Hubris

I don't agree with George Will that often. His column in the Washington Post is however an important message on values. While he speaks elegantly about the danger of hubris, he thus reminds us of the importance of humility.

I had forgotten about the Greek Myth of Icarus whose unstoppable urge to keep flying higher led the sun to melt his wings. The caution from Will is in the context of Obama's new National Security Strategic Review, perhaps reflecting the general propensity of traditional conservative aversion to international entanglements. (President George W. Bush as the exception to prove the rule, perhaps.)

I found Will's piece a helpful reminder more generally of our need for humility in not just international engagements, but in all parts of our national and personal lives.  The urge to always seek "more" is no better demonstrated than in Wall Street during the build-up to the latest crash and in our culture generally when a basketball player makes millions off a bidding contest for his services.

And so the more we seek, the more we get, the richer "we" become, and then the higher we fly. Inevitably the wax of our wings melts and we fall to find ourselves just like everyone else. Only, for some institutions and certainly Governments, the cost of the fall is often born by the innocent and the powerless.