The New Humility

“The new skeptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn . . . The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping, not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether . . . We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table . . . The meek do inherit the earth, but the modern skeptics are too meek even to claim their inheritance.”

Written by G. K. Chesterton in 1908. Truer today.

This sort of “humility” has, in part, produced the current cultural madness that we find ourselves in, with a populace, for instance, that is afraid to say that men are men and women are women and that the former cannot be or become the latter and vice versa—you know, the kind of thing that would have a child of a past age laughing at the intelligentsia of today.

This sort of humility produces a society bereft of truth. And when truth is lost, “my truth” becomes paramount. Subjectivity becomes the new objectivity, and the religion of relativism reigns supreme.

This faux humility, in practice, goes by many names: “tolerance”, “inclusion”, “sensitivity”, “acceptance”, etc.—squishy words for squishy people stripped of all meaning—but let us focus on the first, tolerance, for a moment. Fulton Sheen once remarked: “America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance. It is not. It is suffering from tolerance: tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broad-minded.”

So before you say you’re just being “open-minded,” I would say that it is quite possible to be so open-minded that your brain falls out. Chesterton wrote elsewhere: “An open mind is really a mark of foolishness, like an open mouth. Mouths and minds were made to shut; they were made to open only in order to shut on something solid.” The open-minded can actually be the most close-minded, for they have closed their minds to the possibility that truth can be known.

“When the ordinary man calls himself a skeptic or an unbeliever,” said T. S. Eliot, “that is ordinarily a simple pose, cloaking a disinclination to think anything out to a conclusion.”

This skepticism is not a bad thing on its own; it’s only bad when that’s all there is and, after having its fun, all that remains; in other words, when you ultimately know nothing and believe nothing. When there’s not an ounce of conviction in your bones and only confusion and cowardice without a trace of truth.

Truth, by definition, has an exclusivity to it. Meaning, a conclusion results in exclusion. Meaning, one thing being true runs the risk of another thing being false. Little Scotty being born a boy runs the risk of offending Little Scotty when he decides to be a girl. Abortion being murder runs the risk of insulting an abortionist when you call him a “murderer” rather than a “champion of women’s rights.” Christianity being true, good, and beautiful runs the risk of Islam, to take one, being false, evil, and ugly.

Because of these risks, it can, and often does in today’s day and age, take some measure of courage to step up to the microphone, if you will, and speak the truth. But what else can we do but to speak it in love?