Humility and Truth
On listening, intellectual humility, and the moral foundations of bourgeois life
I cannot conceive the necessity for God to love me. . . . But I can easily imagine that he loves that perspective of creation which can only be seen from the point where I am . . . . I must withdraw so that he may see it.
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1942), p. 41
According to one standard English translation of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, the humble person “in respect of that which is his own ought to subject himself to every neighbor, in respect of that which the latter has of God’s.”[1] It’s a cloudy sentence, and not any clearer in the Latin. But it seems in context to mean merely this: we should respect in other people what God, after all, has created. To scorn listening to others is to commit the chief theological sin against the Holy Spirit, pride. The sparks of perfection in people are to be esteemed, “that we may know the things that are given to us by God,” as St. Paul put it.[2] Or, as St. Augustine wrote—also quoted approvingly by Aquinas—“We must not esteem by pretending to esteem, but should really think it possible for another person to have something that is hidden to us and whereby he is better than we are.”
The founding Quaker, George Fox urged us to listen quietly, and “answer the witness of God in every man, whether they are the heathen . . . or . . . do profess Christ.”[3] Father Peter Maurin was described by Dorothy Day after his death in 1949 as “truly humble of heart, and loving. . . . He. . . saw all others around him as God saw them. In other words, he saw Christ in them.”[4] And Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in 2002, since the point is not merely Christian, writes: “Truth on the ground is multiple, partial. . . . Each person, culture and language has part of it. . . . The [Jewish] sages said, `Who is wise? One who learns from all men.’”[5]
To put it academically and economically, humility enjoins listening to one’s colleagues for the sake of Truth’s message in them. Shut up and learn something. The wisdom books of the Hebrew Bible are full of such advice, as in the proverbs of Solomon:
Wise men lay up knowledge, but the babbling of a fool brings ruin near (Proverbs 10: 14).
He who belittles his neighbor lacks sense, but a man of understanding remains silent (11:12).
If one gives answer before he hears, it is his folly and shame (18:13).
Or Jesus son of Sirach: “The tongue of man is his fall . . . . But if thou love to hear, thou shalt receive understanding” (13, 33). “Some people without brains,” says the Scarecrow in the movie of The Wizard of Oz, “do an awful lot of talking.” Harry Truman, I have noted, defined an expert as “someone who doesn’t want to learn anything new.” Such pride is the opposite of humility, the humility to listen and learn.
The philosopher Amélie Oksenberg Rorty once described the habit of intellectual humility, rare among academics eager to speak and reluctant to listen. What is crucial is
our ability to engage in continuous conversation, testing one another, discovering our hidden presumptions, changing our minds because we have listened to the voices of our fellows. Lunatics also change their minds, but their minds change with the tides of the moon and not because they have listened, really listened, to their friends’ questions and objections.[6]
Humility is part of the cardinal virtue of Temperance, which in turn is the internal balance essential for a good life. Humility, said Aquinas, answers among the Christian virtues to the pagan virtue of Great-Souledness, which Aristotle the pagan teacher of aristocrats admired so much. To be humble is to temper one’s passions in pursuing as Aquinas put it “boni ardui,” goods difficult of achievement. To be great-souled, which in turn is part of the cardinal virtue of Courage, is to keep working towards such goods nonetheless.[7]
We appear to need both. Think of the balance of Hope and Temperance, and in particular the balance of Great-souledness and Humility, necessary to sustain good work in science and scholarship; or in sports or crafts; or in any difficult good. Your high-school driving instructor said, “Aim high in steering.” Words to live by, the great-souledness. But the skepticism of humility is also needed, to listen to the hints of the highway. If we are not to end in foolishness, or in the ditch, we need to aim high and also to listen, really listen.
