The noted popularizer Nassim Nicholas Taleb made a comment about the English language that I thought was worthy of unpackaging a bit, and that was a complaint in his collection of aphorisms The Bed Of Procrustes that there was no difference in American between what he called arrogance up and arrogance down.  To me, this sort of idea smacks too much of intersectionality, where various types of losers argue about who is a worse historical loser and thus entitled to have underdog status in a given situation, and thus, paradoxically, the supposed moral high ground and the benefit of any double standards and favorable biases.  Given what I know, this was not the author’s intention.  He does not strike me, in general, as someone who would want to be seen as one of those losers who is worried about his intersectional score as a well-educated Lebanese-American and bestselling author.  No doubt he would prefer to be one of those winners, but this argument comes off rather poorly and was probably not well-thought out.

The reason why there is no distinction in English between an arrogance directed at someone above oneself and that directed at someone who is below is because arrogance is always directed in a downward axis in the aspect in which it is shown.  To the extent that arrogance is mere bullying, it is so because it always involves a case where someone who has an advantage in an area is taking advantage of the weakness or folly of someone else.  We are arrogant in an area where we consider ourselves superior, because we could hardly feel arrogant unless there was a position of some superiority that we believed we had that allowed us some sort of high ground to look down on others.  Whether or not this high ground exists in reality or only in our imaginations, it has to exist on some level for us to believe that we are looking down on someone.  We can hardly be arrogant while looking up at someone in the specific aspect we are arrogant about, because if we looked up at them we would be envious of them (and certainly willing to cut them down) but not arrogant.  However, if we feel envious of someone and then seek to shift the goalposts and change the axis to one where we feel more favorable, then we can shift from envious inferiority to arrogant superiority.

This can have serious consequences.  As human beings are a species that is incredibly sensitive when it comes to questions of honor and dignity and reputation, it is fairly easy for human beings to be somewhat wrongfooted when it comes to matters that make them burn with the fires of anger and vengeance over the wrongs and injustices that they have suffered.  A significant amount of my own writing deals with areas where either I have felt myself wronged, have been concerned over whether I have wronged others, or have been informed that someone feels wronged about something and desires some sort of rational case that allows them to feel a greater sense of dignity and honor than they feel they have been treated by others in the world, be it individuals or institutions.  And being someone who is sensitive to such matters myself, I certainly have a great deal of compassion for others who desire to feel at least equality, and frequently superiority when it comes to matters of understanding, so long as they do not seek to injure my own dignity and honor in the process of seeking their own.

Given my own knowledge of the writer’s thoughts from his writings, thoughts which I am at best ambivalent about, it is worthwhile to think of what he thinks of as arrogance up.  The author, like many of the left, seems to think of former president George W. Bush as a drooling idiot despite an IQ of 130 that would put him somewhere in the “talented” range.  Yet while I would not consider the former president to be a Mensa candidate (not that this matters much when it comes to issues of moral decency), I do think of him as being at least as intelligent as our political class in general, and certainly no less intelligent than the man who succeeded him as president.  He received a BA from Yale and an MBA from Harvard, and though his elite status certainly helped him in that, his education suggests that he is considerably above average in terms of educational attainments, probably in the top ten or fifteen percent of Americans as a whole.  And it is uncharitable to view someone’s intellect merely by the quality of their verbal blunders, especially given the bias in how those blunders are treated and reported on.  His ability to create worthwhile neologisms is something that I find genuine amusement in.  Yet the author perceives himself to be a very intelligent and witty person (though not a nerd) and views his arrogance towards George W. Bush as arrogance in an upward direction regarding elite status, although the author is certainly an elitist himself, and certainly arrogant in a downward direction when it comes to perceived arrogance.  Perhaps he is jealous about a low IQ score that kept him out of Mensa himself.

To be sure, there are cases where arrogance can be shown in a downward direction.  After all, there are misguided people who think that Planned Parenthood and their supporters have the moral high ground as opposed to those who have a higher regard in the rights of unborn children.  There are those who think that secular humanism has the moral high ground when compared to biblical Christianity or the moral viewpoint of the ethical monotheism of the Judeo-Christian faiths as a whole.  There were those who viewed Soviet Communism as morally superior to Western capitalism, and so on and so forth.  The fact that we believe ourselves to be superior on a given scale does not mean that we are superior in fact on that or any scale, but it is our judgment that we are superior that allows us to act in arrogance.  After all, arrogance, regardless on what dimension, does not concern itself with realities.  What it concerns itself with is a subjective judgment that allows us to view someone who is our equal as a being created in the image and likeness of God as an inferior towards whom we can feel pity or contempt but whom we do not view with respect or regard.  And that says more about us than it says about the objects of our contempt or pity.