A World Without Pride

It’s eight o’clock. Gordon just put his youngest to bed. He kisses his wife and tells her he needs to go for a walk.

The evening air is cool and sweet.

The same thoughts keep running through his head. About work, when he caught Dave looking at a Klan site on his phone. Dave told him it isn’t what he thinks.

It’s not about white supremacy, Dave explained. It’s about pride, and there’s nothing wrong with pride.

Gordon was appalled at first. He’s no racist. But on the news these days all he sees is race riots and protests and black fists in the streets. Statues being torn down and schools being renamed for stuff that happened long ago.

Gordon feels like the whole world is telling him to be ashamed of who he is, of his entire ancestry.

And for the past three months, every Sunday — a church day — they’ve been having Pride parades down Main.

Gordon considers himself a tolerant person, but why do they have to flaunt it? He feels uncomfortable all the time these days, just for being in his own skin.

Maybe Dave is right. Black people can be proud of their skin colour and heritage. Gays can be proud of being gay. Why is it wrong to be proud of being white? Of being straight? Gordon didn’t enslave anyone or discriminate. He didn’t beat anyone up for being gay.

Yeah, maybe Dave is right. There’s nothing wrong with being white and straight. Gordon’s is no Klansman, but maybe it is time to stand up for himself and his way of life.

After seeing so much black pride and gay pride, maybe it’s time to show a little pride of his own.

Maybe he should go to that peaceful protest with Dave.

Maybe he will go to Charlottesville.

What is pride, and why do people feel it?

From an evolutionary standpoint, pride is a mechanism that helps humans survive.

On an individual level, taking pride in your work increases your chance of survival. In tribal society, if you’re good at something that is useful to the tribe people will want to keep you alive so you can keep doing it. Taking pride in your work ensures improvement at what you do and keeps your skills sharp.

On a tribal level being proud of your tribe strengthens the tribe’s chances for survival by fostering competition. If you’re proud of your tribe, you’re more willing to fight battles if another tribe encroaches on your land or threatens your food source, and you’re more likely to be aggressive if you need to raid the tribe next door.

But like many evolutionary survival mechanisms, pride is destructive in our current civilization. Human competition isn’t the same as it was in tribal society. I don’t need pride to keep my tribe strong, and in most cases the job I do at work doesn’t require pride for me to keep it.

When a group — whites, straights, gays, blacks, Newfoundlanders, anyone — says they’re proud and display their pride — be it in a parade or a riot or a protest — it’s a show of strength. It’s inevitable that another group will react to it with a show of their own strength.

The best example is straight pride. Straight pride came as a direct response to gay liberation and the LGBT movement.

Gay pride can make certain people feel threatened. It makes them feel like they can’t raise their children how they want, that values are being thrust on them they don’t share. So they start taking pride in their own situation — their gender, sexual orientation, or skin colour — because they feel threatened.

The problem is that people can misconstrue the intent of pride in liberation movements: they see it as an advancing attack as opposed to a group of people searching for equality, because they don’t understand the history of oppression the group has been subjected to. If they knew that, understood it, felt it, they’d react with sympathy instead of pride and fear.

Ironically, the people who understand pride the least are Christians.

How many times have you heard a politician or protester refer to themselves as, “a proud Christian?” When I hear that, the first thing I think is, “then you don’t understand Christianity.”

In Christianity, pride is a sin, and one of the worst ones, at that. In theory, Christians are supposed to model their lives after Christ, and Jesus is depicted as a humble man without a trace of pride.

C.S. Lewis, perhaps the most renowned and competent Christian thinker in the last three hundred years, wrote volumes on pride. While he wrote from a Christian perspective, much of what he said also applies to evolutionary biology.

My favourite is from Mere Christianity, where he states, “Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.” I would reverse that, and say that once pride is gone, so is competition (or at the least it will be severely curtailed).

Another problem is that pride may be necessary to fix the oppression that was originally caused by pride.

Racial oppression, for example, was caused by an Us v. Them mentality. The Europeans who built America did so on the backs of slaves. Their world was white and Christian, and anything else was heretical savagery. They took pride in their God and their civilization and it allowed them to enslave others and commit horrible atrocities.

In Africa, divisions along tribal lines allowed Black people to sell other Blacks as slaves to the Europeans.

But after hundreds of years, non-whites fought back against slavery, racism and discrimination, and continue to fight today.

Pride is a key part of that struggle.

For hundreds of years Black people were told they were property, stupid, and incapable of civilization. Over time, black people fought back by saying, no, we’re not chattel, we have a rich culture and history that we should be proud of.

We should be proud of being Black.

That pride strengthened them, made their movement stronger, uncovered their heritage and continues to induce change today. The same thing happened with gay liberation.

The same pride that leads to oppression plays a crucial role in emancipation.

My opening scene was a crude attempt to pose a question: would this scene even be possible if pride didn’t exist? I don’t think it would.

Can you imagine a world without pride? What would that look like? No one proud of their country, skin colour, kids, self?

I recognize that the elimination of pride is impossible, but I also think it’s important to cultivate a life with as little pride as possible. But what does that look like?

Well, I’m not a proud Newfoundlander: I didn’t do anything to get there, that’s just where I was born. It’s a nice place, but it’s just an island where people live. I try not to make generalizations about it.

I’m not a proud Canadian. I’m just a person who lives within imaginary borders and generally agrees with people around me about the rules we should all follow.

I’m not proud of my kids: I love them and I’m happy when they succeed.

In the end, maybe my thoughts on pride are irrelevant because I was never persecuted for my skin tone or sexual orientation. It’s easy for me to say pride is destructive and obsolete when I never had to march for my right to be regarded as a person under the law.

But pride breeds pride. It strengthens and steels a group of people to defend or attack. It is reactionary and instinctual and can be exploited by governments and media for territorial or financial gain. It causes genocides and slavery.

I’m not sure what the world would be without pride. Maybe none of us would be here at all. But for now, in this time, looking at our future, I’m convinced that less of it would be a good thing.