Radical Humility

Essays on Ordinary Acts

Rebekah Modrak, Jamie Lausch Vander Broek

• Publisher: Belt Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781953368126
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Social Philosophy

This innovative essay collection explores the personal and civic function of humility from a range of popular and scholarly perspectives.

What does humility mean and why does it matter in an age of golden escalators and billionaire entrepreneurs? How can the cultivation of humility empower us to see success in failure, to fight against injustice, to stretch beyond our usual ways of thinking, and to foster a culture of listening in an age of digital shouting? With contributions from renowned scholars as well as psychologists, artists, and many others, Radical Humility: Essays on Ordinary Acts offers guidance. Having witnessed the personal and civic costs of narcissism and arrogance, these and other writers consider humility as a valuable process—a state of being—with the power to impact institutions, systems, families, and individuals, and give voice to the ways in which humility is practiced in many ordinary but extraordinary actions.

This groundbreaking collection should find a place in the library of anyone seeking alternatives to a culture of self-aggrandizing excess.

Contributors: Aaron Ahuvia, Russell Belk, Charles M. Blow, Richard C. Boothman, Agnes Callard, Lynette Clemetson, Tyler Denmead, Nadia Danienta, Mickey Duzyj, Kevin Em, Eranda Jayawickreme, Kevin Hamilton, Eranda Jayawickreme, Troy Jollimore, Melissa Koenig, Aric Rindfleisch, Valerie Tiberius, and Ami Walsh.

as a new way of being in the world

FREE YOURSELF BY CHOOSING THE PLAIN CRACKERS

Rebekah Modrak

I left Ann Arbor to spend five weeks in the small town of Aurora, Nebraska, happily fleeing an increasingly self-absorbed university culture that seemed to be remaking itself to conform to a corporate model.

My work as an art professor had meant playing in the garden of revelation. For many years, the voices of my advisors and colleagues spoke of meaning. Tell us what you learned from making that artwork? What ideas are you exploring? Why are they significant? How are they connected to the world? Dean Bryan Rogers would refer to us as “creative critters,” as though we fiercely sniffed out our environments with curious snouts. “Get into trouble,” he’d say.

And then he retired and, suddenly, the word from on high spoke “visibility.” My first encounter with the question—“How are you visible?”—baffled me to the point of almost answering, “Can’t you see me? I’m right here beside you.” Are you making yourself visible? How can you become more visible? These new questions encouraged us to think of ourselves as branded commodities and compelled us to incessantly self-monitor. We were learning to be shining examples of what Andrew Ross refers to as the convergence of academics and entrepreneurial cultures.

We had a new Visibility Committee.

We stopped exhibiting paintings and prints in the public, informal spaces of our art building (too messy and “uncurated”) and, instead, administrators commissioned mural-sized photos of professors, posed in the act of working, with any actual artworks as background. Cursory questions caption each image, cementing our affiliation with entrepreneurial buzzwords like “community,” and asserting the usefulness of art and design to “improve the quality of our lives.” We artists are now branded as leaders driving relevant, urgent “creative research.” If critic Bill Deresiewicz were to witness this display, he might ruefully comment that, “Things have value in the market insofar as they are useful.” In the self-promotion ethos, I am no longer Rebekah. I’m a walking monitor of self-projection laden with the baggage of others’ insecurities.

To be clear, I’m in favor of the idea that people, and/or their work, should be seen, heard, understood, and celebrated. We shouldn’t work in isolation. We should think about context and distribution. But now, visibility alone seems to be the guiding factor. Colleagues presenting to the faculty for review no longer describe their work process, their ideas, their discoveries, and their challenges. They list conferences or titles of exhibitions and papers. They show images of themselves giving talks without describing the substance of the talk. Our school hosts “boaster” sessions with other schools, mixers that begin with a round of one-minute introductions, conducive to declarative statements about our own importance.

The atmosphere changed from frolicking to fear. Some creatures, even creative critters, respond to fear with behavior meant to make our animal selves appear larger than we really are. In the animal world, it’s called threat display. We were becoming Australian lizards fanning the frills on either side of our heads. Since some feel more visible when they can make others less so, this leads to other perversions, to bullying, belittling, and abuse of power.

