Pericles is no tyrant in Athens. He is a leader of a people who detest tyranny, who follow him freely because they recognize his wisdom and virtue (2.65). But there is a great irony in the story as the historian tells it: These people who hate tyrants have themselves become tyrants. The Athenians have made themselves masters of an empire by brute force, and Pericles, who led the Athenians to the flowering of their democracy, has now led it to its precarious position as tyrant of an empire.
Leadership and tyranny are so closely tied in our experience that we often find it hard to tell them apart. One man’s leader is another’s tyrant. When we contrast leadership and tyranny we are dealing in values: Leadership is good, tyranny is evil, though in the tangled world of our experience we may never find a pure example of either one. There may have been moments when even Hitler played the part of a leader, and when even Pericles acted the tyrant. Because good leadership is a moral ideal, no human being should expect to be a perfect leader.
Leadership would be easier to define if we could leave out such talk of moral ideals—if we could simply describe, in a factual way, what leaders do. One familiar strategy is to define leadership by the willing obedience of its followers. This is attractive but unlikely to prove successful. The followers of a true leader are not always willing and not always obedient. There is some truth in the proposed definition, however, because tyrants have reason to be afraid of their followers, and leaders do not. That is why Pericles supposes that Athens is a tyrant, and no longer a leader, to most of the cities and islands of maritime Greece—because Athens must use military force to maintain control, and because it is reasonable for the Athenians to fear that their former subjects would destroy them if they regained their freedom.
Willing obedience, however, is not what a good leader always demands of good followers. True, good leaders must have good followers, but a good follower sometimes disobeys when an order is plainly wrong. And a good leader sometimes takes her followers where they are unwilling to go. The need for a system of discipline is not in itself a sign of poor leadership. This is especially clear in the classroom. Teaching is a kind of leadership, and good teachers should find a way to lead unwilling students to learn. At the same time, good students must know better than to obey good teachers when they are evidently wrong, and when they do obey their teachers, they may do so for reasons that have nothing to do with leadership. Obedience and willingness do not by themselves define the classroom of a good teacher. This sort of definition is no escape, then, from the moral perspective: good leaders and their followers exercise certain virtues. That is what distinguishes them from tyrants and their flocks of sheep-like subjects.
The moral aspects of leadership have come in for much discussion in recent years. This has been very useful, but I believe that it needs to be supplemented by the study of reverence. The recent discussion of leadership has not been illuminated by knowledge of the writers who first made the distinction between leadership and tyranny—the poets of ancient Greece. The writers I have been discussing treat irreverence as the plainest clue to tyranny, and they imply that shared reverence is the mark of good leaders and their followers.
Leadership (as opposed to tyranny) happens only where there is virtue, and reverence is the virtue on which leadership most depends. Public devotion to a lofty goal eclipses the leader’s personal interests, if it is a goal that leaders and followers may pursue with equal fervor. Reverence gives leaders the power to treat their followers with respect, and the respect they give is returned by their followers. Tyrants who abuse their followers rapidly lose their respect. Mutual respect—a concept I’ll discuss later in this chapter—springs from shared reverence. The ancient Chinese philosophers would have agreed, adding that the reverence of leaders and followers is cultivated by ceremonious behavior between them. We know this, of course, in modern military organizations, which are scrupulous in ceremony between ranks, but we overlook the moral significance of ceremony.
Ceremony joins leaders and followers in a common reverence and reminds them that they hold certain ideals in awe together. Ceremony is especially important among the military—among those who are entrusted with the use of violence. Ceremony marks the difference in virtue between a band of criminals and a legitimate fighting force—and there are other differences between the two, which I shall not address. (I shall take up ceremony later in this chapter; the relation between awe and respect will become clear in chapter 13, “The Silent Teacher.”)
Leadership does not serve narrow goals any more than reverence stands in awe of small things. The best forms of leadership are devoted to the highest ideals. If Thucydides is right, the Athenians had only enough virtue for them to cultivate leadership within the walls of their own city. But, if so, they were severely limited, especially since they were trying to be leaders of a group of cities that did not identify with Athens. An object of reverence must be one to which leaders and followers—Athens and its subject states, in this example—can share a certain devotion. Athenians may hold their own power in awe, but this will yield only a mangled semblance of reverence. That is why I suggested in chapter seven that a true object of reverence is one that all people can, in principle, hold in awe—justice, truth, God (so long as God is not supposed to serve special interests). This condition explains why leadership is itself a high ideal.
