Lincoln and the Problem of Political Ambition

45 Pages·2016·0.28 MB·English

by  Nathaniel Mull

Lincoln and the Problem of “Towering Genius”

Joe Gillis: “You’re Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to
be big.”
Norma Desmond: “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.”
-- Sunset Boulevard

My theme is political ambition. This is a topic that has fallen on hard times.i
This may seem an odd, even a counter-intuitive, claim. The world is full of
ambitious people, especially young men and women, seeking to make names for
themselves. The problem is not that we do not have ambition, but that we do not
understand it and because we do not understand it, we are likely to misidentify it
when we see it. There are two reasons for our misunderstanding.

The most obvious misconception is the confusion of ambition with what the
psychologist Orville Gilbert Brim has called the “look at me” phenomenon.ii Surveys
have shown that a full thirty one percent of American teenagers – almost a third --
expect to be famous one day, thus appearing to support Andy Warhol’s prediction
that in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. Ambition is
connected here to reputation or recognition whether it is merited or not, a version
of the Kardashian phenomenon. Daniel Boorstin was perhaps the first to identify to
the distinction between a heroic and a celebrity culture where people are famous for
no other reason than that they are famous.iii Yet while the desire for fame and
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recognition may be inseparable from ambition, they are not the same thing.
Ambitious people desire not only to be recognized but to be deemed worthy of
recognition.

Second, the concept of ambition is invariably tied to related notions of honor
and deference. Today these terms have an obsolete sound. “Honor,” as Peter Berger
has written, “occupies about the same place in contemporary usage as chastity,” that
is, as “ideological leftovers in the consciousness of obsolete classes, such as military
officers or ethnic grandmothers.”iv This is a slight – but only a slight – exaggeration.
While “affairs of honor,” as they are quaintly called, seem to belong to a distant and
benighted past, there are still organizations like the military and military academies
that take honor quite seriously. Many colleges and universities still abide by an
“honor code” – Yale is not one of them -- but Berger is right to note that motives of
honor no longer have standing in American courts of law where concepts like “loss
of face” seem increasingly archaic. v

There are, of course, good reasons for the decline or obsolescence of grand
ambition. All of these terms – fame, glory, renown – have traditionally been
associated with aristocratic societies where titles and privileges are handed down.
Acts of bravery, heroism, and self-abnegation were often linked to a person’s role in
a social hierarchy. These hierarchies are in turn composed of highly competitive
super achievers. There is certainly a zero sum quality to terms like honor and
ambition. They are diminished if they are shared. Hobbes, who understood the
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aristocratic ethos of honor better than most, saw it as inseparable from a society
based on orders and ranks. “Glory is like honor,” he wrote in De Cive, “if all men have
it, no man hath it.”vi

Moreover, the theme of great ambition is invariably related to the study of
heroes or individuals of extraordinary accomplishment. There is, of course, a genre
of popular history and biography that celebrates the accomplishments – for good or
bad -- of certain outsized individuals.vii Yet the study of heroes seems to have
something old-fashioned, if not elitist about it. It is too often connected not just with
heroes but with hero worship. Modern history and social science tend to be
increasingly quantitative and data-driven, dealing more with the average than with
outsized individuals. Political scientists focus most of their attention on tracking
that restive nobody called the “median voter.” Furthermore, we are more apt to
explain events in terms of general causes – think of the triad of class, race, and
gender -- rather than look to the exceptional qualities of certain rare individuals.
When we turn to the study of heroes, it is more often with a subversive intent. . “No
man is a hero to his valet” the proverb says. Today, it should be added, we are all
valets.

The Love of Fame

The concept of ambition – and related terms like glory, fame, and honor –
were once at the core of the study of politics. Ancient political theory had a rich
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moral and psychological vocabulary for the study of these phenomena. The Greek
term thymos – often translated as “spiritedness” – was deemed the central political
quality. The man – and they were always men – who possessed this quality was
likely to display a strong desire to excel, to be first in the race of life, a fierce loyalty
to friends, and a longing for immortal fame.viii

The original of all works of this genre is Homer’s Iliad. The first words of the
epic – “Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus” – suggest that there is a
connection between rage and the desire for immortality. From the beginning of the
story, Achilles knows that he has a choice between a short life but a glorious one if
he goes to Troy or a long undistinguished life if he remains at home with his family.
Achilles’ choice of the former is the only choice befitting a hero. The Iliad is a world
whose leading figures eat, drink, and live for fame (kleos). The word hero originally
applied to the offspring of gods who had coupled with mortals.ix These figures
retained some of the divine longing for immortality that can only be achieved
through conflict and war. War alone can confer immortality, at least through the
songs and poems written about it. What distinguishes a hero is, above all else, the
desire for fame, that is, what is said about us after we are gone. A person’s kleos is
his reputation. It is the closest thing to immortality that one is allowed in the
Homeric universe.