The goods difficult of achievement must to be “goods” in the non-economic sense in order for humility and great-souledness in pursuing them to be ethical. Scholarly excellence in understanding actual economies, for example, or the use of one’s wealth in proper stewardship, are good goods, and proper objects therefore of a paired humility and great-souledness in their pursuit. Scholarly excellence in understanding imaginary economies, or wealth used in projects of gluttony, are not such goods. It is not surprising to find people bound up in such bad goods exhibiting an idiotic pride and lack of temperance. They sin boldly, but do not believe in or rejoice in Christ, or any other good Good. Humility would resist such presumption, as Aquinas’ Christian version of great-souledness resists despair.[8]
To be prideful in the bad, unchristian, boyish sense is to will to defy God, which is to say to make oneself the object of striving, a very god, violating the first through fourth commandments. God is God, said the commandments, not little moi: Sh’ma Yisrael adonai elohaynu adonai echad, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord.
Thus Lucifer, who even when he was light-bearer among the angels was not given to humble listening, is described in Paradise Lost:
he of the first,
If not the first archangel, great in power, 660
In favor and pre-eminence, yet fraught
With envy against the Son of God, that day
Honored by his great Father, and proclaimed
Messiah King anointed, could not bear
Through pride that sight, and thought himself impaired. 665
Deep malice thence conceiving and disdain.[9]
“Impaired” turns on the usual sort of Miltonic ambiguity. Lucifer thinks, that is, falsely imagines, himself to be a “pair” with Christ, thus “impaired,” but immediately the reader is surprised to see that Lucifer thinks himself impaired, that is, damaged. And Lucifer thinks himself into actual damage, indeed “conceives,” that is, generates, himself, by way of the double meaning of “conceive” = “think up” and “conceive” = “create a child.” He could not “bear,” that is give birth to, the sight of Christ; he was fraught with, that is, bearing, envy, coming “through” the master sin, pride.
Such word games seem impossibly cute. But that was how Milton worked.[10] For example the number of the last line, 666, known in numerology as the Devil’s number, is exactly where Lucifer becomes Satan (Hebrew “enemy”). The year 1666 was a culmination of disasters for Restoration England, a plague year (1665) followed by the Great Fire (1666). But it was a year of triumph for Milton the Puritan and embittered Cromwellite, who in it appears to have finished the first editions of Paradise Lost (published 1667) and Paradise Regained, though blind. Michael Lieb points out to me that 999 is important, too, the line in Book 9 of Adam’s Fall in Paradise Lost. It is the result of turning upside down that 666, again the number of the beast (Revelations 13:18) . From Milton’s viewpoint one could say that 666 + 999 = 1665, the beginning of apostate England’s well-deserved troubles.
Satan in Milton is a great speaker, and no humble listener, which has led Romantics such as Blake and Goethe to imagine that Milton was of Satan’s party. But he is utterly incapable of shutting up and learning anything, as Milton shows most clearly in the Satan-Christ colloquies in Paradise Regained. His pride is the opposite of a proper humility that could balance his undoubted great-souledness.
The theologian Stephen Pope emphasizes that “Humility should not be confused with humiliating self-abnegation before others.”[11] “Some strands of Christian piety and theology,” writes another theologian, Ellen Charry, “suspect that enjoying life is somehow impious.” She notes that humility as interpreted by medieval monasticism—”because of poor theological education of monastics”—”was interpreted as requiring self-abnegation.”[12]
St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) never learned to write—she would dictate as many as three texts simultaneous to three scribes, in the style of St. Thomas—but became a diplomat in the chaotic Italy of the Schism and was proclaimed at last a Doctor of the Church. She starved to death at the age that Jesus was crucified by insisting on eating nothing but the eucharist. Dorothy Day said that reading a hagiography of St. Catherine inspired her to her own life of radical abstention in the name of Christ. The outcome, Charry notes, “looks to many of us like defiant pride rather than obedient humility. Humility, perhaps now the most despised of Christian virtues, is, nevertheless, essential to happiness.” But in Catherine “we see how easily it slips over into pride.”[13] Simone Weil, too, in her proud self-abnegation seems like a more literate version of St. Catherine.
But Weil declares in her notebooks that “Humility is the refusal to exist outside God,” as she so refused. “It is the queen of virtues.”[14] But as Thomas Merton put it, “Humility is a virtue, not a neurosis. . . . A humility that freezes our being and frustrates all healthy activity is not humility at all, but a disguised form of pride.”[15] That’s Satan’s repeated error. He thinks humility before God is self-abnegation, and a prideful Self is his little god. Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven, says he. No, Satan, wrong again. Humility is seen erroneously as the opposite of a world-enjoying spirit. Satan thinks of it as merely an inconvenience to the questing will. Confusion about humility is widespread. If you are a candidate for the priesthood in the Episcopal church you will fear that your “discernment committee” assigned to test your calling will turn out to be itself a site of envy and pride, engaging in hazing under a demand that you be “humble.”
