Great Books Archives - Page 23 of 26

Leadership in a Democracy

Why is is so hard to get a Great leader in a Democracy?

The answer may lie in the First History of Leadership, the origin not only of something recognizable as a history book, but the first historical textbook on leadership: Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War.

A note on editions: if you want to read this book, there is no contest about which version to read. The Landmark Thucydides, edited by Robert Strassler, is really the only choice.

An amazingly edited volume. The maps alone make it worth the price—instead of one or two maps at the outset, there are maps on every single page in which the action changes venue; you never have to flip a page to get a sense of where you are in the world at the present moment. Who knew that a surfeit of maps could make a book so enjoyable?

The footnotes are also amazing. The side notes indicating what is going on in every paragraph are invaluable for finding things again. The typeset is incredible.

I so want to say that I am totally in love with The Landmark Thucydides, but I am afraid that if I said that I would be committing biblioadultery—having given my heart to the Library of America, I am not sure I can be unfaithful to my other love. But, if I was the adulterous type, The Landmark Thucydides would be my new bibliomistress. But, please don’t tell the Library of America—I am not sure how jealous she is.

The beauty of the volume aside, the book itself is fantastic.

[An aside: I first read The Peloponnesian War when I was interviewing for a job at Mount Holyoke. I even talked about the book during my interview with the Dean of Faculty. (And I got a job offer. Coincidence?)]

As a manual of leadership it raises an incredibly provocative question. Thucydides is telling the story of the Death of Athenian Democracy. The cause of Death: Suicide.

Thucydides places great emphasis on the speeches given by assorted figures. At the outset we get Pericles and the marvelous Funeral Oration extolling the virtues of Athenian democracy. Over time, the speechmakers devolve more and more into demagoguery.

One way to read this book: democracy generates leaders who make the best speeches. But, the ability to make a great speech is not the same as the ability to be a wise and good leader. So, what happens when the best speechmakers are unwise or downright self-serving? Well, you end up with pointless wars which hollow out and eventually destroy the country.

The application is pretty immediate, and hard to dispute. In modern America, Rock Stars win. Think about it; when was the last presidential election which was not won by the person with greater Star Power? Coolidge or Harding??

At a minimum, in the entire time I have been politically aware (since I was 10 and Carter beat Ford), the candidate who was more like a Rock Star won. (Even the totally uncharismatic George Bush Sr fits that rule—he drew Dukakis as an opponent.)

But, do Rock Stars make great presidents? Sometimes. Sometimes…not.

That leads to the fascinating dilemma. Suppose that by having a democratic government, you are doomed to end up with poor leaders who have nothing other than fine oratory skills. Does that make democracy bad?

I am more ambivalent about this matter than I would like to be. From time to time, I have toyed with being a closet monarchist. One virtue of monarchy is that you don’t have to lament the sad state of the public when you see bad leaders. If a king is a bad king, that’s just the fault of heredity. If an elected president is a bad President, then that is the fault of the electorate. Somehow, blaming a bad gene pool is more comforting than blaming a few hundred million people for not choosing wisely. Hence my monarchist tendencies.

Then again, if I could really switch the country over to a monarchy, I am not sure I would.

One of the virtues of being a college professor is that you can have opinions and not have to worry that anyone is ever actually listening to you and might do what you suggest.

In the end: the lesson from Thucydides for leadership: Leadership is giving a Great Speech. If you want to be a leader, learn the art of rhetoric.

Dear Life

Sometimes, I am reading a book and suddenly just mentally step back and admire the artistry of the author.

It is a strange experience—the book has a plot, but I am not really noticing the plot, but rather the amazing way the plot has been so deliberately constructed. It’s like watching a play from backstage; you notice how everything is done.

I have this experience a lot when reading Wodehouse.

And I had that experience with Alice Munro.

Dear Life is her last volume of short stories. She won the Nobel Prize, and I am quite happy to report, she actually merited that award. Munro knocked the short story form into another realm.

