When you see the sea, do you swell with pride?

Why not?

Sixty percent of you is water.

That’s coal over there, isn’t it?

A sprawling seam.

Watching it must make you quiver with vainglory.

No?

But a fifth of you is carbon.

I’m being obtuse, you’ll say.

No one experiences pride over things they had no hand in.

Why, then, does your pulse dash when your national team triumphs?

Your heart swell when your favourite artist is awarded a Turner/Grammy/Emmy/Oscar?

You played no part in these circumstances either.

Okay, you might assert agency in the second instance.

Congratulate yourself on having had the good sense to patronise a figure worthy of veneration.

Hmm –

That good sense –

Where did it come from?

SHOW BLINDNESS

Everything makes me cry these days.

The usual suspects:

Tragedies.

Real/imaginary.

Anyone done in.

Anything done well, too.

The first time I experienced the latter was in the Royal Opera House.

At a performance of Lohengrin.

The moment the titular hero disclosed his identity.

The strings swelled.

And I with them.

As if I’d learned his name along with the characters on stage.

At first I thought this was what used to be known as a rush.

Wherein the blood quickens.

The hairs on the face stiffen.

I’d presented symptoms of cultural contagion since I can remember.

After captured slaves leap to their feet and proclaim ‘I’m Spartacus!’ in Kubrick’s film.

When Kenobi’s disembodied voice says ‘Use the force, Luke’ in A New Hope.

The moment Clark Kent parts his shirt-front for the first time in The Movie.

And many, many more.

This time, though, there were additional attributes.

First off, my eyes sprung a leak.

As if to relieve the pressure on my heart and lungs.

Then came something else.

A sensation that belonged to the person who’d written the work:

Proprietorship.

In those days I’d purchase a ten quid day ticket –

The only one I could afford –

Then move to an empty seat in the stalls come the first interval.

(I virtue-rinsed this as being a con that Wagner –

Lifelong socialist –

Debtor –

Might have worked himself.)

Down from the gods –

Seated among social demiurges –

I felt like leaping to my feet –

Turning to my fellow stallers –

(Most of whom were, surely, tourists –

Opera-goers rather than Wagner-goers -)

And saying:

See!

This is Wagner!

My Wagner.

Consequently, I felt certain that the new symptoms would be restricted to the Master of Bayreuth.

That I was congratulating myself on being an acolyte of the sorcerer who magicked that effect.

But that wasn’t it.

Couldn’t have been.

Because the fresh sensation wouldn’t limit itself to his works.

I went on to suffer it after witnessing anything well done.

Watching Rachel Berry –

A character in my wife’s favourite TV series at the time –

Sing Don’t Rain on My Parade made me dash to the bathroom.

Not to puke up.

Rather, because I knew I’d be incapable of speaking up –

Doing anything –

Without betraying myself.

I blubbed last time I visited the National Gallery.

And saw my favourite Rembrandt in the flesh for the first time in years.

I could only get through The Deer Hunter –

A film previously dismissed as not-Apocalypse Now –

In ten minute chunks for show blindness.

Tragedy –

Romance –

Comedy –

Every scene demanded a demisting.

And not just on account of the in-drama elements.

But for the actors –

Cinematography –

Music –

Everything.

The singer and the song.

And me in the mix somehow.

An emotional admixture that felt like pride.

Or what –

Never having done anything to merit it –

I imagine pride must feel like.

Over what, though?

Being of the same species as the creatures who produced the sensation?

YOU ONLY SING WHEN THEY’RE WINNING

I used to experience something similar after my football team won a title.

A sudden awareness of its power.

Intense desire to claim a share of it.

An ancillary feeling, too:

Equanimity.

That all was well with everything.

And all shall be well with everything.

This is why sports fans become irate when things don’t turn out as anticipated.

Take it personally.

In a way they don’t with any other form of entertainment.

I’m wearing your shirt.

So, you have to win.

To maintain my identity.

That’s why we persist in asserting pride inappropriately.

Over properties we don’t own.

This explains why supporters go apeshit when their team loses, of course.

But why do some go berserk after their team wins?

I said that I used to experience elation when my football team won.

Now I suffer something other a second or so after the final whistle shrieks.

Numbness.

Recognition that the win isn’t –

Never was –

My own.

Or mine to own.

Knowledge that my heroes’ fortunes have changed.

But mine not at all.

A consciousness of the gulf between us.

And this isn’t limited to sport.

I patronise this artwork –

Share this attribute with the author –

But have no hand in the triumph of either.

Despair sublimated into joy.

Desublimated into despair again.

Discombobulating.

A psychological bungee jump.

