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Humility focuses on five historical figures who remained humble, although they had every reason to become arrogant. The author, David J. Bobb, is the Director of Hillsdale College's Kirby Center of Constitutional Study and Citizenship. He contrasts the humility possessed by great American individuals with the empty arrogance or "pride devoid of merit," which he suggests is rampant and even rewarded in society today.
As a 12-year-old boy, George Washington copied a centuries-old Jesuit book on "civility and behavior" to improve his penmanship.
The Bible started Frederick Douglass on his journey from humiliated and brutalized slave to becoming a renowned reformer, journalist, and American hero. When a slave-master chided his wife for allowing Douglass to read the Bible, saying it would make him "unfit to be a slave," Frederick Douglass resolved to read the entire book and ensure his unsuitability for servitude.
Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln met on two occasions and admired each other. Each controlled their passions and overcame any tendency toward the "arrogance, which leads to disorder and lack of selfcontrol."
Lincoln possessed an "admirable intellectual humility" that allowed him to listen to all sides and put together a coalition to end slavery and save the republic. Lincoln's law partner said of him: "His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest." Yet Lincoln tempered his ambition with humility. Dr. Bobb says that there was a "spiritual dimension" to Lincoln's humility that was tied to his relationship to God.
Abigail Adams was a wife, mother, farmer, and businesswoman. She had an astute political mind and even helped her husband control his own hubris. Her devotion to humility meant that even when John was President, the family never changed its lifestyle.
James Madison was the embodiment of humility. He willingly wrote anonymously and worked behind the scenes to guarantee the success of the young republic and to obtain the cooperation needed to create the nation's foundational documents.
The author states that humility "signifies strength, not weakness," and is "the crown of the virtues." Dr. Bobb suggests that the nation must learn to favor humility again, instead of continuing the adoration of arrogance. (Nelson Books, 2013, 228 pp., $24.99) |
Immersed in the book, he set himself on the road to developing the characteristic of humility. Although given multiple opportunities to become vain and self-satisfied, Washington twice chose humility and walked away from power "when he could have stayed at its pinnacle."
