Sunday Magazine - September 16, 2012
Kids don't understand the meaning of the word humility, let alone practise it | News.com.au
RECENTLY I read Charlotte's Web to my daughter.
Remember the story? A tenacious and articulate spider writes words in her web to describe a sweet but otherwise unremarkable pig.
‘Terrific’, she spells out, then ‘radiant’. Just before she dies – because even uncommonly gifted arachnids still cark it – she spins the word ‘humble’.
“What does humble mean, Mum?” asks my daughter.
“It means you don’t have tickets on yourself; let’s say you won the spelling bee at school, you wouldn’t show off about it.”
My daughter thinks for a moment, then replies, “I don’t know anyone who’s humble.”
There, dear reader, is the voice of a generation. Humility, that most venerated, ancient and biblical of virtues, has slipped out of our lexicon, swept away by a culture that’s all about the ‘me’, not ‘we’.
As a freshly minted journalism graduate, I wrote obituaries when there were no ambulances to chase. It was brain-numbingly dull. Most of the subjects hadn’t actually died, but the editor wanted to be prepared.
So I’d eulogise on Sir Edmund Hillary, Nelson Mandela, the Queen Mother (I knocked her off three times) – extraordinary people defined by a common adjective: humility.
Years later, his obit yellowing in a file, I cajoled Hillary to confess who stepped on the summit of Everest first, he or Tenzing Norgay? “We reached the top almost together,” he said firmly. (Notably, there’s no photo of Hillary on the peak; he simply didn’t think to take one.)
In these days of social media and ‘selfies’, it’s not hard to be humble – it’s impossible. Everybody is a brand to be self-promoted. “Get yourself an agent,” said a showbiz friend when I started this column. “Why?” I asked.
“People will read it for the writing, not because I’m some chick on a yoghurt ad.” He smiled knowingly: “Trust me.” (Wish I had, there’s a motza to be made spruiking dairy products.)
“Humility,” said CS Lewis, “is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.” What a quaint notion for a culture raised on praise and driven by a need for recognition.
This lack of humility now defines who we are: the arrogance that drove the global financial crisis; the self-inflation and deflation of our athletes in London; the buying of Twitter or Facebook followers; the slow death of civility.
“We’re going to audit you,” a media exec told me recently when I was up for a new role.
“Audit me? What for?” I asked anxiously, regretting my tax tardiness.
“For popularity; you know, to see how many followers you have and how often you’ve been ‘liked’ and ‘favourited’.” Jeez, Louise – I’m a writer. Do you reckon Shakespeare could have knocked out 37 plays and a zillion sonnets if he’d had to constantly tweet about how fabulous he was?
Look, I love social media, but this need to shop-window ourselves is creating a generation that calculates its worth on external adulation, not personal integrity. Where will our next Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi or Aung San Suu Kyi come from if we continue to pursue glory over good?
One obituary I wish I’d written was Neil Armstrong’s. When he died, TV producers scrambled for video footage.
Yes, there was the moon walk, but there were no red carpets, no appearances on Letterman, no reunions with retired astronauts. He was the ultimate humble hero – an explorer who sought greatness not for one man, but for mankind.
Catch Angela Mollard every Sunday at 8.45am on Weekend Today, on the Nine Network.
Email angelamollard@sundaymagazine.com.au. Follow her at http://www.twitter.com/angelamollard.
Article originally published here: http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/opinion/kids-dont-understand-the-meaning-of-the-word-humility-let-alone-practise-it/story-fneuzvve-1226474389761
