Humility Part 1: The Antidote To Shame
This is the beginning of a 3-part series on Humility. I am going to write about the topic from a philosophical and psychological perspective. There is also a spiritual element that I will weave through the topic as well. My spiritual beliefs and knowledge are rooted in the Bible so I will be using that as my reference when discussing the spiritual aspect of Humility. I will use science and philosophy as the basis for my statements, and then build the ideas out to show how they are validated and expanded upon within the Bible.
What is Pride?
In order for us to discuss what Humility is, I think it is best to first try to understand the nature of Pride.
First, pride can be described as an emotion - a feeling. It is a feeling that reveals itself when we find satisfaction in our positive traits and accomplishments. Depending on the context of where the word is used in today's culture, it can vary in meaning. Sometimes it can be used to mean that someone has a sense of worth. Other times it can mean feeling happy that you were able to accomplish something. Sometimes it could refer to a feeling of superiority over others. I think these definitions talk about the effects of pride but they don't get to the root of what causes them to arise in the first place. I think they are too specific.
I think a better definition of pride is this:
Pride is seeking to find self-worth within the positive traits and actions of ourselves.
There are two primary outward ways that this desire can be practically manifested.
- Making yourself look better
- Making other's look worse
Both of these actions accomplish the task of bringing more focus to your own positive traits and actions. One focuses on your positive traits. The other is comparing yourself and focusing on the negative traits of others. Both of these things accomplish the same goal:
The goal of pride is to protect one's self-worth and avoid feelings of worthlessness.
I believe this statement gets at the psychological root of pride. There are other angles to it, but this is an important one.
It is vital to note that there is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to feel valued as a human being. Humans need a sense of worth in order to continue functioning in a positive way as I will discuss below. However, the reason pride can be dangerous is for the two following reasons.
Pride can cause you to live in willful ignorance of reality.
Essentially, pride tends to make you warp reality into something that it's not. Pride tends to makes people minimize their weaknesses and maximize their strengths. Sometimes it can even mean totally ignoring weakness. This is essentially living a lie. Living this way is not good for you, nor those around you.
The second reason pride is dangerous is because:
Pride makes it impossible to have peace
When you are seeking inner peace through means of your own abilities and accomplishments, you are bound to fall short of your own standards. You will be on a perpetual treadmill of running after your own expectations, and will never be satisfied that you have attained it. The world you create for yourself is fraught with fear and danger.
The Psychology of Pride - Serotonin
Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that our brain releases when we feel we are valuable and significant. This gives us a boost of confidence and has a calming effect on our bodies and minds. Serotonin naturally lowers anxiety, improves sleep, and even aids in digestion.
Serotonin influences our brain psychology significantly, even influencing how we view life and fit within society.
In Jordan Peterson's Book 12 Rules for Life, the clinical psychologist talks about the effect of Serotonin in Lobsters and how dominance hierarchies are formed and maintained in association with levels of Serotonin in the brains of these crustaceans. When a lobster has low serotonin levels, it will lack confidence, be risk-averse, and act impulsively. Inversely, if a lobster has high levels of Serotonin, it will be more willing to take risks, assume dominance of its domain, and assume a position of leadership within the social hierarchy. Serotonin also acts as a feedback loop. With more Serotonin comes more confidence, with more confidence, more Serotonin. With less confidence, less Serotonin, with less Serotonin, less confidence.
These same principles apply to human social structures. If we live in such a way that we have little sense of self-worth, we may be setting ourselves up to live with chronically low levels of Serotonin, increasing our risk of mental health disorders like depression and suicide. However, with increased amounts of Serotonin comes confidence and courage.
So another way of looking at pride is an attempt at increasing our levels of Serotonin in order to maintain or increase our place within the societal structure we live within.
The Inverse of Pride - Shame
In the past, I've thought of Humility as the inverse of Pride. In studying these topics, I've come to the conclusion that this is not the case. I believe the inverse of pride is in fact, shame. This is because pride finds your value and worth in looking at your positive attributes, while shame finds your value and worth in looking at your negative attributes.
Shame occurs when you connect your identity to the awareness of your own shortcomings.
Often people feel the need to live in willful ignorance of their own shortcomings because the belief is that to admit failure and the truth of their state would mean to succumb to feelings of shame.
Shame occurs when you connect your identity to your self-awareness. In other words, if you shoplift something from a store and get caught, the only way you feel shame is if you connect the fact that you stole something to your sense of worth and value. You could instead choose to live in willful ignorance. This would look like trying to convince yourself and law enforcement that you didn't do it, or that there were legitimate reasons to steal. This is to lie to others and yourself in order to maintain your sense of self-worth.
The Psychology of Shame
There is an important distinction between the psychological concepts of guilt and shame. When someone feels guilt, it means that they feel they have committed an offense. The feeling of guilt is associated with activity in the prefrontal cortex of the brain that can trigger the limbic system to produce stress. Feeling guilty about something produces stress in the brain. It is important to note here that the activity starts in the prefrontal cortex which is the frontal lobe of the brain. This part of the brain is responsible for logic, reason, and other high-level cognitive functions.
Since the feeling of guilt is associated with the frontal lobe, it means that the logical part of your brain is still active. The adrenaline rush that you get from feeling guilt helps you to be able to think about how to right the wrong that has been done.
In other words, guilt propels you towards action.
Shame is distinct from guilt. Shame is a term that is associated with evaluating someone's value and worth. To be ashamed means that you are self-conscious. It means that you are conscious of your own being, and wish to be different than who you are.
