The Nevi Hubris
We suffer very much from hubris. That is to say, we like to pretend there are two sides to every question and that a strongly expressed opinion should never go unchallenged. We like to pretend we know everything and we put ourselves in the position of God Almighty. That entertaining talker, Christopher Sykes, gave me a delightful hypothetical example of this sort of thing. An announcement appears in the paper that St. Paul's must be pulled down as it is a waste of a valuable building site. You or I rise up in fury and write a letter to the paper saying this is an iniquitous idea. We express ourselves in unmoderated language. After a day or two a letter comes from some academic art historian saying that there is no need to get hot under the collar, let, us loop at this dispassionately, there are two sides to- every case. St. Paul's is indeed a beautiful building. On the other hand the site is very valuable in these times of economic distress. Let us pull down half St. Paul's and use the other half as a building site. When this is done and the result is deplorable to look at, you and I are blamed for being so immoderate in our language when we were trying to save the whole of St. Paul's,
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