The Greeks and Jews Have Words For It

Suppose you were running for public office. Let us say that you wanted to be the mayor of your local city. You decide that you want to be remembered as the mayor who made the streets safe for everyone and so you build a reputation for yourself as a crusader against speeding. Lowering speed limits, especially in residential areas and school zones, is a major plank in your campaign platform. You are elected, and throughout your first term, whenever something you have done comes under negative scrutiny, your response is to lecture people about the need for safe streets.

Your term ends and you decide to run for re-election. You saw your popularity sag towards the end of your first term. The campaign is underway when all of a sudden disaster strikes. Somebody has uncovered a video from years back that shows you taking part in a drag race – not RuPaul’s kind but the sort that involves motor vehicles – right in front of the city’s largest kindergarten. The video shows you winning the race, and certainly not abiding by the speed limit.

You decide that the best way to minimize the damage is by immediately acknowledging the race and apologizing for your past behaviour. Shortly after, however, yet another video surfaces in which you can be seen recklessly speeding and swerving in front of the nursery school. Then another video is revealed showing you weaving through the playground in your sports car, barely missing the swing set and careening away from the slide before crashing into the tetherball.

You slink back home to hide, convinced that all is over. Then, to everyone’s amazement and not least your own, your chief opponent proves incapable of capitalizing on the implosion of your self-built reputation, and you manage to scrape through and get re-elected.

All of your enemies are bitterly disappointed but they console themselves by saying “Well, at least we won’t have to listen to another of his lectures on speeding again.” Less than a year later they discover just how wrong they are.

In the next town over, a motorist is caught on video speeding around a corner, where he runs into a cyclist sending him flying off of his bike and into the wall of a nearby building. Had he been a pedestrian, it is likely that nobody would have made a very big deal out of it. It was a cyclist, however, and all the various bicycle clubs that make up the powerful bicycle lobby are hopping mad. This is not some lousy pedestrian the motorist has killed, it is one of their own, and they are not going to take it. They organize a bike protest outside city hall which ends with them burning the place to the ground. (1)

While many – probably most – in your position would consider it wiser to keep their mouths shut in this situation, you take it as an opportunity to give another lecture about how unacceptable the status quo of cyclists being run down by motorists is, how all residents of your city have a role to play in confronting systemic speeding and how speeding isn’t just a problem in the next city over, and that there is a lot of work left to be done to eliminate speeding. You don’t say a word about your own past history as a speed demon. When asked about it specifically, you give an evasive answer.

What would be the most appropriate word to describe this attitude of yours?

You have probably recognized by now the real life scenario to which the hypothetical one described above is alluding. If not, I will spell it out for you. Captain Airhead, who is sometimes derogatorily referred to as Justin Trudeau, and who was first elected Prime Minister of Canada in 2015, throughout his rise to power and the first term of his premiership, seldom did anything else but virtue signal to the world about how “woke” he was. He presented himself as the indefatigable foe of sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and every other phobia and ism to ever spring out of the ungodly union of Marx and Freud, but above all, racism. When the next Dominion election came around in 2019 his reputation had already been damaged by repeated examples of his own goofy, idiotic, and embarrassing antics, followed by a much more serious corruption scandal. Then, when the election campaign was underway, three photographs and a video were revealed showing him in skin-darkening makeup. In the video he is wearing full body blackface – legs and arms as well – with a padded crotch, acting like an ape. In other words, behaving in a way that people who hold to his own purported worldview would regard as horribly racist. Astonishingly, in spite of all of this, the Liberals won re-election albeit with a reduction to a minority government. One June 1st, in his daily video selfie, he talked about the riots erupting south of the border - he called them "peaceful protests" - expressing his solidarity with them, accusing our country - not himself - of being racist against blacks, and vowing to extirpate racism and discrimination.

Ideological progressives have, amusingly, been calling him out on this ever since. They accused him of making empty promises and uttering meaningless platitudes, and demanded that he come through with some real action. Given everything that was revealed about him less than a year ago, he was practically inviting this response. It is like he has never heard the old apopthegm "It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."

