priss rather than just
a vulgar yahoo. Clinical language would do what it did in junior
high health class: prompt guffaws and giggles. Trying a more roman-
tic tone might be worse, for it suggests that the person asking really
thinks he stands a chance, and shows him oblivious to the fact that
the constraints imposed by when he is asking leave him with “Hey,
wanna . . .” as pretty much his only option: A “Pardon me, you
wouldn’t by any chance like to make love?” should get him laughed
at by the yahoo as well as by the stickler for decorum.
Decorum, respect for others and oneself, and politeness almost
always involve saying things in more words than the most direct
and most efficient statement of the desire would accommodate. We

49
 faking it

teach our children not to grunt “ice cream”; we discourage the use
of the imperative mood except in the most exigent of circumstances.
Politeness requires the indirect expression of reasonable desire, not
the complete suppression of it. So it is “May I have some ice cream,
please, if it wouldn’t be any trouble?” The child adds even more
words, mostly in justification, about having had no sweets that day
and having eaten a very good dinner, which is a lie, but no matter.
The more indirect, the more polite, the more likely it is that the child
will get the ice cream as soon as the modestly elongated request is
concluded.
Be indirect, and ye shall be served – not too indirect, though.
Cultural rules vary greatly on this. Excessive indirectness in the demo-
cratic West smacks of Eastern slavish groveling, yes-sahib kind of
stuff. People who are ever so hesitant about making even modest
requests provoke bursts of frustrated annoyance: damn it, out with it
already, OK? And ye shall also not be served all the time. This is the
lesson that hits the two-year-old hard when the magic word “please”
doesn’t work to get her candy anytime she says it. The power of the
“please” not to please as advertised may well be a child’s first sense
that the world is not as enchanted as claimed. Parents, not science
and technology, disenchant the world.
Eventually we hope to make such politeness second nature, so one
would never think of it as fakery to express the desire as “may I
have” rather than grunt “ice cream.” But our direct vulgar desirer
answers: “I don’t grunt ‘ice cream’; I ask nice like my mother taught.
I say, ‘Hey, can I have some ice cream if you got any?’ I even add a
please. I still get my ice cream when I want it, not much more than
a second later. But I don’t want to take three weeks of boring talk to
get what I want now from that babe; besides, in three weeks I may
not want to do it anyway.” Given his unwillingness to take risks on
the duration of his desires, and his desire to live very much in the
present, I suppose he makes sense.
Contrast this with the shy guy who is more than willing to take the
days, weeks, months (I leave “years” to those much more persevering
than I can imagine) to fulfill his dreams, but who feels ever so acutely
that his periphrases are transparent. He thus dies a thousand deaths

50
 naked truth

before asking a woman out for a first date even though he has no
thought of doing anything except talking. He is sure that “Would
you like to go see Twelfth Night with me next Saturday?” will be
heard by her as a little hum in the background not quite covering the
“Hey, wanna f***?” she will impute to him – and that at some level,
not far beneath the surface, he imputes to himself.
Sex, quite often not as satisfying as ice cream, can be craved as
much at certain times in the presence of certain others. Yet people
go through elaborate performances in which they purport to be in-
terested in what the other person does, what books she likes, what
food, what movies. They act interested in aspects of the other’s soul
as well as body; they, mostly the men, fight a desperate battle against
the powerful gravitational forces that pull their eyes down to check
out body parts beneath the eyes. Even fixing the lips with a look that
endures more than a nanosecond is taken as not much different from
blurting out the most vulgar declaration of desire.
What is especially interesting in this ritual of faking is that it in-
evitably becomes more than mere fakery. It can lead to disgust for
one’s initial desire or to a total extinguishing of it, as when the soul of
the other turns out to be unignorably dim, shallow, mean, defective,
or boring. You find you don’t wanna do it with this person anymore.
A nicer consequence of faking interest in other things beside the thing
is that faking in this domain becomes, if not quite an end in itself,
then surely a process with considerable charm. Deferring gratifica-
tion has its own rewards, small pleasures that are sufficient – well,
not quite – unto themselves.
Beware of making the easy assumption that it is a sign of how
deep the desire is that one is willing to invest so much time in talk,
talk, talk, and more talk. The amount of time you put in can support
exactly opposite meanings; it can mean you really really want to do it
so much that you are willing to invest considerably in getting there,
or it can equally mean you really want to find a colorable excuse
for postponing the dark deed.1 Delay is more than just a rational
means to get where you thought at the start you wanted to go. It also
reveals to you and to the other that you are discounting somewhat
your belief in your own desire. You think you wanna do the deed,

51
 faking it

but in fact you are scared of it, too – so much risk of humiliation or
of befuddlement. Part of you is willing to run away without actually
doing it as long as you get some assurance that the other desired you
or at least did not find you repulsive.
The faking of interest in other things besides the big desire lets
your ambivalence about sex and your doubts about your desire have
their say, giving you the chance to escape if you wish. The part of
you that wants to do it is, you fear or at least wonder, not you, or not
all of you, or not the real you. You have the feeling sometimes that
your desire exists independently of you, that it is an invader from
the outside. Or you experience it as your genitals engaging in a coup
d’etat that will not bring a stable regime into power. The new regime
will collapse about fifteen minutes after the takeover, if, that is, it has
not already failed attempting to storm the breach.
But also beware of thinking that blurting out an unadorned vulgar
desire is any indication of its strength or clarity. If avoiding sex is
vaguely a part of your complex set of desires, there is probably no
better way to accomplish it than by coming on with a “Hey, wanna
f***?” Even if you truly want to do it, coming on like that is a way
to defend yourself against the pain of rejection because you have
to go in expecting to be refused; you in fact are inviting refusal. If
you ask like that and do mean it, your question is dealt with as not
having been meant and, if you are lucky, is laughed off as a bad joke.
(Treating egregious violations of norms of propriety as merely failed
attempts at humor is one of the classic strategies of tact to salvage a
bad situation.)
Who possibly can expect such an offer to be accepted, assuming it
is a male making it to a female? Not so dumb, those vulgar yahoos;
their very vulgarity proves to be the perfect defense against the pain
of rejection, which, I am sure, these touchingly sensitive souls would
rather avoid. Their vulgarity, to be sure, is more than a defense against
rejection; the indecency of the come-on provides its own form of very
cheap erotic thrill. Bizarrely enough, though, the eminent refusability
of such an offer is politeness itself compared with offers made in such
a way that all avenues of polite refusal are closed off, the kind of offers
mere acquaintances and relatives make: you wouldn’t by any chance

52
 naked truth

be free sometime this year to come over for dinner, would you? Let’s
pick a date right now.2
And those souls who in fact have an unambivalent desire and ex-
press it with vulgar directness seldom do so outside a cultural or social
setting where it stands some chance of success. The yahoo male will
be drawn to yahoo females in a place where yahoos congregate. And
once he is there, alcohol, drugs, and raucous conviviality will provide
an excusing plea should he misjudge. Even such direct expressers of
desire as then-Governor Bill Clinton did not abandon all decorum
when seeking the services of Ms. Jones. With pants down, he asked
if she would “kiss it.” Kiss it?! In the midst of the most vulgar of
come-ons delicacy pokes (sorry) its head up through the harsh soil
of raw desire. Could we expel euphemism from this domain even
if we wanted to? This may be the realm of the unnamable, where
euphemism must intrude.3
Direct vulgarity is a strategy more available to men than to women.
Should a woman come on like that to a man and be turned down,
it would leave her nearly defenseless, because the yes is assumed,
though, truth be told, the male “yes” really means, if not “no,” then
“Well, I guess I will if I have to.” We must distinguish, however,
between those males who actually stand a better chance coming on
like that – people whose best moment is the first no matter how
vulgar the first moment may be – and those for whom time works
small miracles. Charm needs time, and not all that much depending
on how much physical unattractiveness it needs to compensate for.
Funny thing about charm: it can be openly seen to be so much roguish
fakery by the object of it. That is often part of charm’s charm, but the
charming person need not feel as if he is faking it for being charming;
he may be fully immersed in wanting to be admired and liked for
his charm. And when he sees that his charm is working, why then,
he just may pop the question, “Hey . . .”: or better, the object of his
attention will spare him that burden and ask first.
One of central themes – if not the central theme – of a good portion
of nineteenth-century English novels of manners is how to get the
truth across despite the veils with which we clothe it, or equally how
to repair the damage when we let truth show a little too much skin.

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 faking it

No one does better than Anthony Trollope, especially in his delicious

treatment of this theme in Framley Parsonage.4
Miss Dunstable is a rich heiress set upon by impecunious aristo-
cratic fortune seekers. She is too smart to believe that their declara-
tions of love are sincere, and she is something of a plain speaker
herself, possessing “a thorough love of ridiculing all the world’s
humbugs.” She has a friend, a Mrs. Harold Smith, who has an in-
solvent brother about to lose his landed estate unless he can come
into funds fairly soon. Mrs. Smith urges her brother, Mr. Sowerby,
to woo Miss Dunstable, not as others have done with declarations of
love, but with the truth: that he is in financial straits and he wants
her money. “Needy peers have tried . . . and have failed because they
have pretended that they were in love with her. It may be difficult
but your only chance is to tell her the truth.” But Mr. Sowerby is of
insufficient courage to ask so directly for her money in exchange for
his bloodlines, and he commissions his sister to make the proposal
for him.
Even she, a cynical pragmatist, quails. When Mrs. Smith tries to
set forth the terms of the conversation to be “that the truth should
be told scrupulously on all sides; the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth,” Miss Dunstable, discerning immediately what
is coming, concurs. But Mrs. Smith can’t get herself to speak the truth
without varnishing and veneering her shameless proposal to make it a
little less unseemly, a little more palatable. Miss Dunstable, however,
will have no comb-overs on the bald truth, and with almost sadistic
delight she calls Mrs. Smith back to the task and to the rules that Mrs.
Smith herself proposed about getting to the naked truth. “ ‘Magna
est veritas, as the dear bishop said,’ exclaimed Miss Dunstable. ‘Let
us have the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, as we
agreed just now.’ ”
Miss Dunstable begins to cross-examine her friend and keeps forc-
ing her back to the unvarnished truth. And Mrs. Smith is offended!
It is Miss Dunstable, to Mrs. Smith’s mind, who is the one not mind-
ing her manners by not letting herself be fleeced without making a
scene about it. And so Mrs. Smith admonishes Miss Dunstable for
not making her tasteless task easier:

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 naked truth

“But you are so hard on one, my dear, with your running after
honesty, that one is not able to tell the real facts as they are. You
make one speak in such a bald, naked way.”
“Ah, you think that anything naked must be indecent; even
truth.”
“I think it is more proper-looking, and better suited, too, for
the world’s work, when it goes about with some sort of garment
on it. We are so used to a leaven of falsehood in all we hear and
say, nowadays, that nothing is more likely to deceive us than the
absolute truth.”

The chapter goes on more mischievously as to how little truth we

can tolerate, and how even the most straight-talking person needs
respite from it, some softening, some fakery. Several points are dra-
matized here that were made more crudely earlier in the discussion.
Truth telling is hard to do, even when it has been resolved upon,
even when it has been laid down to all parties as a challenge, even
when we are drunk. And here it is the cynical would-be truth teller,
Mrs. Smith, who cannot bear not to pull a sheet up over the naked
truth she vowed to adopt as her best strategy to obtain the hand and
fortune of Miss Dunstable for her brother.
Especially astute psychologically is the depiction of how hard it
is to keep telling the naked truth once we have embarked upon it.
We can blurt out a line of unvarnished truth or steel ourselves to
make one quick statement of it, but to have to keep it up for a whole
conversation without easing up, without backtracking to take the
sting out of parts, without restating it in ever softer ways, is nearly
impossible for anyone but a sadist, a persnickety literalist, or someone
in the throes of a fairly enduring fury. That is why Miss Dunstable
must keep calling Mrs. Smith back to the ground rules and why
Mrs. Smith starts to blame Miss Dunstable for not making it easier for
her to make her crudely self-interested proposal a little less crudely.
The social psychological and philosophical literature focuses on
the ways in which we see the world through rose-colored glasses and
hear what we want to hear, or how the beams in our eyes blind us
to the truth about ourselves. It may be harder, though, to speak hard
truth to others than to speak it to ourselves. The deception of others

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is prior to the deception of ourselves, evolutionarily to be sure, but

even psychologically. Many of the cognitive biases that lead us to
sugar the truth to our own advantage may be hard-wired, but they
are surely reinforced, maybe even generated in part, by our inability
to tell unkind truth, not to hear it told.5 Our sympathetic mechanisms
put barriers in the way.
There are other, more self-interested reasons we keep the truth to
ourselves. We don’t trust what it would mean for the entire conversa-
tional and moral order if we were to speak truth except euphemisti-
cally. We fear the chaos, and the revenge that would recoil upon us.
There is also a connection between the primitive taboo against saying
the name of God and the still thriving taboo against saying the naked
truth. We clothe His name in aliases, as we clothe our bodies, and as
we clothe harsh truth in conventional social fakeries and poses.
Not all truth needs to be treated so charily. It is only certain kinds
of truth that are taboo, those that can be thought of as naked and
thus as ugly. We cannot avow openly, as Adam Smith says, our naked
self-interest or the desires of our body, except perhaps when it needs
to sleep and eat, and even these needs must be mentioned with some
delicacy (TMS I.ii.1). This means, rightly, that sexual desire, no mat-
ter how beautiful the desirer and the desired may be, is ugly truth that
needs proper clothing. But should I with exuberant sincerity praise
the beauty of your singing voice or the grace of your prose, all due
directness is not only tolerated but also welcomed.
The tag “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”
becomes its own joke in this Trollope passage and elsewhere, for it is
ever more difficult to fulfill the more it is demanded. It is a tag whose
association with perjury is much more insistent than its association
with truth. It sets up conflicting demands: the whole truth must be
limited by rules of relevance; we never get the whole, but a whole.
The “nothing but” requirement lets in too little, for very little can
meet a “nothing but” truth standard. Varnish there must be. Though
it is trite to say so, it might be that the ugly truth is one of those
things that are best gotten at indirectly or as byproducts than when
it is demanded nakedly; something in us reaches to pull up the sheet
to cover the shame of its nakedness.

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 naked truth

The core irony of the passage, it turns out, is that once truth enters
the social domain as a strategy to advance self-interest it is magically
transformed into a fake, a pose, an act, and it becomes more deceiving
than the standard deceptions and poses of politeness and civility: “We
are so used to a leaven of falsehood in all we hear and say, nowadays,
that nothing is more likely to deceive us than the absolute truth.” The
choice facing Mrs. Smith, in other words, is not between truth and
hypocritical niceties but between different social posturings: one of
small lies and indirection, which we can pretty much play by rote
and still get the message across, and the other, naked truth, which
requires dares, drink, or drugs to steel ourselves to perform.

The next two chapters examine certain ritual practices – prayer and
apology, itself a form of prayer – and explore how these are variously
infected with hypocrisy and the anxieties of faking it. These are fol-
lowed by a chapter – chapter 8 – devoted to more homely matters of
praise and flattery, both of which are also intimately involved with
prayer, if not so much with apology.

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 six

In Divine Services and Other Ritualized

Performances

Ma n y s i t uat i o n s d e m a n d i n g p o l i t e n e s s – routine greet-

ings and inquiries about health and welfare – are ritualized, but rit-
ualized without our sensing that it is ritual with a capital R. The
big R attaches to formal events that mark major life-cycle changes –
as in Bar and Bat Mitzvahs and other initiation rites, communions,
weddings, funerals, graduations – or to occasions of paying public
homage that often require singing or reciting in unison, as in the
national anthem or prayer services. Big R ritual seems to involve
something that we can call, if we do not fear being struck down by
some offended power, hocus-pocus; it is distinguished from the small
rituals of daily life by a sacred separation.
The expression “hocus-pocus,” being mock Latin, also raises an-
other aspect of Ritual. It is often carried out in a language we don’t
quite understand, as when I pray in Hebrew or Catholics used to pray
in Latin, or when Protestants recently used the King James Bible, or
when kids have not a clue as to what the words are or mean, though
in English, when they sing Christmas carols or the national anthem or
say the pledge of allegiance. What of the “forgive us our trespasses”
of the Lord’s prayer, where it was understood that cutting across
Mrs. Keappock’s lawn ranked right up there with murder in what
got God really mad. What eight-year-old knew what “plejallegiance”
was or why one nation was “invisible”?
Reform movements in religion often make the inaccessibility of sa-
cred language to the laity the rallying point of their program. But that
seems to miss the point of what defines sacredness: its inaccessibility.
So much of the uncanniness of successful Ritual depends precisely on
our not understanding what is said, probably because we think Ritual

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should be dealing with the mysterious, the incomprehensible, the in-

effable. Thus certain branches of Protestantism managed inevitably
to find newer forms of obfuscation to make up for the gap in Ritual
Dignity that was undone by each new modernization of the Bible
translation, even those sects, it seems, that at their official core are
hostile to all Ritual. Some of these sects go for speaking in tongues;
others have hymns do the work of separating Ritual out from the
too familiar, hymns whose forceful musical phrases make the lyrics
become bearers more of transporting melody than of literal meaning.
Or, to put it another way, the words bear the meaning of the melody,
not the melody the meaning of the words.
The worry that we are faking it – whether in fact we are or aren’t –
has a special flavor in these contexts, especially in formal prayer
services but also in other big Rituals. Why, for instance, do we feel
more urges to get the giggles in them than in nonritualized settings?
The giggles are not brought on by the mere demand to play a role we
are not up to playing, for then we would get the giggles every time we
feigned interest in a conversation. Something else is at work here that
has to do with the special status of Ritual, Decorum, Seriousness,
Prohibition, and faking it in highly contrived settings in which we
might be a little spooked, a bit unsettled by what we feel are the
costs of not convincingly faking it. For one, the powerful demand for
solemnity and grave behavior is almost felt as a dare not to get the
giggles. More than the willful disobedience in the Garden of Eden,
getting the giggles is the profoundest revolt against authority that we
have at our disposal, perhaps because it is really not at our disposal
but comes unbidden, the very image of unvarnished truth. For an-
other, Ritual seems to invite us to suffer breaks with total immersion
and see the whole pageant as the highly contrived performance it is.
The actors for a mere moment are seen as puppets, mechanical, as
ciphers, and this vision is loaded with comic possibility.1 The urge
to get the giggles bears testimony to the fact that the demand Ritual
makes on us to suspend disbelief is at times no easy task.
Part of the way Ritual achieves a feeling of sacred separation from
the commonplace is by not letting you forget that the whole thing is
staged and then asking you simultaneously to forget you know that

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it is staged so that you can be transported by it. There is much comic

possibility in the contrasting visions. When we see people with their
“game faces” on in a moment when we are less than fully immersed,
they can look ridiculous. I know the “we” here is not universal, but
it is common enough, especially at certain ages, younger rather than
older. Only rarely do I feel the urge now to get the giggles at funerals
or weddings, or during graduation speeches and religious services. I
was plagued by such urges when younger. But the truth is that as we
grow older the threat of the giggles becomes quite remote. Moreover,
with advancing age ancient rituals are more likely to move us, to fill us
with mystical moments of connection with people long dead. When I
was young, such rituals, if ever moving, were moving, not because of
their ancient links of past to present but because of the music. Also,
the duty to set a decorous example for my kids puts a damper on
things, though this in itself can trigger the giggles, especially when
one of the kids has already succumbed to them. Then too, I fear, I am
tired now, and less likely to find mirth in, or rage against, absurdity.
I have no intention of ridiculing the religious, being mostly respect-
fully so myself in the sense that, though only moderately observant,
I “believe” that if someone speaks serious ill of his parents the heavens
will open up and strike him dead; or should the blasphemer blithely
continue unharmed it is more because the gods are asleep than that
they did not care to kill him. I also believe in an absolute obligation to
pass on my Judaism, such as it is, to my children. I should be rightly
cursed and feel in fact that I will be damned, if I, out of laziness,
should break a chain 3,000 years long. Far be it from me to pretend
to great virtue. I do not do nearly as much as I should for however
concerned I sound. I do just enough to pass it on to avoid the curse.
If my kids wrestle with the same fear of the curse then I will have
done my minimal duty.
In other words, I have a very primitive sense of belief in some force
that might play havoc in my life if I don’t shape up. Occasionally I
ask this force, whom I do think of as God, to refrain from focusing
hostile intention on me, and whom I ask also, on occasion, rather
to do so on my enemies or bad people in general unless they are
my friends. I used quotation marks around “believe” in the previous

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paragraph to indicate that I am half-joking, but only half -joking.

The belief basically boils down to the experience of something that
can aptly be described as getting the heebie-jeebies in settings where a
pure rationalist or secularist should not have them and who then finds
himself anxiously explaining them away as silly and irrational. It is
belief, but belief that is subject to a moderately high discount rate.
My sincere feeling of engagement in religious ritual enlivens itself
mostly in a rather small domain in which the ritual has a primitive feel
to it. The circumcision ceremony and the blowing of the shofar, or
ram’s horn, have that power, as do the reading of the sacrifice of Isaac
on the second day of Rosh Hashannah2 and the celebration of the
Passover seder, which was also Jesus’ Last Supper. There is a danger,
though, in a fascination with the primitive. One does not want to get
too carried away with it: circumcision OK, but no killing animals
or humans. The Nazis, I guiltily remind myself, loved the cheap
thrills of primitivism, and they manufactured stagy primitive rituals,
which got them to feel visceral connections to imagined fake pasts.
So much of the so-called primitive is invented for the purpose of
looking primitive. Phony or real – much in the way that the forms of
sentimentality are irresistible – the primitive can move us even when
we suspect it is part of a quest for false authenticity. But the shivers
from the shofar don’t come cheap – to say nothing of those sympa-
thetic agonies that convulse those witnessing a circumcision; there is
nothing false about them. The shofar follows hours of prayer, and
the ritual has been performed every year, not for mere centuries but
for millennia. The continuity is everything; it legitimates the feeling
of connectedness and gives substance to the heebie-jeebies it elicits. A
resurrected ritual of ancient pedigree long dead strikes us as no less
phony than a wholly invented new one. But an unbroken chain of title
two and half thousand years long immunizes chills and thrills against
any fear that you might feel embarrassed or fake for feeling them.

Staying Focused during Prayer

Being bored during prayer services has a long tradition. Bishops
complained of congregants laughing at martyrologies in the seventh

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century.3 Monks suffered from acedia, or despair, a disease whose

chief symptom was paralyzing boredom from having to pray all the
time.4 Rabbis post advice on the Internet as to how to overcome bore-
dom while praying.5 Memoirists, when describing the horrors of
childhood, invariably devote attention to the miseries of church at-
tendance.
Must we never be bored while praying? Do all species of boredom
in church undermine the sincerity and authenticity of our service to
the service? Maybe we are being too hard on ourselves? One of the
chief thoughts that makes us doubt the authenticity of our prayer is
that we feel we have to mean it; we are not often sure we can meet
that standard when the prayer is a formal one, composed by another.
Just what does it mean to mean a prayer when you are praying in
a language you don’t understand? Are no Jews except those who
understand Hebrew sincerely praying during services? It can’t mean
that. But this does not mean that a person mouthing syllables that
make no linguistic sense to him will not suffer an occasional sense
of wondering whether he is not engaging in a charade. That very
feeling is much of the impetus behind reform movements that argue
for making scripture and liturgy accessible.
Meaning the words is one thing, praying as a ritual performance
is another. You may not be attending to the words, but you mean the
act of reverence, which need not mean you are actually experiencing
feelings of reverence, only that you are carrying on your commitment
to attend services and take part. Some days your thoughts will be
properly pious, and other days you will be distracted; still you pay
lip service on those days – doing it when you don’t feel like it and
aren’t into it – and that is what demonstrates your commitment.
Those who say a standard prayer before meals are seldom thanking
God with a feeling of gratitude or thankfulness. Nonetheless, they
are paying their respects.
Catholics make a useful distinction between mental and vocal
prayer. The former requires a high degree of attention, or else why
do it? No one, after all, is checking to see whether or not you are.
Mental prayer is meditative and usually takes place in private set-
tings. By definition, it ceases the moment it is not centrally occupying

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consciousness. Vocal prayer, in contrast, tends to be communal and

part of a service, office, or Mass. Here a more accommodating atti-
tude is taken: respectful attention, conforming your outside behav-
ior, and saying the words; and as long as your thoughts don’t turn
to images inconsistent with the prayer you are OK. No levity, no
fantasizing about sex, but you do not have to be thinking about the
precise words you are saying beyond the mere saying of them. This
view would wisely deem you to be properly praying when you are be-
set with anxieties that go to whether you are appropriately focused –
even when, that is, you feel you are faking it. That feeling, after all,
can be construed as evidence of a respectful concern about proper
conformity to the demands of the occasion.6
The claim I just made – that the feeling of faking is a kind of
homage – is perhaps too generous. It depends on why you feel you
are faking it. You must evince respectful concern about whether you
are meeting the demands of the occasion, but respect is precisely what
you feel you are faking with your lips and posture. Your thoughts are
variously roaming from anxiety about faking it (which is arguably
respectful) to erotic thoughts about someone a few rows up to the
right or left (a complaint frequently registered in medieval popular
moral literature) to wondering why there are only three people taller
than six feet in my synagogue service and one of them is a recently
converted Dutch woman. Surely, wondering why the beauty sitting
there last week is absent today means that you are completely faking
it. What about thoughts devoted to praying but that are impious?
You, for instance, loathe the tune of the prayer you are singing, wor-
ried that because you hate it you will be humming it for days. And
indeed three days later your worst fears have been confirmed, making
you wonder whether the malevolent DJ is your punishing conscience
or just one of God’s mischievous messengers.
You start wondering whether it is the obligation of every Jew to go
through the motions of service attendance to spite Hitler, or because
you feel guilty if you don’t, or because you have to set an example
of proper faking it for your kids, who are also complaining about
the interminability of the service.7 Though each of these distracting
thoughts and events detracts from full immersion in prayer and thus

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can give rise to the anxiety of faking it, only some of them convict
you of serious faking. Others come close to the line, but one suspects
that these kinds of doubts have been widely experienced. How could
they not, given that everyone since you were a small child has been
lecturing you on the assumption that that is what was going on in
your head?
Some prayers more than others are likely to be faked or to en-
gender doubts about whether they are being faked. We can, for our
purposes, divide prayers into two main kinds that have consider-
able overlap with the mental/vocal categories the Catholics employ:
prayers that are likely to generate the anxiety that we are faking them
and those that do not. Certain kinds of prayers grab us more readily
than others – those, for instance, not said in divine services as part
of a scripted pageant but that we compose ourselves. These are the
prayers we find ourselves saying when we wish to mobilize the deity
quickly or thank him profusely, often when we are in the embrace of
some strong emotion such as fear or relief. To be sure, such prayers
follow predictable forms and arise in predictable settings, but they
have the authenticity of spontaneity.8 Not that spontaneous prayers
cannot be faked; I would imagine that in certain charismatic religions
one must fake them all the time.9
Prayers of petition, particularly for immediate delivery from ene-
mies, prayers in which in the biblical sense we “cry out” to or “cry
unto” God, are much less likely to be beset with anxieties of fakery
than prayers of thanksgiving, unless the gratitude is an expression of
the “phew” of relief, as when narrowly escaping death, shame, or
a visit from a Jehovah’s Witness. Thus prayers uttered in foxholes
are completely sincere, although some soldier memoirs take note of
the self-conscious form these prayers take when a nonbeliever finds
himself praying for the first time since his childhood.10 One soldier
began, “God, if you get me out of this scrape, I promise to believe in
you.” But a prayer taking that form is not faked – quite the contrary.
It is as sincere a form of asking God to reveal Himself as can be made.
The person praying may indeed sense the irony, if his fear allows any
room for irony, but he feels no anxiety on account of not being into
his prayer; he rightly does not feel that he is faking it.

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Routinized prayers of confession, on the other hand, involve layers

of shamming, lies mixed with feelings of fakery. How many Catholics
did not invent sins to confess as kids? To have none was to convict
yourself of the sin of pride or of having a log in your eye, or, worse,
it was to tip the priest off that you were hiding something really big.
No way you were going to confess the sins of your sexual awakening.
Got to go to confession: what bad things did I do this week? I am
sure I lied to my mother three times and fought with my sisters. That
will do yet again this week, but can’t I be more imaginative? Faking
it and feeling that you are faking it, already from mere babes.
Prayers in which we humble ourselves before God by proclaiming
how unworthy we are of His grace or of His beneficent attention
have a certain amount of playacting and shamming built in. There
are people who manage to convince themselves of the truth of their
abnegation; some may indeed be sincere, but they must avoid the
snares of the hairshirt problem – feeling proud or quite pleased with
how good they are at humility and abnegation. “Who am I to beseech
thee, O Lord; I who am but a disgusting worm, nay, the wormiest of
all, the lowest of the low – first place, in fact, among the low.” Prayers
of confessional abnegation are usually combined with a petition for
grace or forgiveness; surely the petitionary part is not being faked,
but the same cannot be said for the abnegatory parts.
This kind of prayer is at its core in grave tension with itself, a ten-
sion captured nicely by the ever-nasty sensibility of Ambrose Bierce,
who consistently makes La Rochefoucauld look like a sentimental
softy: “pray, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in
behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.” It takes chutzpah
to make a demand on God, to presume on His attention and time.
Despite your care to engage in rituals of humiliation, to don sack-
cloth, to cover yourself with ashes, to flagellate yourself, there is a
presumptuousness in your demand for attention. These abnegatory
rituals themselves are attention-getting. You may very well mean the
prayer, but you may also sense your showmanship in the abnega-
tion, especially because such shows are themselves highly scripted.
If you really feel your special vileness, not just in a vaguely philo-
sophical way that makes you indistinguishable from the rest of sinful

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and corrupt humanity, how could you dare approach the font of
purity?
Some, though, felt their wormhood so sincerely that they despaired
of God’s grace and did not pray. No faking there at all. The theolo-
gians intervened to proclaim them guilty of the sin of despair, the sin
against the Holy Ghost. You must not abandon prayer. Your self-
esteem is not to be so low that you are ever to doubt God’s powers
regarding your salvation; if you are in your own sight as a grasshop-
per and think others see you the same way, you get hit with forty more
years in the desert (Num. 13.33). But there is reason to think that peti-
tionary prayer, surely the foxhole variety, is the surest sign of despair
there is, a giving up of all hope except the last very long-odds gamble
that God will pay heed to your cry for help. The Victorian schoolgirl
quoted earlier saw it that way; her routine prayers for chocolate pud-
ding or for illness to befall her teachers were never answered “so that
on the whole I thought Him incorruptible . . .” When she realized that
any God she could believe in would have to be impartial, prayers of
petition ceased to make sense to her: “It was as if you were trying
to bribe the judge.” “After that, prayer became synonymous for me
with giving up hope; if ever I prayed again, it was only in a final
frenzy of despair.”11 In that frenzy one is too distracted to indulge in
anxieties of fakery.
When the stakes were high and sincerity was of the utmost impor-
tance, as in a communal fast decreed to beg God to relieve a drought,
the Jewish oral law (the Mishnah) sought to reduce the risk that the
person chosen to lead the prayers would not be properly motivated.
He was thus to be a man “who has children and whose house is empty
(i.e., he is destitute) so that his heart will be perfect in the prayer.”12
Now there was a man who would mean his prayers; his humiliation
was not a ritual show put on for the occasion but instead was his
true lot in life, imposed upon him by his poverty and the desperate
need of his children. I must confess to taking some small pleasure in
seeing that my anxieties on this score are not postmodern nor even
modern but have been troubling people for millennia.
We don’t feel we are faking when we bark out those daily prayers
beseeching God to damn people and things. These precations are

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almost always exaggerated. Indeed they are ritualized exaggerations;

they are meant, but not literally. You don’t really want to consign
someone to hell for an eternity for cutting you off in traffic; you do
not even wish to apply a hammer to his kneecap; you would settle for
someone keying his car or for him to gesture apologetically. The curse
of “Goddamn it,” by being overstated, helps dissipate our momentary
desires for violent revenge and is itself cathartic. Curses are prayers
that thus partly answer themselves by giving relief. No matter how
many times you use them, they have a certain inexhaustible potency
and charm. Chaucer’s perfectly told Friar’s Tale makes the point
nicely about the difference between actually meaning our exaggerated
curses on the one hand, and meaning only to exaggerate and blow off
steam on the other. The person who really means those curses goes to
hell along with what he asked to be damned should he not relent.13
Formal prayers are the problem. Of these, some have more imme-
diacy than others – the psalms, for instance. Many are curse poems
directed at enemies or are grim solicitations for help in taking re-
venge. Some even berate God Himself for abandoning His faithful
worshiper, the narrator of the poem.14 These are passionate themes
that prompt our sympathetic identification with the psalmist. Those
few that are hymns of general adoration and glorification make that
identification harder. I surely can mean a prayer that asks for a good
harvest, but not with the fervor I ask for vengeance upon my enemies.
Back when calories were scarce for all except the rich, prayers for a
good harvest engaged a petitioner more fully than now, in America at
least, where calories are not scarce enough. Hymns of thanksgiving,
when coupled with glorying over the mayhem God has inflicted on
our enemies, also have a good chance of being, in the words of Adam
Smith, the subtlest theorist of sympathetic identification, “enter[ed]
into.”15
Like the simple melodic beauty of the best Protestant hymns, in
which the music simply lifts you up by the shirt collar into meaning
whatever it is you are singing, the poetic power of the Psalms gives
one chills that can be mistaken for reverence for God or can be fused
with it. They induce, almost involuntarily, a sense of respectfulness
as a tribute to the sheer force of the imagery and emotional intensity

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of the verse. The infectious power of calls to revenge focus attention,

especially in perhaps the grandest cri du coeur in world literature:
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea we wept . . .”; or
some command our notice because of their stunning lyricism, gaining
the added push of its being mobilized in moments of genuine danger
from real enemies: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. . . .”
It has hardly been Judaism or Protestantism that has benefited most
from the easy confusion between aesthetic awe and feelings of reli-
giosity. That laurel belongs to the Catholic Church. The spate of con-
versions to Catholicism among the cultured, among aesthetes, from
the mid-nineteenth century well into the twentieth, must surely have
led some of those converts to wonder whether they were not faking it,
getting their religion all nice and pretty, and confusing awe for human
productions in painting, song, architecture, sculpture, stained glass,
and verse, for divinely inspired chills. But why not welcome what-
ever works? We piggyback on the religiously inspired productions of
others, letting their inspiration lead us to our God.

The Amidah
Once we get away from cursing, thank-yous for escapes from close
calls, cryings out to deliver us from enemies, pleas to God not to
expose us as fakes to our friends and enemies – once, that is, we
are beyond the immediately personal into the prayer service itself –
the anxiety of faking it is much more intrusive. Let me give one
example that comes from the Jewish liturgy, but that I would imagine
is not dissimilar to the experience of many Catholics during lengthy
litanies, and Protestants in charismatic sects when too many people
start speaking in tongues and it is time to go home for lunch.16
The standard Jewish liturgy contains a prayer called the Amidah,
quite possibly the most ancient prayer in the formal liturgy, nearly
2,500 years old.17 It is long and is to be read silently in Hebrew
while standing (the word “Amidah” comes from the root for “to
stand”). Depending on the holiday, it can run to some ten pages or
more. Given the limited facility many in the congregation have for
reading the Hebrew script (even fewer understand the Hebrew they

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are saying), it could easily take the scrupulous person fifteen minutes
to read. When finished, you can sit down. Once the congregants have
completed their silent devotion, the entire lengthy prayer – this is the
truth – is repeated out loud from the altar.
Ritual always involves repetition but not of this magnitude and
duration (the cantor at my synagogue last Rosh Hashanah managed
to burden each syllable with so many notes that the repetition of the
Amidah lasted eighty, yes, eighty excruciating minutes). One senses
a whiff of rabbinic cunning: the ancient sages suspected that many
would not resist the temptation to cheat at their silent devotion and so
decided to visit the sins of the fakers upon faker and nonfaker alike.
Maimonides, in the twelfth century, admits as much. The Amidah
is repeated, he says, “in order that anyone who has not recited the
prayer [silently] shall be regarded as having discharged his obliga-
tion.” Thus those who do not know the prayer, he says, finding a
pious reason, get the benefit of the presiding reader reading it for
them.18 But he is ruthless, for if you recite it without proper devotion
you are to recite it again, he says, this time devoutly.19 The Sages
meant it when they said you were to mean this prayer when you said
(or did not say) it.
In contemporary conservative congregations, most people, I would
guess, are faking, skimming at best, but mostly skipping whole big
sections. One can hear the buzz of fake Hebrew. People surrepti-
tiously look to see what page others are pretending to be on and then
decorously turn a page ahead of that. Finally a few people start to sit
down. I strategize as to when I, who could barely muddle through my
Bar Mitzvah portion, can plausibly sit down and not expose myself
as a cheat. I read a few sentences, then switch over to the English
translation on the opposite page for a few, then back to the Hebrew.
Then I skim a bit, then pretend two pages are stuck together, then just
gaze around. I sit down after about a third of the congregation has
already given up, mostly to set a good example for my kids. Within
a minute or two all but five or six people are seated. No more than
six minutes have passed since the congregation launched forth on its
silent prayer, not enough time for more than the gifted few to have
read it even in English.

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 faking it

A complete convergence of communal faking with no one owning

up to it! It’s one of those secrets that everyone knows, and everyone
expects that everyone knows, but no one is quite willing to confess.
The secret is as well kept as the one men so carefully guarded from
one another for centuries (obviously not from women), recently ex-
posed when Viagra came out; every guy thought only he had the
problem. A recent convert with whom I was discussing faking the
Amidah told me that she would stand there, reading at her patheti-
cally slow pace, making sure to say every word to herself, painfully
self-conscious about holding up the service and feeling she did not
belong. She blamed her lack of practice with Hebrew script, even her
non-Jewish genes. She began to fake, she said, to avoid feeling so
exposed, and then she suffered feeling like a complete fake Jew for
faking the prayer, believing herself to be the only one faking. I told her
to relax, that by faking the Amidah she had proved herself at least as
much a Jew as I was. But I warned her that she would feel that some-
how her fakery was worse than everyone else’s and that she would
still not quite believe they really were faking it to the same extent
she was.
What of those five or six left standing? There was the one convert,
but the rest were zealous young religious types, who unlike the old
religious types did not have the grace to know that they should not be
keeping everyone waiting because we were going to have to repeat
it anyway. Says Maimonides: “One who recites his prayers with a
congregation should not unduly protract its recital.”20 Devotion to
God must give way to mannerliness and consideration of others’
limited capacity for by-the-letter devotion. Eventually, even the rabbi
would get impatient with the zealots and begin the repetition from
the pulpit while they continued their silent devotion.

I was yo u n g when I first cheated at the Amidah. It was at a Jewish

religious camp I was shipped off to for the summer when I was eleven.
My being sent to this camp was, I suspect, my parents’ way of exor-
cizing their guilt about the secularism of our home while at the same
time getting the benefit of the peace and quiet my absence would yield
them. Here I was first introduced to a group of boys who competed

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more zealously for who could daven the fastest than for who could
run fastest or catch the best.
Davening is praying, rocking back and forth as you half mumble,
half-hum the Hebrew you are pretending to read. Needless to say,
this too led to all kinds of anxieties, and I for one could never rock
back and forth during prayers without feeling a complete fool and
fraud. I always did so rather embarrassedly, botching the performance
horrendously. How did anyone overcome embarrassment to fake this
adequately? (Conservative Jews still engage in a modest rock, reform
Jews have gone completely, WASPishly still.) It was simply beyond
me, of an ilk with cheering with abandon at high school pep rallies,
with doing karate yells, or with saying “groovy” in 1968. To my mind
there was no way a self-respecting, self-monitoring person could do
or say these things without feeling like an idiot. I could never do
full-Megillah davening, even when I was the only one not doing it,
as was the case at this camp. I would be only too happy to claim this
willingness to stand thus apart as a kind of moral courage, but it was
no such thing: I was too self-conscious, more embarrassed in my own
eyes for doing it than I would be in their eyes for not.
Was my self-consciousness a pathetic form of incipient self-hatred,
seeing the world a little too much through Christian eyes, or did
young Jews growing up in the shtetl have the same anxiety about
davening, in their case experienced as faking being a pious adult? Or
was it only fearing that I would look so obviously hypocritical, trum-
peting self-evidently fake piety? I settled for a very mild sway, a mere
shifting of my weight from foot to foot. Given the long time a Jew is
asked to stand during prayer my small movements were thus explica-
ble as purely natural and thus, I fancied, not too hypocritical nor so
indecorous that I would be embarrassed if a Christian saw me. Thus
did I join the fray in a kind of lame fashion, starting light years be-
hind, being about the only kid in the camp not to come from a kosher
home. Keeping kosher in Green Bay would have meant vegetarianism
because there were too few Jews to support a butcher; and in those
days most intelligent people felt vegetarianism would lead to death
by malnutrition, if not by pretension. Pretentious vegetarianism still
lay a few decades in the future.

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For half the summer I braved the looks of the faster readers waiting
for me to sit down, for in this camp the rabbi waited until all had
finished before beginning the repetition. I wish I could say I had coldly
calculated that, by standing and facing everyone’s hostility, I was
winning points in the piety game. Truth be told I had been skipping
paragraphs right from the start, and I was still the last kid standing;
I had been cheating too modestly. I was completely snookered by the
other kids, who I believed were not faking it in the least. I could not
believe that religious Jews would do such a thing or would need to
do such a thing.
Maybe these guys could really read their Hebrew at the speed of
sound, some apparently at the speed of light (a colleague remonstrates
that I should not seek to attribute to others my ineptitude at reading
Hebrew script). There was for me only one solution: give up on my
nickel and dime faking and fake wholesale. I developed the technique
of mumbling out a real Hebrew phrase here and there so that those
around me would hear the place on each page I was staking my false
claim to. Each day I sat down a little earlier, until I had risen to be in
the top third, now a really adept speed-reader myself.
Formal secular rituals generate similar anxieties, even a routine
“Star Spangled Banner” before a ballgame. Everyone knows that
you can start cheering during the last line of the anthem without
being sacrilegious, though it would be bad form, no matter how
big the game, to start yelling before “oh say does that star spangled
banner yet wave.” Knowing when to cheer does not present much
of a problem; it’s how to stand and whether to sing. Should I take
off my hat, do I put my hand over my heart, do I stop chewing my
gum? Do I sing robustly with all the signs of patriotic fervor, or do I
kind of hum along? Do I purposely sing an octave lower to outmacho
the guy next to me? While all this is going on, how are the feelings
of patriotic reverence supposed to be attended to? Unless there is a
flyover. Then I am moved to tears by the beauty of those jet fighters,
by the precision of the flight, by their sudden appearance and equally
sudden departure, by the noise. I have thoughts like, “Oh Lord, I will
accept a raise in taxes if it goes to making things that beautiful; yes,

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increase defense spending as a form of subsidy to the arts.” Complete

and total reverence. And then it is time for the kickoff.
That digression into football prompts other memories in which
hard spiritual choices were to be made: whether Rosh Hashanah
was compatible with getting to the Packer game on time; the game
trumped the second-day observances, but what about the first day?
As for Yom Kippur, my father insisted Yom Kippur won. That did
not stop the president of the congregation from hiding, though not
from my discerning eye, a radio earpiece under his prayer shawl and
covering his head with the shawl in an act of extreme piety better
to hide the sacrilege. One can bet that he was sincerely praying, he
being a gambler, that the Packers might cover the spread.

Cynical Ceremony
The Amidah, despite being widely faked, is part of ritual that peo-
ple take seriously. Consider, however, a culture of complete cynicism
with regard to its Rituals. That is how Stephen Greenblatt describes
Thomas More’s world, one “in which everyone is profoundly com-
mitted to upholding conventions in which no one believes.”21 What
do we make, for instance, of Richard III’s cynical farce, which fooled
absolutely no one, of rejecting the offer of the crown and then
“reluctantly” accepting its re-offer? What of the consecration of a
bishop that is a charade because everyone knows he bought his of-
fice? “The point,” Greenblatt says, “is not that anyone is deceived
by the charade, but that everyone is forced either to participate in
it or watch it silently.” The more you can make people swallow, the
“more outrageous the fiction, the more impressive the manifestation
of power.” The claim apparently is that these rituals are so fake that
they constitute an in-your-face challenge to hoot them down. When
those in attendance fail to do so, they then have to accept themselves
as cowards or, if not quite broken in spirit, at least safely docile in
the face of the usurping authority.
If we concede that such breaking of the spirit may be one of the
effects of the performance, it hardly should be conceded that its

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purpose is to cow those present by forcing them to endure an ob-

vious fraud. Do Greenblatt’s examples show that the conventions are
dead and that no one believes in them? It rather shows the contrary.
The coronation ritual still has the power to make a king even though
the ritual has been hijacked; the same with the consecration. The
only way the king so crowned or the bishop so invested can begin his
usurpation is to employ the machinery of the inaugural rituals. After
the lapse of time, when the rules of prescription solidify theft into
right, few remember – or if they remember they no longer care – that
the ceremony was infected when it was performed. They care only
that it was performed; the earlier ceremony is cured of its falsity by
the passage of time.
The validity of rituals whose chief actors were impure or unholy
was oft debated, but practical and realistic considerations favored one
outcome over the other. What of the sinful or the atheistical priest
who ministers sacraments to the faithful, or the faithful priest who
had a nocturnal emission the night before?22 Are the faithful damned
because the priest is unworthy of his position or ritually impure? A
prayer the cantor sings on the high holidays asks that God not punish
the congregants for whom the cantor is praying because of his sinful
condition.23 The Catholic Church, surely, could not have functioned
if it did not defend the position that the sacraments are efficacious
independently of the virtue of the priest administering them. The
sacraments must be understood to have their force independently of
the moral condition of the clergy.
The faking going on, especially the faking of Richard or the si-
moniac bishop, pays homage to the power of the ritual, not just to
the power of the usurper forcing attendance and huzzahs. The claim
of universal cynicism underestimates the power of paying lip ser-
vice. Out of pious impulse we refuse to credit lip service with the
importance it deserves. It is all we usually ask from others and all
we are inclined to give ourselves. The church forcing people to say
the credo, totalitarian regimes making people swear allegiance, even
liberal regimes demanding loyalty oaths, might do so as a sign of
their power to constrain people’s wills, but mostly they do it because
they know it works. You say it, we got you. You say you believe

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long enough and you will believe, if only after a fashion. Maybe such
beliefs are only “beliefs,” but they are not disbelief or rejections.
Belief comes in all degrees of intensity; very few in the West believe
so firmly in Heaven that they will seek martyrdom to achieve it. Most
have some small discount built into their beliefs without making their
belief no belief or reducing it to a mere “belief.” The appalling dis-
plays of dignity-destruction that were a frequent occurrence during
Stalin’s purges – in which people were made to profess belief in a new
orthodox position they did not understand and then had to deny that
belief weeks later and then reaffirm it weeks after that – are especially
horrifying because even these people came to believe, or ceased dis-
believing, the crazy and nonsensical claims being forced upon them.
Animal Farm and 1984 are not exaggerations, but understatements,
as the unnerving Gulag memoirs demonstrate.24
A strong-minded recusant could profess allegiance to an entity he
loathed and make his mental reservations while professing. As long
as the authorities did not ask him too frequently to profess allegiance
he could, with luck, maintain his initial commitments. But should
the authorities become more insistent and keep him under surveil-
lance and force him to speak against his beliefs again and again,
then it would take an extraordinary commitment and continuous
mental effort to keep up his faith. Eventually the mental reservation
itself might become a vehicle of self-deception in which you convince
yourself that a real you exists independently of all your words and
deeds, that you really are still a Catholic living a secret life in a hos-
tile Protestant regime, or a rational human being trying to muddle
through in the mass lunacy that characterized the totalitarian regimes
of the twentieth century.25
The converso Jews in fifteenth-century Spain were subjected to
surveillance and had to live outwardly as Christians, attend Mass,
pray to what they believed was a false Messiah. Those who actually
succeeded in secretly maintaining their Judaism must have devoted
incessant labor to it and must have given each other much mutual
support not eventually to become what they feigned to be, as no doubt
most did.26 But Kurt Vonnegut’s “We are what we pretend to be, so
we must be careful what we pretend to be” makes no allowance for

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the predicament of those poor souls who must pretend to a belief to

save their lives, desperately hoping, against long odds, that they can
summon the psychological and moral force to defend a “true” self
against the insidious intrusions of their forced pretending.27

Wi t h p r ay e r s e rv i c e s c o n t r as t a p o l o g y , our next topic.

In apology we seldom worry about whether we mean it because we so
clearly don’t and often don’t care that we don’t. Apologies are riven
with suspect motives. And if an apology has all the appearances of
sincerity, it is suspect for that reason alone. In a nutshell, the problem
is that remorse is easy to fake.

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 seven

Say It Like You Mean It: Mandatory Faking

and Apology

Some emotions are easier to fake than others, and some are
easier to hide than others. La Rochefoucauld says that as a general
matter it is harder to disguise emotions we have than to pretend to
have those we do not.1 The truth of this matter seems to require
a big qualifying “it depends.” It depends on which feelings we are
trying to cover up and which we are trying to feign. It is much easier
to disguise what Hume called the calm passions than to disguise
the violent ones. I can cover up benevolence more easily than my
sense of disgust, my sense of satisfaction in a beautiful object more
easily than my grief.2 And though it is not hard to feign interest,
concern, amusement, and other emotions that are commonly feigned
in routine conversation, one can almost choke at times trying to feign
delight in the unexpected arrival of a visitor or in a colleague’s big
raise.
Some emotions are characterized by postures and facial expres-
sions that are easy to fake: joy, surprise, female sexual pleasure, anger,
disgust. Very few are impossible to fake in some way, and that is a
very good thing. If we had to rely on really feeling an emotion to
display it, most of us would have been murdered long ago by people
we offended.3 Imagine, as an evolutionary fantasy, that the signs of
our emotions and other inner states were unfakeable or unveilable.
How different human society, if even conceivable under such circum-
stances, would have to be. It is the susceptibility of our emotions to
being disguised or faked that diffuses the violence latent in so many
of our social interactions. We can thank the synergism of our own
acting ability and capacity for mimicry coupled with the ease with
which the bulk of humanity can be conned and duped.

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Blushes are unfakeable, and some researchers insist a really joyful

smile is too, but most of us aren’t all that discerning.4 If a culture
insists on a blush to indicate shame or embarrassment you have to
plan your faking well ahead, and that is one of the reasons women
employed rouge or pinched their cheeks.5 But if all that is demanded
is a sign of fluster for embarrassment, or gestures of shamefacedness
for shame, we can fake it without cosmetics. Most of our fakery gets
by with an acceptable facial expression, plus words to the effect that
we are feeling the right thing. “Oh, I am so happy” – grateful, sorry,
sad, mad, disappointed, interested, amused, and so on. People are
usually willing to accept the emotion words we employ about our-
selves without too much cavil, even in the most staggeringly insipid
conversations involving phrases such as “getting in touch with your
feelings.”
It is easier to fake emotions that have short duration, but it is very
hard to fake consistently and seamlessly emotions, such as love, that
have slow decay rates or are meant to inform an entire state of re-
lations. Of the big-time moral sentiments, arguably none is easier to
fake than remorse, the emotion at the core of apology. Neither re-
morse nor guilt, with which it bears considerable overlap and is often
spoken of interchangeably,6 has a characteristic facial expression. If
we think of people as having a guilty look, the cat that swallowed the
canary, it is not that such a look is a necessary accompaniment of true
guilt or remorse or that it cannot be faked if the occasion demands it.
Remorse takes place mostly on the inside, the biting and biting again
of conscience, as is captured in the root sense of Latin remorsus or the
Middle English calque: agenbyte (of inwit). There is nothing much to
see; we therefore develop rituals that garishly dramatize displays of
guilt or shows of remorse, from breast-beating to donning sackcloth
to handing over cash to offering our heads for decapitation to saying
magic words such as “I’m sorry.” Thus the apology.

