It is easy, reading history, to take arrogance to be natural. Colonialism, the destruction of indigenous peoples and native information is pictured as -- the way everybody with power behaved, until possibly our open minded times -- except for Hitler, everybody's favorite exception. In his book Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, Jack Weatherford pictures an empire which somehow avoided arrogance, and thereby produced a cultural flowering of which the Western Renaissance was a sort of mild aftershock. This message is very important for philosophers, because the philosophic tradition began in the west with Socrates, the great puncturer of arrogance. We have always claimed that something powerful could be built on modesty. Weatherford's book provides some reason to believe that.
Weatherford speaks at Macalester May 19 in the Weyerhaeuser Chapel, 1600 Grand Ave., St. Paul. 7:30.