When one is universally lauded for a well deserved achievement, it is fascinating to observe how people close to you react. Surprisingly not all of them join the chorus of adulation and praise! Some say "don't be boastful"or "be quiet so that others won't hate your good fortune. Others are genuinely conflicted. A lifetime of modesty has left them unable to revel in the success of their near and dear ones. There are some who believe in keeping " a low profile" lest someone knows of their good fortune and profits from it. Others are innately modest and so shun the limelight. But is modesty really such a virtue?
The nineteenth-century British essayist William Hazlitt declared modesty “the lowest of the virtues.” “He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others,” he declared. If you have exceptional talent, why should you hide your successes merely to not give others an inferiority complex, I ask.
Exceptional demonstrations of false modesty is far more pervasive than its true counterpart, even if genuine modesty is a virtue best practiced by the genuinely talented.
Modesty might appear to be on the decline because of its association with another supposedly decaying art: manners. Modesty is central to the cultivation of good manners, according to the inimitable Judith Martin, a.k.a. “Miss Manners.” Modesty, writes Miss Manners, “requires decently covering one’s midriff and one’s achievements when not among intimates who find them exciting.”
But modesty need not mean prudishness, either in attire or behavior. In her 1792 treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, even the radical Mary Wollstonecraft deemed modesty the “sacred offspring of sensibility and reason.” What might a reasonable contemporary approach to modesty be? Consider which is more extreme – a culture that nurtures modesty and restraint, or one that glorifies hedonistic and immodest excess?
Traditionally, modesty is a virtue that has posed particular challenges for women – at least for women who flout its directives. The “gentleness, modesty, and sweetness” of Fanny Price’s character in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is judged “so essential a part of every woman’s worth in the judgment of man, that though he sometimes loves where it is not, he can never believe it absent.”
Modesty is not limited to bodily propriety, however. It can encompass our approach to learning, it can inform our exercise of power, and it can even influence our understanding of artistic achievement. Genuine modesty springs from an honest assessment of the limits of one’s own knowledge, and in no field is such an awareness more important than in science, according to Robert Hazen. In delineating what we can and cannot know about the natural world, Hazen argues, science offers a useful proving ground for modesty. Scientists who ignore modesty’s boundaries fall victim to that virtue’s opposite: hubris.
Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr argued that to be effective in the world, nations need “a sense of modesty about the virtue, wisdom, and power available to us” and “a sense of contrition about the common human frailties and foibles which lie at the foundation of both the enemy’s demonry and our vanities."
In academia and elsewhere, the contrast between the ideal of modesty and a reality that is frequently immodest is often stark; it is the difference between Thoreau’s humble abode on Walden Pond and Trump Tower; the contrast between the acclaim given the dedicated public servant and that offered to the debauched celebrity.
We can locate no simple recipe for reclaiming modesty for modern times. But perhaps the modest explorations of virtue in here will help close the distance between those ideals we hope to live by and the everyday world that unceasingly challenges them.
Modesty may be a virtue but an excess of it may well be a vice. So rejoice in your good fortune when it befalls you, modesty be damned!
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