Follow the Leader
Neo-Neocon has thoughts on leaders.
She runs through the litany of modern leaders, from Hitler and Stalin to Big Brother, who have left the word in bad odor. But she notes that the aversion seems particularly strong among Baby Boomers (she's one, I'm another). And maybe the adversion involves more than a few bad men.
The institutions they most distrust or flee from -- the military, churches -- are the most hierarchical.
She looks at what makes leaders inspiring, but circles back again to the difficulty of being a follower.
Like me, she has made the intellectual break with the reflexive leftish liberalism of her past. The emotional break is a much harder matter.
She's right, of course, that the tension between individualism and authority runs through the American story. It's fascinating to watch the dissenters and non-conformists of old England arrive on this shore and instantly become authoritarians obsessed with rooting out dissent in New England.
But the remarkable thing about the '60s generation -- and I think NNC would agree with me on this -- is the thoroughness of its rejection of leadership, of the very idea of leaders, as outmoded, an impediment to the Aquarian Age. It goes beyond the usual American suspicion. (Even in their most anti-establishment phases, the Puritans and the Quakers had leaders and knew how to follow them.)
This is the generation that produced both Bush and Clinton. It produced most of the people now in leadership positions in the media and academe. Even in many American places where the flower-power '60s gained no foothold, the faith in leadership shuddered.
"Following" is now felt as sheep-like, submissive, stupid. Yet it's one of the oldest and deepest-rooted human behaviors. And it can be a fully alert and active state.
I tend to see things in an evolutionary perspective. Human behaviors are not quite hard-wired, but certainly they've been reinforced by three million years or so of independent existence as a species. Most of that experience was lived under dramatically different circumstances than the way we live now. And you have to remember the forest primeval to make sense of a lot of what we do now.
Why do we keep stuffing our faces with sugar and fat even though it kills us? Because for 98 percent of human history, the intense craving for sugars and fat was a boost to survival. Why do modern men act out rituals of war and hunting in their sports? Might as well ask why we have mouthsful of teeth suited to tearing raw meat.
The interrelation of leaders, followers, and survival is at the heart of one of the great stories of the ancient world: the Anabasis. An army of 10,000 Greeks reluctantly had agreed to go fight for a Persian prince who wanted to claim the throne of his empire. They followed him into the heart of what is now Iraq, and there fought a great battle against his rival half-brother. The Greeks swept the field and won a victory, but their Persian prince, Cyros, was killed in the fight.
It was an awkward situation all around. The Greeks were surrounded by enemies, far from home, with limited supplies of food. The Persian king desperately wanted to get rid of this powerful army in the middle of his realm. Yet as a unit they were too powerful to beat in battle. The Persians lured the chief Greek generals to a negotiation, and treacherously slaughtered them. The Persians reckoned that, without their leaders, the Greeks were doomed.
It's a testimony to the genius of ancient Greece, and the habits of democracy, that the lost brigade replaced its head. But they did so knowing the urgency of the situation, and that unless they had strong leaders, with committed followers, they all were as good as dead. The junior officers got together. A man named Xenophon, "an Athenian, who was neither general nor captain nor private," rallied them. Leadership, he told the others, was essential.
Their leader in battle had been Clearchos. Now he was dead, killed by their enemies.
I watched Clinton's supporters fail to stand up for him when the waters rose. Rather than fight for a leader, they retreated into the comfortable woods inhabited by those who refuse to follow. "I'm indifferent to the fate of the leaders of my own faction," they seemed to say; "My only passion for leaders is to loathe the leaders of the opposition."
There's a pure negativity in that that is frankly revolting. People who only know what they're against, and who never are "for" anything once the going gets tough, can't advance the human race or do very much good at all. People who live in permanent states of authority-questioning, as NNC notes, are useful once in a while, but generally they are a drag on the human race.
There's an old Anglo-Saxon poem -- it survives only in a fragment -- that illuminates the reciprocal relation between leaders and followers. At the Battle of Maldon, when the leader of the Anglo-Saxon warriors is cut down in the fight against the vikings, the poet names and execrates the few who then ran away. One is Godric:
But many more men stay and fight on. In fact, they now are fighting to either victory or death. Which is the proper warrior code response to a leader's fall. A young warrior named Ælfwine exhorts them:
[From a superb translation by Douglas B. Killings]
That's cowardice and bravery. Godric and those who ran failed in their roles. But what NNC is talking about is a generation that seems to have opted out of the relationship entirely. The fact that there were no obvious viking raiding parties or Persian emperors in '60s America made this easier, I suppose.
