By DR. DONALD DEMARCO
We are experiencing a leadership crisis. In Canada, an ineffective prime minister has resigned under pressure. In the United States, one presidential candidate withdrew because of a cognitive disability, while another had virtually nothing to offer. The man who became president has frightened the wits out of many. And the Head of the Church in Rome has, to put it lightly, acted in a peculiarly non-Popish way. How does such unreliable individuals rise to the top of government? Why do the appointed leaders fail to lead?
For the ancient Greeks, three things were required to be a good leader: logos (the ability to reason well), ethos (moral character), and pathos (a sensitivity for others). It is not common for people to possess all three of these traits. But they seem entirely absent in the people who are running today’s governments. In the current world, the three things that help secular candidates to be elected are money, charisma, and a good speaking voice.
Nor do we find capable leaders among the intelligentsia. This is why William F. Buckley once said that “I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than the faculty of Harvard.” Ronald Reagan was more pessimistic: “The most terrifying words in the English language are, I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
José Ortega y Gasset’s book, The Revolt of the Masses, is a classic. It is an insightful analysis of an alarming trend in modern society, namely that the masses are seizing control of society. The “sovereignty of the unqualified,” is his biting phrase. He pays special attention to what he calls “the barbarism of specialization.” Prior to the arrival of the specialist, people could be divided, more or less, into the learned and the ignorant. The specialist, however, falls into neither category. The specialist knows more and more about less and less. The saga of a prominent physicist offers a harrowing example of this. He was a specialist in solid state physics. The more he knew about his subject the more he realized that matter is mostly porous. He entered this theoretical world and developed a fear that he would fall through the spaces. To avoid this tragedy, he wore snowshoes. Walking, for him, was like carrying his body across a tightrope. This may be an extreme example, but it does show how specialization can be a narrowing intellectual activity.
Ortega explains that the specialist is not learned for he remains ignorant of what is outside of his field of specialization. But he is not ignorant since he does know something about that small area that fits into his specialization. “We shall have to say,” Ortega writes, “that he is a learned ignoramus, which is a very serious matter, as it implies that he is a person who is ignorant, not in the fashion of the ignorant man, but with all the petulance of one who is learned in his own special line.” Such a person, in Ortega’s estimation, is hardly prepared to lead or rule.
The specialist is a cousin of the expert. For Marshall McLuhan, the expert is the person who stays put while the rest of the world changes around him. One cannot remain an expert for very long.
The unreliability of the intelligentsia, the specialist, and the expert to involve themselves in governmental affairs leads to nostalgia for the common man. The jury system is based on the premise that in the court of law, a man should be judged by his peers. It is believed that there is a very good chance that justice would be rendered if a jury consisted of 12 such ordinary mortals.
The 1957 motion picture, Twelve Angry Men, is regarded as an exceptionally fine dramatization of what transpires among jury members as they wrestle with justice. It is well written and well-acted. But these are not its greatest virtues. Its chief merit is portraying realistically the kind of interplay between jury members whose interests in justice is compromised by their own prejudices and selfish concerns. It is a convincing argument against sentimentalizing the common man. The dozen jurors are “angry” because they find that the demands of justice are either too exacting or too inconvenient. In other words, the jurors are what we might expect if we took the first 12 names that appeared in the telephone directory. A passion for justice is not distributed equally among ordinary human beings.
G. K. Chesterton had his reservations concerning men who were specialists. He was once called upon to be a juror. The awesome responsibility of determining the guilt or innocence of a man, he mused, should not be left to the specialists. “When [civilization] wants a library catalogued,” he wrote, “or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when I wished anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.”
Chesterton is comparing 12 roses (the apostles) with 12 thorns (the angry men). But, with all respect to the great Christian apologist, was he looking at things through rose tinted glasses? The 12 apostles all became saints, not because they were ordinary men, but because they we nourished and sanctified by the Holy Spirit. The 12 were really 13.
