Arrogance versus Self-Confidence: Us and Them

Of all the charges leveled against me at Syracuse University, the charge that I am arrogant is the one that intrigues me the most.  Some students have accused me of being arrogant; and of late, a few of colleagues in the Philosophy Department at Syracuse University have also accused me of being arrogant.  Of course, defending oneself against the charge of arrogance can almost seem to be self-defeating.  But just as one can rightly defend oneself against the charge of being mean-spirited or inconsiderate or selfish, it seems to me that one can also rightly defend oneself against the charge of being arrogant.

When I think of the arrogant, I think people who have a propensity for drawing attention to their accomplishments or people who are always reminding the other of (what they take to be their superior knowledge.

The arrogant are not to be confused with an individual who is justifiably self-confident.  The self-confident individual knows what her or his abilities (and limitations) are and, moreover, the individual generally knows how to bring those abilities into play at the right time.  We want a self-confident physician, but not an arrogant one.  We want a self-confident pilot, but not an arrogant one.  And so on.  Self-confidence is good; arrogance is bad.

What is particularly striking about the arrogant is the extent to which they are indifferent to their overshadowing others.  The arrogant seem not to care that someone else was trying to get in a word.

What is fascinating in all of this is that whether a person comes across as arrogant or self-confident is not exactly a simple matter.  We can have two equally talented people and yet one comes across as no more than self-confident whereas the other comes across as arrogant.  And the explanation for this, surprisingly, has something to do with our expectations.

There is a very straightforward sense in which we expect more from someone whom we take to be smart than from someone whom we take to be far less smart.  The smart person will be often thought to have lots of interesting thoughts about lots of things, whereas the far less smart person will be often regarded as being out of her or his league about lots of things.  So, for example, we might expect the distinguished literary scholar to have an interesting reflection regarding evolutionary biology, but not the stereotypical factory worker.  So it is, although neither person has done research in the area of evolutionary biology.

Of course, we might learn that the factory worker is not so stereotypical after all.  The reality, though, is that at the outset most of us will have lower expectations of the factory worker than we will have of the literary scholar.

So, the judgment with respect to arrogance or self-confidence is not as independent of the social image that we have of the person as most of us would like to think.  Of course, it can turn out that even someone whom we rightly regard as tremendously talented can also be arrogant.  This truth, though, does not change the reality that the social image that we have of a person typically has a bearing upon whether we judge the person to be arrogant or self-confident.

Now, of course, what surely follows from the above considerations is the simple truth that we can be mistaken in our assessment that a person is arrogant.  The “problem” with the stereotypical factory worker, who has done much to learn about evolutionary theory, is not that he is arrogant, but that she or he does not fit our image of what the typical factory worker knows.  That is, our stereotypical factory worker is not stereotypical at all.

Alas, I would venture to say that it is the rare professor who has not made a wrongful judgment of arrogance merely because a person’s background does not have the characteristic trappings of scholarship.

If the above remarks are right, then it is easy enough to imagine that from all directions ethnicity can be a factor in the mistaken judgment that a person is arrogant.  As is character of my style, let me start with the unusual case.

In my Philosophy 191 class recently, one of the most conservative-looking white guys that one could every lay two eyes upon remarked that abortion is a form of genocide against blacks.  People were struggling to keep their eyes in their eye-sockets as they heard those words rolling off his lips.

Now, let us imagine that this very same white guy has a black singing voice of the 50-Cent genre, contrary to his speaking voice.  Were he to tell people that he can sing like the black rapper 50-Cent, everyone in-the-know would laugh at him, be they black or white or whatever.  They would think of him as arrogant bordering on sheer foolhardiness.  Alas, they would be wrong.  By contrast, If a black were to claim that he could sing like 50-Cent that claim would have, at the very outset, an initial plausibility to it, unless one already knows that the black cannot sing.

Lisa Stansfield provides us with an actual case in point.  All sorts of people were stunned to learn that the singer of the 90s smash hit“All Around the World” is white rather than black.  And she is English, too.

The very poignant point, of course, is that even near the very end of the 20th Century, we still are influenced by ethnicity in terms of what sorts of talents we think that a person might have.  So it is whether we are white or black or Asian or Arabic or whatever.

If that is so, then it would be stunning if ethnicity did not still have some influence upon what we take the intellectual talents of a person to be.  Thus, when we think physics, for example, a black face is not the first image that comes to mind, although there is in actuality a National Society of Black Physicists.  By contrast, the face of an Asian would not faze us in the least.  About 20 years ago, I published an essay entitled “Rationality and Affectivity: The Metaphysics of the Moral Self”; and upon meeting a professional philosopher who very much admired the essay, the person remarked: “It would not have occurred to me to think that you are black”.

If the person’s remarks are any indication of things, it is safe to say that our perception of philosophy is much more like our perception of physics than not, although obviously physics requires a command of mathematics that is not required of philosophy (except in a few subfields of the discipline).  I have subsequently learnt from others that the primary focus of my research is race theory.  Have I written about race?  Absolutely!  But so has Ronald Dworkin; and no one thinks for a moment that race theory is the primary focus of his research.  I written much about friendship and forgiveness and the structure of evil.

As for the relevance of the black experience to philosophy, what I think is that there are fascinating ways in which the black experience can be extremely philosophically illuminating.  And that was the central point of “Upside-Down Equality: A Response Kantian Thought” — and not at all the character and structure of racism.   Interestingly, what I argued in the essay is that whites in South Africa have an understanding about equality generally that few individuals, be they black or white, in Europe and North American can grasp.

Putting these considerations together, perhaps one reason why a few of my colleagues think that I am arrogant may have more to do with their conception of the ethnicity of who should be a successful philosopher and, in particular, who should be a successful philosopher in the Syracuse University Department of Philosophy.  For just as in this blog-entry I have only drawn attention to two essays that I have published (and my blog-entries generally are not about my publications and accomplishments), I say next to nothing to my colleagues about the things that I have done professionally.  Indeed, I am not around them enough to do so.

Alas, when I arrived at Syracuse University Philosophy Department, the most successful of philosophers by far were all white: William Alston, Jonathan Bennett, and Peter Van Inwagen.  It is simply false nowadays that the most successful of philosophers in the Department by far are all white.  And that, I suspect, is a reality that no one saw coming.  Significantly, this could be a more disturbing truth to some old-timers than is the truth that the Philosophy Department no longer has the stature it once had.