(2 of 3)
The braggart, of course, has always been present on the American scene, and boasting has been tolerated when it hap pened to come from certain types — poets, entertainers, politicians — who were considered beyond the pale anyhow. It was all right for Walt Whitman to indulge his flagrant self-celebration ("I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious") because, as a poet, he was lost to gentility anyway.
The public similarly has always recognized that in a democracy, where candidates for elective office have to sell themselves like consumer goods, politicians have little practical choice but to depict themselves as heaven's gift to the voter. Still, for most people, self-containment has long been thought a virtue.
The old ideal probably had begun to fade when Norman Mailer published a hodgepodge of fiction and autobiography under the title Advertisements for Myself. In any case, windy self-advertisement became more and more popular in the years that followed. Said John Lennon at the peak of the Beatles' popularity: "We're more popular than Jesus Christ now." Said Heavyweight Boxer Muhammad Ali, in a typical flight: "It ain't no accident that I'm the greatest man in the world at this time in history." The same period at last produced an intellectual model for publicly saluting the self: Commentary Editor Norman Podhoretz's autobiographical book Making It. Wrote Podhoretz: "I looked upon those who possessed ... fame, and I liked what I saw; I measured myself against them, and I did not fall short."
The ideal of modesty, though hardly dead, has begun to seem almost quaint. In an age when some observers think the U.S. has entered the "culture of narcissism," in the words of Christopher Lasch's study, many people think that self-effacement is tainted with hypocrisy. Says Economist John Kenneth Galbraith in his new memoir A Life in Our Times: "Truth is not always coordinate with modesty." Perhaps, but then, truth is never coordinate with vanity. Self-praise is inescapably distorted and corrupted at its source, and this—not some arbitrary convention of etiquette—makes the self-praiser always seem at least ridiculous or fraudulent, and often worse. One must return to Reinhold Neibuhr for the key: "Since the self judges itself by its own standards, it finds itself good."
The standard of modesty evolved out of concerns deeper than ephemeral questions of style and etiquette. The discipline of reining in one's tendency to boast is, after all, merely part of the larger discipline of keeping the ego in check. And why should anyone wish to do that? Simply because the main thing that traps people into spiritual emptiness is some sort of berserk ego. Says Psychologist Shirley Sugerman in Sin and Madness: Studies in Narcissism: "The ancient wisdom of both East and West [tells] repeatedly of man's tendency to self-idolatry, self-encapsulation, and its result: self-destruction."