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The Pride Placebo | | |
- "Panegyric" is a speech in praise of someone or something, occasionally (and less in the last couple of centuries) a eulogy. I don't think it's completely misapplied here, but it feels wrong to me, and if it's right, it's at the heart of your essay to explain why it is right. I listened to her speech at the time, and I've read it again, and it seems, pardon me, hokey. I don't dispute that it was precisely what people needed to hear: you're the expert on that question. What seems to me so interesting and important is the articulation of the reasons why it was right.
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> | * I understood the word "panegyric" to be a synonym for the demonstrative (epideictic) rhetorical form. Aristotle says that it aims to praise or blame, and that it is concerned primarily with the present. Cicero says it is a speech that deals with virtues that appeal widely to all mankind, and which praises deeds that seem to have been done without profit or reward. Kenneth Burke says it is a form of rhetoric with ulterior motive - the "human interest" story that depicts the sacrificial life of war heroes in war times, or Soviet propaganda that celebrates the accomplishments of individuals who triumph over adversity in carrying out the government's plans for exploitation of the nation's resource. [See A Rhetoric of Motives by Kenneth Burke, pp. 69-78] Given this understanding of the term, I believe it is an appropriate descriptor for Giovanni's speech. As (I hope) I showed below, Giovanni's speech fit with the classical descriptions of the term, and arguably with Burke's definition as well. May I ask - why does it feel wrong to you? You mention - and I agree - that the speech seems hokey, but that does not, to my understanding, make it less of a panegyric. You are right, of course, that what is interesting and important are the reasons why it was right - and I endeavor to show those below. But I'm not sure what that has to do with the application of the term "panegyric". | | |
delivered precisely - almost presciently - what we needed to hear. We are Virginia Tech. Her words were a life line, a buoy amid the grief. We are strong, we are brave, we are innocent and we are unafraid. She defined our identity, she implored us to be proud. We will prevail. She repeated. We will prevail. Stressing each word - We will prevail - as if the very act of emphasis might lend them meaning. We are Virginia Tech. The crowd erupted. A cheer typically reserved for touchdown celebrations was suddenly transformed into a prayer. The stadium sighed in catharsis. | | |
- Are you sure? The first idea, that there's a matter of being trapped without a moral persona when you cannot given an honorable account of your behavior, seems to me different from the second idea, that it is difficult to orientate oneself in the aftermath of trauma that obliterates familiar certainties. Maybe Dawes also has the second idea, but the first--that it harms men to send them off to do horrendous and morally unacceptable things and then deny them "honor" or "glory" in the narrative after the event--doesn't seem to me to be relevant to the mix of harmful emotions experienced by the survivors of other peoples' violence.
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> | * I think you're right that there is something of a disconnect between the passage I quoted from Dawes and the point I go on to make in this paragraph. While I actually do think the two are related, I didn't fully explain why for reasons of space and relevance. I could probably have simply made my own point without citing Dawes and avoided having to draw the tenuous connection, but I really wanted to include Dawes because his work contributed a lot to the way I framed this topic. As for the substance - I think Dawes' point about the moral injuries relates, as you say, primarily to the matter of identifying and knowing a moral persona in the narrative of one's life. I believe that Giovanni's speech implicitly identified that very same issue as an important one for the Virginia Tech community. Of course, it plays differently for the soldiers than it does for the survivors of other people's violence - the agency factor is an important one, not to be overlooked. But the heart of the matter, as far as this paper is concerned, has to do with reforming a coherent and reliable understanding of the world, and the role that pride plays in that process. I certainly do not mean to equate the two experiences - they are disparate in almost every way. But the one thing I do believe they have in common is the thing that is highlighted by the Dawes' passage - that pride can help vulnerable psyches recover from trauma. | | | a deep and powerful doubt that threatens to erode our most fundamental convictions. Indeed, "nothing is so destructive of social habits," Arnold warned, "as the questioning of the existence of some power or reason or mystic word." But pride acts as a glue, holding together the pieces of a crumbling worldview. When nothing else makes any sense, we can rely on the endurance of our own self-worth. Pride persists where little else can; because it is self-reflexive, we can create it, so to speak, consciously within our psyches. | | |
- A risky generalization. At best, as you say, partially true: all sorts of things (starting with parental praise and extending through public recognition) create feelings typically called "pride" without conscious contemplation. Moreover, the process that feels like contemplation ("They've given me the Nobel prize. Is my chemistry really that good? Yes, on the whole I think my chemistry really is that good. Now I am proud.") may have a larger unconscious component than you are admitting.
