The Age of Hubris

We are living in the Age of Hubris.
If you are reading this, odds are you have been born and raised in a Western democracy, like me.
You have never known war, famine, plague.
You have only known peace, abundance, health.
Collectively, this makes our society as a whole overconfident, causes us to have pride, to take the foundations of our society for granted. There is a danger here.
The Greeks had a term for this arrogance: ‘Hubris’, and it is one of the driving themes of Ancient Greek literature. Those whose opinions of themselves or their powers deviated from the natural order of things, were quickly corrected, typically in a fitting fashion. For instance Icarus wanted to fly, flew too close to the sun, his wings melted, and he fell to his death.
The flip side of the coin, Icarus falling to his death in the sea, is known as ‘Nemesis’ the natural correction to hubris.
The height of hubris in our society is unmatched, as technology has disconnected us from the ancient nature of things. Our grandparents had to make their food. They had to heat the house. If they did their chores, and were good, they could charge up the radio batteries on the windmill and listen to the hockey game. All these things are nothing to us. Food is cheap. Natural gas is cheap, it comes into the house magically. There are infinite distractions.
We look around, we have never had it better, thanks to technology, we can work less and earn more than ever before, we have never been healthier, never been fatter, never been happier.
Why?
It must be because we are great. Yes we are very very smart. We are above the things our ancestors did, drilling oil wells, working on the farm, supporting ourselves, our families, our communities.
We don’t need the rule of law — we know better than centuries of measured and weighed opinions, grinding out the shape of justice slowly and with much effort. We have social justice, which means whatever we want, because we are great.
We don’t need that pipeline — if we just wanted to switch to renewables tomorrow, we could, just like that.
We don’t need that job, it’s beneath us and the government will take care of us.
Our government is running a deficit, but it doesn’t need to cut spending, they will just borrow from the future, because the future isn’t here but today is, and there’s an election today.
We couldn’t possibly have it so good because of the sacrifices of our ancestors, the conquest of a continent (that’s a whole other post), incredibly painstaking scientific work, the hard work of many generations, lessons learned over centuries from war, famine, and plague.
No, it must be us.
In fact, let’s tear down the statues we have erected to mark the great people of the past, because they are offensive because we said so and we are great. Let’s not give a thought to how we will be remembered, that’s a given, we are the greatest generation that ever lived, the most tolerant, the most progressive, all because of us.
The nemesis is within us lurking. In fact it is beginning to manifest, if you look closely. It is a world-historical nemesis. It may come slowly or it may come quick, it may come tomorrow or it may come 20 years from now, but it will come.
(Painting: Pieter Bruegel the elder Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium)
