Humility Is a Virtue. But Can Humble People Succeed in the Modern World?
Bring to class 100 words, on paper, with a virtue at you think will not work (or maybe it does work) in capitalist countries–and why that is so.
Requirements: 100 words
Humility Is a Virtue. But Can Humble People Succeed in the Modern World? Oct. 5, 2022 Credit…Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times; images via Getty Images By Peter Coy Opinion Writer
The Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, a friend of Adam Smith, called humility one of the “monkish” virtues, and he didn’t mean that as a compliment. Humble people, he seemed to say, weren’t cut out for capitalism. Skip ahead if you don’t want to read the whole deliciously acerbic passage from his “Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals”: Celibacy, fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial, humility, silence, solitude and the whole train of monkish virtues; for what reason are they everywhere rejected by men of sense, but because they serve to no manner of purpose; neither advance a man’s fortune in the world, nor render him a more valuable member of society; neither qualify him for the entertainment of company, nor increase his power of self-enjoyment? We observe, on the contrary, that they cross all these desirable ends; stupify the understanding and harden the heart, obscure the fancy and sour the temper. We justly, therefore, transfer them to the opposite column, and place them in the catalogue of vices; nor has any superstition force sufficient among men of the world, to pervert entirely these natural sentiments. A gloomy, hair-brained enthusiast, after his death, may have a place in the calendar; but will scarcely ever be admitted, when alive, into intimacy and society, except by those who are as delirious and dismal as himself. I kind of see Hume’s point. If progress in capitalism is fueled by people’s pursuit of their self-interest, we’re not going to get very far if everyone is into mortification, self-denial and so on. On the other hand, we are taught from childhood to be humble. Humility is a core virtue in Christianity, Islam, Judaism and other religions. From Tuesday evening until Wednesday evening is the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, which includes the prayer “Here I am, poor in deeds.” I did some reading and came to the conclusion that humility and capitalism aren’t necessarily in conflict. They can actually go together quite well. Although it partly depends on what you mean by humility. Humility is a tricky virtue to talk about. If you say you’re not humble, you’re probably telling the truth. On the other hand, if you say you are humble, you’re probably not, because people who are humble don’t go around bragging about it. Then there’s the paradox that to be humble is good but to be humbled is really bad. Tricky, right? Jacob Soll, a professor at the University of Southern California, traces the debate over humility and capitalism back to the 13th century in his new book, “Free Market: The History of an Idea.” St. Francis of Assisi stressed the need for humility, rejecting his wealthy family, dressing in coarse peasant garb and living off alms. St. Thomas Aquinas, his near contemporary, agreed with Francis on the need for morally just prices but saw nothing sinful in striving to make money. (“It was perhaps a convenient piece of argument, for the Dominican order was wealthy, with huge feudal landholdings,” writes Soll.) Max Weber, the great German sociologist, sounded a bit like Hume in his book “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” written in 1904 and 1905. Whereas Martin Luther saw a world of “humble sinners” seeking salvation through faith, the competing Reformation theology of Calvinism “bred those self-confident saints whom we can rediscover in the hard Puritan
merchants of the heroic age of capitalism,” Weber wrote. Those merchants proved to themselves and others that they were among the elect who were predestined for heaven through “intense worldly activity,” Weber theorized. “It and it alone disperses religious doubts and gives the certainty of grace.” But the British historian R.H. Tawney disagreed with Weber, saying capitalism preceded Calvinism’s self-confident saints. “There was plenty of the ‘capitalist spirit’ in 15th-century Venice and Florence, or in South Germany and Flanders, for the simple reason that these areas were the greatest commercial and financial centers of the age,” Tawney wrote in “Religion and the Rise of Capitalism” (1926). I asked Benjamin Friedman, an economist at Harvard University, to help me sort things out. Last year he came out with a book with the same title as Tawney’s. He left me a voice mail message saying that being a good person — which would presumably include being humble — was essential in the development of the market economy. “If some guy is a jerk, you don’t have to do business with him,” he said. “You move on to the next stall.” He referred me to Montesquieu, the Enlightenment philosopher who wrote: “Commerce is a cure for the most destructive prejudices; for it is almost a general rule, that wherever we find agreeable manners, there commerce flourishes; and that wherever there is commerce, there we meet with agreeable manners.”
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