Humility and Hubris
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My first impulse in trying to describe the essence and practice of humility was simply to say: Look at the current U.S. president and then think about his opposite in personality and behavior—that will pretty well define humility. My second impulse was to know that that wasn’t it, after all. Instead, my own first impulse shows how easy it is to step off the path of humility. For however true my first impulse might be, the very fact that I didn’t automatically consider my own considerable hubris as the opposite of humility, didn’t deal with the plank in my own eye before the mote in another’s eye (no matter how celebrated and big a mote that might be), reveals the challenge it is to receive the promise of humility.
I could have immediately thought of the examples I know of a few physicians who, once they leave the clinic and enter into community life with volunteer work and church membership, are insistent on not being known or called by the title of their profession. They make this choice not only because they don’t want anything to possibly detract from their mission, but also, and primarily, because this is how they see their core identity as one among many.
My instinct is too often to default to the other way, to indulge in the strong desire to elevate my false and immature sense of myself that is defined by status, achievement, the “likes” of people on social media and the desire to be in charge of my own legacy. I can readily be like the self-deluded man in the Bible story who prides himself on not being proud and showy like that other person. How deep can the roots of self-centeredness go? How mired do we become in that limited sense of self, focused on and forged in fear and scarcity, so fed these days by culture?The evidence is there in the fact that I can be in prison, and still be writing on attachment and longing for reputation.
Shedding hubris and becoming more clothed in humility, getting over ourselves for a better self, begins, ironically, with the stance that we take toward ourselves. To move beyond, we move into. If we rarely or ever truly question our life’s actions and inactions, isolating our inner selves from the influences and sight of others, then we have already given our selves over to hubris. Whatever we attain as a result will have diseased roots and will be short-lived.
However, a life with roots in humility, one that depends on the intimacy of relationships and is open to the guidance of others, is a life that opens doorways to cross into ways of being that are sustaining. It is as true now as it was in previous millennia that humility shows the way to disrupt the default of the dominant culture and its flawed definition of a good life.
It is important, though, to note how a false sense of humility can lead to disempowerment instead of strength and solidarity. It is hubris that elevates the isolated self, while humility elevates the communal. Once we adopt this covenantal reality that at our best we are each one among many, then we can see how humility may prompt some to step back, stay quiet, commit to serve as followers, while others step up and speak out and commit to serve as leaders. To know when it is best to do one or the other is a result of living a life that puts itself within the circle of a Greater Life. Which is another way of describing humility.
Prison is full of daily opportunities to lean into either hubris or humility. Becoming a number among so many other numbers can prompt reactions that lead us away from others, to elevate and think of ourselves as better than those around us even here. It can lead to patterns of fear, even fearing feelings themselves, which create an overblown sense of the self, since so much of institutional life denies it. But, especially for one with privileges of ethnicity and education and gender and sexual orientation, prison’s limits and leveling—even its unjust segregations and stresses and fears—can create opportunities to practice humility in life.
As those in recovery know, and as great spiritual traditions teach, humility is self-care. The unbalanced, driven self—both in being too exalting of self and in being too starving and depleted of self—is what the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions of AA describe as “constant in its unreasonable demands upon ourselves, upon others.” Humility grounds us. It is no surprise that the word’s etymology takes it back to the earth, our communal home, our one-and-the-same soulfulness with the land. No matter where we find ourselves in life physically and spiritually, in whatever status, life’s gift can be more than enough. As author and teacher Jill Filopovich wrote recently in a Time magazine column about those celebrities in many fields who have been exposed in the #MeToo movement, and who have lost positions, work and possibly more as a result of their actions, their futures may still teach them that “a quiet, kind life can be a good life.” That is humility’s promise in return for the hard work—for some of us especially—that it requires.
- Humility and Hubris - December 1, 2018
