We live in an age of bad leadership....

A Response to the Leadership Crisis

By James Kalb

We live in an age of bad leadership. To judge by appearances, politicians today are mostly driven by partisanship and personal advantage. Business leaders are rapacious and indifferent to the welfare of their employees and customers, and to the value of their products. Artists, intellectuals, scholars, and journalists are more concerned with career and ideology than the good, beautiful and true, which they mostly don’t believe in anyway. And religious leaders make their way by manipulating language and symbols for the sake of comfort and worldly position.

In each case the vices seem similar: unrestrained ambition, loss of connection to those they should be leading, and lack of concern for the goods they are responsible for promoting. Those who aspire to high position make career a sort of absolute, and when they reach the top mostly think of increasing their glory by cultivating the esteem of other careerists, especially those in the media.

That way of life evidently does not violate their ideals. Our society has abandoned higher goods and settled connections to others in favor of the goals of the individual, whatever they may be. The result is that our leaders build their lives around advancement and self-assertion simply as such. When they look around for general principles to give themselves and their actions an aura of legitimacy, the ones publicly available have to do with universalizing the self-assertion and self-advancement to which they have always devoted themselves.

That is why the Supreme Court, a committee of lawyers who have reached the very top of their profession, believe themselves called upon to stand firm against marriage and for abortion. After all, marriage binds and abortion frees, and whatever unshackles the human spirit—whatever allows people to give themselves wholly to career and self-assertion—expresses the highest aspirations of our time. Others who have reached the peak of public life, and also want to be admired for their concern for humanity, do the same. They win the esteem of their peers by fighting for the abolition of anything that might stand in the way of universal careerism, for the principle that everyone can become a winner and live his dreams.

The current state of leadership and public ideals is a very serious matter. Man is a social animal who relies on others for what he needs for a truly human life. He doesn’t create individually the language he uses, the assumptions that orient him, the ideals he lives by, or the habits that join him to others. Those things form a system he picks up from others and most often is born into, and leadership is needed to maintain that system. If high-end artists don’t care for beauty, if eminent scholars deny the existence of truth, if Harvard and The New York Times are corrupt, if leading churchmen think following the world is prophetic and pastoral, how can the rest of us make up for that?

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