We can speak of reverence for justice, but we cannot, with straight faces, speak of reverence for a particular law, such as the Gramm-Rudman balanced budget bill. Americans might speak of reverence for the Constitution of the United States, but that is only if they tend to think that the Constitution, unlike any particular law, stands for ideals of justice or the spirit of justice, transcending anything that human individuals could legislate.
Reverence is the mainstay of a leader’s good judgment. Good judgment is the intellectual virtue that guides deliberation in the absence of relevant knowledge. Leaders in real life must make decisions without knowing for certain how those decisions will turn out. Later in this chapter, I will show how reverence supports good judgment. The tragic poets of Greece understood this very well.
If you master people by force without reverence, you will depend on force for your very safety; you will become isolated from the people you are trying to lead, and in this isolation you will make mistakes. From the other side of command, people will see you as more tyrant than leader, and perhaps even as the enemy. When you make mistakes, you will be an easy target for rebellion and revenge. Or perhaps you will bring yourself down without help from below.
This could be the summary of a tragic play—of the Antigone, for example, in which the new king, brought suddenly to power by a calamitous civil war, imposes his will against reverence without listening to the advice of those around him. Or it could be translated to the stage of history on which empires are built. As such, it is the story of Thucydides’ History: Athens’s growing empire frightened the Spartans into war for the freedom of Greece from empire, while this same growth of empire lulled the Athenians into a series of crimes and errors that led to their defeat. The war began forty-seven years after the Greek allies pushed back the last Persian invasion, and it lasted for twenty-seven years (431–404 BCE). Even afterwards the Greeks continued to war among themselves until the power of Macedonia brought them to heel.
The war of Athens and Sparta is really a civil war of Greeks against Greeks. Civil war comes with a breakdown of reverence and the collapse of leadership. Most people side either with Athens or with Sparta; meanwhile, the two great powers exploit their followers shamelessly and sometimes brutally. On a smaller scale, battle is joined between factions in many city-states, and this runs parallel to the great conflict.
Civil war, says Thucydides, means the loss of every virtue, and this he sums up as the breakdown of reverence (3.82–83). It is no good trying to be reverent on your own while everyone around you has discarded virtue, and the same goes for leadership. It is no good trying to be a leader among people who recognize nothing but brute force. Civil war or natural disaster can reduce people to that level; so can tyrannical power. Before they acquire an empire, the Athenians have been among the leaders of the many independent Greek city-states. But they appear to be leaders no longer, as the case of Melos makes clear (415 BCE).
The Athenian warships arrive on the island of Melos with an army sufficient to lay siege to the island’s one small city. In a parlay before battle, the Athenians demand that the people of Melos accept the hegemony of Athens or be destroyed. The islanders refuse, saying that they cherish their autonomy—their freedom to live under their own laws—and that they cannot see any justice in the demand of the Athenians. They have hopes, moreover, that if they are attacked they will be saved by their allies in Sparta (5.84–116).
The Athenians are impatient with the Melians’ talk of autonomy, of justice, and of vague hopes for help from Sparta. The Melians are certain to have autonomy within limits if they accept Athenian hegemony; but if they resist Athens they have no reasonable hope that Sparta will save them from destruction. Sparta has no navy, and its record for helping out small useless allies is not encouraging. As for justice, the Athenians have only contempt for the Melians’ appeal to justice. The subject under discussion, say the Athenians, is not justice but survival—what the Melians must do if they are not to be wiped out by Athens.
The parlay turns out to be a waste of time. The people of Melos cling to their hopes, and the Athenians set out to destroy them. In the end, Athens kills all the men of Melos, enslaves the women and children, and settles its own people on the island. The parlay ends with losses on all sides. Melos loses everything; Athens loses a potential building-block in its empire; and Greece itself—through a long series of such events—loses the opportunity to be united under leadership that could protect it from still-dangerous Persia, from the soon-to-rise threat of Macedonia, and possibly even from Rome.
