The Problem of Pride

The Promised Land Project strives to restore a sense of divine purpose to our culture in part by tracing the poetic genius as it reflects the course of human evolution and provides a projection of where we need to go as a society. Prior to the Civil War, the nineteenth-century American poets and artists sensed a promised land at a time of westward expansion. In poems such as Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" (1855) and paintings such as "Kindred Spirits"(1849) one can still sense and long for this promised land. Yet in each example one can also sense the problem of pride.

Here I define the problem of pride as the setting of one's self apart from others and nature, a state of being we are socialized into to some degree. The problem of pride has lent itself in the twentieth-century to demoralization and environmental degradation (see blog entry of June 14). Here in the twenty-first century, as it appears to me, the situation can be redressed by a kind of spiritual movement as I've articulated in previous blog entries.

In the religious sphere, books like Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life are important contributions towards achieving Christlike love and humility, the antithesis of pride. Yet a broader approach is needed and we can look to other cultures in time and space to enable our society to achieve a state of balance and harmony. By appreciating tragedy in the poetry of Ancient Greece as reflected in the drama Sophocles' Ajax, for example, we can glimpse how we can truly feel love for our enemies by way of the human spirit.

Leading up to the excerpt as follows, the Goddess Athena has cast a spell on Ajax, sealing his doom, because he'd plotted to kill Odysseus. We pick up the dialogue after Athena reveals the situation to Odysseus:

Athena: Do you see, Odysseus, how great the gods' power is? Who was more full of foresight than this man, Or abler, do you think, to act with judgment?

Odysseus: None that I know of. Yet I pity his wretchedness, though he is my enemy, for the terrible yoke of blindness that is on him. I think of him, yet also of myself; for I see the true state of all us that live -- we are dim shapes, no more, and weightless shadow.

Athena: Look well at this, and speak no towering word yourself against the gods, nor walk too grandly because you hand is weightier than another's, or your great wealth deeper founded. One short day inclines the balance of all human things to sink or rise again. Know that the god love men of steady sense and hate the proud.

While our mythos is different than that of ancient Greece, or the simple recognition of the mind's ability to cause a false perception, the above example can lend itself to the creation and reproduction of art towards a new era.