There is an excellent piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, by Miranda Devine on the declension of humility in our modern culture. We have reproduced the article in full below. As you read it, keep a question at the back of your mind: of the political leaders currently running for office in the NZ election, which demonstrate more humility, and which ooze hubris from every pore?
At the Emmy Awards this week, the comedian Tina Fey made what could be seen as the defining comment of the age.
"I thank my parents for somehow raising me to have confidence that is disproportionate with my looks and abilities," said Fey, 38, the Sarah Palin mimic of Saturday Night Live fame. "Well done. This is what all parents should do."
Quite the contrary. The world is already too full of people with too much confidence, who somehow lack the insight to realise it. It would be cruel to say they spend their lives making fools of themselves, but it would be accurate. The pity is that the number of people who can recognise the foolishness is dwindling. No, parents should not be teaching their children to have confidence disproportionate to their looks and abilities. They should be teaching their children the opposite virtue - humility.
Humility is the ability to have an accurate opinion of yourself, to see your own inadequacy with clear eyes.
Even the new federal Opposition Leader, Malcolm Turnbull, an alpha male down to his jocks, recognised the value of at least paying lip service to humility when he described his elevation to the Liberal leadership last week as "a great honour, privilege, humbling". He wasn't saying he was a humble man - a claim no one would believe of the cocksure former merchant banker - but that he was "humbled" by the moment.
Everyone should have some capacity to feel humbled by something at some point, to be conscious, even fleetingly, of the fact you are not the centre of the universe, all-powerful, all-knowing. But some people never do, even when confronted by the full majesty of their ignorance or human limitations.
Turnbull, 53, a man tempted by pride more than most, you would imagine, said later at his first press conference as leader, "I believe that no individual has the sum total of human knowledge", which is another small lesson in humility learned.
Some people, such as the German philosopher Nietzsche, see humility as a weakness. But the ancient Greeks knew it to be an essential quality of heroes, a product of courage and self-knowledge. Humility is the antidote to pride, which the author C. S. Lewis once damned as the "greatest sin", the vice that leads to every other vice.
"There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves," he wrote last century.
Lewis also wrote that, unlike other vices, pride was intrinsically competitive, getting "no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man". He described it as a "spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love or contentment or even common sense".Humility has been the mainstay of Christian societies, and central to the Protestant ethic of the American Midwest of the last century, which fuelled the greatest period of prosperity the world has ever seen. Humility was the core value of people who built great wealth and created the moral capital for generations to come.
As Tom Wolfe wrote in his short story Two Young Men Went West, Intel's co-founder, Bob Noyce, the father of Silicon Valley, headed west from his small Presbyterian town in Iowa, in the 1960s, with the values of his forebears "sown into the lining of his coat". Noyce was not religious but he brought with him all the old habits that would make him a success: honesty, hard work, prudence, self-discipline, lack of ostentation and, of course, humility.
The stern virtues are now laughably anachronistic. Pride, self-confidence and an exaggerated sense of self-importance are the qualities most prized in our narcissistic times. They are the hallmarks of winners, while humility is the vanished virtue.
A lack of humility is not a necessary precondition for our leaders, but it is often a collateral quality. The self-belief necessary to push yourself to the top, trampling over the ambitions of other deserving people, too easily morphs into the delusion that you got to the top not because you got some lucky breaks, but because of your intrinsically superior qualities.
While strong leaders often exhibit little humility, it is the only inoculation against the ancient Greek sin of hubris - excessive pride leading to humiliation and tragedy. The former NSW treasurer Michael Costa may have had hubris in mind this week when he said, after quitting Parliament: "I've always said politics was a modern Greek tragedy, it always ends in failure … and I can say my career has fulfilled that adage."
Strong, decisive types who make the best leaders often have very little inclination for the introspection needed for humility. They have no self-doubt because they never take the time to inspect the self for flaws. They are always "going forward", pushing ahead, getting things done, looking on to the future, not a past that might discomfit them.
In fact, the phrase "going forward" was the latest big cliche in the business world. Now it serves as a motto for the collapse of the financial markets, so full of Masters of the Universe always "going forward".
Of course, we need people of unreasonable self-belief to take risks and attempt to conquer unconquerable problems. But a society composed of too many over-confident types is doomed.
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