The most sinful of the seven

Michael Dyson is Foundation Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the author of 12 previous books, and an ordained Baptist minister. Pride is his own contribution to a series of linked lectures and books on the seven deadly sins.

There is no doubting the primacy of pride among the seven. The Greeks had a word for it. As hubris, presumption or arrogance, it loomed large, often along with its retribution or nemesis, in drama, poetry, history, philosophy. In the development of Christian theology, St Augustine saw pride as the source of original sin, and Pope Gregory confirmed it as the root of all evil. Yet Aristotle, no intellectual slouch himself, argued the case for the virtue of ‘proper pride’, as the magnanimous mean between the extremes of vanity and humility.

A black America, Dyson deals with the paradox of a proper pride that is a virtue to blacks ‘whose self-respect has been battered’, while white pride ‘is often the vice that makes black pride necessary’. Black improper or misguided pride he skewers in ‘high-handed, mean-spirited, self-concerned’ rich black folk, the minions of President Bush’s manifest destiny such as Condoleezza Rice, that ‘blue-blooded conservative in blackface’; the black man, espousing black nationalist sentiment, while yearning to seduce a white woman and explaining this behaviour to a prominent civil rights leader as, ‘I’m punishing her father.’

It is the improper pride of the nation, however, that increasingly concerns the book. Dyson is scarcely alone in finding America’s assumption of a peculiarly close relationship with the divine as unseemly. He goes much further, to explore various dire instances and implications of its associated pride. Martin Luther King, Jr, two months before his assassination, thundered from his Atlanta pulpit in denouncing the ‘senseless, unjust war’ in Vietnam and America’s refusal to stop it ‘because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation’.