Accidents versus Intentional Wrongs

In most of the cases I have dealt with so far, the social actor suffers
from feelings that he is faking it, fears exposure as a fraud, feels he is

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a hypocrite, when he may in fact not be; or he wishes to be rid of an

anxiety that makes him feel something less than all there, not totally
engaged, always feeling that part of him is standing outside himself
about to get the giggles or turn away in disgust, or provoke that part
of himself still performing to crumble in shame or flee in panic. The
case of apology is rather different. The anxiety belongs less to the
apologizer for faking it, which he often knowingly is doing, than to
the person apologized to – for being taken in or for having to accept
an apology he knows is false.
Let’s divide the acts or omissions that provide occasions for apolo-
gies into two broad categories: those in which we did not mean to
harm the other, and those in which we did. Our sincerest apologies
come for the harms that we did not mean to inflict. We not only feel
remorse but, depending on the gravity or kind of harm, we can also
feel specially hated by the gods as well as greatly mortified and em-
barrassed. That our unintended wrongs should lead to the self-blame
of remorse defies standard philosophical and legal understandings
that insist it is right to hold someone to strict accountability only for
intentional wrongs.
We know that is hooey. Just as we curse the doorsill that we trip
over or the lintel we smash our heads on, we blame ourselves or
suspect we will be roundly blamed and cursed for being the mere
instrument of another’s harm, intentional or not.7 The stupidity and
carelessness of others can provoke us to vengefulness as readily as
pointed assaults can. In the latter case we may have to express some
admiration for the other’s courage or enterprise, or even grant that he
has a reason to want to harm us. And the fool who does not apologize
for his inadvertent harm becomes like the lintel we smash our heads
against. We animate him with hostile intention, with willful stupidity,
and we hold him to blame not merely for not apologizing but also
because his failure to apologize makes us suspect him of evil intent
or of trying to get away with something for nothing.
As an example of the sincerity of apologies for accidents, take
the case of a man, call him Larry,8 who in complete carelessness
runs out from between two parked cars and gets hit by a motorist,
flipped head over heels, but miraculously pops up in haste to assure

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the driver he is all right and to beg the driver’s forgiveness, claiming
correctly that it was 100 percent his fault for darting out. The driver,
white as a sheet, is in turn falling over himself, shaking, apologizing,
begging forgiveness from Larry. Both are sincere and profuse in their
apologies; one for causing the accident though he in the end is the
one who got hurt, the other for being a prop in an accident he did
not cause, but in which another got hurt. Larry knows that the driver
will blame himself for merely having been in the wrong place at the
wrong time. Larry is thus apologizing for the harm of making the
driver think he needs to apologize to Larry. The only faking going on
is Larry’s. He is pretending not to be hurt. In fact, he is so embarrassed
and apologetic that he has not yet processed how hurt he is. His very
adrenalin-motivated urge to apologize has intercepted the pain he
will begin to feel as soon as he limps away. It is hard to find mutual
apologies so sincere.
I add two qualifications. There are times when the impulse to
apologize for accidental harms is muted or intercepted. What if the
person we inadvertently smash into is someone whom we already do
not like? We will apologize readily, perhaps more readily, because
the other person, knowing our distaste for him, has special reason to
think it was no accident. Or if he does accept that the harm was not
intended he may doubt that we are really sorry. He suspects we will
be taking a small delight in the happenstance. He is probably right
too. “You know, this was a complete accident, I am so sorry.” Then
comes our mental reservation: “But as long as it happened, I hope it
really hurt.”
The second qualification requires that we make note of the kind of
insupportable person who never thinks anything he does is wrong and
who thus never feels he has reason to apologize. The harms he inflicts
are, to his mind, the fault of the other: “It is your fault for getting in
the way of my fist.” “You should’ve started out thirty seconds earlier
for work; it is your fault for being in the intersection when I went
through the light.”
Some cases mix intentional with accidental aspects. In these, it is
precisely the lesser amount of presumed intentionality that makes
the apology stand a better chance of being sincere. Take these two

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instances: (1) when the harm we meant to inflict leads to a more

serious or to a different harm than we intended. In these cases the
apology that goes to the excess is often sincere. “I am so sorry you
broke your arm. I only meant to push you away.” (2) heat of passion
cases. These are often followed by a quick change of heart because
the heart that did the wrong was out of control at the time. We meant
to do what we did but with insufficient thought to the consequences,
and so we are eager to disown the action. We really do feel remorse
when we see the damage we did.
But why should the other believe we are sincere when we apolo-
gize? Apologies for heat of passion cases tend to engage in a sleight
of hand. They are tricky: “I am so sorry, I don’t know what got into
me. You see, I mixed drinks with my antidepressants, and it made me
go bonkers; that isn’t like me at all.” Sounds pretty good, until you
realize that it is as much an excuse as an apology, a sidestepping of
responsibility by way of blaming some fictive self who just happened
to be occupying your body at the time, but who has now left town
without so much as a promise not to return.9 One should be wary of
apologies that take this form, even if the excuse gets the wrongdoer
“only out of the fire and into the frying pan” in J. L. Austin’s homely
reminder that “few excuses get us out of it completely” (emphasis in
original).10 Although it is true that I can both be contrite and wish to
give an account of how I came to harm you, it is a delicate matter to
keep such an account from taking away with one hand at least some
of what the apology gave with the other.

Regret versus Remorse

Accept then, though it may still sound impious, that it is rarer to be

really remorseful when we meant to harm someone than when we
didn’t. Let me emphasize that of course people can and do feel gen-
uine remorse for the wrongs they have intentionally done. Minds can
change. The problem nevertheless remains: how does the wronged
person know that the wrongdoer is not feigning his remorse, faking
his change of mind? Or that his sorriness is not of a less noble kind
than true remorse? Thus we are indeed sorry we got caught and are

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paying a price we didn’t anticipate paying. In these cases we suffer the

amoral emotion regret, not remorse or guilt. It is regret, not remorse,
that you feel for most gambles you have taken and lost.11 You feel re-
gret, not remorse, that you sold your stock the day before it went up
or bought it the day before it went down. It is regret, not remorse, you
feel for things you got caught at but would do again if you thought
you could get away with them.12 Any sorrow for the harm caused to
the other is secondary; you regret it only to the extent that you feel
it to be causally connected to the punishment you are now suffering.
Bierce in his usual style nails the point in his definition of penitent,
adj.: “undergoing or awaiting punishment.” And this penitent person
is sincere, sincerely regretful, and thus insincerely remorseful.
The problem is compounded because the notion of being sorry is
serviceable not only for remorse and regret but also for disappoint-
ment, pity, compassion, and the miseries of envy. Thus an allegorical
Envy, in the Confession of the Seven Deadly Sins in Piers Plowman,
confesses in answer to Repentance’s query whether he is sorry for
his sins: “I am evere sory; I am but selde oother.”13 Some pirates
about to be hanged in the early 1700s whom the authorities urged
“to turn their Minds to another World, and sincerely to Repent” are
also “sorry”: “ ‘Yes,’ answered one, ‘I do heartily Repent: I Repent I
had not done more Mischief, and that we did not cut the Throats of
them that took us, and I am extremely sorry that you an’t all hang’d,
as well as we.’ ”14 The villain Aaron in Titus Andronicus goes down
with all guns firing in the same way:

Lucius: Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?

Aaron: Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.
(5.1.123–124)

Why we find such defiance charming is another matter.

But because the dominant sense of “I am sorry” is meant to reg-
ister remorse and thus signal an apology, we end up thinking of all
those nonremorseful uses of “I am sorry” as some kind of perverse or
deformed apology. Thus Sinclair Lewis can write that Mrs. Babbitt
“apologized” to her husband for his hangover headache.15 These
“apologies” are not faked in the same way that the paradigmatic

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apology for a harm you meant to inflict is faked. They are often sin-
cere gestures of commiseration and pity in a low-stakes routine way.
Sometimes they are so rote as only to mark that you acknowledge
having heard the complaint and are responding in a polite way that
is no less scripted than answering “fine” to a “How are you?” Yet
this kind of I’m sorry can on occasion mark remorse. When a mother
says she is sorry her child scraped his knee we are still in the realm of
low-stakes commiseration, but when she says she is so very sorry the
child gashed his forehead and requires fifteen stitches to close it, the
apology may reflect the mother’s remorse for her failure to protect
the child against the injury.
There are also compulsive apologizers, ever anxious about the
harms they believe they may have caused others. They sincerely mean
their apologies, but they seldom have anything to apologize for except
their accidental wrongs. They are truly remorseful.16 But such people
devalue the worth of their apologies by apologizing so readily that
their apologies become nervous tics. They find themselves apologizing
for harms they did not commit or, in an especially extreme variant,
apologizing to the person who harmed them. This latter style can be a
form of pathological cravenness, or its own kind of moral heroism –
the form it takes, for example, with Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin.17
What does an apology mean coming from someone like this, however
sincere it might be, for whom real remorse seems to come too easily
or who seems to take a little too much pleasure from apologizing?

Making Faking Hurt

How do we get around an apology’s easy fakeability, its not being

meant or its being meant but motivated by the wrong sentiment?
How can we come to trust sincere ones as sincere and not just as
good renditions of sincerity? We can develop techniques to engineer
real changes of heart or hone our detection radar to unmask the false
heart. Or we can settle for accepting sincere regret as a reasonable
substitute for uncertain remorse by making sure the apology hurts
the person giving it. The second approach has much to recommend
it and is a big part of the cultural history of apology. The church, for

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instance, imposed three stages in the sacrament of penance: contrition

of the heart, confession of the mouth, and satisfaction. Contrition was
at one time held to demand real tears, and confession meant confes-
sion to a priest. Both tears and words could be faked, but the effort
to put on a good show would tend to conform and transform the
inner spirit into genuine remorse, either by some mysterious trans-
formation or by actually instructing and cultivating the moral faculty
of the penitent.18
No absolution, however, was to be granted until satisfaction had
been made. Satisfaction was understood to be a temporal punish-
ment. It might be no more than saying some prayers, but it could
also involve lengthy fasting and stiff alms. Depending on how strict
the priest prescribing penance chose to be, he could make sure the
sinner felt regret for his action, if not remorse for his sin.19 St. Thomas
speaks of satisfaction as “compensation for injury inflicted.” It is a
species of “vindictive justice,” and he is all for it.20 At the very least
it meant the restitution of any illicit gains.
Thus the prayer of Claudius in Hamlet, who is racked with guilt
and contrition, is without effect because he is not moved to make
satisfaction or restitution of his ill-gotten gains. His is a case in which
the proper sentiments are not faked – his conscience is paining him –
though that does not settle the question of whether his feelings of guilt
are not something of a sham nonetheless. He is suffering remorse, but
his remorse is not as strong as his love for his queen and the crown
he gained by the wrong he committed. What is the status of remorse
that simply torments us but does not motivate us to make amends?
Is it weak remorse, or merely a fake remorse, a kind of performance
of self-castigation we put on for ourselves? Moreover, one suspects
that Claudius’ remorse may be as much motivated by fear – Hamlet
is closing in – as by true self-blame.
Although making satisfaction did not solve the problem of faking
contrition of the heart, it surely raised the costs of doing bad deeds.
One Jewish tradition imposes an even stricter control on repentance.
Maimonides defines a perfect repentance to require the monitoring
of one’s future behavior to see whether one truly means the I’m sorry
now. The test of sincerity is that it will alter future behavior. “If a

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man had sinful intercourse with a woman, and after a time was alone
with her, his passion for her persisting, his physical powers unabated
while he continued to live in the same district where he had sinned
and yet he refrains and does not transgress, he is a sincere penitent.”21
This is more than monitoring the penitent’s future behavior; it is a
testing, a courting of temptation – dangling the goodies before his
eyes – and thus a tormenting and hence a continued punishment
of the penitent. The strictness of the sincerity test is lessened by a
corresponding duty in the wronged party to forgive, and evidently
to trust the penitent to alter his behavior. This from the tractate on
torts: “The injured person, however, is forbidden to be harsh and to
withhold forgiveness . . . But once the offender has asked forgiveness
and has entreated him a first and a second time, and he knows that
the offender has repented of his sin . . . he should forgive him.”22

Ta k e t h e e x a m p l e of how one bloodfeuding culture dealt with

the problem of ascertaining the sincerity of shows of sorrow for in-
flicting accidental harms. The following is a case from an Icelandic
saga dating from the early thirteenth century: X accidentally hits Y
with a pole in a game in which poles were used to goad horses to
fight each other, not to whack people. X immediately calls timeout
and says, “I am sorry, I didn’t mean to hit you.” Here is the crucial
addendum. “I will prove to you that it was an accident. I will pay
you sixty sheep so that you will not blame me and will understand
that I did not mean it.”23 To prove lack of hostile intent you had to
pay up.
How much more would you have to pay to show you were re-
ally sorry if you had initially meant to harm the other? Among these
people apologies weren’t acceptable for intentional wrongs without
massive cultural machinery brought to bear to buy off the avenger’s
axe in elaborate ceremonies of reconciliation and peacemaking, usu-
ally after, not before, a few people had lost their lives. You might have
to lay your head on the knee of the person you wronged and beseech
him to give it back to you.24 Usually no one offered his head with-
out some prior assurance that it would not be severed, so that this
highly charged ritual was loaded with playacting and posing, but the

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dangers of glitches were real and people felt the emotional intensity
of the performance. This was Ritual, not mere ritual; one smirk from
anyone in the audience, and the agreement not to take blood could
vanish.25
Honor cultures make apology and forgiveness, even for accidents,
very dangerous stuff because both look as if they might be motivated
by cowardice. When the wrongdoer was a child or an old man or a
woman, I’m sorry’s could be accepted without much anxiety. But
for warrior-aged men the presumption was that harms were inten-
tional unless proven otherwise. The burden was on the harmer to
show he did not mean it, but that got him caught up in fearing to
look cowardly by looking too fearful to face the consequences of
claiming the harm to have been intentional even if he hadn’t meant
it. The apologizer, it was suspected, harbored a cowardly and ab-
ject heart. He was apologizing because he was scared of having the
damage he inflicted revisited upon him in revenge.26
But the person who readily accepted an apology was also sus-
pected of harboring a cowardly heart, revealing himself too scared to
hunt down and kill the person who knocked him down. His fear, it
was believed, biased him in favor of interpreting ambiguous harms as
unintended. Isn’t the connection between ready apology and forgive-
ness and cowardice still true today? My quick and ever so concerned
I’m sorry for inadvertently bumping into someone is more quickly
given if the offended person looks angry and big enough to avenge
himself on me. And I am cravenly eager to forgive the same big per-
son when he bumps into me. Cowardice makes these apologies and
forgivenesses sincere, but not more remorseful than regretful.
Because of its associations with cowardice, only the strong and
powerful could risk granting forgiveness (it was one of the preroga-
tives of power)27 – but not frequently, and they rarely apologized. Not
having to say you’re sorry is another prerogative of power. Because it
looked like weakness to apologize, some people felt they had to stand
by even the stupid things they said or did, posturing stubbornly until
they “reluctantly” acceded to the demands of reasonable people to
back down and make amends. A trivial accident between two people
with no prior enmity could easily explode, becoming the first incident

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in a formal enmity that could last years. But “reluctantly” still de-
serves the scare quotes I gave it because the reluctance was no less
likely to be faked than the apology it was pretending to refuse to
make. The risk was that if you acted your reluctance to make peace
too well you would end up stuck nervously awaiting the avenger’s
axe for having refused to pay up.
The offer of sixty sheep shows that this apology was not cheap.
The injured man could accept them because it could be claimed that
the compensation set a high value on his honor. Being struck, even
accidentally, was a dishonor – not only because the motive behind it
always allowed for some ambiguity as to the degree of its intention-
ality, but also because others might be taking pleasure in the victim’s
pain, laughing at him in the way bystanders laugh when someone
has a pratfall. People often look foolish for being the butt of an acci-
dent. We have special demeaning names for such souls if they make a
habit of this particular kind of bad luck: sad sacks, schlemiels, losers,
people sadly without much honor.
The sincerity of X’s apology cannot be divorced from the com-
pensation payment, which plays two roles in the transaction: it is
compensation for the dishonor to Y of having been struck, and it is
proof that he is willing to pay more than lip service to the issue of
intentionality. The apologizer can be trusted at the minimum to feel
sorry for the loss of his sheep and thus also to be sorry, though indi-
rectly, for the harm done to the other. That much they could verify.
Any true remorse was unverifiable.
Move this into more familiar surroundings, less dramatic but rec-
ognizable to any parent with more than one child. You tell one kid
to apologize for some harm he did to the other. He refuses. You, in a
sterner voice, order the apology. Continued refusal. You threaten him;
in Ann Arbor, the threat might include Draconian measures such as
a timeout for which the threatened sentence of fifteen minutes in his
toy-filled bedroom is inevitably commuted to five minutes. The kid
still resists giving the apology until you take a menacing step toward
him, upon which he turns to his sibling, not completely frontally, but
45 degrees off center, and sneers an I’m sorry in the most unapolo-
getic tone mutterable. Then back to us sternly: “Say it like you mean

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it.” He then makes a small improvement in tone, still without any

sign of contrition, and the matter ends right there.
It ends right there unless, foolish parent that you are, you insist
on asking for a better rendition of meaning it. The kid then has you
boxed in, for he will always find a way of uttering the apology to show
that he doesn’t mean it, thereby managing to glory and triumph in
the face of you and the offended sibling until you finally concede. A
wise parent will accept the spat-out hostile apology that shows the
first slight improvement. To whose satisfaction? Well, to the parent’s,
and to the wronged sibling’s.
True, the satisfaction is hardly perfect. Is any satisfaction perfect?
Even so-called perfect satisfaction is attended by the disgust or heav-
iness of satiation, or by desires for more as soon as the all too briefly
enduring glow wears off. Q: What is the substance of satisfaction
to the wronged person in an unfelt apology? A: The pain it costs the
apologizer to give it. His refusal to play the role of true penitent is the
specie of the compensation payment. His dissatisfaction with having
to apologize is what he pays over to make satisfaction to the injured
party. That is clearly not true for all apologies, but it is true of many
of them, and many in which the stakes are quite high. In this case
the apologizer doesn’t mean a word of what he says; and it especially
hurts him to say it because he doesn’t mean it. His unwillingness to
say the I’m sorry he is forced to say is his sixty sheep, designed to make
him feel sorry for his own predicament of being under compulsion
if nothing else.
It does not matter that in the saga example the apologizer, on his
own motion, is paying over his sheep to convince the injured party
that he meant no harm and that in the case of the child, the parents
force the kid to pay over words everyone knows he does not mean.
In both cases, the wronged party is satisfied to the extent it hurt the
apologizer to make his apology; in both cases the apologizer must
humble himself before the person he injured. Apology is a ritual,
pure and simple, of humiliation. The humiliation is the true compen-
sation. The sibling apologized to might even prefer seeing her brother
disgraced in this way than spanked, though that too would be a plea-
sure if she could be satisfied that the spanking hurt, something she

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knows will not be the case in a professorial household. But if she had
to choose between having her brother forced to apologize and getting
a ten-minute timeout? Easy case: make him say, “I’m sorry.”
The kids who refuse until seriously threatened to spit out their
unfelt apologies are truly better destined for the world of honor than
the world of therapy to which they had the misfortune to be born.
Sometimes they simply will not say it; they will not apologize no
matter what. Smash their toys if you want; they won’t budge. Got
to admire them for it. Thus it is that to force an unfelt apology is
not completely unsatisfying, for it is not easy to overcome the nearly
infinite will to power of the average five-year-old. If our little tyke
has to say uncle, he will still say it defiantly – but he is beaten and he
knows it, his very defiance being the proof of his loss. In a strange
way this is a win-win outcome. The apologizer, by willfully exposing
the fake apology as a fake, gains the dignity of some kind of sullen
defiance, and the original victim gets the joy of how much it hurts
the apologizer to go through the motions of his fake apology. His
very dignity-preserving gesture of defiance is his admission as to how
much humiliation he is suffering.
Someone deeply committed to the rhetoric of forgiveness, apology,
healing, and restoration of relationships will think my account of
apology a travesty. He would say that the story of the unapologetic
child is not a story about apology; that I have committed an error of
categorization, confusing punishment with apology, merely because
the punishment takes the form of a farcical apology. But it matters
that the punishment takes the form of forcing an apology rather than,
say, imprisonment. The ritual, even if performed badly, pretends to
make some sort of amends to the wronged party, which the latter can
choose to accept or not.
A more pious message lurks in the parent’s orders: in the future,
little boy, you should do the groveling and humiliate yourself; your
conscience should prompt you to it; that is what remorse is. Right
now, because your conscience is treating you too favorably or is to-
tally undeveloped, we will do some playacting. We will dress up as
your conscience and make you grovel and beat your breast for you.
You must be made to lower yourself before the other and be beaten

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to it if necessary; better if your conscience do the lashing than that we

do it. Should your conscience remain undeveloped or fall victim to
partiality in your own cause, at least learn to fake it convincingly in
accordance with propriety, if not morality, as though it were merely
an issue of politeness. When it comes to mending fences, appearance
and form are rather more than nine points of the law. Saying it like
you mean it is usually all that will ever be demanded and all that is
verifiable anyway.28
Apology ceremonies, indeed many reconciliation ceremonies,
don’t disguise the fact that they are humiliation rituals; only in
America could we think otherwise. In ancient Israel you rent your
clothes, and fasted, and lay in sackcloth, and went softly.29 The
Emperor Henry IV at Canossa stood in the snow for three days before
an unforgiving Pope Gregory VII finally relented. Lear stripped him-
self naked and went mad and still couldn’t dare to face the Cordelia
he had wronged. In Montenegro you crawled and groveled with your
rifle slung around your neck until the party you wronged lifted you
from the dirt.30 God humiliates Himself by becoming Man and then
gets scourged, mocked, and crowned with thorns, before the Father
will deign to accept an apology from mankind for the first disobedi-
ence of Adam and Eve. Many a spouse has had to grovel even more
before a wronged partner, undertaking all kinds of miserable tasks
with compensatory solicitousness to make up for what the wrong-
doer suspects are unforgivable wrongs. And to what extent are these
submissive gestures “meant”? And do we know that it is remorse and
not regret that moves them?

Forgiveness and Punishment

Suppose that our now well-trained child has learned to say “I’m
sorry” when appropriate and to say it nicely. Not only that, but he
has come to accord his inner state with his words so that he is now a
fully moral being; he genuinely feels remorse when he says his sorries.
What about you, the wronged person? Are you going to accept his
apologies? Do you not fear that it may have come a bit too easily?
Won’t you make him stand in the snow for a few days anyway, make

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him wear some sackcloth, eat some ashes, maybe even want to see
him crucified? Why should anyone believe a sincere apology could
dispense with punishment?
But our sincere apologizer answers, “I am punished; I have been
punishing myself with remorse; my sense of well-being will be de-
stroyed forever if you do not forgive me. Even with your forgiveness
I will be scarred by the memory of my transgression.” “Fine and
dandy,” you say, “but I still want sixty sheep.” You even believe him;
you accept him as being truly remorseful. Moreover, should he be
faking, he is faking with such skill that the performance alone merits
crediting; it would be tasteless and graceless not to reward such mas-
terful acting. As La Rochefoucauld would have it, “Some disguised
deceits counterfeit truth so perfectly that not to be taken in thereby
would be an error in judgment” (M 282). The implications of La
Rochefoucauld’s maxim are not easy. Apparently, the deceit is not
so masterful that it passes without being noticed as a deceit, even at
the moment it is working as a deceit. Deceits, it seems, can work in
more ways than by simply deceiving. They can elicit awe for their
chutzpah, or daring; how is it that snake oil salesmen sell their wares
though every one knows they are lying? As Trollope rightly notes,
“A man may lie in such a way as to deceive, though no one believe
him.”31
Yet do we really believe that people are as hard on themselves as
they should be even when they are feeling truly remorseful? Might
they not actually be pleasuring in their guilt, vain of their self-
punishing capacity, feeling rather self-congratulatory about it, and
oh so moral, proud that they have such a sensitive conscience?32
Whatever humiliation they suffer by apologizing feeds their self-
satisfaction. Where is the compensation to you in their pleasure?
Might they not, by feeling ever so guilty, come to believe they are
allowed, even entitled, to forgive themselves? We can’t let them get
away with that, can we? In the words of the diarist Victor Klemperer,
“If one settles accounts with oneself, forgiveness is self-deception.”33
Apologies, faked or real, are often accepted and repaid with for-
giveness. To forgive, however, is not to forget; it is not letting bygones
be bygones. Forgiveness is merciful when compared with the revenge

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that is being waived, but it is not an everything-is-hunky-dory kind

of thing. Says Adam Bede, “[Forgiveness] can never mean as you’re t’
have your old feelings back again, for that’s not possible. He’s not the
same man to me, and I can’t feel the same towards him.”34 In feuding
cultures, reconciliation ceremonies are meant to memorialize, not to
consign to oblivion. Compare the status of one who is not known
to have done a wrong – one, that is, who is still deemed innocent –
and one who has been forgiven a wrong. The forgiven person is not
innocent; he is on parole.
It is not as if others have not claimed the contrary. George Herbert
Mead is one among many: “A person who forgives but does not
forget is an unpleasant companion; what goes with forgiving is for-
getting, getting rid of the memory of it.” It would indeed be nicer for
a wrongdoer if his victims had short- and long-term memory loss, but
it would hardly do much to discourage him from taking advantage of
their bad memory. Without memory of the wrong, forgiveness con-
verges on stupidity. Thus Trollope: “If you pardon all the evil done
to you, you encourage others to do you evil! If you give your cloak to
him who steals your coat, how long will it be before your shirt and
trousers will go also?”35
Forgiveness can be faked, as when you forgive someone and then
have him assassinated a few minutes later. The Godfather movies
take delight in this form of trickery. But real forgiveness need not
come with a forgiving inner state to the extent we think of such a
state as having the feel of lovingkindness. Indeed the victim is as
often forced by social pressure to forgive no less than the wrongdoer
is forced to apologize. Or he forgives because it is embarrassing not
to once the wrongdoer has given a colorable apology.36 A stubborn
and unforgiving victim eventually will see the sympathies of third
parties shift in favor of the penitent wrongdoer, as long as the penitent
plays his remorsefulness in such a way that it convinces others of
its sincerity. Refusing to grant forgiveness in order to nurse your
resentment is tricky business for your honor.
Whether forgiveness is willingly granted or sullenly begrudged, no
prudent forgiver should be all that trusting of his forgiven, unless the
latter proves himself again and again in the way Maimonides would

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demand, until vigilance once again can be relaxed. Forgiveness that

is honorable and isn’t merely a veneer for weakness can be under-
stood as embodying this warning: you have already blown it once;
don’t blow it again. Some more pessimistic souls deny forgiveness,
not because they harbor inconsolable desires of revenge but because
they believe that the recidivism of the apologetic offender is a cer-
tainty. Thus the narrator in V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men makes
a Biercean point – without Bierce’s charm – regarding failings in
his employees: “I gave no one a second chance: the man who lets
you down once will let you down again. This is especially true of
the man whose dereliction occurs after a long period of satisfactory
service.”37 Or Bierce: “apologize, v., to lay the foundation for future
offense.”38
Indulge me for one more paragraph sounding like a throwback to
honor culture morality. The wronged person who “forgives” actually
might prefer a faked apology, not just because it is a sign that it hurt
the wrongdoer to give it but also because it allows him not to forgive
completely and still to cherish some hatred. His forgiveness is dis-
counted to match the insincerity of the apology. Not to harbor some
hate against the wrongdoer seems to sell your harms and humiliations
too cheaply if they are serious ones.
The wrongdoer’s remorse has a way of compromising the avenger’s
moral standing and sometimes also his resolve. The avenger might be
softened by pity, and grant forgiveness under the sway of that most
transient of sentiments. The Greeks, who never had a high opinion of
pity, noted that it has a very short half-life, decaying quickly into dis-
gust, thus transforming its pitiable object into a pitiful one: “Those
who place high hopes in . . . pity . . . are ignorant of how quickly tears
dry up; no one faithfully loves one who disgusts him.”39 The unre-
morseful apologizer is doing the avenger a favor. He saves the avenger
from his own penchant for pity and allows the justness of his cause
to survive the fake apology when he finally gets the nerve to retract
his equally sham forgiveness and take his revenge.40
To be sure, these concerns are an issue when the situation is one of
a certain gravity. A lot of forgiveness, like a lot of apology, is routine
and uncomplicated because the stakes are low and no one gives a

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damn. But such small encounters can escalate if the ritual forms are
not given their due. Apologies are also often given and received by
people who love each other or who have absolutely no wish to find
reasons to establish enmity. Such people, if they are the wronged
party, wish to believe in the sincerity of the apology or, if they are the
wrongdoer, hope that forgiveness for their sincere apologies can really
restore relations to a peaceful state. For petty wrongs, no problem.
The little I’m sorry’s of day-to-day interaction are freely traded; your
screw-ups are not only compensated for by your apologies, but by
my screw-ups too. We content ourselves to trade screw-ups back and
forth, along with apologies. But for big wrongs? Hand over the sheep,
sixty of them.41

I h av e pa i n t e d a grim picture, perhaps grimmer than need be,

out of pure vexation with so much of the pious blather on apology
and forgiveness one must endure. I don’t mean to make you mistrust
every apology that comes your way. I concede that not all apologies
need be between people who are in a state of enmity or who live
in honor cultures, nor are we quite without the means to discern a
sincere apology when we are dealing with a person we know well.
But unfaked apology is not my theme. My purpose is to show how
much faking it is a part of real apology. It is a big part of how we
teach apology to the young. Apology is so highly ritualized a social
interaction that it cannot ever be free of attacks of self-consciousness
about acting, playacting, masks, make-up, saying the lines right, and
getting hooted off the stage. We will never properly understand apol-
ogy rituals and their requirement of humiliation and compensation
if we do not understand that the ritual form is largely necessitated by
how easy it is to fake remorse, and by how hard it is to distinguish
genuine remorse that arises as a moral response to the harm done
to the other from equally genuine amoral regret that arises from the
discomfort the whole fiasco is causing the wrongdoer.

If r i t ua l s o f a p o l o g y must work to solve the problem of

remorse’s easy fakeability, consider the difficulty that sincere praise
has in trying to distinguish itself from flattery. We have no rituals that

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compensate for the chances that praise may be flattery or a bastard

mix. There may seldom in fact be any way we can consistently tell
them apart, especially because the object of either praise or flattery
is too pleased either way to care all that much. Praise and flattery
provide a coda to the preceding two chapters, which began with
prayer, a form of praise, and followed with apology, a form of prayer.

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 eight

Flattery and Praise

Praise is a good thing, we are told. We are thus to extol God out
of gratitude; we are urged to praise our children to assist their self-
esteem and confidence. We praise virtue and excellence, the motive
varying, but partly because the very praiseworthiness of the person
or deeds elicits the response almost involuntarily, as when we burst
into applause at an amazing performance in art or athletics. Flattery,
in contrast, has been cursed by moralists from the earliest of times;1 it
is hard to find a vice more excoriated. It is felt to be cheating, getting
a step up on the competition by engaging in a form of bribery. The
unfairness of it wouldn’t quite justify the vehemence with which it is
cursed if it were not that flattery had such extraordinary powers. Few
are so virtuous as not to be seduced by it, and thus many are tempted
to flatter because they almost certainly stand to gain by doing so.
Mostly it was the special vice that undid rulers, or people wealthy
enough to have followers and entourages: the “monarch’s plague,”
Shakespeare called it.2 Men who ruled others needed counsel, and it
was much pleasanter to hear one’s praises sung than one’s errors and
vices admonished and blamed.
The flatterer was often pictured as a kind of pimp, a purveyor of
pleasure to the organs of our vanity. As with the allure of delights
of the flesh, the temptation is overpowering. Flattery is narcotic and
addicting. It preys on two desperate and inescapable desires: to be
thought well of by others and to think well of ourselves. The second
desire depends on the first more than the first on the second; in any
event, they are complexly intertwined. Nor is either of these desires
mere vanity: they are much of what makes us socializable; nor is either
entirely distinct from what we, flatteringly, call conscience. We desire

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and need approbation so badly that we seem more than willing to

accept counterfeit coinage as real. Even when we suspect the quality
of sweet words and attentive looks, we push aside our suspicions,
suspend our disbelief, and bask in the false glow.
Flattery was thought to infect friendship too. A friend, according
to ancient moralists, was to make his friend better, not to be an
abettor of his vices. A friend should blame his friend’s faults so as to
improve him, not praise them or indulge them. It is not easy, however,
to tell a flatterer from a friend. A good flatterer adopts the tone of
frankness and even reproves a person if he thinks it will advance his
own standing. Plutarch recommends feigning changes in your views
to test whether your friend sticks to his prior views.3 But that would
trap only a very dim-witted flatterer. An adept flatterer can almost
always foil the most advanced antiflattery security system.
Moralists have often pointed out that we are our own worst flat-
terers. The conniving flatterer finds his way eased by the fact that we
have paved the way for him; we advertise where we are most vulner-
able, where we have an itch that we are desperate to have scratched.
Given the world of competitive vanity that characterized royal courts
and especially given its rococo flourishing at Versailles in the seven-
teenth century, it should not be any wonder that La Rochefoucauld
would be at his most perspicacious (and repetitious) on this vice:
“Self-love is the greatest flatterer of all” (M 2; also M 600); and
“if we never flattered ourselves the flattery of others could do us no
harm” (M 152).
Praise is good, the inevitable fruit of virtuous deeds; flattery bad.
But how do we tell the difference between them? Can we tell when
we are being praised and not being merely flattered? Is it possible to
praise someone without also flattering him or her? Does the difference
simply lie in the intent of the praiser? Or is it equally a matter of how
the receiver takes the compliment? That is, is flattering one thing, and
being flattered another? “It is not he who flattered me,” says Mrs.
Yepanchin in The Idiot. “It is I who am flattered.”4 How is one not
to be flattered by sincere praise? Can a person lower in the pecking
order ever praise someone higher in the pecking order without its
also being flattery?

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Tainted Praise
The common view is that flattery is a fraud, a fake; the dictionary
view is that it is false or insincere praise. But what is the basis of
its falseness? That it is not meant? That cannot be true; flatterers
can sincerely believe what they are saying. That the praise is false?
Although much flattery is false, not all is. I can flatter handsome
persons by telling them how good-looking they are. A teacher loves
to think that students are telling the truth and that they are sincere
when they shamelessly flatter her by telling her that her course was
the best offered in the school. Can’t the poor teacher, desperate for
approbation, believe in the innocence of the students’ intentions if
they say so after she has submitted the grades and the ones saying
it are not the ones who got the A’s? Yes, and that is just how she
flatters herself, though the students may not be conniving flatterers
for having flattered.
So flattery can be sincere and can be true. Then what could possibly
distinguish it from praise, which is also both sincere and true? Might
it be that flattery does to praise what hypocrisy does to all virtue:
infects it so that the real thing can never be trusted? Let’s assume
now that we are dealing with praise, both sincere and true, and see
whether we can keep it from being infected with flattery’s vices. Praise,
no less than flattery, raises the problem of how to handle the benefits
that will come your way as a byproduct of the praise you give. Are
you blameless as long as you do not praise for the reason of getting
rewarded for your praise? How naı̈ve do you have to be not to know
that praise is often rewarded by the person praised? Isn’t that what
motivates a good portion of the praise we give our children and our
dogs (and God too)? We hope that praise will move them to do what
we want them to do in the future, not merely build their self-esteem.
Dog-training manuals are richer than self-help books on this theme.
Praise, even more than flattery, should prompt rewards. The person
flattered might suspect the flattery is false or that it was motivated
primarily to be rewarded, and thus dismiss it if he possesses a steely,
virtuous soul. Praise, on the other hand, to the extent that it is not
flattery, is itself something of a virtue and should be rewarded. It is,

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after all, a kind of gift. And gifts demand recompense. The praised
person who does not reward sincere praise looks like an ingrate and
eventually may come to be blamed as one.5 But balanced against
the praised person’s desire to reward the praiser is a concern that
rewarding praisers will encourage flatterers, and the praised person
doesn’t trust that he will always be able to discern the difference.
Leave it to La Rochefoucauld to suspect that there is no difference
between praise and flattery. For him, praise is merely a sophisticated
form of flattery:
We dislike praising, and never praise anybody except out of self-
interest. Praise is a subtle, concealed, and delicate form of flattery
which gratifies giver and receiver in different ways: the latter ac-
cepts it as the due reward of his merit, the former bestows it so as
to draw attention to his own fairness and discrimination.
(M 144)
La Rochefoucauld is not dealing with low-level, on-the-make flatter-
ers. His praisers are no less vain than the people whose vanity they
flatter by praising them. They praise to be praised in return for prais-
ing astutely, for their penetrating taste and intelligence. This is much
subtler than seeing a flatterer as praising because he suspects it will
be rewarded by some material advancement. Here the act of praising
is itself its own unsavory reward in a world in which vanity, vanity,
all is vanity. We expect, however, that praise will elicit more than
admiration for praising well. How often have you seen people tell
others how nice they look in order to be told the same? Because we
cannot ask to be praised, we often fish for compliments, and praise
is sovereign bait for catching praise.
Is flattery any different? We indeed flatter to get credit for dis-
cernment, as when we pay homage to trendy positions we strongly
suspect are vacuous but fear that we will be seen as vacuous if we
do not flatteringly pay our respects. It is the emperor’s new clothes
all over again. And we surely flatter to be flattered in return. We are
always told to spurn flattery when we are its object, but in fact we
love it, even when we know it is flattery, when we know the person is
sucking up (pardon the vulgarity, but the behavior tends to invite dis-
gusting imagery). It all depends on how he does it. If he smarms and

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grovels, it is disgusting, but if he passes it off with style, we eat it up.

La Rochefoucauld again gets it right: “Sometimes we think we dis-
like flattery, but it is only the way it is done that we dislike” (M 329).
Or as a more recent writer put it a little more crudely: “Flattery in
general is neither despised nor hated . . . What is despised and hated,
however, is flattery combined with arse-licking.”6 I want to add an-
other reason flattery has its appeal: even if you know it is the purest
flattery and recognize that the person is behaving manipulatively, to
find yourself the object of flattery is itself a kind of praise or at least
independently flattering. It is recognition of your status as someone
whom it is appropriate or worthwhile to flatter. Flattery is homage.
Is it ever possible for a low-status person to praise someone of
higher status without the praise collapsing into flattery independent
of the motives of the praiser? It is the structure of the interaction,
the direction of it, that condemns the praise. Praise flatters its ob-
ject and demands recompense, though it be apt, true, and innocently
motivated. Can there be a purely innocent worshiper of a superior?
Wouldn’t the virtuous subordinate of a praiseworthy superior fear
that if he were to be rewarded by the object of his praise he would
look no different from a successful flatterer to all those scrupulous
persons who, knowing they would benefit, suppressed their innocent
desire to praise?
What is a would-be honest low-status praiser to do? There are
three possibilities for praise whose motivation might ensure its dif-
ferentiation from flattery. First, there is that admiration, as I men-
tioned briefly, that bursts forth by sheer exuberance and awe for the
greatness of the performance or for the stupendous majesty of a great
personage. This is the kind of praise the faithful on occasion give to
God, and it has all the marks of genuineness.
Second, there is the praise you give your enemy. This is an imperfect
example because the praiser is still claiming a rough equality with
the praised even though he currently may be a notch or two beneath
him. The praise might be infected with a desire to be praised in return
or might harbor a cowardly hope that your enemy will go easy on
you out of “respect” for your opinion of him. Related to this is
the reluctant praise received from the bitterly envious, who would

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do anything, at great cost to themselves, not to praise you. This is

really a subset of praise elicited by sheer awe, but it bears none of its
signs of exuberance; it is begrudged and rather more genuine for its
gracelessness, which betokens that the givers of it think it is against
their interest to grant it.7
Third, we can praise anonymously or (innocently) to a third party
out of earshot of the person praised. Says Etienne to Henri: “I think
M. le Prince the wittiest and most virtuous of men.” Etienne gets
credit from Henri for his views, as La Rochefoucauld suggests, but
suppose that Henri tells M. le Prince: “Mon liege, Etienne thinks you
the paragon of wit and virtue.” In one coup both Etienne and Henri
become flatterers – Henri consciously so, by bearing a message that
flatters M. le Prince, and Etienne, presumably against his will, as the
author of the praise. Etienne, to maintain the innocence of his praise,
needs to be reasonably sure that Henri will not be a carrier pigeon
and bear the tale.
I dread to think how many students have influenced a teacher, not
by telling her how good they thought her class was but merely by
relaying the news that student opinion in general was that the class
was a real winner. The strong urge to kill the messenger bearing bad
tidings exists in near symmetry with the urge to reward the messenger
bearing good tidings. Not just the messenger will get rewarded, but
the registrar’s office will notice that the whole class curve has shifted
A-ward.
With the possible exception of the praise that bursts from us in
sheer exuberance, might it be that praise is pure in motive only when
it comes from someone who has nothing to gain by it? This is Hamlet’s
view, expressed when he praises Horatio:

Nay, do not think I flatter,

For what advancement may I hope from thee
That no revenue hast but thy good spirits
To feed and clothe thee? Why should the poor be flatter’d?
No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp,
And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee
Where thrift may follow fawning.
(3.2.56–62)

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If God or Caesar praises you, that is praise indeed, as the adage

would have it; yet we know that their praise is not purged of inter-
est merely because of the vast difference in their power and yours.
Kings and rulers prime the pump, fish for compliments, and elicit
praise by flattering their subjects. Why should the poor be flattered?
When they have a vote. Refusing to flatter under the circumstances
can get people in trouble; it did to Coriolanus. But giving the poor
the franchise is not being fair to Hamlet’s example. There may not
be any case that meets Hamlet’s criterion. If not advancement to
hope for, the high-status praiser will always have the approval to
gain of those they praise; the exultant, adoring, and grateful faces
are worth their weight in gold to any leader, whether or not he needs
their votes. “Blessed are the meek” and “Blessed be ye poor: for
yours is the kingdom of God” may be understood as a flattery of the
poor to gain their allegiance. Any teacher who praises his students
wonders whether his motives are pure, even when he is tenured. We
curry favor as actively with them as they do with us.8 And why?
Because flattery from the high often prompts the low to love in re-
turn: “I dare say the beggar’s daughter loved King Cophetua. When
you come to distances such as that, there can be love. The very
fact that a man should have descended so far in quest of beauty, –
the flattery of it alone, – will produce love. When the angels came
after the daughters of men of course the daughters of men loved
them.”9
Praising our children is often infected with flattery. We praise them
to reward meritorious deeds and good efforts but also to cajole, to
motivate. The words of praise are looking for returns independent of
any truth they may contain. We praise the mediocre performance in
hopes of motivating an improved version; it is not that we are prais-
ing the effort, for that may not have had anything to do with the
mediocrity of the performance. Then too there is what Jane Austen
calls “the common cant of praise,” as when a girl is called beautiful
as an empty form of politeness that no one expects really to be true;
indeed Austen calls attention to the practice because in the particular
instance she was describing “the truth was less violently outraged

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than usually happens.”10 Cant admiration of that sort is not flattery,

but a small gesture that must be made because not to make it strongly
suggests you find the person unattractive (haven’t you nearly choked
telling new parents how beautiful their baby is?). You get no reward
for the cant except the avoidance of being ostracized for not having
the grace to do so. And of course we praise, not exactly to be praised
in return but to be loved, honored, and, when the object is our chil-
dren, obeyed. It is very hard indeed to extract praise from the system
of reciprocities in which it is embedded and by which it is in part
compromised.
The high no less than the low are moved to genuine praise by
witnessing great and awesome performances: thus the praise of a
general to his troops after a hard-fought battle. We allow the praise
to pass as praise, because the men deserve it and because the general
means it, even though it will prompt their continued obedience and
even though his praise is obligatory – for not to give it would mark
him as a callous monster. Before the battle, however, that same general
also praised his men, for their prior bravery or for what he claims
are their inherently courageous souls, but here the praise moves into
the genre of exhortation, with the exhortatory intent overwhelming
the purity of the praise and sending it into flattery’s camp by the
dominance of the instrumental motive.
Exhortatory praise moves us toward those manifestly false prais-
ings, sometimes exhortatory in form, as in the “nice try” we say to
the kid who let in a soft goal (the “we” here includes my wife and
the other parents at the game but does not include, I must confess,
me). This is the stuff of cheerleading and thus pardonable despite my
unrepressed distaste for the excesses of the style. To praise with the
goal of building the self-esteem of the praised persons independently
of their actual mastery and virtue is little different from the flattery
bad friends give who abet each other’s vices. Or perhaps the proper
rule for children is captured by a remark I once heard a wise parent
make: you spend their first four years doing everything possible to
build their self-esteem, and then you have to spend the rest of their
lives tearing it back down to reasonable proportions.

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In Small Praise of Flattery

If one is going to flatter, learn to do it well; it is an art. The bad
name flattery has, coupled with its frequent indistinguishability from
certain aspects of politeness and charm – or complaisance, in the
eighteenth-century sense – gives rise to all the anxieties of playing
false roles falsely – or, worse, playing them truly – that is one of the
chief themes of this book. It is thus flattery to pretend to be distressed
at the distress of others, to act, or even be, indignant over the wrongs
they think they have suffered; it is flattery to laugh at the boss’s lame
jokes, to flirt within innocuous limits that passes merely for being
good company, to play the role of an attentive daughter or son to
an old powerful fart on the job (obviously), but also merely to nod
gravely at some vacuous banality he utters with great pomposity, to
seek advice, to adopt a frank and open tone; the list is endless. But
many of these behaviors are also the marks of amiability.
It is hard to escape being a flatterer. It is a commonplace that being
gruff, frank, and direct is readily employed in flattery’s service, espe-
cially if it is nicely contrasted with a large population of groveling,
oily, servile lickspittles:

This is some fellow

Who, having been prais’d for bluntness, doth affect
A saucy roughness, and constrains the garb
Quite from his nature. He cannot flatter, he,
An honest mind and plain, he must speak truth!
And they will take’t, so; if not, he’s plain.
These kind of knaves I know, which in this plainness
Harbor more craft and more corrupter ends
Than twenty silly-ducking observants
That stretch their duties nicely.
(Lear 2.2.95–104)11

Congreve, rather differently, blames the bluntly truthful soul less as

a knave than as a fool: “He speaks unseasonable truths sometimes,
because he has not wit enough to invent an evasion.”12 Others go
further and blame an uncompromisingly nonflattering style as an

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excuse to exercise one’s malice under the pretense of being virtuously

honest. Thus Melville describes the viciousness of a woman he names
Goneril who “held it flattery to hint praise even of the absent, and
even if merited; but honesty, to fling people’s imputed faults into
their faces.”13 Frankness is not the only virtue that can be indulged
in sadistically (chastity and courage are two others), but it may have
a harder time than most avoiding the suspicion that the practicer of
it is deriving illicit pleasure from the pain he is giving.
Even flattery in the oily style has its defenders. On October 16, O.S.
1747, Lord Chesterfield writes to his son on the “art of pleasing,”
“a very necessary one to possess.” No one can dispute a good portion
of the advice, such as to take care telling jokes that worked well in
one company without allowing for the difference in audience; above
all, do not open your jokes or humorous tales with “this silly pream-
ble: ‘I will tell you an excellent thing’; or, ‘the best thing in the world.’
This raises expectations, which, when absolutely disappointed, make
the relator of this excellent thing look, very deservedly, like a
fool.”
The core of the letter, however, states the case for the wisdom of
cultivating that glib and oily art. It is hard to keep images of smarmi-
ness, slime, lubriciousness, and insinuation from intruding, though in
Chesterfield’s favor, it surely would have behooved Cordelia to have
cultivated this art more than she was willing to. “Endeavor to find,”
he advises, people’s
predominant excellency, if they have one, and their prevailing
weakness, which everybody has; and do justice to the one, and
something more than justice to the other. Men have various objects
in which they may excel, or at least would be thought to excel; and,
though they love to hear justice done to them, where they know
that they excel, yet they are most and best flattered upon those
points where they wish to excel, and yet are doubtful whether they
do or not.

“Do not mistake me,” he continues, after advising flattering ugly

women on their beauty, manifestly beautiful ones on their intelli-
gence,

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and think that I mean to recommend to you abject and criminal

flattery: no; flatter nobody’s vices or crimes . . . but there is no liv-
ing in the world without a complaisant indulgence for people’s
weaknesses, and innocent, though ridiculous vanities. If a man has
a mind to be thought wiser, and a woman handsomer, than they
really are, their error is a comfortable one to themselves, and an
innocent one with regard to other people.14

So far, this is all on the side of kindness, of not hectoring others,

of being merely polite. Indeed there is no living in the world if we
were to let ourselves get furious at every little imbecility and vanity
that is the lot of humanity; we would end up with Gulliver in the
stable conversing with the horses, which I admit does seem to have
its attractions.
Noncriminal flattery of others’ vanity is good policy: “And I would
rather make them my friends, by indulging them in it, than my ene-
mies, by endeavouring (and that to no purpose) to undeceive them.”
People who have their foibles exposed take revenge for their humil-
iations. There is something distasteful in this, if not quite vicious,
but in fact it also matches fairly well that definition of politeness,
predating Chesterfield’s letter by less than fifty years, we saw earlier:
“a dextrous management of our Words and Actions whereby we
make other people have better Opinion of us and themselves.”
Abetting another’s small vanities is flattery, but not abject or crim-
inal flattery. It is also politeness, a virtue. As we have already seen,
our politeness can raise anxieties in us regarding our virtue; we feel
as if we are faking it, being hypocrites, not so much out of kindness,
not for virtue’s sake, but out of cowardice, for fear that telling the
truth will prevent our gaining the next rung on the social ladder or
will get us knocked down a couple of pegs instead.
Chesterfield then gets down to particulars:

Observe the little habits, the likings, the antipathies, and the tastes
of those whom we would gain; and then take care to provide them
with the one, and to secure them from the other; giving them,
genteelly, to understand, that you had observed they liked such a
dish, or such a room for which reason you had prepared it: or on the
contrary that having observed they had an aversion to such a dish, a

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dislike to such a person, etc., you had taken care to avoid presenting
them. Such attention to such trifles flatters self-love much more
than greater things, as it makes people think themselves almost the
only objects of your thoughts and care.
This passage goes a long way to confirming Samuel Johnson’s dev-
astating description of Chesterfield’s letters as teaching “the morals
of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master.”15 This is an in-
struction in fawning, sedulousness, officiousness, and conniving, es-
pecially when you shamelessly collude against some absent person
by mentioning the care you took not to invite him. But Chesterfield’s
son is a bastard and must please others to advance or even to hold
his own; he must learn to crook the pregnant hinges of the knee,
as indeed must many an employee in various job hierarchies in our
world. Ugly business, and what do we suppose to be the inner state
of Mr. Stanhope, the bastard son, as he carries out this advice? It
is a role he is being instructed to assume, but can he possibly play
it without a bad taste in his mouth, without some bit of distancing
himself from the lines he must say? According to Diderot, whom we
will encounter more fully later, he need merely learn how to crook the
knee without any according of his sentiment to the role: it is about
mimicry; he can make mental reservations as he says his oily lines.16
Yet Johnson’s suspicion is that this is what makes the whore a whore,
and a dancing master a dancing master, and nothing more. Shake-
speare suggested via the bastard Edmund that playing such a role for
the sake of advancement may generate all kinds of resentments and
vengeful bitterness in the bastard boy. But it is no less likely that peo-
ple will come to enjoy the safety and advantages of their serviceable
roles and live rather happily and productively as slimy insinuators.
Chesterfield, to give him credit, is hardly confusing praise with
flattery. He acknowledges that it is flattery he is teaching, and if his
boy learns his lesson he will come to get praised for his complaisance,
his charm, his manner and manners. If you are loathsome as a flatterer
to the object of your flattery it means only that you are no good at
it. If you are loathsome to those who resent, envy, or begrudge your
advancement, you can dismiss them as losers at a game you beat them
at. Your successful flattery prompts vices in them; they entertain mean

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thoughts, they tattle on you, and gossip. But that only makes them
look like enviers of your talent for advancement, and that is praise
indeed, though a skillful flatterer would also find a way to assuage
the resentments of his competitors even as he triumphed over them.
And then they will emulate you.
Chesterfield accepts as a given, and there is little reason to doubt
him, that adept flattery will please all but the most stony superior,
and even he will not welcome being told the truth. Our desire to
be flattered will make flatterers of our friends out of kindness, of
our underlings out of fear and desire for getting a leg up on the
competition, and of our superiors out of a desire better to get us to
do their bidding. There is no getting rid of the vice, and a good thing
too, or many more of our days would be ruined than already are.

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 nine

Hoist with His Own Petard

There’s letters seal’d, and my two schoolfellows

Whom I will trust as I will adders fang’d
They bear the mandate, they must sweep my way
And marshal me to knavery. Let it work,
For ’tis the sport to have the enginer
Hoist with his own petar, an’t shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines,
And blow them at the moon.
(Hamlet 3.4.203–210)

Earlier we met those words and phrases that made no sense

to us when we were little and not so little, the “plejallegiance” or the
“forgive us our trespasses” of the Lord’s prayer. Without checking the
gloss on the bottom of the page, few of us know, or remember if we did
check, what exactly the image of being hoist with a petar(d) is. When
we read Shakespeare we are so often faking reading Shakespeare.
Many think the image of petards means being run up a flagpole or
tossed in the air and impaled on your own spear (and to justify this
the line is often misremembered as hoist on his own petard). Even
misunderstood in that way, the metaphor is properly conceived as
having something to do with plots recoiling on the plotter in ways
he never foresaw, of having himself become the inadvertent object
of his own machinations intended to undo another. To be hoist with
your own petard really means to have the mine or shell you intend
for the enemy explode in your own face. A petard is an explosive
device – thus the relevance of the image of being blown at (to) the
moon.

