Seven Deadly Sins: Pride
by Bradley DoucetMichael Eric Dyson, Pride: The Seven Deadly Sins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 160 pages, $9.95 (paperback).
“Of all the deadly sins, pride is most likely to stir debate about whether it is a sin at all,” writes Michael Eric Dyson in the introduction to Pride, the last in a series of books about the seven deadly sins, each by a different author, published by The New York Public Library and Oxford University Press between 2003 and 2006, and all newly available in paperback as of late 2006. “After all,” Dyson continues, “without a sense of pride, one might not achieve or continue to strive for excellence in one’s field of endeavor.”
I couldn’t agree more, and this encouraging opening left me hoping that this series of books would end on a high note. The first chapter did not disappoint, offering up an engaging survey of religious and philosophical thinking about pride through the ages. This was followed in the second chapter by a revealing look at Dyson’s own personal history and the things that give him a feeling of pride.
Unfortunately, the remaining three chapters are irretrievably mired in identity politics. Whereas Dyson’s identity as a black man—the back cover blurb says he “has been named by Ebony as one of the one hundred most influential Black Americans”—is explicit even in the early parts of the book, it becomes the dominant thread as of Chapter Three, in fact completely hijacking the last two thirds of the book.
Pride of Place
Before giving in to his temptation to paint everything with a racial brush, Dyson does give us a lot of good background information about pride. We learn, for starters, that
Saint Thomas Aquinas was of a similar opinion. Dyson writes, “Aquinas understood pride as man’s disordered desire to be exalted and as contempt for God seen clearly in the refusal to submit to God’s divine rule. This is why, for Aquinas, pride is both the foulest of sins and the mother of all the vices.” The reason all other sins are secondary is that committing any sin requires turning away from God, and that requires some amount of pride.
The Ancient Greeks also condemned pride, denouncing it widely “because it destroyed the cardinal virtues of courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom that buttressed the political order and made the good life possible.” Interestingly, though, one famous Greek thinker took a slightly different view: a man by the name of Aristotle.
Aristotle, according to Dyson, “famously caught sight of the prideful man, and for the most part, liked what he saw. In fact, he viewed pride as ‘the crown of the virtues.’” He believed that a great person should be proud and should claim what he deserves. In Dyson’s words, Aristotle thought that “proud men should be accorded their aristocratic due, but only because they have earned it through genuine merit, through moral superiority, and not through the fortune of good birth or wealth or power.” As D. S. Hutchinson put it in his article “Ethics” from The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle, quoted here by Dyson, the “problem with the vain man is not that he claims too much respect, but that he does not deserve it enough, and he tends to confuse the outward marks of dignity with dignity itself.”
Aristotle’s “proper pride” is contrasted not only with empty vanity but also with excessive humility, which if anything is worse. Dyson writes, “Aristotle despises such undue humility because the humble man thinks he deserves less than he does, and thus fails to appreciate his true worth.” Proper pride, as those familiar with Aristotle might suspect, is seen as the golden mean between false pride and false humility. Basically, what Aristotle is celebrating is the clear perception of reality.
Although he is an ordained Baptist minister in addition to being a Georgetown University Professor, Dyson himself seems closer to Aristotle than to Augustine or Aquinas. While his religion tells him that “pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall,” one could argue that it is false pride—the kind not grounded in reality—that leads to destruction. Indeed, Dyson claims that a healthy self-regard, neither too proud nor too humble, “is a vital pillar to love of God and neighbor.” To take an appropriate level of pride in one’s person and achievements, as Aristotle counseled, “is to affirm and embrace the character of God reflected in one’s own soul.”
But one glaring problem remains for anyone trying to fuse the secular and the divine: the issue of faith versus reason. Dyson writes that undue pride can lead to “the loss of a healthy skepticism about one’s own religion and the poignant self-questioning that authentic faith breeds.” I fail to see how “authentic” faith can breed healthy skepticism; they are in fact perfectly opposed.
One must choose between reason and faith, and it is clear which side Dyson ultimately chooses. He writes, “It is true that one of the vicious consequences of pride is that human reason threatens to replace divine revelation in the religious worldview.” Furthermore, he sees a corrective to this secular arrogance in the divine: “There is, however, a healthy skepticism in religious circles about enshrining reason as an idol or fetish.” Let’s be clear: To the extent that religious folk are skeptical at all, they are using a tool of reason, not a tool of faith.
