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HOW TO BE A LEADER:
An ancient guide to wise leadership
Plutarch lived from c 46 to 120. He was an admirer of Sparta whose
decline he found hard to accept. His most famous work is Lives,
in which he writes about leading Greek and Roman figures focussing
more on their character than the historical events in which they
engaged. Gathered here are three essays: To An Uneducated Leader,
How To Be A Good Leader and Should Old Men Engage in
Politics, in dual language form. The preoccupation of Lives
is, to a degree, replicated her. Plutarch is interested in
character, something we have more or less lost sight of. We are
encouraged to admire people for wealth, money, fame, prowess, but
character? A person of character is an anachronism. The measures of
success have no need of such a definition.
Plutarch’s definition of “educated” differs from ours. The
possession of a degree from a Russell Group university is not what
he intends; rather being educated means understanding the moral
responsibility of power. An educated leader is disinterested.
Serving needs other than their own, educated leaders rise above
egotism, pride, and self-advancement. The MPs’ expenses scandal
would have been for Plutarch evidence of uneducated leaders.
Interestingly, the MP with the lowest expenses claims today is
Jeremy Corbyn. Perhaps that makes him
closer to Plutarch’s ideal than many of his colleagues.
“Depravity, once combined with political power, races to give
expression to every emotion..”
Plutarch quotes Dionysus who said that when he could carry out his
wishes quickly he felt at his most despotic. Power is attractive to
those whose emotions remain regressed. Nye Bevan accused Churchill
of “congealed adolescence”. Plutarch’s insistence is that leaders
who are in it for themselves, even to a small degree, are unworthy.
“Cracked souls cannot contain political power…”
This is reminiscent of Abraham Lincoln’s observation that anyone can
cope with adversity, but if you want to test a man, give him power.
The leader who can put aside his or her own desires and be devoted
to something beyond themselves is very rare. Yet this is what
Plutarch argues must characterise an educated leader. This begs the
question, in a democracy, of educated voters. To elect people of
character requires voters of character, something not much in
evidence today. The cracked souls can be those of the people as much
as the leaders.
“…ignorance of people’s character leads to missteps and
mistakes no less in our political system than in the entourages of
kings…”
The return to character reveals Plutarch’s moral orientation:
“Politicians do not give an accounting only for the things
they say and do in the public sphere.”
In our post-shame culture, politicians are judged must less
stringently. This isn’t particularly modern, it could be argued: the
chaotic private life of John Wilkes was thought
by some to be irrelevant to his politics. Perhaps this shows
us what happens in divided societies: people will vote for anyone
who represents their interest.
In the second essay, Plutarch treats the matter of eloquence.
Politics is, of course, principally about the capacity to persuade
and those who can produce mellifluous language prosper:
“It’s a pity human deeds cannot speak for themselves. Then
those who are clever at speaking would amount to nothing.”
When, today, we see footage of the Nuremberg rallies, they seem
ridiculous. How could all those people have been fooled? They were
the wrong side of the gas chambers. We are all always the wrong side
of politicians’ promises. Even incoherent, contradictory speakers
can rally people if they are convinced their interests are at stake.
Themistocles is quoted: “May I never sit upon the sort of
throne that prevents me from giving more to my friends than everyone
else.”
This is the misuse of power Plutarch thinks is characteristic of the
uneducated leader. Leaders must serve what is good. The exercise of
power is a matter of virtue and true leaders are those who work out
what is good and serve it. Needless to say, this is a high-minded
view, at odds with the modern conception. Machiavelli, for example,
would have considered politics as the pursuit of moral good as far
removed from the machinations necessary to rulers, believing as he
did in a strict division between private and public morality and
seeing vice as a potential contributor to the security and stability
of the State, which ought to be the main concern of a leader.
Machiavelli and his inheritors, Mandeville for example, represent
the death of moral decision-making in public life. A moral decision
consists in this: a perceived advantage has to be resisted because
its achievement requires denial of a moral imperative. How do we
know what is a moral imperative ie that something is wrong? Moral
relativity asserts that this changes from culture to culture, but
the ability to recognise wrong must be consistent. It must be wired
in. It consists in the simple matter of being able to recognise that
others have needs like our own. As we would be injured by an affront
our own needs, so we should avoid affronting the needs of others.
Modern politics rejects this in favour of the doctrines of
legitimate interest, balance of powers and so on. Yet no one can
stop the moral imperative bubbling to the surface, so even the most
cynical politicians have to claim to be serving some good. Even
Hitler had to claim he was liberating the master race by pursuing
genocide. We are moral creatures by nature which means nothing more
or less than we share a common condition. This is the meaning of
equality. Our common biological inheritance is a given, in spite of
all differences of wealth, power or status. Whatever denies it is
essentially morally dubious, differences of wealth, power and status
for example.
“..there is nothing honourable or democratic in the love of
holding office.”
Plutarch recognises in the love of power a destructive form
of egotism. Good leaders rid themselves of it. To them, office may
be a burden borne for the sake of the good of others.
“Now the love of honour, though it is a more impressive
quality than the love of profit, is no less ruinous to a political
system.”
This dismissal of the pursuit of private gain is apparently
contradicted by a later mention of “the authority that comes from
wealth”, but perhaps Plutarch, in the second comment, is merely
recognising a social fact rather than asserting what he values. In
any case, his view is astringent. It is the opposite of our flabby
assumption that people pursue “honour” (how old fashioned it sounds
in our culture of vacuous celebrity) as a natural aim. What Plutarch
is always pointing towards is the stern self-discipline by which
people keep their worst impulses in check, a difficult notion for a
culture of self-abandonment and sloppy indulgence.
Of course, Plutarch was no democrat in the contemporary
sense. He thought monarchy “the most perfect and greatest of all
constitutions”. Yet his view of monarchy was demanding: it was a
heavy responsibility and if carried out properly would impose
strictures that would prevent anyone from envying its power. He
could nevertheless write this:
“Politics is not a public service with a functional
objective. Rather, it is a way of life for a tamed, political, and
social animal, one that by its nature must live its whole life
interacting with its fellow citizens, pursuing what is good and
caring for humankind.”
The final essay asks if this can be done by the old (men, of
course, though today we can apply what he says to women). His
conclusion is that there is every reason for the old to continue to
be engaged.
“Envy…which is the greatest evil in political life.. hardly
comes into conflict with old age…”
The old, he implies, are more or less beyond ambition, willing to
give others a hand, unlikely to push themselves forward at every
opportunity and to try to seize every office.
“We do not take leadership roles for ourselves but rather we
surrender ourselves to being leaders.”
This raises an interesting idea: perhaps people should be
forbidden from putting themselves forward for election but instead
should be invited by those who know them, have experience of them
and wish them to stand. Perhaps it wouldn’t lead to much change, but
perhaps it would nudge our elected leaders towards that pursuit of
the good Plutarch believes in.
The young, says Plutarch, are not ready for “the mobs that
treat politicians unfairly”. It is the older who must bear “the
enmity that comes from doing what is good for the people”. A curious
idea, but perhaps one Freud would have understood. Watching people
get angry at those who are trying to do what is good for them and
embrace what will damage them is pretty much the unedifying
spectacle of modern politics. Across the globe are leaders Plutarch
would have undoubtedly designated uneducated, in his sense.
Prominent amongst them, of course, the leader of what is hailed as
the world’s greatest democracy. Government by the good and wise
evades us. Why? It’s a complex and vexed question but to read
Plutarch is a sensible way to at least start thinking critically
about it.
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