A Plea for Proper Pride (1955)
Every generation has its own special vices. Every people has its cardinal sin; sometimes cruelty and sometimes immorality, sometimes idolatry and sometimes intolerance. Ask any of today’s teachers of religion what, in their opinion, is the greatest sin of our generation, and they will unhesitatingly tell you: Pride. Preachers of all faiths regularly attack our pride in our technological progress. Moralists berate us for our pride in our scientific accomplishments. And recently theologians have been scolding modern man for what they call “the pride of the intellect.”There is, of course, a kernel of truth in all this. We are foolish if we think that building better machines makes us better men or that constructing greater cyclotrons makes us greater human beings. Yet, it seems to me, they miss the point. For while all this pride is sinful, it does not constitute the special, characteristic sin of our generation, the generation of Americans and especially American Jews we represent. I prefer to think that our great crime, our cardinal sin, has been, quite the contrary, not enough pride. We have too much pride in things, in possessions, in techniques. But we have a crying lack of proper pride – a lack of pride in ourselves, a lack of appreciation of the human beings we are, with the infinite capacities for good with which we are endowed. The tragedy of our age is not our foolish pride, but an unwholesome humility which makes us forget that we were created in the tzelem Elokim, in the Image of G-d. It is this lack of self-appreciation and proper pride which accounts for the mediocrity of the spirit, for the religious shallowness, for the amorality of our day. It is our accursed inferiority feeling that breeds our inferiority. We have so convinced ourselves of our lack of worth, our incapacity for greatness, that we no longer strive for it.One of the greatest sociologists of our time, Prof. David Reisman, has noted the same unfortunate tendency in his own students, colle…
