The Virtue of Humility

Humility, like so many of these virtues, is about caring what others think and feel, about giving validation to others instead of seeking it all for yourself. The best way for parents to teach this, of course, is to model humility ourselves. Monitor your next conversation. How often can you catch yourself saying, “I may be wrong about that”—no one should know more than a skeptic that everything includes an element of doubt—and how often do your kids hear you saying it? How often do you invite someone else’s opinion? Do you spend at least half of the conversation asking about the other person, or are you mostly yakking about you? Do you find something to validate in the other person’s thoughts, or is it wall-to-wall correction?

If being a bearable member of society isn’t incentive enough, try this one: Humility is the natural consequence of religious disbelief. The Christian view holds humans to be specially created repositories of the divine spark, molded in the image of the Creator of the Universe, granted dominion over “mere beasts,” and promised immortal life in God’s loving embrace.

Wow. Hard to be humble when you’re the center of it all.

But we’re not the center, of course. Perhaps the greatest contribution of science has been its humbling recasting of our role in the universe. Instead of the main event in a young, small universe, we have come to realize that we are a blink in time and a speck in space. And instead of having dominion over the animals, we find that we are simply one group among them, special only in the development of one organ—which we too often underuse.

Everything about the scientifically informed world view cries out for humility. We are trousered apes. Yet many nonbelievers arrogantly strut and crow about having figured out that they are apes. That’s pretty hilarious if you think about it.

Next time you look in the mirror, scratch under your arms a bit. Say hoo hoo hoo. Let your kids see you doing it and invite them to do the same. We’ve done some pretty amazing things, we trousered apes, but genetically we’re still less than 2 percent away from our fellow chimps. When we get a little too full of ourselves, a little pit-scratching in the mirror can do wonders for restoring some humility.

Humanists, who know we come from apes, are naturally humble.