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January/February 2022
The Narcissism of Small Differences by Michael Horton
ALTHOUGH THEY LIVED near
each other along the border, the McCoys were in Kentucky and the Hatfields in West Virginia. Their infamous feud began when Asa Harmon McCoy returned from fighting for the Union in the Civil War and was murdered by some Confederate thugs calling themselves the “Wildcats.” A prominent member of the Hatfield clan was suspected as the ringleader, though he was never arrested. It was not until 2003 that an official truce was declared, signed by sixty descendants. The McCoy-Hatfield feud has become a cliché for what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences.” There are countless examples in history of inhabitants who live close to borders, whether artificial or natural, asserting their identity more intensely than the rest of their compatriots. Taken to the extreme, patriotism, ethnicity, language, customs, or just about anything else can explode into a Manichean vision of a final battle between Darkness and Light. There were socioeconomic differences as well. The Hatfields were wealthier and better connected than the McCoys, but not so far apart that their daily lives didn’t intersect. At those intersections, superiority and resentment bred the narcissism of small differences. Group narcissism is seductive, especially when people feel like the folks in the next neighborhood over are threatening their future. We have a created instinct to identify with others because they are different, interesting, and challenge us to grow in ways we wouldn’t have if left
in our own stew. But in our sinful condition this good instinct is warped, and we’d prefer to be in our own silo with people who think, look, act, eat, feel, and dream like us. I need other people to justify me, to assure me of my righteousness, and that even in my self-indulgence disguised as “righteous indignation,” I am not alone. European settlers in America were able to unite around the cause of independence—the otherness of the Old World with its failed civilization. Through kidnapping on a massive scale, they sought to form a permanent other whose very skin could be represented as encoding a difference that made them “special.” This is the narcissism of small differences, but differences nonetheless. A biblical doctrine of creation says that difference is God’s good, true, and beautiful intention in creation. Uncorrupted Adam exclaimed at God’s creation of Eve, “Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Gen. 2:23). Very different, yet one. “He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth,” Paul told the philosophers, “having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us” (Acts 17:26–27). Diversity from unity should lead us back to the ultimate Unity who is simultaneously Three Persons. We can therefore never get back to a unity that isn’t also a communion of distinct persons. If we don’t like difference, then we don’t like God. Michael Horton is editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation
and the J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California in Escondido.