What may be bothering Satan is the feminine quality of humility. Feminist theologians such as Valerie Saiving, Judith Vaughan, and Rosemary Ruether have been observing for decades that humility has a womanly cast, and that the corresponding sin of excess against the spirit is precisely self-abnegation—as Saiving put it in 1960, “triviality, distractability, and diffuseness; lack of an organizing center or focus; dependence on others for one’s own self definition; . . . in short, underdevelopment or negation of the self.”[16] It is a point that John Stuart Mill made in his feminist blast of 1869: “I believe that equality of rights would abate the exaggerated self-abnegation which is the present artificial ideal of feminine character.”[17] Excess in self-abnegation is to humility as excess in pride is to great-souledness. Together the two virtues balance and complete each other. On their own, without the other, they are not virtues at all, but rather the characteristic female sin against the spirit and the characteristic male one.
True humility is not undignified. Uriah Heep is most umble, but of course has merely the semblance of the virtue. He esteems, or more accurately feigns to esteem, only rank. That is undignified. “But how little you think of the rightful umbleness of a person in my station, Master Copperfield! Father and me was both brought up at a foundation school for boys. . . They taught us all a deal of umbleness. . . . We was to be umble to this person, and umble to that; and to pull off our caps here, and to make bows there; and always to know our place, and abase ourselves before our betters. And we had such a lot of betters!”[18]
True humility on the contrary is democratic, looking for the best in people, and often finding it. In theological terms, it is to answer the witness of God in any other person, whether he is the heathen or does profess Christ. Uriah does not honor the God’s Truth in the least high-ranking of us, which is to say that he embodies the error that rank and truth are identical. He defers unreflectively to rank. In similar fashion, to give examples from the Theory of Prudence, misled “Austrian” economists will defer unreflectively to, say, Ludwig von Mises or misled M.I.T. neoclassical economists to Paul Anthony Samuelson. Like a bad scientist, Uriah does not listen, really listen to anybody or anything.
In his Autobiography Benjamin Franklin makes a characteristic joke about the matter, noting of humility “I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue; but I had a good deal with regard to the appearance of it.”[19] Yet in fact—a point which applies to most of his self-descriptions, and is part of his craftiness in appearing umble—he understated his ethical achievement here. The mature Franklin was well-known as never giving an answer before he had heard out the other person. He acted as though he had read and taken careful note of the medieval motto, Listen even to the other side.
In an age of orators Franklin was a listener. In the Constitutional Convention he hardly spoke, not out of pusillanimous fear of failure—this diligent printer had stood before kings, and had all the great-souledness a man could require—but out of a proper and habitual humility towards his fellows. To be humble in this sense, from the Christian and doubtless other perspectives, is merely to have a decent respect to the opinions of humankind, because other men and women sometimes reveal God’s Own Truth. As Iris Murdoch expressed it in 1967, “Humility is not a peculiar habit of self-effacement, rather like having an inaudible voice. It is selfless respect for reality and one of the most difficult and central of all virtues.”[20]
A striking example in my own experience—I myself cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue—is the late Don Lavoie (1951-2001), a professor of economics at George Mason University. His very name reflects it: officially “Don,” in French-Canadian style, not the full Hibernian Donald, which means in Old Irish “world ruler”; and was indeed once my own name.
He was humble, a most startling quality in a profession not known for showing it. When a physicist some time ago attended a conference about economics and chaos theory he remarked that he had once thought that physicists were the most arrogant academics around.[21] Lavoie was not umble. His respect for the opinions of humankind was not deference to mere rank. He was a democrat, small-d. He embodied the great-souledness that Aquinas viewed as paired with humility. He ventured on great, hopeful projects, such as bringing the humanities to economics, seriously, or bringing the computer to economics and to its teaching, seriously. He satisfied the Aquinian definitions of a humble and great-souled venturer, being a Christian with a telos of approach to God.
