The Challenge of Being (Fiercely) Objective About Reality

On my goal of being fiercely objective about reality, so that in seeing reality as it is, I might respond to it with grace.

Triple Self-Portrait by Norman Rockwell (1960)

A recently self-imposed commitment of mine is to try to be more objective about my life. Fiercely objective, actually. That’s the qualifier I’m using to emphasize my embrace of a type of merciless accounting of reality, of being brutally honest about my situation.

I know it’s impossible to be truly objective and to step beyond my own subjectivity and biases, which would require a divine-eye view. But I’m inspired to make an honest attempt, and in this way, come to a greater awareness of myself so that, ultimately, I might be able to receive God’s grace more readily. If we can glean something about God in all of creation, then there is something to be gained by being able to see and accept reality as it is, including the reality of our specific selves.

As the Greek philosopher Zeno of Citium claims, “The goal of life is living in agreement with nature.” This sounds simple but, like a lot of ancient aphorisms, is difficult to follow. It’s far too easy to delude ourselves, unfortunately, and live in a type of unreality—a disharmony with nature.

In The Art of Living,” Dietrich von Hildebrand writes about the individual who is inauthentic due to self-delusion.

“[He is the] man who lies to himself and consequently to others. He is the man who simply erases from his mind everything in his life that is difficult or disagreeable, and who not only hides his head like an ostrich, but persuades himself that he is going to do something, when he knows full well that he cannot do it. This is the man who does not want to recognize his own faults; he is the man who immediately twists the meaning of every situation that is humiliating or disagreeable for him so that it loses its sting.”

This can occur in trivial ways, like with the small half-commitments we make to ourselves all the time. I’ll get up thirty minutes earlier to pray or exercise. I’ll cut back on drinking or sweets starting next month. Once I’ve graduated/gotten married/raised the kids/retired/saved X amount/etc. then I’ll pursue this or that dream or goal. We tell ourselves this when, if we are truly honest (if we attempted to be fiercely objective about it), we would admit that we won’t or can’t. But we refuse to engage in such an exercise and, rather, choose to believe otherwise because it’s too painful to admit our weaknesses. There is a type of false comfort in telling ourselves one thing today to ease the burden of actually doing something tomorrow. This may not be the worst thing in the world if it applies mostly to the smaller details of our lives but the danger is that this type of thinking can pour into major aspects of our lives. In the worst cases, we can fashion the entirety of a life on delusion.

I recently saw a film exploring a character who suffers precisely from this lack of honesty about her reality. The Last Showgirl, featuring Pamela Anderson as a character named Shelly, offers a tragic glimpse of such a person. The film, which I would consider a “companion” piece to The Wrestler, depicts Shelly struggling to accept that youth and beauty are, well, no longer in her possession. Again and again, we see reality clashing with her perception of reality. She perceives herself to be a highly trained artist, a dancer of the Parisian variety who has—by her faulty estimation—given her life over to the celebration of real beauty when, in reality, she is an aging topless dancer at a seedy Vegas club that’s about to go out of business. She continues to reframe her choice to be a dancer as a heroic and romantic one, even if the consequences of her choice entail abandoning her daughter and refusing deep relationships with men. It’s a heartbreaking movie. In one scene, after her daughter has watched one of her performances for the first time (the movie never shows us a real performance to emphasize Shelly’s deluded perception of her own show), her daughter, disgusted and upset by what she has seen, asks Shelly, “Is this what you gave me up for?” The main character cannot or will not give a truthful answer to this question. But we know the answer. Yes, her mother has given her daughter up to feed a delusion built on vanity and insecurity. Yes, her mother has wasted her life and irrevocably harmed her relationship with her daughter. Shelly remains imprisoned in a dream world, a world that, despite opportunities to accept her reality (i.e. moments of grace), she refuses and, in the words of von Hildebrand, buries her head “like an ostrich.”

It is a defense mechanism to naturally want to avoid coming to a realization about our limitations, unmet expectations, or poor choices. Just as when we are criticized by others, when life threatens to critique us our first impulse can be to refute it. Because it hurts, of course. And because it’s hard to accept we might not align with some ideal.

I do this. But I’m trying to be better at not doing it. I’m trying to take a more humble posture: to be willing to see myself more clearly, both the good and not-so-good, because it is precisely from this place that I’m better able to experience God.