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Talking to Hamlet
The mere mention of Hamlet in a book about faking and feeling like
a fake is a temptation to dive in and drown. Consider the plight of
Ophelia and Gertrude, who must pretend that they are having normal
conversations with Hamlet but know they are staging it for eaves-
droppers hiding behind arrases and elsewhere. Bad enough, as I have
been supposing, to have to attend to the colleague you are talking to
and worry about what you are going to say next. But imagine if that
colleague were Hamlet. A reptile on a cold day would be a nervous
wreck talking with him.1 How do you converse with Hamlet and not
walk away feeling humiliated unless, like Horatio, you have culti-
vated a stoical disposition? Hamlet is so much smarter than you, and
he delights in never letting you forget it. He makes each conversation
a contest to see whether you can follow his speed-of-light access to
startlingly original images juxtaposed in difficult and fantastic ways.
He tests to see whether you can fathom his incessant punning, his
playing with words only a tenth of which you grasp at the moment;
and while you are figuring out how to respond to them, another
hundred whiz right by you, ones that future editors of Hamlet’s con-
versations will spend years parsing. When you finally steel yourself
to open your mouth, he plays with your words, turning them against
you or making you not only feel stupid but look it too. Now add that
Gertrude and Ophelia have to perform not just for Hamlet but for
the eavesdropping Polonius or Claudius and know that by so doing
they are betraying Hamlet. It is amazing they don’t give up imme-
diately under the stress of the duplicitous conditions in which they
are being asked to converse and perform as genuine interlocutors.
No wonder Gertrude can continue discussions with Hamlet quite
rationally in the presence of Polonius’s bloody corpse. For her, the so-
cial situation has become infinitely simpler now that she is not being
overheard and can attend fully to her son’s whirling words. To credit
Ophelia’s and Gertrude’s attempts to act naturally when they know
they are being overheard, recall how hard a time Hamlet has convers-
ing with his mother when he discovers the ghost is eavesdropping on
him.

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Hamlet and Hamlet have beaten me to every punch I have tried to

throw. He is obsessed with faking, thinking himself to be, and some-
times not quite inaccurately, a fake avenger, a fake son, a fake lover,
a real actor – that is, a professional assumer of roles – a director of
actors (“Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc’d it to you”), an
expert on various acting styles, especially as these treat of rendering
the emotions on stage, a master tricker of others and of himself, a
wearer of masks the most opaque of which are donned for solilo-
quies, a dissimulator of his inner states, a piercer of others’ veiled
inner states. Never was a soul more self-conscious about faking it
or about all the multitudes of meanings in his wondrous cascade of
words, with meanings undoing meanings, making everything look as
if it were a sham, arabesques of seeming by a man who claims he
knows not seems.2
Any high school junior knows that the play plays with issues of
appearance and reality; the ghost, the play within the play, the dis-
cussions of acting, the eavesdropping, the antic dispositions, all make
that obvious. We should hardly be surprised that the kings in this play
are player kings – either as usurpers, ghosts, or actors; only young
Fortinbras is the real kingly thing, the wiliest politician in the whole
play, though he must play at being as brashly shallow a man of honor
as Laertes is in order to take advantage of the turmoil in Denmark.
It is Fortinbras who positions himself to “clean up,” in every sense
of that expression, at the end, but who will not be a real king until
after the play ends.
Polonius, the person who utters the most quoted line in English
about characterological authenticity, is a sententious fool who dis-
tinguishes himself by being especially deluded about his own psycho-
logical acuity:

This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
(1.3.79–81)

Sounds good, but what on earth does he mean? To be true to your-

self, you might reasonably think, you first need a recipe for knowing

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yourself. And how are we to go about that, or know when we have

achieved true knowledge if we chance upon it? No easy matter given
the ease with which we delude ourselves. But suppose you do know
yourself, or don’t but are still true to yourself; why should that pre-
vent you from deceiving others? A truer non-platitudinous sentiment
offered by George Eliot introduces a further wrinkle: “Examine your
words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be
false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own
immediate feelings – much harder than to say something fine about
them which is not the exact truth.”3 That most brilliant of ladies
gives us more insight in such off-hand comments than we get from
volumes of depth psychology, Oedipus complexes, and Lacanian petit
objet a’s.
Part of the problem of getting to know oneself is a lack of precision
in language to fix feelings and inner states that resist description. And
even if we found the words to do the trick, there are still cognitive
biases, such as the effects of self-love, that make the project next
to impossible. The very feelings we are trying to describe interfere
with the ability to describe them. Maybe Polonius is making a more
modest point than the Delphic one of “know thyself.” He may merely
be continuing the rather narrow advice to a young man of how to live
within his means and still cut a good figure in the world. Pay your
debts when due and don’t overspend – that is, know thy financial
limits and so thy checks are true and do not bounce.4
Go back to Hamlet’s image of the mine and countermine: “I will
delve one yard below their mines, / And blow them at the moon.”
Mines are tunnels the besieger digs to gain entry to a fortress either
by going under the walls or by breaching the wall by undermining
its foundational support and collapsing it. By the late Middle Ages,
explosives became available to help the miners chipping away in the
dark with their picks and spades. The explosive engines were by ex-
tension also called mines, an acknowledgment of their underground
paternity. Countermines are tunnels dug to intercept the miners and
kill them.5 You are a miner picking away, removing dirt and rock
working toward the enemy fortress, when you start to hear a chink,
chink, chink above or below you: counterminers. Imagine your fear;

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they may miss you, tunneling five yards to the right or left; it is the
fourteenth-century version of the submarine movies I grew up with.
As Hamlet, the counterminer, says: “O, ’tis most sweet, When in one
line two crafts directly meet.” Craft here means stratagem; it is not
a shift to nautical imagery. The countermine to gain its end must be
dug so as to intercept the mine. The lines must meet. But if they miss?
The miner wins, the counterminer loses, for he bears the risk of loss,
the loss of his home base, if he fails to stop the miners.
Countermining is a defender’s strategy, but unlike the paradigmatic
defensive strategy of awaiting the advance of the enemy, it requires the
defender to move forward and intercept. The whole imagery of mines
and countermines is rich in its suggestiveness about strategizing and
identity, how so much of it must be carried out blindly or in very dim
light, secretly. How like our own interiors and subsurfaces, where we
hatch our plots and orchestrate our roles but also where we often
don’t see very well through the murk of vanity, stupidity, and smoky
passions; the space and place of operations are obscure. The space
is also spooky, magical, and it can turn things into their opposite –
hate to love, coldness to warmth – and it is often lethal to songbirds.
I offer one stunning example of the magic of the mine. By the rules
of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century warfare, should two enemies of
knightly rank meet and fight in a mine, they became brothers-in-arms
and one could no longer take the life of the other; one also had to
help pay the ransom of the other should he be captured or set him
free without ransom should they meet again on opposite sides above
ground.6 Talk about transformations of identity and role!
This is surely one of my frolics, but not quite a detour, for strategiz-
ing under the ground darkly brings me back to the idea of the roles
we play and the degree of our immersion in them. Precisely when
does faking it work such a transformation upon the faker that he is
more faked out than his audience? He is not always hoist with his
own petard when this happens. He is indeed if he is a seducer, the
“cunning fool”7 who finds he has fallen in love with his quarry and
now suffers all the anguish of a jilted lover when she dumps him.
But there are other times when we devoutly wish to be hoist with
our petard, to find that the role we are faking takes over and we end

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up the grown-ups, teachers, parents, perhaps even the decent human

beings, we thought we were only faking being.
This transformation takes place sometimes unconsciously, in spite
of ourselves, sometimes half-consciously, as when we try hard to
lose ourselves in our role but never quite know when we finally have
stopped trying and have become one with our role. And sometimes we
make a conscious decision to do the work of refashioning ourselves
or our beliefs so that we can genuinely, we think, make ourselves feel
what we think we ought to feel and miraculously end up being what
we feel we ought to be. Pascal’s wager works like this, and so do the
various character-transforming methods of Buddhism, twelve-step
programs, and the American feel-good-about-yourself movement.
Indeed, much of the therapy racket depends on the belief that one
can actually purchase a different set of beliefs about oneself and the
world. There are all kinds of purveyors advocating various methods
of how best to hoodwink oneself.
Not all these transformations of the fake into real are for the bet-
ter. They can be rather a mixed bag, as the Vonnegut maxim noted
earlier warns. Be careful what you pretend to be. Toughness, or a
certain hardness, is a very useful trait to have, but the person who
undertakes a pose of hardness or flippancy to protect what he fears is
his core vulnerable sweetness may end with his sweetness shrunk to
invisibility or inaccessible behind the ramparts, though he maintains
the belief that his toughness is only a pose.
What of the spacey pose so common in the academy of the absent-
minded professor? Some actually cultivate spaciness because they and
others think it is cute, and it also helps them evade responsibilities.
It is not only a matter of being to the manner born. They miss meet-
ings, are excused from burdensome committees, and never get blamed
much because, well, you know X, he’s just a space cadet. Sure, they
lose a few extra pair of eyeglasses a year, but the time saved miss-
ing appointments more than makes up for it. In critical matters they
flatter themselves that they can put aside the spacey act and be the
real, competent souls they think they know they are. But by this time
they have been blown at the moon by their own petard. Having no

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practice at being focused in small matters, they are as unreliable in

big ones.

Ironists
The ironic pose is a common one and more complex than most. Those
who adopt it seem to feel that irony gives them some control over
feeling foolish about playing the various roles they are self-conscious
about playing. It is a style of making one’s less than full immersion in
various roles the substance, as well as the style, of one’s character. The
ironic style is made up usually of a few parts self-mockery, more parts
mockery, all devoted to constructing a distance, an ironic distance,
between role and self, so that whatever gaffes and screw-ups occur
will be cushioned by a certain deniability. To play up anxious self-
consciousness in this way helps inure the ironist to it or lets him take a
second-order delight in it. The ironical posture also helps improve his
chances of being the center of attention by altering the game subtly
into one in which he can star for not being as good at the real game
he thinks everyone else is playing more adeptly than he could. He
often is pleased by his irony, flattering himself with the belief that it
takes more intelligence to be so painfully aware and self-aware.
At the very least irony keeps him, or so he believes, from being hoist
with the petard of uncritical full immersion into the conventional
roles he is called on to play. But the irony is that instead of lowering
the stakes of failure he raises them. Though irony provides an excuse
that he wasn’t playing for real, in fact he is playing for keeps. He
is not about to refuse the benefits he gains in social and self-esteem
for being good company, nor will he fail to feel chagrin at the losses
he suffers when his shtick fails to gain him social credit. Unlike the
person who plays it dully straight and goes home to a good night’s
sleep, our ironist worries how his act went over.
Though this kind of ironic style is meant to call attention to itself as
a pose, it is still committed to good manners. Its practitioner means
only to amuse or to be amused by introducing a whiff of drollery
into simple encounters, not to make scenes or make everyone else

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awkward. Yes, a little more risk is introduced into the setting, but
only in the interests of interestingness and of protecting himself from
the risks of nonironic social interaction. This is not the freshman’s
view of irony, in which words are used in the opposite of their literal
sense, and it is broader and subtler than merely saying one thing when
you mean another but with an intonation or wink so that there is no
blame for a lie or misrepresentation.8
This kind of irony can function as a fake fake, for it is hardly
the case that he is not still properly filling the roles he is pretending
to distance himself from. It is trite to observe that we suspect that
certain people might also adopt this style to cover a deep seriousness
that they think, at some level, it would be bad form or unsafe to
reveal. They thus pose as ironical when they are dead serious. Part
of the motive may be that they are shy or embarrassed by their own
seriousness or afraid to give up the defense their irony provides. And
what is one to do once the conventional markers of seriousness and
sincerity have been polluted beyond repair by those given to new-age
“I hear you”-style signs of concern, by politicians, by people who
believe themselves serious and sincere because they have learned to
look you in the eye, or into the television camera, and not smile,
except with unctuous empathy?
I do not mean to delve very deeply into the various styles of ironic
poses except to mention a few of the most common types.9 There is
the knowingly defensive ironist, anxious about his position. He can
be a high-status person desperate not to seem snobby; or she is the
anxious middling soul uncertain of precisely where in the hierarchy
she is; or they are those self-conscious occupiers of the marches and
border regions of full personhood, who are never quite sure whether
they are in or out: the Jew, the affirmative-action admittee, the fat
among the thin, and so on.
There is also an ironic style we associate with snootiness, usually
adopted by people who think themselves brighter than they are, and
hence their irony often becomes the failed irony of a would-be ironist.
Incompetent ironists have a moral failing we tolerate about as well
as we tolerate a completely humorless person. The latter we avoid as
a killjoy, the former we fantasize we might enjoy killing. The sins of

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the bad ironist are numerous: they insult us by their lamely hostile
comments, which are all the more offensive because they radiate su-
perciliousness, excessive self-regard, and contempt. If their irony is
a defense to cover various fears, those fears are buried deep indeed,
for these are usually very self-satisfied souls.
The ironist is not quite the licensed fool, the court jester, although
he runs the risk of becoming one if he cannot modulate his pose from
time to time. Unlike the ironist, the fool has a privilege to overstep
the bounds of propriety because he is already deemed a nonperson.
His privilege, ironically, comes from the fact that he has no other
privilege but to be a fool, and this means he must speak the truths
that politeness refuses even to the ironist. He is compelled not to fake
it, to tell the whole truth and nothing but that truth that Mrs. Harold
Smith found so hard to do even when freely resolved upon. He must
expose pretense, whether he wants to or not, and that is another rea-
son the fool is harmless – not only because he is counted no person,
but also because his truth is constrained, not freely told, and hence
dismissible as compelled and not meant. Contrast the constrained
truth of the jester with the constrained unfelt apology of the impeni-
tent wrongdoer. Coercion makes the apology work as compensation,
whereas coercion makes the jester’s truth a joke.
Cultivating an ironic sensibility as a way of handling one’s own
anxiety about faking roles, or failure to get into role, or one’s anxiety
about one’s own seriousness, or as a means to prevent getting hoist by
excessive immersion into one’s roles, is, ironically, a petard waiting
to explode in your face. For being an ironist is a pose. It too is a
role, an amusing one if played well and very conventionally within
the array of acceptable social roles. But the ironist takes on risks
that other presentations of self do not take on in the same degree.
He had better be good at it. It takes very fine adjustments to mock
without offending, to self-mock without self-aggrandizing, and to
assume ironic posturing without calling into question whether there
is any nonironic self that is left to be protected by the pose. It can
also become excruciatingly tiresome. The risk is that irony ends in
self-involved shallowness, irony all the way down, a chronic refusal
to take anything seriously. Ultimately there may be no there there.

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But I wonder. If being an ironist is itself a role, like other roles, then
it can be taken off, if not quite at will, then stripped off involuntarily.
It is hard to be ironic all the time. One must eat, sleep; and one
complains and means it. More than anything one gets bored, not in
the style of ennui, which forms an unholy alliance with irony, but
plain old bored as when listening to people discourse on where their
kids are applying to college. Irony also beats the rats off the sinking
ship, long before life itself is threatened, when things are getting to
you. Furnaces break down, pipes burst, your spouse’s needy friend
just rang the doorbell, and you see no humor in it at all: nothing but
pure unaccommodated reality.
Most ironists in our day are not the kind of ironist a saga hero
was; he would joke in the face of his own violent death, and he could
do so because his irony worked in the service of his sense of honor.10
A saga character named Atli remarks dryly on the fashionableness
of the spear used to run him through; Hrapp congratulates the per-
son who chopped off his arm as doing the rest of mankind a service.
Honor was not a joking matter; but death was. Our kind of bemused
irony – “I am above losing my entire being in any role I play, I have
a proper critical perspective” – doesn’t have great staying power in
the face of serious humiliation or pain. It does fine with small-stakes
embarrassment, but not with bigger issues such as betrayal by some-
one you love or the discovery that you are physically revolting to
the person you have a crush on. You may put on a mask of irony
to hide the pain, but you are no longer an ironist when you do so,
for you are recoiling in misery, buying time until you figure out how
to reconstitute your being, desperately serious, hurt, vengeful, and
bitter.

Experience: Becoming What You Pretend to Be

Not all merging with role has an unhappy ending. A law student
graduates. Three years earlier she knew nothing about the law. Now
she knows something, but not very much. She is not deluded on this
score. She knows she knows very little. She did well in law school,
gets hired by a big firm at a big salary, and is assigned work that

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sometimes has her talking to clients. Each encounter with a client is

a real test of her ability to put on a show. She must exude confidence
and competence. People are paying big, and the last thing a client
wants is someone assuming a light irony about how she is fresh out
of law school and doesn’t have a clue. So she fakes it.11
She feels painfully aware that she is faking it. She fakes confidence;
she fakes a kind of tough directness to cover her fears of not knowing
anything. She is completely aware that these are poses, even ironical
ones, but without the appearance of irony to make it bearable, to
give it a lightness of touch. Because what client would accept that?
Imagine the resident surgeon joking to you about this being his first
time removing a disc, but big deal, got to do the first one sometime
on something other than a cadaver or a cat.
To her mind the chief irony is that she is a lawyer; the state bar says
so. That’s the joke. She is, but she isn’t. She feels as if she is winging
it, all pretense, a pure fraud, though she prepares with care for each
meeting. She fears nonetheless that she might have overlooked the
most obvious of things, the most obvious of theories, because what
does she know? After a meeting she is drained, not quite relieved, be-
cause she is not sure the client didn’t see through her. After a couple
of months of faking, she gets more daring; she risks sounding knowl-
edgeable when she has not looked the stuff up, just guessing but with
an air of assuredness. She can’t believe she is running a risk like that,
and after the meeting she races to look up what she had so blithely
been BS-ing about. To her great surprise, she finds she basically got it
right, but then what if she hadn’t? How would she have covered for
that? Well, she would harrumph about minority rules and majority
rules, splits in jurisdictions, confuse the client a bit. And she survives
yet again.
We know the end of the story: after faking it like this for six years,
something has been happening. She is now what we call a possessor
of experience. She has become what she was faking. She is so good
at faking it that she is no longer all that anxious. She might even not
feel like a fake anymore, but surely some days it must dawn on her
that so much of what we call expertise is in fact expert faking it and
never having been caught, and that we will have an excuse or answer

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ready when someone calls us on it. But no one ever does, until one
day . . .
On bad days she cynically suspects it is an unwritten rule that no
one calls anyone’s bluff unless someone pretty much dares you to.
The whole world is faking it, and everyone is complicit in everyone
else’s frauds. That is not fair. She has acquired real judgment. She
knows she doesn’t know everything, but she knows something; she
sees people who indeed know much more than she knows, more than
she believes it is humanly possible to know; and she genuinely respects
and admires such people more than she fears them, but fear them she
does, for surely they must see through her. These are the people who
are “the real thing,” truly knowledgeable, who she imagines must feel
secure in their mastery of their subject, though perhaps they never do
either. She comes in the end to believe that her anxieties about faking
it and exposure are the very form her respect for mastery takes. On
good days she lets herself believe that she might not be faking it; she
is truly what she once had to fake being; she is one with the role, a
lawyer and a pretty good one at that.
The analogy with the lawyer is not quite apt, but it suggests that
if someone plays being an ironist long enough, a mocker, a person
who fancies he is deep and needs to protect his depths – with humor
when he is charming, but with sneers and superciliousness when he is
not – he eventually becomes his defensive system and nothing more.
A walled town, with everyone inside dead of the plague.12
No sooner do I write that than some part of me stands outside my-
self and says, come off it, Miller, what pretentious overdramatization.
You really are not ready to defend the implication that somehow the
nonironist has any more people alive inside her town. It is the letter,
remember, that slayeth, not irony. That metaphor about everyone
dead inside the walled town suggests there is a lively core housed
within that needs defense. Just what is at the core? One true self, a
town full of clamoring burghers, or nothing at all?

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 ten

The Self, the Double, and the Sense of Self

Suppose the notion of an authentic core self is an illusion

or little more than what Edith Wharton called a “fugitive flash of
consciousness”;1 at least she thinks it is there even if gone in a flash.
Much respectable opinion doesn’t think the self is really there so
much as it is a fiction that keeps us roughly the same person from
one day to the next, or a convenience adopted because it is useful
for us to think that way. Thus, for instance, Hume.2 Very respectable
philosophers still argue for some form of his position.3 The debate
continues apace, and I merely intend to gesture in the direction of
it after my own fashion to get at various social and psychological
anxieties that suffuse certain aspects of identity, self, and role.4
There is also a long tradition that we do not have one self, but
many. This view was offered in various forms, from something as
simple as the idea of good angel/bad angel, a kind of Jekyll-and-
Hydism, to a view of multiple selves recently resurrected in rational
choice theory to help account for the myriad human behaviors that
make us continually act as if models of economic egoistic rationality
were silly inventions of bizarrely robotic minds.5 Even the words we
use to describe aspects of the individual, if not the self itself, such as
“person” or “character,” are evidence of a deep belief as to the fic-
tional nature of our psychological, social, and moral selves. “Person”
comes from the word for mask, a theatrical term, still imbuing the
word “persona” with its sense of an assumed character. “Character”
is the name we use to refer not only to our moral essence but also to
an eccentric person and the fictional denizens of novel or play, and
to the very letters of the script that create him.

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The anxiety that our self may be constantly threatened by doubling

and replication is an ancient one.6 The horror of cloning is only its
most recent form,7 and cloning itself can be seen as a continuation
of the theme of doubling so central to the nineteenth-century Gothic
imagination.8 But one can see it in the Bible too. The chief article
of faith in Judaism is embodied in a commandment called after its
first word, Shema: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is
One” (Deut. 6.4). The literal meaning is clear: it basically repeats the
first commandment prohibiting setting up other gods before God.
But it is more than that: it also says that you Jews shall not evade
that prohibition by making Me into myriad emanations of Myself.
Angels OK, but no avatars. But the Shema also looks as if the people
are giving an order to God to hold Himself together, to keep himself
One, as against the threat to multiply implied by his name “I will be
who I will be” we touched on in the first chapter. The Shema is thus a
kind of mutual command and compact between God and the people
to work together to keep Him One.
But no sooner does Judaism make God one than its daughter reli-
gion gives Him three selves, and that not being enough, each village
and monastery claims its saint, and we are pretty much back to Baals
in the groves and on the mountaintops.9 All the king’s horses and
all the king’s men in the Reformation got Him back to three, and
then the Unitarians get Him back to one, but with an accompanying
tolerance that let everyone else have their God too, which meant He
pretty much disappeared as a unified being. You can have your God;
I got mine, and I bet they are not quite the same guy; yours may
not even be a guy. Our views of God’s own self are a mirror of our
uncertainty about the unity, even existence, of our own self – am I
one, none, or many? The self, not unlike God, may be something we
sense more than something that is, and we sense it in more ways than
one.
The anxiety regarding multiple selves also manifests itself in the
fear that the self or selves we think we have may not be ours, but may
be imposed on us or borrowed from without. George Herbert Mead
has us introjecting various selves from others into our own version of
our “me.”10 Much of Mead’s position is already set forth in the role

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played by Adam Smith’s impartial spectator, who variously resides

within and without. Hume goes so far as to imagine our minds to
be mirrors, set up to reflect the mirrors that are other men’s minds,
with the effect that our opinions and emotions are located in a kind
of no-man’s-land of infinite regression, an image Smith also resorts
to.11 Without too much stretching we can see in Hume and Smith a
highbrow form of the theme of the double.
In a different but related matter, both Hume and Smith can be
understood to suggest that our emotions are not our own either, but
are caught from others because they are contagious, reflected, or
generated by mechanisms of sympathy that require the projection of
emotions into others before we can feel them ourselves. One can see
in these views a justification for taking allegory seriously as a genre
of psychological realism. Those ridiculous personified characters –
Anger, Temperance, Sin, Prudence – in poems and narratives we no
longer have much taste for are what we ourselves become when we
say we feel anger, grief, and so on.12 Rather than merely feel these
sentiments we often become them, or they, like spirits from beyond,
come to take over and occupy our bodies. We thus register our emo-
tions not only by saying we feel them, which may or may not be the
case, but also by saying we “are” them: I am sad, mad, glad as if I
were Sadness, Madness, and Gladness in an allegorical poem.13 We
even raise our kids to see themselves as allegorical figures. Mary, you
are the Messy One; Anne, you are the Organized One; Jim, you are
the Hot-Tempered One; and John, you are the Quiet Guy. We find
ourselves at times feeling put upon to play an allegorical version of
ourselves because that is what the company expects from us. Time
to be the me they invited me here to be, and that means, generally,
they want an overstated version of the type, just to make sure that it
is utterly recognizable and what they bargained for.
In the West, however, a philosophical and primitive fear of core-
lessness flies in the face of the strong psychological sense of having a
unique self at the core. At a minimum this sense of self is the point
of consciousness from which I have thoughts that are felt to be mine
and mine alone; it is that feeling of being inside my head and not
somewhere else. This sense of self , which we believe mostly to be a

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feature of sanity, is assuredly there. Whether the self that the sense of
self senses is there, too, is probably not susceptible of proof.
Most of us, even when sitting with 60,000 identical souls at a
football game or when packed into a subway car, except in brief
moments of dissociation, feel quite certain, self-deceiving though it
may be, that we have a uniquely indelible core – embattled perhaps,
but still special and our own. Me, a mere subject position? My foot.
But why my foot? Is that foot part of my self, or merely attached to
it? Would I cease to be me without it? Does my self need it? Surely if
I am a serious sprinter it does. And why did I utter “my foot” as an
expletive? Is it because it is even lower by one measure than the arse,
which stands halfway between foot and head but still is understood to
be the bottom – even named “bottom” or “bum” – spiritually lower
than the foot? And thus the foot, because physically the lowest, is
able to work as a euphemism for the lowly arse, which I, in a gesture
of politeness, substitute prissily for ass, opting for the English form as
against the American. And why is it that in biforms such as arse/ass,
curse/cuss, burst/bust, horse/Hoss, it is the short-voweled r-less form
that is lower in social status?
Desperate to distinguish my self from others I am thrown back
on the fact that whoever I am I cannot tickle myself. I am also the
only sighted person in the world who needs a mirror to observe the
progress of my hair loss, and I am thus the only person in the world
who can construct a self that forgets how thin my hair is in back
while still caring desperately about it. But that’s a start. Not even my
clone or double can say that. My self is intimately tied up with my
being embodied in a way that distinguishes me from others so that I
am aware that I see their bodies differently and more fully than I see
my own. That means the only full view I can get of myself requires
others, for how can I see myself whole unless I see myself as others
see me, a view I can guess at pretty reliably based on my experience of
how I see them? I also need human culture to manufacture mirrors,
because mere nature with its reflecting ponds will not do the trick of
letting me see the back of my head.
This also raises complex questions of whether my body needs to
be a particular type of body for me to be me. My view is that it does,

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for though I have been envious of other body types a good portion
of my life, I have not been all that envious, for I fear that a body
too different from what I got stuck with genetically would make it
impossible for me to have the same inner life, which, such as it is,
I would prefer to keep. Not because I find it all that interesting,
but because without it my self as I know it would cease to exist, or
so I fear.14
My self, then, to the extent I have one, seems to require some kind
of embodiment, and not just any kind. Is the same always true of
my sense of self, the feeling of being a thinking thing with thoughts
that are mine alone? It has been forcefully argued that the sense of
self is a purely mental phenomenon, for which the body is merely a
vessel:

The early realization of the fact that one’s thoughts are unobserv-
able by others, the experience of the profound sense in which one is
alone in one’s head – these are among the very deepest facts about
the character of human life, and found the sense of the mental self.
It is perhaps most often vivid when one is alone and thinking, but
it can be equally vivid in a room full of people. It connects with
a feeling that nearly everyone has had intensely at some time –
the feeling that one’s body is just a vehicle or vessel for the mental
thing that is what one really or most essentially is. I believe that the
primary or fundamental way in which we conceive of ourselves is
as a distinct mental thing – sex addicts, athletes, and supermodels
included.15

You recognize what the author, Galen Strawson, is describing. Yet

isn’t it the case that so many of those thoughts take the form of talking
to oneself or to imagined others? The effect is to “embody” that
mental self ever so slightly. Much of what we call thinking is carried
on as a conversation within or with ourselves. Mead goes so far as to
claim that self-consciousness can arise only via such a conversation:
“It is only after the child has reached the point of communicating
with himself that his own self-consciousness can arise. This process
largely takes place through vocal gestures.”16 We need not see in our
mind’s eye a mouth talking and ears listening, but this internal talk is
experienced not much differently from routine real talk in which there

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is an assumption of mouths, tongues, and ears and hence bodies. For

instance, real external noise will prevent us from hearing our inner
conversation. Once we cannot hear that internal conversation we get
confused, says Mead,17 and his observation is roundly confirmed by
the reports of combat soldiers. Ford Madox Ford in Parade’s End has
his main character note the effects of the noise of exploding shells:
“If you cannot hear your thoughts, how the hell are you going to
tell what your thoughts are doing?” Civil War soldier Abner Small
agrees: “The shock from a bursting shell will scatter a man’s thoughts
as the iron fragments will scatter the leaves overhead.”18
Who is talking to whom when we talk out loud to ourselves? Who
is the talker, and who the addressee? Mead says it is the self that is
addressed; something he calls the “I,” which is not the self, is doing
the talking. But even if we do not subscribe to the Meadian analysis, it
seems we do experience a sense of something less than unity when we
speak to ourselves, something very much like the sensation we have
of being a person who must play so many different roles. We surely
split ourselves when we talk out loud to ourselves, so that the person
speaking is directing words to the ears of a person listening. Internal
monologues split us this way too, do they not? They might thus
be better understood as internal dialogues, or at least as soliloquies
addressed to ourselves as audience.
Might it be too that anxieties about doubling are simply a byprod-
uct, or detritus, of the fact that self-consciousness is generally expe-
rienced as a conversation within ourselves, requiring speaker and
listener? We find ourselves praising and blaming ourselves, silently
and out loud: Way to go, Miller, or Miller, you idiot.19 My sense of
self can be a disembodied mental thing but not totally so, not all that
differently from the way that I can completely disattend the bodies
of real people when I talk to them on the phone or via e-mail. To
the extent that language and conversation are involved, we assume
certain necessary body parts to be doing their work unobtrusively.
And from this minimal sense of embodiment, some – those who put
gender first, for instance – would no doubt claim that the sense of
self can never be experienced independently from the gendered body.

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This is clearly true of the self, but as Strawson would understand

the sense of self , that sense would precede any notions of gendered
bodies or gendered minds.
Self-monitoring requires more than just talking to ourselves; we
also use imagined visual inputs. We think of much of self-monitoring
as observing ourselves. This observing is a strange thing, because it is
only partly visual (much of it is listened to) and then is carried out by
eyes (and ears) not quite our own. When we talk to ourselves, often
in the form of approval or disapproval, it is because that talk is tied
up with watching ourselves as if we were another, but not quite –
a kind of quasi-other perhaps. And the entity doing the watching is
also cast as a quasi-other in a dizzying sci-fi feat in which each is
partly responsible for creating the other. Smith is clear that we must
split ourselves to carry out the task of self-judging:

When I endeavour to examine my own conduct, when I endeavour

to pass sentence upon it, and either to approve or condemn it, it is
evident that, in all such cases, I divide myself, as it were, into two
persons; and that I, the examiner and judge, represent a different
character from that other I, the person whose conduct is examined
into and judged of. The first is the spectator, whose sentiments with
regard to my own conduct I endeavour to enter into, by placing
myself in his situation, and by considering how it would appear to
me, when seen from that particular point of view. The second is
the agent, the person whom I properly call myself, and of whose
conduct, under the character of a spectator, I was endeavouring to
form some opinion. The first is the judge; the second the person
judged of. But that the judge should, in every respect, be the same
with the person judged of, is as impossible, as that the cause should,
in every respect, be the same with the effect.
(TMS III.i.6)

Smith combines jural images of judge and criminal with theatri-

cal images of spectators and actors. It is perhaps impossible to keep
theatricality out of trials, and it has pretty near been impossible to
keep criminality from coloring the lot of the demimonde of the ac-
tor. Funny, too, how certain forms of self-consciousness have the

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form of show trials. Smith assumes for the most part here that these
internal trials of ourselves are not marred by overt deceptions and
self-deceptions, but he well knows that the impartial spectator is brib-
able, suborned by the various tricks of self-love, envy, and interest –
the log in the eye again.

Stripping Off the Layers

I have been mixing up a set of complicated issues about self, sense
of self, emotions, identity, and consciousness, and to unravel it prop-
erly would make this a book I could not and do not intend to write.
The literature on continuity of character in response to Hume alone
can fill shelves. For purposes of faking it and our anxieties about our
own fraudulence and authenticity, it makes little difference whether
or not the self is there. If the self is really there, it could still be doubted
as Hume and others have, and if it is fictional it could be believed
in as most of us do. The crucial test the fiction must pass is that
it be plausible and sane given the truth about our abilities, looks,
body type, words, deeds, and cultural attributes such as race, reli-
gion, and gender. The self, fictional or not, must measure up reason-
ably well as a legitimate self, given the social constraints imposed on
selfhood.
The anxiety persists that, even if there is no real core of an authentic
me, what part of me is making me a nervous wreck about those roles
anyway? Is that anxiety an unfortunate but unavoidable byproduct
of proper socialization, a sign of caring to play my role well, to good
reviews and favorable mentions? Still, who the hell is running the
show?
Those who sing the praises of authenticity, of being true to oneself,
are of little help. The highbrow advocates are no less embarrassing
than the middlebrow exponents; no one escapes sounding hokey.20
The highly self-conscious poses of authenticity in the self-indulgent
romantic egoistic style are about as silly as primal scream therapy.
Manfred on the mountain, Zarathustra in Sils Maria ever so proudly
escape hoi polloi on the plains below and then seek to be admired

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by them for contemning them as they lecture on self-realization and

authenticity, posing as Moses, no less, laying down the law. Vanity
oh vanity.
Authenticity? True to myself? And what does that mean? Am I
merely the sum of my roles: father + son + husband + professor +
American + Jew + next-door neighbor + writer + teacher + jester?
What if I am good enough at some to qualify as the genuine article
but am pretty much a fraud at others? Is it only the roles I am good
at for which I can claim authenticity? Yup, that Bill Miller, fully one-
fifth authentic. Or do I get credit for being fully authentic if I own up
to being four-fifths a fraud? Or do I get credit only if I determine to
improve the four-fifths of me that is a sham? The self-realization and
authenticity babble assumes an ultimate unity. And I want to agree.
Surely I am more than the actors in the play that bears my name.
But I do not feel myself to be the director of that play either, for I
am hardly calling all the shots. I experience myself as both more and
less than the director. I am also the role I am playing, the repertoire
of roles waiting to be donned at a moment’s notice, and the roles I
have played in the past that I am still hated or loved for. So am I an
incorporated theater company?21 I am more than that too, because I
am also in the audience watching my performances. Moreover, I am
never turned away at the ticket booth for a sold-out performance;
I am condemned, unless alcohol or true fun intervenes to put self-
consciousness to sleep, to play the smalltown newspaper critic to my
own performances in the high school play, while bitterly wishing I
could make a living as an author rather than as a critic.
I am not in despair about this, merely befuddled. Erving Goffman
paints a much grimmer picture. He has often been accused of having
no theory of the self, or of seeing the self as just a bunch of roles
largely imposed from without, but in fact he has a view of the core
stripped self and it is bleak.22 Here he speaks of what is revealed
when an audience is “inadvertently given glimpses behind the scenes
of a performance” and gets a view of the performer it was not meant
to have. What they discover is a “fundamental democracy that is
usually well hidden”:

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The individual who performs the character will be seen for what
he largely is, a solitary player involved in a harried concern for
his production. Behind many masks and many characters, each
performer tends to wear a single look, a naked unsocialized look,
a look of concentration, a look of one who is privately engaged in
a difficult, treacherous task.23

Goffman, ironist extraordinaire, antisentimentalist, plays against

type here, moving from satire and irony to tragedy and high seri-
ousness. And I don’t quite believe him. Why think a harried look
or a look of concentration is unsocialized? Just because it was not
meant for the audience who is catching the inadvertent and unwel-
come glimpse does not mean he doesn’t put it on for himself or some
imaginary audience. Are not those harried looks part of the show he
plays to that judgmental audience he carries within?
Even if that look is really stripped down, naked, authentic,
and unsocialized, the despondent soul may, in an access of self-
consciousness, launch into playing Harried Desperation, an allegori-
cal role to which he cannot find an exit. Goffman’s use of “naked” to
describe the look of the person stripped at last of all his masks sug-
gests that stripping away the masks and roles culture imposes gets
down to a real unaccommodated core. But the image of nakedness
doesn’t quite work. Whether the real me is real or a fiction, I know
it is not the naked me. When Lear strips off his clothes to find man
to be nothing but a bare forked animal, he is posturing. Once cul-
ture makes clothes the norm, taking them off is always a ritual or
Ritual.24 Getting ready for bed, taking a shower, getting examined
by the doctor, sex.
I know I am exaggerating to make my point, but I am not fab-
ricating. I can get ready for bed out of pure habit, without being
racked by anxieties about how ridiculous it is to be human, yet when
I turn my attention to the thought of those who sleep naked, I can’t
help thinking that they are putting on an act, a pretentious one, play-
ing the liberated soul, freely experiencing animal freedom. Ya, right.
Who are they trying to impress by thinking themselves superior to
pajamas? I own to feeling a bit foolish when I put on my flannel pa-
jamas; they seem one step up from pajamas with feet on them, like

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the ones my toddlers wore. At least there is no pretense in them, just

utility, and a necessary accommodation with an imperfect world in
which you must endure, no matter how careful you are, your share
of looking foolish.
But where is the feeling of fakery, you ask, or of faking it when
you are naked all by yourself? Before others yes, but not alone. Even
Goffman would say you are backstage, and though you can’t quite
relax because you will soon have to be on stage again, for the moment
you can catch your breath. I answer partly thus: I don’t see my naked
body as a mere representation of raw nature. No sooner is it looked
at when I dry myself off after showering than all kinds of anxieties
intrude, or are felt to be knocking at the door of consciousness, as
to its increasing ugliness. There is a temptation to blind myself to
the truth of it so that it will appear less disgusting. But I lack the
imagination to do much of a makeover and fear those attractive stu-
dents I teach would get the giggles or get sick at the thought of that
body sexually. Worse, the dog just wandered into the bathroom and
that makes me more self-conscious than if it had been my next-door
neighbor. I feel embarrassed not only for myself, but for our entire
species, which I am representing at that moment to the canine world.
The cat makes me feel this way too, the turtle only a little bit, and
the guinea pig, tree frog, and Siamese fighting fish not at all. I am
still not at the naked core, but in the next chapter I suggest where it
might be uncovered.

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 eleven

At the Core at Last: The Primordial Jew

So i ask again: where amidst all these roles lies the true self, that
core of authenticity, that real me behind the masks and veils, that
authentic Bill Miller, not the guy who signs this book William Ian
Miller? How I got the Ian long before that name became pretentiously
fashionable is a story in itself, an innocent one of my dad doing honor
to the Scotsman Ian McPhearson, who commanded the ship on which
my dad served in the war. I was named after William Isidore Miller,
my father’s dead father, really Velvel or Villkela Yitzhak Miller in
the Yiddish that was my namesake’s native tongue. When you are
Bill Miller there is always a good chance you will be sitting next to
another one on the airplane; you get the mail of several others on
your campus, and most recently you lost five years of accumulated
frequent flyer miles because some other William Miller in Ann Arbor
took a trip around the world on them. So you posture as William Ian
Miller purely as a practical matter. But had my middle name been
Seymour, I see you thinking, you would not be signing your books
William Seymour Miller, would you? Spelling out that Ian, latching
on to it as a veil of sorts, shows I know very well who and what I am
at the core.

A Bowdlerized Jewish Joke

Maybe the core naked me lies in certain identities, ineradicable iden-
tities. Let me try to get at it in a different way. Freud tells a joke, a
Jewish joke, which he bowdlerizes in an important way. The joke –
like most jokes, and especially Freud’s, who had all the sense of humor
of someone who thinks a squirting flower on his lapel is a fine jest – is

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not very funny, but given Freud’s usual fare not bad enough to pro-
hibit retelling:

The doctor, who had been asked to look after the Baroness at her
confinement, pronounced that the moment had not come, and sug-
gested to the Baron that in the meantime they should have a game
of cards in the next room. After a while a cry of pain from the
Baroness struck the ears of the two men: “Ah, mon Dieu, que je
souffre!” Her husband sprang up, but the doctor signed to him to sit
down: “It’s nothing. Let’s go on with the game!” A little later there
were again sounds from the pregnant woman: “Mein Gott, mein
Gott, what terrible pains!” – “Aren’t you going in, Professor?”
asked the Baron. –“No, no. It’s not time yet.” At last there came
from next door an unmistakable cry of “Aa-ee, aa-ee, aa-ee!”
The doctor threw down his cards and exclaimed: “Now it’s time.”1

The joke is put through quite a sea change by Freud’s censoring

and emending the Baroness’s last scream. It was not a prelinguistic cry
of pain, “aa-ee,” but, obviously, “Oy vay iz mir.”2 The point of the
joke is that for the Baroness, an assimilated Jew, each increase in pain
strips away the most recent accretion in the process of assimilation,
the drang nach Westen of the Jew. She is still able to maintain her
role as a French-speaking German aristocrat in the midst of minor
pain. Jack up the pain, and she starts drifting eastward back across
the Rhine to echt German, until agony rips off this last mask to reveal
the inescapable core of her being, east of the Vistula. Freud’s bowd-
lerization is not motivated by scruples against telling unvarnished
Jewish jokes, for right before this joke he had been regaling readers
with them, some making much the same point as this one.
We can explain Freud’s rewriting the last line this way: every-
one knows this is a Jewish joke, that the last line has to be oy vay.
It advertises its bowdlerization because it is so unfunny as told; it
has no point except a cheap misogynistic one not worth the telling.
Childbirth really hurts; you going to mock the woman for screaming?
But as a more complex commentary on Jewish pretensions to escape
Jewishness, it has some social and satiric bite. It just may be that
Freud’s bowdlerization is itself a rather clever joke. Suppressing the
Yiddish of the last line is an attempt to make the joke pass, just as

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the Baroness is trying so hard to pass. But the joke is that neither a
Jew nor a Jewish joke can be anything but what it is. Their cores are
ineradicable. No amount of culture will change the Jew; his Jewish-
ness will burst through at embarrassing moments. That is the surface
point of the unbowdlerized joke, and the deeper one of the bowdler-
ized version. All those parapraxes, those Freudian slips, are so many
lapses into Yiddish or into a telltale accent. The point of the joke is
that there is no risk that a Jew desiring to pass will ever fake so well
as to become one with his new role.
John Murray Cuddihy argues powerfully that Freud’s purpose is
to war against the goy, to rub his face in the uncivilizable Jew. Because
the Jew could never make a good civil Christian, show the Christian
instead that underneath his veneers, his politeness, civility, decorum,
restraint, and good manners, he is at his core nothing more than
what he thinks the Jew is: a bestial, filthy sexual thing, precultural,
neither civilized nor civilizable. The bowdlerized Jewish joke says that
at our core we are instinct and beast, prelinguistic and precultural
screamers.
But that aa-ee, aa-ee is also a mask for Yiddish, Jew talk. The sug-
gestion is that the first human sounds of agony are not just nonsense
syllables, that they are not a pure manifestation of unadorned nature
that comes with the purity of pain, but that those pure unadorned
natural vocalizations are Yiddish, or some kind of masked Jew talk.
Jew talk in the Western tradition was the ur-talk, the first talk, the
natural language of humankind, and the language of pain. The point
is not the humanist one that at root we are all mere forked animals,
but a more hostile one that at root gentiles are no better than a bunch
of Jews trying to cover it up with perfume and manners, a claim that
is a horror to Christians, too nauseating to contemplate.
Among the many hypotheses offered to explain anti-Semitism, at
least in part, has been a supposed Christian bitter envy of the Jews for
having been chosen as God’s people. This view would then propose
that the Christian could resolve the pain of his envy by making the
lot of the Jew unenviable; make it so unpleasant as to breathe a sigh
of relief that God had not chosen Christians like you to be tortured
by the likes of you. But the one thing that must have still stuck in

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the craw was that during that period of history when God cared to
speak directly to human beings at all, He had chosen to speak to Jews.
No mediation, no translation necessary.3 Though Christians insisted
that from the time of Jesus God was veiled to the Jews, who in their
blindness could not see the One Way to the Lord,4 that loss did not
quite assuage the envy of the fact that the Jews could talk directly
to Him and He to them. He was a co-linguist of the Jews. The Jew
could hear God and understand Him, argue and bargain with him,
as Abraham, father of the Jews, did in Gen. 18.23–33. Christians,
however, had to secure translators to hear God or his son, for both
spoke in a Jewish tongue, whether Hebrew or Aramaic.5
Imagine, though, how to explain that God became man as a Jew.
You could argue that God chose the most telling way to humble
himself. Incarnating himself as Achilles or Socrates rather than as a
Judean would have carried a very different message. But God, like
pagan deities, cannot shake completely a habit of tricksterism; there
are more than a few ironies in choosing to enflesh Himself as a poor
Jew. Can we suppose a deep Christian anxiety that God, instead of
masking Himself as the Jew Jesus, in fact, was stripping Himself of
all His own veils and masks, revealing the naked truth about His own
core identity? It turns out that God’s indelible self, in the Christian
exegetical tradition, his core, is the Jew Jesus, harbored deep inside
His bosom until the time was ripe to loose him upon the world.6
Like man, like God: Jew at the core. “Aa-ee, aa-ee, aa-ee!” For the
anti-Semite, and for Freud, the Jew has a fixed self beneath his masks;
it is Western civilizing Christian culture that is the costumery of roles
and poses, fronts and fakes.

The Jew at the Core of Christian Identity

If there is a core that is the pure us, that purity is subject to con-
tamination. A researcher on disgust asks us to consider the effects
on a barrel of wine of adding a tablespoon of raw sewage compared
with the effects on a barrel of raw sewage of adding a tablespoon of
wine.7 The wine is magically transformed by the sewage, rendered
disgusting and undrinkable. The sewage, however, remains just what

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it is despite the addition of the wine. Pollutants are thus powerful in

a way that the pure is not; purity is much more vulnerable to pollu-
tion than pollution to purification. To war against the most routine
types of moral and spiritual pollution, recourse must be had to ma-
jestic notions such as Plenitude of Grace. But the exceptional nature
of Grace merely underscores the underlying sense that only the truly
exceptional can do battle with the most ordinary types of pollution.
The deck is stacked in favor of degradation by the low as against
elevation by the high. Purifying agents thus must give themselves up
in the process of purification in a kind of suicide mission, like the
soap that is rinsed away in mutual scummy embrace with the dirt,
going down together so that we can put on clean clothes again. But the
pollutant infiltrates, thrives, and multiplies, transforming whatever
it touches into, it is feared, what it is.
The power of the pollutant is the power of the Jew in the eyes
of the anti-Semite, and in the eyes of Cuddihy’s Freud and many
another Jew, not all of whom need be crippled with self-hatred but
who cannot avoid knowing how they are seen, loathed, and feared by
the dominant order. Take the case of medieval Spain, which cajoled,
threatened, and forced its Jews to convert during the fifteenth century,
finally expelling those who remained in 1492.8 Judenrein, right? Then
the anxieties set in. What if these conversos really were Jews in secret?
They are passing for Christians, marrying our daughters, and we
marry theirs. And handy-dandy who is a Jew, who a Christian?
In the end, in a form of poetic justice that would make a Jew
smirk if it had not come at such a price, instead of making Jews into
Christians as they had thought and intended, Christians feared and
believed that they were being turned into Jews. One drop of blood did
you in. What power. Who could be sure he was pure? Under the law
of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) those suspected of converso
origins had to prove their purity of blood, and surely this led to false
testimony, to fake genealogies, to all kinds of posturing as not being
the Jew you feared you were and suspected all your neighbors to
be. The proof of converso falsity? They appeared to be Christian,
and that was exactly the appearance that could not be trusted, for
wouldn’t it be just like a false Jew to counterfeit his Christianity?9

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Converso blood filled some of the most pious and powerful of

Christian veins: Ferdinand of Aragon, St. Teresa de Avila, Diego
Laı́nez, friend of St. Ignatius and second General of the Jesuits. So
the most damning appearances were – as per Goffman’s brilliantly
paranoid essay “Normal Appearances” – precisely those that looked
perfectly fine.10 You were either a fake, or, if a pure old Christian,
you could never be sure that you were not, perish the thought, a Jew
“at heart,” for who knows what truth might lie beneath the falsity
of your invented genealogy?11
Not only anxious Spaniards but also anxious Germans and anx-
ious Protestants from St. Louis. This is not a sweet case with a happy
ending in which Jews fake being Christians long enough and become
Christians in the end. This tale is not one of an apprentice becoming
a journeyman becoming a master, as with the lawyer, doctor, or la-
borer, who starts by faking and ends by becoming the real thing. This
is a vision whose claim is that the indelible core will win out in the
end, the Jew at the core, at least the Jew as he is imagined to be by
the most paranoid of anti-Semites, thus captured by the distasteful
sensibility of T. S. Eliot:

But this or such was Bleistein’s way:

A saggy bending of the knees
And elbows, with the palms turned out,
Chicago Semite Viennese.
A lusterless protrusive eye
Stares from the protozoic slime
At a perspective of Canaletto.
The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once.
The rats are underneath the piles.
The jew is underneath the lot . . .12

The Jew, whom Eliot refuses to accord the respect of a capital

letter, in Eliot’s disgusting vision is primordial ooze. Jews are nature
at its most disgusting, representing the disgusting fecundity of rot
and pond scum. They are both the rot eating at the foundation of
Christian civilization and that civilization’s rotten foundation. Venice

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has become Shylock’s, though Shylock was forced to convert as part

of the “mercy” shown him.13 Unlike Iago, who warns us that he is
not who he is, Shylock can be only the Jew he is at the core, even
if he is not allowed to be the Jew he is on the surface. Bleistein is
his modern avatar, now a tourist, having oozed further west from
Vienna to Chicago, passing back through Venice, polluting vistas
that Canaletto painted, ostensibly getting cultured and acculturated
in the process. Eliot lets us know that though he is passing through,
Bleistein is not passing. Eliot is thus in accord with a view that it
has been claimed the Jews have of themselves: that Jews shouldn’t
even bother to fake, we do it so poorly. This is one way of putting
Cuddihy’s argument: the core of Jewish identity is the Jew’s belief he
can never really pass, because he can never learn the rules of civility;
civility is a way of acting in the world completely at odds with his true
self. Freud’s joke about the Baroness is not a joke by an anti-Semite,
but a Jewish joke composed by Jews.
Then why did Christians fear Jewish infiltration if Jews were so
easily exposed? Would anyone “do it” with Bleistein? Here, I suppose,
is where anti-Semitism converged with misogyny. Women, Christian
women, could not be trusted not to do it with Bleistein. And what of
the trustworthy ones, the Portias? Surely they would not give way to
the vile Bleistein. What if, though, Bleistein were not so readily dis-
cernible because he had a Christian mother and maybe two Christian
grandmothers and a Christian grandfather; in fact, he may have had
no more than one Jew way back in his family tree, but such is the
power of that Jewish blood that it a Bleistein makes. Bleistein is the
horrific reflection in Eliot’s worst nightmare of what he himself might
be in the grand scheme of things: the barrel of wine in which some
wag poured a tablespoon of sewage.