The question is whether the kind of rage and love of fame expressed by
Achilles can be somehow transformed or transmuted so that it can be put into the
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service of the community. This was – very broadly speaking – the task set out by
Socrates in Plato’s Republic where this Homeric quality of thymos is enlisted into the
preservation and defense of the city. The character of Glaucon who possesses this
quality in spades is essential for the founding of Socrates’ city in speech. Thymos is
turned into one of the three aspects of the soul serving as the middle term between
reason and appetite. The question the book asks is whether thymos can be made an
ally of reason. Can the thymotic passions like anger, honor, moral indignation,
shame, and disgust that are especially heightened during times of war be made to
serve the public good? Can the Achillean warrior be transformed into a
conscientious citizen, loyal to friends and fierce to enemies? To be sure, this is a
question that Plato never succeeds in answering.x

The idea that thymos could be domesticated and turned into a public-minded
guardian of the city formed the basis of what could be called the moral code of the
Greek gentleman (kaloskagathos).xi This code was canonized in Aristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics in which he presents a list of qualities or moral excellences that
are a halfway point between the demotic virtues of the citizen and the intellectual
virtues of the philosopher. The peak of moral excellence is described as greatness of
soul (megalopsychia) precisely because it deals with matters of personal honor.
Aristotle even describes it as the “crown” (kosmos) of the virtues because it contains
all the other virtues to a superlative degree. In his pride – his perpetual looking
down – the perfect gentleman has something akin to the philosopher who is
similarly aware of his own excellence. The gentleman considers “virtue toward
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oneself” as of a higher status even than justice or “virtue toward others.” To be a
person of great soul is to be concerned not just with honor, but above all with being
deserving of honor, with knowing how much to claim for yourself. Like all the
virtues, greatness of soul is a mean between the extremes of too-much and too-little.
A person claiming too little for themselves is modest (something Aristotle regarded
as a fault) and claiming too much is vain. The great-souled man will know just how
much honor is his due.xii

Aristotle gives an extraordinary list of the psychological and even physical
characteristics necessary for a person of great soul. He makes clear that the
gentleman, unlike the philosopher, is a man of some inherited wealth, chiefly landed
property, although his way of life will be urban.xiii Such a person exhibits a lofty
detachment to the more or less petty things that weigh most of us down. He is slow
to act, unless something of great importance is at stake. He repays favors with
interest so as not to be under any obligation to others. The gentleman speaks his
mind without fear or favor because to dissemble would be beneath him, except
when he speaks “with irony” to the vulgar. He may occasionally hurt others, but
never out of deliberate cruelty. In addition, the great-souled man possesses
“beautiful but useless things,” suggesting not only the possession of wealth, but a
cultivated aesthetic sense. And as if this were not enough, the gentleman must be
tall, walk slowly because to hurry is undignified, and speak in a deep voice.
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Aristotle’s ideal of the gentleman remained – and to some degree still
remains – the ideal of the Christian West. The heroic ethic received its canonical
expression in great ethical treatises of Greek and Roman antiquity and in a
Christianized form it became the basis for the famous medieval chivalric code of
honor. This code was given expression in such medieval romances as the Chanson
de Roland and the Song of El Cid. These were great epic poems – chansons de geste –
stories of heroic deeds and were the first to appear in the West after Virgil’s Aeneid.
These epics expressed a code of honor that would later come to be parodied in the
first great novel of European literature, Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Karl Marx, whose
skill as a literary critic has often been noted, wrote: “Don Quixote long ago paid the
penalty for wrongly imagining that knight errantry was compatible with all
economic forms of society.”xiv In other words, Marx understood the book less as a
satire on the medieval code of chivalric honor than as a statement of its
obsolescence, that ideas of chivalry and honor were appropriate for certain kinds of
society with certain kinds of economic relations, but that these ideas were being
made redundant by a new kind of society that he called capitalist society or that we
might call market society.

