On Humility, Hubris, Hypocrisy and Insights from Human History
I’ve heard a lot about humility as of late, but I’ve noticed it is often invoked in a narrow, one-dimensional way.
Merriam-Webster defines humility as “freedom from pride or arrogance,” and “the quality or state of being humble.” Dictionary.com refers to humility as “the quality or condition of being humble; modest opinion or estimate of one's own importance, rank, etc.”
Those working definitions will suffice for our purposes here. My issue with how humility is deployed in popular culture and political discourse lies not in any issue with use of the term incommensurate with some definition supposed as definitive. Instead, I hear the value of humility championed but only in certain contexts, which seems suspect to me. I’ve noticed the practice of humility venerated but only reserved for veneration in instances that reinforce specific worldviews. Selective veneration and support for certain ways of conceptualizing the world need not be objectionable; however, I contend, it’s worth acknowledging when humility has been invoked with that effect and when it functions ideologically to prop up particular political perspectives. It’s worth thinking through when humility has been or might be upheld as a value informing decision making and political praxis avowed as wise despite that same advocacy for sociopolitical humility concealing (perhaps inadvertent) hubris or hypocrisy anathema to real wisdom.
The point here is not to repudiate any specific thinker or rebut any particular argument, which is why I’m discussing the issue generally. The aim is to unpack the seemingly suspect notion of humility you won’t be hard-pressed to come across. I hope to unpack the narrowly conceived value of humility, to examine some of the underlying assumptions that accompany its use and to explore how genuine humility might encourage us to do the opposite of what a superficial exaltation of humility suggests.
One-Dimensional and Ideological Use of Humility in Political Discourse
I’ve heard arguments for preservation of existing institutions – usually painted in broad strokes, without specifying institutions – justified on the grounds that attempts to transform those institutions or to displace them with other ways or relating would lack the humility required for successful human flourishing. Humility-as-argument in that vein operates as something like an overall prudent principle presupposed as an apropos guide for human behavior. The concern, from what I gather, has to do with the belief that we probably do not know enough to effectively alter what humans have already institutionalized – at least not without causing more harm or suffering.
Proponents of that position aren’t wrong to stress our lack of knowledge and foresight. My appreciation for pragmatic theory and practice also has me acknowledging that advocates for humility in the sense described above recognize there is something within (at least some of our) established institutions that works or functions well enough to reproduce society. Whether ongoing social reproduction also engenders amounts of harm and unhappiness we might deem unacceptable doesn’t usually factor into those assessments, however. Still, when we wish to highlight what’s wrong with the established order and argue for social change, it might help to better account for what about that order has appealed to and assuaged at least some people who in turn become skeptical about change.
In addition, advocating for humility with respect to existing institutions might also be predicated upon the assumption that our repeated ways of relating to each other and to the rest of the natural world work well enough to promote habitual propagation. That advocacy in some cases seems based on the idea that routinized social relations have hitherto brought about more harm than good, or that more good than harm is likely to result from maintaining arrangements as they are.
In such cases, it might in some sense be historically true that certain institutions in existence have previously provided a greater benefit than harm to humanity. But accepting that proposition implies we’re able to come to some semblance of consensus about what constitutes good and what amounts to harm. I tend to think there are areas of overlap and agreement on those subjects shared by all of our species, even if they’re sometimes difficult to parse out. Accepting the aforementioned proposition, though, also implies a clear enough understanding of how those institutions have functioned historically and how they operate at present, and I’m not convinced that comprehension is often present when the relevant claims are made.
But even in such cases I think it would behoove us all to exercise a little more humility in our assessments, especially if upon examination it becomes obvious certain institutions in question have enabled benefits to accrue disproportionately to some at the expense of others. A more modest take on the beneficence of institutionally-derived social or common good attentive to how given institutions harm many human beings, even as they buttress others, might be needed for an authentic exercise of humility.
Exercising that sort of authentic humility reminds us we’re not the only people who matter. In so doing, it checks the assumptions of superiority anathema to humility. It underscores that judgments about the desirability of retaining or displacing ways of doing things actually lack humility insofar as they do not take into account how others might be harmed by dominant, taken-for-granted practices. Calls for greater humility in public affairs are less likely to be discredited as thinly veiled arguments stemming from self-interest when all that’s taken into account.
