Whatever the meme above was meant to signify in its original use, it speaks volumes about the ethical nature of pride as mode of self-congratulation. Pride is an error only when divorced from an object in which to be proud, when it refers not to some achievement in actual time and space that will lose its lustre naturally as the times and spaces in which we operate change. Pride ought to require new achievements, sometimes ones totally different in nature to those we achieved in an earlier time and place, that respond to the best way to act with integrity in the specific moment. In the meme both ‘pride’ and ‘fall’ are reinterpreted in a costly painting on the wall of a lavish home, where people are proud in relation not to what they do but to what they ‘are’, what they are itself being reducible to what they ‘have’ – paintings on the wall, coats of honour, fine clothing, food and cigars at a ‘candlelight supper’ as ‘real’ as those of Hyacinth Bucket (it’s ‘Bouquet’). Then of course they have themselves served by service that prides itself as being, and being owned as, at their service, whether as friend or wine waiter.
Yet we can deceive ourselves. We are PROUD really of our entitlement, as we see it, to be proud irrespective of what we do or the kind of animal we are underneath the clothing that represents our pride. Nevertheless, that pride passes itself off as pride in some object – though usually one sufficiently vague to ever be called up for objective assessment – such as pride in our ‘nation’ or our ‘community’, but only ever as abstracted from the reality of their being and practices (rather than merely playacted formulae – such as a candlelight supper under a portrait of Winston Churchill) that are a performance of the being we wish to exist.
In the meme, the painting on the wall of Lord and Lady Bulldog, Lady Bulldog preferring to be called Lady Bulldog-Badger in honour of her invented fine ancestry), the pride that ‘goeth’ (always sounding so much more refined in the sixteenth century King James Version of Proverbs) before a ‘fall’ is a ‘pride’ of lions (their collective name) who are passing by a fall – but a waterfall. Shifting the context words out of context helps to show the skill of the proud to, like Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty, say: ‘When I use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean’.
Pride is the pride of being in control – of things being, or pretending to be, in fear of our authority, that, were it to exist, would be really just naked power (‘all the King’s horses and all the King’s men’) that entails on others the duty to see in us what they are ordered to see, by means of compliance, but if not compliance by some more harmful use of force on them.
‘Pride goes before a fall’ is a phrase strangely enough used of Humpty Dumpty, who once he has fallen, and broken, can never ‘be put together again’, even by ‘all the King’s horses and all the King’s men’. Poor broken Humpty, even when a dead egg, he acknowledges the power of a purely symbolic Head of State powerless to acknowledge them only by passing them by, his broken subjects, who aren’t able now even only decoratively to serve his supposed power.
So if you are asked ‘What’ are you most proud of in your life, don’t forget that this question is actually a masked one – reflexive on asking you what you pride yourself in not not what value system, activity or object makes you acknowledge its being before your own – one that when you fall still subsists, and more so, because your fall has as caused you to learn that even the fallen you must have pride in it being there for you, and able to put ‘you together again’, even when it cannot or will not.
Put like that a ‘fall’ is not a disaster, it is the kind of lapse that proves there is real; and not false progression in life, just as the recovering substance-user knows that they have not recovered until they can plan for inevitable lapses along the way without seeing them as their final destruction.
Bye for now, with love
Steven xxxxxxx
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