Short stories are, almost by definition, short. They are undeveloped relative to a novel. But, Munro writes novels which are the length of a short story. It is that artistry which is stunning to observe.

I’ve never really had this sensation before. The story “Train,” for example, is 42 pages long, but finishing it, I felt like I just read a complete novel. The characters had depth and the plot was intricate and the story unfolded seemingly slowly with sudden reversals and revelations. Even now, I am a bit amazed that that story was under 50 pages long.

Then we have “Corrie” which was an even longer and fuller story than “Train,” but was actually only 20 pages long. I have that same wonder at many of the stories in this volume—the stories are longer than they actually are.

How does she do it? Well, obviously, there are no wasted words. Munro has mastered the art of compression, packing things which would take mere mortals pages to explain or show into a precisely crafted parenthetical aside. She is a master at creating the illusion that you have just read whole chapters of material between two connecting events in the story.

After reading a volume like this, I am quite glad I do not fancy myself a writer of short stories—I would despair of ever being able to do so much in so few pages.

Another interesting feature of a book like this—it’s silly to even try to summarize the content of the volume. It would be like trying got write a quick summary of the collected works of Faulkner or Dickens.

In Munro, there is a longing for a better life, the illusion that if one just makes the right choices, all will be well. But, while I can write that, and while it is true of this book, what it leaves out makes a mockery of the statement.

Instead, far better to look at, say, “Pride,” which is (in a mere 21 pages) a brilliant examination of the absurd lengths to which pride will drive us.

We often note that Pride gets in the way of forming genuine human relationships, but “Pride” (the story) shows that Pride (the Vice) can actually make life worse for the proud person.

The story feels so natural. When we see the proud making decisions which objectively make zero sense at all, it does not come across as a surprise, but rather as something that obviously a proud person would do. Pride is a tricky thing to manage, in other words.

But why? Why should Pride result in self-destructive behavior? It does, but there is something odd about that fact.

The way we normally think about Pride would suggest that the Proud should always be engaging in behavior which will benefit the Proud. To be filled with Pride seems to mean that one thinks of oneself as above all the lesser beings and that one who thought that way would act in a manner in which all actions are designed for self-benefit.

Yet, it is true, as Munro’s story beautifully illustrates, that the Proud make decisions which will be harmful and they know they will be harmful, but somehow preserving Pride trumps what seems to be objective self-interest. Quite honestly, I have a hard time understanding this; indeed, before seeing it so manifestly demonstrated in Munro’s story, I would have had a difficult time even articulating the problem.

Munro’s novels masquerading as short stories are like that—they grab a hold of an oddity of human behavior and throw it into marvelous relief by the act of compressing the story to its essence.

As someone who is enamored with the Great Books, it is nice to read a brilliant contemporary writer. Given the choice between spending some time reading Munro or Chekhov, I’d now be quite tempted to choose Munro. That is high praise indeed.

Meditations on Leadership

Why do you want to be leader?

Is there any reason to desire to lead?

Marcus Aurelius would like to have a word with you.

You want fame?

People who are excited by posthumous fame forget that the people who remember them will soon die too. And those after them in turn. Until their memory, passed from one to another like a candle flame, gutters and goes out. But suppose that those who remembered you were immortal and your memory undying. What good would it do to you? And I don’t just mean when you’re dead, but in your own lifetime. What use is praise, expect to make your lifestyle a little more comfortable?

Are you ambitious?

Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say to do. Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you. Sanity means tying it to your own actions.

Are you upset about the way things are and want to change them?

And why should we feel anger at the world? As if the world would notice!

Do you just want to make the world a better place?

Don’t let your imagination be crushed by life as a whole. Don’t try to picture everything bad that could possibly happen. Stick with the situation at hand, and ask, “Why is this so unbearable? Why can’t I endure it?” You’ll be embarrassed to answer.

And so, Marcus Aurelius, leader of the Roman Empire when the Roman Empire was Big, advises you in Meditations, a veritable manual on leadership. If you are a leader, then lead. If you are not, then don’t.

