A Few Things Before Beginning
Hello Friends! I have just returned from a week of downhill mountain biking at Snowshoe Bike Park in West Virginia. It was amazing!
I was there with a group of friends and despite five of us riding for a full three days of lift-access bike park (some of the gnarliest trails on the East Coast - this is where they have previously held the World Cup Professional Downhill competitions), there were no trips to the hospital!! There were some crashes, some bruises, some cuts that probably could have used stitches, but all of us left with good spirits and smiles on our faces (which are a bit hard to see given the full face helmets and goggles!).
I say all of this not just to keep you updated on my activities (and I hope you will keep me updated on yours - in the comments here on Substack or even by email!), but as a context in which to apologize for not having a “Music Mondays” post this week for my paid subscribers.
I am sorry!!!
For those of you who have just subscribed, paid subscribers not only get access to the full archive of previous posts, but also get an extra post each week where I think about music from a philosophical perspective (lots of 1990s hip-hop and contemporary extreme metal, but also reflections on genres, rhythms, melodies, and much more). Additionally, paid subscribers are invited to a Zoom livestream every other month, as well as will be getting exclusive content from my new pod/vid-cast that will be launching in July. So, if you have not upgraded to a paid subscription, please consider doing so.
One final note, which I will be talking about much more in my July newsletter - I am starting a pod/vid-cast called “Campfire Philosophy”! It will be livestreamed every Monday in July and August over on my YouTube channel: Philosophy for Where We Find Ourselves (so please get subscribed there so you don’t miss any episodes!).
Ok, so enough preliminaries. Let’s dive in to this week’s topic: Reverence!
Let’s Think Together
“Reverence is our best defense against hubris. Without reverence, religions can show their nasty side and plunge their believers into religious wars. And without reverence, hubris will lead powerful people to make terrible mistakes. They will protect their ignorance from criticism and try to punish those who know better. Then they will fall, and they will take many of us with them. Without reverence, a great power will stumble.”
So begins the book, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue, by the philosopher Paul Woodruff.
I have recommended this book previously in a book spotlight in one of my newsletters, but today I want to think about it a bit more carefully and strongly recommend it to you!
Paul Woodruff was a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin and published widely in the areas of ancient philosophy and social theory. He passed away recently (September 2023) and yet has left us with a wealth of writings that not only encourage us to learn about how to live by tapping into ancient wisdom, but also warn us about the vicious temptations that so frequently threaten our social world.
In Reverence, Woodruff notes that “Today, the United States may vie for first place in rates of incarceration, homicide, and teenage pregnancy, while it is behind or lost in the pack on voting rates, literacy, health care, and social mobility. All of these show failures of reverence.” But he explains that although he draws deeply on the lessons to be found in the history of philosophy, “I write for the future, not the past. I mention our stumbles only to show how reverence could have made the difference between life and death for countless people. That is why we need to educate future decisions-makers. They need to know how dangerous it is to hold power, how power leads to hubris, and hubris to disaster. And they need to see how reverence can serve as a shield in the soul against hubris.”
Sadly, one does not have to dig very deeply or look very closely to see the predominance of hubris (that is, entrenched pride that is resistant to receiving criticism) among not only our social and political leaders, but as almost a guiding norm operating within our broader culture.
I take Woodruff’s notion of hubris to be very similar to what Aaron James terms an “asshole.” For James, the asshole is someone who:
claims systematic privileges due to an
entrenched sense of entitlement that fosters an
immunity to critique.
Simply put, people are assholes due to an unconstrained hubris that defines their sense of self and social interaction.
Ok, we might say, assholes are everywhere. But, how can restoring a sense of reverence help to combat them?
Well, listen to Woodruff’s definition of reverence and see how strikingly it stands in contrast to the narrative of self-importance that so often underwrites political campaigns, claims to religious certainty, and the rising tide of nationalistic sentiment:
“Reverence begins in a deep understanding of human limitations; from this grows the capacity to be in awe of whatever we believe lies outside our control—God, truth, justice, nature, even death. The capacity for awe, as it grows, brings with it the capacity for respecting fellow human beings, flaws and all. This in turn fosters the ability to be ashamed when we show moral flaws exceeding the normal human allotment.”
He then concludes his account with the hauntingly direct words:
“Reverence is the virtue that keeps human beings rom trying to act like gods. To forget that you are only human, to think you can act like a god—this is the opposite of reverence.”
Reverence is the virtue that gets cultivated when we lean into and embrace our shared humanity. As I have argued elsewhere, the human condition is most fundamentally defined by two characteristics: vulnerability and relationality. When we combine those two aspects we get at something like the fact of fragile embodiment as what unites us always to every single other person. Our humanity is not an abstract concept, but rather the lived fact of our finitude.
We are affective beings—which means that we can harm others and be hurt ourselves. We feel before we think. And unless we think well about the limits that define us, we will never inhabit virtuously the shared community that defines our world and shapes our horizon of meaning.
Woodruff rightly points out that reverence is a virtue that does not belong most properly to religion, but instead finds its traction in community as such. That we are social, relational, responsible, invested, and implicated at our core means that any attempts to position ourselves as radically self-sufficient, absolutely independent, or invulnerable is ultimately to deny our very humanity.
Aristotle once said that whatever lives outside of society/community is either a beast or a god. Well, for Woodruff, the more that we consider ourselves to be gods, the more beast-like we become.
(By the way, I tried to find a cool image to put in here of “gods and beasts” but everything that came up was either something off a death metal album cover or looked like a fantasy novel, ugh).
