Peggy Noonan’s column for today touches on a favorite theme of mine. She writes about the 1947 atrocities that followed Pakistan’s independence from India.
Mountbatten and Nehru and Jinnah were brilliant men who'd not only experienced a great deal; they'd done a great deal, and yet they did not know that the Subcontinent--which each in his own way, and sometimes it was an odd way, loved--would explode in violence, that bloodlust would rule as soon as the Union Jack was lowered.
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The leaders of the day did not know that terrible violence was coming because of what I think is a classic and structural problem of leadership: It distances. Each of these men was to varying degrees detached from facts on the ground. They were by virtue of their position and accomplishments an elite. They no longer knew what was beating within the hearts of those who lived quite literally on the ground.
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Each of these leaders had been removed by his own history from facts on the ground. "Elitism" doesn't always speak of where you went to school or what caste, as it were, you came from. You can wind up one of the elites simply by rising. Simply by being separated for a certain amount of time from those you seek to lead.
People who know most intimately, and through most recent experience, what is happening on the ground, and in the hearts of men, are usually not in the inner councils. They have not fought their way or earned their way in yet. Sometimes they're called in and listened to, at least for a moment, but in the end they tend to be ignored. They're nobodies, after all.
She goes on to make rough analogies to the current situation in Iraq and in our government as a whole.
This is a problem with government and governing bodies--with the White House, Downing Street, with State Department specialists, and the Council on Foreign Relations, and West Point, too. It is not so much a matter of fault as it is structural. The minute you rise to govern you become another step removed from the lives of those you govern. Which means you become removed from reality.
Readers of this blog will find many examples of out-of–touch leaders. The problem is, I suggest, worse that just being out of touch. Leaders become so committed to their frames of reference that they can be said to be in denial about coming disasters. Consider:
- The FBI had opportunities to detect 9/11 but couldn't see them.
- NASA has acknowledged that its corporate culture prevented leadership from seeing the dangers that led to the Columbia shuttle disaster.
- In 1985 Dominican Father Thomas Doyle warned The National Conference of Catholic Bishops of the coming priestly pedophilia crises.
- Leadership of the US intelligence community discounted warnings that WMD would not be found in Iraq.
In biblical times the role of warning leaders of coming disasters belonged to the prophet. In church history many men and women assumed the role of changing their orders and were called reformers. In modern times employees can always try to warn the public of a leadership failure by going to the press, the police or congress. These employees are whistleblowers – or informers.
For those of us still in the working world - or in the church - the question is how to be a successful reformer instead of a prophet or unemployed whistle blower. For some thoughts on this see my Spero news column for April 18, 2005.
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