Article
America
Character
Culture
Politics
5 min read

What would make America great again - humility

Hubris, Hope and Humility - and how they fit together in the court of King Donald

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Elon Musk sits next to Donald Trump on a plan, while giving the thumbs up gesture with both hands.
Office of Speaker Mike Johnson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Over the inauguration weekend, I was in Texas. Trump-Vance flags still fluttered in the cold wind, now more in triumph than soliciting votes. This was in the middle of the biggest winter storm to hit the southern coast of the USA in 65 years, where four inches of snow ground cities to a halt. The seemingly endless cycle of American TV news channels were caught between fascination with Storm Enzo, and the return of a political hurricane in Washington DC.  

President Trump’s first few days broke upon the world rather like a fresh storm. When a new government takes over, it is customary to sound a note of hope for the future, uniting the nation, cautious anticipation for a new dawn, pledging to try one’s best for the people and so on. Yet Trump’s speech was optimism on steroids. He announced the beginning of a ‘golden age’ for America. “From this day forward” he claimed, “our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world. We will be the envy of every nation, and we will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer.” 

Elon Musk went even further. This election, he said, was a “fork in the road of human civilisation.” As a result of the good Republican voters of the USA, “the future of civilisation was secured”, as he looked forward to a day when the stars and stripes would even be planted in the soil of the planet Mars.  

There is a fine line between hope and hubris. Many commentators have contrasted the gloomy outlook of Keir Starmer with the upbeat optimism of the Republicans in Washington. American always outdo us Brits when it comes to can-do optimism, yet this was something else.  

Hope lifts people’s spirits. It gives a sense of possibility and points to an unknown but bright future. St Paul asks “who hopes for what they can see?” Hope recognises that the future is not entirely in our hands, that events - and our own stubbornness and pig-headedness - can derail the best laid set of plans. It knows that the future is uncertain and yet, because of a simple trust that the world came from goodness and will end with goodness, believes that sometimes despite, rather than because of our efforts, the future is bright.  

Hubris, however, is when human confidence goes into overdrive. In the classical world, writers such as Hesiod and Aeschylus saw hubris as the dangerous moment when a mortal claimed to be equal to, or better than a god.  

Phaeton was a teenage boy racer, a son of the sun god Helios. He took hold of his dad’s chariot for a day, thought he could steer better than his aged parent, drove too fast, too close to the earth, burning it up and thus earning a trademark lightning bolt from Zeus for his pains. Arachne was a weaver who thought his cloth more beautiful than that of Athena, the goddess of all weavers. And of course, the most famous of all, Icarus, made himself a pair of wings, soared just a bit too high, melting the wax that held them together, plunging him into the sea like a burnt-out satellite falling, falling and then sinking into the dark blue depths of the vast ocean. A trip to Mars anyone?  

Yet without a dose of humility, the modesty that recognises not everything is in their control, that they will get things wrong, and need to admit it when they do, they will only generate antagonism and disharmony. 

There are, of course, parallels in Christian literature. The Tower of Babel is the story of a civilisation that thought it could build to the skies, to reach and rival God himself. God was not impressed and confused the speech of the uppity humans so they could no longer understand one another. King Herod - grandson of the one visited by the wise men at Christmas - dressed himself in finery, smiled smugly at the acclaim of the crowds that his was ‘the voice of a god and not a mortal.’ No sooner had he said this than ‘an angel of the Lord struck him down, he was eaten by worms and died.’ 

These are ancient stories of brash and overblown self-confidence, that a human could do what only the gods can. They recur in pretty well every human strand of wisdom. Hubris usually arises from an insecure desire to be better than anyone else, better even than the gods, or God. It is essentially competitive. If greed is the desire to be rich, then hubris is the desire to be richer than everyone else. It creates comparison, jealousy, and yes – envy - in fact, that is the point - to be the envy of everyone else. Of course, social media is full of it. It is hard to like hubristic people. They generate envy or resentment, or when they fall, a delicious dose of Schadenfreude. None of which are particularly good for us.  

The opposite of hubris is humility. The root word for humility is the same as humus, humour, humanity. It derives from that ancient biblical story of the human race being fashioned by God out of the dirt. It punctures holes in our self-importance, reminds us of our lowly origins. It is the precious ability to laugh at yourself. Humility is appropriate for us precisely because we are not gods, and woe betide us if we think we are. We are instead poised between the earth and the heavens, sharing in the divine image, capable of great things, maybe one day even reaching Mars. Yet we are also capable of great cruelty and harm, frail and liable to get things badly, sometimes catastrophically, wrong. Once we forget our dual nature, made to be like God, yet moulded out of the earth; with huge potential for creativity and yet with a tendency to over-reach, a flaw within that leaves us vulnerable to temptation, we are in danger of blundering ahead like bulls in the proverbial China Shop.  

And this is the danger that Trump and Musk are flirting with. I wish them well. I really do. Maybe they will make America great again. Maybe they will usher in an age of prosperity and order. Yet without a dose of humility, the modesty that recognises not everything is in their control, that they will get things wrong, and need to admit it when they do, they will only generate antagonism and disharmony. And they will probably do more harm than good.   

Fyodor Dostoyevsky once wrote “Loving humility is a terrible force: it is the strongest of all things, and there is nothing like it.” Humility ends up being stronger and achieves more than hubris. Jesus was said to be “gentle and humble in heart.” And he changed the world more than anyone else. Donald and Elon – watch and learn. 

