Benjamin Franklin, who made a methodical, lifelong effort to curb his excessive
if justifiable pride, confessed near the end of his days that he was successful
only in quelling the appearance of it, not the reality, and “even if I could
conceive that I had completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my
humility.”
“Franklin’s dilemma,” writes David J. Bobb in Humility:
An Unlikely Biography of America’s Greatest Virtue, “is America’s dilemma.” How to be great and humble? Bobb, the director of the
Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Studies in D.C., believes
not only that “‘American
humility’ is not an oxymoron,” but that it is actually our country’s greatest
virtue. He argues in his book, however, that as a nation today we have lost
touch with both our humility and our greatness. We are afflicted with an
arrogance that hinders a revival of that greatness, and we must search our past
for lessons in humility to guide us forward.
The book begins by sketching the history of humility and greatness in
political thought from Aristotle to the Founding Fathers, who had vastly different ideas of the
quality. For the leading thinkers of ancient Greece and Rome, who
celebrated the great-souled or magnanimous man, pride was “the crown of
virtues” and a humble existence was by definition an ignoble one. Why crown the
lowly?
Centuries later, St. Augustine of Hippo sought to close this gulf between the
great and the humble by positing that pride pushes man away from God, and that,
in Bobb’s words, “humility alone offers the possibility of real exaltation.” Jesus,
crucified on what Augustine called “the wood of humility,” had elevated the
humble and the meek, and St. Bernard of Clairvaux would later list the four
cardinal virtues as “humility, humility, humility, humility.” The Christian version
of the magnanimous man was a self-effacing servant.
Then St. Thomas Aquinas fused classical and Christian, Aristotle and Augustine
by arguing that magnanimity and the “praiseworthy abasement” of humility are
complementary, not contradictory, virtues. Later, Machiavelli’s and Hobbes’ influential
political treatises rejected the debate altogether in favor of amoral
expediency and sovereign absolutism, respectively. The Founders subsequently rejected
them and returned to valuing humility
as an essential characteristic of true greatness.
The book then looks to America’s early history to illuminate her present, examining
five subjects – George Washington, James Madison, Abigail Adams, Abraham
Lincoln, and Frederick Douglass – who Bobb believes demonstrated that “humility
and magnanimity can coexist in the same soul.” Their examples also show that
“the hidden strength of humility” does not come naturally but is often a
hard-won virtue.
Washington’s impatience for greatness, for example, led him to early
failures, and he continued to wrestle with his ambition and pride, particularly
since the American Cincinnatus was heralded almost as a demigod during his
lifetime. But when offered the position of king, he humbly and wisely rejected a
temptation that would have rendered the American experiment stillborn.
Ultimately, his “boldness and magnanimity,” as minister Henry Holcombe said in
a sermon after Washington’s death, were “equaled by nothing but his modesty and
humility.”
The diminutive, soft-spoken James Madison possessed none of Washington’s
physical charisma. But this “luminous and discriminating mind,” as Thomas
Jefferson described him, embodied a quiet strength (Bobb calls it meekness,
which he oddly defines as “the strong denial of the power of oppression”) in
his fight for freedom of conscience against the “arrogant pretension” of the
state. Bobb calls Madison’s petition to the Virginia Assembly, “Memorial and
Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments,” a passionate appeal to the
government to adopt greater intellectual, religious, and political humility.
The book moves on to Abigail Adams, a “spirited behind-the-scenes stateswoman”
who was humble in her service to family and fellow countrymen: “For myself I
have little ambition or pride; for my husband I freely own I have much.” That service
included reining in what Madison described as her husband’s “extravagant self-importance,”
which John Adams himself conceded was a fault. He confessed in his diary that
if only he could “conquer my natural pride and self-conceit… [and] acquire that
meekness and humility which are the sure mark and characters of a great and
generous soul… How happy should I then be in the favor and good will of all
honest men and the sure prospect of a happy immortality!” Early on in their
relationship, he rightly saw modest Abigail as the antidote to his arrogance.
Humility turns finally to Lincoln’s friend, orator
and autobiographer Frederick Douglass. Praising the former slave’s “humility in
the midst of humiliation” as Douglass first endured slavery, then resisted it,
then tirelessly worked toward its abolition as a free man, Bobb writes that “the
arrogance of those who wished to break Frederick was no match for his
combination of healthy pride in himself and humility before his mission.” As
with Lincoln, Douglass’ view of greatness of soul included an empowering and humbling
religious devotion.
The book opens promisingly, with its overview of the evolving idea of
humility and greatness. And the historical profiles are instructive and
possibly even inspirational. But where Humility
disappoints is in the absence of any discussion about the present. In the
opening pages Bobb refers only briefly to “our fame-addled and power-hungry
existence today” in which “arrogance is rewarded and humility is ignored”; and
two sentences later, somewhat redundantly, “narcissistic displays of arrogance
abound in every arena of life, while acts of humility go unnoticed and
unheralded.” That is the full extent of the book’s focus on “our age of
arrogance,” apart from the cautionary suggestion that America’s empire is
beginning to mirror Rome’s just
before its fall. Considering that Bobb’s thesis is that the challenge of our time “is how to
rediscover humility,” I would have expected the concluding chapter to elaborate
upon that, on why it is so, and on ways to address it. I don’t dispute the
validity of Bobb’s points about the toxicity of arrogance today and our need
for political and cultural leaders who manifest Aquinas’ balance of magnanimity
and humility; the topic simply deserves a fuller exploration.
Augustine wrote of “the
power and excellence of humility, an excellence which makes it soar above all
the summits of this world, which sway in their temporal instability,
overtopping them all with an eminence not arrogated by human pride, but granted
by divine grace.” Economic turmoil, foreign
policy debacles, military downsizing, and dwindling international respect have
humbled—or perhaps more properly, humiliated—America plenty in recent years,
so Humility’s plea to recover our “greatest virtue” seems less
urgent than reclaiming a healthy pride in our exceptionalism. The right balance
of both may be just the spark to enable us to soar again to preeminence.
(This article originally appeared here in the February 2014 issue of The New Criterion)
