The story is told of a rabbi who was recognized to be the world’s foremost authority in a particular area of Jewish law at the time someone was suing a certain Jewish institution. It was not surprising then when he was called to testify at the trial.

During his examination, the rabbi was asked by one of the lawyers whether it was in fact true that he was the foremost living expert in this area of law, to which he responded: yes.

At that moment, the Trial Judge intervened, asking "Rabbi, forgive me for interrupting, but ...doesn't your religion also talk about humility?"

The good rabbi looked up at the Judge and responded without a second's hesitation "Yes My Lord, but at this moment, I'm under oath."

There is an important lesson hidden in this story. True humility involves knowing and accepting the truth about oneself and conducting oneself in a manner that is consistent with that truth regardless of whether that means working hard to overcome one's shortcomings, or allowing others to see and hopefully emulate one's virtues. What humility most emphatically does not encompass, is self-deprecation or outright dishonesty about one's character.

This principle is firmly rooted in Judeo-Christian teaching. Scripture is replete with heroes who were less than perfect and who were well aware of their imperfections. Yet these individuals never flinched from standing for what was right, even when such a stand required leadership on their part which was accompanied by the acquisition of personal honour.

They did not seek personal honour, mind you, but neither did they allow their aversion to it to prevent them from leading when their leadership was called for.

Moses, for instance, is revered in Jewish tradition as being 'the most humble of all men'. He did not seek out honour. Quite the opposite - he tried valiantly to convince God that he was unworthy of being chosen to lead his people to freedom.

But Moses' humility did not prevent him taking on the role of leader when it became apparent that there was no-one else to fill the role, nor did it stop him from resisting the request of some of his followers, most notably Korach, to share some of the burden, and presumably the prestige, of leading the nation.

Indeed, Moses’ legendary humility did not even prevent him from standing up to God himself when he believed that God was acting in a manner inconsistent with His own principles and proclamations.

How could it be that a man so universally revered for his humility be so brazen as to challenge God?

The answer is that humility itself, i.e. self-subjugation to truth, dictated his actions. True humility, that is to say the adherence to truth, is impossible unless we are able to recognize and acknowledge when we are right as well as when we are wrong, because the two go hand-in-hand.

Humility – and its attendant ongoing circumspection – is one of the great virtues of our shared culture in the West, particularly because it is combined with a sense of duty to change if and when we conclude that our behaviour is indeed wrong.

It is what led, for example, to Western society abolishing slavery within its borders. Most civilizations throughout history have practiced slavery at one time or another. Even today, the trade in human beings flourishes in several parts of our world. But only one civilization has ever organized itself against the practice of slavery because it was judged by its own members to be incompatible with its fundamental principles – and that civilization is our own.

Many civilizations throughout history, including our own, have indulged in empire building and colonialism. The Egyptians did it, as did the Persians, the Greeks and the Romans, just to name a few. But only one civilization has ever abandoned the practice because it was deemed to be incompatible with its fundamental principles – and that is ours.

Gandhi once remarked, in response to a question about what he thought of Western Civilization, that “it would be a good idea,” encapsulating his long held disdain for what he regarded as a corrupt, immoral, and even evil society, profoundly inferior to his own. But Gandhi was wrong, and in one of history’s great ironies, his campaign to end British rule in India was successful precisely because he was so wrong.

As Indo-American writer Dinesh D’Souza has observed – Gandhi’s followers, who protested British rule by laying down on railroad tracks, did so because they were rightly confident that the trains would stop rather than run them over. That would never have happened, he reminds us, if the Nazis had been running the trains in colonial India. Indeed, D’Souza recalls a teacher of his in India once remarking with brutal honesty that if Hitler had been running the show, Gandhi would have been a lamp shade.

Gandhi’s was wrong in other respects as well. He often attributed his policy of non-violence in pursuit of political aims as being integral to his own cultural heritage in contrast to Western practice. But can anyone truly say that the history of the Indian sub-continent in the last 60 years been characterized by the peaceful means whereby political disputes have been settled?

Over the years I have personally witnessed hundreds of thousands of Americans demonstrating against American power and policy, Britons demonstrating against British power and policy, and Israelis demonstrating against Israeli power and policy. I have never seen Indians demonstrating against their country's policy toward Pakistan, nor have I ever seen Pakistanis demonstrating against their country's policy toward India.

Nor do I see Indians and Pakistanis, not to mention North Koreans or Iranians, mobilizing in opposition to their respective country’s current and relentless pursuit of nuclear weapons.

It seems plain to me that the introduction of a little good, old-fashioned, Judea-Christian self-doubt and self-criticism, minus the theology perhaps, might go a long way to preserving the peace of these nations and alleviating the hardships of their citizens.