A favorable outcome for Athens would be for Melos to accept limited autonomy and proceed under the hegemony of Athens. But the people of Melos, along with many of the Greeks who are resisting Athens, are committed to thinking of limited autonomy as a form of slavery. How can one persuade a proud and independent people to accept the hegemony of a state they detest, a state that plainly seeks its own interest above all else and will simply use Melos to further its imperial ambitions by allaying its imperial fears? Why should Melos allow itself to be used in this way? Why not fight for what is right, no matter what the cost?
The most favorable outcome for the Greeks overall would be for Athens to achieve a stable hegemony in Greece. But tyranny is inherently unstable because it provokes internal rebellion. For stable hegemony Athens would have to give up its self-interested greed and fear, and Melos would have to give up its loathing of limited hegemony. It is probably too late for this when the warships come to Melos, but it is worth asking what constellation of ideas would have made it conceivable. The debate we have in Thucydides sets justice and equality, on the one hand, against tyrannical power and the moral equivalent of slavery, on the other, with the result that no one is thinking of limited hegemony at all.
What has gone wrong is simply this: neither side sees the possibility of leadership. The only outcome Athens can imagine is mastery by force, while the only alternatives that Melos considers are total freedom and abject slavery. And so there must be violence. This much is clear, and it is common human experience. But why do the two sides have such narrow vision? Why not think of leadership? This is hard to answer.
Failures must have occurred on both sides, but the greater responsibility must lie with the greater power. The leadership of Melos, to begin with, insists on keeping its followers out of the parlay, for fear that they would soften towards the Athenians. The Melian authorities are afraid to treat their own people with respect. Such isolation of leaders from followers is a first step away from reverent leadership, and this step no doubt helps the leaders of Melos to maintain their narrow vision. Generally, isolation impairs judgment, as we shall see.
The Athenians, for their part, feel that they are bound to use force, here and elsewhere, if they are to retain the empire that they dare not lose. Melian talk of justice strikes them as irrelevant. And indeed it is. Melos is too small and too vulnerable for total independence, with the two great warring powers in the region so close by. Whether or not justice is served, Melos will eventually fall under one hegemony or another. The Athenians cannot easily offer justice to the people of Melos in the context of this war, but they could—if they were not tyrants of empire—offer leadership.
Perhaps the Athenians have too much power to think of leadership. When you have the greatest navy in the known world behind you, it is hard to think of leadership. Command comes easier. But the Athenians have in the past known how to be leaders in Greece—seventy-five years earlier when Greece faced a great danger from Persia, and Athens had more determination than power. As Thucydides tells the story, Athenian leadership of the allies changed over the years and was transformed into tyranny over empire.
Thucydides’ version of history cannot be entirely right. A few years after Melos, Athens lost most of its army and navy in a foolish campaign on Sicily. At that point, the Athenians did not seem to have the power to hold their empire by force, and some of it rebelled. But not all of it rebelled, and even in the darkest hours, troops from the empire were willing to die alongside Athenians. For much of the so-called empire, then, Athens was more leader than tyrant. The explanation for this is instructive. Some parts of the empire, at least, must have looked favorably on Athens. In their view, under Athenian leadership and with Athenian power, maritime Greece had virtually eliminated the threat of Persia, brought peace to trade routes on which all depended, and in many cases secured popular government in the city-states. Athenian leadership served peace and prosperity and justice—goals which, in principle, all people can share. On the other hand, much of the empire hated and feared Athens. They saw Athens as having only her own interests at heart, and maritime Greece as the worse for being subject to Athenian power. Thucydides represents their viewpoint.
These two ways of looking at empire illustrate the complexity of distinguishing leadership from tyranny. The people to whom Athens shows the face of leadership find that they are working with Athens toward common goals; the people over whom Athens holds the fist of tyranny believe there is an irremediable clash of interest between them and their masters. But Athens is both leader and tyrant, and this is the tragedy of empire.
How can anyone lead without becoming a tyrant? “Hegemony” is a bad word as we use it in the early twenty-first century, even though it fits the current position of the United States in much of the world better than any other. “Hegemony” is derived from a Greek word which means, roughly speaking, “leadership.” But as we now conceive of the two things, leadership is good, and hegemony is bad. The distinction is roughly the same as the one recognized by the ancient Greeks between leadership and tyranny.
In Euripides’ Helen, the Spartan king says this about the army he and his brother Agamemnon launched in the Trojan War:
I think the pair of us—I’m not boasting when I say this—
Sent the largest force across by sea to Troy.
