Can pride be humbling?

Most religious traditions are critical of pride and for a good reason. There is a kind of pride which gives us a self-sufficient arrogance in our own powers. This pride makes us self-enclosed and therefore closed off to any powers higher than ourselves. Little wonder, then, that religious traditions often warn against hubris, or seek to quieten the egoistic self, or seek to cultivate a reverent, outwardly turned humility.

However, if this is the type of pride to be avoided, there still remain aspects of pride that are either not harmful or that perhaps even help to promote a more humble type of outlook.

For instance, is it really a bad thing to take pride in our work? The sense of "pride" here simply means to have a standard of care in what we do; to be willing to work in a careful and concentrated way; and to create something of quality. Think of a craftsman who wants to create a beautiful, well-constructed piece of furniture; his mind will be quietly concentrated on the value of what he is working on (on something of value outside of himself) rather than on a self-vaunting arrogance.

Then there is a pride we feel in the achievements of our family, town or nation. The positive aspect to this kind of pride is that it begins with the individual feeling connected to something outside of, and larger than, his own egoistic self; it is a sharing of identity and endeavour and a recognition that you owe something of yourself to others. In this sense this kind of pride is also a kind of humility.

Amy Chua to white liberals: you are not elite

Amy Chua is famous for being a Chinese American tiger mom. With her Jewish American husband, Jed Rubenfeld, she has written a new book which is startlingly outside the usual liberal narrative.

Chua and Rubenfeld have decided to write about why some groups in America do better than others:

"That certain groups do much better in America than others — as measured by income, occupational status, test scores and so on — is difficult to talk about"

So which groups do they identify as doing best? They list eight:

1. Jews
2. Chinese
3. Indians
4. Iranians
5. Nigerians
6. Lebanese
7. Cubans
8. Mormons

Note that the only white Americans included in the list are the Mormons, who aren't part of the core white liberal population.

Chua is correct that Asian Americans do better on average than white Americans - I noted that myself back in 2008.

It is significant that mainstream whites are being left off the advantaged list. For decades, white liberals have attacked their fellow whites as being privileged. Here, though, we have a Chinese American and a Jewish American identifying most whites as being part of a losing group when it comes to seeking high position in American society.

There's something else of significance to consider. Although white liberals like to see themselves as being anti-establishment, at the same time they like to see liberalism itself as an elite ideology - as something that confers status and prestige.

But Rubenfeld and Chua take the opposite view. They see liberalism as a losing ideology - as something best avoided if you want success:

in modern America, a group has an edge if it doesn’t buy into — or hasn’t yet bought into — mainstream, post-1960s, liberal American principles.'

So what does confer success according to Rubenfeld and Chua? They believe there is a triple package which drives people onward. The first is having a sense that the group you belong to is superior to others; the second is a feeling of personal insecurity; the third is impulse control.

I don't think Chua gets it entirely right here. I do think it helps if you have a sense that you belong to a high achieving group. I can remember as a boy in the 1970s the positive sense that Anglo-Australian men had of themselves as being masculine high achievers, particularly when it came to the roles of pioneers, soldiers and sportsmen. I don't remember the focus of this being a feeling of superiority over others, though. It was a positive self-focus, rather than being a superiority complex.

Nor were Australian men insecure. I think Chua focuses on this because she believes that therapeutic parenting styles, in which children are forever positively reinforced, leads to low achievement. She prefers the tiger mom style in which children are held to difficult standards of achievement.

By impulse control Chua and Rubenfeld apparently mean the ability to resist the impulse to give up.

I don't think that Chua and Rubenfelds' book, by itself, will discourage white liberals. It's likely that white liberals will respond by thinking that without liberalism you get dangerous claims of superiority, chauvinism etc.

However, the book does point to a different political scenario than the one we've had over the past 50 years. It's a scenario in which new ethnic elites confidently assert their success in terms of their own values, self-consciously rejecting the liberal values of the older, declining elites.

It's one way that liberalism might begin to lose prestige as an elite ideology.

Knocking Australia Day

The 26th of January is Australia Day. In the lead up to this day, without fail, the Melbourne Age newspaper runs a series of columns attacking the idea of Australian patriotism.

They've kicked off this year with a column by a staff travel writer, Ben Groundwater, titled "Why I'm not a proud Aussie". It begins:

Sorry proud Aussies, I don't get you. I don't agree with you.

This is not just the Southern Cross-tattooed proud Aussies I'm talking about, the VB drinkers watching footy in the bars of Kuta. This is all the Australians who pronounce pride in their place of birth
 

So it's not just assertive displays of patriotism he dislikes, it's the very fact of feeling a sense of pride in your country of birth.