Join with us - Behind the Seen

Seen & Unseen is free for everyone and is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Alongside other benefits (book discounts etc.), you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing what I’m reading and my reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief

Find out more and sign up

https://www.seenandunseen.com/behind-the-seen

Article
Belief
Community
Culture
Music
1 min read

Oasis: it's all gone a bit biblical at this summer’s musical moments

We’re reaching for some ancient vocab to describe our experiences together

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A silhouette of a musician holding up shakers.
'Cast no shadow'.
x.com/oasis

A biblical narrative keeps whirring around my mind.  

In the first century, Paul – planter of churches, writer of letters, spreader of the way of Jesus – finds himself in Athens, the Graeco-Roman city where meaning is made. He wanders around this city, soaking up its culture, noticing its priorities, watching its habits. But he doesn’t do so silently. Paul pulls out his usual party trick; yelling about Jesus here, there, and pretty much everywhere, eventually catching the attention of the local philosophers. They want to hear more, and Paul finds himself thrown in front of the Areopagus, the meaning-making council at the heart of the meaning-making city. The cultural epicentre of the Graeco-Roman world, one could argue.  

Never one to miss an opportunity, Paul gets to his feet and unleashes a monologue for the ages, kicking off with this line: ‘People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious…’ 

Quite the opener, isn’t it? 

It’s that opening line that my imagination seems to have gotten snagged on.  

There is so much going on around me – right here and right now, in 2025 - that makes me want to find a place into which I can scream the exact same thing. There and then, here and now, I can see that in every way we are very bloomin’ religious.  

What Paul and I don’t mean by such an assertion is that everyone our contexts are signed up – hook, line, and sinker - to an organised religion. Such an assertion would be silly, considering the data tells a different story. What I’m pretty sure Paul meant, and what I know I mean is this – in every kind of way, people are searching for that which is bigger, deeper, truer than ourselves. We are directing our attention, our energy, our worship in certain directions. We are seeking ritual and practice, wrapping ourselves in stories that give meaning to our day-in-day-out experiences, stories that tie our lived reality into something that transcends it. We’re grasping for a world that is more full of beauty, truth, and sense than we imagined; pledging allegiance to our inkling that there is something more. Yup. In every way, we, the good old human race, are very religious.  

Paul said it with his chest then, I think he’d say it with his chest now. 

There are a hundred different places that I could go in order to pluck some ripe evidence for my theory – but for now, my evidence of choice is the language being used to describe the long-awaited Oasis reunion.  

‘Biblical’ 

That’s the word being used – in national headlines and personal Instagram captions alike, ‘biblical’ is the adjective of choice.  

Isn’t that strange?  

I don’t really know what people mean by it, to be honest. According to my research, they’re taking their cue from Liam Gallagher himself, who was the first to describe the band as such. Stay humble, Liam.   

Is using ‘biblical’ as the descriptor of choice a reference to the reconciliation of warring brothers? That’s certainly a biblical motif, which I guess is being played out in real-time, witnessed by those who could afford the £400 ticket (no, I’m not bitter). Is it implying that this event is so monumental, it should be canonised somehow? Written about? Memorialised? Poured over for millennia to come? Or is it a reference to the fact that what we are witnessing is the fulfilment of rumours, prophecies, hopes and expectations?  

Maybe it’s all of the above, maybe it’s none of the above. It doesn’t really matter. What matters, at least to me, is that people are wanting to express that these gigs are more than the sum of their parts; there’s something transcendent about them, something awe-inspiring, wonder-infusing. Something that feels, dare I say it, religious about them.  

It gets even more interesting, because such sentiments aren’t reserved for the reunification of the Mancunian brothers.  

I’m still stunned, curious to the point of distraction, about the fact that we – in a secular, materialist, rational culture – cannot help but stretch toward spiritual language. 

In a podcast episode recorded in the days leading up to this year’s Glastonbury festival, the DJ and broadcaster, Annie Mac, described the event as ‘communion’, explaining that ‘when you don’t go to church, you need to get that somewhere.’ On the flip side, in the days following the festival, another DJ and broadcaster, Miquita Oliver, teased the endless Glastonbury posts that were filling up her social media feeds – she jokingly stated that ‘it all gets a little churchy after Glastonbury… like “it’s heaven on earth”… can we all relax?’  

So, here we have it again – people reaching for religious language to describe significant musical events. Be it the Oasis reunion or Glastonbury – I’m fascinated by the fact that we’re not content with stating that these gigs are merely talented people doing what they do well, and in so doing, giving us an enjoyable time. Such language may be factually accurate, but it doesn’t feel true enough to us. Rather, we’re grappling with the feeling that these events feel like something we were made to experience somehow, they they’re tapping into the deepest parts of us, perhaps?  

In the past, I’ve wondered whether this is down to the sense of profound togetherness that these events provide – how they have the ability to remind us that we’re bound to each other, only if for a night. They’re a direct afront to individualism, the biggest and sturdiest lie of our age. I’ve also reflected on the fact that they instil as sense of awe within us: raw awe. An elusive emotion that can be hard to come by, but that we were made to feel. I still think all of that comes into play. 

I’ve pondered this a thousand times and yet I’m still stunned, curious to the point of distraction, about the fact that we – in a secular, materialist, rational culture – cannot help but stretch toward spiritual language. Nothing else quite hits the spot; nothing else feels quite deep enough, big enough, true enough. Religious references and language, we’re determined to keep them in our repertoire, aren’t we? Our reliance upon them betrays us. Indeed, I’ve come to see our unceasing usage of them as a crack in the façade of disenchantment. 

Oh, people of 2025 and beyond, I can see that in every way you are very religious.  

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free. 
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?
 
Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief