Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit are two of the keenest observers of Thai society and their recent Wall Street Journal article on the violence in Bangkok, like their book Thaksin on the exiled businessman who revolutionized Thai politics is required reading for anybody who wants to understand the events that are shaking what used to be the most stable democracy in southeast Asia to its foundations.
In the Journal piece, Baker and Phongpaichit say that the best way out of the Thai political crisis requires sacrifice from the leaders of the two sides. Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva should call early elections although this almost certainly will spell defeat for his party and an end to his leadership of the country. And Thaksin Shinawatra should renounce his own political ambitions, accept the loss of his assets as mandated by the Thai courts, and return to serve the two year prison sentence he currently faces.
These steps might or might not solve Thailand’s problems; what’s most interesting about Baker and Phongpaichit’s article is that they link political leadership with explicitly religious values. Thailand, they write, is a deeply Buddhist society. The concepts of renunciation and sacrifice are deeply rooted in Buddhist thought. (The Buddha himself renounced his status as a prince to seek enlightenment and the renunciation of worldly ambition and pleasure remains the path for anyone seeking to follow him today.) Thai politics are spinning out of control; to restore order and harmony to the country its rival leaders must make real sacrifices that demonstrate their sincere attachment to society’s deepest values.
What is sauce for the Thai goose is sauce for the American gander, and indeed for all the other geese in the flock. Especially in times of crisis, effective leadership must be rooted in the deepest values and intuitions of a society, and in almost all cases the willingness to sacrifice for the common good is the core test that real leaders must pass.
This is one reason why military service is so important in American politics, and why distorting or exaggerating a military service record is one of the worst things politicians can do. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,” said Jesus shortly before his own sacrificial death (John 15:13) and that idea still resonates in our own society today. Over the years about one out of four American presidents have served the country in war; the last three presidents have not had combat experience and in all three cases the absence of a combat record has been felt as a political weakness.
In today’s anti-establishment, anti-Washington national mood, military service may be more important than ever. As I wrote in an earlier post, generals are the only insiders (people who know how Washington works, have experience in international politics and understand large government bureaucracies) who can still run for office as outsiders; successful soldiers may be the only people in American life who can be seasoned but feel fresh.
But service, sacrifice and sincerity are about much more than war. Leadership in all walks of life must be rooted in real values and true leadership is inseparable from a commitment to sacrifice. There is no surer sign of social rot than a society whose leaders are animated more by a sense of entitlement than a sense of sacrifice.
Unfortunately the American educational and social systems today seem geared to produce superficial leaders: leaders who believe that the essence of leadership is the mastery of technique rather than a deep understanding of and commitment to the values at the heart of our social compact. I was chatting with a Harvard professor yesterday who told me that surveys consistently show that entering Harvard undergrads list “service to society” as one of their ambitions; four years later most of them have moved on — to Wall Street or to similar opportunities. “Where are we going wrong?” he asked. “What is it that we aren’t teaching them?”
These are good questions. At the end of the most recent semester I sat with some of my undergrads and did something that, they said, their professors almost never did: I opened up a discussion about personal ethics, commitments and choices and the way they shape our lives and careers.
We talked about people like Eliot Spitzer, John Edwards, and other high profile figures whose careers and family lives were destroyed by serious lapses and about how young people starting out in life could try to protect themselves from this kind of tragedy as they move forward. I don’t know that my contributions to that discussion revealed any particular wisdom, but this was clearly something that the students wanted to talk about, and wanted to discuss with people from another generation. Building the kind of character, community and spiritual connection that can help keep us on track is something that all young people (to say nothing of their elders) need to think about, learn about and start doing, but our society is becoming less and less effective at providing this kind of education.
It’s a bit odd when you think about it. The greatest enemy of both personal happiness and professional success is our human liability to moral failure. That, overwhelmingly, is how people ruin relationships, alienate spouses and children, lose jobs and destroy careers. To put it more positively, developing a foundation of values and the spiritual strength to keep working at them is the most important single quality leading to enduring personal happiness, social usefulness and professional success. Yet our elaborate university system, which offers people opportunities to specialize in all kinds of arcane knowledge, is frequently helpless when it comes to providing even the most basic guidance for young people.
In the past, our colleges were much less shy about this. Many required significant course work in religion, and the spiritual training and development of the young was what many educators, whatever the formal subjects they taught, thought was the real business of their work.
This has changed for several reasons. The pluralism of American society makes it harder for a school that aspires to serve society as a whole to require the study of or participation in a single religious tradition for all its students. And once religion moves from the center of the curriculum and mission, chaplaincies and religious studies programs have a tendency to fall to the margins of college life.
