Intellectual Humility

A long tradition, a short memory

The Oracle at Delphi told Socrates that he was wisest man in Athens because he alone had the wisdom to admit that he did not know things rather than pretend that he did.

I’m always mortified when I think back to some of the intellectual positions that I once held so firmly, like my sweeping condemnation of certain thinkers as being purely “toxic”—something I learned from bad mentors whom I trusted too much, and something I had to unlearn—and my resulting skepticism of anyone who read or was influenced by those thinkers…despite my not having engaged with them at all.

I thought of this recently when a young new convert to Catholicism, part of a particularly political group on the Lower East Side, joked that he learned to hate David French on the first day of RCIA (the Rite of Christian Initiation) before even cracking up the catechism. One merely needed to sit in the back row to participate in the ritual scapegoating of the man. It was practically Fundamental Theology.

How might we see t…