Leadership Model for a New Millennium: Jesus as a Leader, Part 2

Before specifically addressing the role of Jesus as a leader, we must address the underlying basis of the model we seek to formulate. An effective leadership model must reflect the values of our society. The United States is a democratic republic based on Western traditions and one that places high value on the worth of the individual. The leadership model proposed must reflect those virtues that we most value, those which Socrates identified in the Republic and which Thomas Aquinas called the four cardinal virtues: prudence (or practical wisdom), temperance, courage and justice. These values are to be found in Western tradition , and reflect the intellectual and moral virtues that Americans seek to emulate and promote in societal intercourse, whether in public or private life. Temperance, courage and justice may be considered moral virtues in that they are concerned with behavior and moral qualities. Prudence unlike the other three moral virtues is an intellectual virtue.

Temperance, according to Aristotle, consists of ordering or controlling certain pleasures. The words temperance and self-mastery are synonymous. Temperance implies a cool head that does not allow a person to do what he or she ought not to do.

Courage does not consist only in conquering fear and not fleeing from danger. It also consists of steeling the will and reinforcing its resolution. It gives a person the ability to face truth however painful that may be. As such, courage may be summarized as doing what ought to be done.

Justice involves the accommodation of individual interests and the interests of the community because justice is political in nature. Aristotle says “Justice is the bond of men in states, for the administration of justice, which is the determination of what is just, is the order in political society.” For Aristotle, the virtue of justice is a habit of conduct. Justice is doing what ought to be done consistently out of habit: doing good, harming no one, rendering to each his own, and treating equals equally. It differs from courage in that it is a habit of action and not of passion. With respect to the objective of justice as a balance of individual and social interests, in a 1971 dissenting opinion to Lowe v. Quinn, 27 N.Y.2d 397, Judge Scileppi of the New York Court of Appeals noted ” The ideal, therefore, is to accommodate both, that is, to forsake equity in a particular case only when to accord it recognition would be to do violence to the recognized public policy of this State.” In sum, justice occurs when individual and general social interests are balanced, thus both interests are advanced.

Prudence, unlike the other virtues, is an intellectual virtue more precisely defined as practical wisdom. However, prudence is not knowledge in the ordinary sense of the term but rather is the product of experience and a reason, which cannot be expressed. Experience is the foundational element in prudence. St. Thomas Aquinas calls prudence a combination of remembering the past, understanding the present, thus providing direction for the future. In sum, prudence requires the application of moral principles—aimed at the general good—to particular cases.

An effective leadership model should be based on these values because persons brought up under their guidance are better able to internalize and adapt such concepts to their daily life. A major problem with models based on warrior leaders, is that what is useful and desirable in war does necessarily apply well to a time of peace, for the moral and intellectual values that we value in war are not necessarily the virtues that we ought to value in peace. For this reason a model of leadership for war does not necessarily or adequately reflect how we ought to model our professional lives as leaders in a time of peace, nor how we should deal with our subordinates and peers. If this were so, then we should model ourselves after Sparta, or its modern day counterpart, North Korea.

To Be Continued

Leadership Model for a New Millenium: Jesus as a Leader

This essay will be introduced in parts over the next few postings.

Ignacio Sanchez Mejias, your friendly Monikin

Introduction

In the last decade, there has been a significant proliferation of books on the subject of leadership, everything from Machiavelli and Sun Tzu to Attila the Hun. After having read most of these books and not being entirely satisfied with the leadership methods advocated therein, it seems that whatever merit these books may have, they do not reflect the leadership principles and characteristics required in a modern democratic society. As such, they do not provide effective leadership models for the business world that ultimately reflect the values of that society from which they arise.

Given the lack of effective leadership models, two significant points must be considered. First, we, as a society, do need leadership models to guide our behavior and teach our citizens how to become effective leaders. Second, whatever guidance has been provided has been inadequate, misinformed, incomplete or not definitive, or some combination thereof.

Thus the fundamental problem which we seek to address is simply: how can an individual become a good leader, that is to say, what characteristics must a person acquire in order to become a more effective leader in our society? What leadership model is suitable for a Western society like the United States? In order to answer these questions sufficiently and satisfactorily, we need to reexamine the role of Jesus Christ, not in a religious or historical sense but rather as a model of leadership. Though Jesus is typically thought of as a teacher, yet the leadership he demonstrated throughout his ministry serves as a useful and effective model that provides answers to the questions posed; that is to say, as guidance for business and government leaders in the United States.

To paraphrase Alexander the Great, it is worth remembering that the true test of leadership is that the institutions outlast the leaders. Ultimately, any model is judged by its results. Jesus’ ministry survives after 2,000 years. As such, it is a leadership model worth considering.

What Should We Do In The World?

President Bush’s call for democracy in his inaugural speech was stirring. Subsequent elections in Iraq and Palestine, the rising of Lebanese against Syrian occupation make us feel that we are right in our call for democracy. However, in our zeal to advance democracy, we must keep in mind that the rest of the world is not like the United States. For example, Robert Kaplan in “Was Democracy Just for a Moment” (Atlantic Monthly, December 1997) informed us:

As an unemployed Tunisian student once told me, "In Tunisia we have a twenty-five percent unemployment rate. If you hold elections in such circumstances, the result will be a fundamentalist government and violence like in Algeria. First create an economy, then worry about elections.


Are we prepared to deal with a sudden “democratic” movement in Egypt under its present economic conditions? North Korea? We must be mindful that during the Cold War, every administration demanded the end of the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. When it suddenly began in 1989, the Bush I administration in its attempts to bolster Gorbachev, was suddenly having to keep the new “democracies” at arms length, as was the case with the Baltic Republics. It made the United States look stupid and duplicitous, and it did nothing to help Gorbachev. It also ultimately cost Bush I his reelection.

As Kaplan observed, our foreign policy leaders must keep in mind democracy and economic well-being are not synonymous:

Because both a middle class and civil institutions are required for successful democracy, democratic Russia, which inherited neither from the Soviet regime, remains violent, unstable, and miserably poor despite its 99 percent literacy rate. Under its authoritarian system China has dramatically improved the quality of life for hundreds of millions of its people. My point, hard as it may be for Americans to accept, is that Russia may be failing in part because it is a democracy and China may be succeeding in part because it is not.

The Palestinians and Egyptians need jobs, not elections for one non-entity or another.

Let us proceed wisely in this area and in this regard we should remind ourselves: IT'S THE ECONOMIES, STUPID.

Monikins

After the court has ordered the decaudization of Captain Poke "to take place between the hours of sunrise and sunset, forthwith":

He (Brigadier Downright) maintained that all light proceeded from the sun; and that the statute, therefore could only mean that there should be no executions during eclipses, a period when the whole monikin race ought to be occupied in adoration. Forthwith, moreover, did not necessarily mean forthwith, for forthwith meant immediately; and "between sunrise and sunset" meant between sunrise and sunset; which might de immediately, or might not.

On this point the twelve judges decided, firstly, that forthwith did not mean forthwith, secondly, that forthwith did mean forthwith; thirdly, that forthwith had two legal meanings; fourthly, that it was illegal to apply one of those legal meanings to a wrong legal purpose; fifthly, that the objections was to no avail, as respected the case of No.1, sea-water color. Ordered, therefore, that the criminal lose his tail forthwith.