WISDOM, INTEGRITY, AND COURAGE

I was honored today to learn that Soldiers and Civilization will be used in a course taught to senior cadets at the Korea Military Academy.  The colonel instructing the course and I will stay in touch. Could be very interesting!

I’ll get back to the Romans eventually, but for now I’m going to stay with the subject of moral prudence and command. The latest national news appears to be keeping the subject timely and essential.

One of the reasons I think the equation of moral prudence and command is so important is that it unites two headings, ethics and leadership, that are sometimes kept separate.   The matter of ethics is sometimes treated as if it were the icing on the leadership cake. On a college or academy campus, they are usually pursued by separate departments. There is also a culture gap between the ethicists and the exponents of leadership, with the former usually more academic and the latter more hands-on and “applied.”  At the service academies, most of the leadership instructors are military types, while the ethicists are more likely to be civilians. If military command is indeed a form of moral prudence, then the two groups ought to at least communicate more than they normally do, breaking out of their stovepipes. Maybe the heads of ROTC departments should be renamed from Professor of Naval/Military/Aerospace Science to Prof. of N/M/A Prudence!

Every now and then, some midshipman at Kings Point, thinking that he’d hit on a brilliant thought, would tell me, “You know, sir, Hitler was really a great leader!” I would generally start off by saying that, just going by the record, Hitler had not performed so well. 12 years into his reign, German armies were defeated, German cities in ruins, and Germany itself covered in a special kind of shame from which it may never fully recover. Beyond this, I might say, a proper definition of leadership, certainly one which we were capable of embracing at a service academy, entirely excluded Hitler and his actions, which should be classed under tyranny, or demagoguery, as not just vexed leadership but really the opposite of leadership. Leadership brings people forward, towards the better angels of their nature. It cannot appeal to the worst in us, to our resentments, prejudice, or lust for power over others, tendencies that lie dormant in all, and that only need the right spark.

A leader who is incapable of moral reason, or who is indifferent to moral issues, or who lacks moral courage, isn’t a leader at all, but the reverse, and such a person in a position of authority may be far more dangerous than someone who is merely incompetent.  We may sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that if someone is technically competent, or if we agree with him on issues, if she has made an effort to reach out to us, if we see some of ourselves in this person (if perhaps not our better self), then this should make up for even serious shortcomings in what I’ve called moral prudence. This is a dangerous path. Employers and teachers are coming to realize that this kind of thinking puts the cart before the horse. We don’t need saints, but we need need people who are willing to confront the unavoidable ethical questions that are running through the decisions they make and the example that they set.

Reading up to this point, some may be thinking that I am lacking in moral prudence by failing to name the specific incidents and statements that are lurking behind this discourse. Well, I must pursue my own way, allowing others to draw their own conclusions, perhaps inciting some discussion.

Later,

Reed

I indicated in my last post that I planned to write more about the Romans, but the news over the last couple of days has prompted me to discuss today a subject that I had planned for a later date. If you read this post, the relevance of this subject will likely become fairly obvious.  In much of this discussion, I am indebted to the work of Gregory Reichberg, to presentations by him and some talks we’ve had at the annual McCain Conferences at the U.S. Naval Academy, to some of his shorter writings, and to his recent Thomas Aquinas on War and Peace (Cambridge, 2017). 

War has been compared to an art, to a science, to commerce and to sport. These are metaphors, and as such all may have their uses, but a little-known section of Thomas Aquinas’ massive Summa Theologica posits what is possibly the richest and most accurate characterization of command in war, which that it is an act of moral prudence.

In his typical interrogatory style, Aquinas begins by asking, “Whether military prudence should be reckoned a part of prudence?” He notes three objections. First, that warfare is an art, which (citing Aristotle) is distinct from prudence. Second, that although military affairs come under politics, so do other matters, such as trade, which are not of prudence.  Third, that soldiers have need of fortitude rather than prudence. Aquinas both poses a general answer to the objections to military prudence, and he also addresses the three objections individually.  He acknowledges that war has aspects of art, such as in the use of “external things, such as arms and horses,” but that as it pertains to the public good, it belongs to prudence. His argument against the second objection also invokes the “common good” as an aim in warfare that relates it to prudence. Thirdly, Aquinas says that the direction of war requires prudence as well as fortitude. As noted by Reichberg, the arguments of Aquinas concerning war and prudence have been neglected, eclipsed by other descriptions and metaphors for how soldiers think. To revive this idea for modern readers, a few words of translation are necessary.

