The Source of Humility

David Brooks, in his column for the NYT called “High-Five Nation”, waxes on about the loss of humility in today’s generation, without ever reaching into the actual nature of humility or its source and roots. Brooks had been listening to NPR and had heard a replay of a program that aired at the end of WWII, called “Command Performance”. He was impressed with the tenor of the program, which was far from self-congratulatory, and was summed up by the program host, Bing Crosby:

“All anybody can do is thank God it’s over. Today our deep down feeling is one of humility.”

As the column's title suggests, Brooks thinks that today an accomplishment as mammoth as winning such a global war would result in high-fives and self-aggrandizing arrogant smugness. Humility, he says, was part of the culture then. But cultural change since then eliminated humility in favor of self-worship:

“But that humility came under attack in the ensuing decades. Self-effacement became identified with conformity and self-repression. A different ethos came to the fore, which the sociologists call “expressive individualism.” Instead of being humble before God and history, moral salvation could be found through intimate contact with oneself and by exposing the beauty, the power and the divinity within.”

Here Brooks comes so close, but after contacting the surface of the subject, he caroms away, merely giving examples of current “immodesty” and then gratitude for the NPR peephole into the lost and nearly forgotten past.

There are some things that Brooks seems not to know or at least recall. There were, in fact, exuberant crowds jamming the streets in New York, and presumably other American cities. These demonstrations came close to the high-fives of today.

And the Greatest Generation which won the two wars, Pacific and European, was largely to blame for the loss of humility in the next (Baby Boomer) generation. When the war ended, procreation surged. And the offspring were reared in an opposite mindset from the way those in the Greatest Generation were reared.

Humility is rooted in the personal acknowledgement that the individual has a place in the hierarchy, and that place is not at the top. In the family hierarchy, children were taught “their place”, that respect is earned and that character is developed, a practice that would bring charges of child abuse today. In the cosmic hierarchy there was at the top a supreme creating being, to which even global leaders were subject.

But many of the children of the Greatest Generation were to become undisciplined under the new scientific rules of child rearing. They became the focus of the family’s goals, giving children everything that the parents never had. And worse, denying them nothing. It was only natural that those children should become convinced of an inflated value of their own self-worth; after all they were at the top of the hierarchy, showered with material things and effectively answerable to no-one. For many in this generation, the ”terrible two’s” lasted a lifetime. They were naturally “entitled”; they were “victims” of society; they were “morally authorized”. As young adults, they recognized no authority, except themselves. Their cultural values were sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll and Woodstock, coupled with "make me happy, it's my right".

Humility is the antithesis of hubris, of arrogance. Humility died off as a cultural value and as a desirable character trait in one, single generation. And along with cultural humility, the publicly acknowledged hierarchy containing a supreme creating being at the top died off as well, replaced by the scientific belief system promoted by Evolution and taught in schools. The Atheist cosmic hierarchy with ME, MYSELF at the pinnacle was firmly established and entrenched.

This is not to say that religion is dead; it is to say that the American culture, education and the government became controlled by the segment of arrogant, morally poisoned offspring of the generation that Brooks venerates. Brooks is not wrong; it’s just that he merely skipped a stone across the surface of an important subject, leaving the depths untouched.

Those deeper parts include the observation that humility is the precursor to honesty. One cannot be open to truth if one is closed to options that might produce it. Arrogance closes in on itself. It sees just what it wants to believe in order to be self-satisfied. So along with humility, honesty (especially intellectual honesty) died also, and at the hands of the morally undisciplined offspring of the Greatest Generation.

What remains is the effluent of a culture empty of truth, honesty, and humility. Where respect is demanded, and character development is passé. Where journalists are empty-eyed propagandists and politicians are uncaught felons. Where entertainment is – for the most part – moral sewage.

The last thing that Brooks ignores is the unseen majority for whom these things are anathema. The ideas that honesty requires humility; that honesty is a valued trait; that positive character must be developed (and one valued character trait is humility); and that respect must be earned; these still exist in the MSM-silenced, politically powerless population. This population demographic is huge, yet it must demonstrate en masse to be heard, and even then it is smeared as a group with unfounded and irrational charges.

These people exist, David; I am one.