The leader-follower dynamic is deep-rooted in us. Like anything that has roots down to the level of instinct, it is dangerous to ignore. To think you can simply walk away from it in a quest for a higher consciousness is a risky business. Don't be in such a hurry to cut off something until you know what's going to replace it. The energy, the need, are going to push through, whether you ignore them or not.
And if human experience has evolved some system to guide and contain the instincts, chances are our ancestors devised it after trying most other things and finding they worked less well. This is the heart of philosophical conservatism. If it looks evil, be sure it's not really a lesser-of-evils before you reject it and tear it up.
In American history, it seems to me, the generation that shares most in common with the noncomformists of the 1960s is the one that came of age in the 1840s. Like the youth movement of the Vietnam era, this was not a nationwide phenomenon, but rather it concentrated in a pocket -- in this case, New England.
At its core were radical individualists -- the Transcendentalist, "who believed that the human mind could through its own capacities transcend its inheritance in human history" [Lewis P. Simpson]. They chased truth to ground in the "self's ultimate power of intuitive perception." They combined an outward utopianism and the need to feel free of any authority but one's own inner voices.
Having rejected leaders of the conventional culture, the Transcendentalists, like their 1960s counterparts, were susceptible to cults, both religious and secular. They sought out gurus and they made pilgrimages -- to lecture halls, if not to rock shows.
Having freed themselves from conventional loyalties, the Transcendentalists easily swerved into authoritarian ways. They refused the taint of compromise. Thoreau turned his able pen to writing a hagiography for the original American terrorist, John Brown.
Thoreau was, like many modern utopian individualists, a totalitarian at heart. "We talk about a representative government; but what a monster of a government is that where the noblest faculties of the mind, and the whole heart, are not represented!"
Their anthem was written to the march of soldiers' boots on the cobblestones of Boston, heading off to wreak destruction and spread the scripture of New England to the Southern heathens.
Neo-Neocon, too, comes around to this generation in her post.
I needed a long time to appreciate Whitman. Too often his poems read like an auto parts catalogue; the long lines lie there inert, like a python that ate too much on a cold day. When I recall some thought from his poems and want to quote it, I turn to the book and find it straggling along over a page and a half, without beginning or end.
Whitman's love for Lincoln, almost embarrassingly passionate, perhaps is yet another expression of Whitman's omnisexuality. But either way, it discovers and draws up a very old thing: The dear love of a leader can be a quality that doesn't dead-end at a Stalin or a Hitler.
Of the few Anglo-Saxon poems that have come down to us, two are laments by outcast men -- that is, men who for one reason or another have lost their "captains," their lords, and the protection of their chieftains and the band of men who surrounded them in loyalty. Evidently this leaderless condition filled the Anglo-Saxon man with dread.
In one of the poems, the narrator dreams that he again is in the presence of his leader, only to awaken to the double bitterness of feeling the loss anew:
Which, in a rather flaccid translation, comes out:
That's pure Whitman. Whitman, like Emerson, had his fervent disciples, who wanted to make a religion out of him. But he wouldn't let them forget the humility of being human. Which includes being a follower sometimes.
Emerson born 1803, the guru. Margaret Fuller, 1810; Thoreau 1817; Julia Ward Howe 1819. Whitman 1819. Whitman was perhaps the truest individualist in his ur-hippie generation, yet he was the only one, I think, who understood what a leader was and ought to be.
The antithesis of New England Transcendentalism was the American South. There, for many reasons, the leader-follower dynamic was firmly in place among the white population. In part because, like Xenophon's Greeks, they sensed the danger surrounding them. In part because they felt a heritage connection to the lowland Scots who were brothers to the men who fought at Maldon. They tended to rally to chieftains, even when they did not entirely like them.
Emerson found the South purely repulsive. He was among the many in New England who hated slavery not so much because they liked Africans and wanted them to be equal partakers of America but because they resented the Southern leadership class.
Whitman had none of that.
Whitman, I have come to think, was the greater American.
