A Slap in the Face, by William B. irvine – review

A friend of mine who works for the NHS has been told recently by a superior that his ‘attention to detail is bordering on the obsessive’. Aside from observing that an obsessive attention to detail might serve the health service well, this is an example of the kind of insult that Professor Irvine would ascribe either to low self-esteem or to narcissism (high self-esteem with no self-knowledge).

The speaker wasn’t offering constructive criticism (my friend had been praised for his attention to detail only days before, by a perhaps less negligent superior) but rather emphasising her superiority, something she had no need to do, unless she felt it threatened. My friend’s attention to detail is clearly her problem rather than his.

Irvine begins with examples of insult.  There are all sorts: Elizabethan, anonymous, first strike, public, quasi-verbal, benign, teasing and so on. He then moves on to why insults are thrown. He puts this down almost exclusively to a need to defend or improve one’s social status. Social status is reckoned by fame or affluence or both. One is hurt because one’s status is challenged.

During the course of this short book of great clarity, Irvine takes on two progressive fashions: the modern educationalist’s belief in the importance of self-esteem, and the shutting down of free speech, especially in the academy, by the imposition of what Irvine calls political correctness codes. For the latter he gives as an example the firing of a college professor for allowing debate about the word ‘nigger’ in his class (a seminar on offensive language, as it happens).

In regard to the former, Irvine points out that while the aim of educationalists was to eradicate the low esteem that leads to a number of social evils, the result was to create a generation of narcissists, hyper-sensitive to any form of criticism, but more than happy to hand it out.