And we did not command them with the force of a tyrant;
We were leaders, and the young men of Greece were volunteers.
(393–96)
The play was written in about 412 BCE, only a few years after the destruction of Melos and about the time the imperial power of Athens was starting to come apart. Other texts from the same period suggest that Athenian thinkers were becoming anxious about the precarious tyranny that Athens was trying to maintain.
Persuasion appears to be an alternative to the use of brute force. Pericles was famous for his ability to persuade the people of Athens, and this ability was the basis of his power. But persuasion can be seen as a kind of brute force through the use of words, and Greeks of this period were well aware of the tyrannical uses to which rhetoric can be put. That is one reason why Thucydides, who professes to admire Pericles, attributes the man’s success more to force of character than to force of words. Twentieth-century history shows how rhetoric supported tyrannies such as those of Stalin and Hitler. So persuasion is a neutral tool. Tyrants and leaders both use it.
Non-violence looks like an alternative to tyranny, because violent force—or its threat—is used by tyrants everywhere. Perfect leadership, which could occur only in a perfectly virtuous society, could no doubt maintain itself without force or violence. In certain circumstances, non-violent leadership has been effective, mainly as a moral beacon, but behind most authority in the real world are discipline and the threat of force. Force, like rhetoric, is a neutral tool, used by both tyrants and leaders, but tyrants and leaders use their tools differently. Leaders do not simply overpower their followers with the force of words or the threat of discipline. There is something that regulates a leader’s use of power, and there is something else that gives a sinister cast to anything a tyrant does with his powers and makes brute force out of force. We will not understand what that is merely by examining notions such as force and rhetoric. The crucial difference must be moral or ethical.
Justice was the key, according to Plato, to the puzzle of sorting out leaders from tyrants. But he cannot be right. Consider again the case of Athens and Melos. The leaders of Melos beg for justice, and the Athenian commanders refuse to consider it, on the grounds that justice never moves people to refrain from doing what they have the power and inclination to do:
For our part, we will not make a long speech no one would believe full of fine moral arguments—that our empire is justified because we defeated the Persians, or that we are coming against you for an injustice you have done against us. And we don’t think you can persuade us by saying that you did not fight on the side of the Spartans in the war, though you were their colony, or that you have done us no injustice. Instead, let’s work out what we can do on the basis of what both sides truly accept: we both know that decisions about justice are made in human discussions only when both sides are under equal compulsion. But when one side is stronger, it gets as much as it can, and the weak must accept that. (Thucydides’ History 5.89)
This is the Athenian theory of history. It is brutal enough, but it does not say that might makes right. It says, frankly, that what is right does not matter. The only thing that matters is the fact of power, that Athens is strong and Melos is weak. As a matter of history, the Athenian theory is false; power is not the only thing that matters, and the Athenians have sometimes done what is right because it was right.
As moral psychology, however, the Athenian doctrine merely overstates an important and obvious truth: justice has very little motivational power. It is a fairly dry virtue, guided more by judicious thought than by trained feeling. Virtues such as sympathy, reverence, and courage, by contrast, are capacities for emotions, and where they are actively present they move people to act or refrain from action. (That is because emotions are, roughly speaking, feelings that motivate.) So the weak cannot rely upon justice to restrain their powerful overlords because justice, unlike reverence, is not a motivational restraint. Nor can the powerful rely on justice to secure the obedience of their subjects; justice would not convert the Melians into willing followers. Suppose the Athenians had arrived on Melos with good arguments for the justice of their cause, and suppose that on balance those arguments were stronger than those of the Melians. This would have made no difference to the issue of leadership. Had the Melians been defeated in a court of law on grounds of justice, they would still have been defeated, and the defeat would rankle. They would plot rebellion and revenge against their new masters. Justice in a prison system does not take the place of walls and bars; it does not pacify the prisoners, and it does not allow them to think of their keepers on the model of leaders.
Justice does nothing to turn the winner of a contest into a leader or the loser into a willing follower. The trouble with justice is that it allows there to be winners and losers in the first place, and such an outcome is hard for leadership to overcome. Far from being a support to leadership, justice in small matters may actually be an obstacle. For this reason a good leader may not insist on everything that is due him under justice. Agamemnon may have had justice on his side when he demanded compensation for the prize captive he had to give up, but his decision to do so was bad leadership.
