I’ve often said that the worst thing, emotionally speaking, humans can do to one another is humiliation. The Nazis knew this, when they set elderly Jewish gentlemen to cleaning sidewalks on their knees with a toothbrush. Schoolchildren often have a diabolically fine sense of it, when they find just the right insult for the victim of their bullying. And at the other end of the scale governments upon occasion do it to whole countries.
Humiliation is almost never forgiven, and never forgotten. A woman in her mid-eighties remembers with crystal clarity the day when a grade-school teacher made an example of her for some transgression, in front of the whole class. And thousands of Russians now support their murderous and vengeful Führer because a generation ago, when Berlin’s vile wall came down, they felt their country had been humiliated beyond bearing.
The French language has two words for “pride”: orgeuil and fierté. The former is the chief of deadly sins; the latter is the healthy pride one may feel in an achievement of one’s own, of one’s daughter’s, of one’s football team’s or of one’s country’s. English has an additional word of great value, “self-esteem”: the form of psychologically healthy, indeed essential, pride that allows one to hold up one’s head, to walk tall. In humiliation, all these are battered, as one is made to feel worthless and of no account. The word, after all, comes from humilis, low, close to the humus, the earth, the soil, the mud.
What, if anything, defends us against humiliation? One may take refuge in overweening pride, orgeuil, but that is a bitter draught that corrodes: not for nothing is it the chiefest of all sins. No: there is one defence, and I suspect one only, against this terrible condition. T.S. Eliot expressed it memorably and with perfect accuracy in “Four Quartets”:
the only wisdom we can hope to acquire
is the wisdom of humility. Humility is endless.
In what is nearly a form of homeopathic medicine, we find a word with the same root, the root of eartth, of soil: humility. He that is down need fear no fall: he that is low, no pride. Humility does not mean hating or feeling contempt for oneself: humility means the openness and the generosity of looking at most other people with admiration for their unique talents or achievements, and not thinking of oneself as better than they. And it protects one against humiliation, because if that’s the way you feel and someone snide snarls “you’re not much” you quite naturally feel that he has a point, unpleassant though he is about it. It is hard, if not impossible, to humiliate a genuinely humble person.
What message is there here at the level of nations? A major reason for the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party was the Treaty of Versailles, which in sealing the Allied victory after the Great War humiliated the German nation as well as bankrupting it. And it has been said that one reason for the present war in Ukraine is the humiliation Putin and many Russians feel was infliucted upon their country at the fall of the Soviet Union. “In victory, magnanimity” prescribed Churchill: a phrase sometimes remembered but rarely acted upon.
It would be a Good Thing if every government’s foreign policy included a constant, recognized, and expressed, contemplation of every other nation’s especial talents and achievements. Thus we, as citizens, might be taught to look upon, say, the Turkish nation with admiration for its long history of Ottoman civilization and governance; to admire the Moroccans for their medieval philosophers; to be grateful to Spain for teaching us a certain kind of pride and courage, and to Portugal for introducing us to the exquisite melancholy of saudade. We might then tell our Russian neighbours on this planet how we admire the depth and intensity of feeling that their particular culture has made known to us, and compliment the Dutch for having almost invented the precious quality of religious tolerance. We might send a memorandum to the Chinese, gravely thanking them for having presented the world with the wisdom of Confucius. And who knows? the climate of international relations might possibly improve to the point where the other kind of climate would actually benefit.