Personally, I hope that his progressive detractors are right and that all of his talk was just empty promises and meaningless platitudes. In my lifetime, I have seen the basic freedom to think and speak your mind, which in a Commonwealth realm ought to be held sacred, shamelessly, needlessly and severely curtailed in Canada and something that resembles the thought control methods of the Soviet Union - brain washing, special police and tribunals, etc. - established, all in the name of fighting discrimination and racism. All of this is, in my opinion, a much greater evil than the one it is intended to combat. We need less of this sort of action, not more.

My point, however, is that it takes a very particular kind of gall for someone in the Prime Minister's position to accuse other Canadians and, indeed, the country herself, of racism. Even last year, when he was apologizing for all of his transracial cosplay - racist by his standards not mine - he kept trying to twist it into a teaching moment for all of us.

We don't really have a word in English that is adequate to label this sort of gall. Arrogance is the closest thing we have. It is tempting, since the Prime Minister’s speech was made on the first day of "Pride month", to use the traditional English name for the worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, but this word has become so weak that it can no longer really do justice to what we are talking about. Even the Latin Superbia won’t do since it is too easily confused with the cognate English adjective that is a term of praise denoting superlative quality or excellence. So we shall have to turn to the ancient Greeks and the Jews, who each have a word that describes Captain Airhead's attitude perfectly.

The Greek word is ὕβρις which can be transliterated into English as either “hybris” or the more common “hubris”. (2) This word in its everyday usage could mean “outrage” or even “violence.” In its technical meaning, which is the relevant meaning here, it denotes a kind of insolent, overweening, pride that invites divine judgement and leads one foolishly and blindly to his own self-destruction.

The other word is chutzpah. This word, the first syllable of which is pronounced like you are trying to get rid of something stuck in your throat, is Yiddish, belonging to the tongue of the Ashkenazi Jews which combines elements of Hebrew and German. In this case the word is derived from a Hebrew word that means “impudence.” It denotes a defiant, cheeky and insolent audacity that knows no shame whatsoever. It can express either disapproval or admiration – or, probably more accurately, both at the same time. Leo Rosten defined, or rather described, it as “that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.” (3)

While these words are not exact synonyms of each other, they both fit the attitude of the Prime Minister to a tee, and much better than the closest English equivalents.




(1) Anticipating that cyclists may take offense at how they are depicted in this paragraph and object, I here and now unapologetically associate myself with the remarks and prejudices of the late Samuel Marchbanks: “Had to do some motoring today. I have two characters, my Pedestrian Character, in which I am all for the Common Man, the freedom of the roads, and the dignity of Shank’s Mare; and also my Motorist Character, in which I am contemptuous of the rights of walkers, violent in my passion for speed, and arrogant in my desire to kill anybody who gets in my way…I have never ridden a bicycle, I am the enemy of cyclists in both characters. If I am walking, they sneak up behind me and slice the calves off my legs with their wheels; if I am driving, they wobble all over the road, never signal, and seem to be deaf, blind and utterly idiotic. In spite of their stupidity, cyclists rarely get themselves killed; the roads are slippery with defunct cats, squashed skunks and groundhogs, and hens who have been gathered to Abraham’s bosom, but I have never seen a mass of steel, leather windbreaker and hamburger which was identifiable as the cadaver of a cyclist.” - This is from the last Thursday entry, in the Winter section of The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks, which was first published in 1947. In 1985, it and the Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (1949) and Marchbanks' Garland which is an abridgment of Samuel Marchbanks’ Almanack (1967), were edited into an omnibus entitled The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks and it is in the 1987, Totem Press paperback edition of this, that I found the quoted words on pages 52-53. Samuel Marchbanks was the pen-name used by Robertson Davies when he was editor of the Peterborough Examiner.
(2) The Greek letter upsilon looks like our Y in its capital form and like our u in its minuscule form. It was pronounced by a sound we don’t have in English, that which is represented in German by a u with a diacritical umlaut on top. The standard way of transliterating the German letter in English is with the diphthong ue, but this is seldom if ever used for the Greek letter.
(3) Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1968, p. 93.

