Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
This is a scene I see almost everyday at the campus. I can’t read it and likely never will due to laziness in trying to learn how to read Chinese characters. This colorful chalkboard sits in an outdoor hallway protected from rain for the most part and it has looked the same as far as I can tell, for five years now. Possibly some of the characters have changed, but certainly the boat, the fish, the flowers and the titles seem to be the same as when I first say this bulletin board in August, 2006. I took this photo this morning, likely inspired by the book I have been reading on the Tang Dynasty, the golden age of China. This scene evokes some of that history, a sense of golden times, of pride.
As I travelled through various Asian countries this winter, I encountered a lot of “proud” people and it gave me a good feeling. Their pride was of the moment, not of a past – for the most part. Yet, that pride soon shifted to something a bit uncomfortable. The pride somehow became something that “set apart” rather than “joining together.” It made me rethink my own sense of “pride.” And needless to say, that wasn’t something I wanted to peer at in depth.
Pride is narcissistic on an individual level which often leads to a level of hubris that effectively becomes a barricade between self and others. On a collective level, it becomes ethnocentrism, or hyper-ethnocentrism. I am seeing too much hyper-ethnocentrism in the world and seeing how it is causing us more problems that building a healthy sense of community. In my own country which is on the edge of heading into an election, the darkness of hyper-ethnocentrism is visible to anyone who can stand outside the dynamics. As I read various news articles and the public comments, I wonder at the “heat” and the “hate” that comes out at a deafening volume. Where will it all end?
In an individual, it ends in a fall.
