Pride and prejudice

There’s a publication—I need not give them any more publicity by mentioning the name—that has billboards up at the moment bearing this slogan:
Since when did pride in your country become prejudice?
There are lots of definitions of pride: from morning mist to a group of lions, and from personal dignity to the height at which a falcon flies. But the billboard is clearly nodding toward the definition in Austen’s novel, so let’s answer the question on those terms.
In the novel, and particularly in Darcy, Austen draws a distinction between ‘sinful’ pride and ‘dignified’ pride. The former is a sense of arrogance and superiority—the kind of pride in wealth and social status that allows him to dismiss Elizabeth as ‘not handsome enough’ and give him the moral authority to ‘condescend’ to love her. This is pride as prejudice. As the Oxford English Dictionary would have it, ‘an excessively high opinion of one’s own worth or importance, which gives rise to an attitude of superiority over others.’ Not for nothing is it the first of the medieval deadly sins.
By the end of the novel, Darcy has learned some humility: his pride has become ‘dignified’. His pride is grounded in recognising his own innate self-worth and self-respect in a way that is shaped by moral insight, not social superiority. This is pride without prejudice, a recognition that one’s own personal dignity need not denigrate the worth of others. Or, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, ‘self-respect; self-esteem of a legitimate or healthy kind or degree.’
At heart, it’s a distinction between sinful, comparative pride—rooted in a sense of superiority over others—and dignified, inward pride, grounded in one’s moral character.
Since a ‘country’ is, by definition, built on borders—on who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’, on who counts as ‘citizen’ and who as ‘foreigner’—’pride in one’s country’ almost always carries an undertone of superiority. It is a prejudice: a pre-judgement that one’s own country is better than others. Compare the tone of most national pride rallies with most gay pride events—one is about exclusion, the other inclusion. One is about prejudice, the other personal dignity.
So, the answer to the exam question is that pride has been interwoven with prejudice for as long as the word has been around. The earliest dated example in the OED is from 1200 CE, so we can confidently answer the question: ‘longer than you think.’
The central message of Austen’s novel is that pride and prejudice are interwoven in ways that don’t serve people well. It takes a special kind of irony to reference Pride and Prejudice while proving its thesis in real time. But then, manufacturers of dog whistles tend to favour volume over clarity… as, perhaps, does the advertised publication.
The image at the top was created with GPT-4o.
This post was filed under: Miscellaneous, Oxford English Dictionary.