Hubris and Humility

Christian teachings have long warned against the seven deadly sins, but it occurs to me that there is but one sin from which all others are derived.

That sin is hubris. Hubris is the absolute certainty that you are right and is a major force for ill in the world today; probably it always has been all the way back to that Adam and Eve.

We see this in elections with beaten candidates who refuse to concede. We see it in the corporate world where billionaires buy companies and then blow them up seemingly without regard for the people whose lives they are disrupting or perhaps destroying. And we see it in the religious realm when leaders engage in exactly the behavior for which they have been condemning others.

I am rewatching the three part Ken Burn’s documentary ‘Prohibition.’ It is a fascinating look at an ambitious but fatally flawed social experiment. Although the intentions of the temperance movement were sincere and perhaps well-intentioned, it largely became an effort of the middle and upper classes to exert their will over the working class.

The primary target of the movement was not alcohol per se, but rather the saloon where working class people (mostly men) gathered to relax, socialize, and, yes, drink after long days in the factory. Indeed many of those who fought for prohibition were convinced that if enacted the law would not apply to them. Turns out they were pretty much right.

No doubt the saloon enabled some to drink too much and some of those men sank into alcoholism, with devastating effects on their families and society as a whole. But the saloon also served as an important role for the working class to socialize and exchange information about work and family much as the private club did for the uppers.

Those who wanted to put the saloon out of business often resorted to violence and what today we would call terrorism. Carrie Nation (1846-1911), for example traveled from town to town using her signature hatchet to smash the windows and furnishings of many taverns to bits.

Often, the police did nothing to stop her.

From the end of the American Civil War to 1920 the temperance movement built up quite a head of steam, driven by fundamentalist Christianity, xenophobia, and a general tendency for one group of humans to tell another group how they ought to behave. The final nail in the beer barrel was the outbreak of World War I. The ‘drys,’ as they were known, weaponized anger at the German nation and by extension German-Americans and directed it toward the beer breweries, which were predominantly owned by wealthy German-Americans. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified by the states in just 13 months, followed by the Volstead Act in Congress which banned (with some important exceptions) any beverage with more than 1/2 of 1 percent alcohol. The law effectively killed the beer brewing industry, and in 1920 America was officially dry.

Except that it wasn’t.

This act of national hubris was a colossal disaster from nearly day one. Organized crime sprang up to provide the now illegal product to those who wanted it. Doctors wrote millions of prescriptions for ‘medicinal’ alcohol (one of the exceptions). Thousands of secular people joined synagogues and churches for the first time (ceremonial wine was another exception). And in large urban areas like New York where enforcement was nearly impossible the law was simply ignored.

When I read The Great Gatsby in college (set in 1923 or so) I wondered at Jay and Nick going out for lunch and ordering cocktails in a restaurant in Manhattan or picking up a bottle of booze on their way to a hotel. How was possible? Had Mr. Fitzgerald forgotten about Prohibition?

No, New York had.

When Prohibition was repealed 13 years later, not only had organized crime gotten an indelible foothold in American life, but alcohol consumption and indeed alcoholism had increased. One of modern civilization’s largest experiences of one group of people telling another group what they could and could not do with their bodies had been a stunning and abject failure.

But as Alan Taylor said, the only thing humans learn from history is how to make new [and bigger] mistakes.

The Founders of The United States were (rightly, I think) fearful of the tyranny of the majority. To protect against it they built in firewalls to ensure that the minority would always have a disproportion say in national affairs. The U.S. Senate has one such firewall, where each state has the same representation regardless of population. Wyoming has two Senators, just like New York, though its population is minuscule in comparison. The Electoral College is a similar deal, allowing someone to become president while losing the popular vote by millions and millions of votes because most states award all its electoral votes regardless of how slim the margin of victory. This has happened with increasing frequency in recent years as populations have become more concentrated in certain states and in the cities of those states. These protections for the minority are intrinsically anti-democratic but perhaps make sense within reasonable limits.

It made sense for the Founders to build in protections for the minority but, I fear, they failed to account for the hubris that would allow that minority to manipulate those protections to try to hold on to power that properly belongs with the majority in a democracy. They have done this through redrawing congressional districts to disenfranchise voters, enacting voting restrictions that disproportionally impact those who are economically disadvantaged, and supporting the loading of the Supreme Court with demagogues appointed by leaders who were not themselves popularly elected. Using the filibuster to prevent the majority from accomplishing anything whatsoever is another example of out of control hubris.

But the one miscalculation that every person of hubris makes is this: they forget how much we love to see a person of hubris be brought low. Many of those who supported and cheered on that politician, that mogul, that fiery preacher will turn on them as soon as it looks like he or she is going to get what they have coming. I, of course, no such base impulses, but I can certainly understand and even sympathize with those who do.

The opposite of hubris is humility, an understanding that in any argument there is my side and your side and the truth. No matter how sure we are of our position we are called to accept that no one has the exact truth. Humility requires us to ask questions, listen carefully, and examine our own motivations and beliefs deeply. It requires taking a long hard look at our own prejudices and conduct before trying to regulate the conduct of others. For most of us that self-regulation will be more than enough to occupy our hours, leaving us with little capacity to concern ourselves with the behavior of others.

Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge not in spite of God forbidding it but BECAUSE it was forbidden. Ironically, it turns out that they (and not God) were right. That we know the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, is what makes us human. And isn’t this exactly the conundrum? Hubris is what in large part has made the human species successful, however you want to define success. At the same time it contains the seeds of our undoing.

Turns out it is is hubris and not kindness (sorry Ms. Nye) that “sends you out into the day… that “goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.” But we may learn to temper our hubris with wisdom, with humility, and yes, with kindness. Only then can our humanity be fully realized.