FEELING good about oneself has been an unchallenged virtue in American thought for over two decades. Like muscle tone and dietary fibre, self esteem is regarded as inherently desirable: there is no such thing as too much. Whether it is a bumper sticker proclaiming "Damn I'm Good" or Californian schoolchildren chanting "I'm lovable and I'm capable," the benefits of raising an individual or group's self appreciation level have never been seriously questioned. Until now, when an increasing number of academics and psychologists argue that self esteem has been over prescribed at best. At worst, in the case of violent crime, researchers conclude that low self esteem is often a dangerous misdiagnosis. The problem instead may be too much of that feel good thing.
"The self esteem movement has told us precisely what we wanted to hear," says William B. Swann, Jr, psychology professor and author of Self Traps: The Elusive Quest for Higher Self Esteem, "by compressing. . . difficulties from drug addiction to welfare dependency to dropping out of high school into the relatively compact problem of low self esteem". The results are frequently bizarre. At the Halsey Schools in California, for instance, the word "bad" is forbidden, every student gets an award every year and children learn to count by being told how many objects are in a picture. "Wouldn't it be nice if life were really like this?" Newsweek magazine asked in a report on Halsey, "and what's going to happen to those kids when they find out it's not?"
They can appear on talk shows, says William Swann. "Tune in to . . . Oprah, Geraldo or Sally Jesse Raphael," he suggests, "and you'll quickly realise that low self esteem has become a favourite explanation for a wide array of deviant behaviours." Yet even the paradoxical spectacle of self proclaimed self loathing individuals parading their sadism or child beating in these mock shamefests has not discredited the self esteem movement. Its credo - the amended Cartesianism of "I feel good, therefore I am good" has resisted indictment because fuzzy aspirations make fuzzy targets.
Aspirations are also distractions from specific ills, insists Richard Weissbourd, author of The Vulnerable Child: What Really Hurts America's Children and What We Can Do About It. "There are more prosaic problems that undermine children in school, such as hunger," he explains, "Rather than simply touting the importance of self esteem and engaging in superficial praise and cheerleading - a fad in many schools today - rather than seeing a vulnerable child only in terms of weaknesses, effective teachers must view children as having complex constellations of strengths and weaknesses.
Encouraging students to celebrate any performance, no matter how poor, may be not only dishonest but dangerous. Inflated self esteem - based on personal invention, on Richard Weissbourd's "cheerleading", rather than on achievement - was cited as an important cause of violence in a recent study entitled The Dark Side of High Self Esteem. Published in the January 1996 issue of Psychological Review, the journal of the American Psychological Association, the article is the most specific and controversial challenge so far to a central tenet of the self esteem movement: that low self esteem causes violence, that people do appalling things because they feel worthless.
"This interdisciplinary review of evidence about aggression, crime and violence contradicts the view that low self esteem is an important cause," psychologists Roy Baumeister, Laura Smart and Joseph Boden report. "Instead, violence appears to be most commonly a result of threatened egotism - that is, highly favourable views of self that are disputed by some person or circumstance."
Noting that aggression psychologists and criminologists rarely read each other's publications, the authors here survey the literature and experiments in both fields, concentrating on murder and assault, rape, domestic violence child abuse, political terror and genocide. Their conclusions would not have surprised Sigmund Freud, who rejected the comforting view that aggression is a consequence of frustration or social failure, but they seem heretical to many readers today. Even the sanguine Washington Post reported the findings in an incredulous "Can you believe these guys?" tone.
THOSE findings are, nonetheless, compelling. A 1993 study cited in America, for instance, characterised psychopathic criminals as having "a narcissistic and grossly inflated view of their self worth and importance... a truly astounding egocentricity and sense of entitlement . . . seeing themselves as the centre of the universe, as superior beings". They were also observed to be "highly reactive to perceived insults or slights". Threatened egotism emerged repeatedly as a common cause of violence.
Similarly, a 1978 UK study of men imprisoned for assault found that "pride appears to be far more significant than direct external benefits. Wounded pride certainly seems to enrage them". Among children, victims of bullying show multiple indications of low self esteem, while the bullies seem relatively secure and free from anxiety. "In contrast to a common assumption... we have found no indicators that the aggressive bullies are anxious and insecure under a tough surface," the authors report.
Baumeister and his colleagues differentiate between benign and malignant self esteem and reject the suggestion that people with high self esteem are more likely to commit violent crime. But that does not satisfy critics of the report's central thesis. "Most of the seriously violent inmates are in prison because they have been so humiliated and shamed by the world that they have undergone a `death of the self', "author and psychiatrist Jim Gilligan stressed in a recent interview.
But what if society is guilty, not of humiliating the already humble, but of challenging the arrogant - sometimes unwittingly? "We all depend on one another to honour the identities we have negotiated in the past," says William Swann, "and we feel enormously threatened by the prospect of a world in which things are different from the way our self views have led us to expect them to be."
Some react violently to that perceived threat, particularly those in urban youth gangs where "respect . . . being granted the deference one deserves" is critical. Here "the more ambitious people become the more violent ones", the authors note. "Prestige and respect are gained by depriving others of them. Violent youths seem sincerely to believe that they are better than other people, but they frequently find themselves in circumstances that challenge these beliefs." Those who constitute the challenge are attacked.
A similar pattern emerges in Baumeister, Sharp and Boden's survey of rape. "Rape is motivated by a man's belief in his own superiority, which has been challenged or disputed by the woman (or occasionally by someone else)," they report, "The selection of victim on the basis of her own apparent self esteem is consistent with the zero sum view: one can only gain esteem at the expense of others." A large minority of convicted rapists interviewed in 1990 exhibited high but unstable self esteem and assumed that their victims would regard them favourably afterwards.
Violent tendencies and low self esteem may intersect, the authors concede, in the choice of victim particularly among wife beaters and child abusers. "The most viable view in our version sees low self esteem not as a cause of violence but as causing a preference for safe, helpless targets where fear of retaliation is minimal."
The Dark Side of High Self Esteem avoids blatantly ideological declarations. It does, however, shatter the established therapeutic image of violent offenders in need of self image enhancement. "These people are often violent precisely because they believe themselves to be superior. . . perhaps it would be better to try instilling modesty and self control," the study concludes.
It is a timely suggestion in an increasingly harsh political climate. Educators like William Swann and Richard Weissbourd may argue against replacing affirmation with humiliation, but it is worth recalling that General Colin Powell's popularity ratings soared last year when he said: "We need to restore a sense of shame in our society." Feeling bad may be coming back into fashion.
