Reverence
Paul Woodruff published a small book in 2001 called Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue, and the central argument is that the modern world has lost a word it cannot do without. The classical Greeks called it aidōs and treated it as one of the foundations of any community capable of governing itself. The Confucians called it 敬 (jìng) and built the entire ethical edifice of li on top of it. The English word — reverence — is technically still in the dictionary, but the contemporary tone has been trained against it so successfully that most adults under fifty cannot use the word in a sentence without irony. This is, Woodruff argued, a serious loss. It may be most of what is wrong with us.
Reverence is not religion. The reverent atheist is a coherent figure. What reverence requires is the capacity to feel awe at things larger than oneself and not made by oneself — the ocean, a forest, a tradition that has held for centuries, a child whose existence one had no part in arranging — and to allow that awe to constrain one’s behavior. The reverent person does not deface the cave painting. The reverent surgeon does not begin the operation by joking about the patient. The reverent guest in another culture does not film the funeral on his phone. The constraint is internal. No one is enforcing it. The reverent person enforces it on himself because he has learned to feel the magnitude of what would be violated, and the feeling is unpleasant enough that the violation does not occur.
The contemporary difficulty with reverence is that it sits oddly across the line modernity drew between the religious and the secular, and got assigned to the wrong side. The mystic and the priest were assumed to have a monopoly on it; the secular adult inherited a posture of skeptical irony as the default educated stance, and the irony did its corrosive work on the reverence as a side effect. We are now in a position where the people who can publicly express awe at a sequoia are mostly children and the slightly drunk, and where most institutional rhetoric has to launder reverence through the safer registers of respect and appreciation and acknowledgment, which sound similar and aren’t.
The cost of the loss shows up everywhere. A culture without reverence treats the inherited as raw material. The old building gets torn down because nobody can articulate what is owed to the people who built it; the long marriage gets dissolved because nobody can articulate what is owed to the years it has accumulated; the language drifts into a register of universal sarcasm because the alternative — a register in which some things are spoken about straight — has come to feel embarrassing. Embarrassment is the symptom of reverence’s absence. The presence of the thing that ought to be revered is felt; the cultural permission to honor it is not; the discomfort routes itself into a joke.
Wabi sabi depends on reverence for the impermanent. Shokunin depends on reverence for the craft. Stewart Brand‘s long-now thinking is reverence applied at the scale of millennia. Kintsugi is reverence made physical: the broken bowl is honored, not hidden. Each works in part because the underlying virtue is doing quiet load-bearing work, and the work is harder to do without it.
What reverence asks for is structurally hard: pay attention to things that did not require your attention to exist. The forest does not need you to revere it. The tradition does not need you to revere it. The child whose existence preceded yours does not need you to revere her. The reverence is not for them. It is for the kind of person it makes you, which is the kind of person who can be trusted, eventually, with power. The unreverent person handles fragile things like a child handles a music box — pulling, prying, opening to see what is inside, and discovering only afterward that the music will no longer play.
Find one thing today — a tree, an old book, a building older than your grandparents, a piece of music written by someone now dead — and look at it for two minutes without making a joke. Notice what your nervous system wants to do at the ninety-second mark. The discomfort is the muscle. The muscle is what wants strengthening.