Pride
Pride is dignified and accomplished and ridiculous and phony..
Pride was placed on the list of Seven Deadly Sins, but when we observe that a person takes pride in their work, it’s not an insult. When we say to a child, “I’m proud of you,” there is no sense of inappropriate arrogance implied.
This episode explores the emotion of pride in the context of LGBTQ and disabled identities, with stories from authors Lee Wind, Savannah Hauk, and Karol Ruth Silverstein, along with a passage from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
Full Transcript:
Welcome to Stories of Emotional Granularity, a podcast that explores the diversity of emotional experience. In some respects, emotion is the most authentic experience people can have. We feel it first, before anyone can sense any of its secondary external manifestations. Nonetheless, emotion is a social concern. We worry whether our emotions are proper, whether they are the right thing to feel.
It’s difficult to know whether our feelings are in an acceptable balance, however. Often, what feels in the moment like empowerment can end up undermining our relationships. Social expectations about emotion can be unclear and even contradictory.
So it is with pride. Pride is the feeling of self-esteem, holding oneself in high regard.
Pride feels good in the moment, but from an external perspective, it’s often accompanied by skepticism. Looming over the pleasure of pride is the question of whether pride is justified, or whether it is a delusion that reflects a flawed character. Pride carries the potential for a painful ironic twist, because it is simultaneously a description of praiseworthiness and an insult describing a person who claims to be worthy of praise but is not.
Pride is dignified and accomplished and ridiculous and phony.
Pride was placed on the list of Seven Deadly Sins, but when we observe that a person takes pride in their work, it’s not an insult. When we say to a child, “I’m proud of you,” there is no sense of inappropriate arrogance implied. However, we can also describe a person as proud in order to communicate that they are haughty and full of themselves. Pride has always been a feeling we aim to earn, even as we fear that we don’t really deserve it.
Questions about the proper place of the emotion of pride have been present for centuries. Whenever I hear about pride, I think of the novel Pride and Prejudice, which was written by Jane Austen back in 1813. The story centers around the uncertainty of pride, exploring our simultaneous admiration and disdain for those who hold themselves proud.
The dramatic tension in the story begins when a wealthy man named Mr. Darcy arrives in a small town to visit his friend, who has just rented the largest house in the community. His first public appearance is at a local dance, in which he refuses to participate by dancing with the main character, Elizabeth Bennett implying that both she and the setting are unworthy of attention. This sets the townspeople talking. They’re outraged at the insult, and yet some people refuse to criticize him, feeling that Mr. Darcy has the right to be proud because he is wealthy, young, and good-looking.
Elizabeth discusses the issue of Mr. Darcy’s pride with her friend Miss Lucas and her sister Mary.
Pride and Prejudice:
“His pride,” said Miss Lucas, “does not offend me so much as pride often does, because there is an excuse for it. One cannot wonder that so very fine a young man, with family, fortune, everything in his favour, should think highly of himself. If I may so express it, he has a right to be proud.”
“That is very true,” replied Elizabeth, “and I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.”
“Pride,” observed Mary, who piqued herself upon the solidity of her reflections, “is a very common failing, I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed; that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary. Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity to what we would have others think of us.”
Jonathan Cook:
In this passage from Pride and Prejudice, read by Karen Savage for Librivox, we hear three different interpretations of Mr. Darcy’s pride. Miss Lucas simply accepts that Mr. Darcy’s position in society entitles him to feel pride, regardless of that feeling’s impact on others. Elizabeth notes that the interaction was a complex interplay between two feelings of pride, Mr. Darcy’s and her own. Mary, for her part, distinguishes between pride and vanity, observing that Mr. Darcy was merely being true to his own high opinion of himself without regard to the opinions of others.
Mary’s point sounds reasonable. On the other hand, a question remains: What does it mean for a person to think of themselves so highly that they fail to consider the feelings of other people?
Savannah Hauk argues for a different understanding of pride. She distinguishes between the emotion of pride and the sense of pridefulness.
