麻豆社

After England鈥檚 latest international football match last night, which the team sadly lost 1-0 to Italy, fans will be hoping that a player who has just been called up might make the difference when they play Germany on Monday. That could be the first time Ivan Toney will play for his country.
Supporters of Toney鈥檚 own club, Brentford, including myself, have long thought he would be an asset to England. He鈥檚 scored five goals in seven Premier League games for the Bees this season. So while I wasn鈥檛 surprised that he was picked, his reaction to it did make me pause for a moment.

The striker told journalists he never doubted he would be called up for England and said he had full confidence in himself. This read as someone being a little too cocksure, but when I listened to him actually saying these words, rather than just looking at them on the page, it came across as justifiable self-belief. He was being realistic about his talent.

In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, being proud is often frowned upon. Pride is considered one of the seven deadly sins, a belief that you are superior to others. The proudest saw themselves as greater than God and turned away from him. Dante thought pride was evidence of love of oneself that had been so perverted that it caused a person to have contempt for others. The Bible鈥檚 Book of Proverbs has plenty to say about pride, especially that it comes before a fall, and that it leads to disgrace. Humility, in contrast, says the Book of Proverbs, leads to wisdom.

But pride, it seems to me, has often had too bad a press and it鈥檚 worth going back to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle for a helpful distinction between pride and hubris. Hubris, he said, was about people ill-treating others in order to gain superiority over them. This, to Aristotle, was a vice, but he saw pride as a virtue. Somebody who is proud, he argued, was someone who thinks himself worthy of great things, because he IS worthy of them. In other words, he has self-knowledge and self-belief.

One of the problems with pride is that the word has so many layers of meaning. It might be easier if we stopped using it negatively and used vanity instead, which expresses an excessive admiration for one鈥檚 own achievements. John Bunyan created Vanity Fair in his Pilgrim鈥檚 Progress, an account of the journey of a Christian, where everything that might tempt and delude someone is sold.

Today, though, when people talk about pride they often mean having self-worth, a sense of someone acknowledging their own abilities and achievements, and self-respect. That is what Ivan Toney was articulating. As Christ said in the Gospels, don鈥檛 hide your light under a bushel.

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