Pride

“There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which everyone in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people…ever imagine that they are guilty of themselves. I have heard people admit that they are bad-tempered, or that they cannot keep their heads about girls or drink, or even that they are cowards. I do not think I have heard anyone…accuse himself of this vice. And at the same time I have very seldom met anyone…who showed the slightest mercy to it in others. There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others. The vice I am talking of is Pride…it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.” --C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

You might want to call this entry the thesis of my whole blog, the crux of it, if you will. I might go so far as to say the discussion that follows underlines every component of my trip here. It might be the thesis, then, not of this blog, but of this time spend in Rwanda. Rwanda does contribute to the explanation of this concept of interest in a poignant way – Rwanda is a good discussion point. But this goes beyond Rwanda.

It’s difficult, of course, to sum up complex thoughts that have been going on overtime into one entry. But somehow, the matter here isn’t so complex to discuss. It’s surprisingly simple. It takes centuries, though, for individuals, groups, governments, international organizations, movements, and nations to master it. It seems, actually, none of us ever do master it in a complete sense, though we get a taste of it at points in our lives through our awareness of it and our conscious battle to overcome it. Perhaps the pursuit itself – the very effort we put in to master it – is the beauty of it all.

If we were going to talk favorite authors, C.S. Lewis would be up there for me. As a little girl, I would curl up with his Chronicles of Narnia books on the floral-knit couch in our old Victorian house for hours, turning page after page without lifting my eyes. Later in life, I began to learn about the potent symbolism in these books, the metaphorical plots and the grave questions posed through fantastical characters and happenings. Even later, I learned about the life of C.S. Lewis, how he was once a staunch atheist and then turned around and published a tremendous array of books about what he saw on the other side.

If we were going to talk favorite books, Mere Christianity would be up there. It’s scraped and cleansed of all religious (and particularly Christian) jargon that people throw around nowadays, throw around so much, in fact, that most meaning has been lost or muddled. It’s an entirely logical, philosophical, and at times even scientific, discussion on the question of God and, later, on the question of the life of the man called Jesus Christ. It’s about as far from evangelization, conversion, guilt-trips and un-based Christian belief as Neptune is from the sun. It’s not a missive on feelings and church. It doesn’t start with “Christianity,” a term and belief system that has accumulated the dirty lint of misunderstanding and stigma and assumption over the course of the past centuries, and direct life from there; rather, it starts with logical, well-informed explanations and arrives at Christianity. And it’s not some sort of Manifesto or proclamation that Christianity is thoroughly true; rather, it’s a humble piece that provides some very compelling talking and thinking points.

But moving on. This post is not about Christianity – it’s about a chapter in Mere Christianity. Chapter 8. If we were ever going to talk favorite chapters of books, then this one would be up there. C.S. Lewis devotes an entire chapter, the fulcrum of the whole book, to this concept called pride. I want to broach and extend this discussion because I think that, no matter what you believe religiously or what your worldview is, pride is pride, and pride is the driving force for what are deemed the most terrible and unsolvable issues of our world today. Social inequality, ethnic hatred, discrimination, political hatred, greed, economic crises, jealousy, environmental degradation, poverty, mass conflict and war, familial conflict, governmental corruption, organizational corruption, injustice, violence.

Pride is embedded in our humanity. We are competitive; we compare ourselves to the next man. We can’t help it. We can try our best to acknowledge this and move away from it, and this is a great success, though we cannot rid our humanity of pride. We like power. No human hates power or influence or sway – in his own life, in the lives of others, in movements. At one point, Lewis says, “For, of course, power is what Pride really enjoys: there is nothing that makes a man feel so superior to others as being able to move them about like toy soldiers.”

Of course, there is nothing wrong with power or influence or applause or accomplishment. These become problematic only when we think of them in comparison to others and pursue them not for the sake of say, success, but rather for the sake of rising above others. “The trouble begins,” Lewis says, “when you pass from thinking, ‘I have pleased him; all is well,’ to thinking, ‘What a fine person I must be to have done it.’”

Pride is interesting because it can be subtle or blatant. It can be a harp or it can be cymbals. It is blatant in certain extremes: corruption, for one. The lack of good governance among politicians or leaders. Corruption is driven by pride, by a desire to pursue your own ends (power, fortune, fame) despite – or even at the cost of – others’ success or even welfare. Corruption in the DRC, for example, has taken a foothold to such a degree that its disastrous effects are flagrantly known around the globe.