Savannah Hauk:
When I speak of pride, I speak of it on a very personal level about being, you know, we talk about being prideful. It's not about being prideful. It's about being proud. So being prideful sometimes is, you're a little too prideful, you think too much of yourself. But if you're proud, being prideful of yourself in that way, you just love yourself. I always see this, as just I love and I am confident and happy and content and I am proud of the person I've become over these last fifty years. You know, you talk to my origin story in all the steps and all the things I take. That's not unique to me. I am not terribly unique. Every person and every journey in their life has moments and milestones that have led them to the person they are today. My pride comes in knowing who I am as a person and embracing that embrace, embracing, just embracing and loving myself and having pride that I am this person.
I think that being too proud, being too prideful would be akin to thinking that your way of loving and living is the only way of loving and living. I'm very proud of who I am, and nothing else is like who I am. Everybody can be like who you are, in all our different flavors. But to think that you are unique in the holy and only qualified to be righteously proud is where it becomes very problematic and dangerous. We should all be proud of who we are, but just not proud at the sake and expense of somebody else.
Jonathan Cook:
Savannah balances the two aspects of pride by embracing the value of self-worth, while simultaneously observing the impact of that feeling of self-worth on others. If Savannah had been standing with Miss Lucas, Elizabeth Bennett, and Mary, she would have called Mr. Darcy prideful, rather than truly proud. In this formulation, a proud person remains capable of perceiving the worth of the people around them, while a prideful person is so obsessed with their own pride that they become blind to the perspectives of others.
Savannah has had to learn to cultivate her own sense of pride as a dual-gendered person in a society that expects everyone to conform to a single gender at all times. She is author of two books about her experience with this struggle, both with the main title of Living With Crossdressing, but with different subtitles: Defining a New Normal, and Discovering Your True Identity.
Gender and sexual identity are at the forefront of the conflicted image of pride this month, because it’s June, and June is celebrated as Pride Month, a time for LGBTQ+ people to show the world that they are proud of who they are. Pride is always controversial, however, and so Pride Month has also become a time for people to criticize LGBTQ+ people and call for an end to their pride.
I feel as if I’m entering tricky territory with this episode. I don’t want this podcast to adopt any particular perspective and tell people what they should think or feel. I’m aiming for something more descriptive, to identify the different ways in which people experience the feeling of being alive, from the inside out.
Pride, however, calls people out. Pride is a statement that invites a response. Pride challenges people to take sides. Pride Month provokes with a special intensity, this year more than any other.
It would be ridiculous to discuss the emotion of pride without considering the current controversies about Pride Month. An honest investigation of emotion will inevitably come upon controversy, because emotion is about the subjective foundations for people’s decisions about what matters. A dispassionate discussion of emotion misses the point.
So, I’m going to be referring to Pride Month, but the interviews that inform this episode were conducted months ago, before the political arguments about Pride Month became as heated as they are now. I’m also going to try to consider the larger meaning of what Pride Month arguments tell us about the nature of pride as an emotion. In doing so, it’s not my goal to tell people what they should think about Pride Month, but I would like to contribute some emotional depth that might broaden people’s points of view, regardless of their political affiliation.
Pride, as it is expressed in pride month, asserts its positive form of self-knowledge and self-acceptance. It does so, however, in reaction to a long history of negative rejection. Lee Wind, author of the upcoming book The Gender Binary Is a Big Lie, told me of his own journey from fear into a kind of pride that isn’t willing to settle for mere toleration.
Lee Wind:
Hi, my name is Lee Wind. I write stories to empower kids and teens to be their authentic selves and change the world.
Part of pride, part of feeling good about being your authentic self is knowing that you are not alone in the world. You are not alone in history. I do think that that's actually the point of a lot of these book bans that are happening now, and a lot of these anti LGBTQ laws that are happening all around the US in 2023 as we have this discussion, is this idea that we can't hold the Internet back. It's impossible for these, you can no longer grow up today if you have access to a smartphone and think that you were the only guy to like-like other guys in the history of the world, which is what I thought when I was growing up. They didn't have the Internet when I was in school, and it was very scary. I really felt like I was alone and unmoored. So, discovering the fact that there have been men who loved men, all the way back to the time of Confucius before China was unified, there was this incredible story of the Duke Ling of Wei and the guy that he loved, Mizi Xia, how they were walking through an orchard and Mizi Xia picked a ripe peach off of a tree and started to eat it, and it was so delicious that he stopped halfway through and offered the half-eaten peach to the Duke. The Duke made a huge deal out of it. He was like, "I can't believe that you would give up," this is not a direct quote, but "you would give up your pleasure to share this delicious thing with me." Something about that moment really captured the imagination and resonated with people in pre-unified China to the extent that for over a thousand years, the way that they said gay, the way that they talked about two men in love, was love of the half-eaten peach. My mind was blown. I'm not alone. I think that pride is not about like, "I did something good and I'm really proud." I think pride really is about like I am my authentic self and that is enough, and I am good enough and I deserve to have space in this world. I am not alone. There is a legacy of people that I am part of. I think that that is very, very beautiful and very, very resonant.