Then there is the opposite response deriving from the same impulse, I think, which is ultimately reducible to a lack of hope in God. The opposite response is to be excessively cynical, choosing to believe nothing will work out or that nothing is worth pursuing or that there aren’t wonderful and beautiful aspects to ourselves and our lives. You can find these people scouring Twitter and YouTube discussion threads, the magnitude of their despair rivaled only by that of their rampant misspellings. This, too, features an element of delusion—a type of fabrication and failure to regard the true, good, and beautiful within reality.

In certain intellectual circles, this type of crippling cynicism can be seen as a virtue—a sober-eyed accounting of how the world really is. Often it’s motivated by a willingness not to be duped by life, to not be fooled into believing things might work out only to have one’s hopes brutally dashed.

I see this sometimes in academia, or as the buzzing gnat that I am circling the elephant’s ass that is academia (I’m a mere graduate fellow, after all). I once had a professor like this. Apparently caught in the middle of some type of administrative feud, he joked about how the department was after him.

“Which one of you little agents is going to turn me in for that one?” He asked us on our first day of class. This was after he had gone off about how the department was made up of traditional scholars who were, I guess, targeting him in some way.

“I know about the agents in the ranks of our graduate students. Are you an agent?” He said, flicking a twiggy index finger at a girl, to which the poor student frantically shook her head, worried she was now doomed to receive a poor grade because she had the unfortunate face of a mole.

“I’m just kidding…kind of,” he said, and the class laughed uncomfortably.

I don’t know what the guy was going through exactly, and maybe he had good reason to be upset, even if he shouldn’t have been complaining about it to us. From my vantage, he had a prestigious, well-paying academic job requiring him to teach only two classes in the area of his self-professed passion. He spent a lot of time talking about revolutions, the need to push for a more utopian world, and the dismantling of current power structures under which we were all forced to writhe. In other words, he believed passionately in creating a more fair and just world.

But here’s what bothered me: the guy maybe did the equivalent of an hour of work for the entire semester (and it wasn’t like he had some lackey TA, either). I asked him after class once what he thought of my proposal for our end-of-term essay he had us submit weeks prior, and it became immediately clear he hadn’t read it. Standing outside the classroom, he briefly skimmed it over, nodded, and then said it looked promising. At the end of the semester, after slogging through a fifteen-page essay and name-dropping some of the usual theory suspects like Althusser, Freud, and Foucault—the type of guys he loved to talk about—he responded to my essay with a couple sentences and a grade. The rest of the essay was completely unmarked. Sure, maybe he read it. Or maybe he just read the first page and figured that was good enough.

Here’s my point: I think he was engaged in a bit of self-delusion. Sure, you can talk a big game about ideas and theories and about what the world should be like, and you can tell yourself you want those things. But then, due to some personal suffering or disappointment, you can allow a type of near-despair to pour into your life, resulting in behaviors that don’t align with your theories or ideas. So, when it comes to showing up for the real people in your life, in this case, your students, where you can actually make a positive difference in a concrete way, you don’t do it. You just accuse them of being double agents.

This brings me back to where I started: my goal of being fiercely objective about reality, so that in seeing reality as it is, I might respond to it with grace. And this is where it becomes important to access the one who does, in fact, have a supremely objective view of reality—God. He can keep us from both forms of delusion: untethered fantasy and crushing cynicism. Through prayer, he can help us face our faults and limitations with honesty and humility so that in seeing and accepting them, we might receive the grace to remedy them. He can help us embrace and make fruitful the goods and opportunities in our lives, too, instead of sarcastically dismissing or ignoring them. But I don’t think this can happen unless we first accept our reality as it truly is.

And so, with that, let’s end with Father Jacques Philippe’s illuminating advice on this matter from his Interior Freedom:

“The secret actually is very simple. It is to understand that we can only transform reality fruitfully if we accept it first. This also means having the humility to recognize that we cannot change ourselves by our own efforts, but that all progress in the spiritual life, every victory over ourselves, is a gift of God’s grace. We will not receive the grace to change unless we desire to; but to receive the grace that will transform us, we must ‘receive’ ourselves—to accept ourselves as we really are.”