The average university student will take around 40 courses to earn a bachelor’s degree and spend countless hours completing seemingly endless work. Each course covers a different topic, many of which students may not be interested in, especially as they discover their niche. For the arrogant student, lectures start to sound like drivel, and it seems time can be spent better elsewhere.
However, if there is a single concept that has been drilled into every student at university, if there is one lesson that every professor across majors leaves us with, it is that this arrogance is unfounded and that we do not know everything. The following movies explore the concept of intellectual humility or the recognition that our initial judgments can be clouded by prejudice, haste, and the desire to conform.
- 12 Angry Men (1957) directed by Sidney Lumet
The film opens in a courthouse. A judge instructs a jury that their unanimous verdict on a murder case will decide the fate of an 18-year-old minority from the slums accused of killing his father. This is the only time the teen in question is shown on screen in the entirety of the 97-minute film. For the remainder of the film, we follow 12 white men of the jury confined to a small, sweltering room, arguing over the same matter. The initial vote was 11:1 in favor of a death sentence; an “open-and-shut case,” as one of them called it. What unravels is a tense bout of uncertainty as Juror #8 convinces the others to re-examine the facts they thought were indisputable truth. Although he didn’t believe the defendant to be innocent, he believed that they needed to at least have a discussion before sending him to the gallows. By following the sliver of hesitation he felt, Juror #8 finds puzzle pieces deliberately discarded and questions left unasked–such as the eyesight of a witness or the time it took for the defendant’s neighbor to reach his door–planting a seed of doubt in each juror’s mind. In doing so, he reveals the biases and prejudices behind every juror’s argument and shows just how many “quick decisions” are made due to arrogance and a false sense of certainty.
12 Angry Men emphasizes the responsibility of each member of society to think critically, demand further consideration, and accept doubt as a sign of individuality rather than weakness. Our life after university will consist of situations that require a Juror #8 who might not have the whole truth, but will have the right questions to ask and the courage to stand against prejudice and apathy. By playing the devil’s advocate, 11:1 can become 0:12.
- Ida (2013) directed by Paweł Pawlikowski
While the previous film featured loud, heated debates, Ida, by Paweł Pawlikowski, is its quiet counterpart. The film is set in 1960s Poland and follows Anna, a novice nun who is days away from taking her vows of perpetual commitment to the Church. Before she is allowed to do so, however, thehead of the convent instructs her to visit her only living relative and aunt, Wanda, whom she has never met. During her trip, she discovers her real name, Ida Lebenstein, and that she is Jewish—a fact buried with the rest of her family when they were killed during the Nazi occupation. Ida’s identity, which was built on a bedrock of faith, is shattered. Ida expresses her intentions to visit her family’s resting place, to which Wanda replies, “What if you go there and there is no God?” Ida confronts the limits of her worldview and accepts that the fundamental facts she has been taught her whole life were wrong. When Wanda asked her question, Ida said nothing, acknowledging that the answer lies beyond the realm of provable knowledge. As Ida takes on a search for truth and Wanda takes on a search for finality in the form of her son’s remains, Ida’s distinction between sinner and innocent blurs, and her understanding of a world unrestricted by religious law begins.
Intellectual humility is not simply the distinction between right and wrong, truth and lies; it’s also the humility required to tear down the metaphorical house in which your mind lives without knowing whether you can build a new one. Decisions become more significant once they are no longer built on ignorance, but on the painful dismantling of what we thought we knew. Many university students will inevitably come to make this same decision: whether or not to tear down the house and unlearn an identity that used to be certain. Ida shows that these painful realizations can open our minds to new possibilities and the discovery of an identity that is yet to be constructed.Intellectual humility is not simply about “not knowing,” but about the active and often uncomfortable processes of deconstructing your own frame of reference. While 12 Angry Men teaches us to doubt the world, Ida teaches us to doubt the self. For the student, it is important to follow these two principles. To realize the smallness of our own knowledge is to realize the vastness of what remains to be understood.
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