"No humility without humiliation" explained; it has a lot to do with Abraham Lincoln.

I've quoted "There can be no humility without humiliation" several times over the last few months, usually in the context of championing shame culture. I feel like I should take up the sentence on its own merits as a way of answering reader mail—not really any particular piece of mail, more of a general "The hell?" vibe I get every time I talk about how great it is when a policeman makes teenaged girls cry by calling their MySpace pages "slutty" in front of a class assembly.

I think I can wind up at an explanation of why I like "No humility without humiliation" so much, but I can only get there by way of Abraham Lincoln:

Many great and good men sufficiently qualified for any task they should undertake, may even be found, whose ambition would aspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or presidential chair, but such belong not to the family of the lion or the tribe of the eagle. Think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon? Never! Towering genius disdains a beaten path.

And Max Weber, as explained by John Patrick Diggins:

The leader is a figure of conviction, insights, vitality, asceticism, devotion, sacrifice, preferring struggle to subordination, moved by values that are intrinsically worthy and not simply instrumentally useful. Politics, in contrast, is all pragmatic, an attempt at expedients, strategic coalitions, adaptations and readjustments...

Both Lincoln and Weber saw political institutions as a threat to the political ideals born of passion, and charismatic passion itself a threat to order until it becomes normalized. To draw such parallels is, of course, to slight the difference between Lincoln and Weber, not the least of which is the difference between a Christian and a Nietzschean view of tragedy.

There is a certain amount of asceticism and sacrifice that Lincoln and Weber both associate with leadership. What does this have to do with humility? Look back at the first Lincoln quote. Being content to rise no further than governor is, for a man of genius, a kind of sacrifice, but it isn't the right kind. Plain, old, cotton-coat humility wouldn't count; humiliation would. Unpack that and you'll grasp the difference that makes all the difference between humility as we usually understand it ("I'm just a humble schoolteacher/shepherd/stay-at-home mom...") and the humility that comes from having enough courage and self-respect to stand tall through any embarrassment or disgrace.

And that's why I'm on the Colorado cop's side.