Why? He explains:

...the more I travel the more I become convinced that the whole concept of nationality and nationhood is irrelevant. Where do you come from? It shouldn't matter.

That's interesting. The liberal argument is that predetermined qualities like race and ethnicity are impediments to individual self-determination and so should be made not to matter. Therefore, traditional ethnic nationalism has been ruled out of bounds. The idea was that it would be replaced by a civic nationalism, in which we would be united as a country not by a common ethny but by a shared commitment to liberal political institutions and values.

But civic nationalism, predictably, isn't holding. That's not only because it lacks depth, but because it's illogical. After all, most people don't choose to be members of their civic nation, any more than they choose to be members of their race or ethny. They just happen to be born in a particular country. So even membership of a civic nation is something that is largely predetermined rather than self-determined. To a consistent liberal it all seems merely arbitrary.

That's why he writes:

what are we really so proud of? The dumb luck of having been born on a certain piece of land that then becomes "yours"? And what makes your country so much better than everyone else's – other than your familiarity with it?

I dislike the whole concept of nationhood, the way people support their country like it's a football team playing in a grand final. Like we have to choose sides. How much better would it be if we'd all stop taking pride in the little slices of the globe we happened to pop out in and starting just being citizens of the world?

It might sound corny, but it could happen. We could ditch the parochialism and the patriotism and just treat other human beings as other human beings.
 

He sees a civic nationalism as arbitrary, as dumb luck, and urges instead that we just become individual human beings without attachments to any particular place or people - citizens of the world.

And that's the logical end point of liberalism: not just to make traditional ethnic nationalism not matter, but any identity that is larger than the individual unit. We are to ditch the larger and meaningful traditions we belong to in order to identify with ourselves alone.

The better option would be to ditch the underlying assumptions of liberalism, the ones which make self-determination the overriding good. If you do that, then a traditional national identity does make sense. It is based on real forms of connectedness between people: a shared kinship, history, language, religion and culture, one that over time logically creates a sense of being a distinct people and which links individuals to generations past and present, to a cultural heritage, to a love of place and to a willingness to work to maintain or improve standards and achievements.

The three prides

It's clearly the case that many Westerners lack pride. But when I write that I'm referring to positive rather than negative forms of pride. So how do we distinguish between them?

I can think of three kinds of pride, two of them of the positive variety, one of them negative.

Self-full or egoistic pride

This is pride in its negative aspect - the one that many religious traditions, including Christianity, condemn.

It is not necessarily bad in its origins. To live well we do need to exercise a controlling or directing will, one that at its best is guided by reason and prudence. This controlling will then regulates our appetites, thoughts, actions and impulses for our larger well-being.

When, instead of being controlled by our appetites or impulses, we do instead control them, we can feel a sense of self-mastery, of enhanced being and of masculine strength.

And the risk is that these benefits can lead us to think that the controlling will is itself the end good in life. And that can lead to a self-worship, an egotism, a will-full pride in self which then sets the limits of what we are receptive to very narrowly at the borders of self.

Little wonder that, as a counterbalance, many religious traditions then emphasise humility as a virtue. But we should understand humility as a counterbalance and not as a quality that should lead to self-erasure or to a lack of assertion of controlling will in its positive aspect.

Loving pride

This is the inspired pride that we feel on perceiving the good in that which we are closely related to, for instance, the beauty of our spouse, the cuteness of our child, the achievements or the finer qualities of our compatriots or ancestors or race. To feel loving pride is a sign of health, of wholesomeness of spirit.

The lack of such pride in many Westerners is an aspect of an alienated existence, something we should seek to overcome.

Masculine pride

I take masculine pride to be a mostly good thing - that is, unless it spills over into egotistic pride. What, after all, does masculine pride often involve? It involves a willingness to prove ourselves in life's challenges; to pit ourselves against adversity; to be emotionally strong; to keep to standards of honour; and to be courageous and loyal. There are good reasons for this kind of masculine pride to be fostered amongst boys, not the least of which is that it cultivates those qualities which men need to effectively fulfil an adult male role in society.

Positive pride

One of the mistakes we can make is to reduce the good or the bad to single words which don't capture the complexity of moral worth.

An obvious example, and one which I've discussed previously, is the word pride. It's not possible to describe pride as either good or bad as it can be either depending on what exactly the word pride is being used to describe.

There are clearly positive forms of pride. For instance, pride is often associated with a warmth of love, as when we take pride in our children, our spouse or our people. Pride, in this sense, is a healthy sign of attachment - it would not be a virtue to be so cold or alienated or denatured that we were incapable of feeling it.

