Pride is primarily a social emotion. It is about position, confidence, and power. This is why, for the LGBTQIA community, collective pride is adopted as the primary emotion to fuel unity and belonging.

June is Pride Month, celebrated the world over by LGBTQIA individuals as a reclamation of strength. But there’s a much longer history to this emotion, which can be produced in a great variety of contexts.

The circumstances of “pride” change over time, and the way this emotion is felt is directly tied to the social, cultural and political reality of different eras, and different places.

Pride, like the diametrically opposed shame, cannot be locked down.

Tracing the history of this emotion can help us understand how it came to be the empowering concept it is today – even as certain groups try and hijack it for their own means.

In classic Judeo-Christian thinking, pride was originally one of “eight evil thoughts” identified by the Christian monk Evagrius Ponticus (345–399 CE), who characterised it as an overblown sense of self-importance.

Pride was also closely related to another of Ponticus’ “evil thoughts”: vainglory. This referred to an excessive, disordered craving of praise and recognition from others. Both pride and vainglory were........

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