Modesty

I caught a glimpse of Alex Salmond on TV on Sunday morning while checking the weather forecast on Ceefax. He happened to be talking about something when I switched on. Scottish independence I think - I didn't really listen.

What struck me about him was how, in common with almost all politicians, he is quite prepared to speak with certainty on matters with an uncertain outcome, such as Scottish independence. I have no views on the issue, but as Mr Salmond spoke, the word modest popped into my head, because when propounding his ideas, the man is not modest. I may be wrong doesn’t really come into it.

So many useful English words overlap each other in such a way that I sometimes wonder if we need another word for the area of overlap. One of these is modest.

modest Pronunciation: /ˈmɒdɪst/

adjective

unassuming in the estimation of one’s abilities or achievements:he was a very modest man, refusing to take any credit for the enterprise

So we have modest, unassuming, unpretentious and no doubt one or two other words as well.  To me, modesty has a curious relationship with intelligence in the sense that modest people often have a deep seated desire to be right in what they say or do – or at least not wrong.

It applies to both physical and verbal behaviour – driving a car without a need to dominate other road users, putting forward an idea without a burning desire to convince, defeat or browbeat. Surely both these examples represent aspects of intelligence?

Note the modest question mark by the way. Note too the immodest pointing out of the modest question mark. Note...

Yes we are complex, yet there is I think, a certain compatibility between intelligence and modest social behaviour, especially modest intellectual behaviour. Yet the other side of the modesty coin is not necessarily loutish behaviour – physical or verbal.

We may classify people such as Mr Salmond as intelligent, yet something seems to be missing from their supposed intelligence. They lack a certain intellectual modesty where the need to persuade does not overtop the desire to be right. In this sense it is possible to be both intelligent and unintelligent at the same time. 

So intelligence surely has an important weaknesses as a concept. It seems to me, that this lack of intellectual modesty is why political leaders who by any other standards might be called intelligent, are often too immodest to make intelligent decisions. Too often they are simply wrong – even in their political judgements.

I'm not convinced that we account satisfactorily for these failures of judgement.

We tend to accuse politicians of being supremely cynical in their crafty calculations, then when the shit hits the fan we accuse them of stupidity. We can't have it both ways. To some extent they are cynical and to some extent their crafty cynicism is successful, but not as successful as it could be - and sometimes staggeringly, stupidly unsuccessful.

To my mind, the recent kerfuffle over Andrew Mitchell seems to be an example. An emotional outburst it may have been, but maybe it was also a situation where the intellectual weakness of an immodest man accidentally saw the light of day. Of course, he would never have achieved high office through modesty. People don't and it's a problem.

In my view.

Maybe.