“The good man,” writes Murdoch, “is humble; he is very unlike the neo-Kantian Lucifer. . . . Only rarely does one meet somebody in whom [humility] positively shines, in whom one apprehends with amazement the absence of the anxious avaricious tentacles of the self.”[22] Murdoch points out that humility is one of the chief virtues in a good artist and in a good scientist. In his Justice as Translation the legal scholar James Boyd White put it in terms of humble reading, “a willingness to learn the other’s language and to undergo the changes we know that will entail.”[23]
Among the contending schools of economic science there is one which does at least theoretically recommend humility, listening, really listening, scientifically speaking—not certainly the Marxism I started with; nor the Harvard neoclassical economics I was trained in; nor the Chicago-School economics I then practiced; but the NYU-Auburn-George-Mason-University Austrian economics that Lavoie discovered young as a student of computer science and improved in his work. Austrian economists are the free-market followers of the literal, ethnic Austrians Menger (1840-1921), Mises (1881-1973), and Hayek (1899-1992). They have now for about a century been explaining to us other economists that the economic scientist cannot expect to outguess the businessperson.
We should listen to the mystery of entrepreneurship, the Austrians say, not airily assume as my fellow neoclassicals tend to do that nothing whatever is to be gained by actually talking to economic “agents,” because after all such “agents” are completely determined by such-and-such a Max U model. As a non-economist professor at the business school of the University of Chicago put it to me once, the neoclassicals, especially at Chicago, believe a contradiction: that everyone is rational; and that everyone who doesn’t believe so is an idiot.
I said Lavoie improved Austrian economics, and this is one way he did it, by oncovering a hermeneutics in economics, and by listening for the hermeneutics inside the actual economy itself. Hermeneutics is the listening side of a speaking rhetoric, as Lavoie said.[24] It is the art of understanding what you have listened to—really listened to, an art of close listening. Austrian economics is the natural home for a humanistic approach to the economy, which acknowledges, as economics after Smith mainly has not, that humans are speaking and listening and interpreting animals. Smith believed that the propensity to truck and barter was based on the faculty of reason—so much for Max U and the Reason half of the Enlightenment project. But he added, and believed, “and the faculty of speech,” which is the other, Freedom half, ignored after his death.[25]
The habit of listening, really listening in Lavoie’s academic life was strictly paralleled, that is, by his belief that hermeneutics worked also in the economy. Adam Smith was again wiser than his followers. Smith’s butcher and baker are not merely Max-U folk who treat the rest of the world as a lamentable constraint on their own willfulness, a sort of vending machine, as I said.[26] A person in business depends on an imaginative engagement with the customers and suppliers, to guess what they are thinking, to see the witness in them. The Quakers were good businesspeople. The rigorously humble Amish are well-known as brilliant farmers, within their self-imposed constraints of no tractors and no electricity. An alert businesswoman “subjects herself to every neighbor.” She listens and learns from other people and from the world, through that selfless respect for reality. The businesswoman’s goods are difficult of achievement, requiring great-souledness, but depend also on listening to what people want and the world will allow.
The business section of the Chicago Tribune has a feature on Mondays called “My Biggest Mistake,” in which managers of small businesses confess to this or that expensive failure to answer the witness of reality: not listening to customers here; not listening to employees there. It is hard to imagine a similar column in a publication directed at the clerisy: “My biggest scientific mistake” running an experiment on oxidative phosphorylation or “my biggest artistic mistake” wrapping a building in cellophane. The clerisy chooses never to stoop. Considering the allegedly modern temptations to pride in capitalist enterprise it will seems odd to say so, but Lavoie believed, as I do, that a capitalist at her pretty-good best is humble. McDonald’s offers a humble meal for working people at half-an-hour’s minimum wages. WalMart listens closely to what its customers want.
* * * *
A proud, modern, secular member of the clerisy, on the contrary, declares that he can get along without such stuff, and scorns the humility of religion, or of capitalism. But he accepts the cornucopia of a capitalist society. And he is himself in thrall to a faithful or hopeful vision of, say, Art or Science or Progress or Hap or even merely to his proud self-image as the Village Atheist: “I thank whatever gods may be/ For my unconquerable soul.”