Black and White
As I said at the outset, the first part of the book has much to recommend it, and my only reservation is in regard to the issue of reason versus faith. The bulk of the book, however, is pretty much a disaster.
On the first page of Chapter Three—entitled “Hubris and Hue: White Pride”—Dyson writes, “If Aristotle’s ‘proper pride’ is a virtue to blacks whose self-respect has been battered, then white pride is often the vice that makes black pride necessary.” What follows is a tidal wave of nonsense about how great black pride is and about how white pride “exists only to thwart nonwhites.”
Dyson thinks he’s being clever when he quotes comedian Chris Rock from one of his standup routines: “There ain’t a white man in this room who’d change places with me . . . and I’m rich!” Well, personally, I wouldn’t change places with anybody, because I like my life, and I want to be me. But if I did want to change places with someone, I would just as soon change places with Chris Rock as with Jerry Seinfeld.
Whites, according to Dyson, are being disingenuous if they oppose affirmative action while “ostensibly being committed to the principle of color-blindness that guided the civil rights movement.” Whites therefore “manage to cast white pride as a matter of disinterested social policy while decrying black claims to social goods as instances of race-conscious practices that blacks sought to overthrow.” Dyson, however, doesn’t engage with people who oppose affirmative action. He doesn’t take them seriously at all, in fact; he simply dismisses them.
Except, that is, when he’s insulting them. After harking back to the Ku Klux Klan and “white hate groups like the White Knights of Columbus,” he writes, “In our day, it is not uncommon to hear ‘angry white males’ complain about unfair minority access to education and employment as they overstate minority success in these areas.” Note the attempt to smear anyone who opposes affirmative action as an “angry white male,” and the sly linking of affirmative-action opponents to “white hate groups.”
This is what Dyson substitutes for actual argument. Nowhere in his lengthy and racially soaked discussion of the harms of white pride and the benefits of black pride does he give a thought to the real individuals seeking employment or enrollment who are passed over because of affirmative-action laws. Nowhere does he mention the real individual employers who are afraid of hiring and firing based on merit alone. And nowhere does he address the real racism that is fostered by those laws, as whites and blacks alike are encouraged to question whether a given black doctor, say, got where he is through actual merit or through preferential treatment.
Dyson claims, “The demand by blacks for compensatory justice in affirmative action is not special-interest pleading. It is a call to recognize that racial identity has long been the basis for conferring and denying opportunity and fairness.” But a claim is not an argument, and special-interest pleading by any other name does not smell any sweeter.
Yes, there is a history of slavery and racism directed against blacks, and the fights to bring down state-supported slavery, and later state-enforced Jim Crow laws, were noble fights. But while there will always be racists, how much of a problem is racism today? Economist Thomas Sowell, in his excellent new book Economic Facts and Fallacies (which I reviewed for Le Quebecois Libre, posted at http://www.quebecoislibre.org/08/080615-3.htm), marshals evidence that convincingly dispels much of the myth of persistent racism.
The two biggest remaining obstacles I see to black advancement are again state-sponsored: public education, which especially fails those it is meant to help; and the unwinnable Drug War, which helps perpetuate a culture of violence that again hurts the most vulnerable. But affirmative-action policy is not the answer. Affirmative action is explicitly racist, and as such, it is part of the problem, not part of the solution. We should all take heed of what our mothers told us: two wrongs do not make a right.
Left and Right
We might imagine at this point that Dyson believes simplistically that “black is good” and “white is bad.” He is quick enough to disabuse us of this notion in his book’s fourth chapter. There he writes, “I learned enough to know that we can never assume that righteousness resides in dark skin, a point illuminated by Clarence Thomas’s career.”
Dyson doesn’t elaborate on this slight of Thomas, an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court who was confirmed by the Senate in 1991 amidst allegations of sexual harassment. Why do I get the feeling that, were Thomas a modern liberal instead of a libertarian-leaning conservative, Dyson would have concurred with Thomas’s own characterization of the allegations as a circus and an attempted metaphorical lynching?