There's been this whole movement in the educational sphere about teaching tolerance. I've always bristled a little bit at that because I feel like tolerance is such a low goal. Shouldn't we be aiming for something beyond tolerating the people that are different than us? How about we celebrate our differences? How about we embrace them and acknowledge that it's okay to be different? When my parents came to America, it was all about the melting pot. It was all about basically subsuming who you were, erasing who you were, and becoming American, quote unquote. I don't even really speak Hebrew that well, because they didn't speak Hebrew at home. They only spoke English because they wanted my brother and I to do really well in school. We did do really well in school, but at the loss of having a connection to the culture that our parents grew up in. I did take Hebrew in college and my grammar is atrocious. I'm about as fluent as a preschooler, but I think that our vision of what a pluralistic society is changed over time and now I don't think that's as common. I think when families immigrate. I do feel like they don't want to, they do want their children to have the language that they came to America with. They may also want their kids to learn English and do well in school, of course, but it's not an either-or. We're so binary, even in that how I just presented that coloring page. It doesn't have to just be menorahs and Christmas trees. It could be a Kwanzaa display. I mean, it could be some pagan celebration. It can be many, many things, and we should be strong enough as a community, we should be proud enough in who we are that it is okay that you celebrate something different than I celebrate. We can all still be a community together and support each other, and I think that that for me feels like that's pride.
Jonathan Cook:
Lee pursues the emotional implications of the language that has long sought to bridge differences by obscuring them, like cracks in a wall that are covered with successive layers of wallpaper, each destined to split along the slowly expanding faults. Teaching Tolerance is an alliterative phrase that seems inclusive to some, yet suggests a continued marginalization to others, with toleration offering only a begrudging willingness to suppress expressions of outright rejection.
He defines pride the feeling of having sufficient strength in one’s own self-image to allow others to be different, to be proud of themselves on their own terms. Pride Month, in this sense, could become an invitation for celebration of everybody’s identity, not just the identities of LGBTQ people. Lee explains this expansive sense of pride in terms of his realization of the connections between his gay identity and his Jewish, atheist, vegetarian identities. Pride, from this perspective, is not a zero sum game.
Lee Wind:
I don't think pride is a zero sum game. I don't think. I think, you know, if it's like pie, then maybe you just bake more pies. But I think it isn't that, you know, me being proud about being queer means I can't be proud about being Jewish or being an atheist or being a vegetarian or any of the many, many aspects of who I am. And yet I do feel like in our culture today, we are sort of trained to be very laser focused, like, what's your brand as an author or what are you doing and how are you able to get people to care about what you're doing and. I did have a lot of concern about like, wow, this book isn't necessarily on brand for me. And then when I stopped and I thought about it, I'm like, Well, actually it is on brand. For me, it is very much about being your authentic self and about encouraging kids to feel like they have agency and they can make a difference in our world and about how we should be allies for each other. When I it kind of pulled back, I was like, “Damn, it's exactly what I want to say in our world, just about a different part of me,” and it was almost like I had to open myself up and recognize that like, “Okay, if it's pie, I can bake another pie.” There is enough pride within me for all the different parts of who I am that I can have books that are about different aspects of humanity and about queer stuff, about Jewish stuff. Honestly, I have a book about coming out as an atheist that I hope one day will be out in the world.
Jonathan Cook
When Lee Wind advocates for pride, he doesn’t just do so for LGBTQ identities. That’s where his books began, but now he also uses his voice as an author to promote pride for young people grappling with their Jewish and atheist identities. The commonality among these disparate identities is that they’re minority perspectives that are often derided by the majority.