Do what nature demands. Get a move on—if you have it in you—and don’t go worrying about whether anyone will give you credit for it. And don’t go expecting Plato’s Republic; be satisfied with even the smallest progress, and treat the outcome of it all as unimportant.

Control your desire and you’ll be fine:

Start praying like this and you’ll see.
Not “some way to sleep with her”—but a way to stop wanting to.
Not “some way to get rid of him”—but a way to stop trying.
Not “some way to save my child”—but a way to lose our fear.
Redirect your prayers like that, and watch what happens.

Aurelius asks us why we care so much about being a leader. Marcus Aurelius is surprisingly popular with my students. To be sure, they didn’t like the Stoic extreme. But some sort of Stoic-light? They would enjoy that.

Is there a half-way house here? Can you sort of give up the desire to be a leader—can you just sort of want to be a leader and still be a good leader?

If Aurelius is right, the desire to have things as they are not is doomed to lead you to misery.

All of which makes it an interesting question for a leader—if the goal is to accept things as they are, then to what exactly is one leading? How do you reconcile the seemingly tautological statement that “A leader must lead somewhere” with the Stoic belief that there is no point in wishing things were different than they are.

Is it even possible to lead like that? Doesn’t leadership necessarily mean wanting to control things outside of your own desires?

The Undesired Crossroad

Sometimes you are faced with a really lousy set of options.

Sometimes that lousy set of options is your own fault.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Counselor wrestles with exactly that problem.

A brilliant book. Just brilliant. You won’t forget it.

First though, we need to straighten one thing out. This book is called a screenplay. Don’t even think about watching the movie. It’s awful. Just read the book. McCarthy is an amazing novelist, perhaps the greatest living writer. He is a lousy screenwriter, a really lousy screenwriter.

The world you live in is a world which has been made up of previous choices you have made.

You may not have intended to create the world in which you live, but you did create it. Once you find yourself in your current world, you will often find yourself at a crossroad, but it is not the crossroad you want.

You want the crossroad to be whether you have to live in this world you created or not. You want to decide whether you have to endure the consequences of your previous actions.

But that is not the crossroad you are at. You have no choice.

You might give everything to avoid the consequences of your previous actions, but you cannot change your previous actions. You are at a crossroad, but it is only the crossroad of deciding whether you will accept the fact that you have created this world you did not want or whether you refuse to accept the fact that you cannot change the world you created by your previous actions.

But, it gets worse.

It is not simply that you must endure the pain of knowing that the world you created is painful because of things you have done.

You also have to make decisions now and then later on you are faced with other decisions you did not see coming at all. You will in the future be faced with decisions you would rather not make, but you will have to make them later on because of the decisions you make now.

But, it gets worse. There are other people out there who are also making decisions. And some of those people do not have the moral scruples which you have.

And in a world in which those with moral scruples, no matter how small those scruples may be, meet those without moral scruples, the latter will win.

Like all of Cormac McCarthy’s work, this novel has a deeply moral core.

We go through life trying to skirt the edges of being moral. We think we can commit a small sin here or there and that it won’t really matter.

But every time we commit those small sins, those small violations of our moral code, we create a new world in which we must live with the consequences of those past violations of our moral code. One violation of your moral code leads to new choices and you cannot escape those new choices. And once you are down that road, there is no going back. Along that road you will meet people who do not have the same limits as you, and when you meet them, you will not like the results of all those previous choices you made.

And right now, you are thinking this is all a bit overblown. You are thinking that just because you make this small decision now, you will not end up with your world destroyed.

The hunter has a purity of heart that exists nowhere else. I think he is not defined so much by what he has come to be as by all that he has escaped being. You can make no distinction between what he is and what he does. And what he does is kill. We of course are another matter. I suspect that we are ill-formed for the path we have chosen. Ill-formed and ill-prepared. We would like to draw a veil over all that blood and terror. That have brought us to this place. It is our faintness of heart that would close our eyes to all of that, but in doing so it makes of it our destiny. Perhaps you would not agree. I don’t know. But nothing is crueler than a coward, and the slaughter to come is probably beyond our imagining.

