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“I’ve never had a humble opinion. If you’ve got an opinion, why be humble about it?” —Joan Baez

I find this statement disturbing, not because I disliked Joan Baez or her music, but because those words represent how so many people these days, celebrities and common folk alike, think. If you have a strong opinion, you should shout it from the housetops and ridicule any position that differs. Humility is for wishy-washy, weaker, lesser souls. What need is there for a spirit of meekness or compromise when you have truth all figured out?

One reviewer of Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion wrote:

Whatever favored position you have politically, try to always question what else it is you are missing. After all, very smart and good people are conservatives, liberals, Buddhists, Christians, atheists, and many other things. Is it more likely that your positions are right and everyone else is just missing it (the position of the righteous mind), or that you probably have a grain of truth in a field that contains many other grains? 49

Other great thinkers over the centuries have said as much. Mechthild of Magdeburg, a thirteenth-century mystic, said that our understanding of the workings of the universe is the same as the amount of honey a honeybee can carry away on one foot from an overflowing jar—not much.

Sir Isaac Newton, after discovering the law of gravity, wrote: “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

Albert Einstein said: “We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.” Maybe we should begin more discussions with a soft “In my humble opinion” and mean it, and then concentrate on understanding the other person’s point of view.