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account of humility as a liberal-democratic virtue. Distinguishing humility from any
association with “moral masochism or obsequiousness,” Spragens writes that,
“Democratic humility manifests itself in the absence of three things: vanity, pleonexia
(the insistence upon getting more than one’s fair share), and dogmatism.”
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To be sure,
any notion of democratic humility would have to incorporate these elements. Yet my
concern with Spragens’ approach (as much as I endorse its basic moral concerns) is that
democratic humility is defined as the “absence” of certain negative individual traits
(vanity, graspingness, dogmatism), but it does not specify the positive or enabling
characteristics by which democratic humility might be identified. Yet we cannot assess
the full ethical or political value of humility, or consider how something like a virtue of
democratic humility might be cultivated, if we don’t specify in what the
positive/normative qualities of democratic humility consists.
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The concept of humility can do a lot more work for us, valuable democratic work,
if we reposition humility less as a private, inward-looking, self-referencing quality, and
more as an active civic virtue or ethos geared toward facilitating attentiveness and mutual
understanding of plural others. Humility should be seen as a virtue with positive and
creative political-ethical possibilities, not merely as a “corrective virtue”
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or a negative
check on personal vices. Given the general story I have recounted up to this point, are
there any alternative sources within the tradition of western moral and political thought to
which we might turn to support such a revaluation of humility? One intriguing
possibility comes from the writings of St. Bernard.
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By briefly turning to the
contributions of this Cistercian monk we can draw some useful guidance for a more
Convention