Prudence meant more to the ancients and later Latin-speakers than it does to modern English-speakers. Today in common use prudence is almost synonymous with caution.  When we pair it with “moral,” it is to emphasize its status as more than mere caution, and as a moral as well as an intellectual virtue. When we speak of military prudence, we are assuming a prudence that has already accepted the unavoidable hazards and mischances of war. It is in fact these very elements of armed conflict that make moral prudence perhaps the sine qua non of the exercise of military leadership and command. Art is concerned with things to be made, prudence with things to be done. Art (and also science, craft, business, or sport) do not require complete virtue in a person, but prudence does.  Prudence is a “thick” conception of virtue that calls for character plus skill. Further, the truly prudential commander would not seek victory alone, nor a narrow national interest, but a common good. Aquinas’ identification of military prudence accords with his precepts on just war. Just as skill is not enough for the commander, justice or law is not enough among nations. There must be amity as well. The officer who thinks as an artist or scientist, even if subject to law, but who lacks the virtue of military prudence is more likely than the prudent commander to confuse ends and means, to act in a short-sighted way, to surrender to expediency. Since prudence is both a moral and an intellectual virtue, the principle of the golden mean, of navigating between extremes is given emphasis. Few have greater need for this principle than the military commander, who is constantly performing a balancing act between undesirable courses and outcomes. In military operations, the apparently better course is often the lesser, since it will be too obvious and anticipated by the enemy. The need for progress and victory must be weighed against the cost, and the tendency to escalate, and the need to exert superior force against the potential for excessive, engulfing destruction.

I’ll have much more to say on military prudence in my next book, “How to Think Like an Officer.”

Peace,

Reed

In the Teaching Guide, I ask “What were the Roman approaches to education and to religion? Can we learn from these?”  This is another second-order question in that more research could be done on Roman educational and religious practices.  It may be a third-order question (a puzzler) in that the influence of education and of religion on a society and on the military is a nearly bottomless subject that no one can claim to have mapped out definitively. A discussion of this question could lead to another on how students view the importance of education and religion (or the lack thereof) in their own lives. Like the question on the experience of Greek battle that I posed a few days ago, this one could serve as a “distant mirror” (to use Barbara Tuchman’s titular phrase) reflecting on our own lives.

But before we get to that, we should reflect on the Romans themselves, their approach to education and to religion and how the army both influenced and was influenced by them.  The Romans inherited from Aristotle and the Greeks a system of rhetorical education that involved the memorization and recitation of certain texts, and also such arts as imitatio, the imitation of the styles of authors. Roman writers like Cicero and Quintilian wrote extensively about the mean and ends of education.  Through rhetoric, Roman youths were instructed in history, they gained an appreciation for and a facility with language, and they were also indoctrinated in the values of the Republic and Empire. It is fair to say that the works of such Roman writers as Virgil, Plutarch and Tacitus constituted a poetics of military virtue, which the Romans had also inherited from the Greeks through Homer, the Greek dramatists and historians. For Roman boys of the middle and upper classes, their education was intended to prepare them for positions of civic and military leadership.  Many Romans held civic and military posts alternatingly in the course of lifetime.

The picture above shows the Emperor Trajan addressing some soldiers.  Most modern officers are frankly amateurs at the art of public speaking, and many tend to avoid opportunities to speak in public and are often tongue-tied when they try, but Trajan and his fellow Roman officers had been prepared by their education to face such an occasion with confidence and to speak effectively as the occasion demanded: whether to exhort, instruct, rebuke, or inspire. They had practiced this from boyhood. In it’s complete sense, rhetoric was also a moral art, eschewing unworthy appeals and raising standards of conduct.

Modern education might take a page from the Roman book.  The system of education by rhetoric survived the western empire by a thousand years, and its influence can still be felt, but it may be time for a more deliberate revival.  Memorization adorns the mind. Recital embodies the words of the past and present. The practice of rhetoric not only prepares the student to speak, but it involves a clarification of values, defining what she is willing to literally “stand up for.”

How well have our own educations prepared us to lead lives of service, to know ourselves and strive to be better?  This is for each to consider.  Many of us would say that our most important education was self-tutelage, but the schoolhouse is a valuable place too, sometimes as a place to resist, to experience doubt, to make us uncomfortable enough to think of changing ourselves.

I’ll save my comments on Roman religion for my next post, and then maybe a little skit on the Second Punic War.