10
II. Humility and Pride – A Subterranean Alliance
In the previous section we have explored some of significant ways in which
religious thought and practice have conditioned our contemporary understanding of
humility. Part of what this general, abbreviated story helps to explain is why humility is
dropped from the catalog of the virtues in the modern period. By the time of Hume and
Kant, if not before, it becomes increasingly difficult to square principled commitments to
the equal moral worth and dignity of persons with a quality that seems to run afoul of (if
not deny) autonomous moral value to the individual self. Even where humility is not
employed as a moral command within a transcendental frame to combat the sins of
human pride, humility is often utilized in more general socio-cultural terms to discipline
the lower orders in their proper economic/social stations – rendering everyone below the
Monarch a “humble servant” to God and crown. Socially and politically speaking,
humility’s role in securing proper obedience to superiors is both scriptural and capable of
being detached from a specifically religious context of meaning for the purposes of
maintaining rigid class/power distinctions. Thomas Hobbes illustrates both of these
strands (the religious and socio-political dimensions) of humility when he draws on the
biblical image of Leviathan in conjuring his model of a commonwealth (a power that is
“king over all the sons of pride”),
23
and by instructing men, through his “science” of
virtue and vice, in the specific social and political ills of pride and arrogance.
24
We have not, however, fully probed the range of difficulties that the idea of
humility raises unless we confront the fact that it seems to be a quality that is particularly
prone to false representation and human dissemblance. Here the question is not what
moral or political work is being done by the concept of humility within a particular
Convention