Tag: hume

Leadership Lessons from Across the Pond

The Prince by Machiavelli and Charles I from Hume’s History of England

Against the backdrop of his failing city-state Florence, Machiavelli writes to answer the question: “Why are we Italians so weak, unlike our Roman ancestors, and what kind of leader do we need?”

Consider the leadership of Agathocles, the Sicilian who became King of Syracuse. He tricked the people of Syracuse, murdered many of its citizens and seized the city without any civil dissension. He used wickedness to gain power. His brutality forced Carthaginians to leave Sicily in his control. Machiavelli praises him for rising above “a thousand hardships and dangers” to achieve high position.

But, we should not imitate or admire him, he argues, because it is wrong “to betray one’s friends, to be without loyalty, without mercy, without religion.” So he should be praised for his skill in rising to the top, but despised for his immoral means of getting there. These methods bring power, he writes, but never glory.

How do we justify these seemingly conflicting perspectives of Machiavelli? In the end, he doesn’t resolve it. Instead, he argues for hypocrisy, a strategy of apparently embodying the conflict itself. In chapter 18 he recommends that the prince be a “great hypocrite and dissembler,” and insists that such duplicity will triumph. Why? Because men are so simple and only obey present necessities. They only care about what affects them now, not about principle or moral correctness.

What sets the prince apart from the people is that he is not ruled by his appetites. He is able to manipulate events to his own end. He is cunning..skillful..smart. If he were writing today, Machiavelli would undoubtedly have an entire section of chapters on the presidency of Bill Clinton.

If Machiavelli argued for a moral opportunist and political pragmatist, Hume idealized the moral pragmatist and political conservative (?). Hume was asking a different, albeit related question: “Why are we English so misguided as to fight against our own government, and what kind of leaders have gotten us into this predicament?”

His question is answered, in part, by a critique of Charles I, who feels compelled to squash an insurrection in Ireland and Scotland (p. 346). But, ironically, by attempting to suppress this threat to his authority abroad, he allowed a fatal threat to his authority back home.

Parliament gained control of the regular military, so this left Charles to gather up a smaller force among his loyal followers. Then he made the mistake of going against the law of the land, opening the door for Parliament to do the same [Chapter LV, page 379]

It is remarkable how much the topics of argument were now reversed between the parties. The king, while he acknowledged his former error, of employing a plea of necessity in order to infringe the laws and constitution, warned the parliament not to imitate an example on which they threw such violent blame; and the parliament, while they clothed their personal fears or ambition under the appearance of national and imminent danger, made unknowingly an apology for the most exceptionable part of the king’s conduct. That the liberties of the people were no longer exposed to any peril from royal authority, so narrowly circumscribed, so exactly defined, so much unsupported by revenue and by military power, might be maintained upon very plausible topics: but that the danger, allowing it to have any existence, was not of that kind, great, urgent, inevitable, which dissolves all law and levels all limitations, seems apparent from the simplest view of these transactions. So obvious indeed was the king’s present inability to invade the constitution, that the fears and jealousies which operated on the people, and pushed them so furiously to arms, were undoubtedly not of a civil, but of a religious nature. The distempered imaginations of men were agitated with a continual dread of Popery, with a horror against prelacy, with an antipathy to ceremonies and the liturgy, and with a violent affection for whatever was most opposite to these objects of aversion. The fanatical spirit, let loose, confounded all regard to ease, safety, interest; and dissolved every moral and civil obligation.

Each party was now willing to throw on its antagonist the odium of commencing a civil war; but both of them prepared for an event which they deemed inevitable.

Charles I here dug his own grave. By elevating himself above the law when it seemed convenient (under the guise of necessity), he opened the door for his parliament to do the same. And since his power was already weakened by other mistakes, he was unable to recover.

These leadership mistakes broke the chain holding England together, and she simply could not find unity again until after a great civil war—a conflict that combined political power struggle with religious fervor, a catastrophe that questioned the age-old monarchy as a form of government (government by divine right no less), and a bloody slaughter that pitted a great nation’s brother against brother.

Both of these historians set leadership as their topic. Leaders are the rear view mirror they use to evaluate success and failure, virtue and catastrophe.

In Machiavelli we see the Renaissance passing on political theory to the Enlightenment, where God is no longer the author of government, but where government is a contract of the people who have a right to overthrow the government if it no longer serves them (Thomas More, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes). In Hume we see the failure of divinely appointed leaders to know their own followers and serve them in a principled manner.

