James E Hartley

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.

The Beauty of Appalachia

Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

The book is set in Appalachia.

That is the most important fact about the book.

This is a book about Appalachia. Sure, there are people and animals and plants, but the book is really about the place.

It is a place which is rooted, deeply rooted, in the soil, in history, in tradition, in everything which creates Culture.

An outsider to Appalachia has no hope of understanding Appalachia. An outsider to Appalachia reading this book will discover that Appalachia is a beautiful place which no outsider, including the outsider reading this book, will ever understand.

Understanding is not the same thing as knowing the facts about a place. Understanding is something which happens in the bones, in the roots of the soul. At best, the outsider reading this book can only stare at the beauty of Appalachia.

And Appalachia is surely a beautiful place, even if the outsider will never understand it.

I was recently having a conversation with an Easterner. It came up that I was from California, so the conversation turned to being a Californian in the East. I noted that it was just different out here, that California was a different (and better) place, that whenever I am back in California, it feels like home, and that no place else feels like that.

The person to whom I was talking was recently married; his wife was from California. He looked a bit surprised when I was talking about California. He said that his wife also talks about how California is different than the East, but every time he asks her how, she can never really articulate it. So he asked me. I tried to articulate it. I failed miserably. I cannot explain California. It is just different, Other. And if you aren’t from California, I don’t think you will ever understand.

Appalachia is like that. Prodigal Summer makes that clear.

After reading this novel, I am a bit in awe of Appalachia. I can understand why someone from there would be in love with the place.

But, if this novel is any indication, such love can be a bit of a love/hate relationship. What if you are from Appalachia, deeply in love with Appalachia, but don’t feel quite at home in Appalachia because you aren’t just like the rest of the Natives. What if you love Appalachia, but think Appalachia is just too small, too narrow, a stage on which to play? You want Appalachia to change, to become modern, but then again, the idea of Appalachia changing, become more modern, would destroy everything that you love about Appalachia, everything that makes Appalachia Appalachia.

There is no solution to this problem. And an outsider, someone from, say, California, has no hope of ever really understanding the conflict. But, nonetheless, said person from California can say that Appalachia sure is a beautiful place. I learned that in Prodigal Summer.

Prodigal Summer, the novel, is really three separate interwoven stories. The stories don’t meet much—characters from one story occasionally show up as minor background characters in other stories—until the end at which point the three stories become somewhat one. The meeting at the end isn’t terribly important, however. The stories can be taken on their own.

First, there is the story of a Park ranger and an itinerant hunter (“Predators”); second there is the story of a young widow who has just inherited the family farm which her husband had inherited (“Moth Love”); third there is the story of an Old Timer and his interaction with his neighbor who has strange new ideas (“Old Chestnuts”). None of those description, by the way, really describes the stories—but, it would take too long in an already too long blog post to elaborate.

The honest review of the novel: the three stories are not equally good. I really liked “Old Chestnuts”—charming and witty. “Moth Love” was pretty good. “Predators” was tedious, very tedious. I found myself stopping every time I got to a “Predators” section. Picking up the book again, I would plow through that chapter, looking forward to the other two stories.

Kingsolver writes well when she isn’t preaching—she preaches too much—yeah, yeah, I get it: hunting wolves is bad. Killing things at the top of the food chain is bad. Can we please just get back to the part which make me think Appalachia is a beautiful place?

And, that in the end is what makes this book worth reading. The stories aren’t really the point. The point is the location is a wonderful, enchanting, and somewhat maddening place.

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.

Looking Anew at the Progressives

If you want to make sense of the Presidential Election, then you should definitely pick up Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Bully Pulpit.

The Progressive Movement has been much discussed by pundits and intellectuals in the last decade. Much discussed.

Suddenly the word “progressive” became chic in some circles. It became anathema in other circles

This was one of the interesting phenomena generated by the Obama Presidency. I have no idea who started the wave of articles about how the Obama Administration was in the Teddy Roosevelt/Woodrow Wilson vein, but there has been a ton of articles about that in the last decade.

The Roosevelt/Wilson line is the first interesting thing to note: do you notice who is missing in there?

Also, why are TR and Wilson lumped together? According to the recent literature, they were the starting place for Big Government, a government which moved beyond the bounds which it had known before.

Yet, are Teddy Roosevelt and Wilson actually the same? Not really, and therein lies the tale.

Was the Progressive Movement all bad? I am risking losing my Conservative credentials by saying this, but I’ll say it anyway: The Progressive movement had costs and benefits. (Gosh that makes me sound like an economist.)

[It is well worth noting that if you are ever talking with someone who claims the Progressive Movement was all good, just slowly back away. The eugenics arguments much beloved by the Progressives are downright chilling.]

At its inception, the Progressive Movement was attacking many things which one would think Conservatives would also attack.

Take Upton Sinclair (please!). He was a socialist hack and The Jungle is a really lousy novel with overwrought conclusions and way too many maudlin tales of woe. But, I sure wouldn’t want to eat the meat coming from the meat packing plants described (accurately, it turns out) in that novel. Nobody would want to eat that meat. Getting some sanitary standards in the food industry is a good thing.

Before the 20^th century, it wasn’t necessary. You would get your meat locally. You knew the butcher and if he was a disgusting slob, he would be out of business. (Or, hard as it is for some people to believe, you just killed the cow yourself.)

But, with the coming of the railroads, suddenly meat is being packed on a mass scale, shipped long distances, and you no longer know your butcher.

So, it would be a public good if someone (read: the government) was making sure that when I walk into a grocery store and buy hamburger, it is cow flesh and not tainted rat flesh. Yes, I have heard the argument that we could do away with that now because a private firm could provide a seal of approval. But, in the early 20^th century? Who would have monitored the seals of approval?

Similarly, take Standard Oil. Monopolies are bad. That’s Economics 101. Rockefeller was building a monopoly. It’s hard to blame him for that; it is good to be a monopolist. But, who can stop a monopoly from forming? Again, it’s good if the government does such things. It improves economic efficiency.

I’m not sure why it is so hard for conservatives to explicitly acknowledge that the origins of the Progressive Movement are founded in correcting some very bad trends in the American economy which was undergoing a massive economic transformation.

(And, also, in the American political system. Does anyone want to bring back the days of the Political Bosses? Or remove Women’s Right to Vote?)

But, then, after taking care of the blatant problems, the Progressive Movement does go on and on and on and on. It is that later development, the move from legislation on which we would all agree to an ever-increasing bureaucracy, which is the problem.

So, who caused the transformation of the Progressive Movement from something we can all embrace to something which divides us? Why our dear friend Teddy Roosevelt!

At the start of his career, Roosevelt is the type of Progressive a modern conservative could embrace. He, and not incidentally his good friend William Howard Taft, are full of all sorts of ideas which would make this country a better place.

But, then a funny thing happens. Taft becomes President, and keeps right along with that nice set of really desirable polices.

Roosevelt, who needs to be center stage—he really, desperately needs to be center stage—has to come up with things that are even more radical than before. He has to become ever more Progressive in order to get the attention he craves. And the Progressive movement gets more radical.

Making the connection to the 2020 Democratic Primary is left as an exercise for the Reader.

It’s a fascinating tale when you step back and look at it. The motto: Beware of people who demand to be constantly in the limelight.

Making the connection to the 2020 Republican Primary is left as an exercise for the Reader.

By the way, William Howard Taft’s mother went to Mount Holyoke. So, I guess that makes the solution to our political woes obvious…