O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
Robert Burns’s lines from To a Louse express one of the oldest and most uncomfortable human wishes: that we might, for a moment, see ourselves from outside.
We all live according to a version of ourselves. We carry within us an internal portrait—part memory, part aspiration, part defence and part story. We may think of ourselves as generous, rational, independent, open-minded, dutiful, rebellious, spiritually aware or unfairly misunderstood. That portrait gives coherence to our lives. It tells us who we are and helps us decide how someone like us ought to behave.
The difficulty is that the portrait is not necessarily accurate.
Other people do not see our intentions directly. They see our behaviour, our tone, our silences, our evasions and the effects we have upon them. We may believe ourselves frank while others experience us as abrasive; principled while they see us as inflexible; intellectually independent while they detect vanity; tolerant while noticing that our tolerance disappears when one of our cherished convictions is questioned.
Burns continues:
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion.
To see ourselves as others see us might indeed free us from many foolish notions—particularly the foolish notions we hold about ourselves.
The rules that spare us self-examination
Perhaps we do not always need to know ourselves deeply. For most of human history, societies have offered external codes of behaviour: religious commandments, customary duties, laws, conventions and standards of respectability. Such rules tell us what to do without requiring us to examine every motive behind the action.
A rule says: keep your promise, do not steal, honour your parents, care for the stranger, control your anger. We can obey without asking what fears, desires or injuries are moving within us.
That is not necessarily a bad thing. Rules restrain destructive impulses and establish a minimum standard by which people can live together. Civilisation would become impossible if every action had to wait upon prolonged introspection.
The danger arises when obedience becomes a substitute for self-knowledge. We may conclude:
I follow the correct rules; therefore I must be a good person.
Yet outward correctness can coexist with pride, resentment, cruelty and hypocrisy. A person may perform every approved action while remaining largely unknown to himself.
Religious teaching has often recognised this. Jesus repeatedly challenged those who observed the law outwardly while neglecting mercy, humility and the inward disposition from which conduct arose. The question was not merely whether the act appeared righteous, but what kind of person was acting and why.
Rules can guide behaviour. They cannot, by themselves, reveal the person who is following them.
The necessity of automatic pilot
Nor would constant self-examination be desirable. Much of life must be lived on automatic pilot.
We do not reconsider every morning how to make tea, tie a shoelace, drive along a familiar road or greet someone we know. Habits preserve mental energy. Moral habits do the same. A person who has acquired the habit of honesty does not need to debate the merits of deception on every occasion.
Automatic pilot is therefore not a defect in human nature. It is one of the conditions that make practical life possible. We do not need to change gear consciously every few seconds.
The problem comes when the road changes but the automatic system does not. A habit formed under one set of circumstances may become destructive under another. A childhood defence may persist long after the original danger has disappeared. A religious rule may continue to be obeyed after its purpose has been forgotten. A self-image formed decades ago may keep steering us even when it no longer corresponds to the person we have become.
Consciousness need not drive continuously. Its role may be more like that of an attentive passenger: usually content to let habit manage the journey, but ready to notice when the vehicle is drifting, the route is wrong or the gears need changing.
Windows and mirrors
We generally prefer windows to mirrors.
A window allows us to examine the world. We can observe other people’s errors, motives and contradictions with impressive clarity. Their pride is obvious; their self-deception transparent; their emotional reactions easily explained.
A mirror turns the examination back upon us.
We tend to regard another person’s defensiveness as psychology, while interpreting our own as a reasonable response to the facts. Their beliefs are products of upbringing and emotional need; ours are conclusions reached by independent thought. Their anger reveals a sore point; ours demonstrates the seriousness of the issue.
Even the language of self-knowledge can become a means of avoiding it. A person may speak fluently about consciousness, ego, conditioning and spiritual awakening while using those ideas chiefly to interpret other people. The vocabulary of insight then becomes another layer of protection around the self.
The true test of openness is not how readily we question inherited beliefs. It is how calmly we can examine the beliefs upon which our present identity depends.
The self we defend
Some elements of our self-image are especially difficult to question because they occupy positions of moral or intellectual superiority.
A person may need to see herself as unusually rational, free-thinking, compassionate, spiritually advanced or immune to convention. Any challenge to that identity may be experienced not simply as disagreement but as an attack upon the person she believes herself to be.
This helps explain why apparently open-minded people can react with sudden anger when a particular assumption is questioned. The anger does not necessarily prove that the criticism is true. But it may indicate that the discussion has moved from an ordinary opinion to a foundation stone of identity.
There is a difference between challenging someone’s ideas and claiming to understand the emotional origins of those ideas. The first leaves room for argument. The second may make the person feel exposed, reduced or interpreted from a position of superior knowledge.
We may sometimes perceive that another person’s conviction is connected with childhood experience, injury or rebellion. Even when that perception is correct, saying so may not produce insight. It may merely produce defence.
An insight can be true without being useful to deliver.
How much should we say?
This creates a moral problem. Should we always tell people what we believe we see in them?
Not necessarily.
Honesty is not the same as indiscriminate disclosure. There are observations that clarify and observations that merely wound. There are challenges that encourage thought and others that push directly upon a sore point, producing anger rather than reflection.
The familiar advice to “let sleeping dogs lie” can sound cowardly. Yet restraint is not always timidity. Sometimes the dog is sleeping because it is tired; sometimes because it is wounded; sometimes because awakening it will benefit no one.
It may miss the chance of a bone, bit it may also bite the hand offering it.
The more useful course is often to challenge the consequences of a belief rather than claiming authority over its hidden origin. We can ask what is lost through a particular outlook, whether it is too narrow, whether it ignores history or whether it produces contradictions. That keeps the argument in the realm of ideas, where both parties retain their dignity and freedom.
The value of another person’s gaze
None of this means that other people see us perfectly. Their view is also shaped by history, prejudice, affection, resentment and self-interest. One person may see arrogance where another sees confidence. A hostile observer may distort us as thoroughly as we distort ourselves.
We should therefore neither surrender our identity entirely to the judgment of others nor dismiss every uncomfortable judgment as misunderstanding.
Maturity may lie in allowing the two portraits to meet: the person we believe ourselves to be and the person our conduct presents to others.
The gap between them can never be closed completely. We possess knowledge of our intentions that others lack; they possess knowledge of our effects that we may prefer not to see.
Burns does not ask that other people be made the final judges of us. He asks for the gift of perspective—the capacity to step briefly outside the self we habitually defend.
That gift might not always be pleasant. But it might, as he says, free us from many a blunder and foolish notion.
And perhaps that is as much self-knowledge as most of us can bear: not the permanent destruction of our sustaining self-image, but the occasional courage to look into the mirror and remain there long enough to recognise the face.