Shame triggers activity in the limbic system of the brain. The feeling of Shame causes your psychology to self-protect because it uses the same mechanisms as if you were hiding from physical danger. The feeling of shame is so powerful that it actually hijacks your rational thinking prefrontal cortex and pushes your mind into the automatic fight-or-flight response.
There is a massive difference between these two mental states. One propels people to self-improvement and changing their actions. The other is the gateway to depression.
It is also important to note that continual guilt often matures into shame. In other words, if you feel guilty and feel that there is nothing you can do to rectify the situation, you will begin to question if there is something wrong with you. So while guilt can be a positive influence on our ability to progress and learn, too much of it can also lead to shame.
The question becomes how do we avoid Shame, and at the same time live in such a way that we don't have to lie to ourselves or those around us to maintain a sense of self-worth?
Humility
Humility at the core is being self-aware enough to see yourself for who you really are and being content with what you see. Humility is not the inverse of pride, but the middle ground between the extremes of Pride and Shame.
Humility is an outward expression of realism, instead of an expression of falsehood or misrepresentation characterized by Pride on one end of the spectrum and Shame on the other.
To be willing to look at yourself for who you truly are, you need to be able to find your sense of worth outside of your positive and negative characteristics and actions.
In other words:
Humility requires that your validation and self-worth be independent of your traits and actions
You may pose an argument asking, "Is it possible to find self-worth in the fact that you have a balance of positive and negative traits?" In other words, can your good traits and bad traits balance each other out? It is theoretically possible, however, it introduces some problems.
First, it assumes that you know the value of your positive and negative traits and actions. Do they have the same value? If they don't then what is the weight of each? If they do have equal value then you must maintain a perfect equilibrium.
If your self-worth is based on the fact that you are maintaining a balance of good traits that balance out your bad traits then you are bound to have fluctuations in your assessment. It is impossible to think that every bad action and trait that would hinder your self-worth will be equally balanced by good action and good traits. It's not mathematically feasible.
If we think that we can maintain a good sense of self-worth by looking for a balance in ourselves, it will fail unless we manipulate the weights. This is no different than pride because it's not truly seeing reality, and instead, it's believing lies in order to make ourselves maintain self-worth.
This is where it begins to be difficult for me to continue thinking about these concepts without beginning to think about them in a spiritual sense. If we want to be truly humble and find our validation and self-worth outside of ourselves, then the question becomes where do we look?
We have the option to look for our validation to come from others, but unfortunately, other people use the same criteria that we ourselves use to evaluate our worth. They look at our actions and characteristics. This won't really solve the problem of avoiding shame because people tend to focus on their shortcomings. Even if you are only around positive people, you are still putting them in the driver's seat of your own self-worth. All it takes is for them to decide they don't think you're valuable and they can completely break you. It takes a lot of trust in someone's perfect performance of positivity.
So what are the alternatives? There may be more, but the only alternative I'm able to think of is to find our self-worth defined by a good and benevolent Divine Being.
The Spiritual Aspect of Humility
I've found it very interesting to look at the story of the Fall in Genesis in terms of pride and shame. I think it tells us a lot about our state and how we were created to live.
When God created Adam and Eve in the garden it says that they were "naked and were not ashamed". Reading this, it seems like such a strange detail to include within the story. I believe it's an important detail because of how it communicates their state of awareness. The phrase means they were content with who they were created to be. They were vulnerable and exposed. They were defenseless to having their self-worth be judged, yet they were unashamed. They were content with God's evaluation of them which was "very good". They lived in a state in which their "eyes were closed". They had no need to open the eyes of their own self-evaluation because they were content to be defined and valued by God. They were content to be defined by the Divine Creator - something independent of their own characteristics and performance.
When Adam and Eve sinned, the Bible says that "Their eyes were opened". The serpent told them that they would "be like God, knowing good from evil". The serpent tempted them with the ability to be like God - to know and judge what is good and what is evil. This is another way of saying that they would have knowledge that would make them capable of self-evaluation.
When Adam and Eve ate the fruit, their eyes were opened, just as the serpent had told them. However, the result was not what they were expecting. They now had the capacity to evaluate themselves as God did in the creation process where he made things "good" and mankind he proclaimed to be "very good".
Adam and Eve's self-evaluation didn't go so well because the Bible goes on to say that they became ashamed of their nakedness and hid. As discussed above, The feeling of shame comes about when you feel that your worth is called into question. The fear that is generated in the Amygdala of the brain drives your body to self-protect. In Adam and Eve's case, this meant they hid and made clothing out of leaves. They were no longer satisfied by God's evaluation of their value. Their desire was to be God himself and judge what is good and evil.
The Solution
The Bible goes on to describe the way that God makes for mankind to find their value and worth once again in his definition of them rather than their own. God made mankind in His own image. We were designed to be valued and find our self-worth in the fact that we are Tselem. (image bearers) God made a way that we don't have to live in this state of fear and shame. Being Children of God means that we are now defined and valued as "God's children". We are no longer defined by our actions and characteristics because we are first and foremost God's family when we trust in Christ for salvation.
As I said earlier, I don't want to assume that I know everything. There may be other solutions to finding value outside of yourself, though I believe that no other solution would be as absolute and complete as the solution the Bible gives. My suspicion is that any other resolution to the problem of maintaining a positive self-image results in the warping of reality at some level, but I would be curious to hear any thoughts you may have on the subject.
I will be continuing this series on humility by writing more articles on how understanding our own limitations improves our ability to live to the fullest. Humans were designed for humility and there are many more advantages than just avoiding shame. I plan to share some of those findings with you in the coming weeks.
-Josh