Here's how to strengthen our democracy: Practice humility

The most important thing you learn in life is how little you really know for certain.

Once you learn that — once you embrace, like Socrates, the fundamental fact of your own ignorance — the world becomes a more exciting place, chock-full of possibility. Every person you encounter has the potential to offer insight you do not possess: He has experience I don’t have. She might change my mind about something.

Intellectual humility is more than a personal virtue. It is essential to a functioning free society. It’s what empowers people with different experiences and beliefs to value one another, engage in civil discourse, and learn from each other.

The irony is that with each wave of new learning, humanity is tempted into thinking that we have all the answers. This is as true today as it was in Socrates’ day, as it was in the afterglow of the Age of Reason, and the technological and economic progress born of the Industrial Revolution.

With each new era, we seem to forget the fundamental lesson of intellectual humility. Left unchallenged, our sense of certainty gets us into all manner of mischief, from Holy Inquisitions to centralized economic plans.

Today, generations of adults are, once again, interacting with each other without any sense that they may have something to learn. We are certain that our ideas are the right ideas. Full Stop. Further scrutiny, further refinement would be a waste of time.

In his book "Hate Inc: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another," Matt Taibbi explains how the media helped destroy our capacity for humility. “Your media experience is designed to nurture and protect your ego,” Taibbi writes. The rules are simple: “Accept a binary world and pick a side. . . . Feel indignant, righteous, and smart. Hate losers, love winners. Don’t challenge yourself.”

'I am not too sure'

But it’s too easy to blame our current state on the media. We let it happen. We need to begin to challenge ourselves again — to reanimate a secular creed that renders humility a more attractive quality than certainty.

We have a good deal of wisdom to draw upon. “The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong,” H. L. Mencken wrote in notebooks published after his death in 1956. “The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant . . . His culture is based on ‘I am not too sure.’”

Mencken was drawing upon a shared ideological heritage. Intellectual humility is at the core of the American Experiment, in which our founders rejected top-down order —monarchy, oligarchy, and state religion — in favor of bottom-up discovery, self-governance and free association. Ours is fundamentally a culture based on “I am not too sure.”

And so, to begin a new chapter in the American Experiment, we should make a new commitment to intellectual humility.

Universities should be a model

Let’s begin at our universities. Universities are the site of knowledge acquisition, of course. But it’s the sense of excitement for all that is uncertain that is perhaps the great gift academia can give students. As William Cronon observed, a liberally educated person is able to hold a conversation with anyone — whether “a high school dropout or Nobel laureate” — because we have cultivated a genuine, far-ranging sense of curiosity that is grounded in the underlying belief that we have something to learn from virtually everyone.

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Let’s foster good faith discourse — in universities and beyond — in which the goal is not to win a debate or produce viral content, but to have authentic, learning conversations that leave all participants wiser for having engaged. The promise of such discourse isn’t that we’ll necessarily come to agree with each other, but that we’ll come to understand each other.

At the Institute for Humane Studies we’re working with scholars around the country to launch the Discourse Initiative, where we’ll invite learning conversations on issues of politics, philosophy, history, economics and law. Like the architects of the Hidden Common Ground Project, we believe that America is not as hopelessly divided as it seems. We put forth that our hidden common ground is our shared heritage of Enlightenment-era principles upon which America was founded, among them, a belief in the inherent dignity of every person and the importance of individual freedom, tolerance and intellectual humility to the good society.

That many of the American founders claimed ownership of other human beings is also part of our shared heritage. It is a reminder that nobody, not even men who were among the brightest minds of their time, is immune from being deeply, morally wrong. It is a reminder of how grave the consequences can be when we are.

A posture of intellectual humility does not require that we abandon our intellectual, moral, political and spiritual commitments. On the contrary, it is when we are most thoughtful — when the stakes are high and our convictions run deep — that we have the most to gain from sincere and open discourse. The challenge is to avoid the perils of arrogance by recalling the secular creed; by remembering that there is always much more to be learned.

Emily Chamlee-Wright is president of the Institute for Humane Studies, which supports university professors exploring ideas within the classical liberal tradition. IHS’ Discourse Initiative is launching this year.