With support from a university grant, I put this culture in my rear-view mirror that June and headed to Nebraska with my family to ask farmers about their labor. Our destination: a five-week residency on a farm. The series of interviews had started in Michigan and grew out of my artwork Re Made Co., which presents as an online artisanal plunger company to parody actual company Best Made Co.’s $350 striped bespoke axes, titled with names like the Black Donald American Felling Axe. Wealthy New Yorkers hang these fetishes over their mantels, as if to make visible a connection with manual labor. When Best Made’s attorneys sent me a cease and desist saying that I was stealing “their work,” it seemed only logical to recreate the legal document from the perspective of workers with the legitimate right to own manual labor.

I listened to carpenters, custodians, construction workers, landscapers, and farmers, mostly surprised at being asked to talk about their work, accustomed to people caring about the products of their labor rather than the laborer, but willing to put their work into words. At Grain Place Farms in Aurora, Mike Herman told me:

Nobody’s ever asked me about physical labor before. It was just a given. That’s what you did. What do you discuss about physical labor? So that just kind of threw me for a little bit there and I go, okay, I’m not sure where this is going but we’ll find out.

When folks in Aurora heard I was interviewing farmers, several said: “Talk to farmer Ned.” “Ned’s the best farmer. Make sure you talk with him.” At the third recommendation, I asked, “What makes Ned such a good farmer?” Does he know special methods for crop rotation? Does he have innovative methods of pest control?

“He’s humble.”

Humble.

Humble.

A word I had never heard discussed at my university.

Farmers think in year-long increments, through 365 days of preparation, planting, cultivating, and harvesting, but weather has the final say in any plan. Every farmer had a story.

Mim who started the Country Lavender Farm:

I planted three thousand lavender plants by hand, weeded, trimmed, and harvested by hand. Then the winter kill two thousand plants. Anything that survived the winter kill had their leaves sucked off by a tornado.

Mike at Grain Place:

Last year we got hailed out. Lost all the barley. The corn and the popcorn was at such a stage that it would come back, was young enough. I had to replant all my soybeans.

I asked Mike, “How long did it hail?”

Minutes. You’re talking frozen water falling from the sky and you add a little wind with that, and it’ll just shear everything off. The corn, which was four- to six-leaf stage, was just a little nubbins out there.

The best farmer is adaptive. She knows that any of a hundred variables is more powerful than herself. She accepts that and adapts. She’s contemplating three options or directions before the hailstones stop falling.

My family and I stayed at an art residency on a former farm, in a grain elevator, perched atop an old two-story barn. We showed up at every town barbeque and pancake breakfast advertised in the Aurora News Register. Eating BBQ pork sandwiches in the Aurora town square, we chatted with the husband and wife who sat at our picnic table. They asked us about the residency, told us stories about local history, and, when he left to talk with neighbors and we asked more questions, the woman shyly mentioned that her husband was the mayor.

At a pancake and sausage breakfast hosted by the Aurora Municipal Airport the following weekend, we watched circles of batter squirt onto the griddle by the dozens and listened to a father tell us sweet stories about his son’s cycling adventures. He headed out and a farmer leaned over and whispered, “That’s one of our state senators.” Everybody seemed willing to leave the room without our knowing their title, rank, and status, that is, without being visible.

I don’t claim rural Nebraska as the center of virtuous behavior. In running one of the few organic farms in the area, farmer Mike has to reckon with pesticide drift from neighboring conventional farms that strip their own soil of nutrients and poison the land with fertilizer and solvents, even as they co-opt the language of ecology. In his words:

There’s a lot of conventional farmers associating themselves with sustainable activity. They’ve changed the definition of what sustainable is to meet their needs. So, therefore, what’s important in the sustainable aspect is that they continue to do what they’re doing. It’s sustainable. Whereas, in our definition, it’s sustaining the Earth, the big picture. Not the little picture.

There’s much to say for the life we live when visibility isn’t a main concern, when you can leave a room without disclosing anything about yourself, when you can accept yourself as an ordinary, adaptable figure in the midst of more powerful, indiscriminate forces.

