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others in the ‘spirit of gentleness.’”
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For Bernard, a “spirit of gentleness” or generosity,
mercy, and sympathy are fundamentally contingent upon humility. Further – and this is
the crucial point for my purposes – humility’s value is not restricted to hard earned self-
knowledge, but is also a crucial social virtue that relates directly to our ability to seek
understanding with and hold sympathetic regard for others.
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For Bernard, humility is an
active, social practice toward others, not just an interiorized attitude towards the self.
In keeping with this latter sense, I want to argue that humility is best seen as
both a relational quality – a cultivated disposition that pertains to our knowledge of and
relations of interdependency with plural others – and as a potentially edifying civic
practice or political ethos. Such an ethos would reject any identification of humility with
a lowering of one’s sense of self worth or merit as inconsistent with a basic liberal
insistence on the equal moral dignity of persons. By contrast, democratic humility is a
public practice of opening-up or opening-outward towards others, not an individual or
private lowering-down orientation. So understood, democratic humility prompts citizens
and leaders to: (1) actively attend and sympathetically listen to others; (2) strive for
mutual understanding; (3) critically interrogate prejudgments and pre-established
standards governing the public use of practical reason; and (4) be prepared to revisit and
renegotiate previous decisions and policies with new and endlessly multiplying
experiences, modes of being, and forms of knowledge in hand.
V. The Case for Democratic Humility
The case for democratic humility begins with the question: how is meaningful
dialogue and mutual understating between plural beings possible? Related to this
question, we are also interested in asking how a plural citizenry can navigate the tensions
Convention