Summary
Title: Pride: The Seven Deadly Sins
Author: Michael Eric Dyson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195160924
Pro:
• Interesting discussion on where pride in a nation can be a problem
• Helpful exploration of how pride can be both good and bad
Con:
• Too much space devoted to race and black pride
Description:
• Exploration of the nature of pride, one of the seven deadly sins
• Discusses both positive and negative examples of pride
Book Review
Pride in yourself, your accomplishments, your talents, and what you have achieved continues to be regarded in a generally negative light despite the fact that the “seven deadly sins” isn’t given the same respect as it once was. Self-confidence in one’s abilities is acceptable, and so is satisfaction with one’s accomplishments, but “pride” is the label we give to someone who fails to balance this with a proportionate sense of one’s limitations and failings.
Pride in something larger than oneself, though, seems to get a more positive assessment. People who have pride in their local sports team, their race, their ethnicity, their religion, or their nation are often judged as having a healthy attitude and for their involvement with something larger than themselves. This is curious, given the fact that pride in something you have done or can do seems to make a lot more sense than pride in something you have little or no involvement with.
Pride is thus arguably no ordinary sin — and that’s just the argument made by Michael Eric Dyson in his book Pride, the last installment in Oxford University Press’ Seven Deadly Sins series. Dyson has his work cut out for him, examining the varying and conflict natures of personal pride, national pride, black pride, white pride, and so forth.
It’s the third-longest of the series and Dyson has a lot of ground to cover, but I fear that he probably spends too much time on questions about race and black pride. Dyson has written a great deal about racial issues in America, so it’s understandable that his interests and knowledge would be focused there. The book would be much poorer if it didn’t have a chapter dedicated to this issue because the relationship between personal pride and something like national or racial pride is precisely where a good author can tease out hidden assumptions about what pride is, why it can be bad, why it can be good, and how we can understand the differences.
I’m not sure that Dyson quite achieves this. About a third of the book is taken up by two chapters on “black pride” (which is good) and “white pride” (which is bad). The chapter on personal pride relies heavily on Dyson’s own personal experiences and is mostly a personal exploration of “black pride.” This is not to say that the book is bad — on the contrary, I enjoyed it. It’s just not what I was looking for in this book or what I was expecting.
Dyson is a very good writer and an engaging social critic. If I see something else by him, I’ll be predisposed to picking it up because I enjoyed reading his analyses of various speeches, comments, and behaviors to illuminate underlying attitudes about race in America. His differentiation between the pride that can be “virtuous” when it helps one survive and the pride that is more “hubris” because it ignores human faults, done on the example of contrasting attitudes between poor and middle-class blacks, was fascinating as well as appropriate to this book.
I suppose I was looking for a book that had more balance between a discussion of general issues and the author’s personal experiences, perspectives, and interests. Too little of the latter would result in a book that’s too abstract and philosophical; too little of the former, though, takes us away from the issue and prevents us from connecting the pieces in our own lives to the overarching questions. Michael Eric Dyson’s Pride is recommendable as a book on race in America and I’m glad I read it, but it loses points for not striking a balance I think would have made the book better in the context of this series.