Again, nuance with respect to what specific institutionalized behaviors and relations we refer to would also improve the logical, ethical and strategic clarity of those judgments. That is, if you’re willing to make such a sweeping statement suggesting we humans should all exercise greater humility so as not to overturn or interfere with what’s proved durable and possibly beneficial, then you should probably be willing to practice enough humility that you would in turn carefully consider the justifications (or lack thereof) for institutionalized relations and actions. Failure to do so more closely approximates hubris or hypocrisy (or both) than it does humility. Just assuming, sans any interrogation or investigation, that all or the majority of our institutions are justified and worth keeping intact because they’ve so far remained intact hardly reflects the “freedom from pride or arrogance” that really enacted humility implies.
Indeed, I’d argue it’s the height of hubris and antithesis to humility when someone assumes without careful consideration of available evidence that all or most of what the entirety of humanity experiences or endures is justified because it’s proven resistant to change. There’s an equation of endurance or resistance to change with what works and what presumably works well enough for us to keep doing it. Those are not the same. This isn’t an argument against tradition, though, as myriad traditions have undoubtedly enhanced likely untold human communities over the various epochs of our existence. Nevertheless, I will question the legitimacy of the presupposition that what exists is, and will continue to be, or will perpetually do good simply because it exists and has existed. Likewise, that notion is often accompanied by the assumption, rife with hubris, that what is will continually recreate the common good, regardless of changing people and contexts.
That brings me to another point. The world changes. Social relations do not remain stagnant. They constantly evolve, dissolve, take hold and transform. So do the people who do the relating in society (or societies). Already established institutions even impel such change. So to presume that in the midst of inevitably changing contexts what’s worked before will continue to work just because it has historically accomplished something is hardly an indicator of humility. It’s often borderline insanity, especially when evidence accumulates and demonstrates the fallibility of what we’ve created and cling to despite all the indicators the approach does not now produce desired or tolerable results.
Point being, professed and exalted humility as it pertains to enduring social arrangements remains one-dimensional and arguably doomed, arrogant and hypocritical if it does not include the humility needed to fathom when what we have done before no longer works. Humility as a concept becomes highly ideological when its vehement valuation works not to esteem what truly works best for all in practice but instead works insidiously to mask an extreme shortage of humility. Vocal proclamations and calls for more humility by those so professedly besotted with it too often omit or obscure how what’s supposedly worked so swimmingly has in reality benefited only some while contributing to immense harm for other human beings. Putative humility operating at the surface or ideological level precludes the deeper, authentic and encompassing humility that would remind us of our shortcomings while simultaneously recollecting the real history of humanity replete with ample examples of collective, self-conscious decisions to organize ourselves differently.
Humility in Historical Context
That brings me to my final point. For this I draw on a text I’ve cited before in articles for this newsletter. Tackling about a chapter per week, I spent several weeks reading through “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity,” by David Graeber, an anthropologist who died in September 2020 at age 59, a year before the book was published, and David Wengrow, an archaeologist at the University College London. I reference the text again here because the authors amassed examples that challenge the assumptions underpinning the one-dimensional view of humility.
As Graeber and Wengrow argued, too many historical accounts depict “our species as decidedly less thoughtful, less creative, less free than we actually turn out to have been,” and they tend not to accurately represent the history of our species as a “continual series of new ideas and innovations” produced by “different communities [who] made collective decisions about which technologies they saw fit to apply to everyday purposes, and which to keep confined to the domain of experimentation or ritual play.”1
Earlier in the book, Graeber and Wengrow posed an instructive question, opining while simultaneously inquiring, “If the very essence of our humanity consists of the fact that we are self-conscious political actors, and therefore capable of embracing a wide range of social arrangements, would that not mean human beings should actually have explored a wide range of social arrangements over the greater part of human history?”2 The answer, evidence suggests, is in the affirmative. The authors referred to patterns of life during the Paleolithic that people from that period purposefully changed based on the season, which gives us reason to believe “that from the very beginning, or at least as far back as we can trace such things, human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities.”3 As they also noted,
archeological evidence is piling up to suggest that in the highly seasonal environments of the last Ice Age, our remote ancestors were behaving much like the Inuit, Nambikwara or Crow. They shifted back and forth between alternative social arrangements, building monuments and then closing them down again, allowing the rise of authoritarian structures during certain times of year then dismantling them – all, it would seem, on the understanding that no particular social order was ever fixed or immutable.4
They continued, suggesting a long tradition of self-conscious determination of what institutions to maintain and what institutions to dispense with.
