Editor's Note

Is modesty necessary?

It would have been ludicrous to ask such a question in the nineteenth century, when modesty in dress and demeanor was the expectation for both men and women. Then, modesty was associated with chastity, purity, restraint, and propriety, as well as with a lack of ostentation in appearance and behavior. Today, by contrast, if the offerings of popular culture are any guide, modesty is an obsolete virtue – a Victorian remnant that, like the corset, is viewed as restricting rather than cultivating happiness.

Despite the radical transformation of cultural norms regarding modesty, however, we have not lost all affection for this virtue. The Harris Interactive survey we conducted in October 2005 found that 56 percent of Americans still agree with the statement, “Modesty is the best policy.” It is not a policy we have much optimism about pursuing. Eighty-four percent of the adults we surveyed believe that Americans are placing much less emphasis on modesty than they did a generation ago.

Perhaps we are merely returning to an older assessment of this virtue, one that viewed overly eager expressions of modesty with suspicion. The nineteenth-century British essayist William Hazlitt declared modesty “the lowest of the virtues.” “He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others,” he declared. If you have exceptional talent, that is, there is no need for exceptional demonstrations of modesty. But as Richard Stengel suggests in this issue, false modesty is far more pervasive than its true counterpart, even if genuine modesty is a virtue best practiced by the genuinely talented.

Modesty might appear to be on the decline because of its association with another supposedly decaying art: manners. Modesty is central to the cultivation of good manners, according to the inimitable Judith Martin, a.k.a. “Miss Manners.” Modesty, writes Miss Manners, “requires decently covering one’s midriff and one’s achievements when not among intimates who find them exciting.” As Pia Catton describes in her piece about fashion, such mannered expressions of taste are becoming the exception rather than the rule. An exposed midriff might be appropriate at the beach, for example, but in an office it sends an unmistakable signal about the wearer. For the fashionably modest, context is queen.

But modesty need not mean prudishness, either in attire or behavior. In her 1792 treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, even the radical Mary Wollstonecraft deemed modesty the “sacred offspring of sensibility and reason.” What might a reasonable contemporary approach to modesty look like? Essayist Wendy Shalit finds encouragement in the example of Orthodox Jewish women, and asks us to consider which is more extreme – a culture that nurtures modesty and restraint, or one that glorifies hedonistic and immodest excess?

Traditionally, modesty is a virtue that has posed particular challenges for women – at least for women who flout its directives. The “gentleness, modesty, and sweetness” of Fanny Price’s character in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is judged “so essential a part of every woman’s worth in the judgment of man, that though he sometimes loves where it is not, he can never believe it absent.” Is this still true today? Midge Decter and Lauren Winner, our interview subjects for this issue, are women well-qualified to answer such a thorny question. In a wide-ranging intergenerational dialogue, they explore, among other subjects, changing perceptions of modesty in the twentieth century, the absence of modesty in the literary community, and the challenge of inculcating modesty in the young.

Modesty is not limited to bodily propriety, however. It can encompass our approach to learning, it can inform our exercise of power, and it can even influence our understanding of artistic achievement. Genuine modesty springs from an honest assessment of the limits of one’s own knowledge, and in no field is such an awareness more important than in science, according to Robert Hazen. In delineating what we can and cannot know about the natural world, Hazen argues, science offers a useful proving ground for modesty. Scientists who ignore modesty’s boundaries fall victim to that virtue’s opposite: hubris.

Scientists are not the only people who confront this challenge. Writing about Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr argued that to be effective in the world, nations need “a sense of modesty about the virtue, wisdom, and power available to us” and “a sense of contrition about the common human frailties and foibles which lie at the foundation of both the enemy’s demonry and our vanities.” Niall Ferguson examines such warnings in the context of contemporary United States foreign policy. Drawing on classical history, Ferguson reminds us that in the pursuit of empire, “modesty is hard to sustain.”

If nations often fail to practice modesty, how well do artists perform? In Don Quixote, Cervantes claimed, “Modesty, ’tis a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.” By contrast, a biographer described the early-fifteenth-century painter and Dominican monk Fra Angelico as “peaceful and modest” and “most kindly and temperate.” As David Gibson describes in his essay, artistic modesty can take many forms, as it did with Michelangelo and Giacometti, but its foundation is a studied respect for the artistic achievements of one’s elders.

Respect for one’s predecessors is anathema to iconoclasts, as Wilfred McClay observes in his essay about the immodesty of false radicals. As McClay explains, the smashing of idols has become a popular sport in academia, where tenured professors avidly compete for the label of “transgressive,” and where petty bureaucratic rivalries have replaced skeptical intellectual inquiry.

In academia and elsewhere, the contrast between the ideal of modesty and a reality that is frequently immodest is often stark; it is the difference between Thoreau’s humble abode on Walden Pond and Trump Tower; the contrast between the acclaim given the dedicated public servant and that offered to the debauched celebrity. As well, we can locate no simple recipe for reclaiming modesty for modern times. But perhaps our admittedly modest explorations of virtue in this issue will help close the distance between those ideals we hope to live by and the everyday world that unceasingly challenges them.