What Is Modesty?
An Ancient Virtue Revisited
In a modern context, a modest person is someone who doesn’t show off. Only someone who has something to show off can refrain from doing so. As Golda Meir says, “Don’t be so humble—you’re not that great.” Whether a person is showing off smarts, looks, or some talent, immodesty colloquially means showing something that is true, but doing so in a way or context that is inappropriate.
Originally, an immodest person seems to have been one who prone to exaggeration. Modesty, therefore, wasn’t about hiding the truth—but of revealing it. A talented person who refrained from showing her talent wasn’t being modest, but, as we might say today, “falsely humble.” In the 1530s, “modest” meant “freedom from exaggeration, self-control.” The Latin meaning connects modesty to a sense of moderation, temperateness, and measured manner.
A culture of advertising, intensified by social media’s conversion of the self into a “brand,” has changed the meaning of modesty. Our world is one that rewards immodesty, hype. To be measured in a world in which everything is superlative (and adjectives like “best” have lost all meaning) is to be relatively disadvantaged (all other things being equally). Meanwhile, to participate in the Zeigeist’s pressure to exaggerate is no longer to be immodest, since “everyone is doing it.”
The narrow (and often gendered) focus on modesty in terms of dress and/or sexuality, often found in traditional religious discourse, misses the broader issue: what is it appropriate to reveal, to whom, in what contexts? And who decides? Is modesty about hiding what is true, refraining from exaggeration, and/or managing other people’s distorted perceptions?
If one were seeking to describe the metaphysics underwriting a conception of modesty, one would have to say that modesty is a mode of selfhood. To posit modesty is to posit the self as something apart from society, apart from social dynamics, that chooses to reveal or not reveal. Modesty is a way of asserting and/or discovering agency. Conversely, the skeptical view that any value of modesty is a form of surveillance or social control turns the self into a function of other people, deflating its sense of agency.
The most mystical and difficult question of all—and the one that depends on one’s operational definition—is whether one can be modest with regards to oneself? To the extent that modesty involves a sober, clear view of things, the answer must be positive. To the extent that modesty involves a refusal to reveal the truth, out of fear of how it will be received/viewed, the answer must be strange. A modest self in the second sense would be one that considers self-revelation inappropriate.
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