The Two Forms of Pride
A Response to Tim Keller

One form of pride is a self-conceited, self-idolatrous, and vain one. A person with this kind of pride sees themself as superior to others. They refuse to accept their ignorance and make outrageously incorrect claims. They claim to know others better than they know themselves. Their ego is fragile and insecure. It can't stand the thought of other people thriving and living lives the way they wish.

This kind of pride is what ails humanity. People think they are both experts in affairs in which they are not, but also seek to make other people listen to and submit to their decisions. Instead of becoming leaders by showing people you are worthy of respect, they demand other people listen to them because of their position.

This is the pride of the authoritarian. It leads to abuse because it sees others as objects to fulfill its own desires. It sees its own goals as more important and oppositional to the desires of others. It can't stand other people having control over their own lives and have things that make them happy on their own terms.

This is the destructive form of pride that we must root out of ourselves and condemn in our communities.

As C.S. Lewis says (and Keller quotes in his book):

Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next person. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others. If everyone else became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking there would be nothing to be proud about.’

Examples of this kind of pride:

• Refusing to give homeless people money because "they might buy drugs." This shows you think you know better than a stranger about what they need.
• Making a decision for someone else because "they would have said no."
• Accusing other people of being prideful for caring about their agency and setting their own boundaries.
• Denying people medical care because you don't like what they're doing (gender-affirming care, abortion, etc.).

Good humility is a negation of this pride. It recognizes when it is ignorant and is willing to learn. It respects other people and listens to what they have to say. It refuses to dominate others and make decisions about their lives for them. It tempers the bad pride and makes room for the good pride to thrive.

Examples of this humility:

• Asking other people what they need and believing them.
• Double-checking what others need before assuming.
• Practicing mutual aid, because you acknowledge others' needs as well as your own.

In contrast, when we talk about pride we are often referring to self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-respect. This is the good kind of pride that empowers people to do what they wish while also respecting the wills of others. It recognizes our interconnectedness and dependence on one another. It seeks to help others achieve their own goals as they help us achieve our own.

This kind of pride gives us the confidence we need to pursue our own goals and actualize them. If we don't feel like we have the capacity to do something, we aren't going to do them. We have to value ourselves and our abilities in order to achieve our ends.

Good pride is the foundation of both healthy individuals and a flourishing society.

Examples of this pride:

• Participating in pride parades.
• Fighting for civil rights.
• Exercising personal self-defense.
• Practicing self-care.

Bad humility is the negation of this pride. It tells a person their self-esteem is worthless. It makes them unwilling to stand up for themself. It encourages timidity and submission to others in order to find meaning in their own lives. This is the kind of humility that an abuser wishes to foster in their victims.

Examples of this humility:

• Letting someone walk over you in pursuing their goals.
• Assuming you are wrong about your own experiences when questioned.
• Doing something that will hurt you because someone else wants you to do it.

If you see yourself in any of these, I'm not judging you. It's hard work to rebuild your own self-esteem and a lot of people don't want you to do so. Be kind to yourself.

The difference between these forms of pride is not a difference of degree. The self-conceited is not more proud than the self-confident. No, the self-conceited has a different kind of pride altogether, one which some people happen to use the same word to describe. A person can and should respect their selves while also respecting other people. This respect for others allows you to respect yourself even more. The self-conceited pride refuses to see the other as human, while the self-confident embraces it.

Christians seem to be especially confused about this. Throughout history, this dichotomy has been well-understood. Even Aristotle saw pride as a virtue with hubris being a vice.

Some people, like Keller, conflate the two. They demonize all kinds of pride in favor of complete submission to a higher power. They believe self-conceitedness is caused by self-esteem.

Abusers use many tactics to gain power over their victims. One of the most powerful of these is stand in the way of the victim's self-worth. This is possible when the victim has no intrinsic sense of value. This is why abusers often go after those whom they perceive to have low self-esteem. It's easier to abuse someone where the work of destroying the self has already been done.

Keller says that, according to the secular world, the husband who beats his wife is the result of low self-esteem. He says that's not the case, and I agree with him. But the abusive husband also isn't abusive because he has excessive self-worth. No. He's abusive because he wants to control others. He sees his wife as an object, either as an outlet for his frustration or as deserving of his abuse due to disobedience. If anything, destroying his wife's self-esteem is part of the abusive process.

This denigration of self-esteem is why abuse flourishes in Christian communities. When you are constantly taught you are worthless without God because of your intrinsic sin, you tend to devalue yourself. Many Christian living books encourage believers to look at their sin with horror before turning to God for forgiveness. This prefigures the kind of abusive relationship that abusers want to have with their victims.

This dynamic makes it almost impossible to become confident in one's own decisions. Instead, they're always looking for someone else to make those decisions for them.

The few who are able to avoid the destruction of their self-esteem do so by accepting self-conceitedness. They consider themselves wiser and more important than others, in their actions if not their words. These are the people who tend to become elders, pastors, and patriarchs.

I've seen this within my own life. I was never able to achieve a sense of self-confidence. I remember writing a poem at church one Sunday. I lamented my lack of self-confidence and wanted to find a way to be more sure of myself. I never found that within the chuch. My choice was between power or empathy. I had to leave both the faith and the church in order to grow in both confidence and empathy.

Keller's alternative to self-esteem is self-forgetfulness. This mirrors C.S. Lewis's view. When we're self-forgetful, we're not thinking, "Oh I'm so great!" or "Oh I'm so terrible!" Instead, we're not thinking about ourselves at all. We are so focused on God and others that we don't even consider thinking about how amazing or terrible we are. It's a genuine form of humility.

However, this kind of self-forgetfulness can easily be manipulated by those around us. We do need to think about ourselves in order to protect ourselves and pursue our goals. Keller and Lewis might argue that our goals should be aligned with God's, who will work through us regardless of our self-perception, but that's a huge amount of unnecessary faith. Instead of forgetting the self, we can have a healthy image of ourselves, building up good self-esteem rather than throwing off all pride.

Self-forgetfulness can easily turn into self-neglect, which makes one more vulnerable to abuse.

I believe, unlike Keller, that instead of tearing down people's self-esteem, we should build it up. We should encourage each other to participate in decisions. We should tell them their voices and experiences matter, because they do.

We should be precise in our language and avoid conflating concepts that are deadly to conflate.

We should instill the good humility in ourselves, refusing to judge others and working to understand their situations. All the while being more than willing to stand up for ourselves when others are trying to control us and beat us down.