Humilitas: A Lost Key to Life, Love and Leadership

Before closing with a few “tips” on how to cultivate humility in our personal and professional dealings, I want to describe a crucial benefit of humility at the societal level. In a morally and religiously diverse culture such as ours, humility is a much-needed key to harmony.

The Danger of Conviction

The recent “new atheists,” Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet and Christopher Hitchens, have brought into sharp focus the pernicious effect of monopolistic religious and moral viewpoints. Hitchens speaks for many when he writes:

We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true—that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.

As I write these words and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all hard-won human attainments that I have touched upon. Religion poisons everything.

Often the answer to the harmful effects of absolute truth claims is argued to be “tolerance.” If only people would tolerate each other, the logic goes, they would get on. Tolerance in this context usually means something like agreeing that all viewpoints are equally true or valid. In an attempt to establish this concept on the world stage, the 48th UN General Assembly declared that 1995 would be the “International Year for Tolerance.”

The need for such a year was clear. “Intolerance is one of the greatest challenges confronting us on the eve of the twenty-first century,” said the UN mission statement. “Intolerance is both an ethical and political issue. It is a fact that in most societies today, many different religions, cultures and lifestyles coexist. It is essential to recall that the basic human values that unite us are stronger than the forces that pull us apart.” The supporting documentation offered a striking set of definitions of the virtue:

Tolerance is the recognition and acceptance of individual differences.

Tolerance is recognition that no individual culture, nation or religion has the monopoly of knowledge or truth.

Tolerance is a form of freedom, freedom from prejudice, freedom from dogma.

A tolerant person is master of his own opinions and actions.

What I find interesting about this definition is the way it seeks to establish harmony between people of differing views by asking them to soften convictions. Only by rejecting dogma and accepting contrary views as valid can we hope to get on with each other; that is the gist of the document. With due respect to the careful thought that went into the International Year for Tolerance, I think we can do better than to ask people of strong conviction—or even dogma—to relax their claims to knowledge and truth.

John Dickson on the key to true greatness: humility ...

The Limits of Tolerance

Think of the religious context for a moment. Can we seriously ask Buddhists to accept as valid the Hindu doctrine of “atman” or eternal soul when the Buddha himself rejected the idea and taught that there is no soul and, ultimately, not even a self? On this logic, “tolerance” requires the Buddhist to accept two utterly contradictory viewpoints as equally true and valid.

Again, can a convinced Christian accept as valid the insistence of the Quran that Jesus was only a human prophet and not in any sense divine? The divinity of Christ has been central to Christianity from the beginning. It would involve a logical contradiction for a modern Christian to accept an idea so at odds with her core convictions. Equally, of course, there is no point asking devout Muslims to accept as valid the Christian idea that Jesus was divine and that he died on a cross for the sins of the world. The Quran explicitly rejects these things.

In a moral context, “tolerance” (as it is usually understood) is equally problematic. Think of the terrible culture wars between the Left and the Right in various Western countries, especially in the United States. What would tolerance mean in the abortion debate, to pick a tricky example? “Liberals” cannot be expected to accept as valid the conservative view that abortion is a selfish destruction of a powerless human-to-be. To be true to their convictions, liberals will reject that opinion as invasive, imperialistic and bigoted. The reverse is also true. “Conservatives” cannot countenance the view that abortion is simply part of a woman’s natural right to control her own body. They believe there are much larger issues at play.

To continue my controversial tightrope walk, take same-sex marriage. Tolerance of the conservative view is not an option for a long-term gay couple. How can they be asked to regard as true and valid the claim that their relationship is a departure from healthy historical norms or a sin against God’s plan for the family? That said, it would be equally presumptuous to ask conservatives to drop the convictions of millennia, reject the teachings of the Bible and accept as valid a homosexual lifestyle. Tolerance in this sense is illogical and potentially harmful. It is like an inexperienced counselor telling a troubled married couple to ignore their differences and focus on their similarities. This is a recipe for disaster. The skilled counselor encourages clients to be frank about their disagreements and only then to find a way to mend the dysfunction.

