The Virtues

There is a great piece here by one of Australia's best columnists, Miranda Devine (even Mark Lathem has praised her writing!) The reason I bring it to your attention is that she mentions C.S. Lewis and the superiority of the virtue of humility versus the modern truncated version, modesty. Devine writes

"There is no such ambivalence with humility. It is the grandest of the stern virtues that used to be so prized. It is what the ancient Greeks knew to be an essential quality of heroes, a product of courage and self-knowledge.

It has been the mainstay of Christian societies and central to the Protestant ethic, the core value of people who built great wealth and created moral capital for future generations, the antidote to hubris.

Modesty is a strangled, anaemic version of humility that has been bleached through the acid of political correctness, excessive tolerance and gender neutrality into a modest little morsel of itself.

CS Lewis once wrote in his essay The Weight of Glory, that: 'Perfect humility dispenses with modesty. If God is satisfied with the work, the work may be satisfied with itself'"

What we need is greater humility which isn't self-deprecating to the point where we can't speak out boldly for what is true. It isn't even opposed to humility to honestly acknowledge one's own virtues. When one downplays one's abilities falsely, that isn't real humility it is false humility. Pride and arrogance are when one praises oneself or is over confident in one's abilities. In other words, when one is deluded about one's standing in the world. Nowadays a sense of modesty compels one to reject any notions of absolute truth out of fear of being labelled 'arrogant' or 'bigoted' or whatever.

There is another terrific piece on the Cardinal Virtues (and their modern inversions) by the philosopher Ed Feser here.