Barney Zwartz

December 18, 2010

As the old country song says, it’s hard to be humble. Realising we’re not perfect in every way is a start, but there’s more to it than that.

IN 1880, a more religious age,  Punch magazine ran a delightful cartoon of a pompous bishop patronising a pageboy. He says: ”Who is it that sees and hears all we do, and before whom even I am as but a crushed worm?” The page tentatively suggests, ”The Missus, my Lord?” The proud prelate clearly did not see himself as a crushed worm, as the ”even I” proves. His apparent humility was really a form of condescension that the boy punctured.

Humility, properly understood (as the bishop did not), is perhaps the paramount Christian virtue, one the faithful are reminded of at this time of the year as they contemplate the remarkable claim that God himself took the form of a helpless infant.

Yet to the self-assertive culture of the modern West, humility – improperly understood – is contrasted with self-esteem and placed near the summit of the vices. Self-esteem is then presented as perhaps the paramount secular virtue, from which all blessings flow. These two attitudes are sometimes seen as mutually exclusive, with champions of the one deriding the other as providing a distorted picture of both self and society. In a post-Christian age, can humility be rescued to flourish alongside self-esteem as a desirable quality?

Enlightenment philosopher David Hume was chief prosecutor of humility, listing it with celibacy, fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial, silence and solitude as part of ”the whole train of monkish virtues [which are] everywhere rejected by men of good sense”.

Hume regarded humility as either real or pretended self-abasement, and didn’t like either. As Australian philosopher Brian Scarlett observes, there are two traditional objections to humility: that it exalts false belief – we think of ourselves as less than we are – and that, if taken seriously, it would paralyse us and render us incapable of doing good. An extreme version, Scarlett says, is the Rule of Benedict, followed by Benedictine monks. ”There are 12 degrees evidently. The seventh is that a monk should declare and sincerely believe that he is lower than all the others, which obviously can’t be true for all of them.”

In  David Copperfield, Charles Dickens provided us with the literary paradigm of the humility Hume despised in the character of Uriah Heep, the ever so ‘umble, hand-rubbing, black-clad, spindle-shanked personification of insincere self-effacement masking unpleasant ambition.

There is no doubt that Christians have fallen prey to this counterfeit humility, but it is far from their ideal – which has another personification, as St Paul tells us in the letter to the Philippians. He writes: ”Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (chapter 2:6-8, Authorised Version).

At the end of his life, too, Jesus was deliberately humble, ”a lamb to the slaughter” who did not defend himself or resist.

Jesuit theologian Bill Uren says there are justly admired secular counterparts. He cites Thomas More, jailed Chinese democracy activist Liu Xiaobo who recently won the Nobel peace prize, Burmese heroine Aung San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela as ”Christ-like figures who for their principles went to these extremes”.

”The thing to remember about humility is that it comes from the Latin humus, meaning ground. It’s someone who is grounded, has a proper esteem of their own worth and recognises that so much of it is gifted from God,” Uren says.

For Sydney Anglican Archbishop Peter Jensen, humility is the opposite of pride. ”Pride is the declaration of independence, of self-assertion, unwillingness to rely on God. Humility is therefore a humble dependence on God. It starts with our relationship with God himself,” he says.

Humility towards God expresses itself in humility towards others in two ways, he says. Firstly, it requires being other-centred rather than self-centred and, secondly, it recognises that we depend on each other – we should be willing to receive the gifts others bring us and also be willing to serve them with the gifts we have.

THIS links with proper self-esteem, because a psychologically healthy and balanced life does require a sense of one’s own worth and capacities, Jensen says. ”The connection with humility is that we learn self-esteem from others – we can’t manufacture it by telling ourselves we are wonderful. We learn on the faces of other people to value ourselves as we ought, and that will include rebuke as well as praise.”

Leading Australian philosopher Tony Coady sees humility as a form of realism, which involves recognition that we are not as uniquely important as we tend to believe. ”That doesn’t involve any self-loathing or self-abnegation, but recognising that whatever capacities and skills you have, others have more and better forms, and others again have quite different skills important for the human community.”