Reverence, not justice, is the virtue that separates leaders from tyrants, as the old Greek poets knew well. In episode after tragic episode, they show how failures of reverence destroy men who are trying to be leaders. Reverence is the capacity to feel respect in the right way toward the right people, and to feel awe towards an object that transcends particular human interests. When leaders are reverent, they are reverent along with their followers, and their common reverence unites them in feelings that overcome personal interests, feelings such as mutual respect. These feelings take the sting from the tools of leadership—from persuasion, from threats of punishment, from manipulation by means of rewards. This is because there are no winners and losers where there is reverence. Success and failure are dwarfed by the magnitude of whatever it is that they hold in awe together. Wordsworth recognizes this in his tale of boyhood races over water in the magnificent Lake District:
In such a race,
So ended, disappointment could be none,
Uneasiness, or pain, or jealousy:
We rested in the shade, all pleased alike,
Conquered or conqueror. Thus our selfishness
Was mellowed down, and thus the pride of strength
And the vainglory of superior skill
Were interfused with objects which subdued
And tempered them, and gradually produced
A quiet independence of the heart.
(“Two-Part Prelude,” 2.63–72)
A leader who uses persuasion, threats, and rewards reverently does so with respect for the followers. This usually requires two things: the leader does not deceive the followers, and the leader is open to persuasion in return. Leadership involves fairly open deliberation. Openness and honesty are defenses a good leader employs against the danger of bad judgment. Leaders are especially vulnerable to bad judgment when they allow themselves to become isolated. Unfortunately, it is easy to resist this conclusion, and would-be leaders are often given to deceit or other devices that prevent them from taking into account the opinions of their followers. Their excuse is that they know more than their followers. This is often true; they do know more than their followers, but that is no excuse for not listening.
This is odd; I call it the paradox of respect. Why should a leader listen to people who know less than he or she does about the matter at hand? The short answer is that reverent leaders do listen to their followers. The hardest case for the paradox is teaching: Good teachers know more than their pupils; even so, as we shall see in the next chapter, good teachers listen to their pupils, and in this they are reverent.
During his first few weeks in the army the soldier often asks, “Why are drill and ceremonies needed? Why couldn’t I use my time more advantageously learning how to fire my weapon?” The answers are that individual efforts alone do not bring survival or victory for the soldier; that the soldier has to learn teamwork and the value of unified and cooperative action …
—Drill and Ceremonies, Department of the Army
Field Manual FM-25 (1958)
Why should soldiers march in step on parade? Why should their shoes be polished and their belt buckles shined? Why should their posture be stiff at attention? Why should their clothes be uniform, starched, and pressed? All of this belongs to a kind of military ceremony that may have had some direct utility in the eighteenth century. But why now? The manual makes a brave attempt to explain, but it leaves out the most important point: Drill and ceremonies are an essential part of leadership training. The leader-to-be acquires a command voice and comes to see the power of example as military demeanor is communicated from commander to troops on the parade ground. Most valuably, the leader-in-training finds that good commands are followed, and incoherent ones are not followed or are followed badly—that there are clear limits to what can be commanded—that effective commands on the parade ground must belong to the ceremony that brings leader and troops together. It is the same in real life as it is on the parade ground: effective commands belong to a common enterprise.
Ceremony is present in many areas of our lives, such as the classroom and the home, but it is most obvious in the military because of the way in which elements of ceremony or ritual separate military from civilian life. (We have a way of not noticing the ceremonies of civilian life, unless we are observing cultures we think exotic.) This is because the military has two special reasons for cultivating virtue—military people hold the principal tools of violence, and the military is severely hierarchical. The greater the powers that are put in your hands, the more important it is for you to develop inner restraints against the abuse of power. We used to call it “Mickey Mouse shit” when it became tedious, but that is only because we did not realize how valuable it is for warriors to submit to ceremonious behavior.
