Modesty stirs curiosity, conversation

We have succeeded in teaching people to brag.

Personally, Miss Manners never quite saw the need. Listening to people extol their possessions, talents, ancestors, degrees, looks, salaries, brains, important connections and workout routines turned out to be less charming than was evidently expected. It is one thing when 4-year-olds announce, apropos of nothing, “I got new shoes!” and another when adults drag out brand names from their feet.

Yet a wide variety of social forces has combined, for some time now, to teach people to brag. Education promoted self-esteem, by which it reversed the usual sequence of accomplishment and congratulation. Popular psychology fostered the idea of self-love.

Then along came the assertiveness movement. Originally aimed at instructing people to assert themselves at the workplace in order to get their proper due, it leapt into all aspects of life. Swaggering had re-invented itself as strategy and therapy.

Around that time, matchmaking gave up on the idea of depending on others to notice one’s lovable-ness and was literally advertising itself. It turned out that the world was full of people who, by their own admission, had movie-star looks, sensitive souls, healthy incomes, fun-loving natures and no prospects.

In other aspects of social life, increasingly centered on aggrandizing individuals at their own adult birthday parties, weddings or even supposed “roasts,” people were supposed to praise one another. But it’s a rare such speaker who has not discovered how to turn this around by praising the guest of honor for an astute appreciation of – none other than the speaker.

Before all this got going, Miss Manners does not recall our being a nation of shrinking violets and can’t-do types thwarted by adversity. Perhaps bragging was a necessary antidote to some national tendency of being overly deferential and passive that she happened to miss.

If so, it is over now. We’ve cured it.

The next step would be to revive the concept of modesty – perhaps not in the matter of covering vital body parts, but at least when it comes to exposing one’s other good points.

Modesty is a virtue in itself, although that is a recommendation that has a poor record for inspiring changes in public behavior. Fortunately, modesty has other virtues – social virtues, which is what bragging mistakenly aims to achieve.

It provides a time-released system of information so that people are not wiped out by your confluence of advantages. It stimulates conversation, as people have to work to find out about one another. Best of all, it inspires the same sort of skepticism in listeners that bragging does. And thus accomplishes what bragging does not.