Diseased Leadership

Almost four years ago I wrote a post on failed leadership, using the Elizabethan notion of The Great Chain of Being as it pertained to the relationship between the governed and those who govern. In essence it postulated that if the leader was good, the nation would prosper, but if bad, it would suffer. That suffering could take many forms, including the corruption of the people.

In many ways, it echoes what has happened in our modern age. Instead of inspiring and cultivating the best in the people, our leaders often seem far too intent on bringing out the worst in us, appealing not to our nobler impulses but our darker ones. Greed, self-interest, and suspicion abound as our demagogues bray about 'the other' and ignore the collective.

A letter in today's Star, I think, very effectively captures how Canadians and the larger world have been adversely affected by the diseased leadership of Stephen Harper these past long nine years:

Re: Harper plays politics of hate, weakens our democracy, Opinion Feb. 15

Thanks for the excellent column on the damage that Stephen Harper and his ilk are doing to our society. People who I always thought were tolerant and open are picking up on his hateful venom. Even worse, he is cynically using this to get votes.

I hope it backfires and people see through it. I’m dismayed that the opposition parties are not calling him out on this but they too seem to be afraid to call it what it is — hate mongering.

I lived in three Muslim countries — Nigeria, Algeria and Oman — for a total of two years in the 1970s and now hardly recognize them. I lived in the northeast of Nigeria for almost a year while leading a Canadian and Nigerian team of surveyors and explorers mapping the whole northeast part of Nigeria. The situation there has almost brought me to tears when I see the terrible things that Boko Haram is doing to innocent people in the name of religion.

I felt the same way a few years ago when Muslim fanatics were killing entire villages in Algeria. Many of the towns where the violence is taking place in Nigeria are towns that I spend months in and where I made many local friends. They were peaceful places when I was there in 1974.

The whole Muslim world is suffering from the collapse of the world’s 19th century empires and the battle for control of oil in the Middle East. Unfortunately, the stability provided by the Ottomans has not been replaced and this battle for control will continue for some time yet.

Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens points out that the situation in the Middle East since the end of World War I, with no empire in control, is unprecedented in the last 2,000 years or more. Islam has suffered the same damage in this battle as Christianity did in the European religious wars of the 16th century. Protestants and Catholics killed each other for a long time and their theology is far closer than Sunni and Shia Islam. It really wasn’t about religion but for control of political power and resources, as it is today in the Muslim world.

Canada needs to recognize this and, at the very least, do no more harm, like Harper is doing both here and in the Middle East. We may not be able to achieve much in the short term in settling this huge problem of bringing stability to the region but being cheerleaders for Israel certainly isn’t helping.

We need to be even-handed and do all we can to support those who wish to bring peace and stability through democracy, the rule of law rather than dictators, tolerance, economic development and many more building blocks of civil society.

Maybe the collapse of the oil market and ultimately the replacement of oil by renewable electricity for transportation will allow the citizens of the Muslim world to begin solving their problems without interference from others protecting their grip on oil.

I went to the movie American Sniper and was saddened by the glorification of the killing of Iraqis who, misguided or not, were protecting their country from foreign invaders there to take their oil. It’s going to take some time to change attitudes.

Alex Miller, Toronto

The Philosophical Foundation of My Aversion To Stephen Harper And His Government

While conventional wisdom dictates that blog posts should be short and pithy, I am going to challenge it by posting something in excess of 700 words as I outline why I think Stephen Harper and his dark politics are injurious to the Canadian psyche. Although many of my comments can equally apply to politicians of other stripes, it is essentially the philosophical foundation for my aversion to the Prime Minister; I hope you will stay with me.

What does contemporary government leadership have in common with one of Shakespeare's greatest plays, Hamlet, whose chief villain, yielding to his lust for power, kills his brother in order to seize the throne of Denmark? Quite a bit, as it turns out.

To appreciate its relevance, we have to understand that Shakespeare's contemporaries saw an order to the universe they called “The Great Chain of Being” in which each realm, be it divine, human, animal, or mineral, had a hierarchy. (Remnants of that notion remain today as we, for example, refer to the lion as the ‘king' of the jungle; reason has priority over emotion, the eagle is considered the head of the avian world, etc.) In human affairs, the King was regarded as God’s representative in human society and so was responsible for the spiritual and material well-being of the people. If the King was good, the nation prospered; if bad, the country suffered.

Because Hamlet deals with a ruler, Claudius, who achieves his royal ambitions through murder, he is deemed to have violated the natural order and is therefore not God's rightful representative. As the story unfolds, this usurper is responsible for a moral corruption that affects many, thereby seriously undermining the spiritual health of Denmark. Characters lose their better natures, surrendering to betrayal, suspicion, hatred, and vengeance in place of fidelity, trust, love and forgiveness.

So how is this tale of moral decay and destruction relevant to us? Can it help to explain some of the political and moral dysfunction plaguing Western society today? Well, even though we no longer see political power as coming from above, i.e., from God, but rather from below, i.e., the people, (at least in a democracy), it is difficult to accept the notion that government is merely a reflection of the people, that we only get the representation we deserve through the electoral process. In truth, how many of us purposely vote to install people defined by ineptitude, dishonesty, corruption, contempt, and cronyism? Yet these elements characterize so many governments today, including our own.

I submit that the aspect of the Great Chain of Being so pertinent today is the infectiously destructive nature of bad leadership. By this I mean much more than the obvious consequences of being led by those unfit to govern: abuses of basic freedoms, manipulation of truth, withholding of information to which we are entitled, abrogation of due process, catering to special interests, etc. Much more insidious, and something Shakespeare clearly demonstrates in Hamlet, is the toll exacted upon the nation’s spiritual health or character. Indeed, that play's central metaphor is an unseen yet highly contagious and destructive disease.

I believe it to be an apt metaphor for our times.If we consider, for example, the widespread cynicism and disengagement gripping people today, we are witnessing the effects of bad leadership. When people are manipulated by the politics of fear, division, suspicion and exclusion, they become victims of diseased leadership. When people refuse to vote because they don’t feel it will make any difference, when they ascribe self-interest and greed as the main motivations of people seeking elected office, when they evince little or no surprise at the flouting of constitutional laws by their elected representatives, they not only have fallen prey to a spiritual or moral malaise, they are in fact facilitating its spread, something I suspect our political leadership is not in the least bit concerned about; after all, the more disengagement and disaffection there is amongst the voters, the easier it is for politicians to continue on their self-aggrandizing and pernicious paths.

So is there a solution, a cure for this disease? How does a nation recover its soul? Democracy being a messy process, there is no simple answer, but I sincerely believe that the search for one must begin with as many people as possible turning out on Election Day. At a time when people in other parts of the world are willing to fight and die for democracy, that seems like little enough to ask of citizens. And it may ultimately help restore health to the body politic.