I could be wrong, ... but ...

To a large extent, I felt  smacked around into being intellectually humble when I started graduate school. I was amazed at how much had already been said and written about, and I became convinced that I had nothing to offer.  What the heck could I think about that the great minds had not already thought about?

I was an easy convert to "I don't know a damn thing!"

I became convinced, very easily, that my work would not be about uncovering anything dramatic.  No patent or copyrights.  My intellectual ego was quickly deflated.

In addition, I also became suspicious of people who came across as intellectually arrogant, as if they knew it all.  I started staying away from them.

When I started teaching, this understanding that we know very little is one that I have tried to get across to students without making that explicit all the time.  The subversive that I am, it has been mostly an implicit message.  Sometimes, through humor--like joking that the genius Einstein had no idea how to communicate in Tamil when even a three-year old kid in Tamil Nadu can do that ;)

Intellectual humility has always fascinated me.  I have even blogged about that here.  Like this one in 2012.  Or, like when I quoted Montaigne: Que sais-je?

A couple of years ago, I decided to offer a seminar on this subject.  I titled the course as "Intellectual boldness through intellectual humility."  In that, I essentially channeled my philosophy on education and life--to admit that I don't know.  The key, however, is to rise beyond that "I don't know."

Had I known about Benjamin Franklin's approach, I would have adopted that too: "whenever he was about to make an argument, he would open with something along the lines of, “I could be wrong, but…”

I offered that seminar in 2016 and, therefore, had no idea about this systematic attempt to understand intellectual humility:

in 2016, professors from Pepperdine University broke the concept of intellectual humility down into four components and published an assessment to measure them:

1. Having respect for other viewpoints
2. Not being intellectually overconfident
3. Separating one’s ego from one’s intellect
4. Willingness to revise one’s own viewpoint

An intellectually humble person will score high on all of these counts.

I am not sure whether boasting that I will score highly on these will be intellectually humble ;)

The author notes that "certain activities generally correlate with higher intellectual humility across the board":

Traveling a lot — or, even better, living for extended periods in foreign cultures — tends to make us more willing to revise our viewpoints. After all, if we know that it is perfectly valid to live a different way than we do, it makes sense that our brains would be better at accepting new approaches to problems at work. This aligns with recent research on the neuroscience of how storytelling helps us build empathy for other people. (Read neuroeconomist Paul Zak’s HBR article on this fascinating subject here.) Fiction readers tend to score higher in intellectual humility, perhaps because their brains are a little bit better trained to seek out stories that vary from their own, and see characters’ experiences and opinions as potentially valid. Preliminary research is also showing us that practicing mindfulness meditation, learning about the ins and outs of your own ego using a framework like the Enneagram, and learning about Moral Foundations Theory through programs like Open Mind Platform can each help us operate with more intellectual humility.

Readers of this blog, or the rare person who has paid attention to my remarks in the classes, will notice that these activities are also the activities that I talk up and practice.

I cannot understand how one could be anything but intellectually humble.  But then, to use Franklin's wise words, I could be wrong ;)

Que sais-je?

We live in some strange times.  Especially with a demagogue who repeatedly tells us that he is the only one who knows how to fix all the problems and that he alone is to be trusted because everything else is nothing but fake.  He was supported by tens of millions of my fellow citizens, including the college-educated.

Que sais-je?

“What do I know?” was Montaigne’s beloved motto, meaning: What do I really know?

The demagogue and his supporters do not ever worry about that motto.  "“What do I know?” is not what they worry about; after all, they know it all.  With certainty, it seems!  Of course, whites are superior to everybody else. Of course, Mexicans are rapists. Of course, brown people come from shitholes, ...

In the special, one-time, course that I taught last term, I emphasized to students the importance of intellectual humility.  The contrast between the classroom content and discussions versus the outside world of the demagogue and fake news and bullshit was stark.  Depressingly stark.  I am sure the students saw that too.

I remembered reading about Montaigne a couple of years ago.  Google helped me out:

It’s been said — by Bakewell, with reservations, and others — that Montaigne was the first blogger. His favorite subject, as he often remarked, was himself (“I would rather be an expert on me than on Cicero”), and he meant to leave nothing out (“I am loath even to have thoughts which I cannot publish”).

Yes, that was the one.  You can see why that made an impression on me--a blogger, who often uses autoethnography to understand this world and his place in it.

[The] distinctive mark of Montaigne is his intellectual humility. Like Socrates, Montaigne claims that what he knows best is the fact that he does not know anything much. To undermine common beliefs and attitudes, Montaigne draws on tales of other times and places, on his own observations and on a barrage of arguments in the ancient Pyrrhonian skeptical tradition, which encouraged the suspension of judgment as a middle way between dogmatic assertion and equally dogmatic denial. Montaigne does often state his considered view, but rarely without suggesting, explicitly or otherwise, that maybe he is wrong. In this regard, his writing is far removed from that of the most popular bloggers and columnists, who are usually sure that they are right.   

I am confident that Montaigne and his Essais are not what the demagogue and his minions care about!

But then, Que sais-je?!