Portrait of a Canadian Storyteller

Robertson Davies: Man of Myth by Judith Skelton Grant, Toronto, Penguin Books, 1994, 788 pp.

First published twenty years ago, Judith Skelton Grant’s Robertson Davies: Man of Myth is the definitive biography of its subject. Written in the last decade of its subject’s life and with his co-operation is an exhaustive portrait of the man who is usually and deservedly thought of as our country’s most distinguished man of letters.

It is as the author of three popular and critically acclaimed trilogies of novels that Robertson Davies is most widely known. His career was a multi-faceted one, however, and Grant presents us with each facet in intricate detail. From his childhood, Davies’ earliest ambition was to be a stage actor, an ambition he actively pursued through participation in many and various amateur productions during his student days and which was ultimately rewarded with Tyrone Guthrie invited him to join the Old Vic Company after his graduation from Balliol College in Oxford with a Bachelor of Letters degree. It was during his two years with the Old Vic Company, where Australian Brenda Newbold, later Mrs. Robertson Davies, was stage manager, that Davies’ realized that his future did not lie in acting and turned his ambition towards playwriting.

It was with the intention of becoming a playwright that Davies returned to Canada with his new bride in 1940 and over the course of his life he did write, direct, and produce many plays. To pay the bills, he began writing columns for his father’s newspapers, the Kingston Whig-Standard and the Peterborough Examiner, under the pen-name Samuel Marchbanks. He created this nom de plume by combining the first name of his great-grandfather with the maiden name of his great-grandmother. Under this name, Davies’ wrote the column which ostensibly dealt with literary, artistic, and other cultural criticism, as a witty and erudite, eccentric curmudgeon. The column became very popular and during the years Davies’ wrote it the journalistic facet of his career expanded as he became literary editor of Saturday Night and then the editor of the Peterborough Examiner.

Davies continued to edit his father’s newspaper until 1962 when he took on a new and more illustrious position as Master of the newly founded Massey College at the University of Toronto. During his time as editor, however, he had also written his first trilogy, the Salterton trilogy. He had been writing plays all along but his efforts had not met with the response he was looking for, either in Canada or abroad, and he decided to try his hand at a new genre. He drew inspiration from his stage experience for the first novel, which is the story of an amateur production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and from his experience as an editor for the second novel, which tells of the consequences than ensue when a man submits a false engagement announcement to the newspaper in a malicious effort to embarrass both the editor and the couple named. The trilogy is named after Salterton, the city in which the first two novels and much of the third are set. Salterton is a fictional depiction of Kingston, to which Davies’ family had moved after living in the villages of Thamesville and Renfrew, and where Davies’ had studied at Queens College after graduating from “Canada’s Eton”, the Upper Canada College (1) and before applying to Balliol. Each of these places and institutions makes its way into Davies’ novels in one form or another – Thamesville becomes the “Deptford” of his second trilogy, Renfrew becomes the “Blairlogie” of the third trilogy, while Upper Canada College becomes the Colborne College that appears in the second and third trilogies.

Although the first trilogy sold well and firmly established his reputation as a novelist it was the second trilogy that won him international acclaim. Davies had a recurring vision in which two boys on a village street in winter, one throwing a snowball that contained a rock. In his novel Fifth Business, this vision becomes an incident in which the snowball hits a pregnant woman instead of the intended target, and the narrator of the novel, the boy who the snowball missed, traces the impact of the snowball through his own life and the lives of the woman hit, her son, and the boy who threw the snowball. Further consequences of the incident are discussed in the second novel, in which the son of the boy who threw the snowball undergoes Jungian psychoanalysis in Switzerland, and the third in which the son of the woman hit by the snowball, tells the story of his life and how he became the master magician Magnus Eisengrim.