Second, the decline in the hold that mainline Protestantism has on its followers combined with a shift in the mainline from a supernatural, salvationist faith to a rational and ethical approach to religion makes specifically religious instruction seem both less important and less distinct. In that kind of environment it is easy and even natural for a focus on religious and spiritual development to fade away.
Third, the deep confusion in our society over sexual ethics, and especially for young people, has changed the way we think about and teach morality and spiritual development in ways we perhaps have not thought through. The long (and still increasing) gap between sexual maturity (the average age of puberty in both boys and girls has dropped considerably in the last 100 years) and economic self sufficiency makes the ideal of chastity before marriage seem less attainable. The availability of birth control makes that ideal seem much less urgent. The rise of divorce has accustomed us to the idea that most people will have more than one partner over a lifetime. The wholesale commodification of sex in contemporary advertisement and culture accustoms us to the idea that a fairly casual attitude toward sex is normal. The saturation of our cultural space by sexually charged images and stories also raises the level of sexual awareness and what our ancestors would have called temptation around us in ways that make the ideal of chastity seem even less relevant and attainable. Given that the control of sexual impulses among the young was one of society’s most urgent and immediate tasks for most of western history, revolutions in ethics and behavior this profound and this sudden have left us confused about what we should teach and how we should do it. We have been tearing down old standards faster than new ones can emerge; the educational establishment is clear that sexual relations should be ‘non-exploitative’ and fully consensual; beyond that the fog sets in. It’s hard to teach what you don’t know; on a subject that is foundational to human happiness and well-being much of the academic and cultural establishment is at a loss for words.
Finally, the last two generations have seen a dramatic shift from personal to social morality as the chief locus of America’s moral energy. Two generations ago Americans were much more comfortable with certain social forms of immorality and injustice (racism, discrimination against women, violent contempt for lesbians and gays) than they are now. On the other hand, it was considered deeply disgraceful for an established businessman or politician to divorce the woman who had borne and raised his children in order to marry someone younger. There was a time when presidents of Harvard made statements about female intellectual capacity and nothing ever happened — but if a president of Harvard were found to be mistreating his actual wife by dumping her for an attractive younger woman he would be ridden out of town on a rail. Today it is more or less the opposite; you can dump the old bat for a young hottie and nobody will say boo, but if you hint that the female brain isn’t good at physics they will roast you alive. From the standpoint of morality something was gained and something lost.
There are some conservative pundits who see the shift in American morality as a clear case of decadence and decline in moral standards and an abdication of responsibility to the young. I think the story is a bit more complicated than that; the all out attacks on racism and discrimination against women, whatever absurdities and excesses pop up from time to time, were and remain important parts of what America needs to do. Furthermore, the questions about the place of religion in the educational system of a pluralistic society are important and complex ones, as is the need to rethink our canons of sexual morality in the light of changing social patterns and conditions. But the liberal story that the moral history of the last fifty years is nothing more or less than social emancipation from the fetters of the past also seems flawed.
We are not in a good place. It’s not hard to look around and see ways in which moral failure on for example Wall Street has had devastating consequences on our society. Unbridled greed is not unrelated to other failures of character development. The kind of mental outlook that makes it seem OK to shaft your customers to score a $150 million bonus grows from a failure to cultivate important moral habits: the willingness to live with limits, accepting that other things are more important than the gratification of personal impulse or desire, a sober sensibility that helps you remember the difference between enough and too much. Without qualities like this, individuals cannot be happy and societies cannot flourish. Unless our brightest young people are learning through example and teaching about the importance of service and duty, it is hard to see how they will provide the kind of leadership society needs when they come to the fore.
And while some people seem capable of leading virtuous lives without reference to any larger spiritual framework, many and perhaps the large majority of people need a connection with the divine to give them the courage, strength and focus needed for the kind of lifelong moral struggle that the good life requires. The fear of the Lord remains the beginning of wisdom for most human beings; we will not enjoy life among people who neither fear God nor respect the rights of other people.
If our society fails to ground the next generation in the kinds of spiritual and moral values that make for service-oriented, sacrificial leadership, we will pay a heavy price. It is not just that we will be cursed with political and financial leaders who put personal interests above the general good; every profession, every trade, every walk of life needs people who think seriously and soberly about their responsibilities and who choose to do the right thing even when no one will know.
We are, I fear, living on inherited social capital. We have cultural patterns and folkways in our society that were created in a time when conscious moral struggle and individual moral responsibility were the subject of more serious introspection and education than they often are today. These patterns are eroding and the folkways are losing their power and, unfortunately, so far we seem to be falling short in our efforts to find new ways of building spiritual commitment and a striving for moral excellence in the rising generation.
This almost never ends well; fortunately a surprisingly large number of young people today are worried about the moral and spiritual vacuum around them.