Dispatch Faith:  Remembering Humility as a Virtue, by Hannah Anderson (Author, Life Under the Sun: The Unexpectedly Good News of Ecclesiastes (2023)):

With Donald Trump’s decisive win this week, the 2024 presidential election has come to an end. Americans are exhausted and have earned the right to a break from politics, at least for a bit; but soon, we’ll need to start moving toward a new reality. And among the first things we’ll need to do—especially with the specter of the coming holidays and family gatherings that will bring political opponents together around the same table—is to answer the question Bonnie Kristian posed last week: How do we live with one another? 

Whatever form the answer takes, it will require deep humility on all our parts.

We often mistake humility as a kind of deference or respectability. Culturally, we may even associate it with persona: The humble person is the quiet person, the one who hangs back on the edges and doesn’t attract attention, who doesn’t have strong opinions—who for all purposes becomes a non-entity.

But classically speaking, humility simply means living in the reality of the human condition. The word “humility” comes from the Latin root for “ground” (hum-) which it shares with both “human” and “humus”—that nutrient rich soil that gardeners love. In this way, humility suggests a kind of groundedness or acceptance of our limits as earthbound creatures. Humility puts us in our place, teaching us that for all our ambitions and aspirations, our lives are lived in this moment, in this time, in this place.

Philosopher and St. Augustine scholar James K.A. Smith wrote recently about a kind of political humility that honors our identity as limited, created beings—and that might guide us through the coming days. Citing Augustine’s own political theology as expressed in The City of God, Smith argues for a kind of holy impatience that prays and works for the just world that God promises to bring while knowing it doesn’t depend on us. But, he continues, this:

is not the same as what Martin Luther King Jr. called ‘the tranquilizing drug of gradualism,’ which uses waiting as a code for enshrining the status quo. On the other hand, even a properly prophetic desire and hunger must avoid the hubris of thinking we could socially engineer our way out of the world’s brokenness by our own ingenuity. As Immanuel Kant would put it centuries after Augustine: all of our human political constructions are built with the crooked timber of human beings. …

[W]hat is the average citizen’s responsibility in this moment? I think it’s fairly simple. Your responsibility and mine is to become a wise, virtuous person. Our responsibility is to become the kind of citizen who, if replicated across the whole of our nation, would make for a just, virtuous society that cares for all. There is no way we can hope for a common good if we ourselves do not do good.

But this will mean rejecting political affiliation as a substitute for virtue or as a way to take pride in our own moral superiority. It will require humbling ourselves to accept that we still have much to learn, including from our fellow citizens with whom we disagree. Or as Sen.-elect Kim put it, “There is too much hubris in our politics. Too many people who think they have all the answers. Let’s go out and have deep and thoughtful conversations with people. Listen to them. And then earnestly work to address their concerns and rebuild trust.”

Because, the other truth about humility that we also tend to forget, is that if we don’t intentionally humble ourselves, something greater than all of us will.

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