On Pride on on Pride the Morality and Politics of an Emotion Martha Claeys
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On Pride On Pride The morality and politics of an emotion Martha Claeys Martha Martha Claeys Dissertation submitted for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy at the University of Antwerp Supervisors: Guido Vanheeswijck Katrien Schaubroeck Antwerp, 2021 Faculty of Arts, Department of Philosophy cover illustration: © 2021 sara mertens isbn: 9789057286834 depot: D/2021/12.293/04 Over trots De moraliteit en politiek van een emotie Martha Claeys Proefschrift voorgelegd tot het behalen van de graad van doctor in de wijsbegeerte aan de Universiteit Antwerpen Promotoren: Guido Vanheeswijck Katrien Schaubroeck Antwerpen, 2021 Faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte Departement Wijsbegeerte Contents Unapologetic. Introduction 9 Utøya, July 22 9 Baker, Milk, and the Stonewall Girls 12 Two tales of pride 14 The fat relentless ego 17 Social ‘me’-dia 19 Overview 21 1. The forbidden fruit. Setting the scene 27 A brief history of pride 28 Fittingness of pride 34 The agency account of pride 36 Pride the emotion, pride the character trait 40 Self-respect and self-esteem 41 Why keep pride? 44 The gap of self-love 47 2. Before the fall. On self-esteem pride 53 The carrot and the stick 53 Some paradigm cases of self-esteem pride 56 Proud of you 58 Six pitfalls of pride 60 61 Two: whose eyes? 62 Three: on bluff and self-centeredness 71 Four: a zero sum game 73 Five: infectious superiority 81 Six: imprudential pride 84 contents Pride as a second-best moral motivator 87 Preventing the pitfalls: six recommendations 92 3. A line in de sand. On self-respect pride 101 Same same, but different 104 The meaning of self-respect 106 The importance of self-respect 111 Pride and self-respect 112 Two games, two sets of rules 114 Earning respect 115 Entitled to esteem 118 Illegitimate entitlement 121 123 126 Different prides 129 What makes Breivik’s pride wrong? 131 Breivik’s claim to disrespect 132 Sustaining superiority by demanding equality 135 Five recommendations for self-respect pride 138 Regardless 147 4. A particular love. On self-love pride 151 What is self-love? 156 Why self-love is not self-absorption 158 The stakes of understanding self-love as looking at the self 162 What should self-love mean? 165 The whole self 171 And nothing but the self 175 What is the self (and does it matter)? 180 Self-love and self-knowledge 184 Self-love and self-hatred, pride and shame 187 The politics and morality of self-love 192 194 Comfortable fantasies 199 Self-love as a recommendation 205 contents Pride: a skewed distribution? Conclusion 209 The eye of the beholder 210 Split perception of pride 214 Who gets to be proud? 216 Bibliography 223 Acknowledgments 255 English summary 259 Nederlandse samenvatting 261 Unapologetic Introduction Utøya, July 22 “The objective was not to kill 69 people at Utøya. The objective was to kill all of them” (Pidd 2012b). Anders Behring Breivik looks calm and well- groomed on the fourth day of his trial at the Oslo courthouse. About one year before uttering these chilling words, Breivik killed 77 people in two separate terror attacks. On July 22, 2011 he parked a white van in the heart of the government quarter of Norway’s capital. He left the car and walked away, leaving a note behind the windshield to apologize for any foul-smelling odors. Sewage works, he wrote down as the reason. In truth, the chemical smell of the fertilizer Breivik had used to concoct a home-made bomb had proven hard to conceal. Nine minutes after Breivik left the car it exploded, killing eight people. Meanwhile, Breivik had stepped into another, smaller car that he had parked around the corner. He drove it some 32 kilometers northwest of Oslo, towards the island of Utøya, where hundreds of teen- agers had assembled for the summer gathering of the ruling Labor Party’s youth wing. Breivik had called ahead to inform the camp leaders about the Oslo bombing, and said that the police had sent him to reassure the teenag- the part. Breivik had bought a police uniform online and used fake police was no way for them to tell that Breivik was not intent on reassuring them Breivik went about shooting undisturbed for a harrowing 72 minutes, until people, most of them teenagers. Anders Behring Breivik is a tall white Norwegian man with bright blonde, nearly white hair. His acts were those of a militant nationalist ‘pro- 9 on pride tecting’ the Norwegian people against the Islamization of Europe, as Breivik explains in the 1518-page manifesto he uploaded to the internet before the attacks. During his trial, Breivik explained why he targeted the gathering on Utøya. At the site some of the most promising and dedicat- ed young progressivists were gathered, a group of teenagers voluntarily spending some time of their summers