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All of us should be familiar with the seven deadly (or cardinal) sins:
Lust
Gluttony
Greed
Sloth
Wrath
Envy
Pride
Few of us would routinely acknowledge, let alone celebrate our commissions of the first six.
How many of us, for example, lust after our own children?
Most of us, however, are proud of our children.
And just three days ago, on the Fourth of July, the overwhelming majority of Americans sang of the pride they take in their country.
Please help me understand.
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Charles Drago Wrote:All of us should be familiar with the seven deadly (or cardinal) sins:
Lust
Gluttony
Greed
Sloth
Wrath
Envy
Pride
Few of us would routinely acknowledge, let alone celebrate our commissions of the first six.
How many of us, for example, lust after our own children?
Most of us, however, are proud of our children.
And just three days ago, on the Fourth of July, the overwhelming majority of Americans sang of the pride they take in their country.
Please help me understand.
I will take a stab at this. I think that the concept of "pride" being referred to here is more like an exaggerated sense of self- pride. Pride without self- reflection or empathy for others. A kind of pride without foundation.
Whereas pride in our children is more akin to love and happiness in their happiness or chosen paths.
As for "pride in thier country". That is a concept foreign to me. I have never experienced that, except one time, fleetingly. At a U-2 concert in the 80's when they did "Price In the Name Of Love" I felt that should be the National Anthem.
Dawn
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Charles Drago Wrote:All of us should be familiar with the seven deadly (or cardinal) sins:
Lust
Gluttony
Greed
Sloth
Wrath
Envy
Pride
Few of us would routinely acknowledge, let alone celebrate our commissions of the first six.
How many of us, for example, lust after our own children?
Most of us, however, are proud of our children.
And just three days ago, on the Fourth of July, the overwhelming majority of Americans sang of the pride they take in their country.
Please help me understand.
democracy and freedom are ideas as well as ideals, never to be attained in the individual at full measure. Why? Simple, the seven deadly sins you've posted, of course. Man simply can't get there.
Frankly, I think the founding father's would be appalled at the reverence we take in flag worship. In this country faux patriotism has become a national religion.
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David Healy Wrote:Frankly, I think the founding father's would be appalled at the reverence we take in flag worship. In this country faux patriotism has become a national religion.
Indeed, what other nations require their children to recite an oath to a FLAG every morning in school? Perhaps we have not gone far enough ... should we also require them to dip the flag's tip in blood?
As for pride vs. false pride, I personally think this is a theological distinction on the same order as "honest" lending vs. usury or "just" vs. "unjust" war.
But I also wonder how relevant the medieval ordering of these sins is to contemporary "morality", intent as it is on decrying almost exclusively the evils of the least (lust), largely because of its destabilizing threat to the established orders of domination. I don't hear very much these days about gluttony (supersize me), avarice ("free market economy"), anger ("just war"), or envy (you can fill this one in ...) either, although I suppose the Reagan "welfare queen" would qualify in some way as one of the many vestiges of our puritanical (i.e., capitalist) hatred of sloth (though in its medieval sense, sloth wasn't just laziness, but was also a kind of spiritual sluggishness).
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I would like to emend my previous post, which undoubtedly oversimplifies the ambivalences concerning sexuality with which our culture is rife. All I guess I was trying to say is that it does not seem to me that -- pace the influence of Milton or Pilgrim's Progress in early US literature and excepting the short stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne or the works of Melville -- pride has never been the object of outright condemnation in our politico-cultural imaginaire as are other kinds of individual behavior deemed reprehensible. If anything, pride is supposed to be heroic. US culture has, alongside the puritanical, a strong strain of Romanticism running through it.
