There are exceptions, of course. For the rare public figure or celebrity whose cultivated arrogance and lofty untouchability intersect in just the right ways, it’s still possible to be merely “honored” and “surprised,” in old-school acknowledgment of deserved recognition. (Think of Bob Dylan, who was unable to travel to Stockholm to pick up his Nobel Prize in person because of undisclosed pre-existing commitments.) But it’s tricky. We live in a rabidly anti-elitist society that is also in slack-jawed, slavish thrall to elites, and it’s no joke to try to maintain homeostasis between “Look at me!” and “Who, me?”
For most of us, the choice is simple: We can either let our triumphs and random strokes of luck go unremarked upon, or we can bow our heads and declare ourselves humbled by our great fortune.
It seems worth pointing out, though, that none of this is what “humbled” actually means. To be humbled is to be brought low or somehow diminished in standing or stature. Sometimes we’re humbled by humiliation or failure or some other calamity. And sometimes we’re humbled by encountering something so grand, meaningful or sublime that our own small selves are thrown into stark contrast — things like history, or the cosmos, or the divine.
“Humbled” is what a politician might have been, in pre-post-truth times, if, say, caught doing the very thing he had campaigned to criminalize. To be “humbled” is to find yourself in the embarrassing position of having to shimmy awkwardly off your pedestal, or your high horse — or some other elevated place that would not have seemed so elevated had you not been so lowly to begin with — muttering apologies and cringing, with your skirt riding up past your granny pants. It is to think you are in a position of fanciness, only to learn to your utter chagrin that you are in a relatively modest one instead. “So, I sold my book for $100,000,” the author Cheryl Strayed told Vulture recently, in a rare example of correct recent usage, “and what I received was a check for about $21,000 a year over the course of four years, and I paid a third of that to the I.R.S. Don’t get me wrong, the book deal helped a lot — it was like getting a grant every year for four years. But it wasn’t enough to live off. So, I guess it was a humbling lesson!”
This is no longer how most of us speak. In the present-day vernacular, people are most humbled by the things that make them look good. They are humbled by the sublimity of their own achievements. The “humblebrag” — a boast couched in a self-deprecating comment — has migrated from subtext to text, leaving self-awareness passed out in the bathroom behind the potted plant.
Diving at random into the internet and social media finds this new humility everywhere. A soap-opera actress on tour is humbled by the outpouring of love from fans. Comedians are humbled by big laughs, yoga practitioners are humbled by achieving difficult poses, athletes are humbled by good days on the field, Christmas volunteers are humbled by their own generosity and holiday spirit.
And yet none of these people sound very “humbled” at all. On the contrary: They all seem exceedingly proud of themselves, hashtagging their humility to advertise their own status, success, sprightliness, generosity, moral superiority and luck.
When did humility get so cocky and vainglorious? I remember the first time, around 15 years ago, that I heard someone describe herself as “blessed.” An old friend of my boyfriend’s came to visit and spent the evening regaling us with stories of her many blessings. She wasn’t especially religious, which somehow made her choice of words worse. Every good thing in her life — friends, job, apartment, decent parking space — was a blessing: i.e., something deliberate, something thoughtfully picked out for her by a higher power. It took a while to put a finger on why it got on my nerves. The problem was that she couldn’t just let herself be lucky, because luck was random, meaningless, undeserved. Luck was a roll of the dice. She had to be chosen.
Something similar happens with “humbled” and “humbling.” Many uses of the word smack of sanctimony and Christian piety. Which is no wonder: Humility is, after all, a Christian virtue. According to the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia, the word humility “signifies lowliness or submissiveness” and may trace back to the Latin humus— “i.e. the earth which is beneath us.” Applied to people and things, it describes “that which is abject, ignoble or of poor condition, as we ordinarily say, not worth much.” Nobody wins an Academy Award and announces that they are humiliated.
What many people mean when they say they’ve been humbled is that they’ve supposedly been reminded for a moment of their human smallness in the face of some gigantic, mysterious force: art, agents, academy voters. It’s farther down in the New Advent entry that we begin to approach this usage: “Humility in a higher and ethical sense is that by which a man has a modest estimate of his own worth and submits himself to others.” “Others” being God, say, or a grand movement or mission, or just the majesty of your own corporate or celebrity overlords. (There are many downsides to our worship of fame and money, and one is that it makes people confuse sucking up to the rich and famous with spirituality.) Maybe that humbled soap actress was moved to recognize a modest estimate of her own worth and submit herself to her fans. Maybe Conway, as an adviser to the president, was moved to recognize a modest estimate of the value of her work — the work of uncoupling words from their meanings and spinning them into peaky meringues — and submit herself to the power of the office of the presidency.
But it is one thing to stand awed before the highest office in the land and quite another to stand awed before a kind word from a peer, or the purchase of a new luxury car, or the posting of an especially good Instagram picture. The word is, more and more often, just a kneejerk, a tic of false piety and blind worship.
“We’re not worthy! We’re not worthy!” was the supplicant cry of Garth and Wayne in “Wayne’s World.” Twenty-five years later, we’ve forgotten that this was supposed to be funny. We brag about being humble to our voter base, fan base, Twitter followers. We close our eyes in gratitude for our success. We look up in beatific wonder at all we have accomplished. We bow our heads in recognition of this thing that’s bigger than us, than our massive egos, and we’re humbled by its immensity. And why not? It’s got to be huge to eclipse us.
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