Benjamin Franklin, who made a methodical, lifelong effort to curb his excessive if justifiable pride, confessed near the end of his days that he was successful only in quelling the appearance of it, not the reality, and “even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility.”
“Franklin’s dilemma,” writes David J. Bobb in Humility: An Unlikely Biography of America’s Greatest Virtue, “is America’s dilemma.” How to be great and humble? Bobb, the director of the Allan P. Kirby Jr. Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Studies in Washington D.C., believes not only that “ ‘American humility’ is not an oxymoron,” but that it is actually our country’s greatest virtue. He argues, however, that as a nation today we have lost touch with both our humility and our greatness. We are afflicted with an arrogance that hinders a revival of that greatness, and we must search our past for lessons in humility to guide us forward.
The book begins by sketching the history of humility and greatness in political thought from Aristotle to the Founding Fathers, who had vastly different ideas of the quality. For the leading thinkers of ancient Greece and Rome, who celebrated the great-souled or magnanimous man, pride was “the crown of virtues” and a humble existence was by definition an ignoble one. Why crown the lowly?
The Christian version of the magnanimous man was a self-effacing servant.
Centuries later, St. Augustine
