Читать книгу Hope’s Daughters - R. Wayne Willis - Страница 63

Humility gets a bad rap in our day. We associate it with low self-esteem, passivity, weakness, Caspar Milquetoast, and humble pie.

Humility and humus come from the same root word. Humus is the good, rich earth beneath us. We buy big bags of it to enrich our gardens. What binds us humans together, the high and the low, as last rites and funerals remind us, is that we all come from humus and to humus we shall return.

When we forget that we are humus, we run the risk of committing what the ancient Greeks considered the greatest sin, the sin of hubris. They defined hubris with stories of individuals who were feeling their oats so much that they forgot they were humus.

Sometimes hubris happens to people who come into political power. If you are the president or a senator, and millions have cast their vote for you and smile at you and applaud you and are deferential toward you, it must be hard not to feel that you, as king of the world, can do as you please. That is hubris.

One of the most poignant moments in the movie Schindler’s List is the one when a drunken Nazi is sitting with Schindler on a balcony. The Nazi, Amon Goeth, is picking off Jews with his high-power rifle, just for sport; gleefully shooting them—they’re just fish in a barrel to him. When Amon comments about the power he has to kill arbitrarily, Schindler corrects him:

Power is when we have every justification to kill, and we don’t . . . . A man steals something, he’s brought in before the Emperor, he throws himself down on the ground. He begs for his life, he knows he’s going to die. And the Emperor pardons him. This worthless man, he lets him go . . . That’s power, Amon. That is power.”54

Hubris uses power to promote self and exploit others. Humility is virtuous because it helps us identify with and stand in solidarity with those who we know, like us, are really humus.