The Privilege of Hubris

A medieval miniature of Alexander the Great being lowered into the sea in a bathysphere, from Le Livre et le vraye hystoire du bon roy Alixandre, ca. 1420, f. 77v (Wikimedia). The bathysphere is curiously shaped like Reza Baluchi’s “hamster wheel.”

Mythological hubris and its attendant risks and rewards are increasingly beyond the common man’s reach even as the wealthy capitalize on daring, foolhardy adventure. Hubris is defined as excessive pride or confidence. What I call mythological hubris, or classical hubris, is the same, but it incorporates the desire to overcome a sphere that is by nature off limits to human beings. Today in the United States a number of the ultra-wealthy seem to see no natural limits, and without government controls, like the tragic heroes of yore, they have only the natural consequences of their actions to face. This is not so for the average person.

Reza Baluchi and one of his water craft by Jim Rassol from the Florida Sun Sentinel.

Take the example of Reza Baluchi, the extreme athlete and eccentric inventor who seems intent on imperishable fame whether or not it amounts to his death. In August, the US Coast Guard stopped Baluchi from a trans-Atlantic crossing in what authorities have described as a “hamster wheel” held afloat by buoys in a metal frame. The Coast Guard officers saw a man in danger, but the power they wielded to save him was the bureaucratic power of the modern state: Baluchi’s craft was not registered.

The Fall of Icarus, alternate title: Daedalus Icaro alta nimis ambienti orbatur. Etching appeared in: The Metamorphoses of Ovid, plate 75, second edition illustrated by Antonio Tempesta, published 1606.

It’s hard to imagine such a thing happening to Daedalus, who strapped on wings of his own invention and conquered the sky. Of course there was no modern bureaucratic state, no FAA to report him to, as airline pilots reported kindred-spirit Larry Walters, the man who in 1982 rose to 16,000 feet in a lawn chair attached to a multitude of weather balloons. Like Walters, who later took his life, Baluchi seems like a troubled man. Faced with being stopped from running 4,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean to London, England, Baluchi threatened to harm himself with a knife and to blow himself up with wires he claimed were attached to a bomb. It was Baluchi’s fifth attempt to make a major ocean crossing in a similar, self-made craft. In 2016 the Coast Guard shot and scuttled his vessel, sending it to the bottom of the ocean. Baluchi’s friend said that Baluchi had invested more than $120,000 into the craft.

Larry Walters in his lawn chair from the Smithsonian Magazine.

Perhaps if Baluchi had the money and clout to charge a small group of wealthy passengers $250,000 a spot to join him on his perilous mission, like the doomed entrepreneur Stockton Rush, he would have been allowed to run as far as his legs could take him. The cost of legally facing life-threatening danger that allows people to travel to spaces unfit for our survival has become the rich man’s game. Rush’s cofounder Guillermo Söhnlein recently announced his desire to build a colony in the hellish atmosphere of the planet Venus. Elon Musk has garnered attention with his plans to reach the planet Mars. These modern-day Nimrods will commission others to die building their Towers of Babel and chances are, they will find a way around zoning restrictions.

The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1563, from Wikipedia. Extra-biblical traditions name Nimrod as the ruler who commissions the Tower of Babel.

Our modern bureaucracy may stand in the way of ordinary mortals seeking fame or death, but it isn’t against using mythological wonder to inspire us to support expensive ventures with our tax dollars. NASA has long used the cache of myth to inspire Americans, by naming missions after Greek gods and heroes. The Artemis Program to return Americans to the moon is only the latest example of this. NASA’s advertising department created colorful cell phone and desktop backgrounds for Artemis in an attempt to excite the public imagination. The Smithsonion’s Air and Space Museum isn’t above celebrating Walters’s illegal flight by displaying his lawn chair. Give the government some time and it might look back more charitably on Baluchi’s hamster wheel.

Larry Walters's lawn chair, from the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.

We all presumably have the mythological wonder to appreciate the dreams that inspire men like Baluchi and Walters. It is not hard for me to understand what drove Baluchi to brave the laws of man and nature to make five different attempts at crossing the ocean in a self-built, self-propelled bubble-wheel. It isn’t hard for me to understand Walters, who reportedly said “It was something I had to do. I had this dream for twenty years, and if I hadn't done it, I think I would have ended up in the funny farm.” Nothing separates these intrepid, slightly mad adventurers from the rest of us, but the will to carry out their dreams, no matter the cost. And nothing separates them from the men who take those risks without fear of government interference, but a few cool billions.

Biblical Numerology for the win!

Mel Brooks as Moses with these fifteen... TEN commandments. History of the World, Part 1, 1981

“How much do you pay for oil a month?”

“Not sure.”

“What do you mean you’re not sure?”

“It’s on a spreadsheet. I can tell you later.”

“How many days till your vacation?”

“Don’t know.”

“How can you not know that?”

“Someone will tell me the day before.”

“How many miles on the car, sir?”

“Let me check.”

“Just an estimate.”

“A million?”

I’ve never been good with numbers. It is difficult for me to remember them or to report them correctly without looking directly at them (and it took me a lot of years to even learn to do that right.) I would only know that this is notably strange by the looks on people’s faces who know better when I accidentally inflate numbers, for instance, when I say twelve thousand when I mean twelve hundred.

Luckily, the Bible has an answer: symbolic numerology!

