Those who know me know that I have a very strong distrust of psychology as a discipline. My criticism of psychologists can be somewhat glibly summed up like this: when they're wrong, they're wrong; When they're right, they're trivial.
Don Quixote recently wrote an article talking about a recent study of psychological studies about the impact of self-esteem on educational performance. His conclusion is (emphasis his):
So by eliminating the common-sense connection between performance and praise (by praising poor performance), the students were less motivated to perform and did poorly. There is a lesson here for all of us no matter what role we play - teacher, parent, friend, co-worker. Indiscriminate praise is less than worthless, it is harmful. Hopefully, school programs that promote indiscriminate self-esteem will pay attention to these findings.
Well, yeah. Let's rephrase the part in bold: Lying is bad. This is what really makes me suspicious of psychologists. They do complicated studies in order to discover things that anyone past the age of 15 already knows, and often anyone past the age of 10. Do we really need studies to find out that pain hurts or that lying is counterproductive to the people being lied to?
I am, of course, somewhat prejudiced. My first real education was in Greek philosophy at the tender age of 15, and I've never really shaken the prejudice of Socrates (and Plato, and Aristotle) that Philosophy is the highest of the pursuits of man. Of course, the Greeks had a somewhat broad definition of philosophy. At the end of the day, they meant by philosophy the desire to understand everything. It may be a narrow prejudice, but it is a very inclusive one.
In the last few centuries somehow various people became enamored upon the success of natural philosophy (science) and wanted some share of that for themselves. Unfortunately, the best way to study a rock and the best way to study a man are not the same thing. When a man studies a rock, he must throw off his humanity for it has nothing in common with the rock -- his knowledge of himself tells him nothing about the rock. His knowledge of himself, however, tells him a great deal about his neighbor. If it didn't, he should no more call his neighbor his neighbor than he calls his neighbor's chair his neighbor.
The end result of approaching human beings as if they were some foreign object like a rock or a quasar is that you spend a great deal of time proving what you already knew to be true.
Now, it is not the case that a person can generalize everything about themselves to others; clearly the world is not composed of six billion copies of me. However, while I cannot conclude from my own hatred of coffee that no one likes it, and indeed, I can look around and see that people do like it, I already know a reasonable amount about how they like it by looking at my own enjoyment of chocolate (even if I weren't aware of the similarity in the addictive chemicals that they contain).
Now, all this being said, I do not quite think it fair to dismiss the proponents of self-esteem. They noticed a fundamental truth, though they afterwards mistook it for a fundamental falsehood. They noticed that people who lack the practical virtue of confidence (which is really just the virtue of faith) tend to do poorly compared with those who have it. Unfortunately, they mistook the object of the confidence and then confused confidence with pride (let's be frank about what self esteem means, in practical terms).
The people who truly succeed are those who have faith in God, though in this day and age most of them don't actually believe in him. This might perhaps be more understandable to my non-Christian readers if I phrased it, those who succeed are those who operate with the fundamental belief that the rules of nature are consistent and understandable and thus problems which do not contradict them are surmountable by man. This is neither confidence nor a lack of it in themselves, but rather confidence in the universe. A man working on a problem does not concern himself with whether he can or cannot do it, he concerns himself with how he should do it. The object of his attention is not himself but his problem.
This is not to say that when a man considers whether a given problem is solvable he ignores himself, rather he considers the universe with himself merely as a part, and a part no larger than he really is. He looks with his eyes, and consequently with some knowledge of himself, but he looks at something other than himself.
It is easy enough to mistake, "this can be done" with "I can do this"; the difference is really only one of emphasis. Yet the emphasis makes a difference. A man who can't stop thinking about himself, whether he thinks happy or sad thoughts, will never do anything great. Paradoxically, great men always derive their greatness not from themselves, but from the greatness of others. The men who built a rocket ship were great not because of something in themselves, but because space is great, and because rockets are great.
It is something of an irony that in the Christian faith, when God walked upon our earth he did so to give very practical advice, yet it makes a bit of sense, I think. If we assume that God made us for some reason having to do with wanting us (rather than wanting a chorus to praise him and do nothing else), it makes some sense that when we were veering from that goal he might point it out to us.
Jesus said that he who would be first must be last, and he who would be greatest must be the servant of all. It has a deeply sublime spiritual meaning, but is also has a remarkably practical meaning as well. All of the men who were truly great, and even those who were truly terrible, were always so in the service of something else. The scientists who developed weapons that could destroy the earth did so by making the object of all their attention and care mere atoms. Even the great megalomaniacs of history worked their terrors in the service of something else. Julius Caesar brought glory, riches, and empire to Rome. Indeed, there is something almost dangerous in this. There are usually limits to what a man will do for his own benefits, but there are few limits to what a man will do in the service of something he believes to be higher than himself.
Lest someone get confused by proximity, I do not mean to suggest that Jesus came so that men may conquer empires; Jesus said plainly enough why he walked among us and I see no reason not to take him at his word. (That is almost a reasonable definition of Christianity -- taking Jesus at his words.) I merely mean to point out that Jesus' teaching was so practical that it is heeded by the most spectacular of sinners, as well as the most spectacular of saints.
What has gone so very wrong is the confusion of the faith in the world with faith in oneself. If you want to find the men fixated upon the certainty of their own greatness, look among the failures. A man who gets all of his greatness from himself will necessarily have a very small share, for a man is very little in himself, though he is not nothing. Men are not gods, yet reflected greatness is no small thing. The moon is not a star, yet it sheds more light upon the earth than a black hole, which we may loosely say is a star with too much self esteem.
What we need is not to build up people; we cannot do that. We are not greater than God, and he only helps those who help themselves (I hope that no more is read into that phrase than the idea that God put us on the earth not so that he might live our lives for us, but that we might do that). What we need to do is to built up people's faith in the world; to build up people's faith that the world is sensible, and worth knowing. In short, we must build up their confidence, not of themselves, but of the world.