Humility is in shorter supply than surgical masks these days.
The American Christian faith, once a bastion of humility, has gone all muscular. The servant leader concept, popular in the American business community for decades, has been replaced with the Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun.
After the 9/11 attacks, there was a brief bout of national humility before we got on with the business of making the world over through brute force, then sullenly withdrawing when it didn’t go well. We are all masters of the universe now, and when the universe doesn’t bend our way, we embrace blame, not introspection.
Still, if you ask me how I am feeling? Humble, in a word.
“The best of us,” George Eliot said, “are but poor wretches just saved from shipwreck.”
I am humbled on the one hand by the thought that an invisible virus, 600 of which span the width of a human hair, can do this much damage to the global community.
But, on the other hand, I am humbled by how something this insidious, this invisible and this fast-paced can be largely contained in so short a period. If we can get through the fall with, however we measure it, an “acceptable” level of casualties and the currently projected financial fallout, it will be because of the sacrifice of a few and the cohesion of the many.
Looking optimistically ahead, at that point we will have a choice. Will we sustain a certain dose of humility, or will we embrace the worst of our nationalistic arrogance?
The thing about the coronavirus, as the terrorism scourge before it, is we will never be completely in control. Whether one embraces God or nature as the planet’s prime mover, whatever it is, it isn’t us. And that should help us retain a sense of humility.
That humility should lead to a respect for science and expertise, however uncomfortable their findings.
It should lead to support for the systems of government, and the international systems, without which we will be unable to respond to this and other pending crises.
It should lead to moderation in our lifestyle, finally coming to terms with the impossibility of continuing to treat our fragile planet as a conveyor belt from resource extraction to unlimited consumption to waste dump.
And it should lead us to fight the well-established but arrogant temptation to pass the cost of each crisis on to an unseen future generation.
Things may at some point simply be beyond our ability to manage, and we will devolve into the kinds of dystopian societies that have been part of a cottage industry of recent books and movies. But, in any scenario, we will be better served by humility than arrogance. A resolved humility. An active humility. A collective humility.
It will start at the top but will involve all of us, just as it does now.
The educator Obert C. Tanner once wrote: “Social humility is the essence of democracy. Not one ruler, and not a few rulers, but all the people are to be trusted to rule themselves.” Still, he says, “Only the humble can be trusted to govern in a democracy, where the solution of each problem creates newer problems, and rulers hold their positions tentatively and humbly in facing these ever-new situations.”
We will all need to be this kind of self-ruler in a post-coronavirus world. But we must surely insist on this kind of political leadership from those we elect.
Keith Mines
Keith Mines is a former diplomat and army officer. A Utah native, he divides his time between Salt Lake City and Alexandria, Va. His book, “Why Nation Building Matters,” is due out in August.