I s e e m to h av e l o s t my sense of humor and have retreated

into ethnic insularism. Am I just using Freud’s bad joke to make a
bitter one of my own? That if we are made in God’s image and God
humiliates Himself by becoming a Jew from Galilee, then the joke
is that all of us are Jews at the core, a core Christianity has cloaked
and veiled? I have taken an unfrolicsome detour, abandoning the

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psychological and vaguely philosophical approach for a literary one,

because, I suppose, it allows for poetic license. My claim is fanciful
and exaggerated but not necessarily false for being so. The point
is not the banal one that identity is a matter of history, which of
course it is, or that the self is an historical construct, sensible as
such a point would be. The bitterness in the exposition is my quasi-
serious suggestion that not just any history an indelible self doth
make. I don’t mean to be privileging a victim status, nor claiming an
experience available only to persecuted people, for we are not, say,
Gypsies or Potawanamie at the core, though a not altogether fanciful
claim could be made for American identity being black with a dab of
Irish at the core. Please do not think I am whining, though whining
is one of the more authentic behaviors we engage in, despite its being
so easily put on or faked. This foray of mine is a sociological fantasy,
not a personal revelation or complaint.
Sartre claimed about half a century ago that the anti-Semite makes
the Jew, and there is some truth to that, but not the whole truth. The
lot of those with stigmatized identities is not just self-hatred but that
that self-hatred coexists in some complex way with a pride that both
opposes it and is in part caused by it. You lament the injustice of
your group’s inferior status in the larger ordering; you can wish for
admittance or just to be left alone. You can also turn your back on
the larger order and be proud of what you are. But when low-status
groups talk up their pride there is suspicion all around, by insiders and
outsiders, that it is all sour grapes and wishful thinking, a shrinking of
aspiration to coincide with what you are or what you can actually get,
that the whole thing is one barely disguised charade, one big fake.
Or if you cannot find much to be proud of, you can turn your back
on pride, declare it to be a sin, and proclaim yourself to be exalted
by virtue of being low and in the dirt and then, perversely, be proud
of that. This is Nietzsche’s well-known account of the transforma-
tion of values, motivated by cunning, meanness, and vengeful envy
that inform an emotion he called ressentiment. He blamed the Jews
for inventing ressentiment but blamed Christianity for perfecting
it.14 Weakness becomes a virtue, strength a sin. Not fighting back
comes to be called courage, ugliness means beauty.15 For Nietzsche

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the transformation of values is the con of all cons. It means a total

refusal to accept the truth about your real motives and real lack of
merit. Ressentiment is real, not at all a fake, but it motivates a massive
self-deception.16
When excluded groups claim to be proud of what they are, we
might want to test to see whether it is based on something more than
wishful thinking and self-deception. Real pride is indeed available to
them, handed to them on a silver platter by the moronic imbecility
that is so often a salient feature of pompous or brute power. Thus the
Jew’s contempt for the goyische Kopf ; the black’s for the white’s lack
of physicality, humor, cool and grace; women’s for men’s psycholog-
ical fragility; the child’s for adult dullness (and bad breath). And this
contempt funds a corresponding pride in one’s own superiority on
precisely these grounds.17
This kind of pride, though, is parasitical on the politics of con-
tempt that gives rise to it. There is another, simpler feeling of pride,
the one you feel when you see your kid do something special, or
when you actually achieve something yourself that not even you can
prevent yourself from feeling proud of. Pride, the rush of innocent
pride, is another one of those experiences, like shame, that fills our
entire being, uniting body, self, and soul. The rush of pride suspends
self-criticism; pride can also exist in less intense forms, in a quiet
and perhaps not unjustified satisfaction. But then the divisions start
to reappear; we start wondering whether we are not deluded. And
should we conclude that our pride is merited, we must take care not to
impose it immodestly on others. Within seconds, then, unless alone,
we are back to the world of poses and faking it.

Th i s i s m u c h to o g r i m ; it too smacks of being a pose. I in fact

have had it good, for which one must mostly praise the deep decency
and expansive freedoms of America, and I am bitter only in bursts:
when I think of how unfathomable the depths of hatred are for what
my family and kids are, what I indelibly am and my ancestors were.

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 twelve

Passing and Wishing You Were What You Are Not

One of the most insistent pressures to fake it big occurs when

we are ashamed of what we are seen to be. Shame can have a salutary
social effect when it pushes us to be lawful, mannerly, and civil. Or it
can become rather morally suspect when it tempts us to disavow our
religion, nation, race, or some aspects, not all by any means, of sexual
desire. In those cases in which there may be grounds for distrusting
the moral quality of the shame felt, we can blame the person as a self-
hater, as someone culpably not at ease with himself, culpable because
he is cowardly and disloyal to what we say he is.1 (Funny how we
are often so much surer of the identities we impose on others than
of the ones we feel we can claim for ourselves.) Or we can blame the
unjust order that makes him have to mobilize courage simply to be
black, a Jew, gay, or a member of some other group condemned by
the dominant order to be pariahs. Or, as is often the case, we blame
both – the pariah no less than the unjust order.
Hard to believe that turning my attention to self-hatred, very mild
forms of it, will be my amends for the bitterness that leaked out in
the preceding chapter. I undertake to present a lighter heart, and a
droller tone. There is significantly less temptation now for a Jew to
pass than there was fifty years ago. Temptations, though, there are
still, and they are not completely resisted. Why do I really spell out
that Ian, even though there is nothing Jewish about William I. Miller,
unless it lowers the odds even further and in fact makes a false claim
for not being so? There is less temptation for blacks and gays too.
For some who could have passed under the older order, the ideal of
diversity offers inducements to claim and publish identities they had
abandoned or had the option to abandon or keep hidden in closets.

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Yet few would deny that the shades and taints of stigma linger; the
scars are discernible, and the people who bear them are occasionally
tempted by plastic surgeries, figurative and real.
I will stick mostly to Jews in this chapter, with a preamble about
Americans abroad, because I am a Jewish American and that gives
me some license to say truths that if said about other groups would
be deemed unprivileged. Truth is not accepted as a defense in such
cases; in fact, one of the chief themes of this book is that truth is
an offense, seldom, if ever, a defense. I especially want to get at the
moves we make to disavow certain identities for the nonce, not for
all time – small cowardices perhaps, but nothing major. It is about
roles again, and fitting in, and trying to avoid petty embarrassments.
Big shames and humiliations I put to one side.
Distancing oneself from others whom one is lumped with often
involves a set of motives we loosely call self-hatred, but it needn’t
be as grave as that. Self-hatred, like love, lumps together a lot of
different phenomena. The emotion directed against oneself may not
always be hatred but rather contempt, or disgust, guilt, or shame, or
simply a vague dissatisfaction, not even as bad as low self-esteem.
It may be more or less durable, no more than a passing moment at
one end or an immutable trait of character at the other. The loathing
can be for traits that are yours alone or yours only to the extent you
belong to a disfavored group.
Self-hatred can thus have different styles depending on what you
hate yourself for. You might hate yourself in one way for being short,
in another for being fat, in another for being skinny, black, Jewish,
crippled, blind, old, or cowardly. And because self-hatred often takes
its cast from the hatreds of those who hate you, it matters greatly by
whom and for what you are hated, and the ways, means, and his-
tory of that hatred. Presumably the self-hatred of American blacks,
to the extent they are self-haters, would not be structured in the same
way or take on the same style as the self-hatred of Jews, for whom
self-hatred seems to lurk at the very core of diasporan identity.2 Not
all the powerless and disfavored dislike themselves in the same way,
if they dislike themselves at all. Nor are sentiments of negative self-
assessment solely the curse of the powerless.3 I might feel embarrassed

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by privileges I have that I feel I hold unfairly or are not quite legit-
imate but that I am still not willing to relinquish: so-called liberal
guilt, a sentiment that can readily be blamed as merely sentimental,
no more moral than Claudius’s weak or self-indulgent guilt noted
earlier.

An American Tragicomedy
Take the case of a certain kind of American self-hatred that is moti-
vated by class and regional biases, and also by a snobbish antidemo-
cratic impulse. The fear is that one belongs to a people that proves
itself consistently to lack sufficient insight to loathe itself for its beer
bellies, for coming from the prairies, for utter obliviousness to pre-
tensions regarding coffee and wine, for enjoying tractor pulls and pro
wrestling, for bad sexual politics, for being drawn to drawing a bead
on furry creatures with beautiful brown eyes, for being more reli-
gious than is seemly, for having no culture, and, in a very restricted
and bad faith way, for being white, for this kind of self-hater is him-
self inevitably white. What he loathes, in other words, is that these
average people seem so damn authentic and at ease with what they
are, and he cannot believe they should be. Those sorts were supposed
to be shepherds playing flutes and lyres in Arcadia, and it turns out
they are tailgaters eating brats and blasting boomboxes in the parking
lot before the Packer game.
No self-hating American of the kind I am describing feels that
American blacks harm his amour-propre in the same way as does a
white frat guy or a yahoo tailgater. Not because he is not racist, but
because he feels he will never be held accountable for loud fat blacks
in the same way he will for loud fat whites. Indeed, he is willing to
concede with some sincerity that blacks have style.
There is no self-hatred, quite the contrary, for coming from
Berkeley, from Greenwich Village, from unproductively pleasant-
looking settings in Vermont or on Cape Cod, or from any other place
deemed suitable for a second home. This self-hatred, though distaste-
ful, is not as morally defective as, and should be distinguished from,
the self-hatred that characterizes much of the American left as when

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it responded to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 with a barely disguised

Schadenfreude.4 The self-hatred I am talking about, though, is dif-
ferent. It is mostly snobbish and patrician, available to hoity-toity
conservatives as well as to limousine liberals. That these types are
understood as being pretentious by everyone including themselves
matters not; they seem to cultivate and delight in an affectation of
having these kinds of affectations. This kind of self-hatred, in other
words, is really a way of congratulating oneself on being above the
others who happen to be your countrymen. At home it is a cause for
self-congratulation. Trips abroad are the problem, to Europe primar-
ily, rich Europe, and this means that Slavic areas and certain circum-
Mediterranean regions don’t count, nor does much of the rest of the
world. Any number of anxious Americans are eager to show these
qualifying Europeans that they are neither as vulgar, fat, nor twangy
as they suspect they will be expected to be, for, of course, these Yanks
agree entirely with this unkind assessment of their fellow citizens even
as they also believe in their own individual exceptionalism.
Here is a fairly classic situation. My wife and I were in a pub some-
where in the Cotswolds, seated at a small table. To write “Cotswolds”
rather than “England” is of course an affectation, a code for speaking
to those in the know, even if “the know” here represents little real
knowledge. Six middle-aged American women were seated nearby,
speaking loudly, laughing even more loudly, drawing disapproving
looks from the natives. One announced to the others that the Lake
Country from which she had just come was nothing compared with
the Finger Lakes. Both my wife and I sat in silence, afraid to open our
mouths for fear we would be known for what we were. I even thought
we might try to pass with our small amount of German, enough to
have us carry on competently about beer and potatoes, which was
exactly what we had in front of us anyway. Imagine the sorry state of
a less than self-assured American tourist, a Jewish one no less, who
feels tempted to pass himself off as a German. In a gesture of com-
plicity, a young Englishman at the next table leaned toward us and
said, imitating the ladies by exaggerating their nasal vowels, which
he heard as a high-pitched whine, “Yes, nothing to compare with
Rochester.”

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Shameful to tell, we were flattered that he colluded with us, even

more flattered that we weren’t immediately identifiable as Americans.
But such flattery was purchased at the price of not being able to an-
swer without embarrassing him for his having insulted what we were,
to say nothing of embarrassing ourselves for speaking the way we
would once we opened our mouths. Our own American tongue would
sound especially grating to us at the moment, now that we knew
how painful it was for an Englishman to hear it. Hadn’t Trollope
complained of “the well-known nasal twang” as early as the 1870s?5
How were we to answer this Englishman to save him and ourselves
the embarrassment? Moreover, as luck would have it, my wife was
born and raised seventy miles south of Rochester. How contemptible
we were. We laughed in bonhomie and pardoned him and cravenly
said we knew what he meant, but we were painfully self-conscious
of our o’s and a’s. Disgraced and disgraceful as we might have
been, however, we did not stoop to an Anglophilic accent, Katherine
Hepburn talk – self-hatred of this sort has its limits. In my trade that
accent seems to be an occupational hazard of anyone who has spent
more than three months in the United Kingdom some time in the past
forty years.
The best we could claim is that we had been counted as the right
sort of serviceable American. In this setting that meant being an
American who registered proper embarrassment for what he was,
joined in mocking his countrymen, and accepted the greater desirabil-
ity of passing for something else, though in the end we were still as
American as apple pie, forever kin with the ladies from Rochester. But
I can hardly trust my reading of the situation. Maybe that Englishman
could readily see or hear that we were Americans before he leaned
over. In that case his speaking to us was not an act of collusion with
us as against the ladies from Rochester, but revenge in the form of get-
ting one American to betray another by flattering them into agreeing
with the most unflattering interpretation of what an American looks
like to a cultivated Englishman. He had forced our hand; and we
were doubly shamed. Shamed by how we were seen as Americans,
and ashamed for being so ashamed. But that Englishman also did us
a small favor: he let us know that it was not our self-hatred that made

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us attribute to the English such an unflattering view of Americans.

No. He confirmed that the English indeed looked upon us just as we
feared they did.
American self-hatred, though it knows other forms, is mostly
about measuring up to the English first, then to high-style European
sophisticates in general. Any old Englishman and especially an
English woman can prompt it,6 for they can make us feel awkward
speaking our own tongue, though I must confess I have felt that way
when speaking with North Europeans whose English as a second or
third language achieves an elegance in accent mine lacks. We are still
beset with Francophiles, too, though their number is shrinking, mir-
roring the decline in French culture as a standard-setter. “Slavophile”
is not really available to designate a possible American attitude, hav-
ing been taken over by nineteenth-century Russians concerned to
battle what they took to be Russian self-hatred. The grim comedy of
the Slavophile movement is its implicit supposition that only a Slav
could love a Slav and then only after a heavy dose of consciousness-
raising. And as to Latins, Asians, Africans, and so on, we don’t even
have a discernible syndrome ending in “phile” to describe a craven
anxiety to be accepted by them.
The same American who squirms when witnessing American boor-
ishness abroad, nevertheless feels prouder than hell of being an
American when he hears pathetic Euro-rock or French rock ’n roll
playing in a Parisian disco, or notes with self-delighting contempt that
all the anti-American demonstrators are in jeans and baseball hats
and sport t-shirts advertising various American products. He may
lament that American pop culture seems to be driving out quaint
contrived localisms, from Morris dances to Passion plays, but he
revels in the feeling of dominating, of having immediate and natu-
ral access to what all those European wannabes think of as cool.
One’s self-hatred as an American is manifestly not the self-hatred that
plagues the weak, the defeated, the poor, or the downtrodden. It is the
self-hatred, if even that, of the parvenu. Few indeed are the number
of this kind of American who would ever trade nations with anyone
(you would have to be nuts to do so), preferring instead to think of
the rest of the world as so many vacation spots, some of which may

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even offer a picturesque third world experience of mercifully brief

duration.
I must retreat. Self-hatred, self-loathing, shamefulness are too
strong and too pretentious to capture the quality of the emotional
experience. This is not the self-hatred that Jews or blacks (perhaps)
experience, the self-hatred of those actually dealt a bad hand in the
social and moral order, who in fact are demonized, stigmatized, and
made to suffer. This American sentiment of negative self-assessment
is mostly a matter of pretty small-stakes embarrassment, not shame,
except for shameful sorts such as T. S. Eliot and others, who have cul-
tural pretensions that involve them more closely in self-loathing; they
actually do rush to live elsewhere, speak differently, and be something
else. Standard American anxiety abroad, and then mostly in the face
of Brits, operates in the comic mode; it does not owe its origins to
having been beaten, murdered, spat or shat upon, and discriminated
against in myriad humiliating ways. It is fairly small potatoes and
marches to its own tune. This kind of embarrassment is completely
consistent with arrogance and power and certainly consistent with
the kinds of self-satisfaction that flow from wealth and armed might.
As contemptible as my wife and I felt we were, we still felt superior
to the ladies from Rochester, if not to the Englishman at the next
table. Those damn English, we thought. They have no anxieties on
account of their Englishness. They feel unanxiously superior, with a
self-confidence that others, against their own interest, confirm and
defer to. They never have to fake being anything but what they are
anyway, at least in front of the likes of us. We slavishly defer to them,
intimidated by their self-confidence, their reserve, giving them the
benefit of about thirty extra IQ points simply for having the accent
they do, even when the accent is Manchester working-class.
How many Englishmen are ever embarrassed by, let alone ashamed
of, being English? I expect some English person, in response to this,
to remonstrate that he, for one, is embarrassed by being English and
that I have concocted a fantasy that is just another symptom of my
anxieties about what it means to be American as against a stage
Englishman. But should such a soul be embarrassed he would carry
it off with such poise.7

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So secure are Brits that they are barely embarrassed by their soccer
hooligans. I suspect they are just a little prideful that they can set the
standard in boorish and violent self-assertion as well as in matters
of poise, tact, and reserve. Since when did any Brit mind that one
of his countrymen beat the living daylights out of a Belgian or a
Frenchman? There are some groups that are seen as winners no matter
what, and one never hears of the problem of English self-hatred.8
Something about them makes others accept their mildly self-mocking
self-satisfaction as utterly justifiable, something most would agree
seems much less to be the case for the French, whose self-love seems
indecorous, it not possessing the boisterous and generous innocence
of the American version of the same. Funny too is that I feel no
inconsistency in being manifestly proud of being an American and
admitting how nervous those damn Brits make me about it.

Passing
I know I am making some cavalier, maybe offensive, assertions,
parading American anxieties and prejudices as if they were getting
at Truth, but they are getting at some kind of truth, one many of us
have to own up to, however grudgingly.
Take the case of passing, as in light-skinned blacks, closeted gays,
and delicately benosed, blondish Jews. Passing involves, whether in-
tentional or not, disguise and dissimulation. In one sense, all faking
it is a form of passing, but the idea of passing is properly reserved
for big fakes. It is not about being polite when you don’t want to
be. It is about faking what most people feel are essential aspects of
identity for which all would agree the stakes are high: thus a woman
going off to war as a man is passing, but not a sixteen-year-old boy
lying about his age, because the recruitment officer is trying to sign
up bodies, not expose and refuse kids eager to fight. It is about faking
gender, ethnic affiliation, sexual orientation, race, and religion. That
doesn’t quite capture all the cases either. Goffman would include any-
one whose natural identity is stigmatized in some way and manages
to conceal it. We might also want to consider that a spy must pass,
as must many an infiltrator the basis of whose passing is ideological

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and political, but it would seem an expanded use of the term to apply
it to an unfaithful spouse keeping an affair secret. Con men of the
more mundane sort seem to fall on the nonpassing side of the line,
too.
What makes passing full-fledged Passing is that it is undertaken
in relation to what is perceived to be a low-status default identity.
Motives can vary. Self-hatred need not play much of a part. Coleman
Silk in Roth’s The Human Stain is a purely opportunistic passer who
simply decides not to correct people’s mistaken assumptions about
his identity. Coleman harbors no special loathing for his people. Some
people, in other words, pass without trying to; they fake out others
without faking it. Consider the turmoil of self-blame this could lead to
for the very non–Jewish-looking Jew or very straight-acting gay who
fears he might look cowardly or self-hating if he took advantage of
not being immediately recognizable as a member of his pariah group.9
He may thus find himself searching for decorous ways and occasions
to leak out the information as “naturally” as possible.
Assimilation can be viewed as quasi-passing, as a willingness to
adopt the styles and manner of the favored group without disclaiming
the low-status identity.10 Even here the lines get fuzzy. The assimilator
does not see himself as a deceiver in the way a secretive passer is, yet
he may be seen as trying to pass, both by conservative members of
his original group and by hostile members of the favored group. In
other words, he will be blamed as a Passer or an attempted Passer.
Assimilation could be understood to be a strategy of passing at
the level of the genes rather than at the level of the individual; the
first generation assimilator will fool no one, nor does he mean to,
but his children and grandchildren will intermarry with the favored
group and eventually will merge with the nonstigmatized popula-
tion. The first-generation assimilator begins the process of identity
laundering.11
Many in the favored group fear assimilation as a plot ending in a
bastardization of their blood, while many in the assimilating group
fear the dilution of theirs. The two fearers thus share a common in-
terest, and one need not be too paranoid to imagine a despairing Jew,
sick at the thought of his people surviving so many persecutions only

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to be digested and dissolved in the undiscerning maw of the American

suburb, bizarrely seeing in the uncanny lunacy of the anti-Semite the
last hope of Jewish survival. In a minor readjustment to Sartre’s the-
sis, this despairing Jew bitterly supposes that even if Jews disappear,
anti-Semitism, sempiternal, will re-create them, vesting their invented
Jew with the same phantasmic powers Jews have always been accused
of possessing.
Groups that fear themselves subject to infiltration by plagues of
passers develop methods to keep them out. Some also feel it is im-
portant to hone techniques of unmasking those who have gotten in-
side the perimeter; others prefer to turn a blind eye, believing it best
not to know how impure the blood of the so-called bluebloods is.
Techniques of keeping the stigmatized out are sometimes very crude,
such as forcing Jews to wear yellow badges, an open admission that
it was harder to spot or sniff them out – and I do mean sniff out,
given the belief in the foetor judaicus (the Jewish stench)12 – than
the ideology of their self-evident repulsiveness would have it. More
interesting strategies of defending against passing, because they are
more complex, are the ways aristocrats and upper-class people ma-
nipulated and elaborated codes of manners and fashion, posture, and
linguistic markers to catch up the parvenu. Then, when the parvenus
became expert at mimicry, the high would turn around and violate
the strictures with casual nonchalance, a luxury they could in secu-
rity indulge but that the parvenu was hardly secure enough to risk
without being charged with vulgarity or immorality:

The Rich arrive in pairs

And also in Rolls Royces;
They talked of their affairs
In loud and strident voices.13

Classifications based on skin color allow for passing, too, for wher-
ever one drew the line, at one drop or at one great-grandparent, there
were going to be many who fell just to the wrong side who were in-
distinguishable in looks from those who fell just to the right side.
Whatever race was conceived to be, it wouldn’t always be easy to
see.14

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 passing and wishing

The passer runs the risk of exposure that in some regimes could
have more serious consequences than being chucked out of a country
club, painful as such a humiliation would be.15 The passer is faking
it big time, and he must fake out others completely or else the jig is
up. It may be, however, that the anxiety of being discovered is more
than compensated for by the delights of knowing you are bamboo-
zling those on the inside, not to mention the obvious benefits of not
suffering the indignities of being an open member of your low-status
group.16 Not that the glee of putting one over need always run in the
passer’s favor. The dominant group may have set you up, letting you
believe you are passing though they have seen through you from the
start. It is their secret kept from you that they have let you believe
you have a secret kept from them. Your expulsion will come at a time
of their own choosing guaranteed to make a cautionary example of
you, which they (and your own) will regale themselves with from
beyond your grave.
Sometimes, strangely, the dominant culture abandons its surest de-
fenses against the passer. I was seven, the year 1953, in Green Bay. We
were one family in a small Jewish community of about thirty fami-
lies. I was the only Jew in my school class until fifth grade, when two
others joined me. The night before I was to attend my first swimming
lesson at the local YMCA, my father and his brother sat me down
for an earnest discussion to prepare me, they said, for what I would
face the next day. They hemmed and hawed, but the upshot was that
I would notice that I was different from the other boys, who, they
said, would “not have a ring around their penises” as I did.
That night I peered closely to inspect the ring that had heretofore
escaped my attention. Nothing I saw looked like a ring to me, but
then, not to worry, for once I had checked the other boys the next
day the matter would be resolved. At the Y I tried ever so discreetly
to catch a glimpse of the other boys as we undressed and then as we
swam naked. I saw short penises, long ones, skinny ones, fat ones
too; I saw crooked ones with a bend sinister, some dexter, some up,
most down, but I could not for the life of me discern what the ring
was that they didn’t have that I did. God knows I wouldn’t have
been such a close observer of these facts, nor would they have seared

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themselves into my memory, but for Dad and Uncle Gene trying to
spare me trouble on this score; they meant well.
How could Dad and Uncle Gene have been so wrong? It is embar-
rassing to confess the number of years that passed before I discovered
what the ring really was, even more embarrassing that in deference
to my father and uncle I believed it to be the skin within a half-
millimeter of the urethra. Within the twenty-five years that separated
my father from me, Christians in Green Bay had exchanged Pauline
figural circumcision of the heart for Yahweh’s literal circumcision of
the flesh.17 Making circumcision the norm worked to deny male Jews
a stubborn sign of exclusivity while at the same time giving them a
kind of passe-partout, a foolproof means of evading ultimate detec-
tion if they had already managed to remain undiscovered with their
clothes on. Why would Christians give this up? Why would they so
easily cave in to their doctors? (This change took place long before
Jews had penetrated the medical profession in significant numbers.)
It has nothing to do with guilt over the Holocaust, for the practice
had already begun shifting in the late nineteenth century, apparently
taking its good-natured time getting to Green Bay, something it had
yet to do by my father’s boyhood there in the 1920s and 1930s.
Various voguish late–nineteenth-century medical theories argued for
circumcision as a health measure whose time had come; it promised
all kinds of benefits – cures for compulsive masturbation, for paralysis
too, to say nothing of the virtue of having cleaner and less odiferous
genitals.18
Science was also operating, it has been suggested, in response
to anxieties of Protestant America, which was concerned to distin-
guish and insulate itself from the filthy teeming masses streaming into
America, more of whom were Catholic – Irish, Italians, and Poles –
than were Jews. If there was a colorable argument that circumcision
was cleaner (and surely the elimination of smegma should clinch the
case for those inclined to be fastidious about such things), then the
circumcised Protestant could still feel he was not mimicking a Jew in
his heart, for his motives were secular. His conscious motive was hy-
gienic; his unconscious motive was social and anti-Catholic, albeit no
less hygienic for that. The advocates of circumcision took great care

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to distinguish their hygienic procedures from the dirty Jewish way of

getting the same result.19 The Jews, in their view, were still behaving
barbarically, for their motives were superstitious, not progressive in
the best modern style.
With tongue pretty much in cheek, I can’t help half entertaining
the suspicion that another unconscious motive might have been at
work. What if Christian men didn’t want to know how many Jewish
men their women were sleeping with? (Christian men sleeping with
Jewish women posed less of a risk to Christian purity, for by con-
ventional understandings of the sex act it is the male who pollutes,
the woman who is polluted.) Or was it that they wished to preserve
for their women the excuse that they had not done so knowingly?
“That’s funny, you don’t look Jewish” could now be a line said to a
guy in complete nakedness who got himself in that position because
the line was also accurate with his clothes on. But it cannot be de-
nied that by circumcising themselves, Christian men decided to make
their bodies Jewish, thereby, bizarrely, making my earlier, rather ag-
gressive suggestion – that at least as far as the Christian anxiety goes,
humanity is at core nothing more than a Jew – true in body as well
as in mind.

I n s u m : though nothing as firm or pretentious as a conclusion seems

warranted, might we not draw from these last three chapters an un-
settling sense that when our mission is to find our core self we know
we are in its near environs when our consciousness of it sets off un-
pleasant sentiments of shame, self-doubt, and suspicion? Yes, surely,
it may also trigger pride, but the prideful, one suspects, are more
likely to cheat in their own favor. Feeling good about oneself tends
to depend, in fact, on having licked the compulsion to self-examine
very insistently, except perhaps for Socrates. Maybe, just as a brain
researcher gets at how the brain works by examining its pathologies
and lesions, so too if we want best to understand the notion of a core
self, and its relation to one’s core identity, it may be best to look to
damaged identities.

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 thirteen

Authentic Moments with the Beautiful and Sublime?

Maybe the authentic self, should it be there, is not discover-

able by a conscious effort. Self-consciousness, inescapable posturing,
cognitive biases all interfere with finding it. What if, however, the
authentic self is less a thing to be known than an experience to be had
and, bizarrely, an experience of that true self’s own escape from self-
consciousness? Losing track of the self as self may be a way of finding
it. (Sounds kind of flaky – if, like me, you resist it as so much chuckle-
headed nonsense – or Buddhist if you wish to vest it with worthier au-
thority.) There has been floating around since the romantic period an
idea that one can achieve certain grand epiphanies of self-realization
in moments claimed to have a supra-authenticity to them, and that
these in turn are often triggered by confrontations with the beautiful
and the sublime in nature and in art. But since when does the contem-
plation of the beautiful or the sublime necessarily lead to escaping
self-consciousness any more than it is likely to bring in its wake
instead a whole assortment of worries about whether you are feeling
deeply enough or whether others will think you a phony for looking as
if you are feeling too deeply? The pure experience of the aesthetic does
not escape the long shadow of faking it. Unmediated unself-conscious
immersion into the beautiful is often something that must be worked
at, struggled for, or, if we are lucky, achieved as a gift of grace.

Phoniness by the Sea

It has been fashionable for some time in the humanities to argue for
various species of cultural and historical relativism. Suppose a pro-
grammatic cultural relativist or, as the more pretentious cant would

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style him, an antiessentialist. Let us grant that the fashionableness of

his position makes him hold it doubly sincerely; sincerely because he
believes it, and sincerely because he wants to be fashionable. Even
such as he may experience a twinge of anxiety that his experience of
natural beauty suggests he is in the presence of some essential grand-
ness whose grandness will impose itself on a third worlder no less
than on suburbanite, on black as well as white, on woman as well
as man, on Muslim as well as Christian, on ancient Greek as well
as modern. Moreover, the very grandness of his experience depends
on his suppressing any thoughts of its localism and relativity, for its
grandness is felt as indisputable, even to him.
But then his intellectual positions start to interfere and gum up the
experience. Am I awed by that mountain view, our antiessentialist
wonders nervously, only because my culture makes me see the moun-
tains this way or because culture, as I seem to be, is helpless before
the grandness of that mountain? But then, he counters, what is it that
makes the mountains on average more sublime than the plains, or the
sea more sublime than Lake Superior? We can predict, he continues,
given the culture, the likelihood of which member of these pairs will
be considered more scenic and sublime than the other. Were not the
Alps often viewed well into the nineteenth century as jagged defor-
mations of nature, not beautiful but grotesque? Trees? Did not the
Talmudic sages 1,800 years ago require that no trees be grown within
twenty-five cubits of a town, and that carob and sycamore trees were
to be banished to fifty cubits’ distance, along with carcasses and tan-
neries: “To preserve the beauty of the town, every tree that is found
nearer to the town than that must be cut down”?1
If someone were led blindfolded to Lake Superior, would he know
it was not the ocean? You cannot see to the other side of either one,
and, like the sea, Superior is in constant roil and its waves can rip
apart ocean-going vessels. Sure, the salt-free spray is a giveaway, but
that is no longer an issue of visual beauty. Doesn’t our knowledge
of maps influence our decision? The cachet of the sea and the coast,
in the United States at least, is fraught with all kinds of pretensions
that would deny to those in the middle of the country any access to
culture or beauty, unless it be in the form of mountains. No doubt the

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majesty of the sea moves them. They are not faking that, but there
are all the other status gains to be had by communing with the sea
that makes their refusal to have the same experience at Lake Superior
a form of vanity.
That is why I distrust those who claim too much for salt spray
because I suspect that some of what they like about it is the proof
it provides that they are on the coast and have not been tricked by
the Great Lakes; olfaction is needed to save their culturally imposed
ranking system for the sublime. Is there really anything inherently
more beautiful about a mountain than the plain, about the sea than
Lake Superior? If the flat infinite expanse of the ocean makes it, why
can’t the flat infinite expanse of the plains? There are ugly moun-
tains, too, and ones that are kitsch, that are less sublime than a field
of wheat, with the wind stirring the expanse into iridescent waves
stretching as far as the eye can see.
So why is the sense of infinitude a selling point for the sea, but a
reason to dismiss the plains? Is it because the sea and mountains are
scary in a mighty way, whereas the plains, to these sophisticated ap-
preciators of beauty, are scary only because they are believed to house
boring people? Yes, says Edmund Burke, who specifically addresses
the point and claims that the plains are not sublime like the sea be-
cause the plains do not generate terror. Laurence Sterne suggests that
the very commodiousness of a fertile plain can terrorize only the travel
writer, not travelers, because the absence of danger and risk makes
for few good stories: “There is nothing more pleasing to a traveller –
or more terrible to travel-writers, than a large rich plain.”2 Sterne,
living in the eighteenth century, assumes that the flatlands are prefer-
able to the scenic route to the extent they make getting from point
A to point B pleasant and easy, with their good inns and level roads
that don’t tax the horses exceedingly. “Pleasant,” notice, is not the
adjective one uses to describe the experience of the sublime. For us,
though, who do not have to worry about where we will sleep (there
are Motel 6s in every godforsaken place) or whether our horses will
founder on the next steep climb, sublime scenery along the route is
costless and safe as long as we are not so mesmerized as to go sailing
off into it after missing a turn in the road.

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Fear for our lives, even fear as to whether we may run out of gas
before the next gas station, has a way of pushing our attraction to the
beautiful and sublime well off center stage. We must, as Kant says,
“see ourselves safe in order to feel this soul-stirring delight.”3 The
perception and appreciation of beauty in the fearsome, as Kant and
others have pointed out,4 requires our safety and well-being and even
is dependent in some nontrivial degree on pacification and reasonable
security, on political and social order. In other words, we cannot
really be afraid, except in a kind of virtual, fake way, if we are going
to be moved aesthetically.5 Even trivial interferences with our sense
of well-being can reveal just how fragile our willingness to be moved
aesthetically is: vistas of breathtaking fall foliage were insufficient to
overcome my kids’ sense of ruination brought on by the collapse of
the car’s CD player at the outset of the trip. And scenery, no matter
how sublime, cannot elicit much aesthetic attention when we are
beset with a desperate urge for a restroom.
The incredible lethal beauty and awesomeness of a volcano or
tornado or jet fighter is usually apparent to most of us safely on film,
and those of us who have actually witnessed them still worry first
about getting to a safe place from which to indulge our awe or, in
the case of the jet fighter, of making sure it is friendly. A soldier is
more likely to indulge his sense of the sublime at the vast array of
his own fleet behind him than of the enemy’s array in front of him.
But there is something to those suggestions of lethality. The plains
of wheat never seem to overcome the comfortable story implicit in
them of well-being, habitability, fertility, and subdued and defeated
nature.
The relativist wavers: here on the fjords with mountains coming
down to the sea, his experience, he knows, will definitely be im-
proved if he can suspend his disbelief and let himself be overcome by
the feeling that there is something essentially sublime in the setting,
something primordial, precultural and grand beyond all obsessive
human intellectualizing. Did the Vikings find the mountains coming
down to this fjord at sunset sublime, or did they merely look at them
as barriers to be sailed around and see the setting sun as a practical
indicator of tomorrow’s weather? Our cultural relativist finds it hard

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to believe they did not experience the beauty – “Sophocles long ago/
Heard it on the Aegaean.” He is now even less sure that his rela-
tivism isn’t a pose and something of a position he adopts because of
the pleasure it gives him to assert it against philistines or the man on
street. And he is quite thankful the fjords overpowered his intellectual
commitments. These come back later to nag at him in the hotel room,
but they did not interfere with his experience when he was having it.
Though it provides small solace, he feels that his affectations do not
quite render him as obviously phony as those who think that when
it comes to the sublime Lake Superior must be inherently inferior to
the sea.

Anxious Experts
There are other sources of self-consciousness in the face of the beauti-
ful or sublime, as sufferable in a museum before a famous painting as
when dealing with sunsets or fall foliage. These latter add the frustra-
tion of our never being quite sure we have captured or can identify
the optimal moment when the sunset and leaves are at their most
glorious.6 With art we have the added anxiety as to whether we are
enjoying it properly and whether we can convince others we enjoyed
it properly without seeming either too simple or sillily pretentious.
For a painting this means enjoying it intelligently, whereas the in-
telligent enjoyment of natural beauty – say, a sunset – seems less a
matter of the essence of sunsets than of our own response to beauty.
There is no special expertise in observing a sunset. We wouldn’t think
someone a philistine who said that when it comes to sunsets he just
sits back and enjoys them.
But with a painting one knows that there are experts out there who
could tell you so much more about it; you may have read them or may
even be one of them, and still you are not sure your appreciation is the
finest appreciation possible. You still could do better. You start to feel
vaguely deficient for not knowing more or, if you do know more, for
needing a boost to make you feel the power as you once felt it or as you
think you are supposed to feel it. Though your knowledge may have
increased and the sophistication of your appreciation with it over the

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years, the cold fact is you suspect that the painting moved you more
when you were younger and knew less. You are now reduced, if not
quite to feigning awe, to paying mere lip service to awe once felt.
Or are you playing the role of a melancholic, deriving more plea-
sure from present self-doubt than from any misremembered prior
ecstasy? You have reason to believe that your prior ecstasy might be
misremembered. You know it is not beneath you to have repressed
the memory of your anxieties as to your ignorance when young, anx-
ieties that you could dredge up if you wanted to. You suspect that
your recall of the earlier ecstasy is in fact something of an invention
fashioned more for the purpose of casting doubt on your present ex-
perience. For you suspect you were posturing back then, too, faking
feeling awed because you were afraid of being seen as too dumb and
dim not to feel it. But that is not fair either, for the memory of a prior
ecstasy is a pleasurable memory, and it has served you well when
it flashes upon your inward eye. So what if that purer ecstasy was
in fact constructed later, that it is really something of a fake? Fake
memories may enhance the authenticity of the present moment, and
we are never sure that there is not always a whole lot of faking going
on in even our truest memories.
Adam Smith (TMS I.i.2.2) observes, “When we have read a book
or poem so often that we can no longer find any amusement in
reading it by ourselves, we can still take pleasure in reading it to a
companion; . . . we enter into the surprise and admiration which it
naturally excites in him, but which it is no longer capable of ex-
citing in us.” Recapturing or reproducing all the emotions of your
best experience with a particular object often puts you to a kind of
parasitical appreciation, piggybacking vicariously on the joy you see
others experience when they first discover it, especially when as par-
ent, friend, or teacher you introduce them to it. Without that last
proviso their pleasure may simply cause you chagrin, as when you
suffer the view of the young in one another’s arms. Yet your pleasure
is more than just witnessing their pleasure, for you find yourself re-
experiencing your original zeal because you have worked yourself up
trying to convince them to feel the power. Nevertheless you need the
other person in order to feel the greatness of the work again. This is

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one of the great services students provide their teachers, who might
otherwise feel as if they are faking their pleasure in their chosen field.

Faking It in the Museum

This piggybacking of your appreciation on another’s can work great
wonders; but the presence of others whom you are not teaching or
linked to so as to use their pleasure to prompt yours can produce petty
miseries. You cannot help but be aware of their reaction, not just to
the object of appreciation but also to your watching of it. They will be
judging, you feel, whether you are being a proper appreciator. Your
reputation – for having a soul, for having taste, for being a worthy
object of love, and for not being either a pompous prig or a hopeless
philistine – is in some way engaged. There is competition even in the
watching of a sunset as to who is feeling the most, let alone a painting,
where the competitiveness is more clearly the case. True, the others
may not in fact be judging you, but you suspect they are, because
you are certainly judging them and comparing their responses with
yours. It is a rare day that a trip to the art museum doesn’t leave you
feeling something of a moral failure for not liking Picasso as much as
you thought you should have or as much as the others faking liking
him are liking him.
A certain obligatoriness undergirds the awe and admiration we
give to the sublime and to simple beauty too. Some of the obligatori-
ness is the very experience of the sublime, as when the awesomeness
and splendor render nonobeisance to its wondrousness impossible.
But there is also the obligatoriness of being properly appreciative of
those things we are supposed to appreciate, and that can provoke
resistance as well as feelings of inadequacy and failure. If we fall
right in line and admire what is admirable we wonder at how slavish
we are; nor would we feel any more original if we made typically
avant-gardiste gestures of rebellion and resistance. All paths have
been well trodden in this domain, in which the distinctly unconven-
tional is totally conventional. The pretensions and self-satisfactions
of the avant-garde have succeeded in giving the charm of authenticity
to the simple philistine who tells the empresses of performance art

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that they have no clothes on, which in fact they often don’t. Philistin-
ism is no great shakes either; it comes in varieties ranging from naı̈ve
to studied, and its charms tend to have a short life.
How long are you obliged to pay homage, to stay looking at the
Vermeer? There is the niggling worry about when we can declare
ourselves properly released from having to attend to it. The painting
stubbornly stays there, available to be admired or studied until the
museum closes or until your companion urges you to move on in no
uncertain terms. When can you say, “OK, enough” and feel you have
paid proper homage? The problem of release is especially acute in
certain social settings. It is the exhausting demand made upon us to
admire someone’s new home, or garden, or collection of butterflies.
Leave it to the always-insightful Jane Austen to capture the sentiment:

“That [Fanny] should be tired now, however, gives me no sur-

prise; for there is nothing in the course of one’s duties so fatiguing
as what we have been doing this morning: seeing a great house,
dawdling from one room to another, straining one’s eyes and one’s
attention, hearing what one does not understand, admiring what
one does not care for. It is generally allowed to be the greatest bore
in the world, and Miss Price has found it so, though she did not
know it.”7

Sublime scenes in nature raise the same problem. How long do

you have to look at and commune with the scene? When can you
turn away? Taking a picture or buying a postcard of the scene offers
a way of weaseling out of cutting our ties completely with the scene;
taking a photograph lets us pretend that we are not turning away
forever and thus are turning away respectfully.

Postcards and Memories

Have you not also experienced the small shame of having felt more
for a photo or reproduction than for the thing itself? It seems we
often prefer the fake. Nature can be at its best in postcards or nature
documentaries. When en scene I am never quite sure I am positioned
for the best possible view, with the best light, in the right season,

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to say nothing of the vexation of bodily discomforts and the insects

(and tourists) who claim the outdoors as their own. I am determined
too that the kids had better enjoy it because I paid a small fortune
to bring them here. Better not waste such an opportunity. At least I
can blame some of my failures to feel exactly the awe and delight I
think I should feel on the kids, and that may be why it was a good
idea to have brought them along. When one has paid money for the
view, there is pressure to get one’s money’s worth – felt ever the more
keenly because I feel I have to make up for the kids’ lack of interest –
and that complicates the pure aesthetic experience with yet another
distracting intrusion, another demand upon me to perform or else.
I am assaulted from two directions: I worry not only that the kids
are not feeling it as they ought to but also that I am coming nowhere
near my wife’s quiet appreciation of the scene. Going alone doesn’t
solve the problem either because of the need to share your oohs and
ahs and have them confirmed by another. There is sometimes an
overpowering urge to confess the depth of your experience, if you
think it deep, within seconds of its occurrence.
But the sublime seems to invite the ridiculous. We, for instance,
often consider the expedition a success when we find that the scene
lived up to the postcard, that the expectations it raised were met.
The postcard (or the nature documentary) can’t help but be a
reference point, a standard we erect to orient and gauge our aesthetic
judgments of the scene. We also seem almost bent on knowingly sac-
rificing the present moment to make sure we get a good photo of it,
or we hurry back to a souvenir shop to peruse the collection of post-
cards, deferring the appreciation of the present to a more tranquil
appreciation of an epitomized version on film viewable at whim in
the future.
I am being unfair. The photo could just as well be an homage to
the grand moment just lived, an effort to memorialize it. But taking
a picture often ensures a less than optimal experience as we fumble
with the settings, wait for people to get out of the way, puzzle over
which is the best segment of the panorama to settle on, and then
steel ourselves to commit and click the shutter. The photo can also
have the unpleasant effect of diminishing the positive memory of the

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experience if it in fact turns out not to reflect the exquisiteness of the

setting adequately. You end up having to apologize for it when you
show it to a friend: “It’s not really a good picture, but you get the
idea, don’t you?” And though a mediocre photo works well enough
to produce a very active memory of the original experience the first
time it is viewed, it becomes less able to do so as the event recedes in
time and the photo itself becomes more and more the primary source
for the memory. You end up seeing the scene forever as you ineptly
photographed it.8
Memory also acts like a postcard in those scenes and paintings
we actually revisit in the flesh; it can enhance the experience, but it
can also make it disappointing. The memory, contaminated by the
pictures we took and the postcards we bought of the scene, sets a stan-
dard by which we judge the present and sets up various interferences
with present enjoyment. Good memories, as I noted earlier, may be es-
pecially good because you have selectively forgotten all the anxieties
that attended the experience when you had it. This may be a kindness
offered by memory’s fallibility and malleability, but it is a mixed bless-
ing, for it risks making the present fail to match the imagined past.
Stonehenge moved me when I first visited it as I never thought
it would. The sheer size of the stones, the unfathomability of trans-
porting them and raising them given the available technology, the
uncanny perfection of the way some were knocked over and how
perfectly they fell, looking significantly more sublime as ruins than
had they been preserved in their original glory – all this gave me the
heebie-jeebies.9 I dragged the family to it because I wanted to treat
them to the awe. I told them that it surpassed all PBS specials, all
postcards, and this was a recommendation indeed because they are
well aware of my preference for reading about places rather than
seeing them, or for watching them on TV rather than dealing with
the people and clumsy changes of position that come with visiting
them in the flesh.10 I expected to be moved again myself; I was dis-
appointed. It looked so much smaller, and I could not decide from
which point of the circle it looked most like Stonehenge. What was
the optimal point from which to view it? And what was “most like
Stonehenge” to mean?

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The second trip made me doubt the authenticity of my memory of

the first trip. Had I really been moved by it to the extent I recalled,
or was my memory a fake I constructed to make the first trip worth
it, a self-deception I concocted to avoid the self-contempt of having
wasted the opportunity to be moved? Was it that, in Wordsworthian
predictability, the memory was the experience to cherish, not the
actual provision of the raw material of the memory, the experience
itself? What was my present experience but a reassessment of my
prior experience, which now, too, suffered for having played its part
in ruining the second trip. There was no bittersweetness of nostalgia
or wistfulness to add texture to the loss, only a vague annoyance at
Stonehenge for not backing me up in front of my family.
Not only natural beauty or the sublime suffers the postcard effect.
The museum brings you face-to-face with grand paintings you’ve seen
in art books and on the big screen in your introductory art history
class. Sometimes the real thing wins hands down, and not only when
it is bigger. The Vermeer is even more amazing for being smaller than
you imagined it would be, and you discover that it has a luminosity
that is beyond reproduction, while some large paintings don’t live
up to the gasp you emitted when they flashed up on the screen more
than thirty years ago. Such moments in art history class had all the
elements of surprise: a darkened room, the big screen, the feeling you
were finally getting educated and cultured. In the museum you have
to deal with the crowds in addition to the painting, the annoyance of
having your view blocked, the concern that you are blocking someone
else’s, the fear that you may be looking foolish as you try to figure
out precisely how to look appreciative and awed without looking
pretentious; and pathetically hoping the gorgeous soul a few feet
over chooses to notice you as well as the painting. You suffer feeling
foolish for worrying about looking foolish, especially when you know
that nobody is watching you anyway (but someone might; better be
prepared, just in case). Unless you are really misbehaving or are the
best-looking woman in the crowded room, you will be playing to an
audience of one. But that audience of one can be quite demanding
and will insist that you put your best foot forward.

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You know these are foolish thoughts, yet you still worry, especially
about when you can declare yourself released from paying attention
to the painting. That is more than a matter between you and the
painting. In a museum there are many other masterpieces housed
in the same building, in the same room even, jealous of your atten-
tion, getting impatient and insisting you attend to them. Not only
does your companion want you to move on, but the other pictures
are asserting their demands too. Then, when the day is done, you
feel somewhat defeated by the experience, by the fact that you were
cowed into granting your not-quite-sincere homage completely pre-
dictably, paying attention only to paintings you already knew were
to be admired.
You may be tempted to dismiss this as a highly personalized neuras-
thenic account, not worthy of being generalized. Sure, there are peo-
ple, you will say, who are this agonizingly self-conscious, and we will
even grant that many of us have experienced similar sentiments in
some settings. But most of us do not find nature and museums as ag-
onizing as you, Mr. Miller, would make them, nor the appreciation
of beauty as fraught with constant self-defeating self-monitoring as
often as you claim. A good number of us go to museums and are
wholly absorbed, not giving a damn about what others think, other
than looking around occasionally to see whether we have been oc-
cupying the best viewing position too long. Some of us know we are
posturing and love the posturing, love any offense it may give or any
status we may achieve by it. Posturing as an appreciator of art can
put us in the proper mood to be pleasured by it and to appreciate it;
posing as appreciative helps mark the moment as an appreciative one,
and what is wrong with that? Others of us like the fact that we are in
Florence or New York or Amsterdam or Madrid and love that what
it means to visit those places is go to the museums they are famous
for. So how, we say, do you get the right to use “we” or bully us with
that “you” with such a presumption of authority? If you, Mr. Miller,
can be so anxious about a trip to a museum or looking at the trees
in their autumn beauty, how can you be so complacently unanxious
about claiming universality for your inner states?

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I allege in partial defense that the sensibility and anxieties I have

described look typically Western, and its typicality outside the West
seems confirmed in a negative way by various Eastern philosophies
that are centered on the desperate effort to train the spirit out of
experiencing reality the way I have suggested we, or many of us, often
do. The competitive, unsatisfiable, anxious sensibility that informs
this book is the hobgoblin of Buddhism; it is the sullied sensibility that
must be overcome and exorcized. That tormented sensibility, at least
in Buddhist thinking, is taken to be the default setting from which
humankind must work to free itself. And in my defense too I ask you
to consider the ubiquitous museum shop. Were the epiphany before
the original grand work all that it was cracked up to be, a postcard
or a replica would blaspheme the experience. The shop exists as a
testimony to our guilt for having blown it before the original. It
is not as if we just stumble on to the shop at the end; rather, we
feel ourselves pulled, even hurrying toward it, so that we can get a
manageable version, one that is less intimidating because it won’t
raise such unfulfillable demands to appreciate it more than we are
capable of. And we owe those shops a true debt of gratitude, for those
reproductions do teach us to admire the greatness of the original that
made us too self-conscious to appreciate when we had our chance in
its presence.

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 fourteen

The Alchemist: Role as Addiction

The bulk of the vexations dealt with so far have been about
fears of not getting into our roles or experiences as deeply as we feel
we should be. There is perhaps a more compelling problem at the
other end of the scale: getting into them too deeply to get out.

Elster’s Alchemies
Some faking, we have seen, openly acknowledges that you are trying
to bootstrap yourself into a preferred disposition, set of beliefs, or
character traits by acting as if you had it or them. Such is the case
of Pascal’s wager, which has acquired a classic dignity because the
initial risk-averse bet to believe in God’s existence is relieved of its
actuarial small-mindedness by being a necessary first step to commit
yourself to a serious regimen of observance. The habit of acting as if
you believe ends, eventually, in belief.
Some faking has no goal other than for you to survive the moment
with dignity intact and to let others preserve theirs; this is the case of
routine politeness and tact. Even these scripted moments of faking
can bend the mind to play it up all the way, so that instead of faking
sorrow at your guests’ departure you actually end up feeling a twinge
of melancholy when they depart; or, as noted earlier, if you give what
you think is lip service to a position you are too cowardly to oppose,
you end up coming to believe the position.1
Jon Elster describes a variety of transmutations of motivation in
which the initial motive cannot be publicly avowed because of its
offensiveness or inappropriateness. You start with a conscious lie, a
hypocritical assertion of a noble motive. Then you begin to believe

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the lie and think yourself (falsely) nobly motivated. And the last step:
the lie ends up becoming true as you actually come to be moved
as you initially had falsely claimed. The intervening false belief as
to your motivation might be a necessary middle step in the process
of transmutation from knowing hypocrisy to unknowing hypocrisy,
to an actual change of motivation. Elster seems right when he says,
“Durable and consciously hypocritical or cynical stances are proba-
bly quite rare.”2 Or in Orwell’s formulation: “He wears a mask, and
his face grows to fit.”3 More effort is sometimes needed for us to stay
separated from our roles than to merge with them.4
These transmutations of motive, of nasty passions into generous
ones, of self-interest into generosity, of sham sorrow into real sor-
row, are what Elster calls alchemies of the mind. “Transmutation”
is an alchemical term of art; it means the changing of base metals
into silver or gold, a transformation of essences from mean to noble,
from low to high. Elster, rightly, also reminds us that not all such
transmutations are upward. Some work in reverse, turning gold to
lead, as in the classic case of sour grapes, when we downgrade our
desires by imagining that the unattainable thing we desired was no
good anyway; or as in the case of congenital pessimism, such as char-
acterizes the spirit of my dear father. He finds a dark lining to every
fleecy fair-weather cumulus cloud and succeeds in metamorphosing
the fear that things might go wrong into the expectation that they
will.5
For Elster, alchemy provides an evocative metaphor, a way of con-
ceptualizing the transformation of mental, not metal, essences. The
alchemical image means to suggest that these transformations take
place in the world of deception, wishful thinking, and self-deception.
They are magical, at least appearing so, because they seem to be
effected by a mental sleight of hand, operating mostly “behind the
back,” as Elster says. The magic is not psychosexual; it involves a
mix of mechanisms, but the most crucial seem to work in service of
what moralists would call vanity: our desperate need to look good
to others and ourselves.6
I want to put the metaphor aside and treat the real thing, to look
at a tale of an alchemist when alchemy was practiced – a tale of

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deceptions and of self-deceptions too. If the Freudian system is tied

to the deadly sins of gluttony and lust, alimentary and sexual desire,
the alchemical world hovers between what medieval moralists called
pride (refusal to humbly accept the limits of human knowledge) and
avarice (the quest for goods, not the hoarding of them). The tale
also raises the interesting case, very relevant to our central themes, of
people who know they are con men but believe, or do not disbelieve,
the line they use to bilk their marks – the televangelist springs to mind
in our culture, the shaman in shamanistic cultures. It is not so much a
matter of being hoist with your own petard; it is about mental states
composed of, in Goffman’s terms, “mixtures of cynicism and belief.”
He cites the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber:

Probably most shamans or medicine men, the world over, help

along with sleight-of-hand in curing and especially in exhibitions
of power. This sleight-of-hand is sometimes deliberate; in many
cases awareness is perhaps not deeper than the foreconscious. The
attitude, whether there has been repression or not, seems to be
as toward a pious fraud. Field ethnographers seem quite generally
convinced that even shamans who know that they add fraud never-
theless also believe in their powers, and especially in those of other
shamans: they consult them when they themselves or their children
are ill.7

These people, even when perpetrating their frauds, are not stand-
ing outside the structure of beliefs they are manipulating to their own
advantage. It might be that “even when perpetrating their frauds”
should be changed to “especially when perpetrating their frauds.” It
is because they believe in it that they are so good at conning others.8 A
remarkable and perfectly insightful comment from an Icelandic saga
has the thirteenth-century Christian author remark that his tenth-
century pagan ancestors rigged judicial ordeals “because [they] felt
their responsibilities no less keenly when performing such ceremonies
than Christians do now when ordeals are decreed.”9 I did not mis-
copy that. The point is that pagans were just like Christians: both
rigged their ordeals because they feared they would reveal the un-
welcome truth if not rigged. This is something rather different from

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a pious fraud. The cheating is not designed to maintain the belief

in ordeals; nor is the rigging mere manipulative charlatanism; it is
just as likely, as our author notes, to be motivated by a belief in the
efficacy of ordeals, a kind of perverse homage to them.

