David Brooks on Modesty and Civility

David Brooks, "Tree of Failure," New York Times, 14 January 2011.

So this is where civility comes from — from a sense of personal modesty and from the ensuing gratitude for the political process. Civility is the natural state for people who know how limited their own individual powers are and know, too, that they need the conversation. They are useless without the conversation. . . .

A column well worth reading on the necessity for modesty in a democracy.