A Careful Call for Humility

Sit down. Be humble. – Kendrick Lamar, “Humble”

Humility is a virtue, right? Many people think so. Many think: we should be mindful of our limitations. We should take care to keep in view the possibility that we could be wrong about our beliefs. We should attend to the ways that others have helped us to get where we are today. We should not overestimate our merits or accomplishments.

To put a finer point on things: perhaps humility is the lost virtue of our time, the crumbling mortar that could have held pluralistic liberal democracies together. When people aren’t humble, when they arrogantly pursue world-domination and self-aggrandizement or insist on their own visions of success without mindfulness of others’ views or the interconnectedness of all people… well, perhaps we’re being reminded of what can happen.

I think humility is a virtue, too, and a terribly (terrifyingly?) important one. But I also think we need to be careful about how we understand humility and how we celebrate it on a societal level.

Frederick Douglass wrote, in his autobiography The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1896):

I have met, at the south, many good, religious colored people who were under the delusion that God required them to submit to slavery and to wear their chains with meekness and humility. I could entertain no such nonsense as this.

The idea that slaves should humbly submit to slavery is anathema. It is moreover abominable to think that victims of gaslighting ought to humbly submit to those attacking their capacities, that victims of domestic violence should be humble about their deserving better treatment, or more generally that victims of harassment or discrimination on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, or race should humbly submit to oppressive conditions.

In Douglass’s world, calls for “humility” were a way of justifying and prolonging the unjust status quo. Calls for humility can still function that way today, and it’s not just racial oppression they can (still) prolong. In some – though far from all – Christian circles, women are specially encouraged to adopt a position of humility and submission before God but also their husbands. And Christianity is not the only possible culprit here (although perhaps the humility-celebrating religion is distinctively dangerous). An ascendant patriarchy means that women and girls should be wary of how “humility” is often linked with submission.

So… where to go from here? We shouldn’t just trumpet humility as the lost virtue of our time, as much as certain leaders and segments of society might need it. Indiscriminately celebrating “humility” would be to ignore the way that such celebrations can function as a tool of oppression, precisely abetting the schemes of the powerful. As I see things, there are three remaining options.

Option #1: Abandon “humility” talk as retrograde and oppressive. Think pre-Christian – think Aristotle! Or think post-Christian – think Nietzsche! Celebrate greatness and power and nobility and courage, and forget about humility as a genuine virtue.

Problem: humility is sometimes virtuous, and it does seem to be a particularly important virtue for pluralistic societies. I don’t want to live in a world of preening noblemen. I don’t want to live in a world of self-important jerks. The good people I’ve known – the really good people – have all been marked by the ability to listen to others, to put aside ego where necessary, to laugh at themselves. As dangerous as calls for humility can be, we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Option #2: Encourage humility, but not for oppressed or marginalized people. If “humility” was bad for slaves and women, well then maybe we should just ask other people to be humble.

Problem: intersectionality. Today’s victim is tomorrow’s oppressor. Sometimes you don’t even need the separation of time. Nussbaum, citing the work of historian Tanika Sarkar, suggests that British oppression of men in colonial India actually contributed to cruelty toward women and its toleration in Indian domestic life. “Nationalists turned inward, boosting the idea of male autonomy in the home as the one cherished zone of self- rule, ‘the last pure space left to a conquered people’.” (p. 7) This suggests that even oppressed people may need humility, since oppressed people relate to the world in other ways than as victims of oppression and are not themselves immune to the temptations of vicious self- importance and domination.

Option #3: Carefully reconsider what humility really is, in order to celebrate something that’s not going to be harmful or abet injustice.

Commonsense notions of “humility” are kind of a grab bag, and they can bake in a lot of qualities that are not (necessarily) valuable. We confuse humility with submission, with quietness, with being the kind of annoying conversationalist who can’t get to the point because they include so many prefaces about how what they’re saying is “just their opinion” and they “might be wrong.” None of this is particularly valuable, in general. There’s something valuable in the neighborhood of our commonsense conceptions, to be sure. But we need better, less confused and less easily exploitable ways of thinking about what humility really is.

Might I suggest Iris Murdoch as a muse? Murdoch has it that:

“Humility is a rare virtue and an unfashionable one and one which is often hard to discern. Only rarely does one meet somebody in whom it positively shines, in whom one apprehends with amazement the absence of the anxious avaricious tentacles of the self….The humble man, because he sees himself as nothing, can see other things as they are.” (Sovereignty of Good)

There’s a lot in that short passage. Humility is a rare virtue – it’s nothing so simple as not being a jerk, or adding “That’s just my personal opinion,” to everything controversial you say. Humility is also “often hard to discern,” and only rarely does it “positively shine.” We see here the idea, also echoed in C.S. Lewis, that humility has a kind of transparency. There’s nothing in particular a humble person is disposed to do or not do; there are no actions essential to the humble exemplar. Humility shows up in the way we do everything else.

How, in particular, does the humble person do everything else? In “the absence of the anxious avaricious tentacles of the self,” for Murdoch. Or, as I’ve put things in my academic work, in “freedom from prideful distraction by the ego.” Humility consists in the disposition to just get on with what matters in life, without tripping over worries about one’s own importance or status. It consists in the ability to focus on what one is doing or what one is hearing and to “see other things as they are,” because one’s gaze isn’t distorted by the desire to see oneself at the center of everything.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, being free from prideful distraction by one’s ego is compatible with standing up for oneself. There are occasions and contexts – like Frederick Douglass’s quest for abolition – when a concern for status is not distracting but instead centrally on-task. So humility, as I think about it, is compatible with fighting for one’s rights and refusing to submit to others.

And yet true humility, true freedom from prideful distraction by status and ego, doesn’t come for free. It’s as difficult as it is valuable, the work of a lifetime. Freedom from distraction by our egos would be good for each of us. Good for our society. We needn’t sit down. But we do need to try to become truly humble.

Picture Credit: Fermate