Humility, much like life itself, is a treacherous maze.
On one hand, we don’t want to view ourselves with self-loathing. What kind of lame-o (fun American epithet) would go through their decades of existence on this crazy planet of ours and never come to terms with who they are. Not me, that’s for sure! No, seriously though, I want to stand in front of a mirror and say, “I like such and such thing about myself,” and for that to feel perfectly acceptable. Or with some quirk I have, to enjoy it and say, “I’m really glad I do/think this.” The problem is that we all tend to veer off into self-absorption, and nobody likes a prick, now do they?
Nothing is more attractive than humility, and nothing is more unattractive than pride. Someone who is humble is self-aware, which is worlds apart from self-absorbed. In fact, we are drawn to people who are self-aware. A self-aware person may realize they have a talent most people in the room don’t share, but they also understand the context of why that’s true. They know that every desirable trait comes with a trade-off. They are equally aware of what they have and what they don’t have. They know that if they have a special gifting, they probably lack something else, unless they’re flippin’ Leonardo da Vinci. That guy could do it all.
Humble people know any human feat comes with a lot of luck, with a lot of stars aligning. It awes me to no end to see someone demonstrate a near god-like knowledge or ability that I hadn’t even known they possess. It’s very un-American to do that. We Americans just plunk our cards onto the table. We’re often bombastic and averse to subtlety (unlike the ‘b’ in subtlety, it’s very subtle), whereas Europeans can be so annoyingly mysterious. A German, for instance, might apologize for not having better English, but then it will emerge that they hold a deeper understanding of the mechanics of the English language than we could ever hope to have, along with fluency in at least three other languages. But then we Americans gave the world Scrabble, and that’s not nothing. A gentleman by the name of Alfred Butts invented it, during the Great Depression when money was hard to come by. You can check Mr. Butts’ story out for yourself if you are so inclined.
Once when an old friend of mine was training to become a pilot, I was having dinner at his house and we were discussing it. His dad happened to be there, too, and he made a joke–at his son’s expense, really. He posed the question: “How do you know when there’s a pilot in the room?” Then looking at his son out of the corner of his eye, in a slightly non-self-aware manner, he delivered the punchline: “They’ll tell you.” He had a point. I still feel incriminated to this day, although I have never even once pretended to be a pilot. Rather, I know that when I speak to you about some topics, I’ll exhaust the extent of my knowledge or ability in fifteen seconds, rather than building up to it. Sorry about that! I promise to work on it.
I read a book by a Buddhist monk who said we stay humble by remembering that we’re all interconnected and we’re all equally mortal. Each passing day brings us that much nearer to the day of our death. All of us. And we all die alone. How’s that for a bit of uplift on a Monday? We struggle into the world alone, and we shall also struggle out alone. You’ve got to walk that lonesome valley/you’ve got to walk it by yourself. Thus our lives are bookended by suffering, by crushing, poignant suffering that is more than any mortal should have to bear, let alone billions of us. It should make us all more compassionate toward each other.
And you’d think it would. Make us more compassionate. Knowing we are all finite mortals who could easily keel over this very day at the drop of a hat, you’d think it would. It behooves us (which is a semi-archaic expression that can also be written behoves us) to be less judgmental, less competitive, and ultimately less proud.
That doesn’t mean we can’t have a little healthy swagger. Humility doesn’t have to cancel out swagger, and in fact swagger can be endearing, in small doses, though Elon Musk probably overdoes it. His main achievement was becoming the world’s most memorable man-child, a difficult feat given today’s crowded field of contenders. Yes, yes, electric car corporations and clean energy and all that, but let’s not forget that he, as the man who controls more money than any other individual in history, bought the votes needed to elect a squat ogre with a front-butt as president, the latter being an individual I don’t necessarily hate, I just see the role of volunteer parking attendant for a mid-sized town’s summer parade as a better fit for him than US president. That said, some pretty strange people have occupied the office in the past. Anyway, that’s sort of off topic. Back to legitimate swagger, you know who really deserves to swagger? People who can parallel park an electric car, or a chip-oil car, or any car really. I find it oddly impressive to watch them look into their rearview, doff their hair suavely, and then coolly navigate into spaces nobody else even attempts. That way they spend less time searching for parking spaces and walking to their appointments. Something like that, if you swagger about that, you’ve earned it. I respect good parallel-parkers with just the right amount of swagger, if you want to know the truth.
Humility also doesn’t cancel out dignity. Dignity is different from arrogance. Every time we meet another person, we set out our stall. We greet them, in subtle ways (at least if you’re European), announcing to them our vision of reality. That’s not pride, that’s dignity. That’s bearing the image of the Divine faithfully, to the best of our current understanding as to how it should be borne.
I agree with the idea humility is linked to understanding universal mortality. On the other side of the coin there’s a link to the arrogant person thinking or kidding themselves about their own mortality. This may be why the very religious in Abrahamic religions are often so arrogant.
Canonical Christianity is seemingly obsessed with humility, but both Ayn Rand and Nietzsche saw in their eyes that it produced something very different. Rand thought the extreme demands – always forgiving others, putting the other not self first etc. – was not only immoral but impossible. Constant hypocrisy was inevitable. Nietzsche also considered it immoral, and he saw it hiding burning rage, envy and malice. He had the unfortunate experience I know too well of knowing it from the inside out and trying the doomed experiment.
I see humility as rational self interested behaviour. Often people who have been destroyed by life, whether due to canonical Christianity, their mother, their drug use or whatever aren’t humble – they’ve often allowed or had foisted on them a distorted negative position that is untrue – eg. that strangers and people close can mistreat them and they deserve this. They are down on themselves but this in my mind isn’t humility.
Humility is attractive to others to the extent that accurate self-assessment both requires a certain level of confidence (and that my life arc isn’t truly wrecked) and will lead to better outcomes.
Sun Tzu said those who know neither themselves or their enemy will always lose, if they know one they sometimes win, but if they know both they will always win. The overstatement could be painted as arrogance, but generally speaking the Chinaman has a good point.