The Merriam Webster dictionary identifies two main aspects of the emotion of pride:
- inordinate self-esteem
- a reasonable or justifiable self-respect
Right away, the difficulty in understanding the emotional significance of pride becomes apparent. Pride is understood as both as a lofty attainment and as a severe failing.
Jane Austen understood the conflict between these two aspects of pride, and the difficulty of telling which kind of pride is being felt in any particular situation. That’s why she chose this particularly tricky feeling as the foundation for the drama at the heart of her beloved novel, Pride and Prejudice.
The question of pride is whether we have self-knowledge that’s adequate to the task of telling when we’re deluding ourselves about our own worth.
How can we really know? One of the weaknesses of inordinate pride is that pride can foster the simultaneous experience of a lack of self-knowledge and confidence in one’s own judgment. Those people whose pride is least merited are often those who feel most certain in their pride.
Mr. Darcy, Austen’s titular prince of pride, confidently declares, “Where there is a real superiority of mind, pride will be always under good regulation.” The wry humor of this statement is that Mr. Darcy had not yet achieved, at the time he made this statement, the real superiority of mind necessary to properly regulate his own pride.
In a more recent, real world example of conundrum the at the heart of pride was provided by Donald Trump. When he pledged, “We will restore the pride in our communities, our nation,” half of America felt a sense of gratitude, and the other half cringed in fear of the terrible consequences of a national leader who overestimates his own capabilities and judgment.
It is probably an unrealistic expectation, capable of fulfillment only in a novel, that a person could establish an enduring sense of well-balanced pride, in which one’s self-esteem matched one’s actual qualities. The best we can reasonably expect of ourselves in practice is to hold pride in a dynamic balance, sometimes moving into excessive confidence and sometimes moving into excessive self-doubt, while on the average getting it right over the course of time. The most honest confidence we can have with pride, therefore, is the confidence that we will often get it wrong.
Pride is a particularly useful emotion for illustrating the discrepancy between objective and subjective reality, showing the wide gulf between internal experience and what can be externally perceived. How could Emotion AI companies ever hope to measure the emotion of pride in a digital scan of a person’s face, when pride can be expressed both through a serene smile and through a haughty sneer? Rituals of respect can be objectively observed and measured, but the authenticity of the emotion of respect for those who pridefully demand it can only be judged by those who feel it themselves.