If you think this is overblown, you have just closed your eyes.

Don’t act surprised when you cannot undo your prior actions because you don’t like the results.

Hemingway’s Blog

I finished reading Ernest Hemingway’s blog.

Now that I think about it, that is an odd sentence. How do you finish reading a blog?

The very idea implies that there will be no more entries. But how can one be sure?

I finished reading Ernest Hemingway’s blog. Now that I think about it, that is an odd sentence. How do you finish reading a blog? The very idea implies that there will be no more entries. But how can one be sure?

In Hemingway’s case, it is obvious. He is dead and to the best of my knowledge, despite the fabulous technological innovations in human history, nobody has yet invented the ability to do posthumous blogging.

Then again, what if someone took up the Mantle of the Dead Person and continued the blog? Is it then the same blog or a different blog? Curious. Maybe blogs can’t really end.

Nevertheless, I did finish reading Hemingway’s blog, which I can say, despite the philosophical quandary above, because in the present case the blog in question is really just a blog in substance, not form.

A Moveable Feast is actually a book (note the clever plot twist in this here blog post!) in which Hemingway, in a series of short anecdotes, relates his life (or more properly, what he is pretending to be his life (more about that anon)), in Paris in the early 20^th century.

Having read this book, I am perfectly confident in saying that if blogs had existed in the 1920s, Hemingway would have been a blogger.

This book has the same formula as a decent blog: one part tedium, one part narcissistic self-promotion, one part interesting aside. (Yes, Dear Reader, I hear your complaint that the present blog has only the first two components).

The tedium of Hemingway’s book arises from the fact that most of the 20 entries in this book are dull. Hemingway was poor and hobnobbed with lots of famous people and had mindless conversations with said famous people. Yawn.

The narcissistic self-promotion comes from the fact that it is hard to believe this is even remotely an accurate portrayal of either Hemingway’s life at the time or the assorted conversations; it’s all too cute to be real.

As for the interesting asides? Hmmm. Maybe I was being generous. I can’t remember any right now. Which makes me wonder—perhaps the interesting asides aren’t really there at all.

Hemingway writes well. (Understatement Award.) I enjoy reading Hemingway, and so I enjoyed reading his prose in this book.

But, if I think back over all the Hemingway books and stories I have read, this is easily the worst.

Now that is saying quite a lot, actually. If something akin to A Moveable Feast was the worst thing ever published under your name, you would be doing very well indeed.

If this is right, then the sole virtue of this book, and the reason you might want to read it someday, is the joy in rolling along with Hemingway in a book akin to hearing someone telling tall tales round a campfire.

I suppose there is another reason people read this book—fascination with celebrity.

The whole conceit of the book is that Hemingway is repeatedly saying (in effect): “Hey look! I am having a perfectly meaningless conversation with another really famous person. Don’t you wish you were me sitting around talking with famous people? Don’t you wish that the famous people would invite you into their homes for a conversation? Don’t you wish you were me?”

Alas, I have never been enamored with celebrity. When asked that parlor game question, “With which celebrity would you most want to have lunch?” I always draw a blank. I have no idea. I can’t think of any famous person with whom I would be excited to dine simply for the sake of saying I was able to dine with them. (Is that odd? I really don’t know.)

There was one part of the book which did leave me wondering. Hemingway writes:

It was a very simple story called “Out of Season” and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.

A curious theory. Does it apply to blog posts too?

Leadership in The Republic

As a manual on leadership, Plato’s The Republic is a very useful thought experiment.

But, it is a useful guide to leadership?

First off, The Republic a mammothly sprawling book. It is a conversation which wanders all over the place, constantly circling back to the general theme.

