"... as C.S. Lewis wrote in 'Mere Christianity.' Pride is a turning away from God, and an exultation of oneself.* The mirror is a symbol of pride and vanity, but it also symbolizes our incomplete, earthly knowledge. As the Apostle Paul wrote about God in his first letter to the Corinthians: 'For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.'... In Islamic mysticism... a smudged mirror is a metaphor for the human soul. It is only when the ego is annihilated, and the surface is polished clean, that the divine becomes visible.... In 1967, Michel Foucault darkly described the mirror as a kind of threshold, a mix between a fantasy world, a utopia and some weird other place on the margins — which he called a 'heterotopia.' The mirror is one such strange place because we discover our presence and our absence at the same time. 'I see myself there where I am not,' he wrote, 'in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface.'"
A small sample from
"All This Staring at Our Faces Is Messing With Our Heads" (NYT gift link), by Catherine Shannon.
___________________
* Shouldn't that be "an exaltation of oneself"? Are we not talking about raising ourselves above God (as opposed to jubilating over how wonderful we are)? Think about it. We say
"an exaltation of larks," not "an exultation of larks."
पोस्ट्स
५९ टिप्पण्या:
And we say a pride of lions.
I searched the text for the word “gay” and came up empty, which is a remarkable omission, considering the that most common daily reference to “pride” is in “gay pride.” Gay pride is the new state religion. Pride is a good thing for all the “marginalized.” It’s supposed to relieve the “stigma.” The “dehumanizing” bit is a constant with every tech advance. Computerization itself was widely criticized as leading to “dehumanization” way back in the 1960s. We were all going to become “ciphers.” Liberal dogma of my undergrad years. Then, along came Mac PCs and the lit-crit eggheads discovered that you could do art and music on computers. The “ciphers” talk vanished.
A pride parade is lions, lionesses, and their [unPlanned] cubs in gay play on African savannas, exulting the circle of life, exalting the king.
Here's what Chat 5.4 nano says about the word choice:
"He likely chose “exultation” because it means joyful triumphant expression—i.e., a kind of gleeful self-congratulation—whereas “exaltation” means raising or elevating (more neutral or more formal), which can fit a broader “elevating oneself” idea.
So the choice narrows the tone toward boastful, self-satisfied triumph, which matches the way Lewis is often describing pride as not just “being high-minded,” but bright, self-admiring celebration."
From a traditional, religious perspective, "exaltation" would be the better choice. Lucifer was cast out of Heaven for wanting to be God. He placed himself above God, feeling himself to be more powerful and beautiful than the Almighty. “Pride goeth before the fall.”
Yet, in our de-sacralized age in which God is little different than Zeus and just as often thought about, “exultation” might be the better choice after all. People deeply enmeshed in social media take great joy in themselves and everything they are doing (and even eating). They are so profoundly narcissistic that they slip into solipsism, thinking only they exist. Others exist only to reflect their wondrousness like multi-faceted mirrors. Hence, the scourge of Influencers.
That said, I would disagree that Pride is the worst sin. I suggest it is Envy. So much of today’s politics and ideology, particularly among the Democrats and most especially the DSA, is based on envy. For those consumed by envy, their perceived failures are not in themselves, or in the stars, or caused by God. It is other people. And so they use force cloaked in politics to take away from others what they feel should rightfully be theirs.
Overweening pride makes a person insufferable; excessive envy makes a person violent.
Nothing wrong with a little swagger.
The novel green - as in envy, as in naive - deal is a modern model of pride and exaltation of mortal gods and goddesses in political play (PP... no pun intended). #NoKinks (pun intended)
Yukon Cornelius said...
"Overweening pride makes a person insufferable; excessive envy makes a person violent."
This.
Contra the headline, Christians do not believe any of the Seven Deadly Sins (or any other less famous sins) is the Original Sin. Original Sin is the cause of all sins, the broken, sinful nature and separation from God of all people. (Christians don't really go for the "all people are basically good" school of pop psychology; of course, I am speaking of traditional Christianity, not the Moral Therapeutic Deism of most of today's churches.)
The internet informs me that Catherine Shannon is pretty good-looking.
Eric the Fruit Bat said...
The internet informs me that Catherine Shannon is pretty good-looking.
This blog has the best commenters on the internet.
When you examine your own natural feelings, you are examining what other can't sense. When you are looking at yourself in the mirror, you are examining what others can sense. Mostly people ought to reflect on their own natural feelings more and use their brains to make sense of how they relate to each other and our sense of the external world. Internal reflection reflects that which can't much be sensed by others, while external reflection from a mirror reflects fairly exactly what others will see when they look at you. Since it tends to be rather selfish to try to manipulate how others see you, looking at mirrors tends to be sketchier than looking at yourself with internal reflection. That said, being into feelings can be dangerous if the feelings are unnaturally induced more-or-less directly by addictive chemicals unnatural to the brain in the sense they came as a result of externally introduced drugs and not as a result of chemicals created by the brain from nutrients according to the brain's natural tendencies.