THEORY OF FORMS

The two modes of pride:

Personal:

What we do/possess/admire.

Sectional:

What we are/have been.

Part of same.

One authored by self entirely.

The other an aspect of self exclusively.

Another dynamic duality.

Instance of particular and universal.

PURPOSE FULL

The prospect of pride –

The feelings it arouses –

Encourages us to accept applause for things we had no part in.

You aren’t responsible for your aptitudes.

Strengths.

Attitudes.

But take acclaim for the fruits of same.

While maintaining plausible deniability.

So you can crow ‘Cock!’ when guilt by association is insinuated.

Point up the many distinguishing features.

Dissimilarities.

A similar motive applies to your carcass.

Gender.

Race.

Nationality.

All are accidents of time and place.

A consequence of life choosing for you.

Not you choosing for you.

IF YOU HAVE TEARS

Back to the wet stuff:

We take away the two-thirds of us that’s water –

The half of what remains that’s mighty mitochondria –

(Sharing DNA with every other creature in existence.)

And fixate on the one-sixth left over.

Why?

Our extra-terrestrials would suspect we’d be proudest of what constitutes mostest of us.

The two-thirds closest to two-thirds of the earth.

Carry BlueSupremacist banners at our rallies.

NOBODY OWNS ANYTHING

William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade slugs out the beats of his career as a screenwriter.

It’s best known for the maxim:

Nobody knows anything.

Which the author elaborated as:

‘Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.’

To illustrate this, he quoted Hollywood executive David Picker:

‘If I had said yes to all the projects I turned down, and no to all the ones I took, it would have worked out about the same.’

Something about this –

Its acknowledgement of the arbitrary allocation of worth –

Its rhythm, even –

Chimes with pride’s random ascription of value.

We are A, B and C.

Therefore, value A, B and C.

Were we X, Y and Z, we’d value them as much.

Precisely.

So, were an alien force –

Out of an episode of The Outer Limits, say –

To turn us into X, Y and Z –

Then, total all recall of us having been A, B and C –

Implant memories of us having been X, Y and Z –

We’d feel as much pride in X, Y and Z as we did in A, B and C.

Immediately.

Earnestly.

And be indifferent to/loathe A, B and C.

Continue to do so were the aliens –

At the end of the episode –

To reveal what they’d done.

Run film of our old selves being in thrall to that which we now regard as inferior.

CULTURAL MISAPPROPRIATION

National pride is unobjectionable as long as it concerns itself with the conservation of culture.

Custom.

Cuisine.

Dallies with divertissement only.

For the amusement of tourists.

As soon as it injects itself into politics it palls.

Turns pusillanimous.

Nonsensical.

The nationalist who believes their country is right always –

Pre-eminent in all ways –

Has a faith that forestalls inquiry.

Takes the place of it.

So, the more they profess this belief –

The fiercer the desire to do so blazes –

The less inclined they feel to substantiate it.

Fearful that objective world-rankings will upend their worldview.

Dissonate their cognizance that their worst day is better than the best anywhere else.

Have they been anywhere else?

Seen everywhere else?

Read about somewhere else, even?

No.

Certain that their contention will remain true for so long as –

Because –

They don’t do as much.

Blinkered, they may remain convinced that –

Given the choice –

They’d have selected the nation fate allotted them.

That their pride in it is warranted objectively.

This encourages double-think.

Assures them that their respect for homeland is a recognition of genuine superiority.

Whereas everyone else’s is biased.

Prejudiced.

Racist.

ASK NOT WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO FOR YOU, ASK WHAT IT CAN DO FOR WE

Pride in nation is unfounded.

It chose you.

Not you it.

Unless you’re an immigrant, that is.

One, moreover, who was free to migrate to any country on earth.

Chose their current homeland after lengthy research.

Indifferent to immediate concerns.

Personal.

Pecuniary.

Immigrants are sometimes discouraged from participating in national celebrations.

But they’re the only citizens whose presence at such events carries objective heft.

Unnonsenses patriotism.

Who aren’t stating:

This nation is pre-eminent because I was born in it.

GREAT BY ASSOCIATION

I’m a member of this set.

Other members of it have achieved X, Y, Z.

Therefore, I’ll achieve X, Y, Z.

Have – in a sense – achieved X, Y, Z.

On account of the racial characteristics I share with those who’ve done so.

Why should similarity with just these features of an achiever confer greatness on the claimant?

Why not a shared shoe size?

Navel scar type?

Earlobe shape?

Championing these associations would earn scorn.

But they’re no more incidental than place.

No less improbable lightning rods of pride.

