About the South's glorious past

In My Humble Opinion
181

So how would you expect to a person to expunge themselves of an evil feeling like pride? Should they go to therapy? Pray to a diety? Go lift weights at the gym? How did you become such an enlightened sage on the mountaintop? What’s the prescription you would write someone suffering from the horrific malady of tribal pride, oh wise one?

Because I gotta tell you, hearing that my feelings are a “fundamental evil” isn’t persuasive. Your post is no more persuasive to me than one suggesting I come from a “fundamental evil” people because I have dark skin and nappy hair.

182

I’m not trying to persuade anyone in this thread. I’m stating what I believe.

If someone were to ask my advice, I would recommend dealing with their pride in their ancestors the same way they deal with their greed or jealousy or hatred or anger or envy or spite. Hell, the Catholics list “pride” along with their other seven deadly sins. It doesn’t require me to claim special enlightenment to come to that conclusion.

I narrow it to pride in one’s heritage or ancestors and extend it to other things like pride in one’s country or region or city or university or sports team other tribal group.

Those, to me, are not analogous your skin color or hair type. Not every facet of one’s character or makeup is worth celebrating. Some things are negative. To me, pride in one’s ancestors is one of those things.

183

Interesting discussion. I think pride of region/ethnicity/etc is similar to pride of country. Some pride leads to patriotism but too much pride leads to nationalism. Nationalism, among other things, draws a line to keep some people out.

Southern Pride often seems to cross over into nationalism.

184

They seem to be uniquely dedicated to honoring it. Northerners have been plenty racist, but we at least have the decency to not put up monuments to racism, and declare that defending racism was our region’s most notable accomplishment.

185

Ascenray:

I’m not trying to persuade anyone in this thread. I’m stating what I believe.

What’s the point of stating what you believe if you aren’t trying to convince others of your rightness? Why should we care what you believe?

Ascenray:

If someone were to ask my advice, I would recommend dealing with their pride in their ancestors the same way they deal with their greed or jealousy or hatred or anger or envy or spite. Hell, the Catholics list “pride” along with their other seven deadly sins. It doesn’t require me to claim special enlightenment to come to that conclusion.

Whenever I’m feeling greed, jealousy, hatred, or anger, I don’t tell myself I’m dealing with a “fundamental evil”. I just tell myself that my feelings are indicating something is wrong in my life. Either my thoughts are wrong or they are the result of a wrong situation. Like, when I’m feeling anger, for instance, I don’t repress that feeling out of the belief that it is necessarily harmful and evil. Anger is a logical and natural response to being wronged, after all. I might use that anger to motivate me to talk to the person I believe has wronged me in hopes they will apologize and make amends. I have the power, as a semi-self actualized person, to channel the energy of my emotions towards good things. Like, pride in my home motivates me to keep up with yardwork in the 99-degree heat. Pride in my community motivates me to pick up trash in the street in the 99-degree heat.

Tribal pride doesn’t indicate that something wrong. It just indicates that something is. That something being a bond to a specific community. You might as well call family pride a “fundamental evil”. It’s the same feeling just at a smaller scale.

It’s great that you can have bonds to people, places, and things without an associated feeling of pride. (Or maybe you think all connections and bonds are “fundamental evil”. I don’t know.). But for most people, feeling bonded to people, places, and things involves a personal identification with those people, places, and things. It’s not an “evil”. It’s a neurochemical reaction the same as any other.

Catholic guilt has never appealed to me. In fact, I believe the rabid thought-policing of organized religion is what makes organized religion the poster child of “fundamental evil”. I don’t believe in fundamental evil as a concept, but if we must label something evil, I think it should be anything that denies and denigrates basic human emotions.

186

[quote=“monstro, post:185, topic:914672, full:true”]
Ascenray:[/quote]

I don’t often make this correction, but since this appears multiple times in this post, I will note that I use the user name “Acsenray,” not “Ascenray.” I leave it to you whether you care to note the difference.

Pride is not necessary for bonding or identification.

187

This is where I’m at. Pride is not a virtue. While it’s an emotion we all feel from time to time, it’s not something to be encouraged.

188

That’s exactly what I feel. It might exist, but it should not be encouraged or indulged or valued or praised.

189

Not a bad rubric for pride in one’s heritage or ancestors.

190

Sorry about that. It took me an embarrassingly long time to see that there was even a difference between these two spellings.

Acsenray:

Maybe without such pride, you’d make a more rational decision and perhaps wait until it’s cooler to pick up the trash. Or maybe you’d look at the environmental damage and waste of energy and resources that comes out of yardwork and make a different choice, one not hampered by pride.

Maybe if no one had pride in their homes or communities, we’d be overrun in trash, weeds, and fallen tree branches, no matter what the temperature is outside. Maybe if no one had pride in anything besides their own pitiful selves, we’d be a society full of pitiful islands with no shared culture or stories or traditions. Maybe tribal pride is just a natural byproduct of feelings of kinship. Rid yourself of tribal pride by whatever magic you are able to devise and you might risk uninstalling the same driver that bonds you with extended family members (those folks may work your last nerve, but they may save your neck when no one else is willing to).

Ridding yourself of anger makes you the perfect target for bullies and abusers. We can’t defend ourselves if we are unable to feel anger. Anger can’t be a fundamental evil because it often serves a useful purpose. The same goes for tribal pride.

191

Do you apply this logic to self-pride too?

192

My family is an FFV (First Family of Virginia) and most of us are straight up trash. My mom was a researcher and once found a quote about our family from an old newspaper : “the Our Family Name would run Virginia if they weren’t a bunch of drunks.”

