consider, it‘s all just hubris
when we hear the word 'hubris' we like to think of icarus, flying too close to the sun. daring. underestimating the sun‘s power. overestimating his own skills, prowess, intelligence, what have you. we like to think of the people at babel, building a tower to reach god. to become bigger than god. become like god. icarus falling from the sky, plummeting to his demise. the people at babel angering god in their efforts, suddenly unable to communicate, the building of the tower abandoned. it‘s hubris, we chide, to think oneself so great, so capable, so deserving of recognition, knowledge, possession, or whatever it is they have tried to do. i am The Greatest and therefore i Take and Claim and Know and Deserve and Possess and and and and and.
but is that really what this is?
i am taking a seminar where we talk about language as a literary theme and in connection with umberto eco‘s the name of the rose, we read jorge luis borges' the unicorn and a text by physiologus about unicorns. and in discussing those texts, the unicorn and the notions of real/fake, true/false, i began to think about what the unicorn stands for. what it means.
borges and eco mention the connection to the rhinoceros, that tales, stories, recountings of rhinos is what eventually lead us to the white horse with the long narwhal-like horn on its forehead. i recall a drawing in a medieval english text of a mythical dragon-like creature. long neck, spotted body, short ears and horns, legs half the length of the body. the depiction in the text was of a creature crawling on the ground looking vicious. but it‘s a giraffe. that dragon creature is what you get when someone who had never seen a giraffe before is told of its features or reads of them and tried to depict them. think about it. animals like penguins or the platypus are ridiculous to explain. and if someone has never heard of or seen either, it becomes near impossible to explain. so you approximate, adapt to what your interlocutor could possibly understand. you find common ground. and immediately a penguin is only barely a penguin anymore. and by the time the description ends up on an artist‘s desk, it‘s a whole other thing already. i can‘t even begin to imagine what a platypus would look like filtered through the same process that made a giraffe look like a mythical dragon creature.
but the point here is, humans have a tendency to look for the mythical, the fantastical, the beyond belief. (and if you think about it, honestly, the platypus should be a mythical creature. that thing can‘t be a normal animal. it has bioluminescence for christ‘s sake.) humans look for the fantastic in the mundane, the mythical in the every day.
that is why the loch ness monster works. that is why we have stories of gigantic sea serpents, that is why vampires, werewolves, ghouls and zombies crop up in our tales. it‘s why we talk about the gods of the ancient civilisations even today. why comic books about superpowered humans or beings from outerspace still sell and have done so since the 40s.
much of our oceans are still unexplored. outerspace is an infinity of possibilities and unchartered 'waters'. we send probes down below, satellites up and away. space shuttles and deep sea submarines.
if i was an alien observing earth, i‘d think we‘re looking for something. searching, almost desperately. and, in a way, i think alien-me would be right. but it‘s not something. it‘s not a graspable object. when we dig up fossils it‘s not the fossil we were looking for, truly. when we send a probe down into the marianna‘s trench to gather data and take samples, the samples and the data prints isn‘t what we‘re looking for. the photographs our satellites take, the information our mars rovers collect, they’re good and fine but it‘s not what we‘ve sent them out there for. i mean it is, but it also isn‘t.
we‘re searching. desperately. we send out things and people to look, to gather, to collect, to bring back, to study. and that‘s the point. we want to learn. we want to understand. we are looking, yes. but not for fossils or the ruins of former glorious empires. we‘re looking for understanding. for knowledge. for meaning.
which brings me back to hubris. because that‘s what it is. but it‘s not what we think it is. i don‘t think there‘s any grandstanding behind it. there‘s no I Deserve To Know. there is no I Am The Best And Therefore. no I Claim. I Take. I Possess. I. I. I. Me. Me. Me.
no. that‘s not it, not really.
there‘s a desperation there. a need, yes, but not a deserve. it‘s a plea. a begging. hubris isn‘t I Deserve, it‘s God I Wish. it‘s please please let me understand, give it meaning, give it sense.
we want to learn. to understand, to make sense of things. we are desperately, desperately looking for meaning.
