Handbook of Humility

Theory, Research, and Applications

Everett L. Worthington Jr., Don E. Davis, Joshua N. Hook, Everett L. Worthington Jr., Don E. Davis, Joshua N. Hook

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317337157
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

The Handbook of Humility is the first scholarly book to bring together authors from psychology as well as other fields to address what we know and don't know about humility. Authors review the existing research in this burgeoning field that has well over 100 empirical articles and an increasing trajectory of publication. This work should form the basis for research in humility for many years.

In this book, chapters address definitions of humility that guide research. Authors also reflect on the practical applications of humility research within the areas they reviewed. The book informs people who study humility scientifically, but it is also an exceptional guide for psychotherapists, philosophers, religious and community leaders, politicians, educated lay people, and those who would like to fuel an informed reflection on how humility might make interactions more civil in relationships, organizations, communities, political processes, and national and international relations.

Part I

Theory, Definitions, and Measurement

1

Humility as a Moral Virtue

Jeffrie G. Murphy

I have spent most of my academic career writing on the philosophy of punishment and related issues such as mercy and forgiveness. So when I was asked to contribute an essay to a volume on humility, I was surprised at being asked and unsure that I could bring to bear my own scholarly expertise and focus to the topic. After some reflection, however, I came to think that many of the things that I find morally deplorable about America’s so-called system of criminal justice (Murphy, 2014) can in part be explained by a lack of humility, and so I was drawn to considering humility in more depth and in a context not limited in scope to criminal law.

Humility is a complex concept that cries out for interdisciplinary inquiry. Psychology and the brain sciences have much to teach us about what can be learned through controlled empirical inquiry, but I think that the humanities have much of value to teach us about humility as well. This, at any rate, will be my assumption in what follows as I bring to bear both philosophy and imaginative literature as sources of illumination on the topic.

Unlike scientists, philosophers tend not to open their discussions with a formal definition of the concept in question, since a central part of their inquiry is to understand the concept in all its messy detail. A definition of sorts might emerge at the close of their inquiry, but to start with one risks (to use Herbert Hart’s fine phrase) “uniformity at the price of distortion” (Hart, 1994, p. 38).

One thing that philosophers tend to do, as a part of their conceptual analysis, is to draw distinctions. Indeed, one of my first philosophy teachers said that the drawing of distinctions is the occupational disease—perhaps even the occupation—of philosophers, so I will begin by suggesting that several different things can be meant by “humility” and that different conceptions of the value of humility will depend upon which sense of “humility” one has in mind. I will here have space to draw just one distinction—a distinction between a kind of degraded humility that most of us now deplore and a kind of admirable humility that will be the primary object of my inquiry in this essay. There are those who have contempt for humility and it is very likely that what I have called the degraded kind is what they have in mind.

Uriah Heep: Humility as Behavioral Servility

Consider, as one example of humility, the kind of humility embodied in the character of Uriah Heep in Charles Dickens’s novel David Copperfield. Most current readers of this novel find Heep, in his fawning and manipulative claims of being “’umble,” loathsome—a man who gives them the creeps. His kind of humility certainly does not make him a decent person—indeed, quite the contrary—and he certainly would not be used as an example of humility by those who claim that humility is a virtue.

Of course, there are those who would like to see humility as an unambiguous virtue and always use the word “humility” as an honorific designation. They will say that Heep is not truly humble at all, that he is simply faking humility for his own advantage and that it is a misuse of language by him and others to call him humble.

I think that this move is too quick and a mistake. In highly class divided societies people of lower social orders will be expected to be extremely deferential and even obsequious to their “betters” and will be criticized—or even dismissed from service—for lacking what will be called (with, given the norms of the day, no misuse of language) appropriate humility. This is a behavioral and not an internal conception of humility. Heep, given his lower class origins, in this sense really does truly regard himself as humble; and he is in fact humble in this behavioral sense. What he has learned, alas, is that his kind of humility—a humility that causes him to seethe with resentment at those with class power over him—can lull his “betters” into a false sense of security to such a degree that he can manipulate and steal from them. He captures this very well as he describes what he was taught as humility in his childhood and “education”:

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; and mother, she was likewise brought up at a public, sort of charitable, establishment. They taught us all a great deal of ’umbleness—not much else that I know of, from morning to night. 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!… . ‘Be ’umble, Uriah’ says father to me, ‘and you will get on. It was what was always being dinned into you and me at school; and it’s what goes down best. Be ’umble,’ says father, ‘and you’ll do!’ And really it ain’t done bad!

