There’s a strong argument to be made for adding a unit on “The Role of Hubris in World History” to the Grade 12 program.
Hubris is a personality trait that involves excessive pride, confidence and self-importance. Accordingly, hubristic individuals tend to overestimate things such as their abilities, knowledge, importance and likelihood of success.
Last week, because of the Titan submersible catastrophe, hubris was on full display in the news again.
The Titan catastrophe cost five people their lives, including, ironically enough, Stockton Rush himself, the CEO of Oceangate, which built the Titan submersible. Having ignored the repeated warnings of engineers and submarine experts, he sent it along with himself and four other paying adventurers to their doom 12,500 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.
Historically, hubris is a problematic trait that has led to serious, self-destructive consequences for hubristic individuals. The tragic consequences are rarely limited to the hubristic leaders themselves, but almost inevitably include extensive collateral damage to their followers and others closest to them.
Rush, when challenged by acknowledged submarine experts, had spoken scathingly about the engineers who warned of the potential for Titan to collapse at great depths and ridiculed their insistence on safety regulations, which he viewed as red tape holding back innovation in the submersible industry.
Oscar-winning filmmaker James Cameron, who himself visited the Titanic wreck in the process of making the movie Titanic, which won best picture in 1998, says “arrogance and hubris” led to disaster for both the RMS Titanic and Oceangate’s Titan submersible, which — in theory if not in reality — was inadequately engineered to tour the wreckage of the ocean liner.
Cameron himself helped design a submersible known as the Deepsea Challenger — a 24-foot-long sub that had several cameras. Cameron said his vessel underwent engineered testing to the breaking point and had backup gear for power. “You’re going into one of the most unforgiving places on earth. It’s not like you can call up AAA to come get you,” he told The New York Times.
History, over the centuries, has been littered with the bodies of the victims of hubris. A notable historical example appears in the case of Napoleon, the French military leader who invaded Russia in 1812.
It was Napoleon’s ill-advised invasion of Russia invasion that ended with the inglorious retreat of the emperor’s army after his troops suffered greatly as the harsh Russian winter and Russia’s scorched-earth tactics left them with no food and no shelter.
We might be seeing the same thing again with Vladimir Putin and Ukraine.
Historically, catch-all terms such as madness, lunacy, psychopathy and megalomania fall under the hubris umbrella. It encompasses the conduct and eventual tragic downfall of heads of government as diverse as Adolf Hitler, Idi Amin, Robert Mugabe, Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and now former U.S. president Donald Trump
Trump, by his own admission, has based his life in and out of politics on one simple principle: “I make the rules — and I can break them.”
“Let me tell you, the one that matters is me,” Trump said in a 2017 Fox News interview “I’m the only one that matters.”
The main danger of hubris is that it clouds people’s judgment, causing the hubristic individual to make decisions that are bad for them and for others. Hubris is marked by excessive confidence in the individual’s own judgment and contempt for the advice or criticism of others. So the similarity of the character traits of leaders of countries with some of the poorest COVID-19 responses are likely not coincidental. Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro and Trump presided over some of the worst COVID-19-related death tolls in the world during the first year of the pandemic.
Their response was not identical, but what they shared was their arrogance toward the threat of the virus, which they minimized and even mocked. Each demonstrated disdain toward the scientific community that identified the seriousness of the threat; each was willing to capitalize politically on the humanitarian catastrophe, using the crisis to further divide their respective societies.
Probably no playwright has illustrated the consequences of hubris as effectively as William Shakespeare in his tragedies — especially King Lear, Macbeth and Julius Caesar. All warned of the destruction that unfettered hubris inevitably brings. As Cassius asks Brutus before the assassination: “Now in the names of all the gods at once, upon what meat does this our Caesar feed that he has grown so great?”
Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.