The writers of the Bible had specific numbers they returned to again and again to communicate particular ideas and this immediately appeals to me because numbers to me are abstract notions attached to nothing. The biblical numbers are also abstract, but they are attached to concepts I can appreciate, envision and understand.

Forty days and forty nights = a good long time.

Twelve brothers = impressive family

One thousand = happily ever after/they are totally screwed

Again, these numbers are thought to be approximate. Moses meets a certain number of women drawing water from a well. It’s more than two. It’s more than three. It’s not quite so many as twelve. Seven is a good round estimate. Who cares if it’s six or eight? Jacob’s descendants heading to meet Joseph number seventy, but again, it’s approximately seventy. It’s just an impressive group. What, are you planning seats at a wedding reception?

So the next time I get asked a question that requires a number, I just have to choose one of a set of numbers I’ve memorized and throw it out with confidence. It will be very meaningful for the person who wants to hear a number and I’ll have responded with basically how I feel about the approximate number.

“How many students are at your school?”

“A thousand.”

“How many weeks until break is over?”

“Seven.”

“How many days do you get for Christmas this year?”

“Twelve.”

“You guys are lucky!”

“Sure are!”

Black Lives Matter and Hardened Hearts

Mural painting in tomb of Ramose, Necropolis of Thebes, Egypt.

I am reading Robert Alter's translation of Exodus and see some powerful lessons about tyranny and hearts hardened against suffering. This is striking me hard right now as I have seen so many memes and editorials this year argue that conservatives have trouble empathizing with others' suffering until they are stricken with the problem themselves. I say conservatives, because this is pretty much their brand, but really this is true of anyone whose wealth and privilege has insulated them from the problems people face when they lack wealth and privilege.

In Exodus, Pharaoh will not give up his slaves. They are, to him, his by right. The character God must make things so bad that Pharaoh won't just let the Jews go; he will drop them like a hot rock; expel them from the nation. So much of the episode seems to be about responding to recalcitrance and privilege. I don't think that one needs be a king to be a tyrant, and Pharaoh's words bring to mind many arguments and threats I've heard in my life from people no more powerful than my parents or teachers. Pharaoh believes that his Jewish slaves complain because he has been too easy on them. If that attitude doesn't pervade a generation of (mostly) Republican Party arguments against food stamps and subsidies, I don't know what does. You also hear it when (mostly Republican) politicians argue that people in prison have it too easy. Curiously there is a direct link in our country between people in poverty and people in prison. Like politicians and talk radio hosts who want poor people to be grateful and prisoners to really suffer, Pharaoh's instinctual response to Moses wanting the Jews to have time off to worship is to make the lives of the slaves even more arduous: "they are idlers. Therefore do they cry out, saying, 'Let us go sacrifice to our god.' Let the work be heavy on the men and let them do it and not look to lying words!" (Alter, Exod. 5:8-10). In other words, they won't be able to petition for time off if they have to work all day making bricks and all night looking for straw. Again, this is an argument I've seen and heard most of my life, that poverty's roots are in laziness, instead of recognizing the reality of the lives of people living in poverty.

I see Pharaoh's entitlement in America today and in our history. Obviously I see it in the slave trade that so benefited the building of wealth of this country. I see it in the southern Confederacy's war to keep their slaves. I see it in the post-Reconstruction Jim Crow South. And if I can connect those dots, it's hard for me not to connect it to black Americans being arrested and imprisoned at disproportionately higher rates than white Americans. It's hard for me not to connect it to white Americans denying that there is inequity to a system that sees black Americans more statistically likely to be shot by police, or arguing that there isn't a systemic problem when we see repeated cases of black men slowly suffocated to death by a white officer surrounded other white officers who do nothing to stop it. When white people can kill black people with legal impunity, I would say that the system of slavery, carried through the Jim Crow South is still very much with us.

Pharaoh's heart is hardened by entitlement, the belief that the slaves are owed to him, and almost nothing will convince him to give them up. Neither Pharaoh nor the Confederacy could be reasoned with to give up the slaves. They needed to be crushed. The Jim Crow South was not crushed and it is in some ways still with us. If we take our cue from Exodus, the human instinct for tyranny will defeat many other instincts. Losing a child (for Pharaoh) seems to overcome it, at least temporarily, but finally it is an ocean sweeping away an army, the physical destruction of Pharaoh's power that frees Moses's people. Pharaoh will let his kingdom be terrorized by ten plagues before he learns his lesson, until it hurts him directly, personally and irrevocably.

Connections between American slavery and Biblical slavery are not new. See the 1862 spiritual-cum-anthem, "Go Down Moses" (sung by Paul Robeson, if you want a treat). See Mark Twain's black character Jim seeking freedom in Cairo, Illinois. But modern white privilege, much like historic Jim Crow law, has democratized tyranny, put it into the hands of anyone capable of ignoring statistics and the nightly news. Today, we can all be Pharaoh, thanks to generations of slaves who built so much wealth in the United States, and thanks to so many of their descendants who are more likely to live in poverty, to be arrested, to be imprisoned, or to get COVID-19 than someone like me. For those of us with this privilege, what will it take for us to unharden our hearts?

It is the first time in my reading of the Old Testament (having just finished Robert Alter's Genesis) that I've encountered a character that is as human as Pharaoh. You can read humanity into many of the characters in the Bible, but Pharaoh, in these times, jumps off the page. I think there is a lesson in that.