Humility, Prudence, and Other Lost Virtues

Democracy requires compromise, and compromise requires the two virtues lacking most in American society–prudence and humility. What hope is there, then, now that technology and social media have only deepened the virtue deficit?

In October 2012, during a televised presidential debate President Barack Obama earned laughs and pleased pundits when he mocked his opponent, Governor Mitt Romney, for calling Russia America’s “biggest geopolitical” threat. “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back,” countered President Obama, to applause and laughs. According to Mr. Obama, wariness of Russia was laughable “because the Cold War has been over for 20 years.”  Two years later, Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine.

Eight years later, under orders from President Vladimir Putin, Russia invaded Ukraine. It turns out twenty years is really not all that long of a time. Who is laughing now? Not the Ukrainians and not the people who are hosting refugees from that war-battered country. Nor, I would hazard a guess, are those Russian soldiers who seem not to have known initially that they were invading Ukraine. And certainly not Europeans, whose governments are contemplating a predictable slate of unwise economic policies as they find themselves in an energy war with winter approaching. As now-Senator Romney lamented right after the unprovoked invasion, with all the legitimate aplomb of a child’s “I told you so,” “The ‘80s called, and we didn’t answer.”

Yet there is another problem, easily lost amid the war and human suffering: how the decline of the virtues most needed by statesmen, humility and prudence, contributed to these unfolding horrors.

Employing a well-practiced “gotcha” line was not new in 2012 but we need not go all the way back to Pericles or Cicero for examples. George Washington’s first secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, said of Secretary of War Henry Knox that he was “as fat as he is stupid.” That is a nasty tweet, with characters to spare. Never mind that Knox had gone from bookstore owner to chief of artillery to secretary of war (both for the Confederation and for the Union under the Constitution) due to his brilliance. Washington’s vice president, John Adams, called Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton the “bastard son of a Scotch peddler.” Hamilton’s pedigree means one need not take his ideas seriously, Adams seemed to be saying. To Obama’s credit, in his cheeky bid to avoid a real argument at least he tried to be funny, even if he had to ignore hundreds of years of Russian and Ukrainian history and the living memory of the Cold War and Soviet Union’s demise to do it.

Reducing complex issues, global power politics, and any public policy into one sentence is not conducive to the civility, magnanimity, and intellectual processes needed for a free society to flourish. Doing so performs a double disservice, in that even while it redirects one from issues to personalities it also kills the search for truth by ignoring the need for real arguments, even ones made with magnanimity. The human mind was created to seek and know the truth, and to find pleasure in it when it is found. Democracy requires compromise, and compromise requires the two virtues lacking most in American society–prudence and humility.

Prudence, explained Russell Kirk in his landmark 1953 book, The Conservative Mind, “is pre-eminently an attainment of classical philosophy,” while humility is “a triumph of Christian discipline. Without them, man must be miserable; and man destitute of piety hardly can perceive either of these rare and blessed qualities.” Aristotle defined prudence as the use of reason to grasp the truth in order to act for the good. The blessings of prudence are knowable by reason alone. They were first explicated by the ancient Greeks and the laboratory that proves their value is human history. The Romans believed prudence to be their great gift. Prudence involves considering both short-term and long-term effects of our actions, as well as weighing possible unintended consequences, in light of reason, history, and what we know about human behavior.

Humility, on the other hand, is a Christian virtue one of the so-called “theological virtues.” Knowing what we know about human nature, we assume grace is necessary in order to be humble. Being humble, apparently, is too difficult to achieve by non-supernatural means. The Romans may have been prudent but in their drive to rule the world they certainly were not humble. Humility involves a docility to truth, both about the world and about oneself. Put differently, humility demands magnanimity toward others because it recognizes we lack perfect knowledge of the world and of the reasons people behave the way they do. Humility has in common with prudence a recognition of humanity’s limits. There are limits on what we can know as well as what we can do. A truly humble person will not give in to the idyllic imagination and become a utopian ideologue.

The Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek referred to this as “the knowledge problem” when trying to counter the hubris inherent to managerial economies that aimed to replace the millions of people making uncountable daily decisions with a room of central planning experts determined to program choice and direct human exchange. Nobody, said Hayek, possesses such knowledge “in concentrated or integrated form.” Indeed, each of us knows only “the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.”

If what Hayek says is true, then one ought to be humble, and not just when it comes to economics. This humility will lead to prudence when it comes to governance, including geopolitics. Prudence cannot have space to work, however, where soundbites and gotcha tweets rule. These crowd out serious deliberation and argument. Right reason gives way to an intellectually lazy dismissal, and along with it, prudence.

What hope is there, then, now that technology and social media have only deepened the virtue deficit? To paraphrase the great orator, Cicero, who lived at the time of the Roman Republic’s decline into instability, impiety, and autocracy, “silent prudence” is always better than “loquacious folly.” We may live in an age of succinct folly but the first part of Cicero’s dictum still applies. Silence involves listening, for one cannot argue without first listening to one’s opponent. As the writer of Ecclesiastes reminds us, “The words of the wise are heard in silence, more than the cry of a prince among fools.” Thankfully, Solomon has not yet called and asked for his wisdom back.

This essay was first published here in September 2022.

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The featured image, uploaded by Andrey Mironov, is “Virtue and Humility.” This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.