Thought 4: What is humility, really?

I have won a vote of confidence.

From: Friend

To: Everyone

Who is more brutally honest: [Me] or [Some Other Person]?

My vote is [Me]! He does it with so much more confidence.

I received this dubious distinction recently after hearing a story about me sharing a rather blunt truth. I had been very honest about something and the other people at the table hearing the story were struck by my brutality. That isn't the first time something like this has happened.

However I have not been particularly good in my life about being brutally honest with myself. That is something I've been working on for the last year or so. It has brought me to an interesting place, part of which involves writing this blog. I am prone to starting projects and not finishing them. After being honest with myself about this I am trying to have several weekly goals that I meet for an entire year.

One thing I have noticed this year while reading articles was other people talking about this problem. I love playing the card game Magic the Gathering. Many of the top players do a lot of writing. One recurring them I saw among the top professional players was the idea of how to improve your game. I saw the phrase "take responsibility for your mistakes" over and over again. Players talked about how their bad habits and stubborness cost them game after game and until they were able to acknowledge that and work on changing the way they acted they weren't able to break into the top tier of the game.

As I'm trying to implement similar things in my life (which is one of the most difficult things I have done in a long time) I started seeing how this meets one of the definitions we have of humility. As a side note I'm not very humble (by almost every definition). I definitely have a natural tendency to arrogance and condescension. Without conscious effort I quickly fall into a pattern of relating with lots of criticism. It has taken a lot of time and failtures to lose the deep down conviction that if I just tried really hard I could be better at anything than everyone around me.

Back to the point, a willingness to take responsibility for mistakes and admit that you fail because of choices instead of circumstances is a key component of (my definition) humility. It naturally leads to a mastery-oriented mindset over a performance-oriented mindset. The mindset here is failure is okay as long as you're learning from your mistakes, rather than attempting to make oneself appear competent at all times and hiding deficiencies.

I think this approach to life is key to humility, but I don't think that it is humility. A dictator could do plenty of research on how to more effectively run his regime, be willing to admit his mistakes, and even make his operation more efficient without being truly humble. I think we all recognize that humility has an additional component to it.

So recognizing one's own faults or objective ranking is not the only part of humility. It is a valuable tool however it is not something that left to itself will make us better people. It might make us more effective, more competent, and even more productive but we will not be morally better because of it.

When we pursue humility I don't think we are only trying to have an accurate view of our own abilities relative to others. That is a definition I've heard before and I think it misses out on the heart of humility. It is built to allow for a person to still be humble but acknowledge their own superiority in something that can be objectively measured.

It sets the center of humility as accurate knowledge of the world. That isn't right. When we turn to the Incarnations display of humility what do we see? We don't see someone rigidly enforcing an accurate ranking of people in the world. By that definition of humility Jesus could've come to be served instead of coming to serve.

After spending a lot of time trying to come up with a description of humility (and failing) I realized it is easier to describe what humility produces than what humility is. So pardon me as this terrible segue is followed by an abrupt jump in logic.

We all value people differently. Some people (like me) will always value family over friends. That is part of the value system I grew up with. Other people will value loyalty over anything else. Some value keeping to a set of standards. Others value people by how similar to themselves each other person is.

But that isn't what we see in Jesus. He valued every person. While his personal responsibilities did change the way he interacted with people (he setup someone to care for his mother when he died, but not for every woman in the world) his valuing of people wasn't based on any of the above methods. It was based on valuing people because they are people. Giving human being intrinsic value instead of value based on any measurable quantity.

I think this is one of the most important things humility produces in a person. It is a change from a performance or value based measurement of one's self and others to a view of people as being inherently valuable. It pushes us away from a pragmatic valuing of individuals to a place where loving each other person as much as ourself is possible, but all people are equally valuable and wonderful.