Davies’ wrote this trilogy while he was Master of Massey College, a position for which he was personally chosen by Vincent Massey, life-long Canadian diplomat, the first Canadian born Governor General, and heir of the family that had made its fortune in farm equipment. Massey and Davies, both of whom had been to Balliol, had similar ideas as to what the residential graduate college should be. Davies was a popular Master and remained in the position for twenty years until his retirement in 1982 after which he wrote his third and final trilogy, in which Massey College appears as “The College of St. John and the Holy Ghost”, or “Spook.”

It was during the years that Davies wrote this third trilogy that Grant researched and wrote his biography and this influenced both the trilogy and the biography. In Grant’s biography, the Salterton and Deptford trilogies have a chapter each, whereas the Cornish trilogy is given one chapter per novel. Meanwhile in the trilogy itself, the character of Simon Darcourt is engaged in writing the biography of the late Francis Cornish.

In her biography of Davies, Grant explores the man Robertson Davies, and the influences that made him who he was. His father, Rupert, had left his native Wales while a young man, and came to Canada where, starting out as a typesetter, he became a successful newspaper publisher and editor, and eventually a Senator. In Canada, Rupert met and married Florence McKay, a descendant of United Empire Loyalists, ultimately of Scottish and Dutch extraction. Grant gives a detailed account of both family lines, including the ancestral stories that later made their way into Davies’ writings, as well as the strained relationship between Rupert and Florence, and later between mother and son, that was to have a huge impact upon his writing – think of the relationships Solly Bridgewater and Dunstan Ramsay have with their mothers in the first two trilogies.

Rupert and Florence, who met in a Congregationalist Church and later brought their family up in the Presbyterian Church, practiced a severe, Puritan, form of Calvinism. Robertson rejected this form of theology and was confirmed in the Anglican Church at Christ Church Cathedral by the Bishop of Oxford while he was a student at Balliol. The Calvinism he rejected while acknowledging its lingering influence, the traditions and ceremonies of Anglicanism, and his own idiosyncratic and somewhat heterodox theology, can be found throughout his writings, both under his own name and as Samuel Marchbanks.

He was not a very political person, especially in the partisan sense of the word. At various times Grant describes him as a “small l liberal” and a “small c conservative” and he came from perhaps the last generation in which it would make sense to apply both of these terms to the same person simultaneously. His father, who was appointed to the Senate upon the recommendation of Mackenzie King, was a Liberal, the party for which Davies usually voted. His liberalism can be seen in the anarchistic individualism on display in his writings as Samuel Marchbanks, and his conservatism in his love for ceremony, ritual, and tradition, as well as his contempt for the cult of the “common man”. Through his father’s press credentials he was able to be present at the coronation of King George VI, which took place in his Oxford days, and Grant quotes him as having written in the Whig-Standard that the event made him “a Monarchist for life” commenting that “He is still a monarchist, valuing the Crown as a tradition and symbol of permanency that stands above temporary governments”, an admirably conservative sentiment.

Davies was a man of broad classical and humanist learning, with immense knowledge of many arcane subjects. This provided him with ample resources, in addition to his own experiences and those of his forebears, to draw upon as a writer. It also formed his view of what constituted civilization that it was something more than what laws and markets provide. Grant quotes him as saying “Only greatness in the things of the mind and spirit brings lasting reputation” and describes both his belief in Canada’s artistic and cultural potential and his frustration that so few of his countrymen shared his vision. Nevertheless, he continued to do what he could both as writer and educator, to contribute to the artistic and cultural life of Canada and we are a richer nation for it.

Robertson Davies’ novels are well worth reading and for those who wish to know more about the man behind them, there is no better place to turn than to Judith Skelton Grant’s marvelous biography.

(1) The principal of Upper Canada College at the time was W. L. Grant, the son-in-law of another famous Canadian educator George Parkin, brother-in-law of Vincent Massey whom Davies would come to regard as a kind of spiritual father, father of conservative philosopher George Grant and grandfather of liberal philosopher Michael Ignatieff. I do not know if Judith Skelton Grant is related to this family, but she writes of W. L. Grant as being very influential on and supportive of Davies. She also records a dance to which Davies took Grant's daughter Allison (who would become Michael Ignatieff's mother) as his date.