Humility

Meeting the unfamiliar

An invented encounter

The welcome platform has a fine upholstered chair. A pattern gathers beneath it. “It is just a pattern,” your companion says. “It cannot be intelligent.” You were about to say much the same. Then you notice that your test of intelligence was whether the visitor would use your furniture. You kneel, move the chair aside and watch what happens at floor level. You still cannot explain the pattern. That is a limit in your account, not a rank you have established for its maker.

Humility suspends the assumption that an unfamiliar response is inferior. Your experience supplies a starting point, but it cannot settle the worth or capacities of everything you encounter. You can contribute an observation while admitting that your test may be poorly chosen. The meeting becomes more teachable when the visitor no longer has to resemble you before you take it seriously.

Humility: finding the balance

The fitting response retains your powers of observation while loosening your claim to have understood. If moving the chair obstructs someone else's access, that consequence also belongs in the inquiry.

Humility gives…

Humility gives an encounter room to change you. A mistaken expectation can become a discovery when defending your importance stops being the main task.

What Humility makes possible

You can contribute what you know and still ask which part fails to travel. Understanding grows through this exchange: an offered interpretation, another response, a revised account.

Humility in ordinary life

An unfamiliar craft

Ask a willing maker what the apparently awkward step accomplishes before proposing a shortcut.

A mistaken summary

When a friend corrects your account of their idea, restate the corrected point without attaching a defense of the first version.

Nearby virtues, different work

Open-Mindedness

Humility acknowledges the limits of your account. Open-Mindedness gives a particular alternative a fair hearing.

Curiosity

Curiosity pursues the pattern under the chair. Humility makes it possible to admit that you had not noticed it.

Humility and its counterfeits

Self-deprecation counterfeits Humility when you announce that your view is worthless and leave the other party to reassure you. Humility names the particular limit and stays available to contribute.

How to cultivate Humility

• Separate a description from your judgment of its quality.
• Keep one correction that improved your understanding; use it when the same assumption returns.

Try it today

Ask a willing person about a harmless method or preference you initially dismissed. Describe what you did not understand before judging its quality; you need not end by agreeing with it.

You may question an explanation and keep a boundary while acknowledging what you do not know. Humility does not require submission to a confident stranger.

Questions worth returning to

• Which familiar ability did I make the price of being taken seriously?
• Which correction gave me something more lasting than being right?

Keep the practice proportionate

These pages offer ideas for reflection and character practice, not professional advice. Choose practices suited to your circumstances and abilities. You may adapt, pause, or skip an exercise; putting yourself or someone else at risk is not proof of virtue.

Quotations and further reading

Seven readings, one for each day. All remain available here. Historical arguments and fictional dialogue are identified in their source notes.

1. I have never seen them; I do not speak from acquaintance with them.

   Bernard de Fontenelle · Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds
   Author’s preface, p. xv
   Fontenelle · Elizabeth Gunning translation, 1803 edition

   After distinguishing imagined inhabitants from human beings, Fontenelle admits the limit of his acquaintance. The passage suits the host whose seating plan outruns what the encounter has actually shown. His larger speculative argument is not treated as established science.

2. I instantly felt that I had been losing the whole inward significance of the situation.

   William James · Talks to Teachers on Psychology; and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals
   On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings
   William James · , 1899

   A resident corrects James's dismissal of a mountain clearing. The first-person admission suits a host revising a plan after noticing what it excluded; real rural people are not analogues for aliens.

3. Here we wandered into misunderstandings and cross-purposes, due largely, I must admit, to the looseness of my expressions.

   H. G. Wells · The First Men in the Moon
   Chapter XXV, The Grand Lunar
   Cavor, in Bedford's fictional account · , 1901

   Cavor takes responsibility for part of a communication failure. The host similarly examines a familiar arrangement before assigning the problem entirely to the visitor.

4. I am now more than ever convinced that we ought to judge of nothing by its external magnitude.

   Voltaire · Micromegas, in Voltaire’s Romances
   Micromegas, VI, What Happened in Their Intercourse with Men
   Micromegas, a fictional traveler from Sirius · Peter Eckler, New York, 1889; translator not identified in the captured title matter
   French original; English translator unidentified in the 1889 Eckler edition

   Micromegas has discovered reasoning in beings too small for him to notice unaided. His correction addresses the failed measure, size. The story’s remaining talk of superior beings also reminds us that correcting one presumption does not settle every hierarchy.

5. for while every one well knows himself to be fallible, few think it necessary to take any precautions against their own fallibility,

   John Stuart Mill · On Liberty
   Chapter II, Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion
   John Stuart Mill · captured Walter Scott edition with W. L. Courtney introduction

   Mill contrasts professed fallibility with practical precautions. The seating plan needs such a precaution: ask what its designer may have overlooked.

6. he would not believe such a puny species could possibly communicate their ideas:

   Voltaire · Micromegas, in Voltaire’s Romances
   Micromegas, VI, What Happened in Their Intercourse with Men
   The fictional narrator · Peter Eckler, New York, 1889; translator not identified in the captured title matter
   French original; English translator unidentified in the 1889 Eckler edition

   The Saturnian resists an observation that would expose his earlier mistake. “Puny” belongs to the narrated prejudice, not this catalog’s judgment. The passage shows how presumed inferiority can protect the observer’s pride against evidence.

7. This was the most startling feat of mountaineering I had ever witnessed, and, considering only the mechanics of the thing, my astonishment could hardly have been greater had they displayed wings and taken to flight.

   John Muir · The Mountains of California
   The Wild Sheep
   John Muir · , 1894

   The sheep exceed the experienced climber's expectations. The passage makes room for another competence without establishing any claim about extraterrestrial ability.

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