“The man who has made his choice in favor of a profane life,” noted Mercea Eliade in 1957, “never succeeds in completely doing away with religious behavior. . . . [E]ven the most desacralized existence still preserves traces of a religious valorization of the world.”[27] Humans symbolize, and symbolizing entails hope and faith. The atheist treats as sacred the scenes of his youth, the graves of his ancestors, the loves of his life, the blessed hope for his career, for his science, for his family. “The issue between secularists and believers,” writes J. Budziszewski, “is not whether to have faith in a god, or faith in something other than a god; it is whether to have faith in this or that kind of god.”[28]
H. L. Mencken admired in himself and in Joseph Conrad and in Theodore Dreiser—at least in Dreiser’s more aristocratic moods—the “ability to look into the blackness steadily.” He detected backsliding on this matter even in his hero Nietzsche, who
shrinking from the horror of that abyss of negation, revived the Pythagorean concept of der ewigen Wiederkunft [the eternal recurrence]—a vain and blood-curdling sort of comfort. To it, after a while, he added explanations almost Christian—a whole repertoire of whys and wherefores, aims and goals, aspirations and significances.[29]
Theodore Dreiser, too, labored sometimes under “the burden of a believing mind,” lapsing into “imbecile sentimentalities.” He was after all “the Indiana peasant.”[30]
Such a pose is dissected by Murdoch:
The atmosphere is invigorating and tends to produce self-satisfaction in the reader, who feels himself to be a member of an elite, addressed by another one. Contempt for the ordinary human condition, together with a conviction of personal salvation, saves the writer from real pessimism. His gloom is superficial and conceals real elation.[31]
Mencken admitted as much. He was cheerful even after his major stroke in 1949, which left this great writer penless. In 1922 he had declared himself the happiest of men, elated to live in a nation so filled with boobs, clowns, morons, and Methodists—”the Ku Klux Klan was, to all intents and purposes, simply the secular arm of the Methodist Church”—that he could earn a comfortable living making fun of them.[32]
The agnostic and especially the atheist, unaware of the god he believes, is as uncritical in his faith as a Sicilian widow lighting a candle before a statue of the Virgin. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., had been annealed in the fires of the Civil War. He was seriously wounded three times, and saw his best friend die. Before the war he had been a devout and peaceable Emersonian, an abolitionist who joined up on principle. In the War he lost his principles, adopting instead a hard faith of Mere Duty. No God for him—except the Romantic H*ms*lf of the stoic materialist. “The faith is true and adorable,” he wrote in “A Soldier’s Faith,” delivered on Memorial Day in 1895 “which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has no notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.” Small comfort the words must have been to the widows and orphans in attendance. But Holmes was a hard man.
The mere, eloquent assertion of his Faith was as far as Holmes could get in defending it. “Truly courageous persons,” Daryl Koehn argues, “do not fight to death simply because ordered to do so. . . . They consider whether a . . . situation demands such a stance.”[33] But Holmes did not consider ethics to be a matter of consideration. He did not bring a theology to bear, no repertoire of whys and wherefores, aims and goals, aspirations and significances. Theologies are denied to the non-faithful by their faiths.
Yet note the title, “A Soldier’s Faith,” thirty years after the War, and listen to the religious words pouring out. The man who with Captain Holmes has known “the blue line of fire at the dead angle of Spotsylvania. . . [knows] that man has in him that unspeakable something which makes him capable of a miracle, able to lift himself by the might of his own soul, unaided, able to face annihilation for a blind belief.”[34] While sick with dysentery behind the lines at Fredericksburg a younger Holmes wrote to his mother with what was already a mixture of an aristocratic and a shadowy Christian view: “it’s odd how indifferent one gets to the sight of death—perhaps because one gets aristocratic and don’t value much a common life— Then they are apt to be so dirty it seems natural—’Dust to dust’.”[35] Holmes planned his last words: “Have faith and pursue the unknown end.”
