Whatever became of modesty?
A few years ago, a friend dragged me to a sit-down dinner gala in New York. The featured speaker was Richard Murphy, who turned out to be a big noise in American Mideast diplomacy. Murphy (Boston-born; Roxbury Latin; World's Greatest University) had been ambassador to Syria and Saudi Arabia, and an assistant secretary of state.
I kept a few of my notes: "Low-key charm . . . admits he never finished 'Paradise Lost' . . . (who has?) . . . becoming modesty." A cynic might say that an American diplomat specializing in Mideast relations has a lot to be modest about, but I was very taken by his self-effacing appearance. I phoned my wife that evening:
"I just heard this guy speak. He has quite an amazing list of accomplishments, but he was very modest about them."
"He wasn't Richard Holbrooke, you mean?" Yes, that's what I meant.
Around the same time I attended a rarified event, hosted by Thornwillow Press, celebrating the recovery of some priceless paper from a flooded cellar in Prague. The Press had persuaded John Updike to publish an early work in a limited edition, and he showed up to mumble a few words. Updike insisted that his prose was unworthy of the beautiful paper that Thornwillow had printed it on!
Whatever happened to modesty? It is such a becoming trait. Did it die forever in the 1980s, when Donald Trump, Madonna, and Tina Brown embraced the "Look at me!" culture? "Conceit spoils the finest genius," Marmee March tells her daughter Amy in Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women." "There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long," she continues, adding that "the great charm of all power is modesty."
Didn't your mother ever tell you? It's so much more credible when others toot your horn.
America's mothers have apparently been otherwise occupied. Thanks to YouTube, we can see Joseph Biden, the Sarah Palin of the tax-and-spend set, telling Frank Fahey of Claremont, N.H., in 1988: "I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do." Biden goes on to boast of his accomplishments in law school: "Top half of my class, I won the International Moot Court competition, I was the outstanding student in the political science department. . . . I graduated with three degrees, 165 credits . . . and I'd be delighted to sit down and compare my IQ to yours if you'd like."
Successive repudiations from Democratic primary voters haven't dented Biden's exaggerated self-esteem. Dilating on the international challenges a putative Obama-Biden White House might face, the senator brayed that "I've forgotten more about foreign policy than most of my colleagues know, so I'm not being falsely humble with you." No false humility, Joe. We get it.
Sports? By today's standards, Muhammad Ali's 1964 claim, "I am the greatest!" seems quaintly ironic. Now, no football player ventures near the end zone without a Sharpie, and sack dances are as choreographed as an Alvin Ailey ballet. The sell-me culture has certainly invaded college applications, where high schoolers have conquered hunger, cured AIDS, and succored the refugees of Darfur - all by age 16.
I sent my modesty spies into the world, armed with this question: Whom do you know who is both genuinely accomplished and genuinely modest? Many replied: no one, at least no one alive. A friend nominated the Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Edward Purcell, who declined the honor of a Harvard memorial service when he died. Another mentioned that Julia Child left a letter, from then-president of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Rod Serling, informing her of her first Emmy on the wall of her office when she left Boston for California.
The votes are in: E.O. Wilson (multiple votes); writers Priscilla MacMillan and Richard Parker; Drew Faust (multiple votes); Derek Bok (What! No Larry Summers?); poet Frank Bidart; editor William Whitworth; sailor/mathematician Rich Wilson of Marblehead; Architects Collaborative cofounder Sally Harkness; MacArthur genius John Ochsendorf; Bishop Thomas Shaw; Roger Brown of Berklee College of Music; street doctor Jim O'Connell; Michael Dukakis, and Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farm.
Feel free to stand up and not take a bow.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com. 