But if the propensity for self-doubt and self-criticism inherent in our Judeo-Christian heritage is one of our greatest strengths and the source of some of our greatest innovations in the improvement and organization of human life, it is also one of our greatest weaknesses and the source of some of our greatest failures.

The temptation to blame ourselves and our policies for the problems of the world is particularly strong in our society. But the belief that we are to blame for all, or even most, of the world’s problems is as arrogant as the belief that we are to be blamed for none. Both of these positions are rooted in the self-indulgent view that what we in the West say and do is all that matters, and that others, incapable of any meaningful independent thought and motivation, only say and do what they say and do in response to us.

This is a foolish myth, tenaciously adhered to and promoted by pseudo-intellectuals too disturbed to face the fact that the hatred others may have for us, more often than not, has nothing to do with us whatsoever, and is therefore beyond our control. The fact is that those who hate us the most, and who would do us the most harm, derive their intellectual support from some of the most repressive ideologies in our history, none of which emerged as a reaction to Western policies.

It is, moreover, a dangerous illusion that freedom and tyranny can continue to coexist peacefully in our world. This was only possible when large swathes of humanity lived in ignorance of, and were therefore oblivious to, the blessings of freedom and the commensurate failures of their own totalitarian governments. As the American author Allan Bloom has written, “The most successful tyrannies are those that succeed in convincing their populations that there are no alternative ideas, that other ways are not viable.”

The information revolution has virtually swept away this isolation, thereby rendering this technique of oppression obsolete. And the more people read about liberty on the internet and see its blessings on satellite TV, the greater the threat to the authority of tyrants.

Western ideas and culture, for all of their admitted flaws and shortcomings, take root because they appeal to people. People want to be free, even if that means running the risk of doing the wrong thing, from time to time.

It’s precisely that irrepressible drive for freedom that dictators cannot abide, but that they can no longer suppress effectively. And so they must either defeat liberty, or be consigned to the trash heap of history.

There are two fronts in this ongoing struggle. There is the front that we hear about and see in the news: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Indonesia.

The second front is not so obvious though. It is the moral front; the battle amongst ourselves for our own hearts and minds – the struggle to resist the temptation to defeat ourselves by allowing our innate propensity for self-criticism to become our greatest weakness as opposed to our greatest strength.

And it is on this front that committed Christians and Jews have a special role to play – because we are the guardians of the Judeo-Christian heritage that is the very cornerstone of western civilization.

Liberty did not develop in a philosophical vacuum. It was the inevitable outcome of the shared teachings of Judaism and Christianity that all human beings were created – equal and in the image of God. As G.K. Chesterton observed:

The American Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that all men were created equal; and it is right to do so, for if they were not created equal they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in the dogma about the divine origin of man.

And lest anyone think that this dogma is a prescription for the imposition of our own religious convictions upon others, the Bible teaches:

“Behold, I place before you today the choice between life and death…”

In short, free will, explicitly acknowledged in scripture, is one of those inalienable rights that we are endowed with by God.

That does not mean, as so many of today’s prominent thinkers contend, that there are no objectively right or wrong choices. Quite the contrary, the above verse goes on to make clear that there is such a thing as right and wrong, and implores us to choose the correct path – the path that leads to life.

But if there is a right path to choose, then there clearly must also be a wrong path, and free will is meaningless if people cannot choose that wrong path. So, paradoxically, the principle upon which freedom of religion itself is based is integral to our faith.

In fact, the Bible ought to be required reading for all political science students. Men like Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; Moses and Elijah, David and Solomon, Jesus and Paul, were not just important Biblical personalities, they are among the greatest contributors to the West’s intellectual tradition, doing more to lay the foundations of our society than did men like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and the whole cadre of Greek philosophers.

Which brings us back to the relationship between humility and truth.

Traditional Western civilization, (not the hedonism trying to pass itself of as Western civilization today) for all its shortcomings, is fundamentally superior to all others, past and present. It is a fraud to say otherwise.

This does not mean that we get it right all of the time and that we have nothing to learn from others. But we do get it right most of the time, and when we get it wrong, at least our tradition imbues us with the strength of character to recognize that we have been wrong, and equips us with the capacity to correct our mistakes.

And the essential tool that makes this process possible is our humility.

But just as our humility encourages us to acknowledge and correct our mistakes, it also compels us to emulate a man like Moses, renowned for his own humility, who regarded himself as unworthy to be charged with fulfilling the mission God chose him for, but who fulfilled that mission nonetheless, even when that required confronting and challenging God Himself.

For humility that refuses to submit to truth is not humility at all – it is arrogance, masquerading as humility, a vice that we must always be on guard against, lest it succeed in preventing us from transmitting this great, shared tradition of ours to future generations, thereby imperiling our vision of a world of freedom and justice for all.