As his defense of affirmative action suggests, Dyson has a deeper commitment than his commitment to his race: left-leaning politics. He writes, “One of the most deceptive uses of black pride is glimpsed when conservatives argue that black folk should be proud of black achievement no matter its political pedigree or consequence. Hence, black pride is manipulated to bully black folks into accepting ideas and personalities that are hostile to our interests.” Again, Dyson does not argue for the wisdom of his political views; he just disparages his opponents’ motives.
Dyson has no feelings of admiration for other prominent black conservatives either, mentioning disdain for the achievements of Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Rod Paige. He specifically says that President George W. Bush nominated these three in order to manipulate black pride. “To be proud of Powell, Rice, or Paige because their skin is black distorts the morality of black pride, which promotes the uplift of black culture and celebrates the complex features of black identity.” He goes so far as to call Rice “a blueblood conservative in blackface.”
To the extent that it matters at all, I do think it is a good thing for blacks to become Supreme Court justices, secretaries of state, and major-party presidential candidates—and yes, I think it is good regardless of their “political pedigree.” I understand that people naturally feel closer to other people who look like they do, lamentable though that fact may be, and so are encouraged by witnessing others who look like them achieving at the highest levels.
But race is far from the most important thing, and it makes no sense to judge someone, positively or negatively, based on his race. I’m glad that Dyson thinks politics is more important than race. What I’m not glad about is how he questions the motives of his ideological opponents instead of challenging their arguments. It is a basic tenet of civil discourse to assume that all opponents (except for those radical environmentalists who explicitly admit to being anti-human) have good intentions—at least until they reveal otherwise. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty. The important follow-up point, of course, is that good intentions are not enough.
Nationalism versus Patriotism
The fifth and final chapter of Dyson’s book is called, “My Country Right or Wrong? National Pride.” This chapter does extend the racially charged rhetoric of the preceding chapters, and it contains some brand-new nonsense, too: “It was only in the nineteenth century when a sense of competition among territories emerged through the concept of nationalism that pride in country became unpleasant and problematic.” I do not see how one can maintain that prior to the nineteenth century, there was no sense of competition among territories, or that pride in country was always pleasant and unproblematic.
Nonetheless, Dyson’s main point in this chapter is, I think, a good one. He writes, “If pride should on occasion be thought of as a vice, even as a sin, it is particularly true when the subject is national pride.” He goes on to contrast patriotism, which is healthy, with nationalism, which is not. “Patriotism is the critical affirmation of one’s country in light of its best values, including the attempt to correct it when it’s in error. Nationalism is the uncritical support of one’s nation regardless of its moral or political bearing.”
This definition of nationalism is fine as far as it goes, but comedian Doug Stanhope helpfully takes it farther in his hilarious (and yes, vulgar) “F**k the French” standup routine, which has gone viral on YouTube: “Nationalism does nothing but teach you how to hate people that you never met,” Stanhope begins, “and all of a sudden you take pride in accomplishments you had no part in whatsoever.”
Stanhope goes on to catalog all of the boneheaded things he remembers doing, none of which involve “saving the French,” for which his buddy thinks the French should show “us” some gratitude. In his definition and in the rest of his routine, he neatly captures what is wrong with the bulk of Dyson’s book: It makes no sense to “take pride in accomplishments you had no part in.”
Whatever the group identity—nation, race, hometown, gender, school—it is a cheap and dirty form of pride that is found in the accomplishments of others. I can admire what others accomplish, and I can feel encouraged on some level when people like me (from my nation, race, hometown, etc.) achieve, but by what alchemy does it make sense for me to feel proud? Pride in someone else’s achievements is a form of false pride.
Yes, black people suffered disproportionately in the past, to put it mildly. But they fought and won those battles against institutionalized, government-sponsored racism (again, with the exceptions of public schools and the drug war). They won the right to “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” They won the right to be treated, not as members of a race, but as individuals. Those who fought and won should be filled with pride. Those of us who came later, human beings of every hue, should be filled with admiration and gratitude, and inspired in turn to live our lives in such a way that we can feel proud, too—genuinely proud. We should live, in short, in the name of the best within us.