Self-Flagellation (2)

A commenter suggests “another reason why [scientism]’s so appealing: elitism”:

I don't see it so much as self-flagellation… as the opportunity to push oneself out of the class of "menial service and stunted opportunity”, which is to be accomplished by pushing others into it.  It's the old "I'm smarter than you because I can detect the world is awful" rag…

All self-flagellation is at least in part about purification. And all purification is at least in part about elitism.

But as with so many things, it’s hard to know which is the cause and which the effect: do we sneer at the superstitious in bitter envy, because secretly we long to believe in the sorts of things they believe? Or do we suffer the misery of a crushing world-view simply so that we may sneer at others?

What I want to suggest is that the latter description (at least taken on its own) is in some sense grounded in the same bleak world-view that we're critiquing here. It understands human beings in essentially predatory, competitive terms. It finds our deepest motives in some reductive-Darwinist compulsion to climb to the top. True, I am tortured by envy and competitive greed. But this is not all I am, nor will I believe that it’s what I am at heart. I envy not because I am built to envy but because I am discontent in myself, because of some sadness, some fear.

Let us not doubt that economic motivations, class warfare, insensate gobbling greed are at work in all of us, in all of our mistakes. But let us continue to insist that there are other motives at work as well, motives that are irreducibly personal and human. Let us view ourselves and our adversaries as characters in a novel, not as subjects in a statistical study. The more we do this, the more we will in fact experience our lives more like a novel and less like a statistical study.