Humility

A meditation on intellectual courage.

Photo by J. Amill Santiago on Unsplash

Today I want to write about humility—its uses, its excesses, and its strange cultural fetishization—but I can only do that honestly by returning to a passage from The Grand Finale, the penultimate chapter of The Grand Praxis, where I first gestured at this problem.

That chapter contains a scene where the protagonist encounters an apparition of Thomas Jefferson beneath the Circus tent. And no, the protagonist is not me; he never was. He is a vessel—one possible perspective among many, a way of inhabiting a worldview. But he carries some of my normative commitments, and that’s enough to make some readers uneasy. I knew it would. I was hyper-conscious of the likely perceived indulgence of it all.

But in order to have a view of the world, and a view of history, one must sit somewhere in perspective. There is no neutral vantage—no Archimedean point outside of time from which the world may be surveyed without the imprint of the surveyor. The very act of writing is an act of placing oneself.

So I wrote the encounter with Jefferson deliberately, carefully, even defensively—not to rewrite him, but to position him inside his contradictions. I wanted historically literate readers to feel that I understood what I was doing. Jefferson was a man of immense brilliance and immense moral failure. He authored liberty while inheriting and maintaining human bondage. He drafted the ur-text of American political morality while living in a way that violated its most basic commitments.

To imagine him honestly required me to hold that tension—not to resolve it, not to absolve him, but to stage it.

And with a deliberate, philosophically defensible indulgence—the kind of imaginative license that has existed in the Western tradition since Plato’s dialogues—I asked a simple question: How might Jefferson respond if confronted with a mirror held to him in a moment of vulnerable reflection?

That scene was not written to flatter myself. Nor to rehabilitate him. Nor to indulge cosplay. It was written to explore the fragility and necessity of humility itself.

In the scene, Jefferson says:

“To declare oneself a voice of wisdom—to presume to address the public on matters of consequence—requires a certain… audacity.”

And he is right. There is something inherently presumptuous in writing at all. To put words on the page and offer them to others is to imply that they are worth reading. That they contain something useful. That your particular arrangement of meaning deserves attention.

That is always a little embarrassing.

And yet, if no one accepts this embarrassing burden—if everyone remains silent—then we forfeit the responsibility to engage with the world as it is and as it might be.

This is the paradox of humility:

Too little, and one becomes a narcissist.

Too much, and one becomes a coward.

Too little, and one’s voice becomes a weapon.

Too much, and one abandons one’s voice entirely.

It is fashionable today to demand humility as the antidote to narcissism. But like all virtues, humility practiced in excess becomes a vice. Excess humility curdles into self-abasement, into surrender, into the refusal to speak truths that require a moment of audacity to articulate.

We are a culture drowning in imposture, and the final refuge of imposture is the performance of humility—a kind of aesthetic modesty that conceals the deeper cowardice of refusing to risk being wrong.

Jefferson saw this before I did.

He says to the protagonist:

“Those most convinced of their own humility are often blinded by a different kind of pride—the pride of having humbled themselves so thoroughly.”

And here again, he’s right.

False humility is simply pride wearing sackcloth.

But there is another form of humility that I fear more:

The humility that silences people who ought to speak.

I have been told—more times than I can count—that I am arrogant for speaking with confidence, for arguing as though ideas matter, for writing in a way that presumes people might benefit from hearing what I think. I have been told this especially in the past week, as I have written frankly, vulnerably, publicly, with no pretense.

Some readers find this uncomfortable.

They say it feels narcissistic.

They say it feels self-indulgent.

And to them, I say: yes.

It is indulgent to speak.

It is indulgent to claim your thoughts matter.

It is indulgent to write at all.

But someone must do it.

Someone must take the embarrassing risk.

And crucially, I believe there is a moral distinction—a deep, ontological distinction—between two kinds of performance:

Performance used to conceal,

to manipulate,

to dominate,

to distort,

to curry favor,

to avoid responsibility.

And performance used to reveal,

to midwife truth,

to illuminate experience,

to investigate the self,

to lay bare one’s own tensions and contradictions

in service of honesty.

If I err, I choose to err in the latter direction.

The protagonist’s exchange with Jefferson was never meant to anoint him as a moral sage. It was meant to dramatize the audacity and responsibility of speaking. It was meant to show that humility is not the absence of voice, but the willingness to risk embarrassment in pursuit of usefulness.

Jefferson concludes:

“I have written things I now regret—claims too absolute, blind spots too glaring.

But I cannot regret having written.”

That is the point.

That is the gift.

That is the humility worth having.

Humility is not silence.

Humility is the willingness to be wrong in public.

Humility is the courage to speak without the armor of certainty.

Humility is the audacity to stand inside your contradictions and still offer something to the world.

So when people tell me I am arrogant for writing with confidence, I do not bristle. I understand the fear beneath it. We live in a culture that confuses humility with self-erasure and confidence with narcissism. But I refuse to participate in that confusion.

I will not perform the humility that protects pride by hiding.

I will practice the humility that risks pride by showing.

And if that is embarrassing—good.

Embarrassment is the sign one is alive.

Embarrassment is the sign one is speaking honestly.

Embarrassment is the sign one has not yet surrendered to the cultural pathology of concealment.

I will take embarrassment over cowardice.

Any day. Any hour. Any world we inherit.

The Circus continues.

The wire still holds.

And humility—real humility, not its aesthetic counterfeit—

is simply the courage to walk it

without pretending not to be seen.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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