Biden learned about humility the hard way
One of the things politicians almost always say after an election triumph is that they are humbled by their victory. Few actually are. By definition, it takes a high opinion of oneself to believe you are truly suited to high office.
Yet there is much research to suggest that humility is, in fact, a laudable leadership trait. What does humility look like? It manifests itself in a leader knowing his or her own shortcomings, using authority for purposes other than self-aggrandizement.
It appears in an ability to listen more attentively, to solicit feedback, to encourage. It appears in a sense of humour about life’s absurdities and vicissitudes, in gratitude for unmerited gifts.
It shows itself in the willingness to learn from constructive criticism, to recognize and showcase the abilities of others, to acknowledge their accomplishments.
A becoming humility, an ability to admit mistakes, renders a person authentic, aware, as we all should be, of human imperfection and frailty.
That said, humility does not demand hiding one’s light under a bushel or denying one’s talents. But if the team, the company is celebrated first and the self second, accomplishments rather than ego are likelier to be noticed.
Which brings us, inevitably, to the United States of America at the end of a week in which its people were deciding its political direction.
It may well be that the greatest asset that Joe Biden will bring to the most powerful office on earth, now that he has finally been declared the winner of Tuesday’s presidential election, is an admirable sense of humility.
For Biden, it’s an attribute learned, as it often is, the hard way, the product of great pain and hard-earned perspective.
Biden was a precociously ambitious young man, bold enough to have run for the U.S. Senate before age 30, large enough in his sense of personal destiny to have sought the presidency twice before this year’s campaign.
But as Biden discovered, if you want to make the gods laugh, tell them your plans.
His world was shattered before he was first sworn in as a senator when his first wife and daughter were killed in a car crash and his two surviving sons were badly injured. Later, he would again do the most painful thing a parent can, burying another son, lost to cancer.
Biden was introduced to the limits of what he controlled and the heart-shattering randomness of accident and disease.
He also lost those first two bids for the presidency. And even after becoming vice-president to Barack Obama, Biden was proud enough to have had some difficulty adjusting to his role as supporting actor.
Now, after he had probably abandoned it, Biden has achieved an almost life-long dream. It was likely never how he imagined it. But the humility bestowed by a sorrow-laden life might be exactly what the times demand.
In this election, America was presented with a presidential candidate bereft of humility and a man whose share of that attractive trait has increased with age.
If ever a country was in need of humility, it is the United States – even if the attribute runs counter to swaggering American self-image.
The country, for four years, has been an international laughingstock. In many ways, it is broken and facing existential divides.
More often than not, a painful humbling is necessary before nations, as well as individuals, reach a state in which they are able to make the needed changes, compromises and accommodations.
Precisely such compromise and accommodation are what’s needed before the warring sides of a profound cultural divide can be reconciled. Humility was a trait almost contemptible to Donald Trump. Everything was about his self-proclaimed greatness – “I alone can do it.” He was unable or unwilling to take counsel, to admit and learn from errors, to collaborate, to treat others with respect.
He has been the very definition of vain conceit, obsessed with wordly honours, be it his bogus claim to having been Michigan’s man of the year of his self-promoted candidacy for a Nobel Peace Prize.
He never learned, as Hemingway once observed, that “here is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
Biden, by comparison, has humbler origins, leads a humbler life, does not constantly sound his own trumpet.
In his memoir Believer, Democratic party strategist David Axelrod recalled telling Obama as he was interviewing potential running mates that “there’s something special” about the Biden family.
If the Bidens were special, it was in all the small, essential ways that the Trump family would likely never understand.
At 77, Joe Biden was always going to be a transitional president, a leader hoping to lower the national temperature and narrow America’s red-blue, rural-urban divide before making way for a new generation.
It is no mere rhetoric to say, as Biden did, that this election was indeed a battle for the soul of a country.
It is his apparent humility, hard-won and life-learned, that suits him to the challenge.