Humility 2: Follow Your Nose?

I said last time that the common view of humility is false: humility does not deny itself, and it does not decrease our self-knowledge so we only have humility when we don't realize it. So what is real humility, and how does it work?

I'll tell you a secret: I can see my nose.

Not the whole thing, of course, but most of it. And I doubt I'm especially blessed in this regard. You don't need a long or large nose to see it. And all going well, you can see past the end of your nose, which is like seeing the forest for the trees.

So what?

Simply this: again, no doubt like you, I am humble about my nose. Some people may be obsessed with the protuberance, thinking it either beautiful or ugly, but most of us probably don't think much about it.

That's the point.

I can go for amazingly long periods without noticing the thing, usually because I'm looking at something else--words on a page, vehicles on the road, and so forth. But it's there, and I know it. I can shift my attention to or from it at will.

That's humility. I've had a few moments when I realized, to my surprise, that I was being humble. Now, I often ruined it by wanting to advertise the fact. But sometimes I would just think, "Huh. That's interesting." Then I returned to the matter at hand.

If you are humble, you do not lack self-knowledge but self-absorption. A humble person can be aware of his own humility without feeling any urge to publicize it. "Look at me--I'm humble!" is wrong not because of the last clause but because of the first. A humble Christian will always say, "Look at Jesus!"

But then, a humble Christian will always be looking at Jesus, not at his own nose.

Humility 1: False Humility

I recently heard a gentleman talking about humility. He mentioned asking people at a retreat whether they were humble. Some sucker bit and raised her hand--Ha! She isn't humble, or she wouldn't raise her hand!

How droll!

How totally, almost damnably false.

This peculiar view of humility is common, unfortunately: it is the Virtue That Dare Not Speak Its Name. The first (and perhaps still the only) writer I've seen get this right is C. S. Lewis. Unfortunately, many of his "fans" have never read his writings. Pity, that.

Anyway--it doesn't take much examination to locate the problem. Suppose there is a truly humble person. You ask him, "Are you humble?" What does he--can he--answer?

1. If he says "Yes," we automatically dismiss his claim: it's a trick question for which an affirmative answer is impossible even though we have already stipulated that it would be true. That is, we have excluded truth as a possibility.

2. If he says, "No," then he is at best mistaken or deluded and at worst lying. So the only answer we will accept is a mistake, a delusion, or an outright lie. And this is a virtue?

Note that real virtues do not cost us self-knowledge: it's the vices that numb us to reality. That's why we like them. We drink to forget, in other words, though we get drunk on Pride, Wrath, Lust, and so forth. If we concentrate on vices, they will blind us to the guy on the cross and to the same guy not in the tomb but enthroned at his Father's right hand. If you fight vices and exercise virtue, you'll know as much about yourself as your friends and enemies do.

So the fact that this so-called humility at best calls for loss of self-knowledge tells us that it's really a vice. Its patron sinner is of course Uriah Heep.

Someone will probably claim that my thought experiment assumes an impossibility: no one is truly humble. Untrue: at least One was truly humble--and he said so in Matt 11:29! So by the usual reasoning, Jesus himself was guilty of the sin of pride, which would interfere with his being our Savior. Drat.

Next time, I'll explain what real humility is, and why it's as plain as the nose on your face.

Broken Angel 03: Weak points and Conclusion

And now, the part I hope no one's been looking forward to: the weak points of Sigmund Brouwer's Broken Angel.

The first strong negative I encountered was strong enough that had I been reading the book for myself, not as part of a tour, I would have dropped it. Chapter Two is largely Hobbesian, being nasty, brutish, and fortunately rather short. It is also gratuitous: I don't believe any unique and vital information lies therein, so I'd advise others to skip it. It mostly details how obnoxious Mason Lee is.

I've already mentioned that Theo's virtual disappearance later in the story annoyed me: he was an intriguing character and should've been retained. I'm sure Brouwer's a good enough writer to have done so without diminishing the more important characters.

There is also a careless plot hole toward the end of the story, in which some people with very important information apparently aren't going to be debriefed, much less interrogated. If they were, it would undermine the grand scheme that had been running the whole time. But how could a proper tyrant not take the time to break out the thumbscrews?

