Article

America

Character

Culture

Politics

23 January 2025

5 min read

The thing Trump needs most - humility

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

Graham Tomlin

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.

Recently 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 an assured future, 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 - 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 wants to be the envy of everyone else. It creates comparison, jealousy, and yes – envy. 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.

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Article

Art

Culture

Film & TV

21 January 2025

5 min read

The constant pull of David Lynch’s direction

What made the director’s films so universally resonant?

Sonny Tindall

Sonny works creatively with videography, graphic design, fashion, and photography.

Lynch painting.

At the age of 16, initially wanting to experience the infamous performances of actors, John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins, I decided to watch The Elephant Man (1980). This was the film that opened up the weird and wonderful world of director, David Lynch, a world I immediately wanted to dive headfirst into.

I did so by watching the film that became the catalyst for world-renowned director and producer, Mel Brooks, offering Lynch the chance to direct The Elephant Man. The film in question? His very first, Eraserhead (1977).

It was, and remains to this day, the most singular cinematic experience of my life.

I’m of the opinion that almost all filmmakers fall in to one of two categories; those who become artists through the medium of filmmaking, and those who are already artists who choose the vehicle of filmmaking to create their art. David Lynch is, for me at least, the ultimate embodiment of the latter. Proof of such can be found in his status as a renaissance man.

Originally a painter, a practice he continued throughout his life, his desire to transition to making films was borne out of wanting to see his paintings move. He was also an actor, a musician, and sound designer. Not to mention, a furniture designer who regularly built props for his films, author of several books and designer of his very own comic book.

The television show, Twin Peaks, is perhaps the best example of just how impossible it was to bind Lynch to a single artistic form. The seminal TV show revolutionised what television could be, as it was the first show to stray from the episodic storytelling format, instead choosing to follow one continual storyline through an entire series.

David Lynch exists within an exclusive category of artists, those whose names have become an adjective. Lynchian, similar to Kafkaesque, Brechtian or Daliesque, is recognised as an official word in the Oxford dictionary. An eponymous adjective is an honour reserved for only the most unique and distinct of artists.

Although it could be argued that the term – Lynchian - is now too loosely applied to anything deemed to be somewhat counter-cultural within mainstream cinema, its true meaning relates to the often indefinable style and voice of the man himself.

He invoked the spiritual depths of us, the existential longings and cravings, the questions that seem intrinsic to the human condition, the wonderings that feel as though they originate from somewhere deep within us, our souls, perhaps.

I’ve come to think that it’s the ultimately the spiritual essence of Lynch’s films that make them truly unique, and him a worthy recipient of an eponymous adjective. Lynch’s films exist within their own world, frequently reminiscent of a dream.

Sometimes euphoric, often a nightmare.

He was an avid practitioner and advocate of transcendental meditation, so it’s perhaps not too surprising that when speaking on his creative process, Lynch attributed many of his creative ideas as emerging from his own subconscious through the practices of meditation and daydreaming. He’s often compared ideas to the act of fishing, they aren’t created, they already exist, you’ve just got to have the right bait to catch them.

I wonder if this process is what makes the worlds housed within Lynch’s films unlike any others. He invites us into his own subconscious, by allowing it to bleed out onto the screen.

Despite his allusivity in style and format, what I’ve always found most confounding about David Lynch’s work is its universality.

I feel as though the term ‘fringe artist’ has scarcely been better applied to anyone other than Lynch.

How has a man who’s created some of the boldest, most avant-garde and, at times, downright disturbing art of the last century picked up four Oscar nominations (and an honorary win), a Masterclass and a Disney movie (The Straight Story)?

Surely translating your own subconscious, something we view as idiomatic to each individual person, onto the screen is a guaranteed recipe for alienating your audience?

So why does Lynch’s work, instead of pushing us away, so consistently pull us in?

I could pontificate on the different potential techniques Lynch employed to keep his work just grounded enough to allow us to relate to it. His films being rooted in instantly recognisable symbols of Americana, for example. Or perhaps his deployment of easily digestible genres and conventions, Twin Peaks is a melodramatic murder mystery TV show, Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001) are, at their core, noir films and even Wild at Heart (1990) is a textbook road movie.

But Lynch’s work has taught me to dig far deeper than that.

He invoked spiritual depths of us, the existential longings and cravings, the questions that seem intrinsic to the human condition, the wonderings that feel as though they originate from somewhere deep within us, our souls, perhaps.

That, for me at least, is the answer to his universality.

But how did he do it?

As has already been mentioned, it’s by mining his own subconscious and the spiritual within himself, and allowing it to flow into the worlds he created. But, most importantly, he never definitively characterised these things, he simply let them exist, depicted them. His work doesn’t come to us with the answers, it comes to us with questions. David Lynch’s questions: questions about the world. Questions about himself.

The very same questions we all ask ourselves on a daily basis: is evil within us or is it the product of what is around us? How can we allow light to prevail over darkness?

His work allows us to sit, ruminate, and respond to those questions.

I didn’t anticipate how profound of an effect David Lynch’s passing would have on me. It’s undoubtedly the strongest feeling of loss and grief I’ve felt from the passing of someone in the public sphere.

So deep were my feelings that I felt I needed to process it through the writing of this piece.

And despite the myriad of feelings and thoughts that have been swirling around my head since originally reading the news headline, I find myself continually returning to the very first thought I had. It was a quote from American comedian, Theo Von. When mourning the death of fellow comedian, Norm Macdonald, Theo said,

‘It feels like you’re losing a book that nobody has copies of.’

I feel despair that I’ll never be able to see the world through David Lynch’s eyes again. But I find great comfort that he, through his art, has passed his vision onto us, ensuring that we’ll always be able to see the Lynchian in our world.