But even there, it isn’t entirely clear what the general theme actually is. Justice? Good Government? Education? Moral Character?

In previous readings, I had read the book as an argument about a Good Society. This would put the book in the same category as Locke’s Second Treatise or Hobbes Leviathan or Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty.

So, it was rather interesting to read it this time, thinking about it as a manual on leadership. (This was one of the texts in my course “Leadership and the Liberal Arts.”)

Part of the definition of a Great Book is that you can reread it and learn something new every time. With Plato’s Republic, such a thing is easy. Just pick a new central organizing principle and embark on a journey.

It is a fun book. This is truly one of those books where you just go along for the ride and see where you end up.

About halfway though I started wondering how well the whole thing would work as a stage play. A curious production, but I suspect, if acted well (which would not be easy), it could be great. The acting would be a problem though. It wouldn’t be easy to convey the sense that this is just a rambling conversation. The temptation to make it more directed or philosophical-seeming would be quite large.

What do we learn about leadership in The Republic?

Well, first, Socrates is, as always, in pursuit of Leadership, with a capital L. He wants to discover the Truth (capital T) about Leadership, the Form of Leadership of which all earthly examples are merely pale reflections.

This is, after all, where Plato’s Cave originates. You are all in a cave staring at shadows, and I have gone forth into the light and have come back to tell you all (I shall tell you all) about Leadership, the real thing, not the shadow of the real thing.

You want to know the Truth? To be a Leader, you obviously must be a philosopher, a true lover of wisdom, someone who pursues knowledge and wisdom to the exclusion of all else. The Leader is the one who understands the Truth.

You want Justice? You need a leader who understands Justice, True Justice, not the pale imitation which normal people call justice, but the Form of Justice.

You want, whether you know it or not, The Philosopher King.

There are two immediate implications of Plato’s argument (or should that be Socrates’ argument?—it is never easy to tell) which are rather interesting:

1. There are not different types of leadership. There is only good leadership and bad leadership; good leadership is that which comes closest to the Platonic Ideal of Leadership.

2. True Leaders will undoubtedly fail in a real society because it would take a True Leader to recognize the importance of True Leadership. The masses—all the farmers and soldiers, the people obsessed with honor and material gain—will have no ability to appreciate or even understand the best leaders. All those masses are still stuck in their caves, and they cannot comprehend the Beauty and Perfection of Leadership as it truly is.

Those two points are related. We think there are different types of leaders because we cannot recognize True Leaders.

And so, the best Leaders, those who would be closest to the Platonic Ideal, end up not being Leaders in the world in which we live.

Imagine the Platonic Ideal Leader coming to earth and walking among us. That Leader does not lead because nobody follows. So, is the perfect Leader still a leader if nobody follows?

Is the ability to attract followers a part of the Platonic Ideal of Leadership? Why not?

In some ways it is hard to take the idea of the Philosopher King seriously because, quite frankly, people with a Doctorate in Philosophy are not great material for leadership. (Recall William F Buckley’s quip that he would rather be ruled by the first 200 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard.)

But, Socrates would have an easy time noting that our contemporaries with Ph.D.s (doctorates in philosophy) are not generally lovers of wisdom. They are the sham philosophers, the charlatans, who masquerade as knowledgeable so that they can get paid to do very little in a tenured sinecure.

So, set aside the charlatans. Imagine the true philosopher, the person truly committed to gaining wisdom and knowledge. Would you want that person as the leader of your society or organization?

The short answer is “No.”

But why not? I suspect it is because when we think about leadership, we mean more than simply knowing where all the parts should go. We also imagine a mechanical or practical skill—the ability to get things done—and it is not at all obvious that knowing what would be best thing to do is the same thing as accomplishing the best things.

In Plato’s Republic, a society which could never actually arise on Earth, it makes sense to have the Philosophers as Kings.

But, here on Planet Earth? It’s not enough to have seen the light. You also need to have the ability to inspire the rest of us to want to leave the cave and the ability to lead the expedition.