Pride and Identity

Abstract How is it that pride has gone from being one of the traditional seven deadly sins to becoming, in recent decades, the banner under which social movements have declared their objectives (Black Pride, Gay Pride, and so on)? How are we to understand the shift from a theology of sin to a politics of self-assertion (and an accompanying psychology of self-esteem)? Is it simply that times have changed? That, God having died, attitudes have changed—so that what once was thought to precede a fall now seems a condition of rising? Or is it perhaps that the nature of pride is to be understood differently in the two contexts? There may be an inherent ambiguity in pride: associating it on the one hand with arrogance, conceit, egotism, and vanity, and on the other hand with self-respect, self-esteem, self-confidence, dignity. (On certain readings, these may all be seen as different kinds or degrees of self-love.) Thus at different times, different aspects of the nature of the emotion come to be given prominence. Or is the difference in the objects? One place to start is with the recognition that the object, and the subject, of the traditional sin was the individual. The social movements that argue for pride are concerned with groups. How do individual and group identity come together in pride?