But the main problem I had was the handling of fundamentalists and Christianity in general:

Outside, most people knew that decades ago, the religious fundamentalists lost the ability to transform society when they became a political movement. Their boycotts and protests became so commonplace, any outcry against anything beyond the narrow range of what they saw as biblically acceptable was dismissed as a knee-jerk reaction. Once Appalachia was established, there was no one Outside who opposed liberalism and humanism. (p. 172)

There is some truth to this. We do tend to yell about things that don't matter or aren't even true, such as the various myths that are e-mailed around. And we often act as though political solutions existed for spiritual problems, so that outlawing abortion (for ewxample) would make it disappear. We should invest ourselves more in spiritual tactics that form the infrastructure for any permanent solution.

However, there are also some misperceptions of the sort that secular sources, through laziness, ignorance, and plain bigotry tend to spread. For example, there is already some disaffection with the idea of spiritual change through political means, and it's been there for a few years now.

Also, "fundamentalists" are not a cohesive group, and American Christians in general have no theocratic inclinations, so the "Appalachia Solution" simply wouldn't happen. When CNN likens Christian fundamentalists to Islamic fundamentalists and tries to demonstrate that fundies want to fly outsized KJVs ("with Thompson Chain-reference Machine Guns!") into buildings, they forget that most of the things fundies support and oppose aren't even mildly theocratic. Even some atheists are pro-life, for example, and many non-Christians support such common "fundamentalist" concerns as action against religious persecution.

[Brief Digression] This is why the idea that public prayers or displays of religious symbols could somehow lead to "an establishment of religion" (i.e., the founding of a state church) is ridiculous. It is impossible to establish most any religion in the abstract. Establish Christianity? Okay, what kind? Catholic? Orthodox (which kind, again)? Coptic? Don't even get started with "Protestant." Even if you're trying to be open-minded, what's Christian? Are Catholics? Pentecostals? What about Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses? To mean something, it pretty much has to endorse one group above others, a priniciple that will lead to an ever-tighter circle. Any action or display that does not specifically give one denomination an edge over others cannot establish that denomination and therefore the religion of which it is part.

On the other hand, sometimes it's hard to tell what's "narrow" and what's important. For years, Catholics were about the only ones who realized that abortion was important, and whether homosexual marriage is critical or trivial depends on who you ask. When I was in high school, a teacher asked whether we would be willing to go to war. One student said it would depend on the war: for an important one like WWII, yes; for Vietnam, no. But one of the reasons we were so late getting into WWII and let so many innocent people die was that most people were convinced (to use modern terms) that "the war in Europe" was just a Vietnam!

So on this point, I'd say, pray about what is important and what God wants you to do; then do it. Seek spiritual solutions, but also remember that laws represent our standards. If our law allows something, at a deep level, we do too.

A related point is "the kingdom of the cross" versus "the kingdom of the sword" (p. 182). This isn't just a crock, it's a slanderous crock. The idea is that Christians try to force belief on the unwilling. Historically, there have been some cases of this, though it's far less frequent than current mythology claims. Someday Brouwer is going to find himself in the company of a multitude he has blithely condemned without bothering to comprehend. It will be interesting to see his response.

Now, it is true that our strength comes through weakness, and grasping power leads to defeat. However, the Clan uses its own amazing cleverness to concoct the scheme that underlies the plot (a scheme that again would not actually survive routine questioning) and derives its protection from homicidal outlaws. So for them to look down on others seems a shaky move at best. It's also mildly amusing that they don't seem to be directly involved in evangelistic outreach: they help place people Outside and shelter others from the Appalachian cult. But mostly they remain cloistered in their caves.

Brouwer can be very subtle, and I'd like to think this is reverse psychology: that he is actually arguing against the Clan's hypocrisy as much as anyone else's. It's not impossible, but it leads to a kind of relativism: the Christians are no better than the unsaved, so what's the point?

Conclusion. In spite of these points, Broken Angel is a very engaging book, and the problems are a small part of the whole. I'm not sure how many readers will even notice them, unfortunately. So as simple fiction, and more, as a craft exemplar, it is worth reading. It sets up strongly for a sequel, I think, and I hope that will be even better.