I loved it, but some of my family was genuinely upset. Why would I care what someone said about our family 100 years before I was born?

193

To the first part (about yard work), I kind of think that’s a different emotion than aggressive defensiveness about your heritage. It’s more like getting dressed in the morning and putting on a clean shirt as a way of respecting the people you will be encountering that day.

Feeling part of a family or community is different than pride. If you think they are the same then we either have a semantics problem or something deeper than that.

As for ridding yourself of anger – way to argue with six thousand years of spiritual thought, there. Just because you aren’t angry doesn’t mean you can’t stand up for yourself.

Come to think of it, pride is one of the seven deadly sins. So is anger, by the way. Wonder why.

194

I don’t think you should care. But I don’t think you’d be a bad person for caring. Feelings are just feelings.

A few years ago, my sister (the family genealogist) showed me an obituary written by a white guy about my great-great uncle. He was a bellhop at a hotel, but he held prominent leadership positions in the community and was known for having refined tastes. The white guy who wrote the obit was his best friend (which was unusual in racist-ass Indiana). He made a point to quote my great-great uncle: (paraphrased) “I’m not honored to be a white man’s friend. You aren’t better than me, so why should I feel any kind of way about us being friends?” That this was published in a mainstream newspaper blew my mind. However irrational, I felt pride that this distant relative and I have the same last name.

I don’t judge you for not caring about the trash you may be related to, because I don’t feel pride in the trash that I am related to. But not everyone I’m related to is trash. Some of the folks were kind of awesome. I don’t think I’m a bad person just for having feelings of gladness whenever I reflect on those people and their accomplishments

195

Ulfreida:

To the first part (about yard work), I kind of think that’s a different emotion than aggressive defensiveness about your heritage. It’s more like getting dressed in the morning and putting on a clean shirt as a way of respecting the people you will be encountering that day.

But we aren’t talking about “aggressive defensiveness”. @Acsenray didn’t call “aggressive defensiveness” out as a fundamental evil. He called out pride.

As for ridding yourself of anger – way to argue with six thousand years of spiritual thought, there. Just because you aren’t angry doesn’t mean you can’t stand up for yourself.

I know you to be a Christian. Do you think anger is an evil? Is it a sin? Do we not have a number of examples of Jesus being angry about something and even more with respect to God? There is no language in the Bible that suggests God never wants us to be angry, correct? So I don’t know where you’re coming from with this statement.

The seven deadly sins are nowhere in the Bible. A bunch of emotionally repressed people came up with that shit so that could feel superior to everyone else.

196

Umm… pizza. Not from Dixie.
(Blues music, you have a point.)

197

My opinion? Anger is an emotion. Yes, I’m a Christian but I’m also a Buddhist (they are not mutually exclusive).The Buddhists say that emotions are composed of two things, a physical sensation coupled to a thought. If you reflect on that, you will find it to be accurate. Another thing I know to be true about emotions is that you cannot will yourself not to have them. Therefore they cannot be truly “sins”, since sins are voluntary activities.

Buddhists also say that there is a hierarchy of what you might call spiritual weight, or if you like, karmic effect. Body, Speech, and Mind. Actions have the most karmic effect. Then speech without action. Then thoughts, which have the least effect, but they definitely have some. So thinking wow, that makes me angry, saying angry things, and throwing rocks, all have consequence but of clearly differing amounts.

Anger is an emotion that in my experience is a truly shitty guide to behavior. I don’t think I have ever done anyone any good using my anger, particularly myself. If you use your anger to reflect: what exactly am I angry about? That’s a good use of anger. Generally, there is fear of some kind at the root of anger. Fear. Another really shitty emotion to use for behavioral decisions.

I’m Catholic, and Catholics are not Bible-only Christians. We draw upon the next two thousand years of thought for our spiritual direction as well.

Those lists, like the seven deadly sins (there are a number of others) are not meant to end a conversation with yourself, but to begin it.

And I persist in thinking that it would be helpful to agree on a definition of pride.

198

Yes, giving black people credit for things they invented, especially in the context of ‘Southern Pride’ when racist whites attempt to take credit for things invented by black people, is very damn justified. If the South really had this very rich and glorious heritage that all of the white people walking around wearing ‘Southern Pride’ memorabilia and saying the phrase claim it does, it should be easy to actually list some of that Glorious Past, and especially some Glorious Past that isn’t directly attributable to the group that was enslaved during said Glorious Past, but instead to the group that was running things. But that’s not what happens.

Also, aside from two of them not being something the Southern Pride crowd gets to claim, Rock, Country, and Jazz are all 20th century phenomena. As I asked before, does the Glorious Past only go back to 1900? If it does only go back to 1900, then why does the Confederate flag, from the mid-1900s, feature so prominently, as it’s from the Inglorious Past before the Glorious Past came about? The incredible paucity of achivements from what’s supposed to be a Glorious Time speaks volumes.

199

If someone were to create a flag in honor of modern Southern heritage, would you be against that?

I mean, I understand the glaring cognitive dissonance required to wave a Confederate flag in honor of jazz music and rock and roll. But if a person were to tell me they feel proud to be a Southerner whenever they listen or perform certain musical genres, I would totally get why they would feel that way. I certainly wouldn’t assume everyone who feels this kind of pride waves the Confederate flag or worships the KKK.

200

What about people from the modern South of all races who are proud that they were able to get over the hatred and bigotry of the past and that they try to treat everyone with dignity and respect? Some of the posters in this thread seem to suggest that would be wrong because it is pride, or southern, or both.