The Lost Virtues: Reclaiming Meekness, Docility, and Condescension

What do you envision when you think of meekness?

You probably see a mousy doormat, someone sheepishly acquiescing to the will of the stronger. When Jesus says, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,” you might think that those wimps will hand it over without a whimper or word of objection to stronger, more ambitious people. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called meekness “craven baseness.”

Indeed, one of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions is “inclined to submit tamely to oppression or injury, easily imposed upon or cowed, timid.” Meekness, then, is a weakness. Why would you ever want to be meek?

The same goes for docility, often characterized as a near neighbor of meekness. We can get a feel for its usage these days from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, where one finds that a docile person is slow, controllable, obedient, submissive, compliant, passive and under control.

Or consider condescension. You likely envision someone self-important looking down her nose at a service worker, or some insufferable prig unwilling to come off his high horse to mingle with the peasants. Being condescending, far from being a virtue, is universally acknowledged as a vice.

Meekness, docility and condescension: three traits with no cultural capital today. And yet, our ancestors typically understood these traits to be virtues. How in the world could that be?

As any philosopher will tell you, in a case of seeming disagreement, you need to settle the definitions of the words in play. How many arguments have been abruptly dissolved by someone saying, “Oh, that’s what you mean”? When we check the meaning of these three terms, I think we come to see that there’s been a switcheroo. As I’ve found in my philosophical research and teaching, some of the virtues that were most celebrated in yesteryear but now go undersung are traits that can help us lead good lives, even now.

Consider meekness – but allow me to start with a little vignette.

In 2018, mixed martial-arts champion Matt Serra was having a family meal in a restaurant when a belligerent drunken man entered, threatening servers and patrons. Serra could have knocked him out cold. But instead, he calmly pinned him, waiting for security to arrive.

A similar trait is on display when exasperated parents react with control, harried teachers don’t rise to students’ provocations, and police de-escalate situations. In each case, they kept control of their emotions, especially their anger. One common feature of these stories is that the person wasn’t powerless; rather, it was precisely because they understood how much power they had that they used restraint.

Such a trait – excellence with respect to one’s anger – used to be called meekness. We hear an echo of this original meaning even today in horse training, where to “meek” a horse means training it to subjugate its great power to its master, not letting its passions take control. Likewise, meekness once meant not becoming weak, but subjugating power to reason – not letting anger take control.

In the Gospels, when Jesus calls himself meek, it is the same Greek word used for a meek horse: “praus.” A horse is not weaker on account of being meeked; no Greek warrior wanted a wimpy steed. The horse retains its strength, now safeguarded by self-control.

This is quite a different notion of meekness than we find in our contemporary lexicon. Yet in its traditional sense, the word names a trait almost everyone deeply values. No one wants her best friend, child, teacher, coach or deputy to be unable to control her anger.

Such control is an important character trait for living a good life, but we no longer have a concept for it. What term do people use today for being disposed to pick battles prudently, not letting anger cloud one’s judgment, not being easily baited into action they’ll come to regret – without being easily biddable or callous to real injustices? “Self-control,” a broad category that covers facing temptations, enduring difficulties and myriad things in between, is too broad a notion to do the work.

Nor do we have a word for someone excellent at receiving instruction and insights – but at the same time who’s unafraid to think for herself, to disregard the advice of a snake-oil salesman. That used to be called docility.

Condescension, the most surprising of the three, now suggests someone deigning to speak down from their lofty height. Yet it once described excellence at respecting people, regardless of their social status: easily connecting with those on a lower rung so they feel seen and valued, but without causing embarrassment or awkwardness. What term do we have now for inculcating such an important trait?

To be clear, I’m not here from the Language Reclamation League. I’m not necessarily advocating for a return to older language – and certainly not just because it is older. But without replacements for ethical concepts we’ve lost, we’re faced with a moral void, unable even to conceptualize the goodness that we want to see in ourselves and those we love.

Maybe you think that not much is lost. Bridges fall when engineers can’t distinguish varieties of physical strength; what’s lost if people can’t distinguish varieties of character strength?

To my mind, there are at least three reasons why it is important to have some term or other for these traits.

First, there’s good psychological evidence that goals of approach – “I want to get healthy,” “I want to get financially stable” – are a stronger motivation for us than avoidance goals – “I want to stop being sick,” “I want not to be poor.” Approach goals typically yield more effort, more satisfaction and more well-being. But they require naming the moral virtue you want to cultivate.

Second, the positive traits named by these old virtues are what you really want. You don’t merely want your loved ones to stop acting out of wrath. You want them to be able to restrain their power in the face of their anger. You are ignorant of your real goal if you don’t have a concept for it.

Third, consider the detriment caused by not having shared language for an ethical concept. The philosopher Miranda Fricker has written of the time before the term “sexual harassment” was coined in 1975. She provides multiple instances of women being wronged in the workplace, but being unable to articulate that wrong to those in power, owing to a lack of a shared label for it. And not only that, but the lack of an adequate concept prevented the victims from fully understanding the wrong themselves.

Having positive concepts for the traits we want to enable in ourselves and others is essential, then, to the moral life. The fact that we’ve let several go the way of “blatherskite” and “bumfuzzled” is telling.

We still have terms for a bloviating windbag or being bewildered, so we don’t need those archaic, though admittedly fun, words to express important truths. But when it comes to undersung virtues, we do need some way to highlight character traits that help form us into our best selves – even if the words of yesteryear no longer fit the bill.