I'm interested in why we (and I include myself here) are somewhat averse to the very word "leader." One of the commenters on SC&A touched on what I consider the heart of the answer, and that is that leaders require followers. Or at least we think they do, in the common understanding of the word "leader."
Now, who in American wants to be a follower? Practically no one. Individualism was built into this country from the start, and the distaste for a leader in that sense is not limited to the left--it's very strong on the right, too. The idea of "leader" is too close to royalty on the one hand and to dictatorship on the other.
She runs through the litany of modern leaders, from Hitler and Stalin to Big Brother, who have left the word in bad odor. But she notes that the aversion seems particularly strong among Baby Boomers (she's one, I'm another). And maybe the adversion involves more than a few bad men.
Raised by parents who had renounced some of the authority of their own parents; encouraged by our numbers, prosperity, and the press to take our adolescent rebellion to extremes; many of us have taken the charge "Question Authority" to heart. Some never stop questioning it and rebelling against it, often just for the sake of rebelling.
The institutions they most distrust or flee from -- the military, churches -- are the most hierarchical.
She looks at what makes leaders inspiring, but circles back again to the difficulty of being a follower.
If one has a real reason to admire what a person in a position of leadership has done, it isn't as hard to be a follower when necessary, or to trust that things are in generally capable hands.
Like me, she has made the intellectual break with the reflexive leftish liberalism of her past. The emotional break is a much harder matter.
She's right, of course, that the tension between individualism and authority runs through the American story. It's fascinating to watch the dissenters and non-conformists of old England arrive on this shore and instantly become authoritarians obsessed with rooting out dissent in New England.
But the remarkable thing about the '60s generation -- and I think NNC would agree with me on this -- is the thoroughness of its rejection of leadership, of the very idea of leaders, as outmoded, an impediment to the Aquarian Age. It goes beyond the usual American suspicion. (Even in their most anti-establishment phases, the Puritans and the Quakers had leaders and knew how to follow them.)
This is the generation that produced both Bush and Clinton. It produced most of the people now in leadership positions in the media and academe. Even in many American places where the flower-power '60s gained no foothold, the faith in leadership shuddered.
"Following" is now felt as sheep-like, submissive, stupid. Yet it's one of the oldest and deepest-rooted human behaviors. And it can be a fully alert and active state.
I tend to see things in an evolutionary perspective. Human behaviors are not quite hard-wired, but certainly they've been reinforced by three million years or so of independent existence as a species. Most of that experience was lived under dramatically different circumstances than the way we live now. And you have to remember the forest primeval to make sense of a lot of what we do now.
Why do we keep stuffing our faces with sugar and fat even though it kills us? Because for 98 percent of human history, the intense craving for sugars and fat was a boost to survival. Why do modern men act out rituals of war and hunting in their sports? Might as well ask why we have mouthsful of teeth suited to tearing raw meat.
The interrelation of leaders, followers, and survival is at the heart of one of the great stories of the ancient world: the Anabasis. An army of 10,000 Greeks reluctantly had agreed to go fight for a Persian prince who wanted to claim the throne of his empire. They followed him into the heart of what is now Iraq, and there fought a great battle against his rival half-brother. The Greeks swept the field and won a victory, but their Persian prince, Cyros, was killed in the fight.
It was an awkward situation all around. The Greeks were surrounded by enemies, far from home, with limited supplies of food. The Persian king desperately wanted to get rid of this powerful army in the middle of his realm. Yet as a unit they were too powerful to beat in battle. The Persians lured the chief Greek generals to a negotiation, and treacherously slaughtered them. The Persians reckoned that, without their leaders, the Greeks were doomed.
It's a testimony to the genius of ancient Greece, and the habits of democracy, that the lost brigade replaced its head. But they did so knowing the urgency of the situation, and that unless they had strong leaders, with committed followers, they all were as good as dead. The junior officers got together. A man named Xenophon, "an Athenian, who was neither general nor captain nor private," rallied them. Leadership, he told the others, was essential.
“All these soldiers have their eyes on you. If they see you are discouraged, they all will be cowards; but if you show that you are making preparations against the enemy, and if you call on them, you may be sure they will follow you and try to imitate you. ... Now, first of all, I think you will do the whole army a great service if you take care at once to appoint captains and officers in the place of those who have been lost. For it is true one may say universally that without commanders nothing good or useful could ever be done; good discipline always saves, but disorder has destroyed many."
