The well-being that unhumility compromises
If we are to be well, if our life is to be good, we human beings need both to love and to be loved, to respect our fellow humans and to be respected by them.We need to see them and to be seen by them with benevolent eyes.This style of seeing naturally evokes the corresponding style of being seen, a fellowship, a communion of souls.This responsiveness, this vector toward mutuality, seems to be built into human nature.The difference between the vain person's enjoyment of being admired and the humble person's enjoyment of being loved and respected is that the latter evokes reciprocation.
Love, when received as love, evokes love; admiration, when received as satisfying vanity, evokes self-importance, which is not reciprocated by according importance to the admirer. Or rather, the importance of the admirer to the vain person is not the admirer's importance as a person, but is the admirer's importance as satisfying the vain person's appetite for self-importance. That is why there is no deep human satisfaction—no happiness, no wellbeing—in admiring a vain person, or, as a vain person, in being admired.When vanity becomes a settled character trait, the distortion of human nature weakens the natural vector I've identified. Then the love and respect are met, not with the happiness of returned love and respect, but with the frustrating resistance of a soul preoccupied with his or her own importance. Love can be fulfilling even when it isn't reciprocated, but the vain person's resistance is especially off-putting, perhaps because love is not just lacking, but being actively twisted, exploited, and suffocated.The person who suffers from the vices of pride denies to his fellows the love, respect, and well-wishing (the warmth, as the DSM suggests) that they need to feel from him for their relationship to be fulfilling.And the source of his denial is his hunger for self-importance. It isn't just that he is distracted from attention to them by his concern, though that is true as well; he is in many ways (namely, in the ways the vices of pride seek self-importance: by self-display, by claiming entitlements, by denying credit to others, by dominating others, by thinking himself morally or otherwise superior) a very social animal.
He doesn't just ignore his fellows, but actively (though often covertly) assaults their dignity by “putting them down,” by “using” them, and by abusing them when they fail to accord him his claimed privileges. In the process, of course, the unhumble person denies to himself, as well, the happiness of reciprocal love and respect. He forsakes a real joy for the sake of a hollow one.The habitual episodic practice of reciprocal love and respect engenders the virtues of love and respect, and to the extent that these virtues prevail in the members of the community, they dispel the interest in self-importance.The absence of the passion of self-importance is, or at least is a signal feature of, the virtue of humility. This, then, is how humility contributes to human flourishing: by constituting an absence of a main factor that spoils human life, namely, the pursuit of self-importance, and by providing room for one of the main factors that fulfills and glorifies human life, namely, love and respect. To love and respect others is to contribute to the flourishing of the human community, and this contribution expresses and constitutes the flourishing of the one who loves and respects others.To be loved and respected by others engenders the confidence and positive self-regard that are the effective basis of loving and respecting others. In this way, love and respect beget love and respect, and by doing so ground human flourishing.
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