4

The Smug

Superiority, pretensions and fantasy comeuppances

When the state-of-the-art glass walls at Apple’s new Norman Foster–designed HQ, Apple Park campus, achieve such high levels of transparency that workers are injured walking into them, and resort to sticking Post-it Notes on the glass so people know it’s there.

When the doorbell rings and I find my husband, who regularly gives me tutorials on correct key management, has forgotten his keys.

While watching a video of parents smugly showing off their new Echo Dot by getting their toddler to request a song. Toddler: “Play Digger Digger.” Alexa: “You want to hear a station for porn, hot chick amateur girl? Pussy, anal, dildo.” Parents (in background): “No! Alexa! Stop! Stop!” (“Digger Digger” also appears to be the name of a porn video.)

About six months ago, I went to the National Gallery. It was autumn and the tourists had gone. The gallery was quiet, and I happened to drift past a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, painted around 1555. Unusually for me, I read the title card first—Landscape with the Fall of Icarus—and I looked briefly at the canvas for the man who, lusting for fame and glory, tried to fly to the sun. I expected to see a muscular hero in giant prosthetic wings crashing to earth in a ball of flames; no, it was a quiet-looking cliff-edge view. I checked the title again: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Looked back—nope. Here was a bucolic scene of a farmer tending his sheep, of clouds scudding and scrubby grass growing and a boat rocking in a quiet bay. And then I spotted him. In the bottom right hand of the painting, unseen by any of the farmers or sheep, or viewers, having plopped into the water head first, merely a pair of tiny upside-down flailing legs. There aren’t many paintings in the National Gallery which make me laugh, but this does. Icarus hoped to win admiration. Instead, his death goes unnoticed.

Is anything more aggravating than other people’s smugness? Those wisps of moral superiority, that arrogance mixed with a little pinch of studied humility, the smothering, solicitous smile: “Well of course we did get a Prius”; “I confess, I do like to wake at sunrise to meditate.” “You’re forgiven,” say the smug in their most patronizing voice when you apologize after a row (everyone knows the rule is both people have to apologize to each other). “You’re welcome,” they declaim after your muttered thanks for their (frankly, inconsequential) favor. Smugness—along with its close relatives: showing off, superiority, excessive ambition and pretentiousness—isn’t precisely a crime, at least not of the same magnitude as those transgressions discussed in the previous chapter. But it does often feel like one. From Icarus to Elon Musk, hubris is the flaw we are most excited to see punished. It is a special kind of Schadenfreude, akin to that of seeing justice restored, but rather more open to abuse, since vanity and conceitedness in other people—like most of their personality flaws—is firmly in the eye of the beholder.

The Danish author Aksel Sandemose was not, by all accounts, a very likable character: he ripped off his publishers, abandoned his wife and children, and may or may not have killed a man. His work is not read that widely today, except one page of his 1933 novel A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks. Set in a fictional town called Jante that is much like the small North Jutland town Sandemose grew up in, the novel is famous among Danes for encapsulating their country’s tacit disdain for all kinds of individualism and ambitiousness in its Rule of Jante (or Janteloven):

You’re not to think you are anything special.

You’re not to think you are as good as we are.

You’re not to think you are smarter than we are.

You’re not to imagine yourself better than us.

You’re not to think you know more than we do.

You’re not to think you are more important than we are.

You’re not to think you are good at anything.

You’re not to laugh at us.

You’re not to think anyone cares about you.

You’re not to think you can teach us anything.

And the Danish are not alone. People have sniggered with contempt at those who break these unspoken rules in many times and places. Especially when it comes to dancing. Castiglione’s sixteenth-century etiquette manual, The Book of the Courtier, contains an anecdote about a soldier at a court party who refuses to join in with the dancing, since he is a military man and above such nonsense. A fellow guest, a woman, starts mocking him for his pretentiousness; soon there is “much laughinge of the standers by,” leaving the poor soldier humiliated. Among the Torres Strait Islanders, one of Australia’s indigenous communities, male dances are a central part of communal life, and their choreography is highly prescribed. So if someone attempts to show off or embellish the moves with a little extra flourish of their own? Well, the unnerving sound of women laughing at them from the shadows will quickly set them right.

In theory, in the modern West, we have shaken ourselves free of this stifling contempt for individual flair. Don’t we celebrate ambition? Applaud aspiration? But you don’t have to scratch the surface hard to find something like the Rule of Jante alive and well. In 2017, an “Instagram influencer” promoted a luxury music festival in the Bahamas—one of the most expensive weekend packages cost $30,000 per person—which the organizers promised would be the event of a lifetime. The bands didn’t show, the white-sand beach was a building site, the food was sandwiches in plastic wrappers (and yes, it rained). How we gloated.

