The Age of Arrogance
Looking for Mr. Humility

by Douglas Milburn, Editor in Chief

Seduced anew by the old quest for imperial glory, they seek dominion. Will they win? Will they lose? A look at history indicates heavy odds on losing. But who remembers what one of history’s few winners did when he realized he had no new worlds to conquer: he wept.

Our guys—clearly not an Alexander among them—are underway, and probably there’s not much we can say or do to stop their long, bloody march to destruction. As usual with their power-centered kind, thinking to bring light, they bring darkness. Promising hope, they spawn despair. Where once life thrived, they sow death: The Age of Arrogance.

For the rest of us, like Brecht’s Mother Courage in her endless, bitter fight to survive the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), we are left to our own faulty devices.

Of those, one of the most powerful is the fact that, since we are at least at times apart from the central fury of the fray, we can pause, look, and think—behavioral luxuries that our leaders, blinded by hubris, long ago gave up.

Pausing, looking, thinking, I begin to wonder: Where is evidence for a counterbalance to such error and terror as we see burgeoning in the Massively Arrogant? Where, in other words, in this Age of Arrogance are signs of humility?

Across history we can find three areas of culture where humility has traditionally thrived: nurturing, religion, and art.

Nurturing
Few mothers emerge unhumbled from a life of child-rearing. Their experience of humility, though generally unheeded, unrecognized, unpraised, is one of the hidden, constant foundations of human survival. In spite of all the holocausts that rage and come and go around them, the nurturers keep on nurturing—to the benefit of those nurtured (us) and of course to themselves.

Religion
Sometimes the products of this uninterrupted nurturing find it in themselves to see through the surface glitter of ambition and greed. They find that by thinking and acting in gentle ways contrary to the social norm they gain momentary access to sight and insight beyond the ordinary. Now and then their reports on their extraordinary experiences congeal into a body of knowledge called a religion. Whatever happens later (and it is universally not a pretty development), religions at the moment of origin are profoundly humble.

Art
So too with art. Musicians, painters, sculptors, poets, dramatists, dancers—all who proceed with sufficient dedication to get beyond mere clever, profit-driven dabbling are themselves absolutely humbled. For them there is no triumph, no exultation: only gratitude mute before mystery.

Of those three activities now, only the oldest—nurturing—continues untainted. Trying to decide who—the religionists or the artists—are the bigger troublemakers these days is an exercise in both metaphysical and esthetic frustration.

Science?
Where then to look for the hope that humility offers? Oddly, in the most unlikely of places: science.

For the longest time—centuries, actually, science has been in the forefront of the march of human arrogance (if in the supposedly egalitarian world culture there is a class of Untouchables, it is the Nobel Prize winners). Science could do no wrong as it sorted out the wonders of nature for the benefit of all.

Lately, alas, problems—nuclear, biological, environmental—have arisen. And those problems no doubt are have some humbling effect on the guys and gals in the lab coats. Which is all to the good.

But there is another area of science where the seed of doubt—the one that eventually flowers into full-blown, hair-shirt humility—has already germinated, and that is in theoretical physics and cosmology.

Faced with a huge and growing variance between what their measurements and observations of nature (both micro and macro) show, and what the "laws" of science indicate they should show, physicists and cosmologists (including not a few Nobelists) speak more and more in terms of radical—heretical! humbling!—reformulations of, well, everything we thought we knew. Jab this little particle right here and that little particle way over there (like, a billion light years away) responds INSTANTLY? Oops. That can’t be. The expansion of our Big Bang universe is ACCELERATING? Uh-oh. No way.

The measurements don’t lie. And the measurers—like so many others before (Copernicus, Galileo, Einstein)—are brought to their knees. Not, I hasten to add, in prayer, but in simple, pure, mute humility. "Pure" in the sense that it is an attitude that seeks not to repeat the old mistake of anthropomorphizing the mystery but tries only to report: This, right now, is where we are and what we are.

As in the past, that hard-won seed is the one from which a new, healthy culture can again arise out of the devastation of the power-hungry war-lovers.