Let's Do This Together
People, Obstacles and Humility
Hello there! This letter to you is a follow-up to Truly Wonderful the Mind of a Child Is, a note about the enduring power of humility to heal relationships and reopen hearts. It gives you a little more context for this Star Wars anecdote I’m about to go back over for you.
The problems on Naboo were deeper than a droid army invasion in Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Their planet was divided. One culture and species above the water, another pushed below. The Gungans are sort of a George Lucas stand-in for an indigenous people, while the human beings of Naboo are like colonial settlers. “The Naboo” came from off-world and ran the Gungans off their land. That’s hundreds of years of galactic history.
By time we get to The Phantom Menace, the Gungans loathe the Naboo and the Naboo mostly just don’t understand the Gungans. It was their ancestors who had conflict with the weird-looking fish people associated with Jar Jar Binks. “Why do they hate us?”
Episode I gives us clues. When the Gungan Leader, Boss Nass, hears the Naboo have been conquered, he snarls. “We don’t care about the Naboo. They think they’re so smart. They think their brains so big.”
It pains me how much I hear this kind of resentment in the real world. I participate in it often, and I have to hold myself accountable when I slip into it. You know what I’m talking about….another group of people who you hold in contempt because you assume they don’t like you or look down on you.
Rural conservatives to urban liberals. The education gap is the epicenter of modern political polarization. But it’s not as simple as the usual story of snobby artistic city folk looking down on the agricultural trucker class of the countryside. The city people with two college degrees feel judged and looked down on too. Religiosity and church-going is higher on average in those rural-red areas, versus the blue-atheist city centers. Don’t you think those urbanites feel looked down on in a different way? In their minds, the guy in the red truck with a bumper sticker that reads “Do you follow Jesus this close?” thinks them a degenerate sinner. They feel hurt and suspicious too.
It’s sad, because while rural populations with less density tend to report lower levels of loneliness and social isolation, both populations (urban and rural) are showing record numbers of depression and feelings of being lonely.
We’re all feeling so alone, and we want togetherness, but not with those people.
The Queen of Naboo, Padme, took a knee before the Gungan leader and professed that they both represented great societies and unique cultures and that they shared an interest in repelling the off-world invaders. Boss Nass didn’t believe the invasion was his problem, after all, the Gungans live deep in the waters of the Naboo swamps. He changes his tune fast.
“You don’t think you’re greater than the Gungans?! I like this. Maybe we can be friends,” Nass says in the wild Gungan dialect.
I was reminded of this reconciliation moment in Star Wars early this morning while doing my journaling. The Daily Stoic Journal by Ryan Holiday asked me to write “Who can I root for other than myself?” I knew the answer. Someone I love deeply but am mostly estranged from. Distrust and suspicion run deep. Feelings of superiority and condescension have poisoned the well over the years. I don’t know how it happened, but it did. Not that it matters, but it certainly runs both ways.
Then I turned to my Bible and opened it to Philippians. I couldn’t believe the passage that was on the page before me.
“Don’t be selfish; don’t try to impress others. Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourselves. Don’t look out only for your own interests, but take an interest in others, too.”
- Philippians 2:3
As human beings, people are our purpose. As the Stoic Marcus Aurelius would say in Meditations, “In a sense, people are our proper occupation. Our job is to do them good and put up with them.” He goes on to deliver the diary’s most famous line, “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” (The Obstacle Is The Way)
Most people I talk to don’t know this, but Aurelius was not talking about physical obstacles or mountains or athletics. He was talking about people. Difficult people give us opportunities to practice virtue. Without difficult people, in a utopian perfect world, you wouldn’t have to try and be good. It would just happen. Only in a broken world, full of pain and distrust, do you have to bother learning and practicing charity, humility and forgiveness.
The difficulty is the opportunity.
Queen Padme Amidala of Naboo had a huge “obstacle” to overcome, which was an invasion and her lack of an army. But the impediment to her action was not the invasion itself, but her broken relationship with the Gungans. When she leaned into that impediment, it advanced her cause. What stood in the way, Boss Nass, became the way. With humility and mutual appreciation, they became allies, and the Gungans lent their army to Padme’s cause. Together they were victorious.
You can do this too. I can do this. Let’s do it together.
But wait…there’s more….
If I’ve still got your attention and you want to go deeper on this topic, let’s dive in….Starting with another fantastic verse about the importance of humility. This will lead us beyond Star Wars: Episode I and into Episode IV: A New Hope, with Luke’s trench run on the Death Star.
“Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this little child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven”
- Matthew 8:13-14
Jesus Christ was humility advocate, going so far as to lecture a room full of his followers about it. Christ himself was something of a case study in modesty. After all, he was a carpenter-king born in a manger while still being on track to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven and sit at the right hand of God. But his personal biography was not why Christ valued humility.
The 13th-century philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas is credited with saying, “Humility removes pride, whereby a man refuses to submit himself to the truth of faith.” Pride is indeed a human vice, and considered by many theologians to be the most poisonous of the so-called “Seven Deadly Sins”: Lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride.