Equally irrelevant to the prospect of whether the possessor will achieve anything deserving of pride themselves.

RACIAL INDETERMINACY

Would your opinion of your sectional attributes –

Yourself –

Change if you discovered you’d been adopted?

That one/both of your birth parents had been members of another race?

Would you continue to profess the superiority of your former heritage?

Promote proxy ownership of its achievements?

RACE TO THE BOTTOM

Pride in race is as nonsensical as pride in place.

A post hoc passion.

Physiologically arbitrary.

Tribally tautologous.

The only instance of it that might be redeemed sounds oxymoronic:

Pride in someone else’s race.

One that you have no vested –

Under the vest –

Interest in.

Not, then, what we regard as pride currently.

More simple respect.

RELATIONSHIP COUNSELLING

Despite your current concerns –

Momentary missteps –

You rate your relationship as better than those of your fellows.

Why?

Because you’re in it.

It’s commanding your emotions.

The ardent romantic aims to maintain that their love is a star-crossed affair.

Across space and time.

Even if they could prove they’d been feted to be together –

Foaled for each other –

Would that give them the right to bow before a mirror –

Rather than a statue of the goddess Venus?

TERRIBLE PARENTS

To the best mummy in the world –

You scrawl in that Mother’s Day card.

And the sentiment is strong.

True.

For you, she is the best mother in the world.

Because she bore you.

And without you there’s nothing.

Yes –

But that gives you no right to bore us over her ever after.

TERRIBLE CHILDREN

Parents feel similarly –

Illogically –

Regards their offspring.

Though they suspect that more intelligent –

Talented –

Diligent –

Attractive –

Children exist –

Theirs remain superior in some indeterminable –

Unprovable –

Regard.

Again, this is true in a sense.

They are superior to/for you.

Because –

Well –

They’re yours.

FAITH OF OUR FATHERS/MOTHERS/SIGNIFICANT OTHERS

Even if you didn’t adopt the faith of your guardians –

In which case it chose you –

Won it after a grailquest as tortuous as Sir Galahad’s –

What you believe is the gift of the demon determinism.

Born at another time –

In another place –

It’s unlikely you’d have sauled that epiphany.

Would have succumbed to Christianity, say, had you been born in the second millennia BC.

Emerged during this single flutter of a butterfly’s wings –

In terms of our 200,000 year history –

Rather than that.

Or had you dropped from eternity’s womb –

At its whim –

Onto the place called Afghanistan –

A handkerchief-sized patch when set against the planet’s 510 million km² surface area –

Rather than onto the patch dubbed America.

Or do you consider it coincidence that these worshippers live in this region and those in that?

YOU ARE THE AUDIENCE! I AM THE AUTHOR! I OUTRANK YOU!

Genius.

Here we’re on safe ground, surely.

This permits anyone who exhibits it a right to self-inflate.

Sorry.

Better hold off on that, too –

All creativity –

For a moment –

Just in case.

Why?

If determinism is as hard as alleged, we’ve no more right to take pride in what we make –

Let alone what our antecedents made –

Than what fate made of us.

You were born with raw talent.

Inculcated with the knowledge to acquire it.

Induced to develop it.

Or a blend of all three.

In any case, genius –

Capitalised or sentence-cased –

Isn’t willed.

And, even if it were –

Could be –

Schopenhauer objects:

What caused your will to will it into being?

A genius, then, is as much a passenger in fate’s train as their audience.

Hegel’s world-soul on horseback?

Yes –

But with Tolstoy’s reservation that fate determined that there be a horse.

And that Napoleon would get to giddy-up on it.

Consequently, Bonaparte was as much a puppet as the lowliest La Grande Armée caporal.

Our highest cultural earners would’ve remained paupers without those Bialystock & Blooms of fate:

God-given ability –

Opportunity –

Luck.

Thus, Übermenschen would have stayed determinedly unter unless history had deigned to meet them halfway.

Drive is something they discovered in themselves.

Didn’t manufacture.

Claimants to the contrary escher a mechanism as circular as Baron Munchausen pulling himself out of a bog by his own hair.

So, it’s as illogical to take pride in one’s achievements as one’s colour.

Height.

Weight.

All are accidents of fate.

On another day, in another place, the dice might have fallen differently.

Free-will must play no part.

However labyrinthine, then, the journey towards an instance of genius appears from without –

In retrospect –

From within –

As it’s occurring –

Each step is as inevitable –

Unavoidable –

As a tightrope walkers.

INTELLECT, YET

You know it’s dumb to take pride in things you had no role in determining.

Race.

Face.

Et cetera.

But you hold on to your intellect.

Insist it’s a result of personal determination.