Still, there is a beautiful way to appear to others, which may or may not be the way that makes you appear most beautiful. And I suppose that looking in the mirror can help your appearance be more beautiful if this is your objective.
ai: The main figures of speech in John Donne's poem "Death, be not proud" are apostrophe, personification, and metaphor.
“Mirror, mirror on the wall who is...?” (Insert your own question here).
A murder of crows gets me every time.
What would've the great minds thought about the backwards selfie?
Nice thing about getting older is skipping the mirror and not giving a fig.
Ronetc, you are correct but Lucifer’s prideful idea that he was better than the Creator of all and that he could replace him was the foundation of heavenly rebellion and the seed of human rebellion against God.
In Judaism, when someone passes and the household is in a period of mourning (shiva), traditionally the mirrors in the house are covered so that the emphasis is on the deceased and grieving, not yourself or your own image. It's a tradition, not something in the religious doctrine.
Initiation rituals are about grooming pride?
Pride is annoying, too. Annoying. Stop shoving your pride in my face.
Six of the seven deadly sins are the specific actions and/or consequences of pride, the core "sin" of human beings. It's also the core superpower of people. Pride is an emergent property of the illusion of a free will that drives us to strive, compete and achieve, the source of rational self interest disguised as altruism.
“ heterotopia.' The mirror is one such strange place because we discover our presence and our absence at the same time. 'I see myself there where I am not,' he wrote, 'in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface.'"
That is pretty stupid, there was a physicist named Foucault who knew al about optical ray tracing and how to understand the properties of mirrors. This particular Foucault must not have taken Physics 1 in high school. Oooh in the strange piece of rock I see a creature that is and is not myself existing in a place I can not reach, it must be a god! Said Og the caveman.
The G_d of Abraham is the most prideful being ever. He has all all characteristics of a narcissistic psychopath. He takes credit for everything good and blames everyone else for all that is bad. A. Judgmental jealous and vengeful prick who purposefully f**** with his creations. Getting off on seeing them squirm suffer and struggle to meet his impossible expectations.
Selfie-ish is the old modern model of pride in urbane culture and ivory towers. It is also a marketing semantic play in self-parody.
Saw the headline and thought it would be a story about Fauci. Alas, since he is God-like to the NYT, for once it was not about him.
Yukon - excellent.
Howard is having some daddy issues today.
She does use the phrase "self-exaltation" toward the end of the essay, so I would say that she does know the difference between the two.
That's a pretty good essay, I thought. It draws attention to something that is mostly ignored in the dominant click-baitey culture we live in, where we're subtly prompted to behaviors that indirectly benefit others. Maybe all this self-attention in the mirror is just trying to get a handle on something real, without having your perceptions constantly nudged, subliminally.
What is pride, without the excess of self-obsession? I think you have to have pride, if you want to have a high-trust society. Pride without thought of reward. I think constant monitoring and surveillance in our modern world is the bigger threat, that coupled with envy is a straight line to some real misery. Once the envious have access to the surveillance world, Hoo Boy, look out below.
Thanks to social media and influencers like Andrew Tate and Clavicular, millions of young men are suddenly obsessed with their faces. Young men are encouraged to submit photos of their faces for analysis. An algorithm calculates their faces' "PSL" score. Of course, European men with masculine faces will score high on this scale. At the extreme threshold (PSL = 0), very, very ugly men are described as "subhuman." This is some seriously disturbing stuff. These young men must be suffering from serious body image issues. And they're being encouraged to use plastic therapy and hormone therapy to "fix" their faces and bodies. It is pathetic.
And what's with the use of Nazi propaganda? Tate, Clavicular, Nick Fuentes (an evil dwarf) and their cronies use terms like "untermenschen" to describe people with "inferior" or "animal like" features. Seriously? Have these pigs looked in the mirror lately??
Ouch!
Is there actually a hierarchy of sins, theologically speaking? I’m not so sure. I’ve never come up with a satisying answer to that, though I’ve pondered the question off and on, if only in passing, over the decades.
If I had to quickly choose, by gut, a worst sin, I think it would probably have to do with failure related to this:
“And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.”
IMO, FWIW.
Yukon, don't you have to feel prideful before you feel envious? I think if you didn't have the initial feeling of pride - I deserve this, I'm better than other people - then you might not feel envy at all. You'd look at the bigger house your friend owns and think "I wonder what it's like to live in such a large place" rather than having the envious thought of "I wish I had this - it should be mine". So in that way pride is behind most (if not all) of the sins that plague us, and always has been.
I'm not sure that's right or not - just a thought on a half-cup of coffee.
Ex-alt vs Ex-ult.
High vs Final?
Spiros - thank you.
Insane idiots are influencing so many other idiots. It's so depressing.
Well, there's the basic moral principles of Ten Commandments. That's why leftists hate them.
Ayn Rand list...
