Reflections III

Pride, Shame, and Claims

After lying in bed unable to fall asleep for quite some time and contemplating my internal struggles this week, I decided to get up and see where my writing would take me. This is that reflection.

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Ever since I was little, I’ve always wanted to be right, not because of my pride (though my sisters may beg to differ), but rather because one of my baseline intuitions and convictions is that to be right is to be aligned with what is True and what is Good, and as I’ve grown up, I’d even say with what is Beautiful. Naturally, then, I’ve always wanted to have a high degree of confidence in my beliefs; this desire has been a blessing and a curse: a blessing because it has pushed me to be a more critical thinker, and a curse because I’m rarely satisfied with my confidence in my own beliefs. It makes it hard to have intellectual rest and peace. After all, who am I to claim rightness about every (important) proposition? Consequently, the thought of being wrong about my beliefs is terrifying, for it means that my view of the world is not only false but also bad; wrong belief is not just an epistemic issue but an ethical issue. Putting aside the fact that my underlying conviction is very Christian, the very idea of my Christian convictions being wrong is even more weighty, for it adds an existential layer. If I am wrong about my Christian beliefs, then not only are my beliefs false, bad, and ugly, but the door opens to the possibility of a fundamentally indifferent and meaningless world.

Given all of this, it is no wonder that when I got to college, I gravitated to philosophy. At the time, I was an agnostic, and then after freshman year, my beliefs morphed into atheism, which led me to reading Camus and Nietzsche. Nevertheless, after a string of fortunate events, I found myself a Christian convert. This is all a bit tangential, but this is a reflection after all, not some formal piece of writing. Anyhow, I have now stumbled my way onto Substack, which I have done to continue dabbling in philosophy. After all, despite coming to the Faith in college, my nature is to continue to wrestle with my own beliefs. To make the point, my motto in college was “always be willing to be convinced.” In the world of free thinking, this seems like a virtue, but over time, I think it’s really become more a reflection of my own pride. I want to say “I am not dogmatic,” and “I just follow the evidence.” I want my testimony to be perfectly rational because that would mean my belief is right, and if my belief is right, then my beliefs are True, Good, and Beautiful. So, after all, my sisters were a tad bit right.

However, there’s more to it than that. The reality is, I also truly do feel a sense of shame when I’m wrong in my beliefs. The epistemic, ethical, and aesthetic weight that comes with being wrong is a lot to bear. When I was younger, I dealt with this by fighting for my beliefs to the death. I can remember countless times being told, “Porter, you’ll do anything but admit your wrong.” As a child, I couldn’t tell you why I cared so much about being right. As an adult, I can tell you exactly why a younger me cared—being told I was wrong was tantamount to being told I had utterly failed. As a consequence, the strategy of my younger years was to be dogmatic about my own beliefs. I really was my own Pope. Unfortunately, all my personal dogma did was result in people calling me prideful and too competitive, as well as leading to anger and frustration, which frankly, I did not enjoy feeling. Above all else, I hated the division and isolation it caused. My friends and family may laugh a little at this, but I really would describe myself as an agreeable person with a high tolerance for conflict. I hate conflict, but I’ll bear it no matter what if it means reconciliation. I adore unity. Nonetheless, in the end, my dogmatic strategy was hurting me more than it was protecting me. It did not work.

Prince Zuko, pride is not the opposite of shame, but its source. True humility is the only antidote to shame. - Uncle Iroh from Avatar: The Last Airbender

My natural course of action was to change strategies, which explains why I entered college agnostic with my intellectually virtuous motto. Like my previous strategy, this one protected me from being wrong because if I didn’t ever claim to really have a stance on anything, then I could never be wrong about anything, and if I wasn’t wrong, then, at the very least, my beliefs weren’t false, bad, and ugly. Sure, I couldn’t say my beliefs were True, Good, and Beautiful, but my agnostic motto was praised. It allowed me to be an open-minded, free thinker. It permitted me to be agreeable; strife rarely broke out, and no one said, “Porter, you're just too prideful.” In fact, now I was even praised for my so-called intellectual humility. Well, spoiler alert, this strategy did not work either. The existential burden of having no positive acknowledgment of the divine or transcendent weighed heavily on me. Additionally, depriving myself of any ability to stand for any important position felt depleting. On top of this, my so-called intellectual humility was really just my pride masquerading as modesty. I was spiritually rotting, and my rotting turned agnosticism into atheism, and later depression.

Again, I found myself coming to the faith, which was large in part due to one of my philosophy professors who happened to be a Christian. Every day after class, I would go to his office hours, and I would pile objection upon objection onto him until he had to leave. The culmination of a lot of those office hours bore fruit. Why do I bring all this up?

Recently, I’ve ended up back in this place of an almost dogmatic agnosticism. Not an agnosticism of unbelief or disbelief in God, but more like this feeling that I should suspend my belief in God until I become more certain of that belief. Again, I can only attribute this to my own pride: I want to make sure I’m right. I don’t want to be wrong because, again, to be wrong is to have a false, bad, and ugly belief—a personal indictment that fills me with shame. With that said, unlike my old agnosticism, my new strand of agnosticism is showing different side effects: rushing, spinning, and atrophying.

Rushing is that feeling I get when I get a fuller grasp on how much there is to learn and know, combined with the existential weight of limited time. The effect of this rushing is that it exacerbates my already pitiful amount of patience. I find myself trying to consume all that I can. I’m in total haste. You would think the internet would help, but it does not; it makes matters worse. All the internet does between YouTube, Substack, PhilPapers, etc, is make the sheer vastness of knowledge like a billboard with sirens right in front of my face. As a consequence, I find myself trying to multitask, which gets me to the next effect.

Spinning is that feeling I get when I try to comprehend too much at once. Today, I found myself listening to a long philosophy YouTube video while I transcribed quotes from The Fellowship of the Ring and provided brief reflections on them. Am I insane? Yes. Not really, but J. Cole was not lying: pride is the devil. As a result, your mind starts to feel like it’s spinning. This is not peace, nor is it rest. I find myself trying to make sure I read all the Substack posts I can on all the topics. But you can’t keep up, so now you're rushing and spinning. That is when I started to realize why so many people pick niches: there’s too much out there, so you have to be content with your niche, which gets me to atrophying.

Atrophying is that feeling I get when I try to focus on everything, but I end up unable to really focus on anything. What results is that your mind not only dulls but tires. In an attempt to keep up, instead of reading things, you just plug them into your favorite AI chatbot and let it regurgitate the main ideas from an article. Now you find yourself in a position where you're not even reading or thinking. Your mind, if you're not careful, will begin to atrophy.

That is how I’ve felt this week.

At first, I thought I needed to get slow, focused, and quiet as a way to combat the rushing, spinning, and atrophying, but those were surface-level signs of a deeper problem. The root of this issue really is a pride problem—a shame problem. The only antidote I see to my heart problem is grace. Grace to be humble, not a false humility, but a true one.