so when our village sits near a deep dark forest we fear to explore and our parents tell us strange stories about, when people who wander off never come back, when sheep vanish and we hear howls in the dark, echoing from afar, we imagine men who turn to beasts when the moon shines at its brightest in the pitch black sky.
when we look up at the night sky, freckled with billions upon billions of stars, we‘re in awe. when we learn what they are, we begin to hope. that, somewhere out there, there are more of us. others of us. life. somewhere among the stars. and as soon as we were able to, we started sending things out there. to look where we can‘t go. we create robots, rovers, flying machines, equipped with data gathering equipment, little cameras and mechanical limbs to gather samples. we create them, build them, name them curiosity, perseverance, opportunity, spirit, and we send them out in our stead, to go and look and learn and help us understand, to make sense of things, to find meaning in a vast and infinite universe.
it drives me crazy. makes me turn into the jenny slate meme where she‘s talking about unfollowing nasa because she‘d just scream. i am torn in a constant ping-pong of seeing the news and thinking, god, humanity is truly beyond saving, we‘re the actual worst, there is no hope. and thinking about things like this right here and feeling this hope for humanity. i watch the martian and i think god, we could be so good. we have so much potential. look what we could achieve, what good we could do for each other, for the world. and it‘s just back and forth like this. constantly.
but i think, even at its most destructive, maybe especially then, humanity is still just looking for meaning, essentially. it‘s the basis of all our stories, of all that perpetually pops up in the things we create and consume.
godzilla exists because of a human attempt to understand something, and failing.
king kong exists because in our travels across the world‘s oceans, we kept coming across uncharted waters, possibly desolate islands, places no one had ever been before. who‘s to say there doesn‘t exist a ginormous monkey on one of them.
why couldn‘t there be a planet krypton on the brink of destruction and a loving family sends their child away to safety, crashlanding on earth, taken in by another loving family. why shouldn‘t that child become earth‘s protector.
there is electricity coming from the sky, lighting trees on fire, a loud rumbling following. rain. why shouldn‘t there be a god controlling that electricity.
why shouldn‘t our known existence have been created by an omniscient, omnipresent being. why shouldn‘t there be life after death. why whouldn‘t there be a cyclical structure to life, or reincarnation. why shouldn‘t a ferryman take your soul across the river in exchange for a coin.
when icarus flew too close to the sun, he didn‘t think he was The Best at flying or that he alone Deserved To Do This, to try and go as far as possible, to reach the sun. icarus escaped just as his father, and they flew. they flew. icarus flew and he wanted to know, wanted to see, desperately, wanted to understand what it meant to fly, to go up and see, because now, for once, he could. the sky, always reserved to birds of flight alone, unreachable for any human to explore, impossible to explore really. and suddenly, the possibility for understanding, for learning, for making sense of the sky and what it means to fly, free as a bird.
when the people at babel built that tower, i don‘t believe they were intending to do so to become bigger than god. no. they built that tower because they wanted to understand, wanted to learn, wanted to make sense of god. see god. learn god. find meaning in god. and i wonder, now, if by giving them language in it‘s myriad ways, that this isn‘t what god gave them. god is all and god is everything. incapable of being expressed, gathered into words, unrepresentable and unknowable, in a way. and yet as we are, as humans, we put everything into words. we explain giraffes to people who had never seen or heard of them, and yes maybe they‘ll end up drawing a dragon instead, but we made note of them, tried our best to explain a giraffe in words another might understand. we use language to make meaning, put things into words to create mental images. we use a string of words that, literally, mean one thing to express quite another. so who‘s to say that by giving the people at babel all languages, god did not, in some way, grant them their wish. one language is never capable of putting god into words. but maybe, possibly, all of them together, in their differences and varieties, may come closer to help humanity make sense of god. god is all and god is everything. so wouldn‘t you need all and everything that language can express to make sense of god?
we search for meaning. we always have. it‘s the most inherently human thing there is. and out of that search, out of that desperate need to understand, to make sense of things, to find—or if we can‘t, to create—meaning, out of that, come stories.
and that is hubris. and it‘s the most human thing of all.