Truth told, we like to cut our fellow humans down to size in many small ways. My neighbor is ribbed by another neighbor for his sleek new car (“you look like an Uber driver!”). “OooOOOooo,” my friends all sing in a little glissando of mock awe when one of us lets slip she’s going to Harrods for brunch. There is something de trop about excess, and we know the rules: don’t name-drop, don’t boast about your kids’ achievements, don’t draw attention to your expensive new coat. In fact, we must know the rules, otherwise we wouldn’t go to such ingenious lengths to find ways round them (cf. the humblebrag).

The dislike of those who think they are better than the rest of us also lies at the heart of the itch to see experts proved wrong. There is great glee in imagining big-league professionals regretting their hasty pronouncements, as when Decca Records execs rejected the Beatles in 1962, with a dismissive “Guitar groups are on the way out,” or when IBM chairman Thomas Watson declared in 1943, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” And British people, who enjoy anything relating to the weather as much as they hate authority, still snigger about the time when, in 1987, weatherman Michael Fish laughed incredulously at a woman who had phoned the BBC to say a hurricane was on the way. “Don’t worry, there isn’t,” he smirked. Before the greatest storm for three centuries battered the country.

Most know the idea of “tall poppies” as a shorthand for our eagerness to see outstanding and highly skilled people tripped up. There is, we suspect, an undertow of cruelty—and we’d be right. The expression originates with a story told by the Greek historian Herodotus in which the tyrant Periander, struggling to control the unruly citizens of Corinth, sought the advice of a neighboring tyrant. The advice came with a wordless gesture: the neighboring king walked through a field of wheat, silently picking off the tallest, most luscious ears until he had entirely destroyed the best part of the crop (the poppies were only swapped in to the fable later). With this Periander knew what to do, wrote Herodotus, and immediately slaughtered all notable and influential people in his city, so that he might rule unchallenged.

Is our dislike of success similarly paranoid and power-crazed? It is certainly hypocritical. We are all guilty of small vanities, moments when we want to be noticed or stand out. And yet we enjoy nothing more than waiting eagerly for other people’s soufflés to deflate. Perhaps it is little more than a desire to feel better about ourselves, to go about our day unchallenged. No doubt, envy plays its part, along with our desire not to be left behind (as we’ll discover more in the next chapter). When we expose such feelings in ourselves, we might also find ourselves feeling a little clammy, and suspect that we are no better than the penny-pinching Mrs. Hackit of George Eliot’s story “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,” with her love of mean gossip and “utmost enjoyment of spoiling a friend’s self-satisfaction.” Perhaps you are feeling a little ashamed right now.

As with all our vices, a suspicion of the ostentatious and outwardly successful—those tall poppies—is normal. Evolutionary psychologists have ventured that early societies, so reliant on cooperation, must have also been highly egalitarian, even if in practice these societies were not peaceful utopias, but were reliant on aggression and violence. Ridiculing and ostracizing those who domineered or tried to appear more important and deserving than the rest was one way of holding people to account. Whether in twenty-first-century London, in a sixteenth-century Venetian court or among the Torres Strait Islanders, ridiculing pretensions may seem cruel, but it also serves a communal purpose, preventing offenders from setting themselves apart from those who will protect them. It’s for your own good, we might think. If you want to stay in our gang, you have to keep to the rules.

Today we may find ourselves trapped between two different impulses: one to celebrate individuality and flair, and the other to condemn it. But we must acknowledge the pleasures in the latter. We might ultimately be left feeling uncomfortable for sniggering inwardly when the pretentious flounder, but in that little surge of superiority, there might even be a glimmer of hope—that by taking pleasure in their downfall, we are saving them from themselves.

“GOOD SCHADENFREUDE”

“I think there is such a thing as Good Schadenfreude,” the philosopher John Portmann tells me from his office at the University of Virginia. He measures his words precisely; he is—as you’d expect—extremely thoughtful and reflective. In our Age of Schadenfreude we find ourselves in an extraordinary moral dilemma, enticed to feel it and condemned when we do. With his book When Bad Things Happen to Other People (2000), Portmann aimed to “dispel anxiety” for those of us troubled by this unwanted feeling, a desire to console which seems to me unusually generous for an academic philosopher, who usually want to disturb and agitate.

“I’m really just a product of my background,” he tells me. “I grew up in a strict Catholic home. In many religious homes, certainly mine, you’re taught certain rules, and you’re made to feel very guilty for failing to live up to them… I had a mother who loved me but she would say when I was growing up that I was arrogant and that this was sinful. She seemed to take some pleasure in my failures or humiliations, and she felt this was God’s way of trying to teach me something or show me something. Nowadays, mothers, at least in America, are quite different… no matter what their child does they say it’s absolutely brilliant. My mother was really quite strict… and um”—he takes a long pause before continuing—“and yeah so, I was very, very aware early on that sometimes when you fail you make other people quite happy.”

