What does it mean to have self-respect?

The Weighing of the Heart from the Book of the Dead of Ani (circa 1300BCE).
British Museum [Public domain] via Wikimedia.

Kitty Flanagan's recent comedy skit on The Weekly got me thinking about the idea of the "residue" we accumulate from our interactions with others, and how to deal with it. For example, checkout staff have been copping abuse from consumers as a result of the self-imposed ban on free plastic shopping bags at Woolworths and Coles stores in New South Wales.

In the skit, Flanagan pokes fun at angry consumers:

I don't believe that anyone is really that angry about plastic bags; I think people are angry about their lives.

While effective approaches to dealing with "high conflict individuals" are accessible, there is an assumed level of calmness and patience of those dealing with angry people. It does not explain, however, why even self-reflective individuals might feel the after-effects of dealing with these angry people.

The same residue might also remain from those who are hyper-critical, judgemental, or just plain rude. No matter how much we exercise pity or compassion, the residue doesn't remove itself. It requires practice, and, I believe, the practise of self-respect.

One of the major issues I have with terms like self-respect is the lack of a definition. I have found the same with self-esteem.

Self-esteem is often regarded as "the way we think about ourselves and the value we place on ourselves". I take issue with this definition as it assumes that we can perceive that value accurately.

So what if our evaluation is wrong?

In my leadership classes, I ask students to consider self-esteem from a different perspective: our self-esteem is greater the closer our self-image is to our actual self.

So, self-confidence is not the same as self-esteem. Indeed, it is possible to be over-confident while suffering from low self-esteem, or even to appear confident while being incompetent.

And self-esteem is not the same thing as self-respect. To simplify, self-esteem is evaluative, while self-respect is a matter of liking oneself.

Again, the problem with this definition is the presupposition that we can simply like ourselves.

Joan Didion, in an essay on self-respect that appeared in Vogue magazine in 1961, provided a clearer definition. (Her essay was added at the last moment as a previous author had failed to deliver on the same topic. To fit the space available, Didion wrote her essay to a precise character count.)

Didion wrote that self-respect is not a mythical charm that protects us from harm, it "concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation". This reconciliation enables us to deal with the residue of high conflict individuals:

To do without self-respect,... is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable home movie that documents one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for each screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there's the hurt on X's face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.

Didion does not assume that we can simply like ourselves. Rather, we develop self-respect through practice - deliberately - and forever. It is:

...a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth.

Self-respect, then, is part of our character:

[C]haracter - the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.

Much like experience, self-respect does not come without its cost: 

...it is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price.

So why bother? For Didion, it is the price we pay for a peaceful life:

Without [self-respect], one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

And self-respect is not just something for the present moment. It has a clear temporal dimension. Didion makes this clear in her essay, On Keeping a Notebook:

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.

But how does one develop and practise self-respect?

I have found it requires daily reflection through journalling. I notice others' emotional residue most first thing in the morning. Without the practice of journalling, I know my mood would spiral out of control if left to its own devices. Journalling, then, is a process of emotional self-cleansing.

But journalling has its own dangers. For Virginia Woolf, we tend to censure our own private writing. Woolf also wrote about her past and present self to her future self, so there is also a temporal aspect to the journalling process.

Woolf wrote that her journal was a private affair:

The habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.

At the same time, she was wary of her ability to bend the truth, even in her private reflection:

I want to appear a success even to myself.

Two lessons are clear. First, self-respect is more than just liking oneself, it is an active process of reconciling our inner selves to the society we experience on a daily basis. It is a habit of the mind, and not an innate ability.

Second, self-respect doesn't just materialise. It requires a desire to have self-respect, and the price to be paid is to be self-aware, and act in accordance with our sense of virtues. (Note that Didion did not approve of Aristotles' golden mean of virtue.)

Morning Coffee - Wake Up is a Spotify playlist I have been listening to each morning. The first piece is Mt Wolf's Burgs. Over time, the lyrics have grown on me:

I, I think if I could get you to do one thing
I would say that when you get to the point that you...
Really feel, highly motivated, to, just, towards keeping your virtue...
Then you'll you'll discover quite quickly how extraordinary a life was meant to be, could be
And it's, it's just we get so messy, it's not that we are doing lots of wrong things, our mind is so messy
We don't keep it simple
And we end up making the life that we are living, so in-ordinarily complicated
Completely unnecessarily, and it's such a shame to end up feeling, in a real muddle, while actually, you ought to be having the time of your lives.

This reminds me of the Delphic maxim, Know Thyself. It would appear that self-respect begins with living the virtuous life.

We can never be perfect, but it is the striving that counts. And while Rousseau thought experience was "dearly bought and hardly worth the cost", I daresay the cost of self-respect is worth every penny.

Coming Soon: Road Pricing and Provision (Book)

Traffic congestion will only get worse and road pricing is inevitable.
Photo © Depositphotos.com/toxawww 

While it will not be everyone's cup of tea, roads are the least reformed infrastructure sector in Australia, and some form of road user charges are inevitable. I hope that my forthcoming book (edited with Professor John Wanna), Road Pricing: Changed Traffic Conditions Ahead, will go some way to explaining the need for urgency in road reform.

Michael de Percy and John Wanna (eds).

There are two main reasons for a system of road pricing. First, funding the construction and maintenance of roads is based on projections with little usage data. We don't know how much motorists are prepared to pay for the use of roads, so we don't really know their value.

Second, motorists currently pay taxes, fuel excise (a quasi-user charge) and an access fee (motor vehicle registration) which is not based on road use. There is a form of cross-subsidisation where light road users are paying the same amount (proportionally) as heavy road users.