Their leader in battle had been Clearchos. Now he was dead, killed by their enemies.
"... You see that the enemy dared not make war upon us until they had seized our leaders. They believed that while the commanders were there, and while we obeyed, we were able to defeat them; when they took our commanders, they thought we should be destroyed by anarchy and disorder. Very well: the commanders must be much more careful than before, and the commanded must be more obedient than before: and if anyone disobeys, we must vote that each and all of you must help the commander to punish. So the enemy will find themselves mightily mistaken: for this day they will see ten thousand Clearchoses instead of one, who will never permit anyone to be a coward."
I watched Clinton's supporters fail to stand up for him when the waters rose. Rather than fight for a leader, they retreated into the comfortable woods inhabited by those who refuse to follow. "I'm indifferent to the fate of the leaders of my own faction," they seemed to say; "My only passion for leaders is to loathe the leaders of the opposition."
There's a pure negativity in that that is frankly revolting. People who only know what they're against, and who never are "for" anything once the going gets tough, can't advance the human race or do very much good at all. People who live in permanent states of authority-questioning, as NNC notes, are useful once in a while, but generally they are a drag on the human race.
There's an old Anglo-Saxon poem -- it survives only in a fragment -- that illuminates the reciprocal relation between leaders and followers. At the Battle of Maldon, when the leader of the Anglo-Saxon warriors is cut down in the fight against the vikings, the poet names and execrates the few who then ran away. One is Godric:
He leapt upon the mount of the steed which had once been his lord's,
on those trappings of which he was not fit,
he and with his brothers both galloped away,
Godwine and Godwig not caring for battle,
but turned away from this battlefield and to the forest fled,
seeking a place of safety and to protect their lives ...
But many more men stay and fight on. In fact, they now are fighting to either victory or death. Which is the proper warrior code response to a leader's fall. A young warrior named Ælfwine exhorts them:
"Remember the speeches which we had often at mead spoken,
that we on the bench had loudly uttered vows,
warriors in the hall, concerning bitter strife:
Now may we prove who is truly valiant!
I am willing that my royal descent be made known to all men,
that I was of Mercian blood greatly kindred;
my grandfather was named Ealhelm,
a wise alderman and very prosperous.
Not shall me these people's liegeman reproach
that I of this army am willing to depart from,
a homeland seek, now that my lord lies slain
and hewn down in battle. Mine is that sorrow greatest:
he was both my kinsman and my lord."
[From a superb translation by Douglas B. Killings]
That's cowardice and bravery. Godric and those who ran failed in their roles. But what NNC is talking about is a generation that seems to have opted out of the relationship entirely. The fact that there were no obvious viking raiding parties or Persian emperors in '60s America made this easier, I suppose.
The leader-follower dynamic is deep-rooted in us. Like anything that has roots down to the level of instinct, it is dangerous to ignore. To think you can simply walk away from it in a quest for a higher consciousness is a risky business. Don't be in such a hurry to cut off something until you know what's going to replace it. The energy, the need, are going to push through, whether you ignore them or not.
And if human experience has evolved some system to guide and contain the instincts, chances are our ancestors devised it after trying most other things and finding they worked less well. This is the heart of philosophical conservatism. If it looks evil, be sure it's not really a lesser-of-evils before you reject it and tear it up.
In American history, it seems to me, the generation that shares most in common with the noncomformists of the 1960s is the one that came of age in the 1840s. Like the youth movement of the Vietnam era, this was not a nationwide phenomenon, but rather it concentrated in a pocket -- in this case, New England.
At its core were radical individualists -- the Transcendentalist, "who believed that the human mind could through its own capacities transcend its inheritance in human history" [Lewis P. Simpson]. They chased truth to ground in the "self's ultimate power of intuitive perception." They combined an outward utopianism and the need to feel free of any authority but one's own inner voices.
Having rejected leaders of the conventional culture, the Transcendentalists, like their 1960s counterparts, were susceptible to cults, both religious and secular. They sought out gurus and they made pilgrimages -- to lecture halls, if not to rock shows.
Having freed themselves from conventional loyalties, the Transcendentalists easily swerved into authoritarian ways. They refused the taint of compromise. Thoreau turned his able pen to writing a hagiography for the original American terrorist, John Brown.
