Chris Ormell
Chris Ormell looks at the paradox posed by a self denying politically correct ordinance against elites and "the urgent need for leadership" in an age which is apparently falling somewhat apart for want of good leadership.
Well, is there room? Certainly! Without a new elite nothing will happen for the better. History seems to show that only the dedicated, the disciplined, the determined, the organised, achieve things.
On the other hand, nothing is more likely to send a room full of intelligent, caring, charming, progressive people into apoplexy than the suggestion that we need a new elite! So here is a simple example of a philosophical issue which poses two opposing answers to a meaningful question, the two appearing to be in head-on contradiction. Let"s face it, the word "elite" has become obnoxious. It has come to signify a group of intolerable, conceited, ruthless snobs.
The fortunes of the once truly formidable, worthy, arrogant English landed establishment have slumped conspicuously during the present century. (Their motto was formerly Noblesse oblige, but in modern times they began to feel like a victim class, and as a result they tended to forget the "oblige".) This long sustained, unmistakable, historic failure has finally made itself almost universally known. It seems to have conspired to give the very notion of an "elite a bad name. Perhaps we find it impossible to dissociate the term "elite" from the local, i.e. the longstanding English establishment, version of it. So talk of "elites" should be, and is, out.
But the problem of the acute need for modern leadership does not go so easily away. Should we place our emphasis on the need for a new a "leadership"? Hardly. This word, too, has become obnoxious. It has come to signify assuming, jumped-up, ever-so-slightly-fascist narcissists. It is, probably, the arrogances, conceits and perks which modern leaders tend to assume as-their-natural-due" which grate on ordinary people.
We can look at it in another way. Many unconventional and "non-deferent" people now complain bitterly about "power relations", which seems to mean roughly "being given orders by someone who does not exude an obviously sincere, inner sense of natural authority. (More conventional people are generally willing to accept the orders of their legitimate boss, provided of course that the normal rules have been observed.) But numbers of "conventional people" are in decline and society is now predominantly post-modern in character.
In some sectors non-deference has become the presumed
norm. For "non-deferent people" read "people who are almost impossible
to lead". There is a great difficulty, then, in seeing how modern communities
can be effectively led: and in response to this, a body of relativist opinion
has emerged which seems to have convinced itself, contrary to the lessons
of 3,000 years of history, that they don"t need to be.
An analogy: Consider a group of children let loose for
the first time on a set of musical instruments. The results are likely
to be a cacophony. Two opinions can be entertained about this:
A. The best one can hope for is the cacophony,
B. There is a way to get these children to practise, to master their fingerwork and musical notation and hence to create beautiful sounds.
Actually, any experienced teacher knows that (A) is possible: and that the alleged remark "the best one can hope for" quoted in (A) is simply a pathetic reflection of inexperience and/or personality limitations. Similarly it is possible to argue either, firstly,that modern communities can be (and are already effectively) self-regulating without any explicit leadership, or secondly, that we are not, at present, getting a fraction of the cultural achievement and "harmony" which a well-led community can generate. I don"t think anyone is likely to change their opinion on this subject as a result of reading a short paper such as this. The problem does arise, though, for those of us who gravitate towards the latter opinion, that the very possibility of leadership is looking somewhat fragile under modern conditions of media dominance, social dislocation, materialism, anti-intellectualism and endemic me-firstism. Perhaps modern society in some sense would benefit from "strong leadership", but the obstacles to anything like this being socially acceptable seem to be overwhelming.
Is a solution possible?
I want to suggest that there is a partial solution to this problem. Let"s first consider the essence of what good leaders deliver. It is, surely, both a sustained, determined, obstinate, if shared hopefulness about a realistic outcome in any social project, and, secondly, a good judgment about how to achieve it.
Neither of these commodities, though, need be the sole possession of a single person. Nor, in practice, do modern leaders tend to work as isolated individuals. They almost always operate with a small circle of advisers, aides, speech writers, etc. In this way the "leadership rhetoric" becomes, or starts out as, the possession of a small circle of people. Public recognition may reside in a single individual, but the essence of the message is - a message! It is a message of the kind:
This is worth doing and is realistically attainable. To attain it, a strategy of the kind XYZ needs to be followed. But the circle of people who "own" this message need not be small. Let us say, therefore, that any articulate person who has fully internalised this message can be considered to possess forwardship. Forwardship is a kind of democratisation of leadership, bringing it within reach of anyone who is able to think deeply and carefully about both ends and means.
A group of people showing palpable forwardship of a given kind may be termed a "forwardist group". Democratising the idea of leadership in this way enables us to conceptualise a system without the typical sycophancy and personality-cult trappings which, we know, traditionally ~ attend leadership in all kinds of semi-tribal societies. The effect of the arrival of the media in such societies is usually greatly to amplify these tendencies.
Following democratisation, leadership might be said to
become the mental quality associated with optimum forwardship. When it
is conceptualised in this way from the beginning, we may call any person
displaying optimum or near-optimum forwardship - i.e. a person with exceptionally
concentrated forwardship - a "forwardist".