C.S. Lewis believed pride to be the sin from which all others flow, because by its very definition it is a state of mind that hides the existence of your own wrongdoing.
Pride is the mirror we hold up to ourselves to glorify our own achievements, thoughts, and deeds.
If you’ve ever turned on Fox News during the weekend of the Academy Awards then you’ve heard their anchors and guests rail against the “Hollywood elites.” Maybe you’ve spent time in a small town nowhere near a major metropolitan area. If so, you've probably heard an older person denounce “city slickers'' before. The term is a little dusty at this point, but the same idea applies to chiding “hipsters” for moving into your town and bringing their kombucha bars with them.
In both directions what is so grating is the pride, the condescension, and the contempt.
The thing that’s so tricky about pride is that no one wants to discourage someone, like a child, from being confident or believing in themselves. That would foster an insecurity that can be ugly in its own right. The difference is that confidence is the understanding of your own abilities, as well as your own deficiencies. I can’t be confident in my abilities as a writer unless I understand the feeling that algebra has given me since middle school — a cold chill down my spine.
Pride, on the other hand, is taking one's achievements and consistently ascribing them to yourself. It would be me writing this very chapter and thinking with great self-satisfaction, “What a master of the written word I am,” when in reality I was instructed by teachers and mentors throughout my life and developed an aptitude that I had for the craft. Even further, there’s a difference between saying “I have a talent” versus, “I have a gift.”
To have a gift means that someone, or something, gave it to you. It’s not really yours.
Let go and let the Force
In the Christian tradition, a follower of Christ believes they need a savior. But would a deeply prideful person really think they need saving by a power they can neither see, hear or touch? Doubtful. You could think of that person as Han Solo. This kind of person thrives because in their mind they think they know how the world works, and they survive by grit mixed with a little good luck. That’s why Han in Episode IV: A New Hope, is so quick to dismiss the existence of the Force and deride Obi-Wan Kenobi’s “hokey religion.” A blaster, good aim, and street smarts have always been Han’s salvation, and to him, the sight of Luke Skywalker covering his own eyes to train with Obi-Wan is the definition of naivety.
Toward the end of the film, when Luke famously pilots the trench of the Death Star to deliver the shot heard ‘round the galaxy, Luke again covers his eyes — figuratively. The voice of Obi-Wan reached out to him with the advice Luke needed to make a nearly impossible shot, “Use the Force Luke, let go.” So Luke turned off his targeting computer and fired his rockets in an act of faith, practically blind. It was naive, but it was also inspired. The Death Star operation was in fact a nearly impossible mission.
Luke couldn’t make that shot. No one could. So, Luke let the Force take the shot for him, and he made a believer of Han Solo that day.
Perhaps Luke derived this sensibility unwittingly from his long lost mother, Padme. She approached political diplomacy with an openness and vulnerability Christ-himself might have prescribed, which is to say she knew the Naboo needed help. When she said to Nass, “Our fate is in your hands,” that is the essence of being childlike. You live each day knowing you’re dependent on others to survive. When Jesus asked his followers to be more like children, he wasn’t calling on them to be dupes, no, not at all.
Just two chapters later he would say to them in Matthew 10:16,
"I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.”
Padme was as shrewd as a snake, but also gentle enough as a queen to submit when the time was right.
Accept and value challenge
Challenge makes us stronger. It helps us strengthen our understanding of the world and the problems we face. Being confronted regularly with new perspectives, counterfactuals and even inconvenient information is how we make the most constructive decisions of our lives. But is that possible without some semblance of humility?
Based on everything we’ve discussed here, sure it’s possible, but it’s a heck of a lot harder. I told you at the start of this chapter how the world is increasingly oriented toward the adage of “the customer is always right,” and I want you to know that nothing could be further from the truth. Search your feelings, you know it to be true.
Rush Limbaugh did more than just tell his audience that he was always right. No, he was far more clever during his time ruling the talk radio airwaves. Rush always made sure to compliment his listeners and remind them that they are the smartest audience in the world. They already know the truth, he’d say. “El Rushbo” was simply there to affirm what they already knew. And the feedback loop goes round and round.
The story of Padme and the crisis on Naboo is a story of how having humility can create new avenues for action, and make problem-solving all the more possible. It’s a story of knowing what you don’t know, and a story of living in a state of openness to new information, new friends, and new outcomes. Having all the talent and political chops in the galaxy isn’t worth a thing if you aren’t able to see your limits.
Don’t just know your limitations, own them. Make an effort to learn more, and surround yourself with people who fill in certain gaps. If you don’t, whether it be in your work or at trivia night with friends at the pub, your limitations will multiply.
It’s funny — when Jesus said to his disciples, “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven,” it was in essence an invitation to these self-assured grown-ups to let go, and in this case, let God. One lesson at the core of Star Wars’ moral universe that impacts the lives of all its characters, is to as Yoda says, “Let go of all you fear to lose.”
That might need to start with letting go of how virtuously you see yourself.
Excellent piece. We should talk more next time we're climbing together!