Conviction and Humility

How can society as a whole be honest about its moral and religious disagreements and work to mend the dysfunctions? My answer won’t surprise you. If humility is the noble choice to hold your power for the good of others before yourself, its relevance in the moral and religious sphere is revolutionary. Humility applied to convictions does not mean believing things any less; it means treating those who hold contrary beliefs with respect and friendship.

This is an important distinction. Some philosophers argue that the path to harmony is an epistemic humility, that is, only tentatively to claim any knowledge (epistēmē is Greek for knowledge). If I doubt my own opinion, so they say, I will tend to be nicer to those who hold different opinions. The argument for epistemic humility—which I regard as a misapplication of humility—runs something like this: observing diversity of beliefs ought to make me reflect on why I believe what I do; such reflection can reveal weakness in the justification for my beliefs or a realization that my reasons for belief are no better than someone else’s; all of this leads me to hold my views tentatively and so be tolerant to all other viewpoints.

There are problems with this argument. It assumes that all beliefs are basically of equal value—equally strong or weak. That cannot be. A scientific view of medicine, for instance, is better than magical approaches to health. More importantly, since some worldviews encourage harmony more than others do, what would be the benefit of asking them all to relax their convictions? Sure, we might have wished that Hitler doubted his Nazism and Stalin his Marxism, but do we really want the Dalai Lama to do the same? I, for one, am happy for the Dalai Lama to remain dogmatic about nonviolence. The great twentieth-century British literary critic and social commentator G. K. Chesterton made precisely the point I am trying to emphasize:

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself but undoubting about the truth. This has been exactly reversed. … We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.

When I talk about humility applied to conviction, I do not mean believing things less. I am advocating that we hold our convictions firmly but do so with a soft heart toward those who hold contrary convictions. A humble Buddhist, on my understanding, can reject the Hindu doctrine of the soul but demonstrate sincere compassion to Hindus no less than to fellow Buddhists. The humble Christian, too, can think Muslims are wrong to deny Jesus’ status as divine and his role as Saviour but still work to welcome and honour Muslims as fellow members of the human family.

This should be equally possible in the moral sphere. A humble conservative stands up for what he believes in but never allows his truth claims to become justification for discrimination and bigotry. He regards homosexuality and abortion as profound departures from the Creator’s intentions for humanity but actively fosters friendships with the gay community and with pro-choicers and wishes them no harm. Likewise, the humble liberal should be able to profoundly disagree with the conservative position without descending into name-calling, smugness and public bully tactics.

There is a failure of ethical imagination in our culture that probably makes my argument sound quaint and idealistic. We have forgotten how to flex two mental muscles at the same time: the muscle of moral conviction and the muscle of compassion to all regardless of their morality. Secular society no less than religion often operates on a narrow-minded logic: you can only love those whose lives you approve of. You can only be friends with people who agree with you. The logic can take you in two directions. The religious version reduces the number of people it loves—to match the few lifestyles it approves. The secular version increases the number of lifestyles it approves to the point of accepting virtually everything, thus fulfilling G. K. Chesterton’s famous quip about open-mindedness: “An open mind is like an open mouth: its purpose is to bite on something nourishing. Otherwise, it becomes like a sewer, accepting everything, rejecting nothing.”

In both cases the logic is the same: you can only love those whose lives you approve of. But there are weaknesses in both incarnations of the logic. The weakness of the religious version is its inability to show compassion beyond the borders of its moral convictions. The weakness of the secular version is a loss of nerve about what’s right and wrong in the first place.

But there is a third way, based on a different logic. It’s where we learn to respect and care even for those with whom we profoundly disagree. We maintain our convictions but choose never to allow them to become justification for thinking ourselves better than those with contrary convictions. We move beyond mere tolerance to true humility, the key to harmony at the social level.


The senior minister of St. Andrew’s Roseville, an Anglican church on Sydney’s north shore, John Dickson also serves as co-director of the Centre for Public Christianity and as a senior research fellow of the department of ancient history at Macquarie University. He has written more than 24 books.

This excerpt is taken from Humilitas: A Lost Key to Life, Love and Leadership by John Dickson. Copyright © 2011. Used by permission of Zondervan.

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