thinking and talking about political ideas. Breivik considered them “not innocent but legitimate targets be- cause they were representatives of a “multiculturalist” regime he claims is deconstructing Norway’s national identity by allowing immigration,” as an article in the Guardian puts it (Pidd 2012a). While explaining his motives in the manifesto, Breivik claims that cultural conservatives are harassed and discriminated against. He writes about “the rape of Europe,” (2011, 706) referring to the continent as “Eurabia” (739) and writing about the “warfare against whites,” (350) among other things. He suggests that Muslims in Norway should either convert to Christianity and change their names to Christians ones, or be deported or executed. Islamic art in Eu- rope should be destroyed and languages like Arabic, Urdu, Persian, and Somali banned (Seierstad 2019). often carries a meaning of strength, perseverance, and victory. It calls to mind the 1968 protest at the Olympics, where two Black1 athletes Tom- 1. I will consistently capitalize Black throughout this thesis, in compliance with the reasoning behind recent decisions of major institutions like the New York Times and Associated Press. In citations, I will adopt the original spelling of the author. The capi- African country. More on the reasoning behind this can be found in statements issued by the aforementioned news outlets. In Europe, it could be said that such an acknowledgment African Diaspora in Europe is a more recent phenomenon, and European Blacks might therefore be more inclined to identify as Ghanaian, Gambian, Senegalese, Congolese, or other, rather than as Black. I choose here, for matters of consistency, to also capitalize 10 unapologetic heads on the stage to address discrimination of the Black population in the United States. Though for a wholly different purpose, Breivik, Smith, strong, and we will not be oppressed. During the trial, Breivik kept up this attitude, never once repenting what he did, and seizing any opportunity to emphasize that what he did was right and needed to be done. He was eager to explain himself, even right after the attack had ended, said a police spokesperson (Beaumont 2011). A Guardian journalist writes that “Breivik boasted that his was the most ‘spectacular and sophisticated’ attack by a nationalist militant since spent plotting the attack, mostly on a farm two hours northeast of Oslo, his cause had become all-consuming. His country and his people needed protection from the threat of Islam, and it was all too important that he should spread the word by having his words read and his actions seen. He called the attacks the “book-launch” of his manifesto (Seierstad 2019). Breivik was later diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder by court psychiatrists. When doing research for a book about Breivik, the journalist Åsne Seierstad sent Breivik questions by mail, which he answered from prison. Seierstad writes that in his attempt to paint a portrait of Breivik, he found “a life full of shame, failures, abuse and rejections. A boy who never got the attention or care a child deserves; a rejected, uncool teenager; a man who in his late 20s moved in with his mother and mostly played video games. Isolated and angry, but with newfound friends on the dark web, he decided how he would be seen, heard, recognized and feared. He plotted his attack with an audience in mind” (2019). Breivik wanted recognition, for him and for his people, and for the threat he claimed to see to both. Black when referring to the Diaspora, if not to acknowledge a shared culture, then at least - nantly and normatively white context. 11 on pride Baker, Milk, and the Stonewall Girls Now consider a second story. Gilbert Baker was, apart from a gay rights activist, a self-taught seam- ster. In 1978 his friend Harvey Milk asked him to design a symbol for the San Francisco. The only relevant symbol for the gay community up until then had been an upside-down pink triangle, used by Nazis to stigmatize and visibly identify gay people (Waxman 2018). There was a need for a new symbol designed by someone from within the community. The new symbol needed to be an inclusive symbol of pride, not one used to confer stigma. It had to be something visual that gay people could choose to positively identify with, not an enforced symbol meant to categorize and ‘other’ the gay community. What Baker came up with will not surprise the reader. He lined up strips of colored fabric and arranged them like a rainbow, each color rep- is now widely recognized as either symbolizing gay pride, or public ap- preciation and support of the gay community. Its vivid colors show up everywhere – from bumper stickers to rainbow crossroads (Belga 2017). The U.S. White House was lit in the iconic rainbow in June 2015, following the Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage (Mindock 2017).