There is no evidence in the creation story that man was ever designed to rule over nations, or even cities. God seemed to prefer personal relationship and being in charge himself. But in this fallen world, human leadership is a fact of life. Like the farmer who learns how to minimize weeds and maximize yields, we might as well learn to lead the best we can. And these two writers give us valuable lessons that can save our own leadership many years of pain, and our followers much grief.

Leadership is difficult. Success in leadership demands the highest morality, wisdom, courage, and self-control. To fail, only a single weakness can lead to a cascade of consequences, some of them even fatal.

Along with Machiavelli and Hume, we idealize a leader who gives the law, and abides by it. We envision a leader who speaks the truth, and lives it. We long for a leader who gives us a good life, and lives one before us. And when we meet this leader who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, we stop looking for any merely human leader and bow down and sing with the angels, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is, and is to come.”

Dates

1469-1527 Machiavelli
1478-1535 Thomas More, beheaded after trial for treason for denying that King Henry VIII was the Supreme Head of the Church of England
1513 Machiavelli writes The Prince
1516 More writes Utopia
1588-1679 Thomas Hobbes
1632-1704 John Locke
1642-1651 English Civil War
1651 Hobbes writes Leviathan (political theory)
1689 Locke writes Two Treatises of Government
1690 Lock writes An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
1711-1776 David Hume (Scottish philosopher and historian)
1754-1762 David Hume writes History of England

Descartes and Hume: Opposite Ends…of the Same Spectrum

This year we read philosophical works by Rene Descartes and David Hume. In their writings, both Descartes and Hume strive to answer the question, “How do we know what we know?”  Is knowledge essentially gained through reason or through experience?  While these two positions at first seem antithetical, they are actually tightly linked in that the very act of reasoning is an experience and that the processing of experiences requires reasoning.  If a being can engage in thinking, then it not only exists, but is having an experience; and if a being can question and draw inferences from its experiences, then it is reasoning.

From the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, both rationality and empiricism became hallmarks of what would later be called the period of Enlightenment.  Philosophy of existence and causality (as opposed to philosophy of morality) was as much a science as physics; understanding in one discipline would often be used to explain the other. Enlightenment thinkers championed skepticism, abstract reasoning, and testability.

In his Meditations on the First Philosophy, Descartes strives to arrive at one absolute truth which can act as the foundation for all the sciences.  In the first two meditations, through a carefully and brilliantly laid out argument, Descartes arrives at what he believes to be the one irrefutable truth: he thinks.  He can think.  Because he can think, he must exist.  Because he can conceive of himself, his mind must exist.

He proceeds in the next meditation to extend this reasoning to God. That he can conceive of God proves that God must exist.  For how could a finite being conceive of something outside itself? This concept of God must have a cause and that cause must be God Himself.

Descartes spends the rest of his time building upon this method of reasoning, extending it to the material world. He believes that the corporeal world can most accurately be apprehended through careful reasoning.  This, he believed, would lay a solid foundation for understanding all the sciences. It must be understood that this is where Descartes is headed all along.  He seeks to buttress the discoveries of science with reasoning, not demolish them.  But perhaps his defense of the existence of God obscures his intent.

It certainly seems that Hume took issue with Descartes’ defense of the existence of God.  One wonders if Hume would have denounced Descartes so viciously in ECHU if Descartes had not attempted to prove the existence of God.  Hume categorically opposes Descartes’ reasoning here, but elsewhere in Enquiry, he warns against dispelling abstract reasoning altogether.

But the importance of Hume’s writing lies in his careful exegesis of how we perceive both experiences and ideas.  He argues that experiences precede ideas.  A being can have no conception of what he has not experienced.  All thoughts, ideas, memories, even dreams, are based in experience. Causality can only be inferred, and meaning can only be conferred.

This method of understanding the world, that is conferring meaning from the observable, would set the stage for the exaltation of empiricism over reasoning.  While Hume clearly did not propose eradicating reason, the idea that facts and experience exist first and that man must connect the dots between the facts we observe has taken on gargantuan meaning in our own century.  It has become difficult to argue that anything has cause, meaning or even existence, if it cannot be observed and tested.

These two works are seminal because they raise the issues of questioning accepted institutions; accepted methods of understanding ourselves, our world and even God; and because they each introduce a systematic method of enquiry.  The influence of this kind of systematic skepticism reaches through three centuries to our own time and has become a fundamental component of 21st-century learning.