The Pride Placebo

One year ago today, I sat barefoot in the north end zone of Virginia Tech’s football field, holding my head in my hands, while President Bush reminded us of what we already knew – that yesterday was the worst day of our young lives. After Bush came our school’s president, then our state’s governor, then a few faith leaders. One after another, they groped vainly for words of comfort, and then apologized for finding none. I wondered out loud whether there was anything at all worth saying.

But then came Nikki Giovanni, the professor of poetry, whose rousing 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.

In the year since that heartbreaking afternoon, Giovanni’s fiat has become our University’s unofficial motto – the badge of our suffering, and the refrain of our recovery. But why those words - We are Virginia Tech? The phrase itself is entirely hollow. It’s a simple truism, an identity; 1=1. It seems almost irrational to endow great significance to such a meaningless creed. But of course, as Arnold taught us, we adhere to the creed precisely because it is hollow. Because it means nothing, it can mean anything; strength for those who need strength, solace to those who crave calm, artificial unity, exaggerated pride. In a way, Giovanni trumped every politician and clergyman who spoke before her, at the game which they play professionally. It doesn’t matter that the words mean nothing – United We Stand; Yes We Can – any words will do. What mattered was that we found a banner we could cling to, a new constitution for the Hokie Nation. That hollow creed became the vehicle that delivered our self-reflexive - and ultimately empty - sense of pride, and that pride became the vehicle that delivered us from despair.

In his book about the failures of the human rights movement, James Dawes writes of the devastating effects of so-called “moral injuries” suffered by Vietnam soldiers, as a result of the notion that the war was unjust. “If we cannot tell ourselves a story about our experience and the larger endeavor that feels honorable,” Dawes explains, “we are rendered psychologically vulnerable. Pride – it turns out – can actually help us to recover from traumatic stressors.” There are certain events so atrocious - like pointless war and senseless murder - that they are hard to reconcile with any coherent wordview. If the things we've come to rely on - namely, a calculable, regular and necessary world - no longer hold true, then what are we left with? This is the 'psychological vulnerability' of which Dawes speaks, 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.

We generally think of emotions as reactions. Something good happens, and it causes you to become joyous. There is no cognitive step in between; that is, you do not (typically) pause, reflect and then decide to feel joy. But pride is somehow different. While it may be true that occasionally we do feel immediate, unexamined pride, there is also a sense in which pride is self-referential. That is to say, pride is often the result of internal evaluation, the deliberate operation of a complex self-conscious. I am proud of myself because I have considered my achievements and decided that they merit commendation. 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.

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.