6
us little more than a form of slave-morality becoming self-conscious of itself. That is,
humility may be a quality fundamentally geared toward the acceptance of, rather than
resistance to, a wide range of moral and political asymmetries of power/value.
2
Yet, to
the extent that the moral character of liberal citizenship has been shaped over time, as
Judith Shklar has argued, “to preserve [one’s] own self-respect and that of others, neither
demanding nor enduring servility,”
3
then it is not at all clear why humility should be
considered a virtue for liberal societies (as opposed to, say, theocracies or monastic
orders).
4
Indeed, if humility entails the acceptance of a low position for oneself as what
is one’s due,
5
then humility would seem to be a vice for liberal citizens committed to the
equal moral standing of persons and for individuals who treat self-respect and the
conditions that sustain it as one of the most important “primary goods” in our lives.
6
There are very good reasons, then, to be suspicious at the outset about the moral
or political relevance of a concept that seems to possess a congenitally anti-democratic,
anti-egalitarian signification. Yet, as we will see, humility’s long historical relationship
with rigid value hierarchies and anti-egalitarianism may be only part of the problem for
us today. Before a persuasive, democratic reclamation of humility can be undertaken, we
need a genealogical critique of humility that would seek to disclose its meaning and
function within the specific historical-ideological contexts in which it developed. In this
regard the critical question to ask is: what kind of moral and political work has the idea of
humility performed at different points in time and cultural space? And, given that
history, can we draw upon these expressions, or other submerged alternative sources in
order to reconstruct this quality for the politics of the present? In what follows, I offer a
few initial gestures towards such a project.
Convention