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supporting disposition opens a person to those differences and prompts a critical
attentiveness to their potential value. In this civic capacity, humility is not that
deferential, pride-swallowing (or pride-covering) quality discussed earlier, but more akin
to the Socratic recognition of limitation and incompleteness that spurs critical inquiry,
active listening, and personal/cultural reexamination. In this sense, an ethos of
democratic humility doesn’t entail the pursuit of objectivity, “epistemic abstinence,”
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or
an abstract rule of universal argumentation;
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nor does it ask for the suspension or
bracketing of personal belief or private conviction on questions of public relevance.
Rather, democratic humility cultivates a reflexive, critical self-consciousness of one’s
personally privileged perspective/standards of assessment in relation to the unique
demands and burdens of political judgment that exist under conditions of ethical and
cultural pluralism.
Democratic humility suggests that one of the first responsibilities of citizens and
leaders is not the reasoned justification of one’s pre-established point of view, but active
listening to one’s self and others. The moral and political significance of this kind of
listening and striving for mutual understanding is that it may very well augment or
change the terms of both one’s own and others’ pre-judgments on important questions of
justice. This civic form of humility does not deny us our convictions or our will to
action, but instead cultivates alongside these commitments an ethical disposition in which
our convictions, judgments, and actions are never taken as fully complete or closed-off
from future reconsideration. In this sense, democratic humility aims to contribute to what
William Connolly has identified as “the persistent need to maintain a precarious balance
between the politics of governance and the politics of disturbance, not only in the present,
Convention