The Transformation of the Honor Code

The decline in the status of honor and ambition is related to fundamental
changes in our moral and political vocabulary beginning around the sixteenth
century. (It is arguable that the critique of ambition actually goes back to early
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Christianity, but that is a problem I do not wish to address here).xv These changes
were inseparable from the transition from the medieval world based on hierarchy,
status, and honor to a new bourgeois or commercial world based on equality,
contract, and interest. This transition has been described in a number of ways.
Marx called it the transition from feudalism to capitalism; Henry Maine called it the
transition from status to contract; Tocqueville called it the transition from the age of
aristocracy to the age of democracy, but no one provided a more powerful
description than the economist and intellectual historian Albert O. Hirschman in his
book The Passions and the Interests.xvi

In this brilliant study, Hirschman showed how the arguments for the
commercial society were first made possible only after the destruction of the
ancient heroic ideal that had made a return during the Renaissance with its
rediscovery of the Greek and Roman celebration of glory. A whole series of writers
beginning with Hobbes, but including Montaigne, Bacon, Mandeville, Montesquieu,
Hume, and Kant turned their collective eye on the discrediting the idea of the hero
as nothing but a species of vanity and vainglorious ambition.xvii In place of the
heroic ideal with its pursuit of glory, these writers posited an alternative conception
of human nature based on the benefits of commerce and self-interested behavior.

Hirschman made two important points in this book. The first is that the
transition to capitalism was only made possible due to the prior emergence of
certain ideas and arguments. Markets are not simply natural forms of human
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association as today’s libertarians often believe, but are embedded in a dense web of
moral argumentation in which the pursuit of interest – so long considered a deadly
sin within the Christian moral universe – came to be seen as a virtue for containing
the destructive passions for fame and honor. The market society was an idea before
it became a reality.

The second discovery was to show that the concept of self-interest is not a
universal key for understanding all human behavior as this is so often claimed by
economists and social scientists today. Rather the idea of self-interest emerged as a
strategy to counteract the dominance of certain passions, especially the kinds of
desires associated with fame, honor, and heroic immortality. The pursuit of interest
was deemed to exercise a tranquilizing affect on society and on human behavior
generally. The passions were seen as wild and irrational, while interests were
thought to be calm, gentle, even placid. A society devoted to money making, as
opposed to aristocratic practices like war, was described by such metaphors as
“polishing,” “refining,” and “softening” morals. A society dominated by the pursuit
of interest could be counted upon as being less grand, noble, and heroic, but more
peaceful, prosperous, and secure.

The idea of a modern commercial order came to fruition in America. It is no
coincidence – as they say – that the signing of the Declaration of Independence
occurred the same year as the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, the
first great treatise of market economics. The advocates of the commercial society
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from Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams all regarded an ethic
of self-interest rightly understood as a sane and sensible alternative to visions of
moral perfection beyond the reach of all but a few, disdain for the common useful,
and mundane employments, and most of all a world preoccupied – to a degree that
we can scarcely imagine – with intangible goals like honor and glory.xviii

And yet the effort to transform the competition for honor and glory into the
bourgeois striving for commercial success was never complete. The ancient and
medieval codes of honor never completely disappeared, even in the New World.
Douglass Adair has noted that Plutarch’s Lives remained a widely read and imitated
book during the founding generation.xix This neo-classical love of fame survived
throughout the early republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence
pledged not only their lives and liberty but their “sacred honor” to the cause to
which they affixed their names. The authors of the Federalist Papers took the pen
name of Publius after one of the founders of the Roman republic. And George
Washington was regularly referred to as a modern day Cincinnatus for the Roman
farmer who left his plow to serve the republic and then returned to his fields,
relinquishing power.xx

No one among the founder’s generation embodied the characteristics of
Aristotle’s megalopsychos more fully than Washington. He combined effortlessly the
qualities of rank, authority, and the capacity to command that immediately compel
respect. The quality of Washington’s hauteur is captured brilliantly in an anecdote