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> | * I concede that this is not the only way to convince of the pride; indeed, not even the most probable. But I think that it is a plausible and interesting idea. For the sake of argument, I would suggest that perhaps that all those things which create feelings of pride without conscious contemplation are actually just instances of the phenomenon I cite below - where the contemplation took place so long ago that the prideful feeling does indeed feel immediate. For instance, you cite parental praise. It is true that I am proud of myself when my mother tells me I've done a good job, but that is because I decided a long time ago that I wanted to please my mother. Of course, that doesn't account for the same such feelings in very small children, but perhaps those feelings are more appropriately called happiness, rather than pride.
That said, I appreciate your criticism of this argument, and I think you are probably right. I don't know enough about social psychology (if that is even the correct field?) to really defend it thoroughly. I do think that it is sort of interesting, though, and I think it sort of makes sense on some intuitive emotional level. | | | That consideration may have taken place long ago, in which case the pride I feel upon achievement may seem automatic. Yet even this ostensibly immediate pride still stems from a deliberate cognition. Consider our linguistic construction of the phrase "to pride oneself."
Its a reflexive speech-act, the subject of conscious acting on the object of self. Understanding pride in this way is key to understanding its utility. Because of its reflexive, cognitive nature, pride can be deliberately and internally caused. Thus, pride can be harnessed as a tool. | |
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< | But so can anger, which is not usually the result of contemplative processes, or love, or the fear of being seen a coward among one's platoon. Maybe "harnessed," which implies being used by others, is a mistaken verb here. Maybe we should concentrate on those emotions which one can use oneself from "inside." But even so, as I say, it doesn't seem to me that the illusion of springing from conscious excogitation is a precondition of such "tool-fulness." | >
> | * But so can anger, which is not usually the result of contemplative processes, or love, or the fear of being seen a coward among one's platoon. Maybe "harnessed," which implies being used by others, is a mistaken verb here. Maybe we should concentrate on those emotions which one can use oneself from "inside." But even so, as I say, it doesn't seem to me that the illusion of springing from conscious excogitation is a precondition of such "tool-fulness."
* Can "harnessed" not also mean being used by oneself? In the preceding sentence, I say that pride can be internally caused. Taken together with the next sentence, I thought that my meaning would be clear - that we can use our pride deliberately, to bring about certain ends. Moreover, you may be right that the process of conscious excogitation is not a precondition to tool-fulness, but I think it is clear how the two might relate. Again, without suggesting that mine is the authoritative theory on this particular emotional cause and effect, I believe it is defensible. | | | When Nikki Giovanni affirmed our identity as a community, she triggered our cognitive pride mechanism, and the prophecy fulfilled itself. We sat up a little taller, we wept a little less, and we prided ourselves on our virtues. It didn't matter that we, all forty thousand of us collectively, have little in common except our football team; and it didn't matter that most of us, who watched passively from a distance as the events unfolded on television, had done nothing to be proud of. It didn't matter because the real force of Giovanni's words had nothing to do with their content. She reminded us that we still had something to believe in, and gave us the traction we needed to begin our long climb back to life. We wear it on our t-shirts, and we repeat it like a psalm - We are Virginia Tech - not as a declaration to the rest of the world, but as a reminder to ourselves. Though it's apostasy for me to say so, deep down we all know, that the phrase and the pride are empty. But we wear it anyway, and in doing so, we make it come true. |
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