Humility and Hubris
Life is a balancing act is it not, Dear Reader. And, to me, one of those seesaw balances is that between too much hubris and too little humility. We need to encourage confidence in people. Teachers need to praise children, boost them so that they will safely try new things. It has always seemed to me strange that a child’s natural curiosity is accompanied by an equally natural conservatism. A toddler will sit in a puddle and eat worms but also wants the norm of a safe routine. Hmm, Friends, that should not be a surprise!
I came across the word coddiwomple the other day. (Don’t believe me? Look it up!) Apparently it means ‘to travel purposefully towards an unknown destination’. I have never heard it used in 73 years and I never expect to hear it in conversation anywhere soon. Indeed spell check has red-lined it here as I type. I wouldn’t say that it is a beautiful word but I think, Dear Friends, I can get away with saying that it is quaint. And I do think that it is a word that conveys a meaning of the utmost importance to all of us, Dear Reader. It would seem that all of us who live properly are travelling purposefully towards an unknown destination. That is the beauty of life is it not? It would be pretty boring if we were to know what was around the next corner all of the time. It is when the ‘certainties’ come to too much fruition that we tend towards hubris. An uncertain coddiwomple is likely to bring us up short and give us an healthy dose of humility, don’t you think?
What is the balance? When does confidence cease to become healthy and become overconfidence with all of the pitfalls that that state of being brings to us? At what point does pride cometh before the fall? The more that I trundle through life the more I believe that nobody leads us astray but ourselves. We become, sometimes, the common denominator in all of our problems and often we are also the solution. Of course, that statement is a massive and unfair generalisation because there are millions of people in the world who begin life behind the 8 ball that is called poverty, the terror that is called war and the corruption that is despotic power. There are millions of people struggling to make ends meet and when they look like they can just about make it, some ‘parcel of rogues in a nation’ comes along and moves the ends. Wicked selfishness rears its ugly head and stymies success, it heads off progress at the pass . Witness again the tragedy of children mining in the PRC, for our lithium for our batteries. Shameful. OK, Dear Reader, on second thoughts I will moderate the common denominator statement. Some of us are the common denominator in our problems.
Who of us has not been disturbed by the direction of the world since January 20th, 2025, ‘a date which will live in infamy’ as FDR said of the Pearl Harbour attack on December 7th, 1941? If we thought we would have democracy forever and peace in our time, we have learned how quickly things can change. He who wrote “The End of History”* those few decades ago must surely now realise that he flew too close to the sun. History continues to rhyme its pattern as it always does. Our trick now, it would seem, is not to humiliate ourselves by flying too close to the ground so that eventually we bury our heads in the sand, blocking our ears, our eyes and opinions to the troubles of the world. Our flight plan needs to find the middle path. We need to exercise our right to voice our opinions however controversial. We need to continue to greet with a smile and a word. We need to help those who have tripped on the path. We need to understand that despair is not an option. We need to outwit the malicious, the devious and the cunning with our own wiles and wherewithals in the belief that goodness will always triumph if it is forceful and determined. We should smile every morning when we greet a new day but be aware that that sun may not shine on an Ukrainian soldier, a Gazan child, a Congolese mineworker, a starving family in a refugee camp. We see the march of folly being led by the United States at this moment and recognise every day the impact that it is having around the world. We need to read, read, read so that we are well informed and have at our fingertips irrefutable facts to rebuff the lies. We, friends, need to read more than ever with a critical eye, have a mind that sifts through the fake and the fatuous, the foolish and the deceitful. We cannot step back from our responsibility as citizens of a free country; too long we have been complacent; too often we have shrugged our shoulders; too frequently we have turned away from confronting obvious wickedness. Let us set aside our ‘whatevers’, Dear Reader, ‘screw our courage to the sticking post” and call out the evil that men do. I, in my weakness, have a tendency to almost stand up and be almost counted!? To me a single clap is the equivalent of a standing ovation. I don’t think I have the courage to stand on the frontline of principle and rail against those who would usurp our sovereignty and democratic rights. But I am comforted about much that is coming out of the town halls in the US; in the committees at the seats of power. I hold out hope that the US ship of state will be righted, that it will repair itself, that checks and balances will bring it back on course. But, Friends, it needs a leader who is a Democrat and I have yet to see one. Better yet it needs a horde of trumpian republicans to jump ship and call out stupidity and vindictiveness in their ‘leader’.
Since writing these few paragraphs, Dear Reader, I have reread “The Icarus Syndrome: A history of American Hubris” by Peter Beinart. It was written post 9-11 and pre-Trump but is nevertheless relevant at this point in history. It is a part of the human condition to get ahead of ourselves occasionally. Good things happen to us, we achieve what we set out to achieve. We lie on our bed of success, with our hands behind our head and believe that the impossible is possible. We are the unsinkable Titanic, the confidence of the age. Reading in this book about so many great American thinkers, Schlesinger, Keenan, Niebhr, one realises once more that the United States is a wonderful country because it allows free thinking idealism, it provides institutions and environments which allow for innovation and development. As soon as it puts barriers in the way of such things then it opens chasms which the rest of the world are likely to fill and not always in a good way. At the moment it seems the current leadership, in my opinion, is cutting off its nose to spite its face, there is almost an uniqueness to its bleakness. There is indeed a climate change in the United States; it is becoming a drought threatened, arid wasteland of intellectual thought, a desert where no kindness blooms. There are oases appearing here and there. Musical artists are raining on presidential puerile petulance. Judges are conjuring up clouds over dictatorial agendas. It would be nice to see a Democratic monsoon on the horizon but nothing as yet except for another ancient Methuselah in the shape of Bernie Sanders. If a country withdraws from a globalised world, isolates itself from the rest of humanity, it succeeds in becoming an hermit and a recluse. Much wisdom has come from a hermit’s cave but also unlivable nonsense. Being out of the mainstream is the old guy sat at the end of the bar, pontificating with bellicosity and Neanderthal nostalgia for a sunny upland that never really was. Hubris for the past is humility for the future.
It seems to me that we in the western world are in the power of ‘someone who has escaped the tyranny of abstract thought’**. There is a market for simplicity, Friends, but government is nuanced and complicated and doesn’t do well when it comes up with simple solutions.
Rereading this, I seem to have gone off on a bit of a rant. Apologies, Friends, but I shall leave it as it is. John Witherspoon once said, “I can never admit that the happiness of one depends on the misery of another.” It seems that there are people in government who would act to the contrary. Abraham Lincoln, who bestrided the presidency with class, gravitas and wisdom, said that ‘the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate for the stormy present.” Le Carre in one of his many excellent novels had a character who ‘wished to become conspicuous for his humility”. I believe, Dear Reader, that there is a middle road which can serve us well.
*Francis Fukuyama
**Simon Barnes
Thanks for reading.