Lee’s work across these subjects shows how the emotion of pride has come to represent a specific feeling of defiance in the face of others’ negative judgments. This sense of pride isn’t exclusive. Other versions of the feeling of pride still exist in current use. Indeed, as a point of emotional contention, pride seems to invite the development of multiple versions of itself. The understanding of pride as a rebellious self-assertion by socially marginalized people is a mirror image of the pride Mr. Darcy enjoyed as a powerful member of the elite at the height of the British Empire, but in our day, the ownership of pride as an emotional banner for underdogs is the most dynamic and contested understanding of the word.
Karol Ruth Silverstein provides another window into this aspect of pride. She writes about finding pride in disability in her award-winning novel Cursed.
Karol Ruth Silverstein:
A good introduction to me, my debut young adult novel, Cursed, was drawn from my experience of getting sick at thirteen, and it's the little mighty book that could. It's from a smaller imprint, Charlesbridge Teen, but it did win a very prestigious ALA Award, the Schneider Family Book Award, which celebrates the disability experience. I'm really proud of the book, and I don't have another one coming out yet, but I am hard at work at a few different topics.
Cursed, like I said, it's drawn from some personal experience, though it is fiction. It is about a fourteen year-old girl, Ricky, who is duly sent to live with her dad. She's newly diagnosed with a chronic illness. She's pissed off at the world, sort of estranged from her family, in terms of emotionally, cutting a bunch of school. The book starts when she is, her truancy is discovered and she's forced to go back to school and tried desperately to pass ninth grade and not have to repeat the school year. And she is getting used to this new normal of hers, which involves a whole lot of chronic pain and feeling very damaged and getting bullied a little bit at school. Has a bad relationship with the doctor, so she learns to advocate for herself as someone with a chronic illness.
I tend to write about that, to write about young girls who are facing some sort of abrupt change in their lives and have to figure out who they're going to be going forward. And that's you know, that's something that that definitely happened to me a few times as young as a young kid. It's a theme that I think is very universal regardless of what the change might have been, and so it’s something I explore a lot in my work.
Jonathan Cook:
As a writer, Karol chooses the language she uses with care in order to articulate space for people to be open about their disabilities. Instead of using awkward phrases that attempt to avoid centering people’s disabilities, she cuts through to the core of the issues people deal with by using direct language, referring to herself as disabled.
Karol Ruth Silverstein:
There's a definite movement from coming from my community, and those outside our community are sort of giving us pushback about the words that we use to describe ourselves, which is frustrating. So yes, "disabled, disability," that is the word, those are the words I use. In fact, when I share my pronouns, which are she/her, I have added "disabled" to that. The reason for that is I see the practice of sharing pronouns. It's about identity, but it's also like a heads up. When you're referring to me, these are the pronouns that you should use. These are the pronouns that are authentic to my experience. I've had even some of my good friends sort of stumble, not really knowing what word you use to describe my physical condition. So I put "disabled", "she/her disabled", in there because I'm letting people know this is the word that I use. This is how I identify. When you refer to me, this is the word that I feel most comfortable with your using.
Jonathan Cook:
As an individual, Karol struggles with the perception that her condition is a burden for people around her, even when those around her demonstrate patience and support. Ironically, others’ expressions of support for disabled people can unintentionally amplify their discomfort. As an author, however, Karol has the opportunity to work through the more difficult aspects of such feelings, to find ways to assert pride in her disabled identity.
Karol Ruth Silverstein:
There are moments where I still feel terribly apologetic for taking longer than average when I'm checking out of the grocery store because I've got dexterity issues in my hands and I'm sorry, the person behind me is, That's okay. You take all the time you want. So, I wanted to portray this this image of disability pride. Fake it till you make it, there are days when I don't feel it in my bones, but there are other days when I not only want to assert my pride around who I am and my disabled identity, but also to put that out there for other disabled people, for disabled children, able-bodied people that maybe only associate disability with something negative or something worth pitying or something that needs to be fixed.
Again it sort of comes to that pride, the concept of pride, instead of just moving through life anonymously and not caring and not making any sort of mark or difference and not loving who I am, and not feeling comfortable in my skin when I when I sort of assert my right to be on the planet, I take back my power that that was taken away from me, that is continually being doubted and diminished.
Jonathan Cook:
When pride is expressed a person’s declaration of their worth, despite widespread presumptions of their inferiority, pride becomes an emotion that is emblematic of the validity of individual experience. Pride contains within it the implicit recognition of the right of individuals to define their own identities. Pride doesn’t ask people what is true. It observes the truth and states it forthrightly.