The Canon’s Yeoman

The special situation of the alchemist raises these and other issues,
and they are the substance of a confession of an alchemist’s appren-
tice in Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale. Chaucer’s tale depends on
alchemists in his time not having a generally nefarious reputation.
They thus can gull their mark not merely by playing on the avarice
of the victim but by playing on the respect they command as learned
men, as “philosophers.” The tale is especially insightful as a study of
the effects specialized jargon has, not only in giving people an air of
authority and mystery so as to hoodwink others but also in its ca-
pacity to fascinate and thus hoodwink its own users. The alchemist’s
“termes” – terms of art, complex and specialized diction, jargon –
are employed sensuously and lovingly in this tale, not least because
they intimidate others and serve as a special sign of election, confer-
ring too much advantage on its users to be questioned critically by
them (compare in our day the jargon-driven and jargon-dependent
morass of deceptions and self-deceptions that have taken place in psy-
choanalysis, postmodern literary theory, and postcolonial studies, as
well as in other suspect discourses).
To be sure, people in the fourteenth century knew there was an
alchemy racket. From the earliest of times the average person has
mistrusted the smart. Because to the middling mind there is no point
in having brains and wisdom if they are not good for getting rich,
the general belief is that the intelligent need to be regarded with
circumspection. Smarts means cons. Thus the fear and loathing in
various times and places of Jesuits, Jews, and lawyers, but not college
professors. (We academics are deemed more fool than knave by the
laity – the view is that if we really had brains, we’d be a whole
lot wealthier than we are – and though many of us are quite good
at conning each other, cunning is something we are believed to be

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without.) Hence too the double meanings of “craft” and in Middle

English “sleight” to mean both skill or expertise and trickery. Smart
people are always suspect, but by the time Ben Jonson wrote his The
Alchemist, the racketeering alchemist of fiction had suffered a loss of
prestige; he was no longer scientist or philosopher, but a lowlife con
man, a pimp, a small grifter.
Chaucer’s alchemist and his assistant, the yeoman, are more com-
plexly engaged in their craft than Jonson’s alchemist. They are crafty;
but they are craftsmen, too, and the word already had this double
meaning in the fourteenth century. They are searching for the Elixir-
stone, the substance that can transmute substances, altering their
essences and extracting their quintessences, turning lead into gold.
They are crooks and they are believers. They deceive others, not to
get rich but to fund their researches, so committed to and so en-
thralled are they by the quest for the philosopher’s stone.
To the extent that the sin of avarice motivates them their avarice
has been so alloyed with other motivations as not fairly to be their
chief motive, if ever it was. They seek gold, but they care desperately
about how they get it. They do not want to mine it; they do not want
to sail ships and discover worlds and slaughter people to obtain it.
They are not satisfied merely to plunder their marks, for no sooner
do they con a mark than they invest the gains in yet more equip-
ment and raw materials, impoverishing themselves in the process.
They are truly curious souls who are obsessed with gaining a special
knowledge, with cracking a code, with solving nature’s mysteries.
When they swindle their marks they are really engaged in an activity
completely analogous to a modern scientist applying for a research
grant.10 And it is clear that though they are driven to distraction by
their failures, in one sense they love their work.
Chaucer’s tale is a triumph of poetic virtuosity, spoken with a
breathless intensity by its narrator, the yeoman, as he confesses to
the pilgrims that his master is a swindler and an evil man. He cannot,
however, hide his admiration for his master, not for his crookery but
for his learning. The yeoman launches into his confession while in
the hate phase of his love/hate obsession with his alchemical craft,
and as he tells his tale he seduces himself again into the trade, though

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it promises, as he knows, nothing but prospects of frustration and

failure: “But unto God in heaven, I confess, that for all our ‘craft’ and
all our ‘sleight’ in the end it [the Elixir-stone] escapes us” (865–867).
It is not the charlatanism of the craft that calls him back, but that he
believes in it; he too is faked out, at a much profounder level than his
marks. He is hooked: “For all my sorrow, labor, and trouble, I could
never leave it” (713–714).
Try the Middle English for which I provide a translation. Chaucer’s
dialect became the basis for most of modern English, so it is not that
difficult. Ezra Pound, that charming, kindly soul, correctly offered
this opinion: “Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively
small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut
out from the reading of good books for ever”:11

He [the philospher’s stone] hath ymaad us spenden muchel good

For sorwe of which almoost we wexen wood,
But that good hope crepeth in oure herte,
Supposynge evere, though we sore smerte,
To be releeved by hym [the stone] afterward.
Swich supposyng and hope is sharp and hard;
I warne yow wel, it is to seken evere.
That futur temps hath maad men to dissevere,
In trust therof, from al that evere they hadde.
Yet of that art they kan nat wexen sadde,
For unto hem it is a bitter sweete, –
So semeth it, – for nadde they but a sheete,
Which that they myghte wrappe hem inne a-nyght,
And a brat to walken inne by daylyght,
They wolde hem selle and spenden on this craft.
They kan nat stynte til no thyng be laft.
(868–883)

The philosophers’ stone has made us waste much property,

For sorrow of which we go almost crazy,
Except that good hope creeps in our heart,
Supposing ever, though we hurt a lot now,
That the stone will in the end relieve us.
Such supposing and hope is hard and sharp;
I warn you well: it means to seek forever.

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Trusting in that future has caused men to part with

Everything they ever had.
Yet they never get their fill of the enterprise
Which is bittersweet to them
So it seems, for even if they only had a sheet
To wrap themselves in at night
And a coarse cloak to walk around in by day
They would sell them and spend it on this craft;
They cannot stop until there is nothing left.

That stone “has caused us to waste much property (that is the

primary sense of “good” in the first line, though the added moral
meaning colors the sense), for sorrow of which we go almost crazy.”
The property whose loss they grieve they consider their own, and
that indicates that when the yeoman says that for all their “craft”
and “sleight” Elixir escapes them, he means “craft” and “sleight” in
their positive sense of expertise and skill, but the overlay of cunning
and deceit in how it was obtained is also suggested. That the alchemist
and his yeoman are conning others is not the yeoman’s concern; it
is his own getting sucked in that is his theme. He is an addict and
an obsessive. The yeoman’s understanding of his addiction takes a
different tack than that of one influential recent theory, which argues
that the crux of addiction lies in problems the addict has in properly
evaluating and ordering his preferences. According to this view, his
desire for a fix in the short run intercepts and overpowers the desire
for the long-term rational goal.12 Short run beats out long run. But the
yeoman understands his curse differently. It is the long run that does
him in. His problem is to be constantly chasing a future he knows
to be distant against a present stated resolve to kick the habit. “That
futur temps” defeats him, he says, makes him squander everything he
has, waste his “good,” in all the senses that term had in the fourteenth
century.
The modern theory could still press the yeoman into its service by
interpreting him as follows: what the yeoman is calling the “futur
temps,” it could be argued, is properly to be understood to refer to
an immediate overpowering bad desire for the philosopher’s stone
that will defeat his rational long-term goal of an alchemy-free life the

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next time the temptation arises. The yeoman suffers from a gambling
addiction that takes the form of believing that this time he will hit
the jackpot or, if not this time, then surely some time soon. Each time
the bug bites him, he thinks the future is very near at hand, that is, he
fails to discount adequately the probability of his hitting the jackpot
this time.
The yeoman, though, sees it differently. Let’s instead take him at
his word: he says it is the “futur temps” that causes him to succumb
to temptation. He is not some benighted medieval person devoid
of psychological sophistication. To his mind, he is not undone by
thinking the future is now. He is not a victim of his own bad math or
of irrational discount rates; his is not an ordinary case of weakness of
the will. He never forgets that the shot at Elixir is a long one, almost
an impossible one. He is not driven by a belief that this time will be
the lucky one but, on the contrary, by prospects he despairingly sees
as ever remoter, ever more postponed to some rapidly lengthening
future. And still he cannot stop.
He has a sophisticated theory of his addiction that is emotion-
based. It is less about the ordering of his preferences than about the
peculiar workings of particular set of emotions. These lines hold the
key:

that good hope crepeth in oure herte,

Supposynge evere, though we sore smerte,
To be releeved by hym [the stone] afterward.
Swich supposyng and hope is sharp and hard . . .

He sees his compulsion to chase chimeras to be caused by two closely

related emotions. It is “good hope” and “supposing” that do him in.
“Supposing” is meant as more than an elegant variation of “hope.”
Though of an ilk, it is not a synonym; it brings with it a very differ-
ent set of associations. “Supposing” is a sentiment common to these
men of learning; it is part and parcel of philosophical disputation and
argument. “Supposing” is to enter the counterfactual world of hypo-
theticals, of totally imaginary, even far-fetched cases. “Suppose,” for
example, we added brimstone to urine during a lunar eclipse, when
Mercury is ascendant. Philosophers “supposed” in this fashion all the

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time; and in fourteenth-century usage an alchemist was a philosopher,

the same name being applied to both. Philosophy and alchemy had
not yet parted company; the philosopher, the alchemist, was con-
cerned with gaining access to remote knowledge, access to essences
of matter and spirit. Supposing was a tool of this intellectual trade.
It meant using imagination to come up with hypotheses.
The yeoman says his problem is born of hope and supposing. They
creep into his heart, causing great pain, and there is only one remedy
for the pain: the Elixir that turns all matter to gold. Supposing gener-
ates improbable fantasies, and hope sustains them. Hope, a virtue in
the Christian scheme, is a vice to the hard-nosed rationalist, for it is
a form of self-deception, a way of not facing up to the most probable
implication of present facts. Hope, by necessary implication, means
desiring in the face of pretty long odds; otherwise, hope is not the sen-
timent felt. When the odds get better, hope gives way to anticipation
or expectation.
Hope makes these men persevere; it is part of the emotional drive
that informs their love of the very process of searching for Elixir. Hope
also helps drive a propensity to make errors in the math of probability
in their own favor; it often finds itself playing a part in a progression
of sentiments that ends in wishful thinking. As that most eminent of
psychologists, Jane Austen, would have it: “What Marianne and her
mother conjectured one moment, they believed the next – that with
them, to wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect.”13 But our
yeoman’s mind doesn’t work in this way. Hope itself remains for him
a sign of the remoteness of fulfilling his desires. Otherwise, he would
not be hoping, he would be awaiting or expecting. Hope, though, is
its own kind of reward. It provides enough motive to keep plugging
away. It fuels perseverance. Is this any different from the scientist in
search of a cure for cancer? If we called the yeoman a chemist instead
of an alchemist, we would not describe him as addicted but as per-
severing, committed, and dedicated. The yeoman, however, is hostile
to hope. He sees it as his undoing because it keeps him persevering
in what he suspects is a hopeless cause.
Easy to see why this emotion is a virtue in the Christian order.
It is asking a lot of anyone who is suffering injustice, who sees evil

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thrive, not to despair and curse God. Hope keeps him in the fold,
keeps him faithful, on the long shot that somewhere in some other
world, in some eternity, he will see justice done. The yeoman sees
hope the way a lot of cultures did that weren’t as high on hope as
Christianity is. The ancient Greeks made it the evil of what was left
to humankind when Pandora’s box was opened. Nietzsche reminded
us of the proper meaning of that tale – hope is “blind and deceitful” –
but our pious cultural commitments to hope as a theological virtue
make the tale of Pandora baffling to us to this day.14
Consider the yeoman’s blaming “good hope” that creeps into his
heart. Why is the hope good? Hope is what he knows is ruining him,
destroying his sense of well-being. The “good” is there, it seems, as a
nervous gesture of piety or no more than a rote honorific that is unfelt,
as when one addresses a “right honorable sir” or, more pointedly, a
“my good man” in which the “good” often works as a mild form
of reprimand or admonition. The yeoman pays homage to hope as
a virtue in his cultural order just as he is about to curse it.15 Hope
ranks with the most energetic mechanisms of self-deception, not quite
beating out vanity and self-love but coming close. Vanity might stake
the claim to being the chief source of self-delusion of those who do
not have to worry about their basic needs, such as food, clothing, and
shelter. Hope takes over as the chief source of self-deception among
the poor and among victims of suffering beyond all reason.
The canon’s yeoman represents a limiting case, the other side of
the faking-it coin. The yeoman too is anxious about his relation to
the roles he plays, but in a different way from the cases we have
been dealing with, which mostly involve anxieties about inadequate
immersion into a role. The yeoman’s problem is that he is drowning
in his role; there is no self left over to let him regain the shore. Full
immersion in a role is a true delight as long as we can still come up
for air and choose when to dive in again. Though the yeoman might
appear to have regained dry ground in his lament to the pilgrims, it
is still the alchemist in him that is calling the shots. The lament is not
a respite or relaxation but a phase in a cycle he cannot escape.
What is especially interesting about this kind of addiction is that
it leaves enough of its victim’s critical capacity intact so that he can

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understand exactly what is happening to him. But that understand-

ing is itself part of the problem; it is the part that creates the sense of
powerlessness, the sense of despair, and it fuels the sense of urgency
that is the compulsive characteristic of the alchemist. The case shows
that self-deception can coexist rather well with a critical purchase on
one’s condition. It is just that the critical purchase is never consis-
tently available, nor available when it is needed to break the cycle. It
arises only when it will not dictate action. For now come hope and
supposing, and he is undone again.16 And besides, he really loves the
process itself, complain as he may.

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 fifteen

“I Love You”: Taking a Bullet versus Biting One

There is nothing quite like Tristram Shandy, the most deli-

ciously prurient book ever written. You will find yourself returning
to read it again and again, always discovering dozens of new jokes
that flew by you the time before; nor will you ever cease to be amazed
at the cleverness of the ones you get, how surprising they are though
you have read them before and even expect the surprise. You will
lose yourself in wonderment and laughter until you start worrying
about how dim you are, not compared with Laurence Sterne, for you
concede he has it all over you, but compared with the intelligence of
the average eighteenth-century reader he was pitching his humor and
wit to.
Almost nothing in all literature has quite the charm of Tristram’s
Uncle Toby. Toby is simplicity itself, with an idée fixe. He was a
soldier, wounded in the groin at the siege of Namur (1695), and since
his retirement, together with his devoted servant Corporal Trim, he
has occupied his time building models of the progress of the War of
Spanish Succession on his bowling lawn. Toby is at one with himself;
he is, as Sterne says, his hobbyhorse (1.24). He is totally a creature
of his obsession with battle, armament, fortification, and drill; he is
an allegory of himself, meant to be a conventional comic character
with one motivating humor or trait that informs all his behavior and
conversation. Despite his hobby and notwithstanding his benevolence
and sweetness of soul, Toby acquires depth in spite of himself. Much
of the depth is owed to the wound to his groin: can he do it, or can’t
he?
This is the core question for all the males of the Shandy family,
who have the hardest time with their “noses”; either they are too

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small, or unresponsive, or getting inadvertently circumcised by win-

dow sashes slamming down on them because Trim had removed the
window weights to employ as cannon for Toby’s sieges. “Nothing,”
says Tristram of the window, with more than a hint of wider mean-
ing, “was well hung in our family” (5.17). Even the family bull is
impotent. Except, it is faintly hinted that, just maybe, Toby, sweet,
modest, and sexually innocent Toby, with his wound in the groin,
might be fully capable. Sterne dies before the Widow Wadman and
we can find out the definitive answer to her researches on the matter,
but Corporal Trim, who is not cursed with the Shandy curse, vouches
fully for Toby.
The Widow Wadman has besieged Toby for years with every wile
and stratagem. The innocent Toby is oblivious until he finally suc-
cumbs when she asks him to check for a speck in her eye; he, of a
sudden and for no reason he can fathom, declares that he is in love.
Walter, his philosophical and equally endearing brother, in a disquisi-
tion on the forms of love, offers the following opinion on how Toby
will behave in his new condition of love:

Love is not so much a sentiment, as a situation, into which a man

enters, as my brother Toby would do, into a corps – no matter
whether he loves the service or no – being once in it – he acts as if
he did; and takes every step to shew himself a man of prowess.
(8.34)

Toby will perform his role in the world of love as he did in the world
of arms. He will behave admirably. His inner disposition is beside the
point. He acts as if he loves the service, whether he does or does not,
and because love is not so much a sentiment as a situation, Toby will
acquit himself as a man of prowess.

It’s the Word “Love”

The word “love” is not only an emotion term but also a term, as
Walter said, that indicates a certain situation. Love, that is, is a state
of affairs. No, dear reader, Walter does not mean that love is the
state of an affair; where doth the prurience of thy mind lead thee?

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The situation called love brings with it expectations, claims, rights,

and duties that have moral force, and also a kind of quasi-legal force,
independent of whether love also means marriage. Even when “love”
is used as an emotion term it seems to be applicable to a multitude of
rather different sentiments and moods. It is not like disgust or anger.
When you say you are angry or disgusted, I am pretty confident that
I know what you are actually feeling; but when you say you are in
love or that you love X, I know only what kind of general claim
you are asserting, but I am not about to vouch for what you actually
feel.
Words frequently have multiple meanings that context usually
makes clear, but the stakes are higher for love because of the cen-
trality that some version of it has in our moral, social, and emotional
lives. Put aside cases where the word “love” merely indicates an en-
thusiastic preference: for example, I love the Packers, I love real ale,
I love revenge stories. The problem is this: we use the same word
when we say, “I love you” when courting. We apply it to our relation
with our spouse – assuming a reasonably good marriage, meaning
one in which though the battles are frequent the swords are dull and
have buttons on their points. But love hardly means the same thing
the first time it gets said as on the first, tenth, twentieth, or fortieth
anniversaries, when it might not get said. We say that we love our
parents, our children, our dog; we say it too of certain friends, of
either sex.
Why think that any of these loves is the same phenomenon? Of
course each one of them comes with an instant context supplied.
When I say I love my kids, that should pretty much take sex out of the
picture. When you say you love your dog, that is doglove; when you
say you love your mother, that is momlove, which is manifestly not
dadlove, as my six-year-old recently informed me; dads, he said, get
loved every third day. We know this about love, yet we don’t know;
we know that the particular contours of what we call love depend
greatly on the object of that love, whether it be parent, spouse, lover,
child, dog, country, faith, or friend; yet we are never quite sure which
is the love that is the purest or deepest or that should set the standard
for the others. Somehow all are felt to be paler versions of the love

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celebrated in fiction, the passionate quest for a mate. We are put to

ranking these loves, in part, because the word “love” applies to all
of them and forces the comparison upon us. We think of them, if not
exactly the same, as being of the same species.
Walter’s perspicacious observation that love is not just an emotion
but a situation plays havoc with our expectations for both situation
and sentiment. Each somehow, falsely, suggests that it demands the
forms and feelings of the other, or makes us feel we are falling short
now at one, now at the other. In the situation of love, however, as
Walter suggests, the sentiment we call love may be felt only occa-
sionally or not at all. We are not sure what it feels like anyway; it is
always getting confused with other things. A big part of the problem,
as usual, is sex. Passionate sexual love seems to set the standard – at
least for the past eight hundred years in the West it has. Love worth
having is Eros with a little philia thrown in; agape is for when you
are older and need to do penance for Eros.
Examine, in your own life, how many times you have said “I love
you” in and around the sex act, only to decide later or even as you
were saying it that it meant something more, less, or different from
what it was supposed to. You either didn’t mean it fully or said it
to convince yourself, or to prime the other to say it to you, as when
it was said as part of the seduction game, or you meant it but in
the sense of “having a very intense preference for” or in the heat of
the moment as a synonym for “wow” or “zow.” True love in the
hyperpassionate stage usually feels pretty awful most of the time, as
many a poet, novelist, and teenager has lamented. La Rochefoucauld
offers this: “If one judged love by most of its effects, it looks more
like hatred than friendship” (M 72). You constantly fear not being
loved as much as you love; you are insanely jealous of every past
lover, of friends, pets, brothers and sisters, his or her job. You feel
sick, constantly seeking reassurances. And you long for the day when
you can take your beloved for granted and get back to dull grazing
and snoozing.1
When I try to decide for myself what the “feeling” of love is – I am
blushing now at my sentimentality – it is that sensation of wanting to
burst at what appears to be a glowing specialness of the other, seeing

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the other abstracted from the usual clutter, vaguely transfigured and
usually across a room or a table, or at some intermediate distance,
or just as often in the mind’s eye or when looking at a photo, the
person not being there to spoil the glow you now see emanating
from him or her. Usually you do not communicate the sentiment,
too embarrassing, or if you do it is via a smile, a hug, or certain
restricted forms of teasing. If it were taking place in the movies the
soundtrack would let the other know what was going on. But in real
life the communication of the sentiment often fails to register with
its object.

Winding the Clock Once a Month

The sentiment of love is not my theme, it is Walter’s love as a situation
that is, and why that state might generate anxieties about faking it.
Walter does not use the term “faking it”; the word “fake” in the sense
I have been using it is first recorded in the early nineteenth century,
almost a hundred years later than Walter’s conversation was to have
taken place. He says “as if” – that Toby will act “as if” he feels love.
If Toby’s military service is any indication, as Walter says it is, Toby
will occupy his role so thoroughly as to have that “as if” not really
be discoverable to anyone, least of all to the sweet Toby, and in fact
Toby will become his role in both senses that the word “become”
bears: as a transformation and as doing honor to it.
We can conclude, I think, that the proper sentiment, if it is to occur,
is powerfully linked to the commitment to play the role right, to play
it like a man of prowess, to play it convincingly, with complete respect
for the setting. Considering that it is Uncle Toby, Walter is right: no
one would play it better, no one could find a sweeter mate. There
is but one cause for concern: in war Toby was injured in the groin,
and in the situation of love, as far as Walter is concerned, a Shandy
is also likely to be injured in the groin. The situation of love has a
certain noisome chore associated with it for which there is no proper
“as if”; when it comes to sex, Toby has got to deliver. The as-iffing
has to stop the once per month Walter deems it necessary to engage
in this activity (and combine it with the other importuning chore of

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 “i love you”

winding the grandfather clock) and still be fulfilling the obligations

the situation demands.
To others not possessing Toby’s benevolent simplicity of spirit, the
state of love invites all kinds of anxieties. For it seldom “feels” like
much of anything other than the usual array of feelings it takes to
get through the day. That would bother no one if we didn’t feel that
being married, being a parent, a friend, or a brother or sister, even a
lover, didn’t mean we were supposed to feel something more than the
usual flux of daily feelings. Anxieties about faking it in these matters
are like the Eumenides to Orestes. I would bet it is an anxiety most
have experienced: how come the most routine character in a novel or
a movie seems to love better than I do? You worry that you fall short,
too selfish, too easily annoyed, too impatient. Are you a total fake, a
fake spouse, parent, sibling, son? You can fool some of the people
some of the time, something probably made easier because they have
lowered their expectations to accord with what they can get from the
likes of you. But mostly you fear they are disappointed in you, not
just that your kind of love doesn’t stack up very well against that of
fictional characters but that it cannot even make it against the next-
door neighbor’s. You mean you don’t have these worries? Oh what I
would give to have your talent for confident love . . . or your capacity
for self-satisfaction.
Love as a quasi-juridical state still demands ritualized displays of
certain gestures; above all it demands the expression of something
we think of as “concerns.” The state of love demands, it seems, oc-
casionally professing to third parties your love for the second party,
of paying public lip service. This is often easier than expressing it to
the loved one. Love often ends up cowering behind embarrassment’s
burly back. There are those moments when love actually is verbalized
in an overwhelming access of sentiment, yet even then embarrassment
is not so much left behind as suffered to come along for the ride.
Routinized expressions of love don’t often require being acted out
“as if” they were an expression of feelings; they are so conventional-
ized as to be little more than a “see ya later” on parting; no feelings
are expected. Many people, however, cannot get themselves to say
these conventional I love you’s. If you didn’t start the practice early

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on or come from a family that made a habit of it, then all of a sud-
den to begin would elicit suspicion as well as discomfort. Those I
love you’s (not quite as meaningless as love-ya’s) are of an ilk with
those little pecks on the cheek, which are the equivalent of air kisses
between spouses. I must admit I never forgive anyone who gives me
an air kiss, or anyone who gives one to anyone else either; but why
should I not be able to return the favor without feeling awkward and
silly, given that these kisses are, like the apology, openly a fake? Why
is everyone else so good at faking these things, or really meaning
them?
Maybe I am attributing too much virtue to these others who seem
so good at playing the role of love. I do not have access to their self-
doubts. I may doubt another’s motives, but I cannot always know
that he doubts them; I know, however, when I doubt my own. Self-
doubt is more than doubt turned inward, for it not only undermines
my own performances but also seems to give everyone else the benefit
of the doubt. The effect of my blaming my own motives is that I flatter
theirs. Maybe to them I look pretty good. Says my wife in the margin:
don’t flatter yourself.
Is it the sheer conventionality of these rote I love you’s that brings
on the fit of self-consciousness? That can’t be, for conventions in
other domains don’t do so as readily. Might it be that love, even
when completely expunged of sex, makes as much a demand on our
capacity for reticence as it does on our capacity for expression? That
is why public displays of affection strike me as little different from
people not having enough shame to go off into a corner to talk on
their cell phones, and also why it might not always be easy to play the
part privately either. Yet there is surely a case to be made for these
trivial displays. They are small reaffirmations of one’s commitment
to Walter’s love as a situation.
But a certain embarrassed reserve and stiffness can have its own
charm. Especially now, when it comes as relief from our new-age
style of verbalizing invented feelings we are “getting in touch with”
in favor of suppressing verbal expressions of real emotions we are
completely in touch with. A friend’s father, described without con-
demnation as “an uptight and embarrassed Scot,” said to his Italian

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bride, my friend’s mother, at their wedding ceremony: “I love you and

I will always love you. And I am never going to say that again as long
as I live. You will have to see it in my actions.” He kept his promise
and never said it to her or to his kids either, but they loved him like
crazy for that line especially. The line became famous, because Mrs.
McClean and his kids regaled everyone with it for years, the joke thus
being that the one time the poor man did say “I love you” it followed
him as an embarrassing echo for the rest of his life. Had Mr. McClean
dwelt, not in America, but in the Highlands, where reticence is the
norm, he might still have loved just as well for being reticent, but he
surely would not have been so endearing for being so.
We tell ourselves that love, the situation, is about commitment,
faithfulness, caring, and being there when the big crunch comes,
though something worthy of being called a big crunch might never
come. You tell yourself you would take a bullet, knowing full well
that that is unlikely to be put to the test, and besides, you might then
get into a tiff: “Look dear, you take the bullet this time, and then
next year I will take it.” For the kids you don’t argue, but for each
other . . . ? But saying you will take a bullet, actually saying “bullet”
and not using another less metaphorical assertion of commitment,
is a kind of faking it. It is exaggerated, and it is said knowing it is
playing a role, casting yourself as a hero in your own film. Face it: in
suburban middle-aged life, it ain’t going to happen. Still it registers
a fantasy that pays lip service to grand commitment, and, as I have
said, lip service is a kind of service. For if big crunches don’t happen
in a pacified society, little crunches do, and if you said you would
take a bullet when the big crunch comes you would look not just
like a cad but also like a fool if you did not put your own desires
on the back burner and engage in the sometimes irksome process of
being responsible and unselfish, at least for the sake of appearances,
if nothing else. That’s right: bite the bullet, Bill. And to be fair to the
taking-the-bullet metaphor: it is a less embarrassing way of declaring
love than “I love you.”

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 sixteen

Boys Crying and Girls Playing Dumb

The stories i am about to tell are a prequel to the preceding

chapter; they are about the faking that goes on when we are first
experimenting with what it means to be in love as an adolescent and
about the presentation of self in courtship.
The tale that follows is also one of great gender anxiety, and it is
true. I even think it happened exactly as I will relate it, for the events
are so vivid in my mind’s eye. I know – vividness has no necessary
relation with veracity, at least where memory is concerned. I have told
stories about myself that were largely true, but I remember altering
the details to make them funnier, more suspenseful, or less boring, or
to present myself as either wittier or more endearingly pathetic than
really was the case. Now for the life of me I can no longer construct
what really happened. I see it as I have told it, though I remember –
no, I know – that I fabricated parts, but I no longer know which
parts. My intentions are good, and, even if they were not, I take the
refuge of the postmodern scoundrel: whether true or not it makes
no difference. The tale raises the same points whether it happened
exactly as I remember or not.
One day the acknowledged toughest kid announced to a group of
us fifteen-year-old guys that he had had a fight with his girlfriend and
that he had cried in front of her. I cannot recall the reaction of the
others, but I remember mine to have been something like, no way,
impossible. The impossibility was not that boys, especially ones for
whom toughness was the chief virtue, could not cry; hell, you were
on the verge of tears all the time, every boy-on-boy confrontation
being a dare not to shed them. But what could possibly prompt you
to shed them over and in front of a girl who could not beat you up?

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Yet over the course of the next month, one by one, boy after boy
announced a big breakup with their various girlfriends in which they
had broken down in tears and had begged to be taken back. I could
see I would have to take my turn in this new rite of initiation; I either
had to make a confession of tears spilled for love or be forever cast
out among the uncool. Unfair, I thought, to keep changing the rules
of cool like this. Was Ron, the guy who started all this, just trying to
see how much of a trendsetter he could be; was he even telling the
truth? And if he was, could it be possible that all the other guys were
telling the truth? Had they really cried?
As I try to access what I truly felt through the distorted lens of
memory, it seems that whatever distrustfulness I had of Ron was
muted. In short I believed every outrageous tale these guys told, and
the consequences of my naiveté were that I often got into more trouble
than they did actually trying to do (and failing) what they only said
they had done. I was too uninformed and naı̈ve to lie about sex. My
lying was restricted mainly to how many beers I had downed, and in
another year I would add tales of how fast I had taken the corner in
the car, though I still accepted everyone else’s tall tales as gospel, and
probably even deluded myself into believing my own fabrications.
But maybe they did cry, and my retrospective suspiciousness is as
naı̈ve in its own way as my gullibility was back then.
My turn, I saw, had arrived. It is clear to me now, and I think it was
clear to me then, why I was the last to join the new emotion display
fashion. I was barely holding it together in my act as a would-be
tough guy. Pretending to be tough took all my energy and resolve; I
had no margin of error. These guys could afford to announce they
had cried, because no matter how hard they got hit in a game or
fight they would never shed a tear or show signs of fear. They could
actually benefit from the thought that people would mistrust their tale
of having shed a tear over a fight with their girlfriend, but should I tell
the same tale, they would believe it with no discount for whether or
not I was lying. Of course Miller cried. For I suspected they suspected
me of being a fake real guy. I leaked unacceptable truths about myself
more often than I would have liked. I couldn’t, for instance, disguise,
in junior year, much as I tried, my excitement over Hamlet, a guy

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whom I understood to have been as nervous about sex and revenge

as I was. That I tried to cover for my interest by getting kicked out
of the class fooled no one, though I was accorded some grace for it.
Why not put my unmanliness to good use? Because few would
doubt I had shed a tear, I could make up a tale that I had had a fight
with my girlfriend (who dumped me shortly after these events took
place) and forget actually having to worry about generating false
tears, or a false occasion for real tears. I was not sure, either, that
these guys hadn’t actually shed tears, and if that is what toughness
had become in our high school, then I guess I had to go along.
What did I do? I picked a fight with my girlfriend. I cannot recall
precisely the grounds. No doubt it was some jealousy that you were
never quite sure you weren’t faking anyway. Strangely, it was the guys
who insisted you feel jealous. Hey Miller, I saw Ellen dancing with
Zawatska at the CYO. No way I was going to bring that up with
her; Zawatska could kill me with both hands tied behind his back.
Ellen was surnamed Hickok and she claimed Wild Bill as a distant
kinsman and would have insisted I address myself to Zawatska if I
had any complaints. Whatever the grounds, the moment had come
to shed my tears, but none appeared. I was thinking of everything I
could to coax them out, but nothing worked, not even the thought of
my dog getting run over. I was obdurate; me, who had faked his way
through every minute of my public life since the onset of puberty and
a lot before that too, could not generate tears.
Desperately I embraced Ellen – I am ashamed to confess this – so
that I could poke my eyes real hard behind her back, all for the sake
of telling the truth that I too had shed tears in this new cursed regime
Ron had inaugurated. Real tears, genuine fake real tears. But no tears
came. I took some solace in the thought that she was not expecting
tears from me anyway. I just hoped she hadn’t noticed all the ridicu-
lous commotion behind her back. The truth is I was so worried about
what to say to the guys that I can’t remember anything else about the
interaction except a small sensation of cowardice over my inability
to gouge my eyes hard enough to provoke the tears I desired.
I never wondered – and if I didn’t wonder I doubt the other guys
did – though surely it must have been the case, whether the girls were

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also commenting on the new regime; unless, that is, Ron and every
other guy had made the whole thing up and no girl had seen any of the
boys in tears. Maybe she was faking going along with it too, knowing
only too well that I was playing a role. Besides, I had a distinct feeling
I was not playing convincingly any aspect of this postpubescent daily
trauma. Who was I playing this for anyway? Not for her, but for the
guys, but not the guys either, because I could have lied. It must have
been my homage to the dominant adolescent social order, and I was a
member of that audience, judging my competence in proper emotion
display.
If this was how emotions and courtship were to proceed
“naturally,” why didn’t nature operate a little more automatically?
Had any evolutionary psychologists – who blithely come up with
just-so stories to show why it is written in our genes that attractive
undergraduate women must inevitably find middle-aged male evolu-
tionary psychologists sexy – ever been teenagers? None of this was
coming naturally. I was learning a part that I only wish had been
better programmed into my genes (and jeans). We were acting; mim-
icking actors in the movies or enacting what the older kids lied about
doing when they were our age that they had got from the movies: life
imitating art.
I was utterly clueless, operating in a fog. As I dimly recall, the
whole game was played with alternating senses, alternating fast as a
strobe light, of an acute awareness of fumbling cluelessly through a
role not fully understood, and of being so totally immersed in it that
my parents started sending away for brochures from various military
academies as threats to get me to cool it with the fair Ellen.
I was thrown back on my first plan. Tell the guys I had had a big
fight with Ellen and that I couldn’t help it, but that I had broken
down and cried. That is what I did. I was lying through my teeth,
but no one called me on it, for there was in fact a real truth to my
lie. I had committed myself by it to the new order; I was giving it the
homage of paying it lip service.

I f fa k i n g i t i s s o m u c h of what masculinity is, it is surely no

different with femininity. So much of early feminism was staked out

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precisely on this ground, of the revelation of and the resentment for

the playacting women had to do to be women for men: putting on
makeup, feigning desire, faking orgasm, playing dumb, and, above
all, veiling their contempt and disgust at the insipidity of the roles
they were asked to play. The most powerful passages in de Beauvoir’s
Second Sex have this as their theme.
In other words, what about Ellen? In this tale she is a mere prop in
a performance primarily directed to the guys who were engaged in a
competition with each other about who was having the most tumul-
tuous relationship. I am sorry about this. Men no less than women
posture before the other, posture before their own sex too. Surely mas-
culinity, no less than femininity, is about appearances, about strutting
and hiding stuff. Men fake being men no less than women fake being
women. If we still feel that women have it worse in this charade,
might it be because what men must fake is less contemptible than
what women must fake? Pretending to be tough is not as demeaning
(though it is often quite as silly) as pretending to be dumb or scared
of a mouse (which has nothing to recommend it). Or is it because
what women are working so hard to fake is devoted to supporting
the male’s fragile pose, whereas his faking is less likely to be devoted
to supporting hers except to the extent that it helps her to keep him
believing in the success of his?
Yet in this tale of woe I had to fake the equivalent of being scared
of a mouse to add to the many hundreds of times I also had to play
dumb to be one of the guys. But I had to shed tears to maintain
what? My manhood? My sense of belonging? Belonging to what? A
group of tough guys who cried over girls and were probably lying
anyway? This coming to manhood was still about boys relating to
boys, but now it meant boys relating to boys with regard to how
they related with girls. No tears before boys, but tears before girls
were now fashionable, which meant imitating what we thought the
girls did (I doubt any of us ever witnessed one crying) right to their
faces.
Goffman quotes this tale of a college girl from the 1940s reflecting
on the distasteful role she finds herself playing on dates:

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 boys crying and girls playing dumb

I sometimes “play dumb” on dates, but it leaves a bad taste. The

emotions are complicated. Part of me enjoys “putting something
over” on the unsuspecting male. But this sense of superiority over
him is mixed with feelings of guilt for my hypocrisy. Toward the
“date” I feel some contempt because he is “taken in” by my tech-
nique, or if I like the boy, a kind of maternal condescension. At
times I resent him! Why isn’t he my superior in all ways in which
a man should excel so that I could be my natural self? What am I
doing here with him, anyhow? Slumming?
And the funny part of it is that the man, I think, is not always
so unsuspecting. He may sense the truth and become uneasy in
the relation. “Where do I stand? Is she laughing up her sleeve or
did she mean this praise? Was she really impressed with that little
speech of mine or did she only pretend to know nothing about
politics?” And once or twice I felt that the joke was on me; the
boy saw through my wiles and felt contempt for me for stooping
to such tricks.1

This woman has no doubts about her own intelligence; she is smart
enough to suspect she might be getting outsmarted occasionally. She is
alert to the risks of looking foolish in this kind of faking it. She doesn’t
like playing dumb in the first place; she wishes rather that the boys
were “her superior in all ways a man should excel so that she could
be her natural self.” She lives in the 1940s, so pardon her articulation
of her wish. Besides, she is not giving much away. She is asking only
that he be sufficiently smart and secure in his intelligence so that
she can be her natural, manifestly intelligent self, so that she can
give up this particularly contemptible role of playing dumb for him.
Demeaning as it is to have to play dumb, it is not as bad as being
dumb, like many of her dates, though we should not underestimate
how often boys have to play dumb too – before other, tougher boys to
be sure, but for the girls too. Being a dumb frat kid does not come as
naturally to some of them as to others; some guys have to work at it
and never succeed in playing the role without evident embarrassment.
Our girl though is pretty sure these guys are dumb, not just playing
at it. She wishes they were smarter, not that she were dumber. Except
sometimes “once or twice,” the guy, she suspects, is smarter than she

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initially thought and sees through the act and thinks it demeaning
for her to put it on. For this perspicacious and self-reflective girl,
what could be worse? It is not just being seen as dumb for playing
dumb that is so humiliating, it is being exposed as thinking you are
outsmarting someone by playing dumb when you should have been
smart enough to have read the guy better. Now you fear he has real
contempt for you, contempt you would agree with him for having,
not the kind of stupid contempt that a stupid guy has for a “dumb”
girl who is making a fool of him. Yet we do not know whether these
guys have really seen through her either. She may be suffering a bout
of paranoia.
An even scarier thought: only one or two guys made her suspect
that her dumb act was unbecoming to them. What if others let her
continue to think she was getting away with her act and sat back and
played along, outplaying her at playing dumb, either because of some
pathological misogyny that makes them like it when smart girls play
dumb, or because they had too much contempt for her to signal she
should give it up? What if, that is, the joke had been on her seven or
eight times, when she thought it was so only once or twice?
What about the boys dating this girl? They would have to know
she has been getting straight A’s. How faked out are they; are they not
scared of her? Are they really unaware of the contempt she has for
them? This girl suspects they may have such an inkling. In one sense
they are in a less enviable position than even she is. The boy playing
smart and the girl playing dumb do not have the same risks when their
cover is blown. If the smart girl playing dumb has her cover blown,
she falls, if “falls” is the right verb, not very far for being revealed as
intelligent. The guy, though, if exposed, turns out to be revealed as
a dimwit. Neither playing it smart nor playing dumb is an especially
attractive pose, but the risks of the former are the great humiliation
of punctured pomposity; the risks of the latter are that the pose will
be believed or that you will be disapproved of for betraying your own
virtues.
Presumably it is easier to fake being dumb, most of us having
been so at various times, than to fake being smart if you don’t have
the equipment. Playing dumb is not easy though; it takes a certain

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amount of intelligence to get it right. It might in fact be easier to fake

out the smart than the dumb with a dumb act, for, just as this girl
suspects, the dumb cannot be reliably counted on to be so stupid as
not to know when they are being talked down to, whereas the smart
are only too willing to believe you are as dumb as you appear to
be. And if you fake being smart, you had better make sure you are
smart enough to know how smart the people you are playing it for
are. Smart people are experts at faking smartness, that being one of
the surest proofs of it. Nonetheless, there are all kinds of cultural
supports to back up the pompous male and pump him back up when
he is deflated. Indeed most of the cultural support will come from
women who will tell him the lies he needs to hear and even, perhaps,
come to love him, if he turns out to be an amiable buffoon. What
upsets this girl, however, is getting caught putting on the dumb role
for someone she feels she should have been smart enough to see would
have preferred the “real” her.2
Why shouldn’t she recognize in those one or two guys, if not in
the others, their anxiety at the role they must play? She thinks of
them only as dangers to her, as sources of her humiliation. Surely she
must know that they are scurrying about desperately trying to defend
themselves from being made a fool of by this smart girl, while at the
same time, and with equal desperation, trying not to make fools of
themselves without her helping them along. They too have to perform
and may not be into or up to it; they may feel their natural selves are
also light-years away.
Goffman does not say much about the girl’s comment. He takes
her confession to indicate a “special kind of alienation from self and
a special kind of wariness of others” that is a cost of maintaining
“a show before others that [she herself] does not believe.” He says
nothing more about it except this: “Shared staging problems; concern
for the way things appear; warranted and unwarranted feelings of
shame; ambivalence about oneself and one’s audience: these are some
of the dramaturgic elements of the human situation.” For someone
usually so reliably perspicacious, Goffman disappoints us here.
I am inclined to be less melodramatic about her “special kind of
alienation.” There is nothing very special about it: it is business as

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usual when the risk of looking foolish is high. Courtship is one of

those domains in which our self-esteem is especially vulnerable, in
which we can look the fool and not feel it, or feel a fool and not
look it, or both feel it and look it. The roles we are forced to play,
men and women alike, are often badly written parts, and few are up
to authoring their own original scripts. A date, a first date, has such
a vulgar plot. Two people audition for each other, or are making
a judgment as to whether even to hold an audition. Each inspects
the other to judge desirability, availability, accessibility for the act of
darkness, and the probability that this person would be worth talk-
ing to after doing it. The encounter is either, as we have discussed,
an elaborate indirect statement of a vulgar desire, “wanna ****?”
or, worse, a periphrasis meant to convey the brutal message: “with
anyone but you, buddy (baby).” Painful, but not the stuff of tragedy;
it is dark comedy.

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 seventeen

Acting Our Roles: Mimicry, Makeup, and Pills

Recall walter shandy’s statement: “No matter whether

[Toby] loves the service or no – being once in it – he acts as if he
did; and takes every step to shew himself a man of prowess.” Walter
is not just proposing a theory of love but also, by implication, a the-
ory of acting. It says a proper actor need not feel the emotions he is
portraying to portray them well; he need only act as if he felt them. It
is all about adopting the outward signs – the visible postures, words,
and behaviors – and getting them exactly right. Inner states will either
come along for the ride or not, but that is not the actor’s concern,
only the justness of the visible and audible form, of playing the role as
it should be played from the viewpoint of an audience. Contrast this
with the view that a good actor should enter his character’s psyche
so as to generate the feelings the character would feel; that the best
way to get the outside right is to get the inside right first. This was an
actively fought battle in the eighteenth century and continues to be
disputed.

Diderot and Actors

It was the philosophe and encyclopedist Denis Diderot who took the
strong position that acting is about mimicking gesture, posture, ex-
pression, about external representations of feelings and motives, not
about feeling.1 He even argued that it is better not to have the feelings
should you be able to generate them. The conventions of drama ask
for quicker shifts of sentiment than real feelings could possibly keep
up with; it is best to keep cool on the inside and perfect your mimetic
technique. Besides, the actor must perform the same role night after

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night (in the theater), and for consistency’s sake technique is more
reliable than mustering feelings on demand.
Yet Walter’s comments also hint at anticipating the famous view
of emotions articulated by William James, which is usually (and a bit
unfairly)2 boiled down to this: “I do not weep because I am sad; rather
I am sad because I weep”; “I do not tremble because I fear, I fear be-
cause I tremble.” James’s view is that the feeling we call the emotion is
nothing more than our awareness of certain changes that occur in the
body in response to external stimuli. Diderot’s actor, by this account,
need not generate the feeling to represent the emotion on stage, but by
representing it he may trigger the feeling. Diderot, we have just seen,
would prefer that the actor not develop the feeling; it might interfere
with the performance.3 Though the James theory has problems (it is
making a comeback),4 it embodies a certain folk wisdom that some
experience seems to support. The put-on-a-happy-face doctrine is a
practical application of the theory.5 Postures of the body, expressions
of the face, by some mysterious mechanism, seem to push the senti-
ments to accord with the outward display. Toby may indeed come to
feel love if he acts as if he loves. Whatever the mechanism that ac-
complishes this accord between gesture and sentiment, it is hardly
foolproof, for it is not uncommon to feel completely dissociated
from one’s gestures and actions, to feel and know them to be fake.6
Like Diderot, Walter does not care about inner states. It is all form,
throwing oneself wholeheartedly into visible forms when propriety
demands it. That is what a man of prowess such as Toby does. It
leads to deeds of bravery on the battlefield and acts of kindness in
the drawing room. The bedroom is another matter, but there is hope
even there. Walter is not a cynic. How do we teach our children to
have the inner state of the emotions of sadness, guilt, regret, disgust?
We cannot verify that they really feel what they are supposed to. We
are satisfied that they have the proper sentiments if they are mak-
ing the proper facial expressions, adopting the right tone of voice,
making their bodies accord with how that sentiment is to be prop-
erly displayed, carrying out actions that such a sentiment properly
prompts, and last and most importantly, doing those things when

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it is appropriate do so. That much we can teach them and monitor

whether they have learned the lesson.
When changing your two-year-old’s diaper, you go “Yuck, ech,
how disgusting.” You make exaggerated disgust expressions, and the
kid thinks you’re a real comic genius, but the child is also learning
the facial and oral signs of the emotion and learning that they are
properly associated with excrement. (A significant number of those
kids never cease to associate broad comedy with excretory functions;
the joking shows that the disgust response is doing its work with a
vengeance.7 ) It is all about getting the acting down, and we assume
that the feeling in the gut will follow to keep in step with everything
else the body is doing. Even if it doesn’t, as is often the case with
the apology, who cares as long as the proper deeds get done with the
proper display of emotion, whether felt or faked?
Parents put on performances to teach their kids emotions, perfor-
mances the parents recognize as performances, which they play up
in the campiest of exaggerated styles. By the time the toddler is old
enough to be taught to be disgusted, the parents are such old hands
at dealing with his excrement that they are not all that much dis-
gusted; they are faking the degree of their disgust. Parents have to
fake it big to raise their kids. They fake anger, shock, interest, and
indignation. What, you punched the neighbor kid in the nose?8 One
ex-hippie I know, who was unstoned possibly three whole days from
1967 to 1970, assumed a high-toned, Puritanical “absolutely not”
when asked by her fourteen-year-old daughter whether she had ever
taken drugs. Parents must put on shows for their kids, just as kids
come to learn that it is best to put on shows for their parents, espe-
cially when the kids have something to hide. They then get punished
for lying, if caught, but it is hard for them sometimes to discern the
qualitative difference in all these fictions, especially when faking it is
itself often a virtue.
Sometimes they get punished for telling the truth, not just when
the truth is not good manners but when the truth flies in the face of
other expectations. Truth telling in formal settings in which telling
the truth is the actual substance of the ritual, as in confessions or

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judicial trials, is itself a performance in which in the interests of the

“truth of the ritual” the particular truth being admitted must be a lie,
or made to look like a lie. A story told in a student paper I received
makes the point nicely. The tale is of a fifth-grade girl who gave the
finger out the classroom window at the back of a hated playground
attendant on the grounds below. She was soon to discover that in
rituals of truth telling, truth is something more and less than the
truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth:

V. J. Parmley and Chevy Zinder saw it, and ratted me out. [The
teacher] called me into the hallway and asked me if it was true.
“What is truth?” I should have answered . . . But, in my naiveté, and
in the grip of my conscience, I thought that this was a crossroads
moment. I felt that there was a right and a wrong thing to do. And
there was, but telling the truth wasn’t it. I knew instantly that I
should have lied. Whether or not she suspected that I had done it,
she never expected me to own up to it. She was more outraged by
the fact that I had the audacity to admit my misdeed, than that I
had committed it.9

We perform, but we are not professional actors. They are a caste

unto themselves, and there is something unsettling and uncanny
about them. We have raised their status considerably in our celebrity
culture, but they still are of an ilk with the circus performer, carnies,
and prostitutes; they occupy a demimonde. Diderot likened actors to
an unsavory lot: to courtesans faking orgasm, to beggars faking their
meekness and deformities, to seducers faking love, and to atheistical
priests faking belief.10 “The greater the actor,” says one commentator
on Diderot, “the more pointedly he reminds the public of what pow-
erful instruments nature has placed in the hands of the deceitful.”11
One fears they constitute the limiting case we worried about earlier:
is there any core to them? Are they only the sum of their roles? Is their
hollowness the perfect and uncanny image of our own hollowness?
Thus Diderot:

It is said that actors have no character because by playing so many

roles they lose the character nature gave them, and thus they be-
come fakes (faux), in the same way that the physician, the surgeon,

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and the butcher become callous. I believe that that mistakes cause
for effect: it is rather that they are suited to play all roles because
they have no character.12

Actors might chafe at such an unflattering description, but then

many of them, at least the Hollywood sorts, seem bent on proving
Diderot right. All surface glitz, most look like drag versions of them-
selves. One suspects that the tabloids do not make them as superficial
as they do the tabloids. When stripped of clothing, which the female
ones often obligatorily are, they are still in full costume, sometimes
in the form of a faked body double. Other people play them in stunt
scenes too, so that even as actors they are pulling a sleight of hand as
to their assumed identity. You think they are playing others, but in
fact others are playing them playing others. Some movies, none more
so than Sunset Boulevard (1950), are very smart about the general
theme of the illusionism and proteanism of an actor’s self and sense
of self, with directors interchangeable with butlers and husbands,
narration by a corpse who is a would-be scriptwriter (fitting for a
movie about the death of silent film and its stars), real people play-
ing themselves, or characters playing vaguely disguised facsimiles of
themselves watching earlier movies of their “real” selves and fanta-
sizing that they still are what they once were, which was merely an
image in the first place.
Thin-lipped moralists are usually on to something when they sniff
out sources of temptation and corruption. Even should we grant,
against Diderot, that there is nothing especially wicked about the
souls of people drawn to acting, acting, it is feared, will soon make
them so. People who must declare love and show expressions of it in
the theater or take off their clothes and simulate erotic passion on a
sound stage will be tempted to finish offstage what they started on
it. Indeed nonactors may seek to become amateur actors and put on
small theatricals as an amatory aid. Neither Mr. Bertram, nor Jane
Austen, was wrong that an innocuously innocent attempt to alleviate
the boredom of daily life at Mansfield Park by staging a play was not
so innocent. Something about openly donning masks or posing as
another frees the character from moral constraints. An actor gets to

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be professionally what kids are taught is allowable only at restricted

times, such as Halloween, Purim, or Mardi Gras, or only in restricted
places, such as vacation spots catering to the spring-break crowd,
Las Vegas, red-light districts – all sanctuaries of a sort in which one’s
proper identity is suppressed and, with it, the rules of responsibility
and respectability.
My sixteen-year-old daughter wants to be an actress; visions of
Broadway musical theater dance in her head. She is not too young
for me to begin seriously worrying that she is serious, so I have already
told her to hone her table-clearing techniques, which she so far has
shown little aptitude for at home. But do I want her waiting on tables?
The culture of the restaurant or bar is somewhat theatrical, not in the
way life is theatrical but in being a setting in which certain kinds of
vices, amiable and not so amiable, are abetted and thrive. The young
waitress of today occupies much the role the actress did for the idle
young man about town in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries:
an object of desire, attainable desire. But how naı̈ve am I to think
that love does not take place even in the coldest climate? Why, even
the academy, the only place where sex is written about more than it
is done, is a bawd.