So likewise the Nobel laureate in physics and learned theologian Stephen Weinberg accepts invitations to appear on television to attack the very notion of God. He defends his own god, Physics, against the heresies of relativism and postmodernism professed over in the departments of English and sociology, about which, thank God, he is innocent. Weinberg has no need for the hypothesis of a Jehovah. Not for him, this proud physicist, humility before what Kant called the two most astonishing facts, astonishing after thinking about them for a lifetime: “the starry skies above [compare Vincent] and the moral universe within.”[36]
No religion. No theology. No transcendent. No love or faith or hope. The abyss of negation. How glorious and brave.
The text above is an excerpt from The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, the first volume of Deirdre McCloskey’s trilogy on the ethical and historical origins of modern prosperity.
[1] Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, c. 1270, IIa IIae, q. 161, a. 3, “I answer that . . .,” quoted in Pope, “Overview,” in Pope, “Overview,”, 2002, p. 45
[2] 1 Cor. 2:12, quoted by Aquinas, and himself quoted in Pope, “Overview,” 2002, p. 45.
[3] Quoted in Brinton, Friends, 1964, p. 36.
[4] Day, June 1949, in Day 1983, p. 124.
[5] Sacks, Dignity of Difference, 2002, p. 64f.
[6] A. Rorty, “Experiments in Philosophic Genre,” 1983, p. 562
[7] IIa IIae, q. 161, a. 1, quoted in Houser in Pope, ed., Ethics of Aquinas, 2002, p. 311.
[8] Sweeney in Pope, ed., Ethics of Aquinas, 2002, p. 163.
[9] Milton, Paradise Lost, 1667, V, 656-666.
[10] Fish, How Milton Works, 2001.
[11] Pope, “Overview,” in Pope, ed., Ethics of Aquinas, 2002, p. 45; Comte-Sponville cannot get this, or any other Christian virtue, right: On the Virtues, 1996, pp. 140-148.
[12] Charry, “Happiness,” 2004, p. 24.
[13] Charry, “Happiness,” 2004, p. 25.
[14] Weil, Gravity and Grace, 1942, p. 40, in a chapter entitled “Self-Effacement.”
[15] Merton, Thoughts, 1956, p. 55.
[16] Saiving, “Human Situation,” 1960, p. 109.
[17] Mill, Subjection of Women, 1969, Chp. 2, p. 41.
[18] Dickens, David Copperfield, 1850, Chp. 39.
[19] Franklin, Autobiography, 1771-1784, p. 159.
[20] Murdoch, “Sovereignty of Good,” 1967, p. 95.
[21] Richard Palmer, quoted in Pool, “Strange Bedfellows,” 1989, p. 700. Compare Cicero, De divinatione, II.xiii. 30, “physicus, quo genere nihil adrogantius.“ Palmer and Cicero, did not perhaps know any professor of surgery.
[22] Murdoch, “Sovereignty of Good,” 1967, p. 103
[23] J. B. White, Justice as Translation, 1989, p. 42. Our mutual acquaintance Richard Posner does not know how to read this way. See my review of White’s book, a book by Stanley Fish, and a book by Posner, McCloskey, “Essential Rhetoric of Law,” 1991.
[24] Lavoie, ed., Economics and Hermeneutics, 1992, in his “Introduction.”
[25] Smith, Wealth, 1776, Chp. 2 of Part I, second paragraph, p. 25.
[26] Fleischacker, “Economics and the Ordinary Person,” 2004.
[27] Eliade, Sacred and Profane, 1957, p. 23.
[28] Budziszewski, ‘Religion and Civic Culture,” 1992, p. 52.
[29] Mencken, “Theodore Dreiser,” 1916, p. 49.
[30] Mencken, “Theodore Dreiser,” 1916, p. 51.
[31] Murdoch, “’God’ and ‘Good’,” 1969, p. 50.
[32] Mencken, “On Being an American,” 1922, p. 19 and throughout. Compare Mark Twain in Following the Equator (1897), motto to Chp. XXVIII, quoted from Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar, Century Magazine: “Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.”
[33] Koehn, “Virtue Ethics,” 2005, p. 535.
[34] Holmes, “Address,” 1895, p. 266.
[35] Quoted in Alschuler, Law Without Values, 2000, p. 43.
[36] Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 1788, “Conclusion.”