His voice trails off. We’ve only been talking for a few minutes, and this revelation fills me with genuine sorrow. Yet for John this story isn’t so much about misery as about how he translated this early experience into understanding how sometimes pleasure felt at another’s failures can involve a longing for moral transformation—the “Good Schadenfreude” he espouses.

John tells me about a recent visit to the extraordinary baroque château Vaux-le-Vicomte, southeast of Paris. On a table, as part of a historical reconstruction, sat an early edition of the fables of seventeenth-century poet Jean de La Fontaine. It lay open at two pages of “The Lion Becomes Old.” The lion had terrorized the jungle with his power and might, treating the other creatures with contempt. Everyone feared and resented him. But eventually he aged, “laden with years, and lingering away / Mourning the memory of his strength now flown / Attacked at last by subjects of his own.” The animals circle around him as he lies dying, kicking, biting and mocking him. It sounds phenomenally cruel to modern ears.

But how different is it really from the Schadenfreude that accompanied, say, Jeffrey Archer’s fall from grace, or Martha Stewart’s—the journalists all piling in to kick them when they were down, just as the animals did to the lion? La Fontaine’s cautionary tale is not so much about getting revenge for a transgression as the pleasure we feel when someone who has made us feel inferior is destroyed. Picture that kid at school—there will have been one—who was really gifted, academic and popular, sporty and confident, and who then sailed off to Oxford or Harvard and made you feel pale in comparison. Things go really well for them for a while. But a few years later you hear that their life has taken a turn, that they are now unemployed or addicted or living back at home. How do you feel?

“Life is full of ups and downs,” says John, “and people do rejoice in the fact that you’ve lost your fangs, your claws, your power, and they remember what it felt like to be intimidated by you, and they do feel pleasure, I think.”

The Christian tradition in which John was raised is highly conflicted about Schadenfreude. “Do not gloat when your enemy falls; when they stumble, do not let your heart rejoice,” instructs the Old Testament (Proverbs 24:17). And yet, Christian art and literature is stuffed full of scenes which relish the suffering of sinners. Hieronymus Bosch’s The Last Judgment is shamelessly gleeful in its vision of drunkards being forced to drink great barrels of wine, and demons wielding sharp-spiked torture machines. Tertullian, a Christian convert who lived during the second and third century AD, appears to have been positively thrilled by what might happen to his former friends come Judgment Day: the heathen poets would be “covered in shame… as one fire consumes them!”; the actors would howl more loudly than they ever had in the amphitheater; wrestlers would leap and tumble not in the gymnasia but “in the fiery billows.” On earth, Schadenfreude may have been unacceptable; but when it came to the afterlife, the gloves were off.

Bosch and Tertullian’s Schadenfreude involves retributive justice—a retrospective punishment for sinning (and since they take place in hell, there is no hope of redemption). But the Bible does also talk about another sort of Schadenfreude—enjoying the sight of suffering since it may lead to transformation. “I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked man, but rather in the wicked man’s conversion, that he may live,” says God in the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel (33:11). Public humiliation has long been part of religious discipline. The Byzantine hermits usually frowned on laughter and jokes, thinking them signs of lustfulness and cruelty (after all, Christ never laughed in the Bible). Yet the saint Athanasios of Athos, who lived in the tenth century AD, dealt with an impudent monk by encouraging his brethren to ridicule him. In early modern Christian Europe, ritualized public humiliations, including fasting, whipping and processing around churches, aimed to bring the rule breakers down to the earth (the humus in Latin), in the hope that they would emerge more God-fearing and respectful, and set an example to others. As recently as the mid-nineteenth century, Abraham Lincoln decreed that 30 April each year should be a “day of national humiliation,” of fasting and deprivation. America, he argued, had become “intoxicated with unbroken success… too self-sufficient… too proud.”

The vogue for reclaiming our own failures and celebrating them as part of success is a modern take on this—all of the humbling, a little less of the humiliation, since we control the narrative ourselves. Such stories can be tremendously inspiring: J. K. Rowling, for example, has spoken of the importance of becoming “the biggest failure I knew”—a lone parent, jobless, broke—to commit to what she truly cared about. Perhaps this instinct that failure helps is also part of what drives, along with our love of surprises and reversals, our taste for Internet fail videos. Take the hero of my current favorite YouTube video. A fat, gorgeous toddler and pretty fluffy kitten sit opposite each other. The toddler reaches out—we think to stroke the kitten—and punches it on the nose. The kitten rears up and swipes at the toddler with its paw. The astonished toddler falls over and starts howling. If you found this funny, you may, in fact, be celebrating the toddler learning an Important Life Lesson, from which he will emerge chastened and humbled.