Thoreau was, like many modern utopian individualists, a totalitarian at heart. "We talk about a representative government; but what a monster of a government is that where the noblest faculties of the mind, and the whole heart, are not represented!"
Their anthem was written to the march of soldiers' boots on the cobblestones of Boston, heading off to wreak destruction and spread the scripture of New England to the Southern heathens.
I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnish'd rows of steel,
"As ye deal with my contemners, So with you my grace shall deal;"
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel
Since God is marching on.
Neo-Neocon, too, comes around to this generation in her post.
When Lincoln was assassinated, the grieving poet Walt Whitman wrote the famous poem "O Captain! My Captain!" It's a lament for a leader fallen when the prize is so close at hand, a crie de cour on behalf of a nation bereft.
I'm not sure it would be possible anymore for this sort of metaphor and emotion about a leader to be expressed--or perhaps even felt--about a President. The feeling is composed of many things, but one of them is love.
I needed a long time to appreciate Whitman. Too often his poems read like an auto parts catalogue; the long lines lie there inert, like a python that ate too much on a cold day. When I recall some thought from his poems and want to quote it, I turn to the book and find it straggling along over a page and a half, without beginning or end.
Whitman's love for Lincoln, almost embarrassingly passionate, perhaps is yet another expression of Whitman's omnisexuality. But either way, it discovers and draws up a very old thing: The dear love of a leader can be a quality that doesn't dead-end at a Stalin or a Hitler.
Of the few Anglo-Saxon poems that have come down to us, two are laments by outcast men -- that is, men who for one reason or another have lost their "captains," their lords, and the protection of their chieftains and the band of men who surrounded them in loyalty. Evidently this leaderless condition filled the Anglo-Saxon man with dread.
In one of the poems, the narrator dreams that he again is in the presence of his leader, only to awaken to the double bitterness of feeling the loss anew:
ðonne sorg ond slæp somod ætgædre
earmne anhogan oft gebindað.
þinceð him on mode þæt he his mondryhten
clyppe ond cysse, ond on cneo lecge
honda ond heafod, swa he hwilum ær
in geardagum giefstolas breac.
ðonne onwæcneð eft wineleas guma,
...
sare æfter swæsne. Sorg bið geniwad,
Which, in a rather flaccid translation, comes out:
Even in slumber his sorrow assaileth,
And, dreaming he claspeth his dear lord again,
Head on knee, hand on knee, loyally laying,
Pledging his liege as in days long past.
Then from his slumber he starts lonely hearted
. . .
The longing for loved one: his grief is renewed.
That's pure Whitman. Whitman, like Emerson, had his fervent disciples, who wanted to make a religion out of him. But he wouldn't let them forget the humility of being human. Which includes being a follower sometimes.
Emerson born 1803, the guru. Margaret Fuller, 1810; Thoreau 1817; Julia Ward Howe 1819. Whitman 1819. Whitman was perhaps the truest individualist in his ur-hippie generation, yet he was the only one, I think, who understood what a leader was and ought to be.
The antithesis of New England Transcendentalism was the American South. There, for many reasons, the leader-follower dynamic was firmly in place among the white population. In part because, like Xenophon's Greeks, they sensed the danger surrounding them. In part because they felt a heritage connection to the lowland Scots who were brothers to the men who fought at Maldon. They tended to rally to chieftains, even when they did not entirely like them.
Emerson found the South purely repulsive. He was among the many in New England who hated slavery not so much because they liked Africans and wanted them to be equal partakers of America but because they resented the Southern leadership class.
Whitman had none of that.
"I am very warmly disposed toward the South; I must admit that my instinct of friendship towards the South is almost more than I like to confess. I have very dear friends there -- sacred, precious memories; the people there should be considered, even deferred to, instead of browbeaten. I feel sore, I feel some pain, almost indignation, when I think that yesterday keeps the old brutal idea of subjugation on top.
"I would be the last to confuse moral values -- to imagine the South impeccable. I don't condone the South, where it has gone wrong -- its Negro slavery, I don't condone that -- far from it -- I hate it. I have always said so, South and North; but there is another spirit dormant there which it must be the purpose of our civilization to bring forth; it cannot, it must not, be killed."
Whitman, I have come to think, was the greater American.
