Hubris

Originally delivered as Radio Commentary: Michigan Radio Recording on February 10, 1998

I'm looking for a word.
It's on the tip of my tongue; maybe if I talk out loud it will come to me.

What is the word for that peculiar kind of blindness that affects powerful people?

Like, for example, the ways in which powerful armies march out to meet what they think is a weaker adversary, only to learn through catastrophe that their arrogance blinded them to the enemy's superior resources.

I know there must be a good word for this condition; a word with the nuance of power and arrogance and shortsightedness.

That good old Greek word, hubris, fits pretty well; but not quite. My dictionary defines the word with nice irony by quoting McGeorge Bundy: "There is no safety in unlimited technological hubris." Hubris is defined as "excessive pride, wanton violence."

I always associate "hubris" with the Greek tragic heroes who met their dooms by thinking they could determine their fates. It surprises me that neither of my two really good dictionaries mentions tragedy in their definitions.

But the word I'm looking for not only communicates the tragic consequences for the person who is blinded by power, but also and maybe even more for the people who bear the consequences of their blindness. For example, let's look at ourselves for a minute -- what do we call it when we ignore the well-documented studies that found that over a million people in Iraq died as a direct result of the economic sanctions imposed since the end of the Gulf War. Over a million people -- more than 600,000 of whom were children -- dead through starvation and disease that could have been prevented.

What word describes our blindness to this tragedy?

Or another example: in the final days of the Persian Gulf war, US warplanes bombed and strafed a 60-mile convoy of civilians and Iraqi soldiers who were in full retreat, killing tens of thousands in a clear violation of the 1949 Geneva Convention, which outlaws the killing of soldiers who are out of combat. Isn't there a word for the way in which we notice Saddam Hussein's human rights abuses, but are blind to our own?

The Pentagon has a nice term for what happens when mothers and babies are blown to bits by our bombs -- they call it "collateral damage." But what is the word for the way we prefer euphemisms over truth?

What is the word for our failure to take seriously the fact that the people of Iraq have over a million good reasons to hate us? What is the word for our inability to understand that the more we punish them, the more they will hate us, and someday they will find a way to get revenge?

What is the word for our failure to see that maybe if we treated the people of Iraq like human beings; maybe if we applied our unequalled power to the task of feeding their children, then maybe they might not hate us so much, and we could stop killing them.

What is the word? It's a word that says guilt, and shame, and blood in the dirt. It's a word full of weeping and hunger and sleepless nights.

It still isn't coming to me; I guess for lack of a better word, I'll just call it "sin."



The Rev. Matthew Lawrence
Chaplain, Canterbury House
Director, Institute for Public Theology