American Hubris

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear --
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.'

“Ozymandias,” Percy Bysshe Shelley

After browsing among the stately ruins of Rome, of Baiæ, of Pompeii, and after glancing down the long marble ranks of battered and nameless imperial heads that stretch down the corridors of the Vatican, one thing strikes me with a force it never had before: the unsubstantial, unlasting character of fame. Men lived long lives, in the olden time, and struggled feverishly through them, toiling like slaves, in oratory, in generalship, or in literature, and then laid them down and died, happy in the possession of an enduring history and a deathless name. Well, twenty little centuries flutter away, and what is left of these things? A crazy inscription on a block of stone, which snuffy antiquaries bother over and tangle up and make nothing out of but a bare name (which they spell wrong) -- no history, no tradition, no poetry -- nothing that can give it even a passing interest.

                                                                “The Buried City of Pompeii,” Mark Twain

Once again we’re in a presidential election, and once again we’re hearing chest-thumping boasts of “American Exceptionalism,” the idea that we Americans are somehow the savior of western civilization, if not the human species. Jefferson spouted it: “we should have such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation: & I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire & self government.” Lincoln professed it: “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just -- a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.” And everyone from the Puritan John Winthrop (“a city upon a hill”), to President-elect John F. Kennedy (“a city upon a hill”) to the failed Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale (“the city on a hill”) to Ronald Reagan (“a shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere” (Reagan was big on embellishment)), has crowed of our vaunted place in the salvation of civilization. 

Hubris is a term and concept I try to teach in my classes. It’s easier in drama classes than in other classes, if only because so many plays, especially tragedies, revolve around a protagonist’s extreme pride and arrogance that lead to their inevitable downfall. It’s such a long-standing lesson of history and literature that I’m always dumbstruck that we have still, after centuries, yet to learn it. And we slog on in the Middle East and have military bases in 140 countries and still wonder why the world doesn’t do what we want it to do. “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” “Nothing that can give it even a passing interest.”