To lose the association with arrogance, having airs,
being conceited or whatever, it may be sufficient to insist that in modern
times every forwardist needs to carry their constituency with them. That
is, as it were, a performance criterion for forwardists. The proof of leadership
on the part of an individual, X, is the conveyance of the forwardship message
from X to a significant sub-body of the thoughtful and the articulate within
the wider community. Much pivots on the quality of that conveyance" of
forwardship from the forwardist or forwardist group to the rest. To be
acceptable today it needs to be considerably more open, free of explicit
manipulation and essentially "democratic" than the word "democratic" itself
often connotes.
Of course a person (a forwardist) who Ieads in the suggested manner will need to spend substantial sectors of time in intense thought and contemplation, and he or she may therefore appear at times to be aloof. A forwardist requires personal thinking space. The combination in a single individual of a capacity for such intense contemplation, determination and self-discipline, together with the capacity and willingness freely to engage with ordinary people in meaningful two-way dialogue is not common. We celebrate it in figures as disparate as Horatio Nelson, Winston Churchill, Pierre Trudeau, Nelson Mandela, Princess Diana , er... Tony Blair. [Perhaps we should leave Tony Blair for history to celebrate/ condemn? - Ed.] They were all said to have "the common touch.
They were all, at least in the terms of this article, outstanding "forwardists". Such leaders have generally been quite careful not to project "arrogance, airs or conceit" in public situations, but of course their single-mindedness and need for personal thinking space could easily be misconstrued by bystanders or unsympathetic critics as being this. So what touchstone can we use to distinguish genuine from phoney forwardists? The answer is very simple. Success, at the end of the day determines the track record of a forwardist. It is no use a person leading a social group ever-so-skilfully if the result is public dismay, failure and disappointment. On the other hand, given palpable success, the negative associations which, in the recent past, have attached themselves so firmly to the very notion of "leadership", are, we know, apt to melt away like summer snow.
So, what is the general problem?
The chief "general problem" which we need forwardists to tackle is, I suggest, the extensive historic fraying of civilisation caused in modern times by the combined effects of poor education, media fantasy-amplification, social disruption, materialism, technicism and a general dearth of the intense personal self-disciplines needed by virtually everyone in a free but multiply seductive society. The opportunities for the individual to self-destruct through becoming intoxicated with substances, sex, power, work, weight loss, food, drink, laziness, conceit and hubris are greater today than ever before. Coincidentally, owing to the decline of authority and traditional pieties, the normal barriers to such self-destruction are also lower than ever before.
What we have here is actually an extensive area of "problematique" rather than a mere problem. And it is not just about the self destruction of individuals. It extends to an across-the-board loss of effectiveness, on the part of social bodies of many kinds. They all depend, in the end, on being able to marshall a body of intelligent, dedicated, disciplined people. It is quite evident that large numbers of people previously regarded as "intelligent, dedicated, disciplined people" have decided that enough is enough, and that they are going to enjoy life in the future, instead of selflessly devoting their lives to large causes of dubious provenance.
One can form two opinions about the situation: the first is that the problematique is the modern condition and that it is here to stay, the second is that it needs to be tackled, quite urgently, before civilisation generally self- destructs. In my opinion if the problematique is here to stay, the palpable gradual descent of society from its previously taken-for-granted standards is also here to stay. This means, in effect, that the total area of problematique will, inevitably, grow. So we can"t realistically assume that the first scenario, which might sound like an acceptable steady-state, is stable. There are all sorts of reasons for being pretty certain that it isn"t.
It is true that we have already survived about a quarter of a century of the post-modern era, during which respect for rationality, logic, mathematics, science, etc. has tumbled to what may be dangerously low levels. But, one has to remember that, during this period, society has still contained within itself a fair proportion of older, "un-postmodern" individuals, educated in, and harking from, a previous, more disciplined, deferent era. This has probably, so to speak, muffled the impact of some of the more extreme populist, relativist and postmodern impulses.
Postmodern judgments have technically had the upper hand, but they may quite often have been occluded by unexpected reversions to old-fashioned rationality. Such muffling will, however, inevitably taper off and disappear - if the situation continues to drift - as the "pre-postmodern generation" retires and chooses the easy life.board the additional idea that a new kind of vigorous, militant forwardship will be needed to tackle it, take it on, and if possible reverse it. The urgency arises partly from the prospect that postmodern assumptions can only increase inexorably as a by-product of the problematique. To remark on the "urgency" of the situation is therefore to suggest that a definite, committed movement will be needed to reverse the situation. Forwardship, in a word, will be needed, of no mean intensity. If so, numbers of thoughtful, farsighted people will be called on to display this forwardship. Indeed if anything approaching a "movement" is to be created to renew the kind of cultural integrity which used to provide the unquestioned social basis, a powerful general blueprint or ideology of some sort will be needed to energise and focus the exercise.
At present there is no sign of the emergence of such a
"general blueprint" or "ideology", but it should be remarked that imploding
social conditions have been apt in the past to produce such narratives.
The great age of Greek philosophy coincided with the implosion of the culture
of the Athenian city-state.
If such a narrative (and the movement which it implies)
ever arrives, one thing is certain. Its exponents will not want to talk
about a new elite. Genuine elites avoid using the word "elite", and classy
people, by the normal definition, studiously avoid the epithet "classy".
Address for correspondence:
Christopher Ormell, Philosophy for Education (PER) Renewal Group, 3 Ingleside Grove, London SE3 7PH.
email: coolpantony@aol.com