Being in Aurora, Nebraska returned me to the obliviousness to status that defined the first thirty years of my life. Growing up in Pittsburgh, having exactly what we needed and no more was a financial reality but also a personal and political stance. The first payment for the house we moved into when I was four left no money for lightbulbs and we lived by the house’s available light for several weeks. We had no tv, few possessions, and sparse used furnishings. Exactly what we needed and no more is why I still remember the Hostess chocolate cupcake with vanilla swirls that my mother bought my sister and me from the hardware store on the corner, on a swelteringly hot day, as we waited for a bus that never seemed to come. It’s why I remember the conversation about snobbism my father had with me midway through my fifth grade year, after some friends started to talk about Chic jeans, then to wear Chic jeans, and I reluctantly and shamefully brought up the question to my parents. In truth, even the idea of the jeans was a burden—a smokescreen in a world otherwise fully occupied by things that mattered: play, work, music, people, and relationships. It was a relief to have that first flame of visibility and status deftly extinguished by my parents, to recoup from this social tornado and find new friends who didn’t think to talk about jeans.

There’s something to be said for being pleased with the choice of four kinds of crackers at the Aurora Mall, the family-run business that serves as grocery, hardware, toy, and office supply store in Aurora, Nebraska. Ritz crackers, Triscuits, graham crackers, or NutThins.

In Ann Arbor, we have Cauliflower Crackers (sea salt, nacho, and cheddar), Butternut Squash Crackers (sea salt, parmesan), Grain-Free (sea salt, everything, and pizza), Sweet Butter Crackers, Crispy Cornbread Crackers, Flatbread Crisps, Brown Rice Snaps (unsalted, toasted onion, vegetable, and black sesame), Savory Rice Thins, Melba Toasts (whole wheat, sesame, classic), Buckwheat Crispbreads, Chestnut Crispbreads, Quinoa Crispbreads, Rosemary Sourdough Crackers, Carr’s Crackers (water, cheese melts, whole wheat, and cracked pepper), Stone Wheat, Briton Crackers, Cabaret Crisp and Buttery Crackers, Bruschettini (cracker pepper, garlic and parsley, black and green olives, and rosemary and olive oil), Moon Cheese Crackers, Parmesan Cheese Crisps, Asiago and Pepper Jack Cheese Crisps, Ak-Mat Crackers, Aged Cheddar Beer Crackers, Oyster Crackers, Wasa (whole grain, multi-grain, and crisp-n-light), and RyVita Sesame Rye Crispbread.

Six by ten feet of crackers. In one store.

Ann Arbor excesses had inched up on me, made possible—for the first time in forty years—by the unfamiliar presence of disposable income. The first time I shopped for food in Aurora, I thought “there’s nothing here.” No organic grapes, local yogurt, wild-caught salmon, or real bagels. Within weeks, I came to love the ease of shopping in Aurora, grabbing the NutThins and spending no more time than that wondering what kind of cracker would be just right for me. The store said, “This is what we have. You can be happy with this.” I felt lighter.

I dreaded returning home to the aisle of spelt, crisp bread, and cracked pepper crackers and the arms race of status directing us to external meaning and increasingly rarified objects. I listened to a rancher describe fighting the Keystone pipeline, drank dandelion wine with new friends, and walked through a restored prairie with fantastically large cow pies. I felt true joy from the sensation of the cool public pool water calming the chigger bites on my legs. And I exited a lot of rooms without caring whether or not I was visible.

ESCAPING THE GRAVITATIONAL PULL OF THE SELF

Jennifer Cole Wright

Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness…it is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth.

—David Foster Wallace

As David Foster Wallace rightly noted in a celebrated 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, each of us experiences ourselves as standing, psychologically speaking, at the center of a universe. That is to say, we each experience ourselves as the “organizing center” of a consciousness that feels woven together into the form of a life. Our life.

We experience that life as real and substantial, as something to be lived, equipped with the drive to fulfill basic needs and to pursue goals and values that we experience as worthwhile and meaningful. It seems only natural, then, that in a world filled with needs and desires, it is our own needs and desires that press most strongly in upon us, demanding our attention. And in a world filled with beliefs, values, goals, and ideals, it is our own that strike us as the most attractive and compelling, the most true and worthy of commitment and pursuit.

It is ...