Of course, we must be wary. Telling someone to their face that being dumped will “strengthen their character,” or that losing a job will be “the grit that makes the pearl” is barbed at best, smuggling on board a little criticism, the implication that they have a flaw that needs correcting, and so adding insult to injury. Yes, there can be superciliousness in “Good Schadenfreude.” And, when it comes to enjoying the redemption of those who have wronged us, there can also be more than a little self-delusion.

FANTASY COMEUPPANCES

That you’ll take your new rich, handsome actor/model boyfriend to your ex’s engagement party.

That your immaculate best friend, who is always aghast at the stains on your baggy jumper, will have her own kid and look even worse.

That the person who invented jogging is eventually forced to admit it makes you die younger.

In Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (1983), fantasist Rupert Pupkin imagines himself a superstar comedian appearing on The Jerry Langford Show. They bring in a surprise guest: his old headmaster! The high school principal approaches the star timidly, even reverentially. Pupkin makes a great show of not recognizing him (remember: this is all going on in Pupkin’s head), but the principal persists. He wants to apologize personally, in front of the whole country, on behalf of everyone who thought Pupkin wouldn’t amount to anything, and beg his forgiveness, and thank him for the meaning he has given everyone’s lives.

When it comes to those who have wronged us, most of us secretly want to see—or at least, imagine—the precise moment that person realizes they have transgressed: the confusion, the horror, the regret crumpling their faces. And in fact, because we know how important these moments are, we often provide them for others too. Most of us automatically signal to others that we realize we’ve made a mistake. We mutter remonstrations to ourselves when we trip, or make a show of cringing when our phone rings in the library, or pantomime holding our head in our hands in shame when we’ve made a mistake in the car.

These tiny specks of behavior are admissions of guilt, demonstrations that we are suffering already and do not need to be punished further. When people attempt to brazen out their failure, things get more complicated. When the contestant on a reality TV show gets a terrible score from the judges, and seems not to care, even implying that the judges don’t know what they’re talking about, then we respond with wincing and scoffing, the exquisite torture known in Spain as vergüenza ajena (or sympathetic shame). But if that contestant looks crestfallen, with a slight tremble on their lips? Then: awwww, maybe they weren’t so bad may be our predictable response.

If we can’t actually witness our erstwhile tormenters broken and shamed upon realizing the gravity of their mistake, then we must, of course, imagine it. In “Who’s Laughing Now,” Jessie J sings about the classmates who once teased and bullied her trying to befriend her now that she is rich and famous and living in LA. This is nothing. Sue Townsend’s celebrated diarist Adrian Mole, aged 13¾, is one of the great masters of these fantasy comeuppances, obsessed with elaborate scenarios in which people who have diminished him are confronted with the error of their ways. The geography teacher will be sorry when Adrian grows up to be a Famous Intellectual. Pandora will cry herself to sleep when Adrian, tanned and knowledgeable, returns from traveling the world and she realizes she missed her chance to marry him. The school bully Barry Kent will end up in prison, where he will read Adrian’s PhD thesis on the relative stupidity of larger youths compared to smaller youths and feel ashamed at his sniveling inferiority.

We imagine their pain and shame and think: maybe they won’t be so arrogant next time. Though look more closely and our self-satisfaction will be curled at the edges in a little twinge of fear. Because we all know that nothing is more likely to lead to a comeuppance than smugly gloating over someone else’s.

In A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh story “In which Tigger is Unbounced,” it is a summer afternoon, and Rabbit, Pooh and Piglet sit outside Pooh’s front door talking about the new arrival in their small community, the irrepressible, exuberant Tigger. “In fact,” Rabbit says as Pooh wakes up from his daydream, “Tigger is getting so bouncy nowadays that it’s time we taught him a lesson… There’s too much of him, that’s what it comes to.” Rabbit hatches a plan. They will take Tigger deep into the forest, lose him, and then come back to rescue him the next morning:

“Why?” said Pooh.

“Because he’ll be a Humble Tigger. Because he’ll be a Sad Tigger, a Melancholy Tigger, a Small and Sorry Tigger, an Oh-Rabbit-I-am-glad-to-see-you Tigger. That’s why… If we can make Tigger feel Small and Sad just for five minutes, we will have done a good deed.”

Well, you can guess how it ends. Rabbit gets lost, and becomes Small and Sorry. And Tigger, who lacks fear, along with all social grace, rescues him.