The more that we follow leaders who embrace power without appreciating responsibility, who mock the weak as losers, and who view the world through a lens of self-aggrandizement, the less our social fabric will hold. The tears at the seams are already beginning to show and yet rather than call each other to a restored appreciation of reverence, we have allowed our lizard-brain fear-instinct to take over such that we only see “them” as enemies to be defeated, rather than neighbors to work with as we all strive toward what Martin Luther King called the “beloved community.”
I tend to think that the addition of the qualifier “beloved” was King’s attempt to remind us both that we are all worthy of love and also that none of us are perfect. It is our flawed humanity that actually makes love to necessary and yet so hard.
Tragically, when we irreverently see ourselves as gods, we see others as lesser. This is how democracy dies in tyranny and how community slides into nothing more than gross competition.
Reverence vs. Respect
Without wanting to go too deeply into Woodruff’s specific arguments, I do think one of his early points is well worth mentioning. Reverence is not the same thing as respect!
“Respect is sometimes good and sometimes bad sometimes wise and sometimes silly. It is silly to respect the pratings of a pompous fool; it is wise to respect the intelligence of any student. Reverence calls for respect only when respect is really the right attitude. To pay respect to a tyrant would not be reverent; it would be weak and cowardly. The most reverent response to a tyrant is to mock him. All of this is because reverence is a kind of virtue. . . . Reverence is one of the strengths in any good person’s character.”
I love this paragraph because we more and more hear about the importance of “loyalty” in our contemporary politics. But, we must remember:
Loyalty to lies is self-deceptive.
Loyalty to tyrants is socially destructive.
Loyalty to ignorance, meanspiritedness, division, and selfishness marks the end of community.
Virtue requires that we NOT show respect to liars.
Virtue requires that we NOT show respect to assholes.
Virtue requires that we NOT show respect to those who would tell us to believe “alternative facts” and to love power more than truth.
Alternatively:
Reverence cultivates awe in the fact of truth—because of an awareness of my own tendency toward error.
Reverence fosters humility in the face of our own limitations.
Reverence facilitates hospitality to others in light of our shared humanity.
Reverence is necessary for leaders if they are not to become tyrants.
Reverent leaders are those who seek to cultivate compassion, not circle the wagons in self-protective ways. As Woodruff so beautifully expresses it:
“Leaders are responsible for the compassion of those who follow them.”
Exactly.
Ask yourself, is this tendency toward compassion something that you see in those you follow? If not, then you are likely not following someone who is devoted to the virtue of reverence.
Next Steps
I imagine that many of you are saying “Amen” to these claims and yet still wondering: So what can we do to encourage reverence from not only our leaders, but also from ourselves and our neighbors?
Woodruff offers a few practical suggestions and I want to close by mentioning them here.
He suggests that, as was the case in ancient Athens, “everyone should have the education of a leader.” This is a cool idea because notice how it democratizes access to power. Rather than the rich and powerful getting the “best” education, genuine democracy seeks to maximize the virtue of all such that everyone/anyone could be qualified to lead. This is how democracy resists sliding into some sort of aristocracy or oligarchy.
This education that is shared by all would include “a broad education in the humanities.”
YES!!! It should come as no surprise that those lacking in reverence would seek to gut the humanities in the name of “practical” disciplines that embrace profit without an awareness of the complexities of assessing value.
Moreover, this education should “demand the ability to communicate clearly and with feeling.” Unfortunately, when we excuse “mean tweets” in order to focus on artificially low gas prices, etc., we have already abandoned a concern for the shared task of reason-giving that unites us all not only in thinking well, but in a community of common (felt) experience.
Third, Woodruff says that this education will foster “imagination.” Importantly imagination is not the same thing as “innovation,” which sadly is just too often code for a business logic guiding our sense of value in ways that do not admit of self-reflective awareness.
Fourth, such education will require “practice.” In other words, we should not get lost in abstraction—as admittedly too many in the humanities tend to allow themselves to do. Instead, and here I see some hints of a John Dewey-esque approach, theory must find its way into our lived experience. And our experiences should inform the theories we take to be most compelling.
Finally, Woodruff notes the need for training in ethics, but warns against the run-of-the-mill philosophical ethics class. He encourages the need for case-studies, for applied decision making, and for wrestling with the real messiness of moral life. I take his view here to be quite close to that of Simone de Beauvoir who reminds us that ethics is best understood as “ambiguous.” So, we should move away from the clean models of our theoretical frameworks and instead get our hands dirty dealing with the situations in which human bodies find themselves.
Ultimately, I think that Woodruff is right about the desperate need for reverence today. We often hear the question “are you better off now than you were four year ago?” Well, I would encourage us to ask “are people kinder now than they were four years ago?”
I don’t think so. Sigh.
But, and this is what I think Woodruff so rightly takes from the Greeks, hubris is not a necessity. It does not have to define us. We can do things differently. And, if history is any guide, if we are to avoid the social destitution that lurks right around the corner when democracies slide into tyranny, we must do things differently.
We are not gods and so reverence first requires that we admit we are likely part of the problem that we are blaming others for creating. When we humble ourselves, we begin to see others as equals and the future as a space where the beloved community doesn’t seem quite so distant as it does now.
Thank you all so much for spending a few minutes today thinking with me. I love walking the trails of life with you. If you are a paid subscriber, please drop a comment so that we can keep the conversation going.
Also, this community can only grow with your help. Please share this post with your friends and encourage the to join us as we walk together and talk along the way.