Pretending versus Faking It

Four-year-olds, not sixteen-year-olds, match actors in their uncan-
niness. They dress up in costumes, talk to themselves, invent whole
lives and imaginary friends. “Child’s play” we call it as they hone
their skills of faking it with no sense of faking it, but of pretending
instead. There is a difference: pretending allows you to play any role
you want; you write the play, set it where you will, play the part you
want to play. Faking it means playing a role that the larger culture has
already scripted and that your inner being somehow feels is not quite
your own. Faking it is forced upon us and gives rise to unpleasant
accesses of self-consciousness. Faking it places us ever so much in the
world. Pretending gets us out of it for a brief vacation.13 Pretending
is like a daydream or often takes the form of a daydream, adopted
because of the pleasures it affords, pure escapism. Indeed, there is

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some marring of the pleasure by the knowledge that it is not really

real, but most of us wouldn’t wish it any other way for fear we would
lose our moorings entirely or actually have to be the action hero we
daydream ourselves into being for a two-minute fantasy.
Parents who watch their children totally lost in their fantasy worlds
worry that their kids are nuts, only to see that the neighbor kid seems
almost as crazy. When my aspiring actress was two she would pro-
claim that she was Cinderella pretending to be a mouse pretending to
be Bess (her name) and then would proceed to do nothing different as
far as I could tell. She continued to sit there with furrowed brow until
she announced she was pretending to be another someone pretend-
ing to be something else. I am not sure what she was doing. Was it
pretending to pretend? Or was it a complex nesting of roles to make
pretending itself the subject of the pretense – she was starring as the
Great Pretender?
I want to give this some pretentious meaning when it probably has
no meaning beyond the ludic (ludic? thus I manage to be pretentious
while pretending to turn my back on it). Giving grand significance
to things that cannot bear the weight of the pretense is one of the
most common forms of fakery academics engage in. Settle then for
this, which does not quite evade charges of pomposity either: Bess
was testing the durability and contours of the self she was in the
process of acquiring, making sure it would be there to come back to.
This kind of play is part of the process of coming to believe there
is a self called Bess precisely because she could be X, or Y, or Z
at a whim of her choosing, though the roles she plays will still be
stitched together from the culture she is training herself to enter. This
is long before she will feel as Orwell did when he shot an elephant he
did not want to shoot because the expectation in the eyes of 2,000
Burmese natives watching him gave him no choice but to shoot the
poor beast. As a toddler Bess felt the freedom of willing her role
and would be as free in willing it as she would ever be again. She is
already finding out that an actress, though she gets to play various
roles, does not get to choose the roles she gets to play. The competition
for being a professional assumer of roles is as stiff as any competition
there is.

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I would imagine that at age two she experienced no anxiety for

complicating her relations to herself, though I know of one child
who, when pretending at two, would turn to tell her parents not to
worry, that she was only pretending. But by seven or eight can’t you
recall already feeling silly at some of the parts you were forced to
play in certain games? It was more than the fear that adults or older
siblings might stumble upon you and make you feel self-conscious or
tease you; it was that you were embarrassing yourself in your own
mind whether they showed up or not. I recall that playing war was,
on occasion, not fully consuming, though it was still more fun than
not playing war. I would feel a little foolish making the gun noises;
maybe it was because I made them so poorly compared with the other
kids, though my envy of them was tinged by a nagging disbelief that
they could be so totally into all those pows, clicks, and saliva-thick
explosion noises. That is not fair to them: they too must have been as
disappointed that they could not really shoot me as I was that I could
not shoot them, that it was all fantasy bullets and shells. Instead we
argued over who killed whom first.

Making Up Is Hard to Do, or Masking for It

We sometimes need external aids to get us through performances or
prepare for them. Our roles need props and proper costumes as well
as proper dispositions, though these be feigned. Thus rum rations are
needed to help us through the minefields of so-called convivial social
interactions. Actors get in costume and makeup; they go into training
to lose weight or gain it. When does preparing, making up, getting in
costume pass beyond mere preparation to play a part well and begin
to shade into morally troubling misrepresentation – hoodwinking,
conning, tricking? Must we own up to certain kinds of help we are
getting to play our roles, help that if not revealed would be thought to
be cheating? Surely we will trouble ourselves about hiding something
that we think might raise a moral demand to disclose, or that requires
an explicit limitation of warranties.
Actual cosmetics, face-painting, have long been held to be a le-
gitimate prerogative of women; men quite frequently have dabbled

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in it too, and not only in decadent Rome or Weimar Berlin. Like all
practices it is subject to a thick array of rules, some articulated, most
not. Makeup that calls and is meant to call aggressive attention to
itself tends to indicate an aspiration for, or the fact of, marginality:
the whore or actor or super-hip or gender-bending male or weirded-
out teenager. (Makeup that calls, but is not meant to call, aggressive
attention to itself is usually the curse of the bumbling teenager or
aging woman.) Long before that line was crossed, however, innocent
rouging provided a basis for misogynists to lambaste the false seem-
ing of womankind.14 The woman who does not make up, or put on
a face, is also sending a message variously ranging from indifference
to not giving a damn (not the same as indifference) to thinking she
is so beautiful she doesn’t need it to claiming a certain style of femi-
nism, and more. The woman who refuses makeup is no less making
up for a role than the one who puts it on. The exact meaning of the
positions changes roughly each decade or two but, again, very much
within predictable ranges.
There is an honesty to cosmetics: the woman putting them on is
not ashamed that she is doing so. Women in my mother’s generation
would pull out a compact and reapply makeup seated in a restau-
rant; not to do so was bad form. In that day a woman might never
be so inaccessible as when she was redoing her face in public. And
cosmetics work more magically for not being disavowed, for being
so open; it draws men and frightens them; it is all so mysterious. The
more makeup, the more it suggests a certain freedom from sexual
constraint, a mask for carnival, while also suggesting a seamless self-
involvement that blithely denies the existence of others present. The
coding is complex: certain styles of making up thus signal primness
and propriety better than would no makeup. I am speaking only very
generally; these rules vary by social class and ethnicity and geograph-
ical region, and most of us are quite fluent in the language, at least
in the dialect of our own generation.
Before Prozac and its ilk, before implants, Viagra, and Rogaine,
the world of faking and pretense was about donning clothing and
the vocal accent of a different class. Shakespearean comedy depends
on the magical transformation that changes of dress can work on

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identity, and surely it was the case that clothes made the man and
woman, hence the myriad sumptuary laws to regulate who could
wear what, so leaky were the dikes separating the various social
ranks.15 You were to stay within gender confines too. Saga Iceland, for
instance, loved its women tough, capable, good-looking, and smart,
but they were not to dress like men, nor men like women. The penalty
most frequently visited on cross- or ambiguous dressers in the sagas
was immediate divorce, but the laws go farther and subject the person
to prosecution for lesser outlawry – loss of property and three year’s
exile – at the suit of anyone who wished to bring it.16
What of the status of Rogaine, Prozac, or implants? Is there a duty
to inform? A very bald friend suggested that Rogaine does not belong
on this list because “it just retards hair loss and I wouldn’t call that
‘faking’; how about liposuction?” But I am retaining Rogaine; it tries
to mask the truth of the disgrace that the course of nature has visited
upon us. To confess to using it is embarrassing and forces one into a
self-mocking mode to own up to it, for it is proof that our vanity has
reached pretty near the depths of pathetic foolishness. Something still
makes Rogaine more a form of deception, for instance, than using
toothpaste with whitener in it, which is more, we think, like using
soap. That aside, is there a duty to inform, say, that you have breast
implants or use Viagra? And if you don’t tell and the other finds out,
will he or she accept you as the real you or as a discounted “you” or
as a jacked-up YOU?
Would you not feel a little bit betrayed by a guy taking Viagra or
a woman with breast implants? Wouldn’t a guy, in the latter case,
feel embarrassed if he got aroused by them knowing they were fake?
He, however, would have a response to that: “Fake? What’s fake
and what’s real? I have been reading the fathers of the church and
various monastic writers, and they have always suggested that even
so-called real breasts are fake, a false appearance, for all they are is
skin covering disgusting goo, mostly fat.17 Would a bowl of fat turn
you on? No, it is only the location and the skin over the fat that
transforms the fat into a breast. So what is wrong with skin over
silicon or salt water? Rather better in fact.” And he is not a fetishist,

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merely a medievalist. If men can get turned on by makeup, why not

by a false breast with real skin on it?
Does a man who needs Viagra to perform have to avow it? Would
a woman feel betrayed upon discovering that the man, whom she
heretofore believed she was exciting so much that he never failed,
owed his powers of penetration to a blue pill? Feel she got conned,
made a fool of, not just a teeny bit hurt? Or would she feel grateful
that he cared enough to take the pill? Doesn’t the guy, himself, feel
like a fraud? Or does he defend himself thus: until Viagra all the
faking in sex was on the woman’s side; their pleasure could be faked,
and few men were ever the wiser, and none had any inducement to
probe too closely anyway as to whether the woman was faking it for
fear of finding out how unaccomplished he was. Now men get to fake
it too. Admittedly it is not quite analogous. Women who fake don’t
get orgasms – that is what they are faking – men whose erections are
in fact Viagra erections do get orgasms. But there is still a point to the
comparison. Both are about playing roles convincingly and pulling
a fast one. Is it the poor man’s fault that he simply cannot fake it
without chemical intervention?18
What of antidepressants? Depressed people, down-in-the-dumps
pessimists, people given to ready annoyance at human foible, might
find life easier, if not quite as interesting, if they use chemical aids
to help them mellow out. These people are often types who need
chemicals that really work – no faking them out with placebo. There
have been a host of studies proving that depressive pessimists are
not misreading the world. They tend to test out much better than
happy people in intelligence and in seeing themselves and the world
accurately. Their powers of discernment send them into a tailspin.19
If, as Swift would have it, “[Happiness] is a perpetual possession of
being well deceived,” then the problem of these depressed souls is
that they are not much given to self-deception.20 For these depressed
Westerners, yoga and Eastern meditative techniques won’t work, ex-
cept to the extent that their spirits get picked up for a few seconds
to ridicule the hokiness of going east for spirituality rather than for
food. Yes, they know this snake oil stuff works for people who believe

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in it, but there is no way they could ever overcome feeling foolish for
giving it a try. They would sink even lower for having sunk so low.
But a little yellow pill?
Here then is the problem. Suppose you court a person and win him
or her over to love you because you are easy-going and sociable. True,
some people would have loved you as a depressed and occasionally
angry wit, but this person whom you love beyond belief loves you as
you are on Paxil. He or she bought the act hook, line, and sinker. What
if she should go up to the attic and find your true portrait? Should
anyone feel anxious about matters of authenticity in this vignette?
Should they treat the new, docile you as an amiable imposter, a new,
better Martin Guerre returning from the wars? Good riddance to the
old one, whom no one liked anyway. And though people know the
new one is a fake, they prefer not to think of him that way; it is so
much pleasanter to take the imposter as the real Martin.
Your old friends know that it is not the real you but may prefer the
more tractable fake you anyway. But what of the friends you have
made after you became Paxilman? Must you disclose? If you do, do
you risk losing them? Or will they stick with you because it would
make them look shallow to abandon you on such grounds?21 But
then you might suspect that the only reason they did not abandon
you was out of a sense of duty. Would they trust you to keep taking
your pills? Maybe they would love the old you too? Want to give it a
try? These same anxieties are mirrored in the other person, who may
want to live dangerously by finding out what the real you is really
like. Nor is it all that unlikely that the person who discovers that
your character is chemically maintained is also on an antidepressant
and so may be forgiving. Does this make the situation exponentially
falser or somehow truer and fairer?
Then there is hair. The rules are very different for men and women,
because the former are desperate to acquire it except on the ears,
back, and neck, and the latter are desperate to get rid of it, except
on the head. It is male hair loss I limit myself to, not waxing, bikini
lines, or electrolysis. Rogaine seems fair preparation for the public
presentation of self. If it grows hair, which it probably won’t, it is real
hair, your hair. And though this makes it seem analogous to Viagra,

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which makes real erections, that is not the case, for she has no reason
to believe that your love and desire for her caused your hair to grow.
If Rogaine doesn’t grow hair, you are out the money and look foolish
only to yourself and to the check-out clerk in the pharmacy.
Rogaine is surely an acceptable preparation for presenting yourself
in public in a way that hair transplants, with plugs that change a
head into a doll’s head or, worse still, a toupee, which justifiably
subjects its wearer to infinite ridicule, is not. A toupee is by definition
a botched performance.22 You think you are playing in a serious
drama, and instead you are the star of a farce. Rogaine carries a
risk of humiliation too, though small. No one believes you want to
be bald; they will mostly amiably laugh away the silly vanity you
reveal for wanting to have more hair than you do. You give others a
chance to tease you gently: suppose you say to your significant other,
“Hey I think it’s actually working” and the response is, “Yup, as an
hallucinogen; just slip it into your students’ water and they will see
you with hair.” Oh, the trials and tribulations of maintaining dignity.

Surgical Masks
There is a tradition, often maintained ironically or with a sense of its
shock value, that it is only when masked that we can speak truly, or
if not truly, at least interestingly. This is Oscar Wilde’s view. But there
has always been a related belief that fiction is better at approximat-
ing truth than nonfiction and then, paradox upon paradox, that the
“truest poetry,” according to Touchstone in As You Like It, “is the
most feigning” (3.3.16).23 Real life often seems more fake than fic-
tion. And acting styles as well as characterizations and plots in novels
have always had to perform serious cosmetic surgery on true life to
satisfy our demands for verisimilitude and plausibility. In a different
vein, we know how to mobilize contrived fiction to flush out truth, as
when the play is the thing wherein we catch the conscience of kings, or
as when Polonius and law enforcement agencies entrap wrongdoers:
“Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth” (2.1.62).
But the truthfulness of masks is not categorical; some allow truth
to flourish, others suborn it utterly. It depends on what kind of masks,

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when and where donned, and what kind of fictions. To play being a
polite person is to be a polite person. The mask is all that is asked for.
There is a truth there. Sincerity supposes, in contrast, masklessness,
but that presents an impossible bind stated succinctly by Andre Gide:
“One cannot at the same time both be sincere and seem so.”24 One
can play a role sincerely. I sincerely act out my role as a teacher. Play-
ing the role of the sincere person sincerely, however, rightly raises
suspicions. Recall the unverifiability of sincerity in displays of re-
morseful groveling. There is, as we have seen, more verifiable sincer-
ity in the coerced spat-out apology than in voluntary sackcloth and
breast-beating. In the latter case, but not the former, the apologizer is
trying to sell the other on his sincerity and hence falls afoul of Gide’s
law.
Where, though, is the truth in masks that are surgically applied or
achieved by ingesting pills, other than the truth that we are vain, ill,
neurotic, and sad? These are not masks that allow for much artistry
on the part of the wearer; all the art belongs to the surgeon or the
chemist. What a crabbed moralist I have become. Is it because I feel
conned by breast implants, Paxil, Rogaine, and Botox, but not by pre-
tenses of gratitude, amiability, and modest applications of makeup?
Or is there some deeper notion of fair play and cheating involved?
Some ways of cheating nature have a long and venerable tradition;
other ways look like crass innovations, part of an unrelenting move
toward the moral horror of designer babies, cloning, and obscenely
long life.
Is it that a breast implant suggests the mind of the whore, or a
similar kind of pathetic pandering to male foolishness? Or is it noth-
ing more than a slightly more expensive and invasive succumbing to
pathetic vanity on the order of the man driven to Rogaine? Neither
wants to be rejected as an object of desire because of having, in one
case, small breasts or, in the other, thinning hair. Both evidently would
prefer knowing they have been rejected on more substantial grounds,
such as their dullness, shallowness, or moral failings. Incredible, but
no small number of us, I bet, would rather find out another is turned
off by us because he thinks us morally defective than that he found us
so physically unappealing as to make sex with us either unthinkable

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or nauseating. Is it that self-esteem starts first with wishing to see

ourselves as attractive rather than wishing to see ourselves as good?
Or at some deep level, is it that we, like ancient Greeks, do not feel
there is any distinction between the good and the beautiful?
Why is it that cosmetic surgery seems like cheating and cosmetics
do not? Is it only a function of what our sense of the usual is? If I
were thirty years younger and had lived a good portion of my life
in southern California, I would probably be more liberal on these
matters. Moreover, surgical interventions catering to vanity are not
some newfangled innovation; they have an impressive historical pedi-
gree of more than two millennia. A popular one for Jews trying to
Hellenize themselves before the birth of Christ was to undergo an
uncircumcision, an operation designed to make them look as natural
as the day they were born, with penile skin stretched out enough to
make it pass for a real foreskin. Locker room anxieties, it seems, are
as old as the hills.25
Botox, the wrinkle remover, raises other issues. It works by par-
alyzing selected facial muscles, relaxing away wrinkles, thereby also
destroying those muscles’ ability to participate in the making of var-
ious facial expressions, such as furrowing the brow in a frown of
annoyance or of concentration. Try this experiment. Concentrate
intently on a difficult math problem or focus your attention on a
picture of a painting in an art book without furrowing your brow
or contracting it a little. Not easy, is it? It may be that we need
the facial expression as an aid to the deeper thoughtful enterprise,
that the furrowing is more than a mere sign that thinking is taking
place. Now comes the Botox person, who not only can no longer
fake a look of concentration, interest, or mental focus but also may,
at the margins, lose the very ability to concentrate, focus, and think
intently. Better, it seems, to be thought vacuous and indeed to be vac-
uous than to bear the signs of your age. Big deal, you say: people so
apocalyptically vain as to sign up for Botox injections probably are
not losing an ability they had before anyway.
Perhaps the draw of these surgical interventions and openly fake
re-creations of our lost beauty – or new creations of beauty we never
had – is that the embarrassment of being seen as that shallow has a

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short half-life. The same person who might at first give you a black
mark for shallowness and vanity on account of your breast implants
is soon likely to be very forgiving. Better attractive fakery than ugly
truth. Besides, the fakery has its own kind of truth, the truth of beauty,
which moralists of a certain stripe forever claim, to little avail, is false.
Within a month, maybe even an hour, he will be putting the moves
on you, and you will not reject him as readily as you would have
months before Rogaine had its salutary effect on him, and, what
with his Viagra, to misuse Yeats dreadfully,

So great a sweetness flows into the breast

We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.

Tr a i t s a r e n o t ro l e s , but they imbue roles with a certain style.

And these styles can be faked too or can often look fake when they are
genuine. The next chapter takes up certain styles of self-presentation:
modesty, both true and false, pretentiousness, and a reprise of some
issues raised by the ironies of self-mockery.

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 eighteen

False (Im)modesty

Role playing, performing our parts, is what we do; we can

hardly blame one another for playing roles. Suppose, however, the
role is flavored in such a way that the player can be described as
pretentious. We all pretend, but that does not make us pretentious, or
even pretenders in a bad sense, or in the way of Bonny Prince Charley.
Pretension can take the form of adopting a style of something you
aspire to be, and may eventually be, but are not there yet – thus
the grad student who postures as a prof. A variant version has the
middling prof posturing as a prof of importance. He differs from
the grad student because his case holds no promise of the pretense
ever converging with reality. The third in the series is the prof of
importance who postures as a prof of importance.
Unlike the first two examples, the prof of importance is playing a
role he is entitled to play and is claiming a status he actually occupies,
but in a way that reveals him to be too taken with the station life has
assigned him. We can imagine a person exuberantly delighting in his
high station who is not pretentious. It takes more than just loving his
role to make the prof offensive. This pretentious person’s delight is a
smug delight. He is self-satisfied; he puts on airs, and we feel he is full
of air, usually hot, a stuffed shirt, overinflated. As early as Chaucer,
this kind of intellectual pretentiousness was conflated with flatulence,
as an intellectually pretentious friar is stumped by the subtlety of how
to divide a fart into twelve equal parts.1 And images of gas (flatus)
and overinflation invite corresponding images of vengeful deflation:
we thus speak of popping or piercing their pretensions. One of the
reasons I try to deliver lectures in what I congratulate myself is a comic
style is that it allows me to interpret the laughter of the students as

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not being at me. But can’t the pretentious prof think he is a really
funny guy too, delivering what he thinks are fine jests?
Not all fakes are pretentious, and not all pretentious people are
fakes. But so obviously unpleasant and affected is the style that one
wonders why on earth anyone would adopt it outside the German
academy, where it appears to be a necessary and often sufficient
qualification of a professorship?2 There are various cultural rules
on this. In America, democratic norms should make a pompous pro-
fessor more seriously morally defective than his pompous German
or even English counterpart. Pomposity does have different national
styles: the pomposity of the French, who think themselves witty and,
more pathetically, sexy, is not the pomposity of a Herr Doktor who
prides himself on taking more words rather than fewer to say some-
thing. The pomposity of Oxbridge dons is itself such an arabesque
of affectations that it is hard to believe anyone can play the part
without being aware of its comic implications. It is badly restyled in
the American academy, the difference being that the English are se-
cure enough in their pomposity to engage in pompous self-mockery
about the pompousness of it all, whereas the Americans are sincerely
pompous, like the parvenu who cannot run the risk of self-mockery.3
So distasteful is the style, given democratic assumptions, why on
earth would any American adopt it?4 Here is one reason that tran-
scends the cultural: I have found over the years that students tend
to confuse pomposity with knowledge and nastiness with smarts.
Students thus force otherwise indifferently kind and modest teachers
into being mean windbags to get the respect they crave. It may be less
that pompous power generates toadies than that toadyism generates
pompous power.
Pretentious people seem to inhabit their role in a unique way. They
are fully immersed in their role, but not in the manner of people who
lose themselves in a role out of exuberance, dedication, addiction, or
simplicity. One of the peculiar forms of this pretentious style is that
though the person never puts his role aside, he also never seems to re-
lax into it. One imagines that they never cease thinking of themselves
as Herr Professor Doktor when they fornicate and defecate. Yet such
pompous souls, not uncommonly, believe themselves, in fact, to be

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rather deft wits and ironists; they thus take great care to enter their
bons mots in their class notes for annual repetition. And it need not
be that the pretentious person thinks he is more important than he
is – he is often quite important. It’s that he wants to make you feel his
importance in an unbecoming way. He lacks what in the eighteenth
century was called the virtue of condescension; he does not know
when to give up on the privileges of his standing when he could gain
credit by doing so.5 Because he insists on extending his authority to
occasions and physical spaces where it has no business, we treat him
as if he were making fraudulent claims. And we are right, for his
authority is not always properly to be on center stage, but only when
the stage directions say it is.
There is no way to separate the sociological from the moral here.
Modesty is a virtue that has very little to do with intention and very
much to do with how you present yourself modestly. Like courage,
modesty is about delivering the goods. If others feel you lord it over
them, never letting them forget for a moment that you are pleased
to be their superior in a way that makes them resentful, well then,
despite all intentions, you got it coming. That is another of my over-
statements, so let me clip its wings in the interests of accuracy. If we
discern that the pompous person is otherwise decent, that when push
comes to shove he is kind and generous and comes through on im-
portant matters, we will tell ourselves things like, “He really is OK
once you get to know him.” In the interests of equity, we make the
moral move of distinguishing between his style, for which we want to
stone him, and his substance, for which we will commute his capital
punishment into merely complaining about him behind his back or
warning people who are about to meet him to cut him some slack.
Pomposity seems to be an occupational hazard of academics more
than most professions, and I fear I am not always vigilant enough not
to succumb myself. But is it really that the academy draws more than
its share of pompous people? Or is it that the peculiar kind of preten-
tiousness that thrives in the academy is one of gravity, gravity being
much more prevalent in the ivy-covered walls than other equally
annoying forms of oppressing people with self-satisfaction, such as
the tough guy who won’t let you forget he can kick the crap out

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of you; or the femme fatale who, depending on your gender, either

won’t let you forget you are to desire her or that she is more beau-
tiful than you; or the rah-rah jock who is always too loud; or the
cooler-and hipper-than-thou types, any number come to mind, peo-
ple so thoroughly immodest in their style, so deeply self-satisfied? If
the professor’s offensiveness of style lies in its pomposity, the cooler-
than-thou’s offensiveness is his flippancy, in which a pointed detach-
ment of a contemptuous sort pretends to wit, which even if directed
at himself fails to do the proper work of false modesty or of wit.

False Modesty
Pompous pretentiousness is one way of characterizing the vice op-
posed to the virtue of modesty. In the Middle Ages the opposed vice
would have been understood to be pride, but we have long since
reevaluated pride and blame only a pride that is too prideful, too
showy, too pompous. Quiet pride is in fact how we have come to
understand what modesty is. Not too quiet, though. What is more
pretentious than the friend who does not tell you about winning a big
award? So what if she is beside herself with anxiety about how to tell
you or whether to tell so that she doesn’t look as if she is bragging?
To choose silence is the wrong move.
Modesty is another one of those virtues in which the faked version
makes the real thing suspect, so common is fakery in this domain.
Whatever false modesty is, it is not hypocritical any more than po-
liteness is. False modesty is about taking care of others’ feelings on
the tricky terrain of envy. It is the concession we grant to a certain
justice in envy that we not too far outstrip others, lest they hate us or
we offend them. False modesty is thus an homage to envy, born not
only of fear but also of fellow-feeling.
True modesty may have no motive other than its own realization.
False modesty, though, is precisely what propriety often demands
in the service of reducing envy. For this reason, real modesty that
does the sociable work we ask false modesty to perform will get
not much more credit than if it were false to begin with. What is
being asked is that the fortunate person spare the feelings of others.

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And this can often be accomplished by the falseness of the modesty,

the very falseness, within decorous limits, revealing the effort being
made to make concessions to the dangers of the situation. The proper
performance, in other words, demands small leakages; the falsity
should not be completely hidden. True modesty does not show effort,
often because it doesn’t take any for those to whom it comes naturally.
If it were to take effort, the modest person would suspect that her
modesty had failed for that reason.
Modesty is tricky: if you are a person of considerable ability and
talent you can exemplify one minimal conception of the virtue by not
calling attention to your virtues and position, by not being openly
vain of them, or showy; one cultivates understatement. We even
credit people with some facsimile of modesty if they quietly take
their advantages for granted. As it is said of the two Miss Bertrams
in Mansfield Park, “Their vanity was in such good order, that they
seemed to be quite free from it, and gave themselves no airs” (ch. 4).
Suppose, however, you are a person of “modest” abilities or station,
no great shakes at anything. This person has one kind of modesty
thrust upon him, and it is not a virtue, merely a statement about
where he ranks in the relevant pecking order. He would get no credit
for understating his abilities, for they are already sufficiently under-
stated. For him modesty demands that he not overstate his modest
talents, that, in other words, he know just where he stands. It would
be a presumptuous arrogation for him to put on a show of false
modesty. Nor do we want him pretending to be worse than he is, to
indulge in a sentimentalized low self-esteem or a flaccid spiritlessness.
Modesty, in our time, has come to be tainted by a supposed rela-
tion between it and low self-esteem, either as cause or as effect. And
immodesty, in the sense of bragging and talking oneself up, has gotten
some cachet not only because of the self-esteem movement but also
because of the draw of the energetic in-your-face style of trash talk,
hip-hop braggadocio, a style that is hardly recent or black; it also is
the style employed by Beowulf and the heroes of the Iliad, if not U. S.
Grant or Clint Eastwood. Despite the decline in the value of its shares,
modesty continues to be respected as a virtue by enough of us that it
behooves us to cultivate our talents for false forms of it.

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When I am being falsely modest, though, I am not really faking

it. I am being sincerely falsely modest. The sincerity of it goes to the
real concern it evinces not to want to give others grounds for hating
you. You hardly want your pride to alienate your friends or mobi-
lize your enemies. False modesty nicely unites motives of prudence
with motives of benevolence. But woe to the person who acts falsely
modest when he has no basis for gloating or inspires no envy in any-
one. That is a fear that haunts more than a few of us as we feel oh
so good about our managing to be (falsely) modest about precisely
those virtues that we incorrectly believe ourselves to possess.

Self-Mockery and Frank Confessions

Sincere self-mockery can do the work of false modesty. But it is falsely
modest in a different way than feigning modesty is. False modesty
must obey the time limits of true modesty. No holding the floor
beyond the minimum necessary. Self-mockery, in contrast, is often
meant to be a way of holding the floor, having the topic be yourself,
and entertaining others with all attention focused on yourself. Self-
mockery is not about quiet self-effacement or about self-effacement
in any form.6
Self-mockery attempts to package vanity in acceptable forms. Thus
you ridicule your hot temper, but you really are making a claim for
the virtues of your recklessness, your daring and courage. Or you
can ridicule your blundering failures in courtship as long as it makes
desirable people desire to take you on as a work in progress, or at
least to give you credit for being charming. Self-mockery is also a
way of fishing for compliments on the cheap, because it dispenses
with the expense of the bait of falsely complimenting others first so
that that they will compliment you back.
La Rochefoucauld discusses another variation in which contrary
to the self-praise effected by self-mockery we actually confess to real
faults “sincerely.” You decide whether “sincerely” needs the scare
quotes: “The desire to talk about ourselves, to expose our faults from
the point of view which we would choose, constitutes the great part
of our sincerity” (M 383).7 The way the maxim is worded indicates

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that the speaker is not using a tone of self-mocking raillery, but a

more somber tone of self-criticism. It makes no difference that the
self-criticism is falsely motivated; that, says La Rochefoucauld, is the
strategy we must employ when it comes to posing as sincere about
our own faults. The sincerity, though, is not quite a pose. One is
indeed sincere about maintaining one’s standing before others; what
is false is the pretense that the sincerity is attached to remorse.
La Rochefoucauld’s bemused oh-what-fools-these-mortals-be tone
is more tolerant of our vanity than George Eliot’s judgment of this
kind of self-protective strategy: “The vicar’s frankness seemed not of
the repulsive sort that comes from an uneasy consciousness seeking
to forestall the judgment of others. . . .”8 The good vicar is frank
not in order to talk about himself or to put a favorable spin on his
faults. But Eliot feels obliged to defend his motives because frank
confessionalism looks like a pretense, a repulsive one at that. The
uncharitable La Rochefoucauldian viewpoint has become the norm,
so that no one believes that sincerity and frankness about one’s own
faults are anything but ploys.
Self-mockery has to be managed with care. You cannot ridicule
yourself for all your failings without seeming undignified and shame-
less. If self-mockery descends into playing the clown one had better
be sure that it is a fairly sophisticated kind of clowning. An unseemly
self-mockery is a role foisted upon the powerless, stigmatized, and
deformed: the Jew, the black, the Italian, the Irishman, the physically
deformed, though these clowns often manage to turn the tables on
their audience. It takes skill to play that role with enough leakage so
that the dominant order understands the depths of your contempt for
them, without giving them reason to chop off your head as an impu-
dent rebel. There is no exact way to define the limit of the confessable,
admittable, or own-up-to-able (these are not quite synonyms); some
of the things your enemies would say behind your back are proba-
bly easier to mock yourself about than are some of the things your
friends say behind your back, so the line between enmity and friend-
ship provides no clear guide.
Finding the right faults for which to ridicule yourself need not
be tied to whether you have them. A good portion of successful

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self-mockery is to do La Rochefoucauld one better and confess not

just to modest faults but to faults we do not have. Engaging in the
forms of self-mockery and frank confession is what is rewarded, not
its accuracy as a self-critique. Clearly there are limits if it is to be
successful. The absolutely good-looking person cannot be heard to
self-mock about her ugliness. But she could tell stories of clumsiness,
of slipping on the ice when she was strutting around thinking herself
really something. It is probably best to tease the audience by hav-
ing the false fault be one that they cannot prove you have or don’t
have, but whose substance gives you credit for modesty or proper
false modesty either way. Thus the big strong guy can joke about his
fear of bugs or bats, and people may or may not believe him, but
the company appreciates that he is wearing his bigness in a way that
makes it palatable for all who might resent him for it.
Do you as self-mocker suffer from feeling you are faking? Not at
all, because you are one with your role: a performer holding center
stage in a play about himself. That does not prevent momentary
accesses of panic that people are not laughing with you, but at you.
The thought often waits until 3 a.m. to pay you a visit, when it is too
late. The various looks in the audience that encouraged you earlier
that evening are now recalled as bearing a different meaning than
you thought they bore when you were flushed with adrenaline in the
midst of your performance; you now, with a sick feeling in your gut,
recall seeing X cast Y a knowing look that their laughter did not
quite hide. You tell yourself that this is frequent 3 a.m. fare for you,
and as soon as the sun comes up you will have a more comforting
picture. But that is an eternity away; so you hasten to your computer
to e-mail apologies to everyone, thereby making sure you will have
something to be truly humiliated about when the sun rises.
The truly modest person, however, unlike the knowingly falsely
modest person, may fear he is faking his modesty, caught in the same
bind as the humble person who may be proud of his humility. Or he
may fear that his true modesty looks more fake than false modesty
would and so becomes self-conscious about how to style his modesty
to make it appear real, not just to be real. Maybe he thinks he would
be better served by packaging his true modesty as false modesty. But

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he also fears that he will only outsmart himself and opts instead to
stick with being his plain old modest self. Except that is now not so
easy. How did he act when he was unconsciously modest? Can he
reproduce it if he is self-conscious about it? Perhaps, just perhaps, he
will manifest sufficient embarrassment and fluster trying to present
himself as the modest person he truly is that his very embarrassment
will be exactly the right signal to sell his modesty. And if it works this
time, next time he can fake the fluster.9

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 nineteen

Caught in the Act

Mostly we live and let live with our faking it. I won’t call you
on yours if you won’t call me on mine. The agreement works quite
well in domains of small encounters and routine politeness. But what
if your faking is less about faking for a good cause – such as politeness,
apology, being a dad, a teacher, a friend – than for a bad cause? And
what counts as a bad cause? So much of our faking is done to satisfy
our vanity, the bad cause par excellence in one well-established moral
tradition: the sin of pride.
We have already seen that another nonnegligible moral tradition
winked at vanity, even blessed it as the chief motive behind making us
virtuous actors. The desire to gain the good opinion of others and the
equally great desire to think well of ourselves drove us to do good
deeds and cultivate virtue. Vanity of this sort, if not quite a good
cause, surely makes the world a better place to live in. To borrow
from Lord Chesterfield, why should we not wink at the small-stakes
vanities that help people get through the day a little happier; politely
flatter them so that they will politely flatter us, all to the advancement
of sociability and amiability?
Most – but not all – in the tolerant second tradition would agree
that it is a bad cause when our misrepresentations and self-delusions
claim more for ourselves than is fair. We draw a line at some magical
point when your attempt to fake it, to fool me – pardonable – makes a
fool out of me – absolutely unpardonable, unless I have it coming. But
we also find it unpardonable when you fool yourself to the point of
making a fool out of yourself. And that is precisely the circumstance
in which I can make a fool out of you, because you have done most
of the work and you have it coming. When your vanity so blinds

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you that you feel yourself great and grand no matter how inept and
unbearable you are, then you deserve precious little quarter.
I must immediately make a clarification. Not all self-duping is
unpardonable, especially that kind of self-esteem that leads you not
to quit at the first failure and persevere instead, or that keeps you
performing at the highest level of your abilities. But when vanity
moves in the direction of pomposity or self-inflation or ineducability,
it dares us to pierce it with pin or pen. The implicit agreement not to
expose each other’s faking collapses in the face of our graceless and
baseless self-love.
Because these themes are rather central to some of the essays I
published in a book called Humiliation, I will take up only issues
not discussed there, or ones that looking through the lens of faking it
might lead to different observations. I want to deal with the earliest
stages of self-consciousness about faking it, and then treat of some
especially anxiety-provoking settings in which we feel exposed and
the risk of exposure is at its highest.

Faking Sleep
Insomnia is one of those states it is virtually impossible to defeat by
direct action, unless the direct action is to admit defeat and take a
knock-out pill. Some of us are so self-tormenting that we test the pill
once we have taken it by trying to stay awake to see whether we have
been duped with a placebo. I nod off all the time reading scholarly
articles, but if I read one in order to overcome my insomnia it loses
its power to knock me out because I know I am reading not to read,
but in order to fall asleep. I see through the trick.1
We have seen this problem before: it is not easy to have the left
hand act as if it doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Yet people
do it all the time. Our vanity makes us gullible; there is no difficulty
in seeing ourselves prettier, smarter, and more interesting than in
fact we are. Indeed, some of us endure bouts of seeing ourselves as
dumber, uglier, and duller than we are. We, however, usually do not
think of underevaluation as self-deception, perhaps because we have a
hard time accounting for vanity, the usual culprit, driving it, though

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we have seen that it can. Proud pessimists, proud depressives, and

proud humble souls are hardly uncommon. But deceiving ourselves
into better or worse images of ourselves is a whole lot easier than
deceiving ourselves to sleep. Is it because tricking ourselves to sleep
can’t piggyback on our vanity as can the self-deceptions we engage
in regarding brains and looks? Or does it have more to do with the
neuropsychology of falling asleep?2
If we find it next to impossible to fake ourselves to sleep, some
of our earliest efforts at faking have to do with faking others into
believing we were asleep. We fake sleeping long before we learn to
fake looking alert and interested. It is not easy to fake being asleep.
When we fake politeness, attentiveness, or concern, our eyes are open
and we can read from the looks of others how well the act is going
over. The problem with faking sleep is that our eyes are closed, and if
we crack them open even a teeny bit to check out how the act is being
received, we’ve blown it. Remember too how difficult it is to feign a
normal conversation when you know someone is eavesdropping, as
in the case of Ophelia and Gertrude. It is not much easier to fake sleep
when someone is watching to see whether you are sleeping. You feel
the power of his gaze; it cramps your muscles, it makes your heart
pound faster and so loudly as to give you away for sure; it screws up
your breathing, it makes your eyes squint tighter than they would if
closed in sleep.
The demand to fake sleep falls on the child at two key times: (1)
when way past bedtime the kid is supposed to be asleep but is either
reading or talking to a sibling or sleepover guest, or (2) when way
past rising time the kid is trying to play on an adult’s pity to let him
lie there instead of being rousted up to go to church or in my case
shul. In adulthood we fake sleep to avoid ***; if you thought sex,
you have only yourself to blame. My thought was of avoiding the
talkative dullard seated next to me on a transcontinental flight.3
The faking of sleep is usually in the service of a bad cause – weasel-
ing out of duty, avoiding contact with a particular person. I wonder
whether the mechanism by which we come to acquire a conscience –
the process, according to some theories, by which we internalize the
Father, the parental No – doesn’t rely heavily on the experience of

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faking sleep as a child: your eyes shut, Father looking on, examining,
detecting, you unable to see him but fantasizing and anticipating the
worst.
It is actually scarier with Mother looking on, because you know
she is better at discerning the fake, even if she is more inclined to let
you lie in. Father does not care whether it is a fake, except that if you
are faking, it deprives him of the added pleasure of actually waking
you up. In either case you feel they see through you. Why are you
even putting on the charade? When they let you lie there it is not, you
suspect, out of kindness or out of love of your cuteness, but that they
wish to torment you for an entire geological age. They are making you
squirm on purpose, to let you know that your transgression is allowed
by their grace alone and not by the virtue of your deceptiveness,
should they decide to allow it. It is only later, during adolescence,
that you realize how easy it is to trick parents when, though they
pretend otherwise, they are too scared to want to find out what you
are really up to anyway.
At night the child is more likely to have his faking excused than in
the morning; wanting to read late bodes much better for his character
development than wanting to sleep late. At night the torture your
parents deliver actually helps you. They will come to your bedside
and turn your lamp off and then kiss you as you “sleep.” For once
you actually welcome their kisses because it allows you to act as if
they awakened you.
When it comes time to be rousted out to go to services to pray,
there are no kisses; there is nothing cute about you. Still they test to
see whether you are sleeping or faking, for there is a moral difference
between morning and night. Bad enough that you have to be awak-
ened in the morning when your sense of responsibility should have
done it for you, but that you are faking sleep betrays a depraved and
willful turning of your back on Responsibility. Let his heart pound a
little harder until the kid fears it will surely explode and kill him if he
fakes another second; then rip the covers off and indicate how many
minutes he has to get ready. Little did they know that I was already
conducting my own prayer service, praying they would buy the act,
praying God to intervene and make them merciful; He, however, is

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a jealous God and instead steeled their resolve to crush the whining
resistance they had yet to face.

Facing Those Who Know or You Fear Might Know

Faking sleep is an intense experience because the child knows he is
skating on thin ice, knows he is faking, and knows that it is likely he
will suffer the humiliation of having such an obvious fake exposed.
The whole world can hear the poor kid’s heart pounding. Faking sleep
is a training ground, training us for higher-stakes fakes, as when we
grow up to lecture on property or on self-consciousness and there are
philosophers of mind in the crowd.
The fear of exposure is perhaps greatest when we have to perform
before people we know to be experts. Experts come in two main vari-
eties: those who are experts on the subject on which you are lecturing,
and those who are experts on you, such as your family or friends.
Have you ever taught a class with your father or spouse or kid sit-
ting in the class? They see the act, the pose, and the pretenses. They
are painfully aware of all your nervous tics, which, until the VCR
and camcorder came along to jolt you out of your self-deceptive par-
adise, you had blithely believed yourself to have been without. You
know they must be squirming or barely able to suppress the giggles;
or they feel sick with embarrassment for you and for their connec-
tion to you, even when you are doing a job that is holding the first
category of experts at bay.4 But you suspect you haven’t held that
first class of experts – the ones who really know something about
the subject matter – at bay for long. You know they will expose your
faking it: yes, I always suspected Miller to be a fraud, substituting
stories for analysis and apparently having no knowledge of my sem-
inal article that has already said everything on the topic there is to
say.
Afterward the subject experts tell you how much they enjoyed
it. If you allow yourself to feel relief at their comments you cannot
delude yourself that they are sincere, only that they have decided to
keep you guessing as to when they will blow your cover. Yet you are

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grateful that they chose to fake pleasure in the performance rather

than expose you by setting off a gong during it, if only for your wife’s
sake. Prof Z actually left in the middle, though. You are sure it was
in disgust, not because he had to go to the bathroom. Or he had
to go to the bathroom in disgust; that’s how bad it was. Then they
kept whispering to each other and nodding, agreeing that you were a
complete and total fraud. Worse, your students in the audience were
wonderful: they rallied to you; they actually looked engaged, they
asked good questions. But of course you read their engagement as a
sign that they knew you were in trouble and they were trying to save
the situation to alleviate their own painful embarrassment at your
plight.
You somehow survive. You seem to be treated no worse than be-
fore, leading you to wonder whether the experts of the first type are
as smart as their writings and their reputations had you believing they
were; maybe they were dim enough to buy the act. Or, if not, they
enjoyed the fact that they need not fear your exposing their fraud-
ulence; the whole corrupt enterprise gets to continue, with mutual
forbearance triumphing yet again.5
Those paranoid thoughts might be held to bespeak low self-esteem,
but in fact they exist almost simultaneously or in rapid oscillation
with the opposite belief that is equally delusional but on the positive
side. You feel you were really something; man, were you good, putting
on the show of shows, strong in substance, not somber or grave. And
if you are a fraud, then what the hell is everyone else, especially Prof A,
who gave the Big Wig Lectures last year, completely vacuous, trite,
and pious, in which a good third of the time was spent clearing his
throat? If he is the real thing, then you are the real thing plus. Then in
the next second you worry that all your judgments are so infected by
emotion and interest that you don’t have a clue. You have I-beams,
logs, a whole redwood forest stuck in your eyes. Upon reflection,
days later, you decide that somewhere in the dull middle is the truth
regarding yourself, though the truth about Prof A is right where you
pegged him. In the words of George Gascoigne, one of our better
unread poets,

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Yet therewithal I can not but confesse,

That vayne presumption makes my heart to swell,
For this I thinke, not all the worlde (I guesse)
Shootes bet than I, nay some shootes not so well.6
You don’t know all you should, but you know enough to deliver
fair value, with an occasional new small idea (“new” hardly means
original; it means no one has said it in your field for about thirty
years); you muddle through. You, however, cannot shake the suspi-
cion that you are still flattering yourself, in exactly the way you would
have to serve up flattery to get yourself to fall for it. You still fear you
might be tricking yourself to believe that you are not a fraud. You
admit you fake it all the time but claim that that kind of faking is in
the interests of the scholarly enterprise and your merely staying alive
in it, not a cynical appropriation of a status you have no business
occupying. That would mean you are a total fraud, and today, at
least, you choose to believe you are not one.
I do not mean this to be a paranoid account. It is meant only to
capture anxieties that intrude occasionally; or more accurately, it is
that they threaten to intrude but only rarely do so in full regalia.
These anxieties I would guess are part of the substance, and if not
the substance then the detritus, of normal middling self-monitoring.
A certain amount of worry, which takes the form of feeling we are
faking it, has to be part of the psychological package of what it
means to have to play so many different roles. There are whole do-
mains in which we are mostly confident of our abilities to perform
the roles asked of us in a reasonably competent fashion, in which
we feel pretty much at one with the role, but not so uncritically im-
mersed that we lose our sense of whether we are doing OK in the
performance. We also know that we have honed our remedial skills
of poise and tact to save ourselves at a reasonable cost when we botch
it, or to help others save themselves when they do. These are the cen-
tral moral and social skills demanded of us in the Goffmanian moral
order.
Not that Goffman’s moral order does not have its paranoid mo-
ments, but mostly his description strikes us as apt and the stuff of
normal presentations of a normal self. Some of our faking leaves

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us feeling very vulnerable to exposure. The risks are not evenly dis-
tributed across all social domains. They are especially high when we
gauge a big hunk of our self-esteem, as in our professional compe-
tence or in courtship and sex. Nor is feeling anxiously self-conscious
likely to be distributed equally up and down the relevant hierarchy.
Those who must please others to survive, low but not so low as to
have no hope of advancing, those on the make trying to rise, those
who come from pariah or disfavored groups who fear a false move
means pogroms, those others who are stigmatized in more personal
ways – for these souls the costs of screwing up are greater.7 The com-
placently secure can afford a duller inner life, but as I have written
elsewhere, once democratic norms become generally accepted, even
high-ranking people lose their complacency and come to worry they
may be being judged as fools by those beneath them and are disturbed
that they are being so judged.8
Performing before experts is one way of describing the agonies of
courtship. No matter that each person is a miserable wreck before
the other. That other is an expert of his or her own tastes as they
apply to you. You are judged either to pass muster or to have failed.
There is no disputing the expertise of the taste that condemns you.
At my age I experience vicariously the miseries of courtship watching
my teenagers. Both my wife and I were surprised to find we feel
more excruciating pain on behalf of the pathetic boys who call the
uninterested Bess for dates than we do for Bess having to figure out
how to turn them down. Appallingly, we almost end up siding with
the guy so that we can be spared witnessing his humiliation. Bess, this
guy has called three times; he wants to come to your play; aren’t you
going to call him back and tell him when it is? Dad, he is so dumb;
I mean do you want to hear the dumb jokes he thinks are funny?
She then tells me one, and well, I guess he’s got it coming. But the
agony.
I would never be a teenager again even if it meant having a full
head of hair. You perform and are judged a fool, and the very fact
that you are performing means you have judged the other desirable;
you have hung yourself out to dry. More pathetic, though, is that our
endless vanity never lets up. It is not only rejection by those we find

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desirable that is painful; it is also no fun to be thought undesirable by

people you do not desire. Caring to be desired or approved of never
stops; we perform courtship rituals in effigy for those we do not want
(within some limits to be sure) and still care that they do not want
us. Most of us accept that people are playing in implicit leagues. To
be judged a reject by someone who you accept is in a higher league
has a certain justice to it; though painful, it can be understood as a
proper reprimand for your presumption. To be rejected by someone
in a lower league than you fancy you are in, however, is not only a
lese majestie but also is evidence, very disorienting evidence, that you
may be operating under a serious delusion as to the league you are
truly in.
What about those small-stakes encounters, though, in which the
role is second nature, the risks of exposure low, and if you are ex-
posed, no big deal – things such as having a sneezing fit, bumping
into someone when not paying attention? A quick “I’m sorry” or
“Pardon me” sets everything to right. Yet even in such trivial matters
there is danger. All it takes is one pratfall. Gerald Ford was voted out
of office because he tumbled down an airplane gangway, exposed
as faking badly the minimal competence of being able to descend a
staircase.
And what of the poor woman law student in her serious interview
suit who trips on her way into class and splats on the floor? Bad
enough had she been in jeans and a sweatshirt. Caught faking it as a
young professional, as a competent human who could get dressed up
and walk at the same time. It is worse for a woman too, because skirts
mean revelations, and the world holds women to a higher standard
of bodily monitoring than it does men. Only the poor prof who wit-
nessed the scene matched her: he had hurriedly gone to the bathroom
before class and forgotten to zip up. Up to the moment a student in
the front row pointed it out to him he had been posing as an author-
ity figure. The professor, scrambling to save himself and the woman,
decided to devote the first twenty minutes of the class to the themes
of this book, especially given that it was interview season for the stu-
dents, the season in which their own anxieties about faking it were
the centerpiece of their psychic existence.

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 caught in the act

Did You Know How Big You Blew It Back Then?

These momentary botchings of performance demand another perfor-
mance, the one of recovering. It demands, as Goffman says, and I
have noted, poise from you and hopefully tact rather than laughter
from the others. But their tact is also painful, because you know how
hard a time they are having managing your pratfall. You fear you are
now in touch with the real you; it is not the you who is running the
show, because that is precisely what the real you was not doing. The
real you was the guy asleep at the switch who didn’t see the patch
of ice; it is the real you who must now suffer. The real you feels the
shame and knows that in a nanosecond you have to set about trying
to salvage the wreckage. A red face, unwilled, and thus the perfect
response, shows you shameable. That buys you enough time for the
real you to put on a mask again. Quick, set everyone at ease for the
burden you have imposed on them not to laugh at you. Make a quick
joke. You are back playing a role, but you, yes you, are still feeling
humiliated; the real you is the one feeling the panic. And you fear the
real them will be revealed when they get the giggles at your expense.
Nothing convinces us so much of its authenticity as the giggles at
another’s expense.
We are at unaccommodated man. Unaccommodated man, how-
ever, stripped as he is, remains a social being, whose true self is a
self that cannot escape the judging eyes of others who still do not
relinquish their demand that he maintain a respectable self, for the
shame of it if he does not, and for the pride of it (yes, there is a sunny
side too) if he really manages something admirable. The core unac-
commodated you is still a creature of vanity. Thinking back then, it
must have been the real me, a very embarrassable real me, who drew
the line at how much davening I would fake, how loud I would not
cheer at a pep rally, or how nothing in the world could get me to say
“groovy.” My true inner self sets limits and draws the line at certain
kinds and amounts of faking, not so much out of fear of looking like
a fool – though that too – as the fear of actually feeling like a fool.
I opened this book with those momentary doublings that occur
when you stand outside yourself and see yourself as some not so

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friendly other might see you. But what if instead of spreading our-
selves thin over many roles and even expanding into multiple selves
and voices, we found our self shrinking down to one part of our
body? Sexual desire might reduce us in such a way to our genitals.
Compare too the feeling of being taken over by a discrediting failing.
When you were a teenager and had an enormous zit prominently ex-
posed on your face, did you not feel as if that zit were you? There was
only a little of you that remained that wasn’t that zit; that was the
part of you that felt so ever keenly that all you were to yourself and
others was that zit. Whatever desperate attempts you made at dis-
guise, masking, faking only called more attention to it. You were not
making it up; people teased you, your brothers and sisters laughed
at you; you saw people avert their eyes and be equally unable to pre-
vent their eyes from fixing on it. A stain on your pants or dress can at
times take you over too. The problem with these discrediting failings
is that they feel as if you have finally been stripped of all poses. You
are stripped, naked, authentically a discredited being. Not faking at
all.
Not just discrediting bodily blemishes, but discrediting deeds
shrink a person to an unwelcome essence too. Do you remember
the kid who in third grade wet his pants, or picked his nose and
ate it? Sure you do. No matter what he became in later life, be it a
big CEO or a famous actor, that is what you remember about him.
He, I suppose, gets the benefit of not knowing that you see him that
way, but because you see him that way he should, you feel, go into
a witness protection program. A mistake or habit at nine years old
will never let him make satisfactory amends for the disgusting im-
age rooted in your mind. What if that person were you? Will it be
forgotten? Depends what it was. The girl, Robin, will forgive if not
forget that you crashed the car into a tree because you forgot to put
it in park before you grabbed at her in teeny-bop obligatoriness, not
in anything resembling passion. Surely every kid had gaffes like that;
they are the stuff of comedy, not soul-destroying in the least. As with
the zit, you can live them down; their power to discredit is of short
duration. But what about the especially egregious lapses, the ones
that were dignity-destroying, perhaps irremediably so? Not just the

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failures to control your bodily secretions, emissions, and excretions

in a nondisgusting way, but the times you got caught up in a lie, got
caught faking it, were exposed?
Now you remember. It is all coming back. More than one kid wet
his or her pants back then, but the one you remember is the one who
made it hard on everyone else by completely collapsing, or because it
was the kid you hated already for being a crybaby. The others must
have handled it; in fact you think you may have wet your pants too.
You must have. You cannot even recall. Not all big deals turn out to
be big deals.

