Pete Wright

Like on the other hand, right, of pride, humility involves having an accurate perspective or view of yourself, right, and recognizing your own limitations. And once you recognize your own limitations, you're doing so with a perspective that you are not above anyone else. Right, it's not you and everyone else. You're not above the rules. You're not above the systems.

You exist and you understand what is above and below your worldview. And that perspective leads to modest behavior, selflessness, respect for others, right? It's through humility that we... maintain our perspective on our own abilities and skills, right? And foster gratitude and dependence on our community and others. And of course, in the church, dependence on God. Wow.

That's a little bit mind blowing, right?

And this, so this transitions because so much of like, we just talked about it, right? The foundation of humility is based on a supremely religious event, right? The crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. You bet. Right. Right. Yeah. And, And so how, like, I'm not, I am notably not a religious person.

How am I, secular human, supposed to relate to humility if I'm not religious and don't have that background? Asking a rhetorical question, but I am also curious what you think.

No, and what that begets is greed, right? I'm keeping my only friend to a begotten son, right?

Thankfully, you and I don't have to armchair too much because David Hume got there first.

oh dave i know dave yeah so uh the good dave he has a what what he called a secular ethic right and so this is 18th century now we're we're many many years post-crucifixion we've we've jumped time uh everybody's wearing did you just have me try to do stuff and then you actually have a real smart guy gonna answer the question Isn't that what we do? Yeah, I guess so.

Except mine are usually plagiarists. So he was a massive critic of Christian humility. And this is why I mentioned we were going to come back to this particular word, because he promoted, Mr. Hume, a form of humility that he termed modesty. Oh, involves a realistic self-assessment of the recognition of one's limitations.

We mentioned that he argued specifically that this form of humility is essential for moral motivation and social harmony. Right. You talked about that because you don't see yourself apart from everybody else. Yeah, exactly. and says it fosters extensive sympathy and empathy and moral judgments based on, this is the part that I love, common human experience rather than doctrine.

So I did a little bit of searching on other sort of models of secular philosophical approaches to humility or perspectives. There is intellectual humility, right? It emphasizes the importance of recognizing the limits of one's knowledge and being open to information and perspectives. I think it's safe to say that in many circles, we lack intellectual humility right now in our modern society.

Right. And of course, intellectual humility is very much, you know, valued in scientific and academic communities and formerly in journalistic communities. And it was seen as crucial for the advancement of knowledge and the avoidance of dogmatism, I think is how to put it. Right. Big deal. The other, Confucian humility is another.

In Confucian philosophy, social humility is rooted in the social and ethical fabric of society. Confucian humility emphasizes the importance of placing social good above individual aspirations and recognizing your own place. in a larger community, which is antithetical to capitalist dogma, right?

Absolutely anti-humility feels to me in this context, antithetical to the Western way of life, which is kind of, it's really makes me a little bit sick to my stomach.

I know, God, why do I keep hearing that? You know, secular humanism, we've got humanist ethics and, you know, just this the whole idea that there are ethical principles based on reason, empathy and commitment to human well-being. Again, it feels like we're trailing off as we fall off the edge of our flat earth. Sure. Interesting. Yeah.

I feel like all of this is really useful right now, especially as we just try to rationalize how we can still be good people, how we can still find a way to be modest, if not humble, right? Right. From a non-secular perspective. And and and be able to live a whole life with other people and different belief systems.

I don't think we can find I think where we struggle to find commonality is when we are not able to understand the perspective that we bring to differing communities. Self-awareness with other people. The other. Yeah. Yeah. The other. Isn't that part of it? Very much so. That's what I've been thinking about. That's my whole, that's my whole jam.

I feel like now we've solved humility and what are we going to do for the rest of the episode? I don't know. Um, play a little, uh, yeah. Rochambeau football. Is that a thing you can do? I don't know how football works.

I just spiked a ball on your head. Oh, guess what? You're out. I just, I just took your entire team out of the umpires. You just struck me out. Is that a football thing? All right.

Are you ready? First of all, let's just note you were just complaining that I did this exact thing to you and you already had it locked and loaded.