Karol’s novel is thus a retelling of her own path to pride, but is also a kind of statement of the right of disabled people to feel pride, even when the world tells them that they are flawed and broken, that there’s something wrong with them. Its story is about a person learning to have pride in herself because of her struggle. Writing the book was also an opportunity for Karol to demonstrate pride in her own work, standing up for the integrity of her story’s authenticity even in the face of her editor’s admonishments to weaken the impact of her story to make it emotionally easier for people to read.
Karol Ruth Silverstein:
I was proud that I was able somehow to get that book written, sold and published, and to really work with the editor. My editor, Monica Perez, was terrific. But there was one point that I had to sort of stand up and say, No, I don’t want to make that change where she was toward the end, where everything’s going wrong for the main character. And she admits that with her friend and she’s got this big school assignment bearing down on her and she’s just really freaked out about it. And her pain is beginning to come back after a little bit of a break due to a new medication. And my editor said, you know, do we really need to have her pain come back? Can we just give her a break? I really put my foot down and said, “No. First of all, that’s how chronic illness is.” It doesn’t flare and reside based on your schedule. In fact, when you’re stressed, a lot of times chronic illnesses will be more prominent because your stress level does have an effect. Also, when you’re starting with new medication, it fluctuates. So, we wrote some things into the book so that it wasn’t confusing to the reader. But that was one where I really had to assert my reasoning for wanting to keep that in, and that sort of speaks to some of the pride I feel when I’ve had these really, really painful periods or periods where, you know, my disability really hindered me and what I wanted to do, and I figured out ways to get around it and to reach whatever goal it was.
Jonathan Cook:
Karol’s disagreement with her editor demonstrates that the struggle for pride isn’t a single achievement. Karol didn’t just get through her adolescence and then emerge as a fully integrated adult who had it all figured out. She didn’t just finish the narrative arc of her novel and then no longer have to struggle to put it out into the world. Pride is the manifestation of an ongoing struggle for a sense of entitlement to respect and belonging in the world. In a world as immense and multifaceted as our own, there will always be those who challenge the foundations of any claim to pride.
What’s more, pride can contain the catalyst of its own disintegration. Pride comes with a sense of entitlement to respect, but a sense of entitlement can quickly shift into an arrogant feeling of special superiority. As the popular aphorism puts it, pride goes before the fall. Karol describes pride as having the potential for self-defeat.
Karol Ruth Silverstein:
I have some experience with the kind of pride that is sort of a negative, that is sort of self-defeating. I have a lot of compare-and-despair with other authors. Sometimes, I look at my numbers on Goodreads or Amazon and compare them to a similar author, maybe a similar book that didn’t win the big award, and I feel so slighted, and that’s my pride. My pride wants to have nothing but five-star reviews. Sometimes, I have to lick my wounds when I face the reality that, you know, these other books, like, for example, I’m not going to name names, but there was a book recently that won the same award that my book won. It was actually an author who came up with my debut group, the 2019 debut group, and I was so thrilled for her, and I got her book from the library and I read it and it was really good, and I was really happy for her. I was really happy for her and I went to too Goodreads to leave her a nice review, and I noticed that her book that had just come out last year had over a thousand ratings, and my book, which won the same award that came out in 2019, has just shy of four hundred. You know, my little wounded pride sort of flared up and at the same time, I realize this is ridiculous, but, I also think, “Why? Why doesn’t my book have over a thousand rating? It’s been out for years!” My rational brain wants to tell me all these different possible reasons, like a bigger publisher or a PR push or whatever, but my little wounded pride still smarts a little bit when I when I am faced with this sort of evidence to boost the fact that I’m not as good as others, or my book isn’t as important, or I don’t matter as much as these other people, and I want so desperately to matter. I definitely do struggle with the negative type of pride as well.
Jonathan Cook:
Even as Karol has successfully created an award-winning work of art that articulates a vision of pride for disabled people, she’s aware of another kind of pride, a wounded pride that leads her to compare her success to others’ success in a way that undermines the power of her achievements. Karol wants to matter, but there’s always somebody else who seems to matter more, and though her rational mind knows better than to make that comparison the standard for her success, it’s emotionally difficult to look away.