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 Afterword

This journey through the land of faking it has been something

of an antipilgrimage, it having no earthly or celestial city as its end
point. But it is only an antipilgrimage because there is no exit, no real
conclusion to the journey.1 As for worshipfulness, though, there is
plenty. The book is an homage to the extraordinary richness and deep
interestingness of the most mundane matters in psychic and social
life. We did indeed get mired in the Slough of Despond, as when I
contemplated the boundlessness of anti-Semitism, but for most of
the time we settled in at Vanity Fair, taking day trips into its suburbs
and nature preserves (which are testimonies to man getting nature to
fake it too). The tour guide obviously is not Bunyan’s Christian. He
is, instead, a wandering, and occasionally a meandering, Jew. Yet I
bet his sensibility is not unfamiliar to most readers.
I have taken “faking it” colloquially. I have tried to let the notion
exfoliate as it does in conversation, the style revelatory and expansive
rather than strictly logical and restrictive. If the exposition appears
at times to proceed by free association, that freeness is, trust me,
contrived. I have not so much set out to prove a thesis as to give the
reader, as I indicated in the introduction, a feel for the terrain, for the
custom of the country. The point of the book is that faking it is no
simple point, but many points. Consider, for instance, that the “it”
in faking it is variously a role, a disposition, an emotion, a character
trait, a commitment, an experience, or an entire identity.
Faking it is like the words “good” or “real,” which have engaged
philosophers from Aristotle to Austin;2 it is not easy to get a grip on
them. But just because a colloquial expression such as “faking it” has
no “single, specifiable, always-the-same meaning”3 does not mean

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that anything goes, for it does not have a large number of different
meanings either. The range of relevance is constrained. Though I
cannot see by their looks how my kids are related to me, to the
outsider they look like Millers, even if looking like Millers means
they mostly look like my wife, a Koehler. Faking it thus offers a
family of topics, and though it defies reduction to a unified theory
the little fakelets have the resemblance that family members come
to have. All these faked “its” in the last sentence of the preceding
paragraph are united also at the practical level by fears about our
competence in playing both true and false roles truly and, at an airier
level, by our anxieties about the ultimate authenticity of any of these
“its.”
Do not read me as willing to martyr myself for faking it, or as
irremediably hostile to the idea of authenticity. But, like it or not, we
are stuck with faking it. If we try to avoid it by refusing to don masks
or strip our veils we are only playing a role that has a lengthy and
complex history, predating the cynics, and ever so susceptible to hyp-
ocritical and false forms. Some accommodation with faking it is in
order. And though quests for authenticity prompt some raillery from
me, not all such quests are silly, and some indeed are necessary or un-
avoidable. What, in effect, is that niggling self-doubt, that stream of
self-consciousness that colors the voice of this book, but constantly to
be worrying about, and holding oneself up to, a standard of genuine-
ness? From whence the chronic anxiety if there weren’t some deep
urge to be whole and true? The urge, though, is often self-defeating,
for it is what keeps us doubting the quality of our motives and makes
us wonder whether we are really getting there or aren’t just faking
it. Should that doubting cease, it is no more likely to be a sign we
have become one with our true selves than that we are in the throes
of seamless self-deception or Paxil.
We seem destined to recapitulate at the individual level various his-
torical movements of authenticity and purification. We thus find our-
selves driving the money changers from our temples every now and
then, stripping away the costumery of certain roles, junking whole
roles that have become too ornate, too in-your-face false. But the
attempts to get back to true basics mostly succumb to the vanity of

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human wishes; they never quite measure up to the hopes we had for
them. We do not escape the anxieties of authenticity once we embark
on the quest or once we get to the Celestial City. Even there, doubt
exists or Satan would not have fallen.
Such movements have brought us Christianity, Protestantism
within Christianity, various civil rights and social justice movements
on behalf of pariah groups. Still, a gay out of the closet, a Jew out
of the ghetto, and Protestants of whatever sect, from the highest
Anglican to Shakers and Pentecostals, will hardly have resolved once
and for all the problems of faking it and authenticity. At best the
doubts are relocated, but I doubt they are any less intense, rather
more so in fact because of the pretension of the claim to have at-
tained the pure and the authentic.
Do not read me to be sidling toward the conclusion that the most
authentic persona might be a voice similar to this book’s narrator’s.
That voice’s anxious self-doubt, self-mockery, constant ironizing, and
occasional bitterness need not mean that this voice is meaningfully
self-examining or struggling for psychic unity and authenticity. A
possessor of such a voice may find the comedy of the process its
own reward, or as providing a topic for a book. And not all simple
pleasures or simple miseries need elude him.4
But do read me as suggesting that faking it partakes in a serious
way in the struggle to maintain one’s dignity and honor. The self-
watching internal eye that prompts the anxieties of faking it and
authenticity are very similar to the external eyes of an honor/shame
culture. In some deep respects it is all about measuring up, and mostly
about not quite measuring up. If the stakes are often not of the se-
riousness that lead to shame, they are surely the stuff of constant
embarrassment.
Some readers might wonder whatever happened to the uncon-
scious in my story. Freudians will be mystified at best, incredulously
dismissive at worst, especially considering that the master was given
only a cameo appearance as a bad comedian. The neglect is deliberate.
The unconscious, the existence of which I am not about to deny, plays
a different role in the world of fakery, largely one subsumed under

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the notion of self-deception. Though some of our motives may indeed

be unconscious, there is no reason ever to trust someone who claims
that his motivations are unconscious, nor even someone who claims
that for another, because he is usually either a therapist or one who
cants like one. “Oh, I must have done that because of some bizarre
unconscious desire” is an excuse, an avoiding of responsibility, not
an explanation, though once in a blue moon the excuse may turn
out to have some reasonable probability of being true. I continue to
believe more than ever that the diction and substantive categories of
moral discourse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – vanity,
pride, honor, self-command, passions, interest, and various emotion
terms – are so much better at getting at the richness of human social
and psychic experience than the diction of twentieth-century depth
psychology.

L e t m e s i t uat e t h i s b o o k in a broader perspective. Various

political movements and moral theories have tended to divide hu-
mankind into two groups. We thus have saved and damned, faithful
and infidel, Christian and Jew, left and right, East and West, capitalist
and proletarian, black and white, woman and man, gay and straight,
and so on. In present academic discourse the favored dichotomies
are based on the last four: class, race, and gender (including sex-
ual orientation).5 These are held by those committed to seeing the
world so cabined also to be an issue of left and right, and thus too
of being saved or damned. On certain confined terrains these binary
theories can indeed cast much light into the murk, but their acolytes
are always too ambitious on their behalf. As you have seen by now,
none of these favored dichotomies underpins my analyses, at least
consciously. Yes, I make some gestures toward the discomforts that
class, gender, and racial differences cause us as they relate to faking it
in conventional encounters. But I studiously avoid explaining much
of anything in light of these pairings; they provide examples, not
explanations.
In the kind of moral psychology that I am drawn to, none of
these contrasting pairs does so well at capturing human foible as

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my preferred pair: knave and fool. This pairing lies at the heart of
faking it, appearing often as deception (knave) and self-deception
(fool). Some might reply that the more seriously intended pairings in
the preceding paragraph are not meant to get at something as trivial
as foibles or fakery, but at more gravely grounded issues of right,
justice, and salvation. Besides, there is a lack of high seriousness in
the word “foible.” Call it sin or evil, and then make the evil banal,
and then high theory can sneak foible, in disguise, into its country
club, but not in all its riotous and varied grotesquerie. Human foible
undoes much highfalutin theory: mere mortals, dull as we are, are
inevitably too complex for pairings as restrictive as man–woman,
white–black, gay–straight, capitalist–worker, and the theories such
oppositions support.
The knave–fool pairing differs from the others because it gets at
human behavior at its most interesting; it is as expansive as its neme-
sis, the self-interested-rational-actor model of human behavior, is
limiting and limited. It forces us to contemplate, sometimes mor-
dantly, sometimes even lovingly, the wondrous complexity of the
simplest face-to-face encounters, the comic pretensions of our hopes
and dreams, our postures and poses, all our various forms of fakery.
Knave–fool does not reduce us to one dimension but keeps all our
motives, desires, fears, and hopes, all aspects of us – as workers,
friends, sexual beings, parents, children, believers or unbelievers –
on the table for discussion and gentle raillery. It is a particularizing
dichotomy. It loves stories and details, mostly comic ones, but tragic
ones too. Is not Othello a fool–knave story no less than the standard
comic trickster tale?
The knave–fool distinction, historically and perhaps even neces-
sarily, is wedded to a misanthropic style. Some may thus find the dis-
tinction a distasteful one, unworthy of decent-spirited souls. But that
misanthropy need not be of a savage Swiftian sort; it is equally suited
to the more amiable moral vision of a Fielding. The knave–fool view
of human moral possibility desperately seeks human goodness and
even recognizes its possibility, but it sees the forces arrayed against
goodness as undefeatable. It laments the fragility and vulnerability
of human goodness. It fears that the good person will be eaten alive,

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plundered, not just by knaves but by other fools too, and, worse, by
his own foibles.
Foibles, of course, are usually held to be the lot of the fool. But it
is not only the good person or the fool who is undone by foible; the
knave is undone by them too. As I tried to show in the discussions of
being hoist with one’s petard and of Chaucer’s alchemist, the knave
is often his own fool, even outsmarted by fools, just as the genre
of the slick urban knave cleaned out by his country cousin would
have it. The fool–knave distinction is porous indeed, with any single
person playing both roles quite frequently, sometimes shifting from
fool to knave and back again within the confines of a single social
interaction. Think of the motives, moves, stratagems, defenses, and
humiliations of a first date. Think too of poor Wile E. Coyote.
This book is a small effort in an ancient tradition of moral writing.
Its primary article of faith is that humankind is vain, inescapably vain,
comical and foolish, though nonetheless, both in spite of and because
of these traits, capable of extraordinary achievements. If this were not
the case, this moral tradition would have no motive. It ridicules us
for our boundless vanity because it aspires to more. Still, that is not
a reason to turn its back on the small virtue of muddling through,
even if it cannot pass up the opportunity to give muddling a heavy
dose of comic and satirical treatment. For the most part, this book
sides with those who see some virtue to our vanity. We are something
more than mere fools for wanting so badly to look good to ourselves
and to others, so badly that we actually end up delivering on some of
the goods we hope to be esteemed and praised for. The same impulse
that sends some to a plastic surgeon for an implant sends others to
deeds worthy of an epic hero.
Our vanity, though, is seldom so seamless that it succeeds in sup-
pressing all our doubts about faking it. Now come, like so many
Grendels in the night, those niggling anxieties that pierce through
the vain veneering. They disorient us in dizzying attempts to figure
out who we really are and where we really stand. But that sick feeling
in the pit of the stomach, real as it is, is also part of a pose, as I am
proving right now as I write this for public consumption. That does
not make it fake, however. Not all poses are false in the same way,

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nor even false at all. Yet we often worry they are; and we, or if you
do not wish to be included in that “we” then I, suffer real bouts of
wondering when the other shoe is going to fall, the shamming ex-
posed to the light of day. But I am not sure whether the first shoe
has even fallen yet or whether both have. I think I may have lost
count.

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 Notes

One. Introduction
1. Robert Nozick (Philosophical Explanations 257) is willing to confess to
much more: “My departmental colleagues are meticulous intellects who
instill in students the importance of mastering all the details whereof they
speak; while I think it is important for students also to learn how and
when to fake things, to glide over topics with a plausible patina.”
2. See Miller, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking; “Clint Eastwood and Equity”;
“Deep Inner Lives.”
3. See Kerrigan’s superb Revenge Tragedy, making the argument for the nec-
essary linking of revenge and drama.
4. One still cannot quite say “woman on the street” without raising improper
suggestions.
5. Emerson, “The Comic,” 8.157.

Two. Hypocrisy and Jesus

1. Trollope, The Claverings ch. 5.
2. Nietzsche sees us as no less given over to lies and self-deception when
sleeping as when awake, rather more so in fact: “Man permits himself to
be lied to at night, his life long, when he dreams, and his moral sense never
even tries to prevent this – although men have been said to have overcome
snoring by sheer will power” (“On Truth and Lie,” 43–44).
3. See Shklar, Ordinary Vices 58; Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity 16,
comes close to making the same observation.
4. See Fingarette’s discussion of sincerity (Self-Deception 50–52), distinguish-
ing a shallow and a deep sincerity: in the former the person means the
promise he makes at the moment he is making it, but he is too thoughtless
and free with them and they are unreliably kept; in the latter the person
spells things out to others the same as he spells them out to himself and
does so in a way that “reflects the engagement correctly and aptly.” As
usual, good novelists get there first: “That he was sincere, too, no one who
knew him well ever doubted, – sincere, that is, as far as his intentions went.
When he endeavoured to teach his flock that they should despise money,
he thought that he despised it himself” (Trollope, Rachel Ray ch. 5).

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 notes to pages 11–15

5. On hypocrisy in general see Shklar, Ordinary Vices 45–86; the most astute
unraveling of the vice I know of is Melville’s in The Confidence Man.
The classic treatment of the religious hypocrite as con man is Moliere’s
Tartuffe.
6. The judgment of hypocrisy in this case is an external one, about ranking
the propriety of certain motives in displays of piety. Jesus’ hypocrite is
hardly being dishonest in the sense of failing to match words and deeds
or words and intentions; he likes giving alms because he wants the glory,
which he is noisily open about. What Jesus is complaining about is the
hijacking of a pious ritual for such unashamed glorying.
7. See Melville on strategies of maintaining self-respect under the burden of
gratitude; The Confidence Man chs. 3–4.
8. Jesus is not counseling giving anonymously, for that is not suggested here;
the pauper will still know the identity of his benefactors. Anonymous
giving does not solve the problem of playing to the glorious applause of
one’s internal audience. The pride of turning one’s back on the more ob-
vious public attempts at approbation is a frequent topic of seventeenth-
century moralists; see discussion in Lovejoy, Reflections 99–112. Even
earlier the friar in Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale tells about his own
“private” self-mortifications lest they go unnoticed.
9. This is the standard conundrum at the core of the philosophical self-
deception problem; see ch. 4n6.
10. Many in the self-esteem movement would say that our psychic biasing is
more prone to see our own specklike faults as logs.
11. Jesus does not call those who are about to stone the adulteress in
John 8 hypocrites. He confines the word “hypocrite” to settings where
it can sensibly have its Greek meaning of theatrical actor, which is
precisely why the trumpeting almsgiver is to him the hypocrite par
excellence.
12. An aside on the mote–beam metaphor: how is one supposed to visualize
a log sticking out of an eye unless it be the eye of Polyphemus? I find the
image puzzling. How can we not know we have a log in our eye even if we
are blinded by it? Consider too the problem with specks in our own eyes;
they hurt so much we feel they must be logs. But ask someone to look in
there and they see nothing. The log–speck metaphor appears better suited
to describing how our own little pains seem so much greater than other
people’s big pains.
13. See Elster’s discussion, Alchemies 87–88, on the “double perversity of
amour-propre.” See also La Rochefoucauld, M 31.
14. See Hebb’s experimental evidence that we are much better at reading oth-
ers’ emotions than our own (“Emotion in Man and Animal”).
15. A similar case for going easy on the hypocrisy of blaming others for faults
one has oneself is made by Hazlitt (“On Cant,” 360): “We often see that
a person condemns in another the very thing he is guilty of himself. Is
this hypocrisy? It may, or it may not. If he really feels none of the disgust

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and abhorrence he expresses this is quackery and impudence. But if he

really expresses what he feels (and he easily may, for it is the abstract
idea he contemplates in the case of another, and the immediate temp-
tation to which he yields in his own, so that he probably is not even
conscious of the identity or connexion between the two), then this is
not hypocrisy, but want of strength and keeping in the moral sense.”
Hazlitt, in his essay, makes hypocrisy a very narrow category. Much of
what many of us would call hypocrisy he claims is canting, the former
involving a true inward despising of what he affects outwardly to admire.
The canter affects to admire more than he really does, as when people of
a certain class and set of pretensions ooh and ah over Merchant–Ivory
films or the latest BBC production on Masterpiece Theater. Not that
Hazlitt is much easier on canters than on hypocrites: “Hypocrisy is the
setting up a pretension to a feeling you never had and have no wish for.
There are people who are made up of cant, that is of mawkish affectation
and sensibility; but who have not sincerity enough to be hypocrites, that
is, have not hearty dislike or contempt enough for anything, to give the
lie to their puling professions of admiration and esteem for it” (366).
Hazlitt is one of the brighter of the unread jewels in the canon of English
literature.
16. Langland, Piers Plowman B 1.183–184: “You will no more benefit from
your masses and devotions than Malkyn does of her virginity that no man
wants to take from her anyway.”
17. Shklar (Ordinary Vices 49) suggests that Jesus recognized the tension
within his own message that leads him to blame the faultfinder for seeing
motes in others’ eyes while himself finding faults in ostentatious almsgiv-
ing and obeying the Sabbath rules, among many others. The rebuker’s role
is a tricky one.
18. Thus too the invective hurled at the scribes and Pharisees in Matt.
23.23ff.
19. Jesus also might be suggesting that his healing makes it under the old
Sabbath rules because it is no different from feeding a flock, which he
understands his healing of the sick to be in his role as Shepherd. The
metaphor then would make the sick woman analogous to an animal
that is being fed on the Sabbath. Hence no violation of the rules. But
such an interpretation would miss the sense that Jesus is out to chal-
lenge an entire legal culture, not just the interpretation of one particular
law.
20. Jesus has an answer to this: though it is not a good thing to be ostentatious
in matters of daily ritual (where I advise small self-deceptions to get the
motive right), I am spreading the gospel, and my ostentation in such a
cause is necessary, for I am trying to get the word out.
21. See Bierce’s very Protestant definition: “rite, n. A religious or semi-religious
ceremony fixed by law, precept or custom, with the essential oil of sincerity
carefully squeezed out of it.”

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Three. Antihypocrisy
1. Montaigne, 3.10, “On Restraining Your Will,” 1157–1158.
2. Twain, “Capt. Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven,” 854.
3. Is the person who pretends to vices he does not have a hypocrite? Does
culpable false seeming run only in the direction of falsifying upward –
pretending to virtue – rather than falsifying downward? What of the clean-
cut kid pretending to badness – the drinking, womanizing, drugging that
I mentioned earlier – in order to have the tough guys think him not so
contemptible? Do we call him a hypocrite because, given the frame of
reference, he is pretending upward toward the cool; or do we refuse to
“honor” him with the dignity of hypocrisy and instead think him merely
pathetic, a wannabe?
4. See Elster, Alchemies 93–94.
5. On unostentatious virtue as suspect because of the approbation of one’s
internal audience, see the discussion in Elster, Alchemies 92–94; and Love-
joy, Reflections 99–112.
6. One of the most insightful character studies of the pridefulness of humility
is Trollope’s Rev. Crawley in Last Chronicle of Barset.
7. On pus-drinking saints, see Bell, Holy Anorexia; also my discussion in
The Anatomy of Disgust 157–163.
8. Trollope, Rachel Ray ch. 5.
9. Franklin, Autobiography 90.
10. Hávámal st. 76, my trans.
11. Lovejoy, Reflections 153–193; see Smith, TMS VI.iii.46: “The great secret
of education is to direct vanity to proper objects”; also Hirschman, The
Passions 20–31.
12. Even La Rochefoucauld appreciates the good things that flow from our
vanity; see, for example, M 150, 200, 220.
13. The Idiot II.11.
14. Victor Klemperer in one of the many astute asides in his diaries captures
the hokum of the pastoral in this way: “When politicians idealize rural
labor, they are always being hypocritical” (I Will Bear Witness July 19,
1937, I.230).
15. On pastoral cultures and mandatory sheep rustling, see Herzfeld, Poetics,
and Campbell, Honour. Hampshire supposes that “the ideal of natural-
ness of feeling, uncorrupted by reflection” is unattainable “once we have
built up a sophisticated vocabulary of intentional states, of emotions, sen-
timents, attitudes” (“Sincerity,” 248–249). I have argued elsewhere that
lack of a specific and rich vocabulary of emotions need not prevent implicit
emotion talk of substantial subtlety. The feeling, with a description of the
context generating it, will do much to make up for a lack of a specific
emotion vocabulary. See Humiliation ch. 3.
16. See Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance; Packer, Transcendentalists
466–470.
17. Raverat, Period Piece 214.

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 notes to pages 26–33

18. Aquinas, Summa 2.2 Q111, A4.

19. On this tradition, see Hirschman, Rhetoric 10–42.
20. Nashe, Christs Teares 75v.
21. TMS II.ii.2.1; in Smith’s scheme it is not via self-deception that we end up
adopting more generous principles but rather by a sympathetic mechanism
making us see our own motives and behaviors from the viewpoint of an
impartial spectator, whose views we then are moved to adopt as our own.
Still, the impartiality of the impartial spectator is often threatened by
various self-deceptions.
22. Elster, Alchemies 332–342.
23. John Locke was not distressed in the least by adding the heavenly
payoff to the scales so that virtue would be more attractive to mere
earthly mortals. The heathens that argued that virtue was its own re-
ward “satisfied not many with such airy commendations.” One must open
the eyes of men “upon the endless, unspeakable joys of another life” to
“find something solid and powerful to move them” to virtue; see Locke,
Reasonableness c. 245, and the discussion in Herzog, Without Founda-
tions 104–105.
24. See Tocqueville (429; discussed in Elster, Alchemies 359), who doubts
that a Christian who alleges as the motive of his good deeds his quest
for salvation is really properly describing his true motivation: “I respect
them too much to believe them.” But maybe Tocqueville is holding God
and God fearers to motives that may offend Tocqueville’s sensibility and
ours but not His. Might it not be that the rules of non–self-interested
motives just don’t apply when the self-interest is pursuit of God’s favor?
Scripture is full of instances in which the message from God is, “Obey
me or I will squash you, and you should praise and obey me precisely
because of fear.” Fear is an emotion that prompts one kind of very basic
self-interested behavior. Maybe there is a double standard. Ostentatious
shows of piety directed only toward God, even if intended to get treasure
in heaven or avoid annihilation, are OK. If directed toward man, sorry,
you are a hypocrite.
25. This is a corollary to the well-known Weberian and Tawnian theses on
Calvinist anxieties about salvation.
26. The most famous testimony to Hume’s sweetness of character and great-
ness of soul comes from his friend Adam Smith. See the letter from Smith
to William Strahan, Nov. 9, 1776; reproduced in Hume, Essays, Moral,
Political and Literary xliii–xlix.
27. Hume, “On the Dignity and Meanness of Human Nature,” Essays, Moral,
Political and Literary 86.

Four. Virtues Naturally Immune to Hypocrisy

1. In The Mystery of Courage I argued that ultimately the distinction be-
tween physical and moral courage collapses, except on one issue: moral
courage must be lonely courage. Now it occurs to me that susceptibility

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to hypocrisy might also be a basis for distinguishing them. Shamming

moral courage is a frequent vice in the academy. One “speaks out” against
racism, imperialism, sexism, and so on. Zero risk is run, though the
air is thick with self-congratulation for taking a courageous stand. Such
hypocrisy is a vice not only of the PC crowd; I am one of those older
people who think some wars need to be fought, but I surely won’t be the
one fighting them.
2. Some kinds of fakery are not even vaguely virtuous. Thus the malingerer
who feigns illness, or Falstaff, who lies about deeds not done or stages
fake brave deeds, as when he stabs corpses and then claims to have killed
them; I Henry IV 5.4.128.
3. See Miller, Mystery of Courage 42–45, 84–88.
4. According to one compelling view, for a threat to work as a threat it must
induce the behavior it desires in the other; to have to carry out the threat
means the threat did not do its job. See Schelling, Strategy of Conflict
35–43.
5. You surely want to deceive your enemies about more than your courage;
see Sun Tzu, The Art of War. Moreover, you may want to deceive them
equally about your courage in either direction. You mostly want them to
fear your bravery, but the common Scythian tactic was to feign cowardly
flight and then turn and hack down their pursuers; see Plato, Laches
191a–c.
6. This is the core of the self-deception puzzle in the philosophical literature.
The literature is extensive; see, for example, Davidson (“Deception”),
Pears (Motivated Irrationality), Fingarette (Self-Deception), and Mele
(Self-Deception Unmasked). The issues seem largely to center on how
the mind can compartmentalize itself to let the deception work. Lazar,
however, would remind us that much belief formation takes place not
in a cold, rational environment but under the influence of strong emo-
tions, where our purely rational systems are being pressured (“Deceiving
Oneself”). It is now theorized that the brain is made up of various mech-
anisms, systems, and structures that have a quasi-independent existence
and are in incomplete communication with each other, thus allowing for
self-deception, internal arguments, and so on; see Pinker, How the Mind
Works 421–423; also Trivers, Social Evolution 416: “The mind must be
structured in a very complex fashion, repeatedly split into public and pri-
vate portions, with complicated interactions between the subsections.”
The problem remains a puzzle.
7. OED s.v. politeness, 3, from a manners book of 1702: Eng. Theophrast.
108.
8. The nineteenth-century novels of manners are masterful at presenting these
perfectly polite conversational battles, for which it is hard to improve upon
the conversations of Elinor and Lucy in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.
9. Proper use of tact and poise is the central moral virtue in what is often
thought of as Goffman’s amoral universe; Giddens, “Erving Goffman,”

244
 notes to pages 37–56

113, makes the case for Goffman’s world being a moral order precisely
because of the centrality of the virtue of tact.
10. Mansfield Park ch. 28.
11. Sense and Sensibility ch. 21.
12. Santayana, Soliloquies 133–134, quoted in Goffman, The Presentation of
Self 57.
13. See Lovejoy, Reflections 135–136. The seventeenth-century French moral-
ists viewed the chief motive behind vanity to be the desire for praise, not
the fear of shame. The two go hand in hand, but the inner lives of per-
sons whose primary motive is fear of shame are miles apart from those of
people whose primary motive is to seek praise.
14. Notice that the log in our own eye not only causes us to exaggerate the
faults of the other but also can just as easily construe his bad intentions
as good if seeing them that way serves the cause of our self-love.
15. Chesterfield, Letters March 9, 1748; the last sentence is from Oct. 19,
1748.
16. Sense and Sensibility ch. 7.
17. For example, ch. 4, where each plays up to the expectations of her type
and each is delighting in playing it up for the other.
18. Elinor states clearly that the demands of propriety, meeting the expecta-
tions of others, govern only in small matters. Thus to Marianne: “. . . but
when have I advised you to adopt their sentiments or conform to their
judgment in serious matters?” (ch. 17).

Five. Naked Truth

1. See the discussion in Elster about contrary mechanisms being equally plau-
sible in so many settings; virtually every proverb coexists with another
proverb that depends on an opposite view of what the default position of
so-called human nature is; Alchemies 10–23.
2. On offers you cannot refuse but not in the Mafioso sense, see Austen,
Mansfield Park ch. 12: “I wish my good aunt would be a little less busy!
And to ask me in such a way too! without ceremony, before them all,
so as to leave me no possibility of refusing. That is what I dislike most
particularly. It raises my spleen more than anything, to have the pre-
tence of being asked, of being given a choice, and at the same time
addressed in such a way as to oblige one to do the very thing, whatever
it be!”
3. See Jones v. Clinton, 990 F. Supp. 657 (E. D. Arkansas), 1998.
4. Trollope, Framley Parsonage ch. 24; see also Nyberg, The Varnished Truth,
in praise of varnishing truth.
5. See Goffman, Presentation of Self 81n6, who, like Mead, believes that
many of the psychological and philosophical puzzles about self-deception
may be better understood by starting from the social setting and moving
in.

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Six. In Divine Services and Other Ritualized Performances

1. Bergson’s theory of the comic puts the pratfall right at its center; Laughter.
The comic, in his view, depends on rendering humans as puppets or mere
lumps of matter.
2. The story never ceases to prompt fear and trembling. In one Jewish tra-
dition Isaac dies of fright and needs resurrecting with divine dew. The
tradition derives from a gloss on Gen. 31.42, in which Jacob makes ref-
erence to “the God of my father, the God of Abraham, and the fear
of Isaac”; see Etz Hayim, Haftarah for Pesah, Intermediate Shabbat,
1307.
3. I am desperate to locate the citation: about fifteen years ago I heard a
paper read at a medieval conference quoting such a text, but I cannot
recall who gave it or what year.
4. The first mention comes from Evragius (4th century) as the noonday de-
mon that tempts the hermit from the duties of the ascetic life. Acedia,
before it was reformulated as sloth, was specifically understood as de-
spair, what we would think of as depression, characterized by boredom,
dejection, and disgust with fulfilling religious duty. See Wenzel, The Sin
of Sloth.
5. See, for example, http://www.project-awareness.org/page shmooze.htm
and http://www.aish.com/spirituality/growth/Soul Matters 5 Prayer Made
Practical.asp.
6. Maimonides is stricter. You must concentrate during prayer services on
the prayers. “The mind should be freed from all extraneous thoughts . . .
and not regard the service as a burden which he is carrying” (Book of
Adoration “Laws of Prayer,” 2.ii.4.16).
7. Behavior primarily motivated to set an example is often felt to be some
sort of faking it, a kind of pious fraud.
8. Catholic mental prayer can still be roughly scripted, as in St. Ignatius’
spiritual exercises, but with the particulars left to the worshiper.
9. Though we cannot will spontaneity, we can fake it rather convincingly at
times. When we are surprised we script our behavior into the expected
way of acting surprised. You, for instance, can be genuinely surprised by
a gift or surprise party and still know that you must show off that surprise
in a certain way to please the crowd or else be perceived as an ingrate and
a bungler of the occasion.
10. See my discussion in The Mystery of Courage 215–217.
11. Raverat, Period Piece 212.
12. See Ta’anit 2.15a in Steinsaltz, Talmud XIV, 4.
13. Jewish ritual takes these kinds of oaths to God seriously indeed. It is
too dangerous to have them floating around unretracted. The Kol Nidre
prayer chanted at the commencement of the Yom Kippur liturgy voids all
such casual and not so casual imprecations. See Rawson, God, Gulliver,
and Genocide 12, on exaggerated murderous invective, “a volatile com-
bination of ‘meaning it,’ not meaning it, and not not meaning it.”

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 notes to pages 67–75

14. See, for example, Psalms 44, 74.

15. For example, the exquisite Psalm 92; see Smith, TMS passim.
16. A person who goes on too long or too often speaking in tongues, I have
been informed, will be given a subtle message to wrap it up. When people
stop interpreting or refuse to interpret the sounds the ecstatic person is
uttering, the point is to be taken to close up shop. The next week the pastor
might even focus on the text that says that interpretation is required for
a valid revelation; 1 Cor. 14.5ff; 2 Pet. 1.20–21. There are also different
practices among Pentecostal churches. Some consider that the longer you
run into lunch time the more successful the service; others might prefer
mobilizing more social control to give brother X or sister Z the message
in order to get home before the football game starts.
17. See Steinsaltz, Essential Talmud 102.
18. Maimonides, Book of Adoration “Laws of Prayer,” 2.ii.9.2–3. For another
strategy for passing time during the Amidah see Goldberg, Bee Season
50–51.
19. Maimonides, 2.ii.10.1.
20. Maimonides, 2.ii.6.2. Anxiety about finishing the Amidah in a reason-
able time plays a role in Chasidic tales; see, for example, the story of
Reb Mordecai available in The Making of Chassidim: A Letter Written
by the Previous Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn
(Brooklyn, NY: Sichos In English) at http://www.sichosinenglish.org/
books/making-chassidim/08.htm.
21. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning 13–14.
22. Leviticus 22.4. Rabbinic law says it is permissible for a scholar of repute,
known for his truthfulness, to lie about the bed he has slept in “lest signs
of nocturnal emission be found there” (Maimonides, Book of Torts “Laws
of Robbery and Lost Property,” 11.iii.14.13).
23. “Hineni,” in Silverman, High Holiday Prayer Book 124; see also
Maimonides, Book of Adoration “Laws of Prayer,” 2.ii.15.6–7 (priestly
benediction is effective even if the priest is not a man of integrity. The
benediction’s force comes from God, not the priest).
24. See Elster, Alchemies 336: “Neither philosophy nor social science is of
much help in explaining how we may believe partly or weakly in the
ideas that we present ourselves to others as believing fully and strongly . . .
The constant need to assert one’s belief in communism in public probably
induced some kind of mental assent.” This modifies a position, similar to
Greenblatt’s, that Elster had supposed earlier to govern in pathological
cultures of hypocrisy such as obtained in the USSR or Mao’s China, in
which the claimed hatred of the class enemy was entirely faked. But one
can fake only so long before one may become wholly or in part what one
is faking.
25. Consider the plight of people in sixteenth-century England forced in the
1550s to profess Protestantism, Catholicism, and then Protestantism as
Edward gave way to Mary, who gave way to Elizabeth.

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26. There is a large literature on the conversos and Marranos; see, for example,
Bodian (“Men of the Nation”) and Netanyahu (The Marranos of Spain
and Toward the Inquisition).
27. Vonnegut, Mother Night p. v.

Seven. Say It Like You Mean It

1. La Rochefoucauld, M 559.
2. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature 2.1.1.
3. Or else we would have had to generate a different understanding of what
constituted an offense.
4. The thrust of much of Ekman’s research is to claim differentiable muscle
movement for genuine and fake, involuntary and voluntary, emotion dis-
play. But even if we concede the physiological point to Ekman we simply
are not very good at picking up on the falsity; most of us can’t detect lies
very well. See Ekman et al., “A Few Can Catch a Liar.” Pinker, How the
Mind Works 421, comes up with what I find an implausible suggestion that
emotions evolved because they were hard to fake. His hypothesis cannot
survive your last conversation with your next-door neighbor. Remember
that the inept faker has the vanity of his interlocutor helping him sell his
false positives. See too the discussion in Nyberg, The Varnished Truth
115–122.
5. The existence or mere indiscernibility of the blush in dark-skinned people
is discussed by Darwin, Expression of Emotions 315–320; nineteenth-
century racists argued that the blush showed the moral superiority of the
Caucasian race; see Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color 37.
6. Guilt has come to bear Freudian baggage, which remorse is still mercifully
free of. Guilt is now often thought to be more a condition of which the
emotion remorse is properly one of the features.
7. The psychological mechanism is more complicated. It is, I believe, that at
some primitive core we never really believe an accident is an accident. On
the surface this looks like strict liability, but it harbors a belief in animism.
Thus the doorsill was out to get us. Why else curse it? See also Miller, The
Anatomy of Disgust 197–204.
8. Thanks to Larry Kramer for sharing this experience.
9. See Tavuchis on apology versus excuse, Mea Culpa 17–18; and Goffman
on giving accounts in Relations in Public 109–113.
10. Austin, “A Plea for Excuses,” 177.
11. Tavuchis’s helpful treatment of apology does not adequately distinguish
regret from remorse, nor does it worry about the fakeability problem. For
a recent critique of the dubious role of apology in so-called restorative
justice, see Acorn, Compulsory Compassion.
12. Smith makes remorse a compound sentiment “made up of shame from the
sense of the impropriety of past conduct; of grief for the effects of it; of
pity for those who suffer by it; and of the dread and terror of punishment

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from the consciousness of the justly provoked resentment of all rational

creatures” (TMS II.ii.2.3). The mere dread and terror of punishment are
not sufficient for true remorse without the other components.
13. Langland, Piers Plowman B.V.126.
14. Johnson, A General History 53.
15. Lewis, Babbitt 1.4.
16. Aren’t we ashamed of our accidents? We blame ourselves for being the
kind of klutzes we are. The distinction between shame and guilt loses its
force here, because whether we apologize for what we did or for who we
are, we still feel we owe reparations.
17. There is a style of sanctity that seeks suffering and welcomes being
wronged so as to be able to forgive or ignore the offense; this is not
the stoical style because it is too active, but it incorporates aspects of the
stoic regimen. The pathological variant is the battered wife syndrome; the
saintly variant is Myshkin.
18. All three elements are necessary; no satisfaction, no absolution, and no
absolution if satisfaction is not preceded by contrition and confession.
Judaism also makes confession necessary; punishment and satisfaction
alone are not sufficient; see Maimonides, Book of Knowledge “Laws of
Repentance,” 1.v.1.1.
19. See further Aquinas, Suppl. Q 15, A 3 on suitable forms of satisfaction.
20. Aquinas, Suppl. Q 12, A 2.
21. Maimonides, “Laws of Repentance,” 1.v.2.1.
22. Maimonides, Book of Torts 11.iv.5.10; see further “Laws of Repentance,”
1.v.2.9 on the sin of continued refusal to forgive.
23. I am adapting this from Reykdœla saga ch. 23, taking some small but not
crucial liberties. See my discussion in Bloodtaking and Peacemaking ch. 2.
24. See Miller, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking 368n22; remarkably, the cere-
mony of begging forgiveness mimics a gruesome ceremony in which the
avenger is charged to take revenge by someone displaying the head or
some other body part of the victim before him; see Miller, “Choosing the
Avenger,” 202–203.
25. See, for example, Njáls saga ch. 123.
26. See Miller, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking 61–68, on the very narrow range
in which people understood the claim of accident to be acceptable.
27. Even the once meek and weak Isabella Linton comes to understand that
forgiveness worth the name is inevitably coupled with the ability to take
revenge: “It is utterly impossible I can ever be revenged, and therefore I
cannot forgive him” (Bronte, Wuthering Heights ch. 17).
28. Suppose that the parents declare themselves satisfied by the groused I’m
sorry they have extorted but that the wronged sibling is not satisfied.
In the forgiveness God grants the fasting faithful on Yom Kippur, He
pardons only His claim against the sinner; the claim of the person the
sinner wronged still must be satisfied; see Mishna Yoma 8.9 (quoted in
Silverman, High Holiday Prayer Book 207).

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29. Thus Ahab, I Kings 21.17.

30. Boehm, Blood Revenge 133–136.
31. Trollope, Can You Forgive Her? ch. 39.
32. Hampshire (“Sincerity,” 249) refers to this pleasuring in our own negative
emotions as a sentimentalization of the emotion. We thus experience not
true remorse in this circumstance but sentimental remorse, and Hampshire
takes it to be fundamentally insincere. What if the self-satisfaction comes
some time after an initially sincere remorse that prompted forgiveness?
The forgiveness probably could not be revoked on such grounds, but the
forgiver would be justified in feeling a bit snookered and look for some
pretext to reopen hostilities.
33. Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness 1.411.
34. Eliot, Adam Bede ch. 29.
35. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society 170; Trollope, The Way We Live Now ch. 8;
also see ch. 100.
36. The avoidance of embarrassment, or of making a scene, surely explains
as much of Milgram’s (Obedience to Authority) experimental results as
does his theory of obedience to those in hierarchically superior positions.
37. Naipaul, Mimic Men 70.
38. Bierce is especially good on the insincerity of repentance; see his definitions
for impenitence, pardon, penitent, redress, and reparation.
39. From Quintus Curtius, first century a . d . , from a speech of a man giving
a reason a band of soldiers in Alexander’s army, mutilated by the Persians,
should not return home; cited in Konstan, Pity 23.
40. Maimonides argues that impenitence is its own punishment because it
justifies punishment of a more aggressive sort in the hereafter (Book of
Knowledge “Laws of Repentance,” 1.v.6.3).
41. This is only the tip of the iceberg on the variety of practices that use the
apologetic form but that don’t engage the theme of faking it as fruitfully.
Someone steps on your foot or bumps you hard because he was not mon-
itoring his movements, and you apologize to him. For whatever reason,
you may have no interest in making this a big deal and just want to termi-
nate the affair by using your I’m sorry to indicate no offense was taken.
Such an I’m sorry demands a response, however, and the proper response
is not “I accept your apology” or “I forgive you, son.” Your I’m sorry is
meant as a polite request for the other to make a submissive gesture. It all
happens so fast it is almost reflexive, but if the other does not ask to be
pardoned, you will have been wronged.
Compare the very different and hostilely intoned “Excuse me!” You
know the type: someone who feels he has been slighted in some way not
to be forgiven. This is not a request for an apology, but an indication of a
refusal to accept one because it was not already proffered.
Then there are those routinized I’m sorry’s, excuse me’s, and pardon
me’s that are designed to preempt offenses about to be given. Thus if I
cut in front of you I ask you for proto-forgiveness for the offense I would

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have given you had I not asked you to forgive me in advance, a request
that you cannot deny given the rules of polite excusings. So expected is
your pardon that I am already pressing my body into the contested space
as I am saying my pardon me. Your conceding the space is pretty much
a given, or else I wouldn’t have presumed upon you in the first place. Yet
should I not give my little sorry in a properly pleasant tone, an unignorable
offense will have been given.

Eight. Flattery and Praise

1. See Konstan’s discussion of Plutarch’s “How to Tell a Flatterer from a
Friend” (Friendship 98–103). Dante puts flatterers in the eighth circle of
hell, where they wallow in excrement that looks as if it came from human
privies. They are covered with “merda” (Inferno, 18.113–114). There is
a rich anticourt, anticourtier tradition that makes flattery the currency of
court.
2. Sonnet 114, v. 2; see Montaigne 2.16, “Of Glory,” 703. Even the re-
doubtable twelfth-century Abbot Samson of Bury St. Edmunds was not
immune to it, though he flattered himself to be only feigning to go
along with his flatterers, claiming that he could see through their designs:
“I am forced into many shams and pretences to keep the convent peaceful”
(Jocelin of Brakelond, Chronicle 38).
3. One commentator concludes, “There’s nothing in Plutarch to flush out the
flatterer”; Konstan, Friendship 101, quoting Graham Little, Friendship 19.
Without being very cynical or vicious we may want friends that make us
feel good by flattering us on occasion. I have my parents, my spouse, my
children, my conscience, and the dean to reprove me; why have friends to
do the same?
4. Dostoyevsky, The Idiot I.7, 74.
5. Even God and the saints are chided as ingrates for not making fit return
on the multitude of prayers extolling their greatness. Thus the rituals of
humiliating saints, putting their bones on the ground or in dung, or beating
their relics, when they refuse to aid the faithful against their enemies; see
Geary, “Humiliation of Saints,” and Little, Benedictine Maledictions. An
analogous ritual in Jewish tradition is performed when God has not seen
fit to send rain to relieve a drought. A public fast would be decreed and
the ark would be taken out of town and ashes placed on it; see Ta’anit
2.15a in Steinsaltz, Talmud XIV, 3.
6. See Silbermann, Grovelling 74.
7. See La Rochefoucauld’s related thought: “The mark of extraordinary merit
is to see that those who envy it most are forced to praise it” (M 95).
Closely linked with this is the form of envy known as emulation. The
praise that issues from the emulous person is not as meanly infected as
is the reluctant praise of the conventionally envious. The piano student
desperately wants to surpass the maestro who teaches her. But she is moved

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to tears by his performances – not to flatter him, though there might be

competition among the students to see who can get points for being moved
the most, but because the master is an embodiment of all the virtues that
draws her to the enterprise. On the necessity of nearness in the relevant
hierarchy for envy to arise, see variously Aristotle, Rhetoric 2.10.1388a5;
Hume, Treatise 2.2.8.377; Swift, Poetical Works, “Verses on the Death of
Dr. Swift,” vv. 13–14.
8. Hegel’s parable of master and slave is not quite accurate as either a soci-
ological or a psychological matter; Phenomenology of the Spirit B.IV.A.
Lords took great care to make sure the mockery they suffered at the hands
of their slaves was limited to fixed forms and fixed occasions; and surely
they cared to be deferred to by their inferiors.
9. Trollope, The Duke’s Children ch. 77.
10. Austen, Sense and Sensibility ch. 10.
11. Silbermann mentions “negative flattery,” a “so-called gesture of friend-
ship,” in which his colleague made criticisms of insignificant passages in
his writing and then praised parts of “which, as he well knew, I was par-
ticularly proud. Behind this mask of a brave and loyal lover of the truth
we find a great many arse-lickers” (Grovelling 75).
12. Congreve, The Way of the World 1.6.
13. Melville, The Confidence Man ch. 12.
14. Chesterfield, Letters October 16, O. S. 1747.
15. Boswell, Life of Johnson 188; aetat 45. 1754; Johnson never forgave
Chesterfield for treating him with contempt when Johnson sought his
patronage for the dictionary.
16. Diderot, Paradox.

Nine. Hoist with His Own Petard

1. The anxiety of talking to Hamlet is given delightful treatment by Stoppard,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
2. Except perhaps for Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, it seems that obses-
sive self-observation can only approach but never surpass in any interest-
ing way Montaigne, Hamlet, and, in a different but equally telling way,
Samuel Pepys.
3. Adam Bede ch. 17; also on the same general theme from Romola (ch. 64):
“Our naked feelings make haste to clothe themselves in propositions
which lie at hand among our store of opinions, and to give a true account
of what passes within us something else is necessary besides sincerity, even
when sincerity is unmixed.” And for a philosophical treatment of the same
issue of how hard it is to name or describe our internal states, especially
given that the very effort to do so is part of the mix of what that internal
state will in the end be, see Hampshire, “Sincerity,” 236–244.
4. “This above all” follows immediately upon “Neither a borrower nor a
lender be, / For loan oft loses both itself and friend, /And borrowing dulleth
th’edge of husbandry.” Can Polonius be talking merely of creditor–debtor

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relations? Gauge exactly your financial means – “costly thy habits as thy
purse can buy” – and then you will not be false to any creditors? But then
“this above all” bursts the restraints of such a narrow reading, and we get
instead Delphic wisdom.
5. Hamlet means to delve under them to place an explosive charge to collapse
their mine. Countermines could also seek to gain entry to the mine by tun-
neling above and pouring in lethal substances, or by entering and fighting.
6. See Keen, Laws of War 48–50, for examples. In saga Iceland the formal
blood-brotherhood ceremony required passing under turf to reemerge as
brothers; see my “Ordeal in Iceland.”
7. This is the term the rake Willoughby uses in an access of self-castigation
in Sense and Sensibility ch. 44.
8. Alanis Morrissette, an unremarkable Canadian pop singer, had a 1996 hit
called “Ironic” in which most of her examples of irony involved no irony
at all. One of the many merits of the Internet is that it prompts people who
otherwise would not feel compelled to write about such things to do so.
Her mistaken ideas about the meaning of irony have spawned numerous
hostile and amusing commentaries.
9. Following Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity 120: “Irony is one of those
words, like love, which are best not talked about if they are to retain any
force of meaning.”
10. Grettir’s saga ch. 45; Njáls saga ch. 92.
11. She has the added problem of being and looking young and having to
advise elders. Trollope has a nice treatment of a twenty-three-year-old
cleric giving his first sermon to graybeards (Barchester Towers vol. 2,
ch. 4).
12. The ironist doesn’t necessarily improve his ironic talents with practice.
One suspects that if you have to practice at it you are without the talent
for it in the first place.

Ten. The Self, the Double, and the Sense of Self

1. Wharton, The Custom of the Country ch. 6.
2. Hume, Treatise 1.4.6.
3. See Nozick, Philosophical Explanations 90–94 (the self synthesizes itself
by reflexive self-reference); Dennett, Consciousness 414–418 (the self as
a narrative spun out like a spider spins a web) and cf. Kenny, The Self 4
(the self as a mere grammatical error).
4. The work of Walter Mischel, an experimental psychologist, could be read
to support some rough form of the Humean position, though Mischel’s
attack on trait theory need not necessarily dispose of a core self. In his
view, we are what the situation demands; there is no core self with stable
traits across all settings, except, it seems, the trait of intelligence. The
claims made in this literature get less dramatic when it is recalled that the
research arose as an attack on the personality trait tests that were given

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regularly in high school to help guidance counselors send students to the

right segment of the job market. A large body of evidence in the 1960s
began to reveal that these tests were not able to predict behavior and
performance. I recall the laughter among my high school friends when the
test revealed I would do especially well in sales.
5. See the various positions pro and con in Elster, The Multiple Self .
6. Strawson, “The Self,” 417, admits the insistent anxiety that there may be
multiple selves but argues that that experience “is necessarily experience
from a single point of view.” But that single point of view may be in a
state of panic for fear that it cannot locate itself.
7. See Miller, “Sheep, Joking, Cloning and the Uncanny.”
8. Hogg’s Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Dostoyevsky’s The
Double, Freud, “The Uncanny,” and Stevenson, Jekyll and Hyde, among
many other instances, such as Bronte, Wuthering Heights (Cathy: “Nelly,
I am Heathcliff”). Notions of doubling also figure in scapegoating, whip-
ping boys, good angels/bad angels; the nearly universal fascination also
continues apace with the rise or invention of so-called multiple personality
disorder and the rational choice literature on multiple selves. Twinning is
also an aspect of the comic.
9. Maimonides admits that “sometimes one will waver in his mind concern-
ing the Unity of God, as to whether He is One or He is not One” (Book
of Knowledge “Laws Concerning Idolatry,” I.iv.2.3).
10. Mead finds it helpful to distinguish an “I,” that present point of con-
sciousness, from the “me” that bears personality and character and has
origins external to the individual: “Our view of the self is the individual
as we conceive him to exist in the minds of other members of the group.
This is the ‘me.’ The ‘I’ is the speaker over against the one spoken to,
but the attention is given to the other.” The Individual and the Social Self
92; also, 71; and Mind, Self, and Society 178, 225. Mead also speaks of
a “primary self.” Its job, if I read him correctly, is to give some kind of
coherence to all the roles, especially to resolve conflicts among them. We
can only account for its presence after the fact; it is not experienced in the
present; The Individual 74–75.
11. Hume, Treatise 2.2.5; Smith, TMS III.i.5.
12. See Pinch (Strange Fits 21–44) on Hume’s view of the dubious ownership
of our own emotions; and her able treatment of personification in relation
to the passions (44–50); see also Donald Davie, “Personification,” on the
centrality of personification to language and thought. For the suggestion
that personification does more than just enliven us with passion, but ac-
tually is a way of bringing life to the dead, see the allusive tour de force
by Cunningham, In the Reading Gaol 391–396.
13. On the origins of the feel + emotion term construction in English, see
Miller, Humiliation 176; see also Austin (“Pretending,” 257) who notes
that being angry is not the same as feeling angry, because “angry” is
considerably more than just the name of a feeling.

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14. For the average person it is very hard to separate body types from character
and the propriety of and eligibility for certain roles, though philosophers
might show we need not feel that way; see the discussion in Parfit Reasons
and Persons §89.
15. Strawson, “The Self,” 407.
16. Mead, The Individual 53–54.
17. The Individual 46.
18. Ford, Parade’s End 55; Small, Road to Richmond 185. Even a dualist
would admit that the body can distract the mind from its thoughts, but I
am inclined to claim more for the body’s necessary participation in think-
ing for reasons I suggest in the text because thinking as a conversation
implies certain organs of sense, and the language we think in would hardly
have a metaphor available to it without recourse to images implicit in be-
ing embodied. Notions that assume our embodiment pervade language at
every level; see generally Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By.
19. These kinds of congratulations or cursings of oneself do not carry quite the
same meaning when uttered audibly as they do when said only internally;
at least this is the case if there are people present who are meant to overhear
you. Thus, when I damn myself for missing an easy shot in basketball I
do it out loud as a gesture of apology and placation to my teammates.
20. Even respectable scholars end up sounding like self-help books – for ex-
ample, Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity. His ambitious Sources
of the Self has some of the same failing as Whig history in that it assumes
the excellence of the development that leads to his book. Works such as
Taylor’s set up the man of honor with a shallow inner life as a strawman
that the West has managed to overcome. I defend the depth of the inner
life of people of honor in “Deep Inner Lives,” and I suggest there that for
real shallowness one need only look to the discourse of self that congrat-
ulates us on being deep, ending in self-esteem movements and new age
sentimentalism.
21. See Parfit (Reasons and Persons 277) for an image of persons as “nations,
clubs, or political parties.”
22. Cf. Giddens, “Erving Goffman,” 118.
23. Goffman, Presentation of Self 235.
24. Outside tropical zones clothing is surely more “natural” than naked-
ness. Thus Dennett, Consciousness 416: “Clothes . . . are part of the ex-
tended phenotype of Homo sapiens in almost every niche inhabited by
that species. An illustrated encyclopedia of zoology should no more pic-
ture Homo sapiens naked than it should picture Ursus arctus – the black
bear – wearing a clown suit and riding a bicycle.”