Genocide is another example of blatant pride at work. I can name 2 incidences/ways, and only 2 here for the sake of space, in which pride ruled the genocide in Rwanda:

(1) In the years leading up to 1994, the incumbent dictator, Habyarimana, decided to kill his political competition, Kayibanda. Habyarimana did this by sending military men to surround Kayibanda’s home. Kayibanda and his wife spent their final days in hostage, eating the pages of books in their library, and by the time they died, Habyarimana had established himself as Rwanda’s dictator.

(2) Any given Rwandan killed in 1994 because he (there is no gender bias here, as there were plenty of female killers – this is just to keep things grammatically uncluttered) was either under threat – he killed for fear of losing his own life for non-participation – or he was completely convinced that another man deserved death in his place, or some fateful combination of the two. In any case, the genocide was really a bloody fest of everyone trying to save themselves.

Everyone trying to save themselves, preserve themselves. Pride was at work.

The economic collapse. Did prideful people (and greed is an offshoot of pride) not have a hand in it?

Jealousy is an offshoot of pride.

Familial conflict often results from a lack of effort or ability to see the wrongs committed by both parties and only sees the wrongs committed by another.

Poverty can be exacerbated and perpetuated by pride: a man who decides to hoard riches for his own spending instead of for his family, for their education or welfare; a woman who decides to spend on unnecessary things for herself rather than to invest in the future of her children or serve their immediate needs; a landowner demanding increased payments from farmers who barely see yields that year; a leader who ostensibly “serves” others, only to accumulate profit and power for himself through “servitude.”

Doing service not for the service itself, but instead to get a pat on the back or to do something glamorous in others’ eyes, or to hear people say, “my, what a fine young chap” or “that there is a jolly sweet lady.” You get my drift. It goes on.

If you think just for a moment about an issue that causes affliction or inequality or injustice or suffering in the world – choose one, any one – can you not trace it to pride? I do not believe we can trace it to something more fundamental. Please, enlighten me if you can. This is what I am trying to drive home, and I am open to criticism.

There’s a purpose for saying all of this. First of all, I am in no way saying that I have personally won my battle with pride and thus am giving you the skinny now on how to overcome pride, or some preposterous nonsense of that sort. I am personally about as far from achieving mastery over pride as I am from running a 5-mile cross-country race in 5 minutes. The point is that the most important thing we can do, I think, in response to some of the most engulfing and convoluted problems of our day, is to recognize that pride – no matter on what scale or level – is eternally destructive. Pride may start as a seedling, and it can grow. Or, it may have adverse effects on others of which we are not even aware.

And I am not speaking so much of the pride of others, for there is little we can do to force or convince someone else to cease being prideful. I am speaking of examining pride in ourselves, because in all frankness, that is the only pride about which we can even begin to do something. Perhaps the very essence of pride, in fact, is not to examine it in others, though it is vastly unfortunate and we feel as though we are sitting in the audience and watching it contemptuously and sadly as it runs its course. Rather, its essence may very well be to take note of it in ourselves, recognize its destructiveness, think hard about any action we can take to turn and flee, quickly and entirely in the opposite direction, from where we see it in ourselves, and then to flee. Scram.

Just imagine for a moment what kind of world this would be if everyone attempted to do the above. If everyone, that is, cared for themselves in order to care for others. In short, if everyone got over themselves. We would not always succeed, of course, and relapse occasionally if not frequently into prideful tendencies. And yet, a good bit would be done about corruption. About war. Poverty. Conflict between friends and families. Greed. Suffering.

Example. You find yourself thinking you are better than someone else for whatever large or small reason. Oh, but remember: you are better than no one, and no one is better than you. Look inward instead of outward. Take note of the dramatic shift in perspective that takes place in that moment. And, such a small modification in our psychology can induce impactful and lasting effects in the course of a lifetime. Humility, you might see, can be contagious.

Forgiveness is a gesture of humility.

Example on the large scale. There were some – far too few, but some – Rwandans who refused to participate in the genocide. By doing so, they knew that they increased their chances of being killed either by government forces or by everyone else who was madly convinced that killing was the correct thing to do. They decided to spare others’ lives at the expense of their own. Some survived, and some did not. There were people, in other words, who were courageous enough to swallow their pride in the genocide. However few in number they were, these people changed the progression of the genocide in notable ways. They are remembered all over Rwanda and around the world today. Suppose that every Rwandan had refused to listen to government authorities and had chosen instead to hold onto his own morals. Suppose that every Rwandan (meaning millions of people) had swallowed his pride to risk ostracization or worse, torture or death. There wouldn’t have been a genocide.

Food for thought.