Other CSFF posts:
Brandon Barr
Justin Boyer
Keanan Brand
Jackie Castle
Valerie Comer
Karri Compton
CSFF Blog Tour
Stacey Dale
D. G. D. Davidson
Janey DeMeo
Jeff Draper
April Erwin
Karina Fabian
Mark Goodyear
Andrea Graham
Katie Hart
Timothy Hicks
Christopher Hopper
Joleen Howell
Jason Joyner
Carol Keen
Magma
Margaret
Shannon McNear
Melissa Meeks
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Nissa
John W. Otte
Ashley Rutherford
Hanna Sandvig
Chawna Schroeder
Mirtika or Mir's Here
Sean Slagle
James Somers
Donna Swanson
Steve Trower
Speculative Faith
Laura Williams

No Neutrality Allowed?

I once thought I was going to be tossed out of a church for heresy. It didn't actually go beyond odd looks, but it was uncomfortable.

Some friends were teaching a Sunday school class, and they had a spare session because they finished the book early. (Actually, they thought they had two.) Since there was a lot of talk about eschatology, they asked me to explain the different views. I decided to start small and build: the first session was about different premill views, and the second was supposed to be on different views of the Millennium. The second was pre-empted by an all-church function, which was just as well: it might've caused brain hemorrhages.

So what shocking thing did I do for the premills? I simply took the first part of 1 Thess 2 and explained how different groups interpreted it: pretribs, midtribs, pre-wraths, and posttribs, in that order. I wasn't playing favorites; I gave strengths and weaknesses for each view. But that was seen as proselyting for some view or other. I'm still not sure which one I was supposedly promoting.

Part of the problem was that the assistant pastor's wife was there for some reason. (Yes, I know: I always wondered why the pastor needed an assistant wife too.) She was Not Pleased, and it spread. The worst problem came when she flat-out denied that pretribs have anxiety about finding themselves alone unexpectedly. (This is the "Left Behind" syndrome, where you think everyone else has gone in the Rapture and you didn't get called out.) I know for a fact that this anxiety exists, having experienced it myself and having heard other pretribs allude to it.

I decided not to defend the point. It turned out I didn't have to: an elderly lady laughed and said that she had been there personally and knew many others who did too. Oops!

Could I be blamed for that? Could be and was.

So what's the lesson here? In some areas neutrality is impossible. You're either One of Us or One of Them, and One of Us wouldn't go talking about Them as if they were anything but wrong-headed idiots. The real downside is that by being neutral you wind up being One of Them to everyone, which is a lonely position.

It's still worth it.

The Sacred Cliché

The Sacred Cliché is the only one still applauded by critics, even though it’s as old as a seventies newscast. It involves someone with a disadvantage, whether physical (blindness, paralysis, etc.) or social (ethnic minority, female, etc.), who is put down based on the disadvantage. But it turns out that the disadvantaged person is amazingly (even impossibly) good at something, and the skeptic is completely blown away as a result. So the guy in the wheelchair can still beat him at basketball, the girl can still beat up a guy twice her size who probably has a lot more practical combat experience than she does, and so on.

I deplore this on two grounds. First, it’s patronizing to the disadvantaged person. If he has any sense, he likely knows that his disadvantage (even a social one, such as race) does not confer any super powers. He’s still average, like as not, and from my own experience I can tell you that the only super power a guy in a wheelchair has is that he can’t walk. The better approach would be to note that if the person has been told (especially if the disadvantage is social) that he’s stupid, incompetent, or something like that, again, he’s probably average, and thus superior to what the other person thinks. That can give the element of surprise. Will it be enough to take the villain? If the villain is above average, probably not. But the villain is also likely to be average, so even a slight and temporary edge can be enough.

The second problem is that it can lead to unrealistic thinking. Remember a few years ago when a guy escaped on the way to trial? (This was in Atlanta, I think.) He was a black belt in a couple martial arts, and he was built like a linebacker. His sole guard was a grandmother who was about a foot shorter than he was. When asked why they had such a guard for such a prisoner, the authorities replied that the guard had “so much spirit” that they figured she could handle him. In fiction, yes. But even fiction shouldn’t seem like fiction.