Just as it is reasonable to assume that Pleistocene mammoth hunters, moving back and forth between different seasonal forms of organization, must have developed a degree of political self-consciousness – to have thought about the relative merits of different ways of living with one another – so too the intricate web of cultural difference that came to characterize human societies after the end of the last Ice Age must surely have involved a degree of political introspection.5
Subsequently, during the Neolithic period, “inhabitants of England appear to have taken the measure of cereal-farming, and collectively decided to live another way.”6 The authors also refer to quite a few examples of “schismogenesis,” a process whereby one group of people consciously and deliberately creates a society and culture among themselves that differs appreciably from another observed society/culture. The Neolithic lifestyle, for instance, was coeval with alternative lifestyles in the steppe and upland regions of the Fertile Crescent characterized by large monuments and symbolism concerning male virility and aggression.7 But “the art and ritual of lowland settlements in the Euphrates and Jordan valleys presents women as co-creators of a distinct form of society – learned through the productive routines of cultivation, herding and village life – and celebrated by modeling and binding soft materials, such as clay or fibres, into symbolic forms.”8 Those contrasts, Graeber and Wengrow offer, could be yet another example “of mutual and self-conscious differentiation, or schismogenesis.”9
Other examples of schismogenesis and collective reflection upon and alteration of institutions abound throughout human history. Ancient Athens and Sparta were, in tandem, a schismogenesis exemplar, defining themselves largely in opposition to each other.10 Indigenous persons in what’s now called California and the indigenous along the Northwest Coast of North America engaged in a similar process of schismogenesis.11 The northern neighbors enslaved persons – up to a quarter of the overall population in the area – while the native Californian groups to the south (e.g. Yurok, Karuk, Hupa, Tolowa), with few exceptions, did not, likely because they didn’t like the consequences that unfolded along the Northwest Coast.12 Free persons on the Northwest Coast would not chop or carry wood publicly, while “Californian chiefs, by contrast, seem to have elevated these exact same activities into a solemn public duty, incorporating them into the core rituals of the sweat lodge.”13 The native Californians also came to consciously embody “puritanical manners” and put “extraordinary cultural emphasis on work and money,”14 in contrast to their neighbors up north.
To cite another example of self-conscious societal experimentation recalled in the text, Amazonian societies over thousands of years left “evidence of plant domestication and land management, but little commitment to agriculture.”15 The historical record of Amazonia reveals “people who possess all the requisite ecological skills to raise crops and livestock, but who nevertheless pull back from the threshold, maintaining a careful balancing act between forager (or better, perhaps, forester) and farmer.”16 There were early inhabitants of Amazonia who decided not to focus on domesticating plants and instead opted “for a more flexible kind of agroforestry.”17
There’s also the example of Cahokia, an area located in “an extensive floodplain along the Mississippi known as the American Bottom. It was a bounteous and fertile environment, ideal for growing maize, but still a challenging place to build a city since much of it was swampland, foggy and full of shallow pools.”18 I grew up in the greater St. Louis area in Southern Illinois, not far from where indigenous persons erected the famous Cahokia Mounds. Charles Dickens once visited the area and called it “an unbroken slough of black mud and water.”19 Ironically, as Graeber and Wengrow explained, “the metropolis of Cahokia was founded through its rulers’ ability to bring diverse populations together, often from across long distances,” yet “in the end the descendants of those people simply walked away.”20 (p. 469). The authors charted Cahokia’s trajectory:
Within a century of the initial urban explosion at Cahokia, in about AD 1150, a giant palisaded wall was built, though it only included some parts of the city and not others. This marked the beginning of a long and uneven process of war, destruction and depopulation. At first people seem to have fled the metropolis for the hinterlands, then ultimately abandoned the rural bottomlands entirely. This same process can be observed in many of the smaller Mississippian towns. Most appear to have begun as co-operative enterprises before becoming centralized around the cult of some royal line and receiving patronage from Cahokia. Then, over the course of a century or two, they emptied out (in much the same way as the Natchez Great Village was later to do, and possibly for much the same reasons, as subjects sought freer lives elsewhere) until finally being sacked, burned or simply deserted.21
Descendants of Cahokia, Graeber and Wengrow added, often framed migration “as implying the restructuring of an entire social order,” bringing together the forms of freedom the authors consider fundamental “into a single project of emancipation: to move away, to disobey and to build new social worlds.”22
And although there is no direct through line making this crystal clear or incontrovertible, Graeber and Wengrow go on to intimate that the lasting memory of whatever transpired at and around Cahokia and the concomitant collapse of the Mississippian world prompted subsequent rejection of that legacy and an evolution of indigenous politics. People quit building mounds and pyramids. They organized communities on principles vastly different from the stratified hierarchies reified at Cahokia, creating “small towns of a few hundred people, or at most 1,000 or 2,000, with egalitarian clan structures and communal council houses.”23 By the time the Jesuits arrived and confronted indigenous townships, like those of the Creek, they encountered the widespread practice of adults gathering to spend much of the day discussing “politics, in a spirit of rational debate, in conversations punctuated by the smoking of tobacco and drinking of caffeinated beverages”24 – institutions akin to the coffeehouses we associate with Enlightenment thinking in Europe.