Military people wear uniform garments, even in combat, and this is an element in ceremony. Why do they do that? Some troops in Vietnam began to dress like bandits when discipline eroded. Oliver North’s first company commander wore a red bandana and allowed himself to be called “Organ Grinder” by his troops; meanwhile North and other platoon leaders grew long hair and mustaches. When Paul Goodwin took command of North’s company he would not speak to these young officers until they had gone back to standard military appearance. His explicit reason for insisting on proper haircuts was that “dress is an extension of discipline,” but there is a moral aspect to this as well. If you carry guns and dress the part of a bandit, you may find it easier to play the part of a bandit as well (and there were many temptations in that direction in Vietnam). The ceremony with which we surround ourselves in war is part of what makes warriors warriors and not bandits. It’s part of what expresses the attitude that is essential to any orderly military force: that the violence they use is not in their own service, but in the service of something larger than themselves—even, in the end, larger than nations.
Ceremonious behavior is a sign of reverence. It also shows respect for other people—a kind of respect that can flow only from reverence. The respect that is shown in ceremony cannot be based on good opinions of the other people involved, because we may not know them well enough to form good opinions, and because, in any case, such opinions are secondary to our larger shared purpose. I do not have to like you or approve of you in order to show respect for you with sincerity. Consider the simplest of ceremonies, the salute. A junior officer salutes the colonel, and the colonel returns his salute. These should be acts of respect. But suppose Junior Officer thinks Colonel is a fool and therefore has no respect for her at all. She has given orders he thinks are absurd. To his peers, Junior Officer says, “When I see the colonel, I salute the rank and not the woman.” But this means that his respect is only for an abstraction and not for a person, and his salute is not a sign of respect for her. It is empty ceremony, void of meaning so far as these two people are concerned. She may sense his contempt and return it, along with her equally empty salute. This is not a healthy command relationship.
What has gone wrong? You might answer that the trouble is with the colonel, for being a fool, or, if she is not, with the junior officer for misjudging her. That answer comes from what I call the “good opinion” theory of respect—the idea that mutual respect grows from good opinions people have for each other. This puts an intolerable burden on command relationships, requiring the two parties to prove their value to each other before they can achieve a good command relationship. But the “good opinion” theory is backward. Good opinion in such cases grows from respect, not vice versa. Long before they have any opportunities to test each other, Junior Officer and Colonel must show respect to one another. Respect is given, not earned, and to think otherwise would tear any hierarchy apart. What has gone wrong is that both parties have let their personal judgments of each other undermine the respect on which their entire enterprise depends. What is wrong is that they have lost reverence.
Reverence is a shared devotion to high ideals. Respect—the respect that flows from reverence—requires that we recognize each other’s devotion to those ideals. Now suppose that Junior Officer and Colonel recognize each other as being devoted to the guiding ideals of the military. Whatever they think about each other’s abilities at first meeting, if they begin with respect they will have a chance of developing good opinions of each other. Junior Officer will try to see why Colonel gives commands that he thinks are foolish. That is, Junior Officer will try to see how, in Colonel’s view, those commands promote the common cause. And Colonel will see how Junior Officer’s cockiness grows from his less mature but equally fervent devotion to the same cause. From such beginnings good opinions grow. Without respect, there is no hope of good opinion rising over personal differences, and there are always personal differences.
The “good opinion” theory of respect entails that whenever I respect you, I believe that you are worthy of my respect. This is dangerous if it forces respect to wait on convincing evidence of individual competence. Such a condition would shoot a crippling confusion into the heart of any organization—the false belief that our success depends simply on each person’s being good at his or her job. This is false because, as the field manual points out, success is achieved only through teamwork. And that is true because, as the field manual does not say, even the best of us makes mistakes. A good team is a system for preventing and correcting for individual error at all levels of command. Teamwork of this kind would be destroyed by overconfidence on the part of Junior Officer in his personal judgment of Colonel, whether he thinks she is brilliant or a fool. Either way, overconfidence ruptures teamwork. And overconfidence, as the Greek poets taught us, is a failure of reverence, a failure that leads often to bad judgment.
Now suppose Junior Officer does salute Colonel with genuine respect. He is now expressing two complementary attitudes—first a sense of awe, and second a sense of his place in the world. His place as a human being is at bottom no different from the colonel’s—subject to error, to temptation, and to death. His sense of awe is directed at something more noble and worthy of respect than any human being. A good army serves no single human master, but rather a principle of order and discipline that holds power and violence firmly in the service of the common good.