(Dickens, 1983, p. 639)

When made more fully aware of Heep’s background and the way in which this background has formed his personality, many people will become less harsh in their judgments of him, and may even come to pity him. They will at least think that simply describing him as loathsome does not do justice to the moral complexity of his character and situation.

Humility as a Cluster Virtue

My view is that it is a different and morally valuable kind of humility that allows us to revise the hasty negative judgments we are initially inclined to make about people such as Heep and to scale back the suffering, if any, we may think they deserve. I will suggest that this humility involves three main aspects: attention, a strong sense of the role that luck has played in one’s own life, and empathy or compassion. Since each of these aspects can be regarded as themselves virtues, I am inclined to view humility as what might be called a “cluster virtue”—a virtue to be analyzed as composed of all three of these. They can, of course, bleed into each other, but I think it is useful at the outset to sharply distinguish them.

Immanuel Kant and Iris Murdoch

Before exploring these three virtues (by which I mean a trait that makes a person possessing it a better and more admirable person than if he did not), let me first indicate the philosophical framework that will guide my thinking about them and their relation to humility. This framework is essentially Kantian (with some assistance from Iris Murdoch, 1971) and will draw primarily on Kant’s thoughts expressed in his Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (1960) and his Doctrine of Virtue (1996). I have also been influenced by Jeanine Grenberg (2005) for both an excellent survey of the philosophical literature on humility and a rich discussion of Kant’s contribution to our understanding of that topic, and by Norvin Richards (1992) for the best general philosophical introduction to the topic of humility as a virtue.

Central to my largely (but not exclusively) Kantian account of humility is his doctrine of Radical Evil (Kant, 1960). Although the phrase “Radical Evil” is now generally used to refer to mass atrocities such as the Holocaust, this is not Kant’s usage. By “Radical Evil” Kant means a depravity inherent in all human nature. Such evil is, in essence, the unavoidable tendency within all human beings to subordinate morality to the demands of what Kant calls “the dear self.”

I do not think that by the phrase “the dear self” Kant means merely ordinary selfishness of a kind that seeks to promote the welfare or happiness of the person engaging in the conduct itself—although this is certainly a part of it. I believe he would also include those who act, even at considerable cost to personal happiness and well-being in the ordinary sense, out of loyalty to evil principles—a Nazi soldier, for example, who remains at his post that is under attack from Allied forces and willingly suffers painful wounds and ultimately death to make sure that a final trainload of Jews is sent on its way to the extermination camp at Auschwitz. This is still an act corrupted by the “dear self,” however, since it represents an act of a self (a self of evil although principled desires) that has chosen to follow its own desires without properly subjecting those desires to appropriate moral scrutiny and having them vetoed on the basis of such scrutiny.

Such Radical Evil can never be totally overcome by human beings (it is a kind of secular equivalent to a doctrine of original sin without the bizarre notion of inherited guilt), but its impact can be constrained to some degree by the three virtues constitutive of humility that I noted earlier. Let me now briefly explore each of these.

Attention

One of the most moving passages in Shakespeare’s King Lear, at least for me, is when old Lear—suffering on the storm-tossed heath the torments of lost status, abandonment by family, hunger, and bitter cold—has an epiphany of self-transformation when he notices (for the first time in his life) the suffering of others, sees an equality with them, and seeks to assist them in the small ways he still has available to him. He says to his Fool (1997, p. 298):

In, boy, go first—You houseless poverty—

Nay, get thee in. I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep.

Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en

Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,

That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,

And show the heavens more just.

(Act III, Scene 4)

Being aware only of his status and power as king, Lear had previously never even noticed those around him as people of a moral worth and dignity equal to his own. If he paid any attention to them at all, it was only to see them as useful for his amusement or service—to see them, in Kant’s language, as means only and never as ends in themselves.

The philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, influenced by Simone Weil, made the concept of attention central in her analysis of morality. By speaking of attention, Murdoch did not mean simply superficially noticing other people as bodies to be ordered around, ignored, or even mistreated—depending on one’s whims of the moment—but attempting to see each person in depth and as sympathetically as possible. She refers to this kind of attention as just and loving attention, and gives a rich example of such attention in an often-quoted passage. She describes a mother, M, who initially feels hostility to her daughter-in-law, D, regarding her as lacking in refinement and dignity—pert, familiar, brusque, rude, tiresomely juvenile. But then:

Time passes, and it could be that M settles down with a hardened sense of grievance and a fixed picture of D… . However, the M of the example is an intelligent and well-intentioned person, capable of self-criticism, capable of giving careful and just attention to an object which confronts her. M tells herself: “I am old-fashioned and conventional. I may be prejudiced and narrow-minded. I may be snobbish. I am certainly jealous. Let me look again.” Here I assume that M observes D or at least reflects deliberately about D, until gradually her vision of D alters… . D is discovered to be not vulgar but refreshingly simple, not undignified but spontaneous, not noisy but gay, not tiresomely juvenile but delightfully youthful, and so on.

(Murdoch, 1971, p. 17)

Of course this attempt to see in a good light what appear to be a person’s bad qualities will not always work. The person’s qualities may really be bad. But to at least try is an important kind of humility—to have as one’s primary disposition an attempt to see others at their best and not at their worst. We would all welcome this applied by others to our own case, and the world would be better—less hard and cruel—if this disposition became common. Not everyone possesses this disposition of just and loving attention, of course, but I think it is a virtuous trait in those who have it (as Lear came to have it) and is one that those who do not have should at least attempt to acquire. How one might make such an attempt will be discussed later in this essay.

Recognition of Luck

There is often deep insight in clichés, and one such insight is to be found in “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” Many people who have attained a certain level of success and happiness in their lives—money, status, professional, or athletic accomplishments, etc.—have a tendency to overestimate their level of actual desert for these accomplishments and thus fail to see the role played in them by what John Rawls called “luck on the natural and social lottery” (Rawls, 1971, pp. 74–75). The circumstances of one’s natural genetic endowment, upbringing, and education; the fact that important mentors gave their favors to them rather than others; and many other factors over which these people had no control played a significant role in what they have accomplished. This does not mean that they should take no legitimate pride in what they have done with the hand they were dealt, but an awareness of all this good luck should make them avoid taking excessive pride in their accomplishments and have the insight and modesty to give thanks for the good fortune that helped to make them possible.

Many such people, however, not only feel no gratitude for their good fortune but come to think that their status or accomplishments make them somehow better as human beings than ordinary people. As the recent scandalous behavior of successful athletes illustrates, they may come to feel a special sense of entitlement to do things that mere mortals should not be allowed to do. And the larger celebrity-worshiping society itself, alas, often gives them a pass on their behavior. Even within the academic and business and legal worlds we often find this attitude present in those of great fame and accomplishment—not universal by any means, but more prevalent than it should be.

One of the worst ways in which such a self-perception of entitlement can manifest itself is the presence of a smug sense of such purity and superiority that such people begin to hold others who are poor or who have done wrong (such as Uriah Heep) in total contempt, happily accepting for them suffering out of all proportion to what—all things considered—they actually deserve. We see this in America in the attitude of many people toward those who are poor or who have committed crimes—dismissing the former as nothing but “welfare chislers” and advocating (or at least being totally indifferent to) excessive punishments or unspeakable prison conditions for the latter as no more than what they deserve.

Finally, it is all too common for those who have not done certain wrongs to feel an unjustified certainty that they are righteous and thus can hold in utter contempt those who have fallen. If one seeks to persuade them to soften their harshness by reminding them of Jesus’s counsel to “let him who is without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her” (John 8:7), they will simply respond “but I am without sin with respect to the kind of sin found in drug dealers, rapists, torturers, and murderers so it is perfectly OK for me to cast the stones.” They say this without any consideration of the possibility that, had they had the opportunity and the temptation, they might have done things just as bad, and that it is not for nothing that the Lord’s Prayer contains the plea “Lead us not into temptation.” They are rather like those who, never having been in battle or endured torture, smugly condemn as “cowards” or “traitors” those who run from battle or who cooperate with the enemy under torture.

Consider as an example of descent from virtue into depravity the confession of Doctor Miranda in Ariel Dorfman’s powerful play Death and the Maiden. Miranda had for many years been a conscientious physician and family man—a generally kind person. He was then asked to serve as a physician for interrogation sessions under the dictatorial regime then in power. (We are to imagine that this is Chile under Pinochet.) His role is to make sure that the interrogation is not so severe that those being interrogated will be rendered incapable of cooperation or even killed. Since it was not really possible to refuse such a request under the regime in power, he agreed and thought that his task was consistent with his rol...