What Graeber and Wengrow refer to as the “indigenous critique” regarding “the perceived failure of European societies to promote mutual aid and protect personal liberties,”25 appears to have exerted tremendous influence on Europeans. The critique, announced as the historical record attests, by “a multiplicity of [indigenous] American voices complaining about the competitiveness and selfishness of the French – and even more, perhaps, about their hostility to freedom,”26 might have emerged partly as a result of centuries of critical self-reflection following the fall of Cahokian hierarchy and the corresponding political changes. That historical knowledge and experience later undergirded persuasive arguments against the affront to fundamental freedoms and the subordinated values of social solidarity the aboriginal Americans saw inexplicably accepted by Europeans at the time of contact and ensuing conquest. Moreover, “our standard historical meta-narrative about the ambivalent progress of human civilization, where freedoms are lost as societies grow bigger and more complex,” Graeber and Wengrow insisted, “was invented largely for the purpose of neutralizing the threat of indigenous critique.”27
On occasion, I think we witness calls for greater humility functioning in similarly ideological fashion today. Our complex institutions, created and reproduced by human societies, are now rendered beyond reproach within these ideological frameworks on the supposition that it would be folly or arrogant for us even to contemplate how social life could be otherwise, let alone for us to use critical contemplation to inform action capable of bringing about better social relations. Yet, in my view, it’s not only arrogant to assume what we’ve created is flawless and foolproof. Making that assumption and taking a related position belies the rich human history of people having enough humility to understand when they’re going astray and when they’ve erred in the past. It ignores the historical record of those people then acting together to organize themselves and relate to each other in ways that differ from what’s been socially rebuked as abhorrent or just inadequate to meet everyone’s needs now.
When humility is trotted out with the intention of of eliding our history and, irrespective of intentionality, when it produces that outcome anyway, it militates against the exercise of human “freedom to shift and renegotiate social relations, either seasonally or permanently,”28 a freedom Graeber and Wengrow claimed fundamental, as well as arguably essential, to our humanity. You can remain wary of claims regarding our essence while still considering that capacity as, at minimum, an indispensable facet of our sociability responsible to some degree for the survival and relative well-being of the species. Due to duplicity or obliviousness to what humans have done for ages, those peculiar-yet-popular arguments for greater humility come with tacit instruction to forego the freedom that has proved so valuable throughout our history – a freedom suffused with the humility that assists us in acknowledging what we’ve done wrong and collectively deciding how to correct course. Those arguments entreat us to forsake a primordial, long-standing institution and tradition of evaluating, reinventing, upending and displacing less illustrious, ‘Johnny-come-lately’ institutions in the name of humility. To try to persuade people that abandoning a key feature of human freedom is somehow the essence of humility strikes me as the antithesis of the authentic humility truly helpful to human beings. Perhaps a little more humility among those attempting to do such persuading would aid in that recognition.
Endnotes
1. David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), 501.
2. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 86-87.
3. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 107.
4. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 111.
5. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 205-206.
6. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 106.
7. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 245.
8. Ibid.
9. ibid.
10. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 180.
11. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 202.
12. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 199-200.
13. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 200.
14. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 203.
15. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 268.
16. Ibid.
17. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 270.
18. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 464.
19. Quoted in Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 464.
20. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 469.
21. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 467.
22. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 469.
23. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 471.
24. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 473.
25. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 130.
26. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 40.
27. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 31-32.
28. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 398.