Coady, a Catholic, also defends self-esteem as containing an important truth. We need an accurate picture of our capacities, avoiding self-loathing, because misinterpreting our gifts by denigrating them is as bad as misinterpreting by overestimating them.

The ”enormous emphasis” on self-esteem counterbalances indoctrination to think of oneself as unworthy. ”Racism and sexism have had a very bad effect on people’s self-confidence. And some concepts of humility have worked in the interests of oppressive regimes, political or spiritual. They have been geared to people accepting an assigned status in society and accepting whatever the ruling power, social or political dictated. It’s not part of humility to be squashed down. Anything that makes people craven can’t be a genuine virtue.”

More than that, humility might be essential for human happiness. ”O Lord, it’s hard to be humble, when you’re perfect in every way,” sang country star Mac Davis. There is a strand of modern psychology, generally found in self-help books, that encourages us to see ourselves this way, but it is a long way from a healthy self-esteem, insists psychiatrist Patrick McGorry. The mental health expert and 2010 Australian of the Year is concerned at the modern focus on the self. ”That’s a different issue from self-esteem, which is a healthy concept. Lack of humility and lack of concerns for others isn’t just an individual trait, it’s the way society has gone,” McGorry says.

He criticises self-absorption as the besetting sin of the baby boomers. ”You see this with ageing hippies like myself. Our generation has been so self-preoccupied, whether it’s meditation or consumerism.” His cure, and the secret of happiness, is a focus outside self, be it family or caring for strangers. ”The idea of service may be old-fashioned, but it’s a good legacy and it’s alive and well.”

Psychiatrist Michael Dudley agrees happiness follows helping others rather than acquiring goods or focusing on one’s own conflicts, or the best possible psychological adjustment as advocated by self-help books. But Dudley, a senior lecturer in psychiatry at the University of NSW, goes a step further, suggesting spirituality is also essential. ”The notion of a healthy social and emotional life comes from a lot of things that give people a sense of who they are, so that some sort of spirituality is crucial to that, to give them a sense of value and of purpose and of connection to others,” he says.

HUMILITY is part of that – it links with mental health by not needing to be defensive or admired. ”Humility is to know one’s own value, to stand with people who are marginalised and to stand out against the crowd. It’s a deeply internalised sense of agency and purpose that really stands out when there’s something to be stood for.”

Catholic thinkers, with their historical affinity for Aristotle, are inclined to find humility in his ”golden mean”. They invoke the megalopsychia, or great-souled man, who is the golden mean between vanity and false modesty or pusillanimity. But Aristotle’s society did not esteem humility, and the great-souled man disqualifies himself by insisting on receiving all the recognition he is due. He could never be a modern sportsman, wittering on about ”the boys” (”the boys played well”, ”I’m just pleased for the boys”), for which the only thing to be said is that self-deprecation is better than self-aggrandisement.

Humility is the most paradoxical of virtues. It is constantly in danger of subverting itself and turning into its opposite, pride. You cannot discipline yourself by effort of will to be more humble, and as soon as you seek to recognise it in yourself you lose it, unlike courage or prudence or temperance.

Melbourne University philosopher Christopher Cordner is reluctant to call it a virtue at all, though it is certainly an excellence. ”A virtue sounds like something you can set yourself to develop, you can regard yourself as having improved because you’ve developed more of it,” Cordner says.

”I’m inclined to say it’s not something someone can be aware of in oneself. It’s a certain sort of self-forgetfulness, an attentiveness to what is not you. One can turn that into a poisonous project as well – ‘I am nothing’ – but that’s because once again the thought is about you.”

It seems humility may be becoming fashionable again. What 18th-century Anglican wit Sydney Smith said of man’s natural benevolence – ”A never sees B in distress without thinking that C ought to relieve him directly” – applies just as much to humility. If religion exhorts us to wish for others what we wish for ourselves, in this instance we should wish for ourselves what we wish for others.

Barney Zwartz is religion editor.

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/humbly-yours-20101217-190tk.html