A system of road pricing provides market signals - we can discover the actual rather than the estimated demand for road usage. Although we pay an access fee, in effect, road users don't actually pay for how they use our roads.

Sure, we have tolls in major cities, and there is some form of road user charge for heavy vehicles, but this neither accurately reflects the extent of road usage nor the damage done to the roads by heavy vehicles.

Road pricing (what they are worth) and road user charging (what motorists will pay) are basically unknown quantities. Many motorists assume that road usage is free (after paying rego), but this is because there is no point-of-use cost to motorists.

Even the fuel excise, which motorists pay at the petrol bowser, is not clearly indicated on fuel receipts. Indeed, motorists with fuel-inefficient cars actually contribute more for their road use than those wealthy enough to afford the latest Tesla or hybrid vehicle. Poor people in general are paying more fuel excise than wealthy people do for the same amount of road use. And the fuel excise is not linked to road funding - it is, in effect, a tax that goes back into general revenue - it is not hypothecated funding.

Previously, the technology did not exist to accurately reflect individual motorists road usage. Those days are long gone. Yet roads remain inefficient, and political representatives are reluctant to tackle an issue that, based on the evidence, is the best way to signal demand, fund, and charge of road use. We do this for everything else: electricity, gas, water, telecommunications, and so on, but not roads.

The distortions in the market mean that it is cheaper to use trucks than it is to use rail for freight. But this is because the externalities - the hidden costs of road use - are not included in the price of road freight. It is interesting that the exact opposite was the case back in the 1950s before State-owned railways, as a result of a Privy Council decision, were forced on to a level playing field with trucks.

I have written about this problem for a few years now. Each time I have, someone has complained about the extra costs they will have to pay. The thing is, motorists are paying for it anyway, either in rego and fuel excise, or for every minute they sit in traffic.

This book is due to be released by ANU Press soon, and includes chapters from several transport policy experts. All are in favour of road reform and road pricing. But the biggest issue is the lack of political will, coupled with a lack of understanding by the average motorist.

I suspect road pricing will be like the introduction of the GST, which, along with the Y2K Bug, appeared like it was going to be the end the world. But the opposite was true. Our income taxes were reduced significantly, the price of many goods decreased after sales tax was removed, and now we consider the GST as part of our normal household expenditure and don't think twice about it.

Road pricing will be the same, but the trick is to convince others that the time has come. I hope this book goes some way to accelerating the implementation of road reform in Australia.

Lenny: Mahler, Pedagogy, Leonard Bernstein, and My Cat

Leonard Bernstein rehearsing with Benny Goodman, 1940s. [Photo: Public Domain via Wikimedia]

Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein by Jonathan Cott

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A brief look at Jonathan Cott's profile at Rolling Stone magazine reveals a long list of interviews (including dinners) with some of the greats of music, literature, and film, including Bob Dylan, Susan Sontag, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Henry Miller, Richard Gere, and Francis Ford Coppola. I found this book, which was originally meant to be an article for Rolling Stone, refreshing. During the course of some twelve hours, Jonathan Cott interviews the conductor and composer most famous for West Side Story, but is not allowed to ask questions such as "What is your favourite book/composer/music (etc)?" The interview was conducted in 1989, and within a year, Bernstein, a heavy drinker and smoker, was dead. There are some great reviews that cover the basics of the work, including Amanda Mark's review in the New York Journal of Books. I agree with Mark's criticism of the interviewer injecting a little too much of himself into the interview, but it is clear that "Lenny" was taken with him. Suzy Klein's interview in the New Republic captures more of Lenny's sassiness.

But for me, two things stand out most. First, Leonard Bernstein was a great conductor. And not just because others say so, but now I am armed with more knowledge of his work as a conductor, I have been able to compare the works conudcted by Bernstein with that of others. For example, I have taken a keen interest in Mahler. This interest stems from a number of coinciding interests. I first "discovered" Mahler after reading Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. This led me to watching the movie starring Dirk Bogarde, where Mahler's music forms a major part of the soundtrack. (This led me to discover the literary work of Dirk Bogarde.) Around the same time, I was fortunate enough to attend the inaugural performance of John Adam's Saxophone Concerto at the Sydney Opera House, where John Adams conducted the work. Despite a non-existent microphone, Adams held the audience captive as he spoke to the audience about Mahler (among other things). I have never heeard such silence from such a large crowd. John Adams is easily my most favourite composer (of any genre), but there is clearly a connection here with Mahler. So I was surprised to learn that Bernstein fits into the theme of things I enjoy, and I have been comparing recordings of Mahler's work conducted by Lenny with other conductors. There are clearly interesting differences that I would otherwise have missed.

Second, I had no idea that Bernstein had a clear pedagogy. He is credited with teaching a new generation about classical music with the 1950s television series Omnibus. Suffice it to say that Bernstein had a way to lift the lid on education, to inspire, entertain, and really teach. I like West Side Story, but I was never really enamoured with it, as many others seem to be. But reading this book has given me a glimpse of the great man. Finally, and despite my initial reservations about the interviewer, I have a new appreciation for Jonathan Cott's work, and will investigate some of his other published works. I am not sure how I stumbled upon this book, but I have a suspicion it was from Maria Popova's wonderful blog, Brain Pickings, which is easily one of my favourite blogs. And by way of an aside, we named our cats Karl and Lenny (of The Simpsons fame), but interchangeably refer to them as Karl Marx and Lenny Lenin. But now I can only think of my cheeky cat as Lenny Bernstein. And, based on Cott's interview, reincarnation was not something that Lenny took lightly.

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