HUBRIS

Copyright © Barnabas D. Johnson

In ancient Greece, “hubris” denoted wanton arrogance, especially of the mighty at the expense of the humble. It was bad enough when three rich young men beat up a helpless old beggar. It was hubris if they laughed while doing so. And it was far worse hubris if they urinated on their unfortunate victim before departing. 

But there are more subtle kinds of hubris, with potentially calamitous global consequences. Here I want to explore what, for lack of a better phrase, I shall call “theological hubris” — wanton religious arrogance … misplaced literalism and fundamentalism in all its forms, whose victim is … a contingent future that might, some day, be unable to identify and curb human theological hubris. While we can yet identify it, let us explore this ugly tendency towards crass stupidity-on-stilts.

Its worst manifestation is when “organized religion” works hand-in-grubby-hand with the Party of Power, each benefiting from Byzantine mentalities that place emperors, kings, bishops, dictators, and Aparats of every corrupt stripe, above the Rule of Law.

I feel privileged to be able to think and write when the dew is fresh upon internet-mediated thought and communication. Because this dew is fresh, I want to remain open to improved tools of thought and communication that are currently evolving or, indeed, have yet to be devised, while also honoring those “tried and true” tools — including value-generating fundamentals — which (who can seriously doubt it?) have carried humanity forward, and can carry us yet further.

Among those values is courageous circumspection, including “institutionalized backward glances” that compose what cyberneticians call “negative feedback” and what common sense tells us is closely linked to intelligent self-correction — how our personal recollections or others’ reliable accounts of past “miss-takes” (roads that should not have been taken) instruct us as we choose today’s road(s) towards tomorrow, or (more precisely) towards alternative tomorrows worth keeping global options open for.

In simple logic, certainty about the value of uncertainty might seem paradoxical, but — based on tried-and-true experience, a valued component of complex logic — we ought to feel comfortable with the realization that our emerging global “good society” must be courageously circumspect about locking future generations out of finding their own answers to questions that we cannot pose as well as they might be able to … and as they have a right to try to do. That is the essence of both conservatism and liberalism, each properly understood, each properly balanced. Hubris comes from lack of balance.

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I submit that the most precious values we pass on to our children are those which “institutionalize” unfinishedness, further exploration, cultural open-endedness bounded only by those restraints that (a) uphold isonomia, equal justice, and (b) foreclose future generations from foreclosing their own future generations from finding answers to questions which, on principle, past generations cannot pose as well as future generations must be accorded the right to try to do. We institutionalize these values by incorporating them into traditions, those “unarticulable major premises” [1] which “go without saying” and are therefore often excluded from constitutional texts even though they constitute the very foundations of Open Society civilization. See Ordered Liberty.

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Foreclosing choices for our children and grandchildren requires consideration of what appears to be our emergent “third-nature” capacity to place ourselves in the shoes of a distant future. Such foreclosing becomes the worst sort of hubris unless it is carefully circumscribed, focused on promoting “responsible” explorations.

 

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Another perspective on hubris appears here

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