Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gregg A. Ten Elshof is professor of philosophy at Biola University, La Mirada, California. His book I Told Me So: Self-Deception and the Christian Life won the Christianity Today 2009 Book Award in the Christian Living category.

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i told me so

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

Foreword........................................................................................ixPreface.........................................................................................xiii1. Let's Make a Deal............................................................................12. What? Why? Where?............................................................................153. How-To, Part 1: Attention Management and Procrastination.....................................294. How-To, Part 2: Perspective Switching, Rationalization, and Ressentiment.....................495. Getting Help When It's Not Working...........................................................756. How-Not-To, Part 1: Giving Self-Deception a Demotion.........................................957. How-Not-To, Part 2: Three Good Ideas.........................................................1098. Three Warnings...............................................................................129

Chapter One

The Offer

I'm a college professor — I have been for almost a decade. I work reasonably hard at my job, and I think I do it fairly well. In fact, in my honest and solitary moments, when there's no occasion for false humility, I'd say I'm a better-than-average teacher.

I'm in good company. A recent study revealed that 94 percent of the people who do what I do think they're doing a better-than-average job. And it's not just college professors. "A survey of one million high-school seniors found that 70 percent thought they were above average in leadership ability, and only 2 percent thought they were below average. In terms of ability to get along with others, all students thought they were above average, 60 percent thought they were in the top 10 percent, and 25 percent thought they were in the top 1 percent!" Clearly, a lot of people are wrong about how they stack up in comparison with their peers.

Fortunately, I'm not one of them. Am I?

What's going on? These are intelligent and often self-reflective people. Many of them are aware of statistics like the ones I've just cited. For some of them, the evidence against the suggestion that they're doing a better-than-average job is fairly straightforward. Still they persist in their belief. They discount or ignore the evidence suggesting less-than-stellar job performance (negative course evaluations, people falling asleep in class, low course enrollments, bad test results) and find unusual standards against which to judge their work. But they seem utterly oblivious to the fact that they're doing this. They are the victims of a completely successful sham and deserve our pity. Except for the fact that there's nobody to blame for the lie but them. If they're to blame, should we still pity them?

But who can blame them, really? They've got an amazingly good thing going when you stop to think about it. It's hard work being a genuinely better-than-average college professor. It's hard to engage thoughtfully with the forty-third paper in the stack on Plato's Republic — most of them written in the wee hours of the morning they were due. It's hard work getting to know the quiet student — the one who sits in the middle of the far left side of the classroom — to get to know her well enough to really help her along with her thinking. Connecting with students often means time with them beyond what we do together in the classroom — a movie night to discuss The Matrix at your house on a Wednesday night, say, or attending the Collegiate Cheese Club society meeting that begins after you're usually in bed.

And what do you get in return for your effort? There isn't much money in it. And if your field is relatively obscure (mine's philosophy), you can forget about fame. At best, you get to go through life with a certain satisfaction in the realization that your job is important and you're doing it well. But suppose you could have that same experience of satisfaction without all the hard work of becoming (and continuing to be) a genuinely better-than-average college professor? If you could convince yourself that you were better than average, you could enjoy all the benefits of theft over honest toil. The one catch is that you'd have to do all of this convincing without catching yourself in the act. If you caught yourself in the lie, you'd miss out on the satisfaction that comes from believing, really believing, that you're doing a better-than-average job.

So lots of college professors have taken the deal. And it's not terribly shocking that they have. It is, after all, a pretty good deal. What is surprising is that they are able to pull it off — that they are able to tell themselves the lie without catching themselves in the act. And what's alarming is that if I had taken the deal, it would seem to me (as it does in fact seem to me) that I had not.

As it turns out, a fair bit of our felt well-being is dependent on our beliefs. In this case, what I believe about my job performance has a direct bearing on my sense of well-being. I feel better when I believe that I'm doing my job well. But other beliefs affect my well-being too. I believe that I'm in a vibrant, growing marriage with a beautiful woman who has been (and continues to be) faithful to me, that I have friendships that are — some of them, anyway — deeper and richer than your average friendship, and that my friends and my wife love me with something that approximates unconditional love. I believe that I'm relatively free of egregious racial bias — the kind that leads people to think reprehensible thoughts about and do reprehensible things to each other. I believe that I've successfully come over from being a "non-Christian" to being a "Christian" and that I'm making some progress toward maturity in Christ. I believe that God's not presently calling me to missionary work in Africa and that if he did call me to missionary work in Africa — if it was a very, very clear call — I'd go (or at least I'd seriously consider it). I believe that I can honestly sign the doctrinal statement that you have to sign in order to work at the Christian institution where I teach — that I really do believe everything it says I believe. These are just a few of the beliefs that contribute noticeably to my sense of well-being. There are many more.

Each of these beliefs offers me a certain kind of satisfaction. A discovery to the effect that I was in error about any of them would be pretty upsetting. If I discovered that the seeming depth of my friendships was a sham, I would be significantly disappointed. If it dawned on me that my marriage had been stagnant (or worse) for the last decade, I would be crushed and disillusioned. A discovery to the effect that I could not honestly sign that doctrinal statement would be a source of deep anxiety and fear about my future job prospects. To discover that I'd not been making any progress in the last ten years toward maturity in Christ would depress me to no end. And what would it say about me if I were not ready to go to Africa if God really did call me there?

Here again, life offers me a deal. The beliefs I have about myself and others do not need to be true to bring me...