All right, I’m not responsible for my physicality –

Locality –

But I’ve a right to take pride in the products of my mentality.

After all, I applied myself in school.

Did the homework.

All that extra reading.

Commendable.

But what determined that you’d have drive and your neighbour not?

That your ride would be a Ferrari 812 Superfast and theirs a Little Tikes Cozy Coupe?

THE PIG THAT WANTS TO EAT ITSELF

Even those who regard themselves as constitutionally sceptical –

To the point of being cynical –

Prove susceptible to this form of vanity.

Philosophers.

When they claim that the unexamined life is not worth living.

Why?

Because examining life is what they do.

Discovered that they can do.

Born with this disposition, they sanctify it.

Insist it’s not good for them only –

Easy for them to do –

Easier than it is for most others at least –

But is what they ought to do.

What we ought to do.

And if this proves true, who seems extra special suddenly?

ALL SHALL NOT HAVE PRIZES

A sportsperson scrapes through a tournament.

Prevails on points.

So, is judged undeserving of the prize.

And pride.

If that were the critical criteria, none would escape title-stripping.

Success is the result of privilege.

Always.

Proof that the winner was advantaged.

By virtue of a god-given gift.

Or circumstance.

The X factor?

The symbol denotes the unacknowledged –

Indeterminable –

Advantage that enabled its possessor to wow.

GREATER SCOTT!

On another day, what occasions success might have resulted in failure.

Amundsen and Scott lead expeditions to the South Pole.

The former’s party returned to base camp.

The latter’s passed over on the journey back.

The relative abilities of each team were never tested.

Their fates might have been reversed.

Both teams planned for every eventuality.

Amundsen’s every eventuality more closely corresponded with his team’s actuality.

His success, then, might be dismissed.

Put down to the fortuitousness of the conditions encountered.

Scott wrote:

‘Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman.’

Would he have had a greater right to pride had this come to pass?

If determination –

Pig-headedness –

Weren’t gifts that would’ve made the counterfactual outcome inevitable.

FORTUNATE FORTUNE

Pride attempts to claim reward for hard work undertaken by another party:

Luck.

Beyond everything, we are proudest of the beneficence of fate.

Our fortuitous thrownness in the world.

Set against the unfortunate thrownness of others.

The sensation is occasioned by the sudden realisation of the fortune of our station.

It is the joy of the lottery winner.

Not delighting in the sudden abundance of moolah merely –

The bounteous blackening of their bank account –

But what it signifies:

A nod from the gods.

We’ve been following your progress, it signals.

And, moreover, care.

A commendation –

Special mention –

From fate.

A spore of lichen rather than a laurel wreath in most cases.

But welcome, nevertheless.

A whisper out of the suffocating silence of space.

This inspired Achilles’ vainglory.

Not the fact of him being a fast runner merely.

Fearless fatally.

But that the gods had determined he should be both.

Out of all others on earth.

HUBRIS-NEMESIS

The ancients dismissed those who sported their literal fortunes as vulgar.

Indulging a hubris that invited nemesis.

It’s the same with figurative fortunes.

Achievement –

Status –

These are products of lucky events.

Environments.

Temperaments.

Circumstances their possessors had no hand in.

WHAT WILL SURVIVE OF US IS LOVE OF SELF

Pride in all its forms is vanity.

What we’d like to proclaim is that the finest creature to be –

Coincidentally –

Fortuitously –

Is me.

We can’t bring this off.

Not convincingly anyway.

So, we do the next best thing.

Hint that the ideal is to be is a creature like me.

Born and raised in my neighborhood.

Believing what I believe.

Occupying themselves just the way I do.

Et cetera.

Such that a disinterested party might reason:

Born and raised there –

Believing that –

Occupied thus –

Wait a minute –

That’s you, isn’t it?

Obviating the need to declare:

Even if fate hadn’t created me as it did –

Hadn’t placed me in this physiological vessel –

Awarded me this timespace –

I’d have selected it all anyway –

Out of every option on the planet –

Throughout all of history.

WHY SELF-ISHNESS?

Self is what we take pride in most.

The simple realisation that others aren’t us.

This is why we regard them coolly.

They’re a breathing riposte to our supremacy.

An organic argument against our way being the high way.

How to assert our validity?

Take pride in our life choices.

Though it would be truer to say that they choose us than we them.

That none of us do any of the things we do without uninvited inspiration.

Nevertheless, pride vindicates our choices.

Gives us motive to go on.

POTENCY VERSUS ACTUALITY

One out of the fifty thousand on the terraces who chant:

We won the cup!