Eleven. At the Core at Last

1. Freud, Jokes 8.81.
2. Cuddihy, Ordeal of Civility 24; Freud, Jokes 80–81.

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3. The days of the prophets officially ended with the death of the last of
Jesus’ disciples. From then on God spoke through the translators and
interpreters of His church. You can speak to God in your tongue, but
He would no longer speak directly to you in His. The Protestant sects
that accepted contemporary prophecy had to develop means of crediting
revelations as authentic. One might see in the practice of speaking in
tongues an attempt to prove the authenticity of the revelation by putting
it in a kind of incomprehensible tongue that could pass for God’s own
Hebrew. For an especially good account of the anxieties of authenticity
that faced self-styled Anglo-American prophets in the eighteenth century,
see Juster, Doomsayers.
4. For a brief but suggestive treatment of the theme of Moses’ veil and the veil
over the Holy of Holies as taken up in the Christian exegetical tradition,
see Cunningham, In the Reading Gaol 398.
5. Cuddihy (Ordeal of Civility 24) reads this joke in a slightly different way,
but his central claim strikes me as having much merit, or at least as being
very rich in its suggestive possibilities. Cuddihy jokes that for Freud the
id is Yid, the Yid, id.
6. For the Son as co-eternal with the Father see Heb. 1.2, where through the
Son God made the world; and so, too, John 1.1. See Milton’s rendition of
the role of the Son in the wars in Heaven: “Son of my bosom, Son who
are alone / My world. My wisdom and effectual might” (Paradise Lost
3.169–170).
7. Rozin and Fallon, “A Perspective on Disgust,” 32.
8. See the discussion in Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews ch. 1.
9. The online edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia, published in 1912,
in a hagiography of Torquemada, testifies to the endurance of a view
that ended in the destruction of European Jewish culture within three
decades: “At that time the purity of the Catholic Faith in Spain was
in great danger from the numerous Marranos and Moriscos, who,
for material considerations, became sham converts from Judaism and
Mohammedanism to Christianity. The Marranos committed serious out-
rages against Christianity and endeavoured to judaize the whole of Spain.”
10. Goffman, Relations in Public ch. 6.
11. A similar problem arose in America with regard to black blood; but the
courts were inclined to let sleeping dogs lie. By encouraging slander suits
for loss of white racial reputation they discouraged zealous efforts to inves-
tigate people’s racial backgrounds, something many astute racists knew
would risk their own claims to purity of blood; see Sharfstein, “Secret
History of Race.”
12. Eliot, Complete Poems “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar,”
sts. 4–6.
13. Shylock is not mentioned directly, but his presence in the poem is suggested
by the allusions to The Merchant of Venice (“on the Rialto”).
14. See Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals Essay I.

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15. Ressentiment is not sour grapes: in the sour grapes mechanism you still
value sweetness, it is just that you see the particular grapes that are be-
yond your grasp as not being sweet because you cannot have them; in
ressentiment you decide that sweetness itself is bad and that those who
enjoy it are inferior, evil, or damned.
16. As an aside I note that it is often the case that the charge of ressentiment
leveled at others is itself a form of ressentiment, hurled by losers at winners,
or if not quite by losers, by fearful dominators who see their grip slipping.
Max Scheler’s treatment of ressentiment, for instance, strikes me less as
an analysis than as an exemplar of it. Scheler, a Jew, was a convert to
Catholicism when he sought to defend Christianity against Nietzsche’s
charges of its being a religion of ressentiment.
17. See Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust chs. 9–10.

Twelve. Passing and Wishing You Were What You Are Not
1. That same person can be praised for attempting to “improve” himself by
rejecting his tainted people. It is part of the morality of authenticity to wel-
come or at least to accept certain aspects of ourselves, and to self-realize
and self-improve as part of the proper development of our authentic self.
But which aspects are to be welcomed and which rejected or improved
beyond recognition is part of the flux of political, social, and moral
clashes.
2. See Gilman (Self-Hatred 6–9) regarding the Jew as black in the Euro-
pean context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The
most provocative study is still Cuddihy’s Ordeal of Civility, though in a
perverse way I find von Rezzori’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite stunningly
insightful from the other side.
3. It is also necessary to distinguish a self-hatred deriving from a general-
ized misanthropy and melancholia, as in the case of Hamlet or Pascal,
from those arising from more ressentiment-like settings, as is the case of
Underground Man, to Jewish self-hatred, which is only partly susceptible
to being understood as ressentiment. Groucho Marx – “I don’t want to
belong to any club that would accept me as a member” – hardly means to
transform the values of the dominant order. He has internalized their view
of his powers of contamination; so his presence ruins the attractiveness
of the desired object. He wishes desperately that it were otherwise. See
Scheler, Ressentiment 52, on self-hatred and ressentiment.
4. See Walzer, “Can There Be a Decent Left?”
5. Trollope, The Way We Live Now ch. 91.
6. The image of the intrepid middle- or upper-class traveler of the late
nineteenth or early twentieth century springs to mind – Edith Durham,
Margaret Hasluck – and Margaret Thatcher for a recent exemplar.
7. The English would tell a different story: that their whole style is cultivated
because they are the most embarrassable of people, and they contrast

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themselves proudly on precisely this trait from the French, whom they see
as profoundly unembarrassable; see Ricks, Keats 5–6.
8. Compare the ready coupling of leftist politics and patriotism in England
(Orwell, E. P. Thompson, et al.) with the smug and embarrassed disap-
proval of patriotism on the American left; see Walzer, “Can There Be a
Decent Left?”
9. Goffman, Stigma 73–91.
10. See Yoshino, who discusses the burden of “covering” a stigma such as
homosexuality so that an individual “modulates her conduct to make
her difference easy for those around her to disattend her known stigma-
tized trait” (“Covering,” 837). Yoshino would prefer a world in which
such accommodations are unnecessary. I am not sure I concur if it means
abandoning reticence with regard to aspects of one’s identity that are not
relevant to the moment. Surely the Jewish kid who sings “Hatikvah” in
Hebrew, or the Protestant who sings “Onward Christian Soldiers” during
their auditions for the junior high play can be reasonably expected to do
a better job of “covering” aspects of their identity.
11. See I. J. Singer’s work, which is quite good on these matters: The Family
Carnovsky, also to a lesser degree The Brothers Ashkenazi.
12. See Herzog’s account (Poisoning 321–323) of Coleridge and the stinking
Jew.
13. Hilaire Belloc, “The Garden Party,” vv. 1–4, Complete Verse 219; on this
issue see also Smith, TMS I.iii.2.5: “Politeness is so much the virtue of
the great, that it will do little honor to any body but themselves. The
coxcomb, who imitates their manner, and affects to be eminent by the
superior propriety of his ordinary behavior, is rewarded with a double
share of contempt for his folly and presumption.”
14. The literature on passing, black and Jewish, is enormous. Some of it is
of value, but much of it is tainted with the complacent assumptions of
a naı̈ve social constructionism that holds that because something is so-
cially constructed it becomes less durable, less real, for that reason. Social
constructions, on the contrary, might well be more durable than certain
basic aspects of our biology. We will be able to engineer our genes to our
liking long before we will rid ourselves of social constructions such as
racism. I have found these works of interest: Jacobson, Whiteness; Hale,
Making Whiteness; Gilman, Self-Hatred and Smart Jews; and Sharfstein,
“Secret History.” None strike me as being as consistently perspicacious as
Goffman’s Stigma.
15. Not that he will be tossed out on his ear if he is discovered. Goffman
notes that when someone’s false identity is seen through in a forbidden,
out-of-bounds place, where exposure means expulsion, the people seeing
through him may choose to avoid making a scene by kicking him out,
“an eventuality often so unpleasant to all parties that a tacit cooperation
will sometimes forestall it, the interloper providing a thin disguise and the
rightfully present accepting it, even though both know the other knows

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of the interloping.” The understanding is this: don’t ever let this happen
again, buddy, or I can’t promise you such a tactful response; Stigma 81.
See also Larsen, Passing 16: “It wasn’t that she was ashamed of being a
Negro, or even of having it declared. It was the idea of being ejected from
any place, even in the polite and tactful way in which the Drayton would
probably do it, that disturbed her.”
16. Larsen, Passing 55: “White people were so stupid about such things for
all that they usually asserted they were able to tell . . . They always took
her for an Italian, a Spaniard, a Mexican, or a gipsy.”
17. Gilman, Smart Jews 183, cites Terry Abrahamson as claiming to have been
an anomaly in his high school locker room in Amundsen, Illinois, in the
mid 1960s, but unless the three or four uncircumcised penises loomed
very large in his imagination it is hard for me to believe that Amundsen’s
practices were more retarded than Green Bay’s on this issue.
18. See Gollaher’s tendentious anticircumcision account, which nonetheless
tells the American medical historical tale (Circumcision ch. 4). One of the
burdens of living in a university town is to find flyers such as the following
at your friendly Whole Foods store: “Beautiful music for alternative Jewish
Baby Naming Ceremonies. Contact Brandy Sinco, Member of MUSIC
(Musicians United to Stop Involuntary Circumcision).” And then Brandy
gives a sample verse from a song:

When we welcome our baby,

The only tears will be of joy, not pain.
Our child’s body was formed well at birth.
Let’s leave all parts as the creator made.

19. Gollaher, Circumcision 94; and J. Levenson, “New Enemies.”

Thirteen. Authentic Moments with the Beautiful and Sublime?

1. Middle Eastern trees to be sure, but still one would think the shade would
be tempting; see Maimonides, Book of Acquisition “Laws Concerning
Neighbors,” 12.iii.10.1.
2. Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful II.2; Sterne, Tristam Shandy 7.42. The
terror of having nothing to write about is not the kind of terror that
engenders the sublime, even though sublimity may leave us without words.
3. Kant, Critique of Judgement 262.
4. For example, Burke, I.7.
5. The special aesthetic emotion engendered by horror films is not really fear
either, though it is strongly felt, and perhaps all the more strongly for
benefiting from the knowledge that nothing is really at stake.
6. On the compulsion experienced by many to discern the best moment of a
sunset or day of fall foliage, see my “Of Optimal Views.”
7. Mansfield Park ch. 9.

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8. The theme of pictures or paintings of a scene displacing the memory of

it has been often noted. Stendhal advises not purchasing pictures or en-
gravings on our travels because they will then take over our memory; see
W. G. Sebald, Vertigo 8. Sebald’s works can be seen in part as a wonderful
and wistful application of this theme.
9. For the kitsch of ruins, see the recent humorous treatment of this well-
studied issue by Dekkers, Way of All Flesh ch. 2.
10. For similar sentiments see Huysmans’s description (Against Nature ch. 11)
of des Esseintes’ virtual trip to London in the latter decades of the nine-
teenth century.

Fourteen. The Alchemist

1. For some illuminating experiments on interest effecting articulation of
moral positions, see Batson, “Moral Hypocrisy.” The results would bring
a knowing smirk to La Rochefoucauld.
2. Elster, Alchemies 335.
3. Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant,” 152.
4. Experimental evidence suggests it may be too easy to immerse ourselves
fully into roles, even ones that require us to abandon or set aside previous
moral commitments. This is one of the lessons to be drawn from Milgram’s
famous experiments. A now infamous psychology experiment at Stanford
in the 1970s asked students to assume the roles of prisoners and guards;
it had to be halted because the subjects got too immersed in their roles;
see Zimbardo, “The Pathology of Imprisonment.”
5. Pessimism can be a hypocritical position. See Melville, The Confidence
Man ch. 9, who notes that feigning pessimism presents opportunities for
gain. The ironies of the passage are complex because the words are those
of a “confidence man” speaking of Wall Street “bears”: “Why the most
monstrous of all hypocrites are these bears: hypocrites by inversion; hyp-
ocrites in the simulation of things dark instead of bright; souls that thrive,
less upon depression, than the fiction of depression.”
6. Of the mechanisms available to account for these transformations, Elster
(rightly I think) rejects Freudian defense mechanisms as incoherent and
does not see mere dissonance reduction, at least in its classic formulation,
to be a sufficient explanation either; see Alchemies 363–366.
7. Kroeber, Nature of Culture 311, cited in Goffman, Presentation of Self
21. The point was made earlier by Melville, The Confidence Man ch. 16:
“You talked of confidence. How comes it that when brought
low himself, the herb-doctor, who was most confident to prescribe
in other cases, proves least confident to prescribe in his own; having
small confidence in himself for himself?”
“But he has confidence in the brother he calls in . . . Yes, in this
hour the herb-doctor does distrust himself, but not his art.”

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8. This is the view offered by evolutionary biologists as to why self-deception

is adaptive. It helps us be better deceivers of others; see Trivers, Social
Evolution 415–420. Within limits perhaps, but then why that self-deceiver
gains an evolutionary advantage is still not explained, for he is losing to
other convincing self-deceiving dupers as much as winning. I think we
need to look elsewhere for the evolutionary story of the selective advan-
tages of self-deception. Perhaps it is that it keeps us from killing ourselves
in despair by convincing us of our merit in the face of countervailing evi-
dence. Or that it provides the necessary underpinnings for manifest virtues
like perseverance; see Flanagan, Varieties of Moral Personality 329–332.
9. See Laxdœla saga ch. 18; see Miller, “Ordeal in Iceland,” 200–203.
10. After he found the Elixir, the successful alchemist would have to make
sure he kept gold reasonably scarce or else gold would be cheaper than
the lead used to make it, though Elixir itself would still have substantial
value.
11. Pound, ABC of Reading 99.
12. See primarily Ainslie, Breakdown of Will.
13. Austen, Sense and Sensibility ch. 4.
14. “The Greeks likewise differed from us in their evaluation of hope: they
felt it to be blind and deceitful; Hesiod gave the strongest expression to
this attitude in a fable whose sense is so strange no more recent commen-
tator has understood it – for it runs counter to the modern spirit, which
has learned from Christianity to believe in hope as a virtue,” Nietzsche,
Daybreak 38; also Human, All Too Human 71. See, too, how the Athenian
negotiators in the Melian dialogue ridicule hope as the refuge of the weak;
Thucydides, Peloponnesian War 5.103.
15. There is also a punning reference to good in the sense of assets, for
it is the hope of that kind of good that is in part responsible for his
misery.
16. Compare Chaucer’s Pardoner, who confesses with pride how he cons the
ignorant faithful by selling indulgences and then tries to perpetrate the
con on the pilgrims he has just confessed to as a joke, but the joke is not
taken as one. The canon’s yeoman does seem to be genuinely expressing
his present beliefs, not as a setup for a future con, though clearly he and
his master joined the pilgrimage with a swindle on their agenda.

Fifteen. “I Love You”

1. Trite as it is, I do recognize that sexual desire can also end transmuted
into love, just as the euphemism “making love” would have it.

Sixteen. Boys Crying and Girls Playing Dumb

1. Goffman, Presentation of Self 236–237, citing Komarovsky, “Cultural
Contradictions,” 188.

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 notes to pages 193–198

2. Would she prefer that he see through her and excuse her? What if he
believes the dumb act but then finds her unappealing because he doesn’t
like dumb girls? In that case would she be even more chagrined for not
playing dumb with enough leakage so the smart guy would see through
the pose?

Seventeen. Acting our Roles

1. See Roach’s excellent treatment of this period of acting history (The
Player’s Passion).
2. William James, “What is an Emotion?” See Ellsworth, “William James
and Emotion,” on the common misreadings of James’s position.
3. Diderot (Paradox 120) does not directly speak to the issue of acquiring
the actual feeling by acting as if you have it. He cites a routine Garrick
did in a Parisian salon in which within seconds Garrick mimicked a whole
array of passions in a tour de force of mimicry. The point Diderot makes
is that there was no way possible, given the rapidity, that Garrick could
have first engendered the emotion in order to express it; nor was there, by
implication, enough time for the display to generate the feelings.
4. One can read LeDoux (The Emotional Brain), for example, as James
brought up-to-date; instead of looking to gross action tendencies or so-
matic changes as causing the feeling, LeDoux substitutes the behavior of
the amygdala in the brain.
5. See Ekman and Keltner, “Universal Facial Expressions”; Duclos et al.,
“Emotion-Specific Effects”; Levenson et al., “Voluntary Facial Action”;
and Strack et al., “Inhibiting and Facilitating.” The latter details an ex-
periment in which people gripped a pen either with their teeth (to engage
smile muscles) or with their lips (to engage frown muscles) and then judged
cartoons. Those gripping the pen with their teeth found the cartoons
funnier.
6. The mechanism that works to accord gesture and sentiment is mysterious
indeed. Does, as per James, the psyche observe the actions of the body
that houses it and magically take its cue as how to feel, or is a kind of
dissonance reduction at work that seeks to get rid of the disharmony of
thinking one thing and doing or saying another?
7. See Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust 116–117.
8. Regarding anger, Maimonides believes that “one should train oneself
not to be angry even for something that would justify anger.” But he
then advises it might well be wise to fake anger, especially when one
is trying to correct children or members of the household (Book of
Knowledge “Laws Relating to Moral Dispositions and Ethical Conduct,”
1.ii.2.3).
9. From Judith VanHoose, UM Law class of 2004.
10. Diderot, Paradox 108.
11. Roach, The Player’s Passion 137, discussing Diderot.

262
 notes to pages 199–209

12. Diderot, Paradox, French edition, 145, my translation; Penguin edition,

135.
13. Austin (“Pretending,” 268) notes that pretending has limits as to how long
it can go on before it simply becomes a role, or you become the pretense.
14. For sheer disgustingness nothing matches Swift’s “The Progress of
Beauty,” Poetical Works 172; see also Webster, The Duchess of Malfi 2.1.
The genre is ancient and follows the example of Ovid; see his “On Paint-
ing the Face,” “The Art of Love,” and “The Remedies of Love” in Art of
Love.
15. See Hughes, “Sumptuary Law.”
16. Grágás K, c. 155.
17. See, for example, John Chrysostom writing in the fourth century. From
Homilia XIV, De mulieribus et pulchritudine, quoted by Gerald of Wales
writing in the late twelfth century (Hagen trans, at 140).
18. There is surprisingly little social science research on faking orgasm; see
Wiederman, “Pretending Orgasm.” Literature professors are less shy; see
Garber, “Insincerity of Women.”
19. See Alloy and Abramson, “Judgment of Contingency”; Taylor and Brown,
“Illusion and Well-Being”; also Kruger and Dunning, “Unskilled and Un-
aware of It”; but see Flanagan’s critique placing the truth somewhere in
a fuzzy middle, Varieties of Moral Personality 315–332. For George Eliot
it is a “piteous stamp of sanity” to have a “clear consciousness of shat-
tered faculties,” to be able to measure accurately our “own feebleness”
(Romola ch. 30).
20. Swift, A Tale of a Tub sect. 9. The quote, as usual with Swift, is filtered
through several layers of ambiguating ironies, but the sentiment is still
enough in accord with his general pessimism that I see no reason not to
attribute it to him rather than to the fictional author of the tract that
makes up the bulk of the tale.
21. See Parfit on the justifiability of the transferability of love among replicas
and facsimiles of persons (Reasons and Persons §§99, 295).
22. Goffman, Presentation of Self 235. One of the burdens of a male’s masking
in this way is that even a wig to cover hair loss due to chemotherapy would
not be excused as a matter of course, as it would be for a woman.
23. “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask,
and he will tell you the truth”; Wilde, The Critic as Artist 1045. Diderot’s
theory of acting can be assimilated to this view. See also Nietzsche’s some-
what different twist in Beyond Good and Evil §40: “Every profound spirit
needs a mask: even more, around every profound spirit a mask is growing
continually, owing to the constantly false, namely shallow, interpretation
of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives.”
24. Gide, L’immoraliste 420: “On ne peut à la fois être sincère and le paraı̂tre”;
see also Sartre’s attempt to turn sincerity into a form of bad faith, Being
and Nothingness 2.2.105–112.
25. See Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews 129.

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 notes to pages 211–222

Eighteen. False (Im)modesty

1. Chaucer, Summoner’s Tale.
2. Many of the features of the style we associate with unbearable pompos-
ity Aristotle admired as attributes of the magnanimous man: a contrived
measured gait, deep voice, and slow speech; see Ethics 4.3.1125a13–15.
3. See Hillaire Belloc, Complete Verse: “The Garden Party . . .”
4. Sometimes, given the horrors of the subject matter, pomposity may work as
a form of discretion and decorum, as when, say, a law professor must teach
pornography regulation. See Coughlin, “Representing the Forbidden,” for
a witty tour de force on the fakeries, duplicity, and complicity of anti-
pornography scholarship.
5. See Shklar’s discussion of snobbery, Ordinary Vices 87–137, which is
relevant to the point made here.
6. A small qualification. Some forms of self-mockery can be quiet, because
they take place as gestures. One rolls one’s eyes at oneself. But these ges-
tures are still meant to amuse and get attention, not just to stage, but to
upstage, for they are usually exaggerated and broadly comic.
7. The French has sincérité; the Penguin translator renders it as candor; the
idea, as the context suggests, is probably halfway between; see also Eliot,
Adam Bede ch. 12: “Candour was one of his favorite virtues; and how
can a man’s candour be seen in all its luster unless he has a few failings
to talk of? But he had an agreeable confidence that his faults were all of a
generous kind . . .”
8. Middlemarch ch. 17.
9. See Goffman, “Embarrassment,” 108n6: “When an individual, receiving
a compliment blushes from modesty, he may lose his reputation for poise
but confirm a more important one, that of being modest.”

Nineteen. Caught in the Act

1. On states that are very difficult or impossible to will and can be achieved
only as byproducts, see Elster, Sour Grapes 44–52, who discusses insom-
nia. Sour Grapes deals, from the perspective of rational choice, with more
than a few of the themes of this book in a consistently penetrating manner.
2. Tricking yourself to sleep is a harder task than the frequent self-trickings
that go on as part of the routine self-deceptions of wishful thinking. The
desire to be attractive often leads us to think we are doing better in that
department than we are without our having to do anything actually to
make us better-looking; the desire to sleep makes us have to do things in
preparation. We do not get to the state merely by wishing it.
3. There is no better literary treatment of feigning sleep than Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight (vv. 1195–1197), where the seductress toys with
Gawain’s faking, making him feel totally embarrassed not only for how
embarrassing the situation is but also for how transparent are his attempts
to escape it by feigning sleep; see Miller, Humiliation 186. Faking sleep

264
 notes to pages 224–235

is not an infrequent theme in literature as people employ the strategy to

avoid sex, or to avoid letting late-arriving spouses see that their lateness
was a ground for suspicion; see, for example, Wharton, The Reef ch. 8.
4. Failures of what Goffman calls audience segregation cause all kinds of
embarrassment, blowings of cover, and so on. Ann Arbor is a fairly small
town, and my students often see me out with my kids. It is very awkward,
especially if they stumble upon me while I am screaming at one of them,
or worse, while one of them is screaming at me. On audience segregation
see Goffman, Presentation of Self 49.
5. There may be a kinder mechanism at work. Sometimes an able person,
no fraud at all, gets a good idea that is triggered by the imbecilities of a
dullard, and in turn the able person, generously and sincerely, attributes
his own good idea to the dullard, because the dullard triggered it in him.
6. “Gascoigne’s Woodmanship,” vv. 97–100 (1573), in Gascoigne, I.348–
352.
7. See generally Goffman, Stigma.
8. Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust ch. 9–10.

Afterword
1. I have been taken to task on my reluctance or inability to write conclusions
to my books; see Stark, “Courage.”
2. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia, especially ch. 7, on dimension words and
trouser words.
3. Austin, 64.
4. Moments of naturalness are available even to such a type, as they were
to Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man. Thus Underground Man, that most
self-conscious and self-torturing of souls, can report that he made a gesture
in “a surprisingly disengaged manner” though he immediately loses his
naturalness by being so taken with his having actually succeeded in making
an unstudied gesture II.3. He cannot help being surprised by his own
naturally engaged manner, thereby managing ex post facto to turn his
naturalness into a fake.
5. East–West is also one way of repeating, if not white–black, then
white–dark.

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277
 Index

abnegation, 65–66. See also prayer pride and avarice as vices of, 169.
absolution. See penance See also Chaucer; Elster; Nashe;
accents, 203; academic, 145; transmutation
American vs. English, 144–145; alchemists: curiosity of, 171;
Katherine Hepburn’s, 145; lapsing reputation of, 170
into a southern, 39; alcohol, 48; as bootstrapping aid, 34
self-consciousness about, 39–40 allegory, 123
accidents, 249. See also apologies; almsgiving, hypocrisy and, 11–12,
remorse 28
acedia, sloth, 62 Americans: craven self-hatred of,
acting: Diderot’s theory of, 195–196; 144; modest self-hatred of,
Mansfield Park and, 199; teaching 143–144, 147–148; patriotic pride
children emotion display and, of, 146–147, 148. See also
196–197; Walter Shandy’s theory English; self-hatred
of, 195, 196 Amidah, 68–72; on Rosh Hashanah,
actors: characterlessness of, 69
198–200; as doer and as fake doer, anger: fake, 262; self-command and,
7; making up, 202; vs. thin-lipped 44
moralists, 199–200; waitresses as, anti-depressants, 205–206;
200 compared to yoga, 205
addiction: alchemist’s theory of, anti-essentialism. See relativism
173–177; gambling and, 174; hope antihypocrisy: looking bad in order
and, 174–177 to be good, 20–23. See also
aesthetics: vs. moral, 208–209, 210; Becket; hypocrisy; More; Twain
posing and, 154; religious anti-Semite, -ism, 134, 139, 232;
conversion and, 68. See also fears of pollution of, 136; limpieza
anxiety; art; sublime de sangre and, 136; misogyny and,
affectations: of hipness, 49; of 138; 1912 Catholic Encyclopedia
prissiness, 48 and, 256; uncanny lunacy of, 150;
airs: giving none, 215; putting on, 43 visions of Shylock and, 137
alchemy: deception and anxiety, 4–7; passim; appreciating
self-deception and, 170–176; as art and beauty and, 155–156,
metaphor for mechanisms of 158–161; doubling and, 126;
transmuting motives, 167–168; experts failing and, 158–160

279
 index

anxiety (cont.) authenticity, 129; achieving it in

feeling of faking it as, 3, 10; irony moments of shame and
and, 115; as to motives, 23, 24–25; humiliation, 229–231; and in
praying and, 64–73; self and, pride, 140; hokey praises of, 128;
121–128; self-mockery and, 218; as ill-mannered, 35–40; memory
shepherds and, 24–26. See also inferring with experience of,
authenticity; exposure; experts; 164–165; book’s apparent hostility
pastoral; self-doubt to, 233–234; phoniness of some
apologies: for accidents vs. attempts at, 25, 46, 61, 71, 205;
intentional harms, 78–81; posing as authentic and, 45, 128;
anxieties and, 79; coerced, 87–90; search for authentic core self,
commiseration and, 83; 128–131, 132, 154; whining and,
compulsive, 83; cowardice and, 139. See also breast implants;
86–87; vs. excuse, 81; honor deception; masks; self;
culture and, 85–87; humiliation self-deception; Viagra
rituals and, 88, 90; “I’m sorry” avarice, 169; as minor motive of
and, 82–83, 250; rituals of, 86; alchemist, 171
sincerity and, 78–90. See also
compensation; forgiveness; beauty. See appreciation; sublime
penance; ritual; satisfaction Beauvoir, Simone de, 190
appreciation: of art and natural Becket, Thomas à, 21–22
beauty, 158–160; anxieties of belief: as “belief,” 60–61, 75; of con
faking it and, 160; memories and men, 169–170; cynicism and, 169;
photos affecting, 161–164; narrator’s religious, 60–61; in
obligatoriness of, 160; posturing ordeals, 169
leading to, 165; problem of release Bible, translations of, 13, 59
from paying homage, 161 Bierce, Ambrose: on apology, 93; on
Aquinas, Thomas: as non-rigorist on penitence, 82; on politeness, 35; on
hypocrisy, 26; on satisfaction, 84 prayer, 65, 241
Arcadia. See pastoral blacks: American identity and, 139;
Aristotle, 32 passing and, 148, 258
art. See aesthetics; appreciation; bloodfeuding culture. See
sublime honor/shame culture
assimilation, 149–150 bluffing, as convergence of fakery
audience, internal, 22 and courage, 34
Austen, Jane, 21; appreciation of blushing, 78. See also emotions,
beauty and, 161; burdens of display of
politeness and, 37, 38, 245; on bootstrapping, 34
canting praise, 102; hope and, boredom, 4; politeness and, 36;
175; on morality of theatricals, prayer and, 62
199–200; self-command and, Botox, 209
42–47; Sense and Sensibility, bowdlerization. See Freud
44–47; vanity without airs and, breast implants: as easily forgiven,
215 210; feeling conned by, 208–209;
Austin, J. L., 81, 232 medievalist’s defense of, 204–205;

280
 index

motivations for, 208–209. See also clothing, 130, 203, 255

vanity compensation, forgiveness and,
Brook Farm, 25 88–89, 94
Buddhism, 44, 114, 166 competition, muddling aesthetic
Burke, Edmund, 156 experience, 160
compliments, fishing for, 99, 102,
Calvinism, double thoughts and, 29 216
Catholicism, 64, 68, 74. See also con men, 149; believing own cons
Christianity; penance and, 169–170
character: continuity of, 128; confession(s), 65, 84; “frank” and
polysemy of, 121; traits and, 210. repulsive, 216–217; in Jewish
See also self, doubling and tradition, 84; limits on in
splitting of self-mockery, 217. See also
charm, 53; flattery and, 104 penance; prayer
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 31, 261; Canon’s Congreve, William, 104
Yeoman’s Tale, 170–176; Friar’s conscience, 2–3, 89; faking sleep as
Tale, 67; piercing pomposity and, origins of, 222
211; simple parson and plowman contrition. See penance
of, 25 conversations, internal. See
Chesterfield, Lord, 220; on criminal self-consciousness
flattery, 106; flattery and, conversos, 75, 136–137. See also
105–108; laughter and, 43 Jews
children: as actors and pretenders, cosmetic surgery, cheating and,
200–202; coerced apologies of, 209
87–90; complicating the cosmetics. See makeup
appreciation of nature, 162, courage: feeling fraudulent about,
163–164; faked sleep of, 222–224; 32; hypocrisy proof, 31–35;
parents’ disenchanting world of, self-command and, 32;
50 self-deception and, 33, 34–35;
Christianity: anxious relation to sham moral, 243; soldiers as
Judaism, 134–139; Bible moral rigorists and, 33
translations and, 13, 59; hope and, courtship, 51, 186, 189; as a form of
175–176; Protestant hymns and, performing before experts,
59, 67; self-mortifying forms of 227–228; painfulness of observing,
devotion in, 22 227; risks to self-esteem and, 194
circumcision: of Christians, 151–153; cowardice: apologies and, 86–87;
figural, 152; as moving ritual, 61; contrasted to other vices, 32;
passing and, 151–153; surgery to flattery and, 106; as malingering,
reverse, 209 244; as motive for virtue, 16, 41;
civility: Jews and, 134, 138; vs. politeness and ; prudence and, 41;
naked truth, 48 self-hatred and, 141
class, 38–40 craft, double meaning of, 171
Clinton, Bill, 53 crying. See tears
cloning, 122. See also self, doubling Cuddihy, John Murray, 134, 136,
and splitting of 138

281
 index

culpability: accidents and, 79; false Eliot, T. S.: “Bleistein” and,

false modesty and, 216; making 137–138; self-hatred and, 147
fools of self and others and, Elixir-stone, 171. See also
220–221; pomposity and, 213, alchemy
221; stupidity and, 79 Elster, Jon, 28, 245, 247; on
cursing, of oneself, 255; as prayer, transmutation of motives, 167–168
66–67, 246. See also prayer embarrassment: when pretending,
cynicism, 73–76, 169 202; selling modesty with, 219.
See also anxiety
Darwin, Charles, 248 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 7
davening, 71 emotions: allegory and, 123; display
daydreams, 200. See also pretending of, 4–7, 77; emotionalism and, 45;
deception: cosmetic surgery and, fakeability of, 77–78; Marianne
209; forgiveness and, 91; on Dashwood’s theory of, 44;
obvious lies working as, 91. ownership of, 123; self-command
See also breast implants; makeup; and, 42–47; sentimentalized, 250;
Rogaine; Viagra shallowness and, 44–46; of short
decorum: giggles and, 59–60; duration, 40, 45, 78; verbal
periphrasis and, 49 expression of, 78. See also
Dennett, Daniel, 255 apologies; Austen, Sense and
despair, 66 Sensibility; guilt; regret; remorse;
Diderot, Denis, 107; on deformed shame; and other individual
character of actors, 198–200; emotions
theory of acting of, 195–196 English, the: American self-hatred
dignity, trials of and Rogaine, 207 and, 146; lack of self-hatred of,
disgust: fears of generating, 52, 118; 147–148
teaching kids emotion display and, envy: being sorry and, 82; false
196–197 modesty as defense against,
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: compulsive 214–215; rebuking and, 16
apology, 83; The Idiot, 97; Prince euphemism, 53, 124
Myshkin and double thoughts, 24 experience, transformations wrought
double thoughts (the doubting of by, 118–120
one’s own good motives), Prince experts: anxieties of, 158–160; fears
Myshkin and, 24 of exposure by, 224–226; two
doubling, 1–2, 254; cf. reduction of main types of, 224–225
self to less than whole you, exposure, as fake: fears of, 220–231;
230–231. See also self, doubling justified, 220–221; mutual
and splitting of forbearance and, 220–221, 225;
dumb. See playing dumb recovering from, 226, 229–231.
See also anxiety; humiliation;
Ekman, Paul, 248 shame
Elias, Norbert, 48
Eliot, George: on forgiveness, 92; on faking it: feeling of, 10, 37, 40–41;
preemptive confession, 217; on good causes vs. bad causes for,
self-knowledge, 112 220–221; vs. pretending, 200;

282
 index

sexual desire and, 51–52; used in frankness, 97, 216–218

colloquial sense in book, 232; fraud, pious, 169, 246
various referents of “it” in, 232. Freud, Sigmund, 112, 136, 248;
See also anxiety; exposure; roles book’s neglect of, 234;
false modesty, 214–216; as homage bowdlerized Jewish joke of,
to other’s envy, 214–215; sincerity 132–134; gluttony and lust at core
and, 215–216; vs. true, 214 of his system, 169
fasting, 20 friendship, 97
fear: of exposure as fraud, 220–231;
self-command of, 44; sublime and, Gascoigne, George, 225–226
156–157 gays: “covering” and, 258; passing
Fingarette, Herbert, on sincerity, 239 and, 148
flattery: Chesterfield, on, 105–108; gender, 38, 126. See also women
of children, 102; cursed by Gide, Andre, paradox of sincerity
moralists, 96–97; exhortation and, and, 208
103; frankness as, 97; friendship giggles: as lese majestie, 59–60; pain
and, 97; of high by low, 100–102; of the object of, 224, 229
as homage, 100; Jesus’, 102; of glory-seeking, 28
low by high, 101–103; of oneself, God, 138; anxieties of identity of, 6,
97; politeness and, 35, 104–107; 122; apologies and, 90; co-linguist
vs. praise, 96–103; seductiveness with Jews, 135; doubling of, 122,
of, 96; sincerity and, 98; small 254; humiliation and, 90, 251;
virtues of, 104–107; styles of, 100; incarnation of, 135; Jew at His
teachers and, 98, 101. See also core, 135; names of, 6; narrator’s
Chesterfield; La Rochefoucauld; vision of, 60–61; praise and, 96;
praise; vanity punishing kids for faking sleep,
flippancy, 214 223. See also Jesus; Jews
foibles, and relation to social theory, Goffman, Erving, 37, 137, 169, 193;
235–237 core self and, 129; passing and,
fool: to fool me vs. making one of 148; poise and tact in moral
oneself and others, 220; as world of, 226; on self-deception,
fundamentally what we are, 245
236–238. See also deception; graciousness, 36
knave-fool pairing; self-deception Greenblatt, Stephen, 73
Ford, Gerald, pratfall of, 228 guilt, 2, 78, 84, 248; liberal, 143.
forgiveness, 84–85, 91–94; See also remorse
cherishing hatred and, 92, 93;
faking, 92–94; of oneself, 91. hair, 206–207, 208–209. See also
See also apology; Bierce; Rogaine; vanity
compensation; George Eliot; hairshirts, the problem of playing to
humiliation; Naipaul an internal audience and, 21–23
formalism. See hypocrisy Hamlet: conversations with, 110; on
Francophiles, 146 flattery, 101; as poster boy of
Franklin, Benjamin, on pride in faking it, 6, 7. See also mines;
humility, 23 Shakespeare

283
 index

Hampshire, Stuart, on sentimental identity, damaged, 153. See also

emotions, 250 anti-Semite; authenticity; Jews;
Hazlitt, William, 240–241 passing; pollutants; self
heebie-jeebies, 61 impartial spectator. See Adam
Hepburn, Katherine, accent of, Smith
145 indirection, limits of, 50. See also
hippies: inauthenticity as politeness, periphrasis
authenticity and, 46; quondam as intelligence, mistrusted by middling
parent, 197 souls, 170
honor. See apology; honor/shame innocence. See pastoral
culture; modesty insomnia, 221. See also sleep
honor/shame culture, 234; apology irony: as a defense, 115; durability
and, 85–87, 92. See also irony, vs. of, 118; humiliation and, 118;
saga irony inept, 117; vs. licensed fool, 117;
hope, 174–177 as a pose, 115–118; prayer and,
Hume, David, 77, 128; character of, 64; risks of, 117, 120; vs. saga
30; defense of vanity allied to irony, 118; types of, 116–117
virtue, 30; on self, 121, 123
humiliation: betrayal and rejection James, William, 196
and, 118; courtship and, 227–228; jargon, self-deception and,
exposed as fraud and, 224–226; 170
failures of minimal bodily Jesus, 34; almsgiving and prayer
competence and, 228–229; of and, 11–13; fasting and, 20;
God, 90; rituals of, 88, 90, 251. faultfinding and rebuking and,
See also apologies; forgiveness 13–14; as God’s core self, 135; as
humility, bind of. See hairshirts; hypocrite, 17–18; self-deception
modesty; pride and, 12–13
hypocrisy, hypocrite: as benign, Jews: assimilation and, 149–150;
26–27; distinguished from other civility and, 134; converso, 75,
vices, 20; faking it distinguished, 136–137; at core of Christian
9; faking vice and, 20–23, 242; identity, 135–139; as counterfeit
feeling like a, 3; formalism and, Christians, 136; distrust of the
18–19; Jesus and, 11–14; motives intelligent and, 170; fecund rot
and, 11–12, 27; new vs. naive, 10, and, 137; foetor judaicus and, 150;
27; politeness and, 35–40; ineradicable identity of, 135–139;
rebuking and, 13–14, 16; religious language of, 134; passing and, 134,
piety and, 18–19, 31; Sabbath 148; relation to God of, 134–135;
rules and, 17–18; stoning self-hatred and, 136, 149–153. See
adulterers and, 14–15; weakness also Amidah; anti-Semite; God;
of will and, 15–16. See also lip prayer; self-hatred; Miller, William
service; politeness; prayer; Ian
self-command Jonson, Ben, 31, 171
Judaism: Freud and, 134; obligation
Iceland, sagas, belief in ordeals and, to transmit, 60; repentance in, 84.
169 See also Jews; prayer; Shema

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Kant, Immanuel, safety and the Mandeville, Bernard, 27

sublime and, 157 masculinity: anxieties in
Klemperer, Victor, 91, 242 performing, 189; politeness and,
knave-fool pairing, as imbuing 38, 39
sensibility of this book, 235–237 masks, 202–207; surgery and,
207–210; truth and, 207–208
La Rochefoucauld, Francois, 41, 65, Mead, George Herbert: on
77, 91; on authenticity and bad forgiveness, 92; on self and
manners, 40; on cognitive bias, 14; self-consciousness, 125, 126; on
on inattentive conversation, 41; on self-deception, 245
deceit, 42; o envy, 251; on flattery, melancholic, playing role of,
97, 100; on hypocrisy, 20; on love, 159
181; on praise, 99; on self-esteem Melville, Herman: The Confidence
and gullibility, 42; on sincerity, Man, 240; on meanness of
216 anti-flattery, 105; on pessimism,
Lacan, Jacques, 112 260
Lake Superior vs. the sea, faking memory, 186; interfering with
awe, 155–156 present experience, 161–164
Langland, William, 8, 16, 31, 82 Miller, William Ian: aspiring actress
laughter. See Chesterfield; giggles daughter of, 200; bitterness of,
leakage. See roles 138–139, 140; bungled attempt to
Lewis, Sinclair, 82 shed tears of, 186–189; cheating at
lies. See truth the Amidah, 70–73; circumcision
lip service, 3; paid to one’s own prior and, 151–153; davening and, 71;
experience, 159; as paying respect, flannel pajamas of, 130; flyovers
62, 189; power of, 74. See also and, 72; gaffes as teenager of, 230;
transmutation as homme moyen, 7; inability to
Locke, John, on virtue as insufficient say “groovy” of, 71; insomnia of,
reward unto itself, 243 221; mixed motives of, 24; naked
love: air kisses and, 184; anxieties before the pets, 131; name of, 132,
expressing, 183–185; fears of 141; narrative tone of, 234;
inadequacy of, 183; feeling of, one-fifth authentic, 129; paranoid
181; intrasubjectivity problem thoughts of, 225–226; parting
and, 180; La Rochefoucauld on, anxious thoughts of, 237; playing
181; polysemy of and types of, war as child, 202; pretentiousness
179–181; reticence and, 184; of, 1, 120, 201; prissiness of, 48;
self-command and, 44–47; sex religious beliefs of, 60–61;
and, 181, 182–183; Shandyism self-hatred of, 71, 132; shifting
and, 178–179; as situation, 179, accent of, 39; splitting in two
182, 183; small ritual displays of, while lecturing and, 1–2; at
183–185; taking a bullet and, 185 Stonehenge, 163–164; stream of
self-consciousness of, 7; struggles
Maimonides: Amidah and, 69, 70; with politeness, 38–40; taken to
on anger, 262; repentance and, 84 task for universalizing sensibility
makeup, 202–203 of, 165–166; underinsured, 24

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Miller (cont.) Pandora’s box, 176

vacuums under guest’s feet, 38; paranoia, 7, 225–226
with wife among the English, parents, acting and, 196–197.
144–148; a wreck before experts, See also children
224–225. See also anxiety; parvenu, 146, 150
self-consciousness Pascal, Blaise, wager of, 114, 167
mines and countermines, 112–113; passing, 148–151; vs. assimilation,
transformations wrought by 149–150; defined, 148–149; risks
fighting in, 113 of exposure and, 151, 258;
Mischel, Walter, 253 strategies of defending against, 150
misogyny: anti-Semitism and, 138; pastoral, 24–26; on hokum of ideal
makeup and, 202–204. See also of, 242
women Paxil, 206. See also anti-depressants
modesty, 213, 214–216; changing penance: faking confession and, 65;
fortunes of, 215; embarrassment Jewish tradition and, 84. See also
and, 219; having to package itself confession; humiliation
as false, 218–219; honor societies person, 121
and, 33; low self-esteem and, 215. pessimism, 168, 260
See also false modesty petards, hoist with, as image of
Molière, 240 becoming what you think you are
Montaigne, Michel de, 20 pretending to be. See mines;
More, Thomas, 21–22, 73 transformation; transmutation;
motives, 24; ascertainment of, 10; self-deception
mistrusting one’s own, 24, 32; photos, frustrating experience of
mixed and double, 24, 26; of beautiful and sublime, 161–164
those seeking salvation, 29, 243; pity, 93
transmutation of, 28. See also playing dumb, 192–193; men and,
anxiety; hypocrisy; self-deception; 191; women and, 190–194
transmutation pledge of allegiance, 58
museums: anxieties in, 160–161, Plenitude of Grace, 136
164–165 politeness, 35–42; authenticity and,
40–41; benign hypocrisy and, 35,
Naipaul, V. S., 93 42; cross class and race, 38–40;
nakedness, as pose, 130–131 characteristics of, 35–37; difficulty
Nashe, Thomas, 28 of, 37; flattery and, 35, 106; vs.
nature. See Lake Superior; graciousness, 36; indirection and,
sublime 49–51; being perfectly polite and,
Nazism, and fake primitive, 61 36; vs. raillery, 36; revenge and, 42
Nietzsche, Friedrich: authenticity pollutants: blacks and one-drop rule,
and, 128; hope and, 176; masks 256; Jews as, 135–136, 256; more
and, 263; ressentiment and, 139; powerful than purifiers, 136
self-deception and, 239 pomposity, 1, 212–214; cutting slack
Nozick, Robert, 239 for, 213; of German professors vs.
Oxbridge and French, 212; vs.
Orwell, George, 168, 201 modesty, 214; reasons American

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prof drawn to style, 212; reconciliation, rituals of, 90. See also
self-satisfaction and, 213 apologies; penance
Pound, Ezra, 172 recusants, burden of maintaining
praise: vs. flattery, 96–103. See also secret beliefs and, 75. See also
flattery; La Rochefoucauld conversos
prayer: abnegation and forgiveness regret, 82. See also remorse
and, 65–66, 74; Amidah, 68–72; relativism, cultural, experience of
bored in services and, 62; of natural beauty and, 154–158
confession, 65; curses and, 66–67, remorse, 78; easy fakeability of, 78;
246; despair and, 66; faking it for forgiveness and, 90–94; vs. regret,
the kids and, 63; in foxholes, 64; 81–83; self-indulgent forms of, 91;
hypocritical, 12; Lord’s, 58; Smith’s nuanced view of,
meaning them, 62–68; mental vs. 248–249; weak, 84–85, 91
vocal, 62; petitory, 64; Psalms, respect: flatteringly, 99; paying, 62
67–68; spontaneous, 64; of respectfulness, 63, 67, 182. See also
thanksgiving, 67 lip service; politeness
pretending, 200–202; vs. faking it, ressentiment, 139; accusations of,
200; kids and, 200–202 257; relation to self-deception,
pretense, pretensions. See 140; vs. sour grapes, 257
affectations; pretentiousness ritual, Big R, 58; apology and, 86;
pretentiousness, 71, 120, 130, 160, coronation and, 74; giggles and,
211–214; art appreciation and, 59–60; hijacked, 74; hocus-pocus
158, 160, 164, 165; images of gas and, 58–59; of humiliation, 88,
and, 211; vs. modesty, 214; 90; nakedness as, 130; primitive,
professors and, 1, 211–214; 61; purity of officiator and, 74; of
unique way of inhabiting role and, reconciliation, 90, 92; “Star
212 Spangled Banner” and, 72
pride: authentic experience of, 140; Rogaine, 204, 208–210; vs. dignity,
of excluded groups, 140, 153; 207; vs. Viagra, 206. See also
humility as, 22, 23, 222, 240; vanity
reevaluations of, 214, 220; as sin roles, 3–4, 5, 6–7, 9–10, 104, 211;
of alchemists, 169 passim; anxiety as by-product of,
primitivism, 61 10; fears of botching, 37; irony
Protestantism, circumcision and, and, 115; playing with leakage, 46,
151–153. See also Christianity; 214–215; pretentiously played,
prayer 212; problems of immersion, 3–4,
Psalms, 67–68 113–115. See also anxiety;
punishment. See apologies; penance authenticity; pretentiousness;
Puritanism, 46 self-consciousness
Romanticism, 45, 128
race, 38–39 Roth, Philip, The Human Stain, 149
racism, 15; self-hating American
and, 143; sham moral courage sagas, Icelandic, women of, 204.
and, 243–244 See also irony
raillery, 36 salvation: glory seeking and, 29

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Santanaya, George, 40 self-doubt, 184, 233. See also

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 139, 150 anxiety
satisfaction, 88; of a wrong, 84–90. self-esteem, 22, 221; gullibility and,
See apologies; penance 42; internal audience and, 22;
Schadenfreude, 87, 144 modesty and, 215; praise and, 96,
security, sin of, 28 98; risks to in courtship, 194, 227;
self: authentic and core, 121, 132, run amok, 103, 220–221;
229; doubling and splitting of, self-hatred and, 142; sin of low,
1–2, 10, 122; embodiment of, 66; virtue and, 26–27
124–125; as fiction, 121; God’s, self-hatred, 141–143, 257;
122; foot and arse and, 124; Americans and, 143–144, 146,
imposed from without, 122–123; 147–148; English lack of,
inner conversation and, 125–128; 147–148; Jews and, 132, 136;
metaphors of theater and, motives and styles of, 142,
127–128; multiple, 4; pretending 147–148
and formation of, 201–202; self-knowledge: difficulty of, 10, 14;
reduction of to genitals or zit, obsessive quests for, 252;
230–231; sense of, 123, 124–128; Polonius’s dictum and, 111–112.
sense of as embodied, 125–127; See also Eliot, George
shameability of, 229 self-mockery, 216–219; vs. false
self-command, 42–47; cold insipidity modesty, 216; irony and, 115;
and, 43; laughter and, 43; as pose, limits of, 217–218; vs. pomposity,
45. See also Austen, Jane, Sense 212; sincerity and, 216; vanity
and Sensibility; Smith, Adam and, 216
self-consciousness, 5, 7, 29, 37, 233; self-monitoring, 4–7; anxiety as
passim; authenticity and, 154; by-product of, 226–227; cognitive
escaping of, 154; inner biases and, 14; measuring up and,
conversation and, 4, 5, 125–128; 234; sleeping and, 9–10; Smith
irony and, 115; mental vs. physical and, 127; voice of judge and, 5,
processes and, 2; being overhead 127. See also anxiety;
and, 110; as show trial, 127, 234. self-consciousness
See also anxiety; faking it; self-mortification, 22
pastoral; self-monitoring self-realization, 129, 154, 257
self-deception: addiction and, self-satisfaction, pomposity and,
173–177; conscious self-tricking, 213–214
34–35; core puzzle of, 244; sentimentality, 61, 250
courage and, 33; evolution and, seriousness, 116
261; hoist with own petard and, sex: coming naturally and, 189;
113–115; hope as mechanism of, euphemism and, 53; expressing
174–177; jargon and, 170; Jesus raw desire for, 48–53; shying away
and, 12–13; knaves and fools and, from, 51–52. See also courtship;
235–237; Pascal’s wager and, 114; love
self-knowledge and, 177; Shakespeare, William, 203, 207;
supposing and, 174–175. See also faking reading of, 109; Hamlet,
transformation; transmutation 84, 109–113, 187, 207; Lear, 90,

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104, 107, 130; Othello, 236; stoicism, 44

Titus, 82 Stonehenge, 163–164
shamans, 169 Strawson, Galen, sense of self and,
shame, 32, 33, 34, 141; American 125, 127
self-hatred and, 145; blushes and, sublime, 154, 156–157, 161; inviting
78; fear of, contrasted with desire the ridiculous, 162
for praise, 41, 245; internalizing Sunset Boulevard, 199
eyes of other and, 234; supposing, 174–175
unaccommodated you and, 229;
virtue and, 41 Talmud, rule prohibiting trees in
Shema, 122 town, 155
shepherds. See pastoral tears, 4, 186–189; fake real, 188
Shklar, Judith, 10, 241 Theater. See acting; actors;
shofar, 61. See also ritual, primitive Diderot
Shylock, 138 therapy, 14; cant of, 235
shyness, 50 Toqueville, Alexis de, 243
sincerity, 87, 116; apologies and, transformations: by clothing, 203; by
78–90; paradox of, 208; experience, 118–120. See also
preemptive confessions and, 216; makeup
shallow vs. deep, 239 transmutation: of motives, 27, 28,
Slavophiles, 146 113–115, 167–168; by
sleep: as first experience of faking it, bootstrapping, 34; by posture and
221–224; pretension of doing so facial expressions, 196. See also
naked, 130; self-deception during, acting; Diderot; Elster;
239; self-monitoring during, self-deception
9–10 Tristram Shandy. See Sterne,
Smith, Adam: avowing selfish Laurence
motives and, 28; desires of the Trollope, Anthony: American
body and, 56; impartial spectator accents and, 145; deceit and, 91;
and, 3, 44, 123; reexperiencing forgiveness and, 92; naked truth
enjoyment and, 159; remorse and, and, 54–55
248; self-command and, 43–44; truth: blurting out, 41; vs. civility,
self-monitoring and splitting 48; coerced, 117; dares, drugs, and
and, 127; sympathy and, 67, 159, drink and, 48, 57; as deceitful, 57
243 difficulty of keeping to it once
snobbery, American self-hatred and, embarked upon, 55; harder to
144 speak than to hear, 55–56; of inner
sour grapes, 168, 257 states, 40–41; masks and,
spontaneity, 64, 246 207–210, 263; naked and ugly,
“Star Spangled Banner.” See ritual, 55–56, 104, 105; necessary lies in
Big R rituals of, 197–198; as offense, not
Sterne, Laurence, 156; brilliant as defense, 142; pawing at door of
prurience of Tristram Shandy, cage, 37; vice of anti-flattery styles
178–179; Walter on Toby’s love, and, 104, 105
179, 195, 196 Twain, Mark, 21

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vanity, 99, 176, 220; communing wanting to do good and, 26.

with the sea and, 153, 156; flattery See also courage; politeness
and, 96, 99; gullibility and, 221; Vonnegut, Kurt, on pretending, 75
hair loss and breast size and,
208–209; looking bad and, 20–23; Wharton, Edith, 121
as spur to virtue, 24, 26–30, 96, Wilde, Oscar, 207
220; vulnerability and, 227. women, 203; burdens of narrator’s
See also self-deception; wife, 38; Christian, 153; makeup
self-esteem; self-mockery and, 202–204; making up in
vegetarianism, pretentiousness of, 71 public and, 203; performing
Viagra, 70, 210; avowing use of, femininity, 190; playing dumb,
205; compared morally to Rogaine 190–194; risks of expressing
206 (cf. fake real tears, 188) unvarnished sexual desire, 53;
vices, 20; central ones in Freud vs. sagas and, 204. See also
central ones of alchemy, 169; misogyny
glory-seeking and, 28; virtue of,
27. See also hypocrisy; La Yeats, William Butler, 210
Rochefoucauld; Mandeville; Yiddish, 134
vanity Yom Kippur, vs. Packers, 73
virtue: faulted for looking good,
20–23; non-self-tormenting, 24–25; zits, 4, 230

290