Pride can also be positive when it is a matter of not wanting to be bested. That's particularly true, I believe, for boys or young men - it is an aspect of a healthy competitive spirit that helps boys and young men to push forward their development. Even the dislike boys have of being bested by girls has a logical purpose: given that women tend not to have romantic feelings toward men they feel superior to, it makes sense for boys developing toward manhood not to want to be bested by their female counterparts.

Pride can be positive, or negative, in another sense: when it comes to wanting to hold to standards. For instance, if we take a pride in our appearance it can be positive (if it means not falling into slovenliness) or negative (if it becomes narcissistic or vain). If our pride in holding to standards helps us resist taking part in base actions that is positive; it can be negative, though, in other contexts, e.g. a woman who has an aristocratic standard and who therefore won't engage in ordinary work (snobbery?).

It's the same when it comes to communal pride. If we take pride in the history of our family, or in the beauty of our local surrounds, or in our national culture then we can be motivated to work to hold to the best of these things.

Miles Franklin was a well-known Australian author of the 1900s. She was on the left, but even so she was critical of some of the debasement of Western culture. Just after WWII she wrote a hostile review of a book by a much more radical woman, Christina Stead. She accused Stead of "writing a handbook on whores," one which depicted women "without shame or pride" - note how shamelessness is associated here with a lack of pride. Miles Franklin also tells the story in this book review of how two feminist men in 1920s America tried to persuade her to join their "free love" circle. They didn't get far because Miles Franklin was revolted by the idea of men describing themselves as feminists. She wrote:

[Floyd] and Charlie announced to me the glad tidings that they were feminists. I was so uninstructed that distaste awakened in me. It seemed to me that the word was related to feminine, and for a man to be feminine was to be effeminate, and utterly obnoxious to me, reared where men were men.

This is a more indirect example, but it does suggest the connection between a pride in her national culture and holding to positive standards (in this case, of masculinity).

Religious traditions have tended to emphasise the negative aspects of pride. That makes sense for two reasons. First, it is common for religious traditions to identify too strong an egoistic sense of self as a barrier to being receptive to the spiritual. Second, there is a sense in many human cultures that an overweening pride, (or hubris), when directed against the divine, leads to man's downfall.

There is a more specific understanding of this second negative aspect of pride. Let's say that man is confronted with a reality that has been determined for him, one in which important aspects of his being and his place within a larger order have already been cast without his choice. How does a man respond to this? If he is humble before God he might well accept his place in a larger order oriented toward the good. But if he, from a pride in his own capacity to make things as he will, is not humble but rebellious, then the given reality with all its predetermined distinctions will feel like a restriction, an impediment to his liberty.

This, it seems to me, is at least part of what the Christian tradition is criticising when it comes to pride; it can be seen in the story of Satan, of Adam and of Babel.

Proph at Collapse:The Blog has written a post on this theme:

reality itself is radically unfree: man's species, sex, race, nationality, time and circumstances of birth, and the authorities to which he is subject, to name just a few, are all determined for him without his consent or even his notice. In him, determinism reigns. With a strong sense of the sacred, this lack of freedom becomes understandable and rationalizable: through his participation in the sacred (for instance, by religious ritualism), man understands himself to be part of a rational order oriented toward the good. In other words, the sacred allows man to experience the authority of the order of being as legitimate. Without a sense of the sacred, reality becomes meaningless, senseless, and incomprehensible; the human condition becomes one not of citizenship and duty but of imprisonment and injustice. Rebellion against that order results, with predictable consequences.

I find this particularly interesting as it relates to trends we see in modern society. Clearly there are liberals who do fail to understand themselves as being "part of a rational order oriented toward the good" and who therefore reject predetermined aspects of being such as sex, race, nationality, forms of authority etc. At the same time, there is a risk that those who do understand themselves to be part of a rational order then become overly compliant toward all aspects of hierarchy or given conditions of life, leading to unnecessary injustices or inequalities. And the focus of the modern world (and the modern churches) often seems to be on an exaggerated attempt to demonstrate that one has not committed this error.

There is an irony, too, in that a hubristic pride before God can lead to a loss of the positive pride in belonging to a social order oriented toward the good - including the warmth of love that is associated with given forms of social distinctions, such as being a man or woman, father or son, Frenchman or Japanese etc.

However, although the churches do have reasons for criticising certain expressions of pride, it would be a gross mistake if they regarded pride as always a vice and never a virtue. That's not a reasonable position to take. It should be possible for churches to go beyond a single word and to explain in some depth how best to understand qualities like pride.