In 1999, I wrote that reverence is our best defense against hubris. Without reverence, I wrote, 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, I wrote, a great power will stumble. All that was in the first edition of the book you now have in your hands. I had learned most of it from reading ancient Greek plays and history, but I am sorry to say I have had to learn it again from current events.
The first edition of Reverence was released in September 2001—during the very week of 9/11. I had composed the manuscript well before the events of that day shook the United States into war. Since then I have had the sad experience of seeing my predictions come true. Without reverence, religiosity has indeed fed the flames of war. And without reverence, a great power—the United States—has stumbled badly. The nation’s leaders have blundered into two wars, both long and ineffective. The decision-makers chose to go to war in a state of ignorance, which they protected with a wall of boasts, while they did their best to stifle disagreement. The result has been great loss of life, and little progress in the countries where they brought war. Further bad decisions shattered the United States’ reputation for justice, as the world learned how this nation—founded on the premise of human rights—threw rights to the winds in its new prisons.
To make matters worse, a string of poor decisions drained the country’s economy, while a ruthless political storm is pushing our people further behind on almost every measure of success for a modern, developed nation. 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 these show failures of reverence. A great power stumbled soon after I wrote the book, and even now, still with reverence largely in abeyance, it continues to stumble.
These stories are well known, and I have nothing to add to them. The makers of bad decisions need no more blame from me than they have reaped already; they succumbed, in the ordinary way, to the confidence that grows from power, which so easily grows into overconfidence. I have felt this in my own careers as soldier and teacher and dean; I have had power, and I have sometimes overreached. “You are part of what you criticize, or you don’t know enough about it to criticize,” says poet William Stafford.
I write for the future, however, 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 decision-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.
I would not belabor Reverence with a second edition if I did not believe that reverence saves lives. I won’t say that my book will save lives—that would be hubris—but I firmly believe that reverence has saved lives and will save lives if only it has its proper place in the souls of people who wield great power. At the end of my epilogue I give a few examples to seal the point.
In this second edition I have made small corrections and additions to the original chapters, in order to clarify some of the fuzzier points. I have also provided three new chapters:
I have added a chapter called “Sacred Things” (chapter ten). Reverence has an uneasy relationship with sacred things, but reverence does entail that we respect whatever people hold sacred, if we can do so while still respecting all the people concerned. Americans abroad have stumbled by failing to respect sacred things.
A second new chapter, “Compassion and Responsibility,” discusses compassion as a consequence of reverence (chapter twelve). Without compassion, we declare open season on the helpless, and without ethical leadership, we are all too often without compassion. Compassion is easily drowned out by a rush of events, by fear, or by anger. Reverent leaders take responsibility for compassion in their neighborhoods. I now believe that the most important message of this book is this:
Leaders are responsible for the compassion of those who follow them.
In writing about reverence, which is timeless, I have generally avoided the controversies of our time, but not on this topic. Failures of compassion touch us too closely. The section in chapter twelve called “A Failure of Leadership” is based on the case of Abu Ghraib, which illustrates in shocking detail how irresponsible it is to give power to very young people without training and oversight by leaders who have values.
Because I have often been asked how individuals may renew reverence in their lives, I have provided an epilogue on the subject (chapter 15): “Renewing Reverence.” I end with examples to illustrate the urgency of this project: Reverence saves lives.