On Pride and Enmity, Humility and Grace

The following is my first guest post, by Syl, a self-described “witness to the Internet.” Her article was inspired by my recent post On Taking Offense. Syl left a comment there on the concept of pride, and offline the two of us discussed the topic in more detail. It was a great conversation, invoking many of the themes from my writing and my book—compassion, honesty, grace, finding values outside religion, and even a garden! So I invited Syl to articulate her thoughts more fully here.

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By now, a lot of people “on our side,” and even many who aren’t, have noticed that critical social justice or “wokeness” functions similarly to a religion. In particular, it bears a strange resemblance to the main religion that lies at the foundation of western civilization - Christianity - but warped, distorted. Through a glass, darkly. A church without mercy, forgiveness, or grace.

In a sense, you could say it is a Christianity without Christ.

I might not be a believer per se, but in times like these, I think it’s important to avail ourselves of all the tools at our disposal. This includes the wisdom of our ancestors, and Christianity certainly is that - even if we, from our (increasingly less) comfortable perches in postmodernity, might think it patriarchal and backwards, even deluded. What about all those predatory priests? And, ew, the female mystics of the middle ages? What a bunch of Karens!

“Sin” was perhaps a poor choice of word on my part to use without some throat-clearing, as I know it can have a lot of emotional baggage for those from religious backgrounds. By “sin,” I don’t mean “a wicked thing to do that God will tally up against your soul to decide whether to save you or cast you into the fires of hell.” I mean something more like, “a disconnection from grace.” Or maybe, “kind of a dick move.” If we think of a person’s character as being like a garden, sins are like weeds. They will inevitably sprout up, but the onus is on you as gardener to remove them if they threaten the well-being of the other plants. Ideally, the goal is a healthy, thriving garden - an excellent moral character.

For obvious reasons, it’s fallen out of fashion to use the term “prideful” as a pejorative in liberal circles. We speak of pride and “taking pride in” as neutral-to-positive states. It means a healthy sense of self. Freedom from shame. When we talk about “pride” as a negative trait, we tend to use the words derived from the Greek tradition instead. Hubris. Narcissism. When we think of those words the issue with pride - why it was considered the deadliest sin in Christianity - becomes clear.

What are some of the features of narcissism? An inflated sense of self-importance. Lack of insight. Lack of empathy. Pride puts a distorting filter between yourself and the world. You begin to see others as beneath or against you. Innocent words are interpreted as having hostile intent. Your capacity to demonstrate compassion towards others and to accept it, when it is directed at yourself, is reduced.

To me, the two primary pillars of Goodness are wisdom and compassion. This means developing your understanding of the world along a pathway towards truth, and having empathy towards other sentient beings. Goodness requires both, working together in harmony.

Pride is, by its nature, both anti-wisdom and anti-compassion. Unlike other sins, pride is radically anti-Good. It attacks Goodness at the roots.

Lewis says of pride in Mere Christianity, “But pride always means enmity—it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God.”

Now, enmity is not a common word. It could be defined as “the mutual hostility between persecutor and persecuted.” And doesn’t that describe our present moment? Our intense political polarization? The ease with which we assume ill-intent and take offense? Accuse others of being fascists and Nazis? The concept of "intersectionality" has been wielded like a knife to conceptually divide society into an endless array of oppressor/oppressed subsets. If this is our conception of the world, then we have returned to a Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all.

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How did we get here? When I think of my time in intersectional feminist spaces online over the past twenty years, there was a lot of not just indifference, but outright contempt towards The Other (men, white people, "cis" people, straight people, et cetera, et cetera): holding them/us to impossible standards then getting angry with them/us when they/we failed to live up to them. It seemed they/we were meant to serve as emotional punching bags, that was their/our purpose in these spaces. I remember thinking, "Who would want to be an ally, if this is how we/they treat them/us?"

In my recollection, the communities on LiveJournal were even more bleak and cruel than Tumblr on this front. Maybe they needed to be, because these ideas were newer then, less well established, more novel, and “oppressors” fought back harder, believing in their/our own innate humanity and their/our right to an opinion, whereas by the time of Tumblr, they/we had mostly learned to self-censor, to try not to think or speak outside the lines. Learned helplessness. Rats lying apathetically in cages that shock them/us over and over again because they/we have learned that nothing will save them/us, and so they/we no longer seek freedom, but rather succumb to their/our fate.

There’s that saying, “Sometimes people use ‘respect’ to mean ‘treating someone like a person’ and sometimes they use ‘respect’ to mean ‘treating someone like an authority’ and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say ‘if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you’ and they mean ‘if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person’ and they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay." That's how it felt, but with the expected oppressor/oppressed power dynamics flipped to reflect the way power actually flowed within these spaces. As Sarah Haider said in her post about the stabbing of Salman Rushdie, "In the West, power rests behind the facade of victimhood."

I think for people who see themselves as oppressed (regardless of whether or not this is actually true - given that narcissists have a propensity to DARVO, the reality might be exactly opposite), there's a seductively comforting appeal to hurting those you see as your oppressors. And perhaps they might also be acting in accordance with the idea, "well, I'm powerless, and they are powerful, therefore nothing I can do can really hurt them anyway." But that idea is rarely true on the level of individuals, and it is an extremely dangerous one.

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Now, let’s talk about Pride month.

If you were an author writing a book about this exact story unfolding in a parallel world, you’d probably go, “Oh no, I couldn’t possibly name the sacred days of the horrifyingly punitive new religion after the deadliest sin in the previously dominant religion! It’s too on the nose!” It’s like naming your MacGuffin “unobtanium.” It’s a clear sign that we have collectively forgotten where we came from.

Of course, many of the more grounded and aware gay, lesbian, bi, and even trans people have stepped back from Pride as it has metastasized into The Pride Industrial Complex, as Meghan Murphy so aptly called it. We recognize that it is no longer by and for us. In fact, it’s frequently hostile to our experiences and interests. The new Pride is instead dominated by the devout, corporations, churches, and allies.

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The virtue opposite Pride is Humility. Its etymological root is the Latin word “humus,” meaning “of the earth.” To me this suggests embodiment, interdependence. Again, if we consider a person’s character as like a garden, to be humble is to tend to the soil, and keep it clear and healthy so that your plants (or virtues) will thrive. You see yourself and the world just as they are. Compassion flows freely from yourself to the world, and from the world back to yourself.

Pride is to enmity as humility is to grace.

Grace was born independently as a spiritual concept in many world religions, so to me that suggests it answers some call from within our hearts. In Catholicism, grace is "God's benevolence on the undeserving." In a school of Buddhism, "grace isn’t something that we receive from God or some higher power. Grace comes from recognizing and appreciating the indispensable relationships in our lives. [... N]ot only are we interrelated, our individual existence is indebted to one another. This realization of interconnection and indebtedness allows us to be more understanding, responsible, and selfless." And the concept of grace can exist even outside the framework of religion. "Anyone willing to accept their humanity and that of every other person and to respect other sentient beings can present grace and act in grace."

We are all "problematic," because we are all human. But that does not mean there is not always the possibility of redemption, of slates being wiped clean, of forgiveness. Of grace. Hearts and minds can change. We can choose to set our weapons down. Life is not a zero-sum game. It never has been. And where we have constructed it as such, let us imagine a new way forward.

After all, what is the alternative? An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. And a word for a word leaves the whole world speechless.