In a recent essay, Mark Shiffman notes that in the fiercely competitive
but nonetheless gloomy context in which university students find themselves,
many opt to “major in fear.” Fear that they won’t find work or pay off student
loans. Fear of lost opportunities or moving home with mom and dad.
Consequently, Shiffman states,
“it’s easy to see
why The Hunger Games is the novel of their generation. The trilogy depicts
adolescents rigorously trained by adults for desperate but meaningless life-or-death
competitions. Its dark emptiness resonates with students’ latent unease
and dissatisfaction with their educational regimen, as
well as with their worry that they’re all honed up with no place to go.”
In this fearful state, students skip the humanities in favor of
something “more practical”, perhaps more suited to pre-professional training.
Only those with leisure can afford to study philosophy, and fearful people have
no luxury for leisure, or so it is thought.
Never mind that many employers actively seek out English or Classics
majors; that philosophy students, statistically, end up with greater earning
power than an average business student; that both medical and engineering
programs are pushing students to learn the arts or history. Never mind that
Jean Paul Getty, perhaps the richest man in the world at the time of his death,
employed readers of Greek and Latin to run Getty Oil. This seems quite
romantic, and yet his reasons were entirely pragmatic: “Asked why he insisted
on employing classicists in key positions, he answered bluntly: ‘They sell more
oil.’”
Wanting
Something Worth Getting
On a purely practical level, there is a case to be made for the
humanities. But fear responds poorly to reason, and the number of majors in the
core humanities is declining, at an accelerated pace since the recession.
Moreover, for those interested in leadership, a similar cultural trajectory
pushes into the technical aspects of leadership—the how or means, the
techniques or best practices of getting things done, of communicating,
planning, strategizing, organizing, motivating, and delivering outcomes. That’s
fine, as far as it goes, but it reduces leadership to management, often
overlooking the character and virtue of the person. It asks not whether the
leader is a good woman or man but whether he or she is effective.
Surely, some will say, that is naive. “Character is a private and
subjective matter.” “We want leaders who are good at leading, not leaders who
are simply good.” “Maybe in a perfect world, but we just don’t have the luxury
for this.” Like many contemporary students, leaders are more afraid of failing
to make a living than of failing to live well.
But leadership is about human flourishing, so to think about leadership
without virtue is to divorce leadership from living well. And then what is the
point of leadership? Mere success? I should think that real leaders want
something more. They should aim higher, both for themselves and for those they
lead. Success is too small a goal, not noble enough, even though necessary.
Recall the distinction Aristotle makes between the person of cunning and the person
of practical wisdom. Both are accomplished at attaining what they set out to
do—at getting what they want—but the cunning person lacks nobility or virtue in
his desires, often wanting something base, while the person of wisdom gets what
he wants and wants something worth getting. Something noble.
Great leaders want more than to get what they want; they want great and
good things.
What
Moves Great Men?
Consider American history and the remarkable bounty of leaders during
the revolutionary era. A small, scattered, and often uneducated population
produced an almost unbelievable crop of leaders. The historian Henry Steele
Commager once remarked that if Florence was conducive to great art and Vienna
to great music, the specialty of colonial Virginia was statesmanship. With a
total population smaller than that of contemporary Delaware, Virginia
nonetheless gave us Washington, Mason, Henry, Jefferson, Madison, and Marshall,
and at the same time. How did this happen?
Commager lists several factors, especially the relatively limited
opportunities for talent at the time. But at least some causation has to be
given to the classical impetus for duty to the commonweal and a concern for the
welfare of posterity. The concern for posterity involves both the sense of being
remembered—fame—and the felt duty to benefit generations not yet born: “our
descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generations,” as Jefferson put it.
The historian Douglass Adair stresses the Founders’ desire for fame.
Fame, he says, is “the action or behavior of a ‘great man,’ who stands out, who
towers above his fellows in some spectacular way.” The desire for fame causes
action; it pushes people to “reject the static complacent urge . . . to merely
be and invites a strenuous effort to become.” The colonial leaders, he claims,
sought fame, sought it above all else (clearly above money, about which they
were famously careless), dedicating their efforts to the well-being of others,
including their posterity—us.
The political scientist Robert Faulkner thinks this analysis is not
quite right. He notes Lincoln’s great ambition of “being truly esteemed by my
fellow man” and “rendering myself worthy of their esteem.” For Faulkner, the
great leaders are ambitious—they desire to be in charge, to have their names in
the papers, and to make a difference (power, reputation, and
accomplishment)—and the greatest leaders are those with truly grand ambitions.
But, he continues, Lincoln and others like him not only seek the good opinion
of others—fame alone—but also wish to be worthy of that good opinion. Or, as
Aristotle describes it, the good man doesn’t merely want honor; he wants honor
as confirmation of his virtue.
America’s great statesmen, then, wished not only to win a name for
themselves but also to be worthy of renown. This was not vainglory that
welcomed all praise blindly; rather, as Faulkner puts it, they sought
“intelligent honor, bestowed knowingly and deservingly.” In what Faulkner calls
a “reasonable understanding of human excellence,” the leader wishes to earn
true esteem and also to be recognized or counted as good.
