Humility

Knowledge in other hands

An imagined contribution

The community walking map is your proudest piece of work. Its curved route line is elegant enough to frame. A new contributor points out that it ends at a gate permanently closed to the public. You go through their evidence and redraw the route. The line becomes less graceful; the walk becomes possible.

The newcomer has not acquired authority over everything by finding one error. Nor has your previous work become worthless. Humility allows a specific correction to have its proper size. It frees attention from defending the author so that it can return to serving the reader.

Humility: finding the balance

Both defensiveness and theatrical self-dismissal can make the author the center of the exchange. The useful question is what the map now needs.

Humility gives…

Humility shortens the distance between a discovered problem and a repaired resource. Contributors learn that evidence will receive attention even when it arrives without an impressive biography.

What Humility makes possible

A project can gather knowledge scattered among people who would never call themselves experts. The regular walker, recent learner and occasional user may each notice something the experienced editor misses.

Humility in ordinary life

A translation

A new reader explains that your familiar phrase has a different meaning in their language. Ask for an example before defending its elegance.

An old tutorial

A beginner cannot follow a step you perform automatically. Their difficulty may reveal an omitted instruction.

Nearby virtues, different work

Open-Mindedness

Open-Mindedness gives unfamiliar approaches a hearing. Humility recognizes that your own account may need correction.

Candor

Candor states the limitation plainly once you recognize it.

Humility and its counterfeits

Modest language can conceal an immovable opinion: “I may be wrong” means little if no evidence can change the answer.

Deference to every confident newcomer abandons judgment. A claim still needs support.

How to cultivate Humility

• Invite comment on a specific part of work, not a general verdict on your worth.
• Repeat the proposed correction accurately before answering.
• Record what changed so that the next reader benefits from the exchange.

Try it today

Revisit one small explanation you have written. Identify a step that depends on knowledge a new reader might lack, and clarify it. A willing reader may help, but need not do so.

No one owes a personal history to make their correction worth examining.

Questions worth returning to

• What evidence would make me revise this?
• Am I defending the resource or its author?

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. Indeed, I have had no choice but to act in this manner, for with the exception of the Coral Reefs, I cannot remember a single first-formed hypothesis which had not after a time to be given up or greatly modified.

   Charles Darwin · The Autobiography of Charles Darwin
   WRITTEN MAY 1ST, 1881.
   Charles Darwin · Francis Darwin’s edited text from The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887); PG #2010; not the later unexpurgated edition

   Darwin describes revising first hypotheses repeatedly. This is retrospective self-assessment, not a claim that his every theory was correct; it makes revision part of serious work.

2. The truth however of the principles I have stated, is of much more importance than their origin; and the utility of an enquiry into them, and of establishing others more correct, if these should be erroneous, can scarcely admit of a doubt.

   Charles Babbage · On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures
   Preface
   Charles Babbage · 1832 text with Preface to the Second Edition; PG #4238; underlying print imprint not fully specified in transcription

   Babbage gives the truth of principles priority over their origin. A correction can deserve adoption even when it displaces the author’s own proposal.

3. I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue, but I had a good deal with regard to the appearance of it.

   Benjamin Franklin · The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
   Autobiographical narrative (continuation begun at Passy, 1784)
   Benjamin Franklin · Harvard Classics, edited by Charles W. Eliot; P. F. Collier & Son, New York, 1909; PG #148

   Franklin distinguishes the appearance of humility from acquiring it. Modest phrasing alone cannot establish willingness to accept the newcomer’s correction.

4. when your prudent spirit acknowledges and obeys the voice of reason from what quarter soever it be heard speaking; and renders ye as willing to repeal any Act of your own setting forth, as any set forth by your predecessors.

   John Milton · Areopagitica
   A SPEECH FOR THE LIBERTY OF UNLICENSED PRINTING TO THE PARLIAMENT OF ENGLAND
   John Milton · 1644 work in PG #608 transcription; underlying print edition not specified

   Milton asks Parliament to hear reason from any quarter, including against its own act. His address supplies an institutional example of receiving correction without surrendering judgment.

5. Men, in general, seem to employ their reason to justify prejudices, which they have imbibed, they cannot trace how, rather than to root them out.

   Mary Wollstonecraft · A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
   CHAPTER 1. THE RIGHTS AND INVOLVED DUTIES OF MANKIND CONSIDERED.
   Mary Wollstonecraft · 1792 work in PG #3420 transcription; underlying print edition not specified; anonymous biographical sketch excluded

   Wollstonecraft criticizes reasoning used to defend inherited prejudice. The article asks whether an author’s explanation is examining a correction or protecting an existing preference.

6. We realize, too, that social perspective and sanity of judgment come only from contact with social experience; that such contact is the surest corrective of opinions concerning the social order, and concerning efforts, however humble, for its improvement.

   Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics
   CHAPTER I, INTRODUCTION
   Jane Addams · Macmillan, 1902; captured PG #15487, reprints June and September 1902 named in front matter

   Addams treats contact with social experience as a corrective to opinion. The map editor’s account becomes more adequate through the experience of someone who uses the route.

7. I write the exercises, daily themes, criticisms and hour-tests, the mid-year and final examinations, on my typewriter, so that the professors have no difficulty in finding out how little I know.

   Helen Keller · The Story of My Life
   CHAPTER XX
   Helen Keller · Special Edition with additional chapters; edited with supplementary material by John Albert Macy; PG #2397; print date not specified in capture

   Keller’s humorous account of college work allows instructors to assess what she actually knows. The self-directed joke punctures prestige without denying her achievement.

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