Values === Reason, Purpose, Self-esteem >>> to seek
Virtues === Rationality, Productiveness, Pride >>> to achieve
"Pride" can be "hubris;" it can also be "self-respect;" it can also be well-deserved respect for the achievements and accomplishments of those we associate with; it can be narcissism.
Confusing those meanings just muddies the water, and you end up debating semantics. (Which Althouse seems to enjoy).
Pride has mistakenly come to mean "not ashamed", which is quite different.
Proud of your country, proud of your kid doing well, proud of your wife looking great.
Whenever I feel proud, I try to turn it into gratitude, because that's often what it really is.
We’ve must’ve needed pride when we wanted to eat better than the birds. I’m thinking of Jesus saying look how the birds don’t plant and God provides. Not an exact quote. But, you get my prideful meaning.
Peachy+2 said...
"Insane idiots are influencing so many other idiots."
Even more are just plain stupid. They can't even explain why they have the positions they have.
I assume it has always been so, but today individuals can so easily influence, without proving themselves or their ideas first. They don't have to convince friends and family and eventually publishers before telling the whole world their latest "truth'. That's very democratic, but there is a reason no pure democracy exists, and our founders avoided it.
Actually, Norm had a bit about the garden of Eden apple. When Adam came back and found Eve had eaten the apples.
https://youtu.be/Z1WSes3Fht8?is=ANdTvdrf4-os8zPb
Portlandia did an episode with an Allergy Pride parade. Contingents of proud gluten, peanut, and lactose allergics.
‘Shouldn't that be "an exaltation of oneself"’ Possibly, but I’ll stick with Lewis on this.
Howard said...
Six of the seven deadly sins are the specific actions and/or consequences of pride, the core "sin" of human beings. It's also the core superpower of people. Pride is an emergent property of the illusion of a free will that drives us to strive, compete and achieve, the source of rational self interest disguised as altruism.
Everything is a spectrum.
Arrogance is sin.
Pride is homeostasis.
Apathy is sin.
I think we lost too much in translation.
Howard said...
The G_d of Abraham is the most prideful being ever. He has all all characteristics of a narcissistic psychopath. He takes credit for everything good and blames everyone else for all that is bad. A. Judgmental jealous and vengeful prick who purposefully f**** with his creations. Getting off on seeing them squirm suffer and struggle to meet his impossible expectations.
The worst thing God could do is put us in a world with no conflict and no way to prove our mettle.
The harder he fucks with us the more fulfilled we have a chance to be.
The thing I've noticed about the seven deadly sins is that they are only bad when taken to extremes. We actually need these qualities, from time to time, to survive and be healthy. (Both mentally and physically) It's only when they're excessive and out of control that they become destructive.
I agree. 100%, Achilles. However, it's not God, it's just our entropic universe which is completely indifferent to our peril.
Interesting thoughts, Achilles. I view arrogance as something that comes in handy only rarely kind of like the sympathetic nervous system. On the other end of that spectrum. We have confidence which is an absolute necessity for the day today like the parasympathetic nervous system.
I think pride, as a sin, has more to do with a lack of humility, and of course we see this on steroids pretty much everywhere these days.
The older one gets, the less one looks into mirrors and the less one worries about mirrors. Younger people are more worried about -- or in love with -- their appearance. Older folks don't care. Maybe the young are using mirrors as a divining device, staring into them, trying to determine their destiny. In any case, selfies are probably more common than mirror-staring now.
Dostoevsky, yes, but before him there were Poe and E.T.A. Hoffmann. Gogol's "Nose" was also a kind of double.
There are different versions of God. Whether or not God himself is a narcissist, the biblical God does seem very full of himself.
Whether a stochastic figment of our collective imagination, a dark sarcasm, or a colonial establishment, Earth is a proving ground to assess fitness.
The biblical God is an extra-universal, empirical constant beyond our tangible conception. That said, we have only skimmed the edge of our local environment, and inferred of a universe beyond from signals of unknown origin and condition.
“ In 1967, Michel Foucault darkly described the mirror as a kind of threshold, a mix between a fantasy world, a utopia and some weird other place on the margins — whicht he called a 'heterotopia.'”
Uh….OK.
More importantly,
“ The Foucault knife-edge test is a simple, highly sensitive optical shop test invented by French physicist Léon Foucault in 1858 to evaluate the surface shape and aberrations of concave mirrors, utilizing a point light source and a sharp edge placed at the center of curvature.”
I used this when I made a telescope mirror in high school. It’s really cool…it gives you a contour map of the mirror in which deviations of a few millionths of an inch from the desired shape are clearly visible.
I think there's a good pride and a bad pride. E.g., Ann Althouse should be justifiably proud of her blog. But [false] pride goeth before a fall.
I used to be confused about Foucault and the other Foucault. But after I built and used my own Foucault tester, I was able to easily distinguish between them.
Are cataloging sins God's Way to guilty trip human?
To everyone who has ground and polished their own Pyrex telescope mirror and tested it for parabolism with a Foucault knife edge instrument I say good on you! And moreso those who made solutions and silvered them themselves, but sending it out to be aluminized is ok too.
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