We are all familiar with the concept of hubris. The vice of excessive self-confidence and ambition which, by inducing a form of blindness in the sufferer, inevitably leads to their downfall. That hubris, at least understood this way, lies at the heart of today’s ideological left, is self-evident. If you assert, with absolute conviction, that you can change the climate, fashion a perfect world, or even erase biological facts you are clearly transgressing limits all sane people recognise, risking disaster in the time-honoured way.

The classical Greeks had a different conception of hubris.