Will go on to constitute one of the we who’ll have just cause to proclaim as much in the future.

That a Brit wrote Hamlet suggests that someone not unlike me is capable of doing as much.

That, though unlikely, it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility.

It doesn’t mean that I did write Hamlet.

Will one day write Hamlet 2.

The distinction, then, is between potential and actual.

An association that inspires creativity.

And another that forestalls it.

Obviates the need to pursue its promise.

That says:

I need not write another Hamlet –

Anything like it –

Because Shakespeare wrote the original.

And I had a hand in that.

Somehow.

CONQUEST OF GALL

Pride is constructive when it inspires effort.

Destructive when is fosters apathy.

Rome fell when it prided itself on past triumphs.

Had little time –

Less desire –

To win new ones.

ENTITLED TO ENTITLEMENT

Are we entitled to be proud of anything?

Perhaps.

If we reappraise pride to approximate what it actually amounts to.

Retrofit it to mean:

I’m lucky in this fashion.

And only then if the subject assertion is true.

Objectively.

THE IRREMEDIABLE REDEEMED

Can pride be redeemed?

If it’s unpacked.

Decluttered.

Repackaged.

And why shouldn’t we do as much?

It never meant what it was assumed to mean anyway.

Why not repurpose it into something useful, then?

What?

A riposte to anyone who threatens your flourishing.

Attempts to put you down.

Drag you down.

Insist you’re worthless.

Incapable.

Then, you can counter:

People like me have achieved X, Y, Z.

Therefore, people like me ought to be given an opportunity to achieve X, Y, Z.

Providing you quote the proviso:

This doesn’t mean that I will achieve X, Y, Z.

Am capable of doing so, necessarily.

Only that somewhere –

At some time –

Someone like me –

In this one regard at least –

Achieved X, Y, Z.

Therefore, I have the potential to achieve X, Y, Z.

And must be permitted to realise same.

This sounds not unlike the pride those dismissed as woke champion.

It is.

Only the motive is distinct.

This claim isn’t for the sake of being politically correct solely.

But against the senselessness of the conventional interpretation.

The illogicality of it.

FATHER, FORGIVE THEM, FOR THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY BOO

The riposte argument might be regarded as a justification for nationalism.

Racism.

After all, adherents of this politics protest because they feel emasculated.

Forgetting, for a moment, that Western democracies are still run by and for whites –

In the overwhelming majority –

This interpretation might have motive force if it didn’t attribute blame to the blameless:

Immigrants.

Minorities.

If it acknowledged that its true nemeses are aristocrats.

Plutocrats.

Technocrats.

All overwhelmingly –

Blindingly –

White.

That were every immigrant deported tomorrow –

Every person of colour too –

The status of your average nationalist wouldn’t rise one percentage point.

Because the authors of their woes aren’t those whom they vote against –

Never were –

But those they vote for.

That their social castration is a consequence of policies introduced by politicians they support.

Examples?

One:

The value of the dollar began to lilliput the second Nixon took the currency off the gold standard.

Two:

Globalisation is a corollary of capitalism.

Industrialists outsourced to factories faraway for the same reason their Industrial Revolution forebears built satanic mills in the north of England.

That is, as far away from the chattering capital as possible.

Ensuring that unskilled labourers could be secretly overworked.

Safely underpaid.

If every job lost to the developing world were repatriated, then, nationalists wouldn’t want them.

Couldn’t afford to live on the wages latter-day mill owners drip out to have them undertaken.

Not that it matters.

Technology will render most of these occupations obsolete shortly anyway.

This is the reason why their political representatives O’Brien an eternal enemy.

Eurasia.

Eastasia.

Goldstein.

A perennial other who may be risklessly blamed for everything.

A corporeal cover under which these politicians may continue to be lobbied by –

And lobby on behalf of –

The modern mill owners responsible for it all.

Why don’t politicians spill any of this?

They know it would bring about a revolution.

Their cessation.

So, instead they insist that the problems are soluble.

The fault of peoples who are victims of their scheme.

Every autumn the Spartans declared war on the Helots.

The slave class on which their wealth depended.

I AM NOT PRINCE ELIOT, NOR WAS MEANT TO BE

The determinist deity will forgive all.

Must forgive all.

So, its day of judgement won’t be a grand settling of scores.

More a post-match deconstruction indicating what occasioned the final scoreline.

A cosmic accountant’s day of adjustment.

When we’ll discover why we were what we were.

Weren’t what we wanted to be.

Achieved this because circumstances/forces acted in concert to make it inevitable.

Didn’t achieve that because circumstances/forces acted in concert to make it impossible.

Negating pride.

Obviating it.