The competitive version of pride seems to be behind this year’s controversies over Pride Month, the annual celebration of LGBTQ identities. Opposition from conservative groups has been directed at businesses that include Pride Month decorations and products.
Target stores were vandalized and Target employees were threatened by people opposed to Pride Month displays. In reaction, Target managers began moving Pride Month displays to the back of their stores in some parts of the month, and Target announced that it would stop selling some Pride Month products.
Starbucks engaged in a similar withdrawal of Pride Month decorations, and in response thousands of workers went on strike at 150 locations. Starbucks management claimed that there had been no coordinated plan to reduce Pride Month displays, but this claim was contradicted by emails that showed regional managers of Starbucks discussing plans to mute signs of Pride Month at the coffee chain.
Executives at Target and Starbucks had gambled that they could profit with a message that aligned the companies with LGBTQ pride, but the strategy backfired. Ultimately, the problem didn’t come from conservative protesters, but from the superficial nature of the corporations’ support for pride. As soon as their alignment with Pride Month experienced a small challenge, Target and Starbucks panicked, and began to act as if they had done something wrong, as if Pride Month was something to be ashamed of.
Through their actions, Target and Starbucks lost the trust of LGBTQ Americans and their allies, but failed to gain the trust of conservative organizations, who continue to urge their followers to protest the companies until every last trace of corporate acceptance of LGBTQ people is gone. Target and Starbucks executives showed that they never really embraced Pride Month, but had merely sought to profit from it through a performative display of what many call “rainbow capitalism”. Pride that withdraws itself in shame at the first sign of trouble is not pride at all. It’s the opposite of pride.
Why, though, is pride so controversial? Is there something about pride that’s always going to have conflict about it?
If we view pride, as a zero sum game, yes. If we work from a model of achievement that is competitive, then the pride achieved by some is going to be interpreted as putting shame to others. There will be winners and losers in that kind of game. As in the English Empire of Mr. Darcy, in which he almost certainly gained his wealth through some kind of connection to the trade in and labor of slaves, there would always be some shame contained within his pride. A system like that elevates winners by creating losers.
If, however, we could imagine another kind of achievement, one that simultaneously lifts up and creates opportunity for all people, then pride would not inevitably provoke conflict. If the pride of one group of people did not require the denigration of another group of people, then we could feel pride without negative undertones. The trouble is that, in order for such a purely positive form of pride to work, everyone would have to participate in it. As long as we have a society in which some people view achievement as a limited resource, pride is going to provoke debate and controversy and resentment.
There are always going to be people who want to achieve at the expense of others. Exploitation is often a successful strategy. It’s always going to be tempting for people to move themselves forward by shoving other people back.
I am not producing this podcast in order to present a vision of people should feel, but to describe how people feel emotion, whether those feelings are right or wrong. Emotions are subjective, and that means that they belong to individuals first, and are primarily accountable to individuals.
We can’t preach to people and force them to feel the way that we want them to feel. We can, however, pay attention to the way that other people feel, and learn to communicate with them more effectively and more persuasively. We also can learn to be more observant of our own emotions, to notice not just their broad strokes, but also their more subtle patterns.
We can go beyond learning the differences between emotions, to observe the complex dynamics within each emotion. Pride is an excellent example of emotional complexity. That’s why Jane Austen made it the subject of her novel, Pride and Prejudice. It’s also why prejudice was a conceptual partner to pride itself in her work.
Mr. Darcy bragged that to Elizabeth Bennett that he need not worry about his pride, because “where there is a real superiority of mind, pride will always be under good regulation”. The trouble was that Mr. Darcy’s belief in his superiority of mind was a sign that his pride was not under good regulation. In the same way that drinking alcohol makes people less capable of perceiving their drunkenness, pride can deceive itself with its inflated self-estimation.
Pride is all about self-perception. In good measure, pride doesn’t need to suppose a superiority over others. Pride can be simply the feeling of being good enough, being a valid person with a point of view that’s worthy of respect.
Stories of Emotional Granularity aims for that same kind of balanced respect for the point of view of emotion. This podcast doesn’t propose that emotion is superior to objective knowledge, simply that emotion is equally as valid as rationality, although its standards are different.
Next week, this podcast will consider another emotional perspective, this time shifting away from the enduring emotion of pride to the historically specific emotion of climate grief.
Until then, thanks for listening.