Arrogance and Humility and America and the President

A friend of mine said that people today don't value humility, at least not in themselves. I wonder if she isn’t right. Yet clearly arrogant is in our ammunition-case of insults, and we are glad to hurl it at people whom we hate. Maybe humility is a quality we value in others, but we don’t value it in ourselves, as if we were saying: "Why should I be humble if I’m perfect?"

In a Facebook discussion-thread, I offered one of my blog posts. A conservative participant in the discussion called it arrogant. That surprised me, because I thought that my post was meek and self-critical. I regret that I did not ask this conservative to point to something arrogant in the post; maybe that would have caused him to read it.

What quality in a person permits him to judge a writing without reading it?

1. Arrogance, Accusation, and Barack Obama.

Arrogant is an insult often flung at President Barack Obama. Here’s a link to a video of Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie accusing the president of arrogance.

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2012/10/22/Chris-Christie-Unloads-On-Arrogant-Obama-If-He-Cant-Change-Washington-What-The-Hell-Is-He-Doing

Christie said:
If you don’t think you can change Washington from inside the White House, then let’s give you the plane ticket back to Chicago you have earned. I mean that is a scary thing for the President of the United States to say, isn’t it? It shows his arrogance. If he really believes that, if he believes that, then what the hell is he doing asking for another four years?"
This is the episode in which Christie said that Obama is like a man in a dark room groping for the light-switch of leadership and not finding it. But now Christie has famously praised Obama for his, um, leadership and for his outstanding service to the people of Christie’s state who were overwhelmed by Hurricane Sandy.

A Google search of the words arrogant and Obama yields 14,400,000 results. That of course is a very loose metric, and naturally I can’t describe the content of the 12,301,404^th result. But even if those numbers are a very loose metric, they might be a good metaphor for some people’s ideas about Obama. Christie’s accusation that Obama is arrogant was well received because it is widely believed.

And here’s the thing: it is widely believed by people who know Barack Obama less well than Governor Christie knew Barack Obama before Hurricane Sandy put them in each other’s admiration. It is widely believed by people who know Barack Obama no better than my conservative accuser knew my blog post before he called it arrogant.

What quality in a person permits him to judge another person without knowing him?

2. Barack Obama and arrogance.

And yet, without knowing Barack Obama, I worry that the accusation might be right.

This worry is not based on any particular action. But I look upon the presidency, and I wonder how any person can hold that office and not be arrogant. It is an office with great power. And the president appears before huge crowds of cheering people. On a whim, a Marine helicopter and an Air Force jet take him wherever he wants to go. Many people look upon him with awe. World leaders crave a visit from him.

Yet I think of Abraham Lincoln as a man who occupied the presidency and remained humble. But Lincoln was an amazing man. And he had known hardship and sorrow, and these imprint humility upon a soul.

Lincoln knew hardship and sorrow before he came to the White House, and he knew hardship and sorrow in the White House. His young son died there. And he was commander-in-chief of a powerful army that bled and failed in battle time after time. I doubt that Lincoln shared the hubris of many Northern citizens who believed at the start of the Civil War that the South would be subdued quickly and easily. But if he had that delusion, events stripped it from him.

Barack Obama has not known the sorrows of Lincoln, nor his hardships. But he must bear the insults and hatred of many people, including a massive right-wing opinion-generating machine, which he has little influence over. Even the liberal press insults him; I think that I have heard few conservative pundits abuse Obama much more than liberal pundit Keith Olbermann did.

And in his first term Obama found himself opposed in almost all things by unified Congressional Republicans who, if you believe Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, made their first priority Obama’s defeat in the 2012 election. Obama was not helpless against their opposition, but strong opposition itself, that you have to struggle against, can teach humility because it makes you to know the limits of your power.

As a lawyer who has been crushed in court, I know this.

And the authority of American citizens to turn Obama out of office must give some humility to a president. And Mitt Romney’s triumph over the president in the first 2012 general-election debate must have humbled the president who came out of it damaged, with his reelection in doubt.

3. And yet.

The humbling experiences of the reelection campaign aside, it must be a heady thing to win reelection. With triumph hubris can come. In that way lies danger.

King David was a king of the ancient Jewish kingdom of Israel. He had been anointed for kingship by the prophet Samuel, and the kingdom was taken away from King Saul and given to David. For many years, David lived under threat of death from Saul, until Saul died in battle and David took control of Israel. In this time he knew that he survived by God’s power. But David forgot to be humble after he came into his kingship.

In addition to being handsome, powerful, rich, and blessed, David was a great writer of psalms to God. I wonder if he had just finished writing a particularly excellent psalm before he committed the moral blunder that gave him great grief and great turmoil in his kingdom for the rest of his reign. This episode is described in the biblical book of 2 Samuel, starting at chapter 11.

David had a romantic relationship with beautiful Bathsheba while her husband Uriah was off at war. She conceived. Adultery was punished by death in that time and place. So David worked to fix the crisis that his hubris had brought about.

He called Uriah back from war on a pretext, and then he encouraged Uriah to refresh himself with his wife’s company. The idea was to attribute Batshsheba’s child to Uriah. Loyal Uriah refused to enjoy himself while others were at war, so David’s scheme failed. So David arranged to have Uriah killed in battle; then he hastily married Bathsheba.

David’s crime was discovered. Hubris became humility. Psalm 51 is David’s plea to God for forgiveness for his crime. It is a model of contrition and hope for we who fall.

I don’t know Obama. He might be humble, not given to ego. Maybe his wife sees and undermines any uprising of hubris in her husband. I don’t know. I know people with opinions about Obama’s hubris or his lack of it, but I don’t personally know anybody with real knowledge on that subject.

But I don’t want the president to have a David-and-Bathsheba moment, in whatever shape it might come.

4. Against arrogance.

So I am thankful for the opposition that Obama faces. It curtails any sense of omnipotence that he might have.

I am thankful that he has opposition in Congress. When the final electoral count is in, the Republican Party stands to lose seats in the House of Representatives, but they will keep majority-control of it. As a Democrat, I regretted this electoral outcome, but I see in it a moral boon for our president.

I am thankful that we have an independent judiciary. In the next four years, the president will be subject to it. One of the president’s controversial plans will likely come before the Supreme Court. Obamacare calls for all employers, including secular institutions run by religious bodies, to furnish, through insurance, birth control to their employees who are women. Some churches that run hospitals and universities cry against this as an invasion of religious freedom.

I support the president’s policy, but I see the boon to his character in the humility of being subject to the last word from the courts. I would regret it if the law were struck down. But were that to happen, it might be blessing to the president to be curtailed in this way, if un-checked power made him think more highly of himself than he ought to.

I am thankful for international opposition. To be sure, I don’t think America is always right and good, but compared to countries that jail and starve their political opponents, rape with their armies, and ignore or curtail democracy, I consider America to be a bright light. For example, I am proud of the anti-Aids program started under President Bush. It was good, it was generous, it was benevolent, and it will always stand as a credit to him.

As a country, we have done wrong, and we have done right. But the point here is that international opposition, right or wrong, helps to keep us and our president humble.

5. Prayer.

So for the sake of his soul and for the sake of America, I grudgingly welcome hardships for the president.

I also pray for the president. I pray for his family. I pray for his wisdom and his humility, and for other blessings. I would have prayed these things for Mitt Romney if he had won, but Obama won, so I pray these things for him. (I still pray for Romney.)

I hope that my friends and even my conservative friends will join me in that. If we join in prayer for the president to be wise and humble, how can that possibly lead to evil? And much good might come of it.