The same goes for non-military occasions. When I deliver a talk to a learned audience I usually dress as a visiting professor does, with a tie and a jacket, and the audience comes dressed as for an academic discussion—that is, no tank tops or torn shirts. Here too there is a principle that is revered by all present, and it is related to order. Gathering in a room to talk about philosophy, we show implicitly our devotion to the orderly exchange of ideas, from which flows the duty of listening and, when speaking, of attending to the ability of the listeners to comprehend. Genuine discussion serves no human master, but harnesses the force of argument and the power of personality to the common goal of growing understanding.
An act of respect says that none of us is all-powerful or immortal, that no one can play god and get away with it. We will all die; we will all make mistakes. We all together seek to maintain an orderly system that is least vulnerable to hubris, to the violence of mind or action that comes from forgetting our common human limitations. An act of respect represents the thought that I cannot get away with treating you like dirt, no matter how powerful I am. No matter how low, how immature, how foolish, or how weak in mind I think you are, reverence does not allow me to overlook our common humanity and, in the case of a hierarchy, our devotion to common ideals.
In the Antigone of Sophocles, Creon refuses to allow burial for a traitor who has died, Antigone defies him, and Creon’s son takes her side. Creon has let his personal judgment outweigh the importance of ceremony, and the result will tear his family apart, especially because he seems to have lost his hearing when he assumed power.
Haemon
So ease off, relax, stop being angry, make a change.
I know I’m younger, but I may still have good ideas;
And I say that the oldest idea, and the best,
Is for one man to be born complete, knowing everything.
Otherwise—and it usually does turn out otherwise—
It’s good to learn from anyone who speaks well.
Chorus
Sir, you should learn from him, if he is on the mark. And you,
Haemon, learn from your father. Both sides spoke well.
Creon (To the Chorus)
Do you really think, at our age,
We should be taught by a boy like him?
Haemon
No. Not if I am in the wrong. (718–28)
The play pairs the themes of irreverence and bad judgment so clearly that no contemporary of Sophocles could have missed the point: if you arrogate to yourself an authority beyond what is permitted to human beings, your judgment will go bad. When your judgment is bad, you will not listen to good advice, and you will bring catastrophe on yourself and loved ones. Creon’s mind becomes sound only when he begins listening to ordinary people in his city. In the Bacchae, too, a king’s failure of reverence leads to a failure of judgment, made plain to the audience through his refusal to listen to those around him. As unmovable as a god in his own decision, King Pentheus plunges down the path to ruin like any number of tragic figures before him, deaf to the entreaties of sages and injured relatives.
Good judgment is the intellectual virtue by which we make reasonable decisions in the absence of knowledge. It is, as its name (euboulia) suggests, a virtue that requires deliberation and is most evident in paying attention to different points of view. The ancient Greeks developed a procedure for achieving good judgment through adversarial argument—through debates calculated to bring every possible consideration into play. A wide range of considerations is necessary to good judgment, because judgment without knowledge yields conclusions that are not entirely reliable. Philosophers call such conclusions defeasible. In order to make good use of such conclusions, you need to know that they are defeasible and be on the alert for any information or ideas that might open your mind to defeating them. Reverence, by keeping you humble in your opinions, is a bulwark of good judgment, because it keeps you open to new considerations that might alter the course of your reasoning. The example of Haemon shows that it does not matter how young or ignorant the other speakers are. What matters is that they make the best case they can for the position opposed to yours, and that you take the case seriously.
Reverence is not the only conceivable way to avoid error. Perfect knowledge or divine guidance would do even better—if we could be sure we had them. Haemon considers that alternative and dismisses it as unlikely. But it is true that insofar as we have knowledge (and we do on many points) we have no need of good judgment. And surely if leaders received clear divine guidance they would not need to think things through at all; they could do quite well without knowledge or intellectual virtue. But these are deceptive hopes; people who think they have perfect knowledge, or are guided in their decisions directly by God, are usually in for a surprise. Overconfidence is an ever-present danger in a human mind, and the best defense against it is listening to others, with reverence.
To ask what exactly you and your poor
Daughter want from us here in Athens.
You can speak freely without shame.
There is nothing you can say so unspeakable
That could deny you a fair hearing.
You should know that I too
Was an exile and had to struggle to survive,
So how could I ever allow myself to ignore
The pleas of one so lost in desperation?
I know that I’m just a man and that tomorrow
May hold nothing more for me than you.
—Theseus, speaking to Oedipus,
Oedipus at Colonus, 556–68.