Can you say hubris?

Yeah for Us!

“The insufferable arrogance of human beings to think that Nature was made solely for their benefit, as if it was conceivable that the sun had been set afire merely to ripen men’s apples and head their cabbages.”

                                  Cyrano de Bergerac

“The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about the certainty of our centrality in the cosmos.”

                                  Stephen Jay Gould

         Sometimes all you can do is laugh at us feeble humans.  We appear to be in a time when the very coarsest people are our role models.  Think Donald Trump; think Lady Gaga and Rush Limbaugh.  Our political leaders have fallen prey to astounding arrogance and folly. In one week we’ve had the head of the International Monetary Fund molesting a hotel employee, the former governor of California owning up to fathering a child by one of his staff, and a clergyman claiming he knows when the world will end.  One county in Alabama fired all five of its duly elected County Commissioners for corruption and outright theft.  It is pretty pathetic, y’all.  At a time when we desperately need cool headed leaders and visionaries, what we have created is a system where only fools will put themselves out to lead.  Any one with sense would run the other way as fast as possible. 

         I know I’ve been harping all week on the notion that any of us knows what is best for all of us and decrying our tendency to measure everyone with our personal yardstick, and I apologize for going on and on.  But hubris is overtaking the world.  I hold the Bible partially responsible for this numb-skulled craziness---that business about being created in God’s image, a little less than the angels, has gone to our heads.  It has been interpreted to mean, we are the center of the universe and we are so fabulous we can do anything we want and there will be no consequences.  I have to believe this says something about our collective level of maturity.  Adolescent, at best.

        

         According to Abraham Maslow, the hallmark of the actualized person is the very lack of hubris.  At the top of his hierarchy of human needs is a person who is simple, straightforward, benevolent, and not egotistical; who accepts himself, others and human nature.   The self-actualized person is strongly ethical, moral and unprejudiced.  Boy, do we ever need that person to step up and give us some grounding and direction.  Let us pray for such a leader.

                                  In the spirit,

                                  Jane