Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: Split in Two
- 2 Hypocrisy and Jesus
- 3 Antihypocrisy: Looking Bad in Order to Be Good
- 4 Virtues Naturally Immune to Hypocrisy
- 5 Naked Truth: Hey, Wanna F***?
- 6 In Divine Services and Other Ritualized Performances
- 7 Say It Like You Mean It: Mandatory Faking and Apology
- 8 Flattery and Praise
- 9 Hoist with His Own Petard
- 10 The Self, the Double, and the Sense of Self
- 11 At the Core at Last: The Primordial Jew
- 12 Passing and Wishing You Were What You Are Not
- 13 Authentic Moments with the Beautiful and Sublime?
- 14 The Alchemist: Role as Addiction
- 15 “I Love You”: Taking a Bullet versus Biting One
- 16 Boys Crying and Girls Playing Dumb
- 17 Acting Our Roles: Mimicry, Makeup, and Pills
- 18 False (Im)modesty
- 19 Caught in the Act
- Afterword
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
18 - False (Im)modesty
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: Split in Two
- 2 Hypocrisy and Jesus
- 3 Antihypocrisy: Looking Bad in Order to Be Good
- 4 Virtues Naturally Immune to Hypocrisy
- 5 Naked Truth: Hey, Wanna F***?
- 6 In Divine Services and Other Ritualized Performances
- 7 Say It Like You Mean It: Mandatory Faking and Apology
- 8 Flattery and Praise
- 9 Hoist with His Own Petard
- 10 The Self, the Double, and the Sense of Self
- 11 At the Core at Last: The Primordial Jew
- 12 Passing and Wishing You Were What You Are Not
- 13 Authentic Moments with the Beautiful and Sublime?
- 14 The Alchemist: Role as Addiction
- 15 “I Love You”: Taking a Bullet versus Biting One
- 16 Boys Crying and Girls Playing Dumb
- 17 Acting Our Roles: Mimicry, Makeup, and Pills
- 18 False (Im)modesty
- 19 Caught in the Act
- Afterword
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Role playing, performing our parts, is what we do; we can hardly blame one another for playing roles. Suppose, however, the role is flavored in such a way that the player can be described as pretentious. We all pretend, but that does not make us pretentious, or even pretenders in a bad sense, or in the way of Bonny Prince Charley. Pretension can take the form of adopting a style of something you aspire to be, and may eventually be, but are not there yet – thus the grad student who postures as a prof. A variant version has the middling prof posturing as a prof of importance. He differs from the grad student because his case holds no promise of the pretense ever converging with reality. The third in the series is the prof of importance who postures as a prof of importance.
Unlike the first two examples, the prof of importance is playing a role he is entitled to play and is claiming a status he actually occupies, but in a way that reveals him to be too taken with the station life has assigned him. We can imagine a person exuberantly delighting in his high station who is not pretentious. It takes more than just loving his role to make the prof offensive. This pretentious person's delight is a smug delight. He is self-satisfied; he puts on airs, and we feel he is full of air, usually hot, a stuffed shirt, overinflated.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Faking It , pp. 211 - 219Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003