The Weekend Interview with James Hankins: The Case for an American Revolution in Morals

 

"Somerville, Mass. -- It's hard to contemplate American public life in the 21st century and not arrive at the unhappy conclusion that we are led by idiots. The political class has lately produced an impressive string of debacles: the Afghanistan pullout, urban crime waves, easily foreseen inflation, mayhem at the southern border, a self-generated energy crisis, a pandemic response that wrought little good and vast ruin. Then there are the perennial national embarrassments: a mind-bogglingly expensive welfare state that doesn't work, public schools that make kids dumber, universities that nurture destructive grievances and noxious ideologies, and a news media nobody trusts.

Readers may object to parts of this list, but few will deny feeling that the country's government and major institutions are run by people who don't know what they're doing. A similar situation obtained seven centuries ago in Europe, as I learned recently from "Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy." The 2019 book, by Harvard historian James Hankins, is a study of Italian humanist writers and statesmen beginning with Francesco Petrarca (1304-74), known to English speakers as Petrarch. Fourteenth-century humanism arose, Mr. Hankins writes, from a widespread disgust with the venality and incompetence of political and ecclesiastical leaders in late-medieval Italy.

The humanists basically rejected the central question of Greek and Roman political theory: What is the best regime? For Petrarch and his followers over the next century, "constitutional form was far less important than the character of rulers," Mr. Hankins writes. By the early 14th century European political thought had degenerated into narrowly legalistic arguments about why this or that ruler has a superior claim to office. To the humanists, that preoccupation was being beneath the notice of serious thought. Their goal "was to uproot tyranny from the soul of the ruler, whether the ruler was one, few, or many."

The Western political tradition would ultimately move in a different direction, toward rights-based constitutionalism and the rule of law. "Virtue politics," as Mr. Hankins terms the political ideal developed by the Italian humanists, "aimed primarily to bring to power rulers who were good and wise; constitutional thought aimed primarily to limit the damage that might be done by bad and foolish rulers." In this respect the humanists were totally unlike that other Italian Renaissance writer -- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527). He counseled a less principled, more calculating and brutally realistic approach to leadership. The Italian humanists -- Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio, Leon Battista Alberti and others -- produced, Mr. Hankins writes, a "distinctive way of thinking about politics that amounts to a lost tradition of political prudence."

My own attachment to classical liberalism makes me skeptical of any philosophy purporting to empower "good" and "wise" leaders without first attending to the limits on their authority. But I have to admit: At the moment American constitutional democracy doesn't seem very good at limiting the damage done by bad and foolish officials. In fact we seem overrun with rulers who possess lots of Machiavellian guile but no Machiavellian competence. Maybe we have something to learn from virtue politics?

On a recent visit to Mr. Hankins's home, I ask about the American conviction that the way to reform society is to reform laws and institutions and create new agencies. "The Renaissance humanists didn't think that way," he says. "Part of the reason had to do with their relationship to the Catholic Church." In late antiquity -- roughly the fifth century -- Christians redesigned the liberal arts as a set of skills: grammar, logic, rhetoric and so on. Their idea was that Christianity would transform the heart -- education wasn't going to do that. The Renaissance authors of the 14th and 15th centuries, by contrast, had a more difficult relationship with the Catholic Church, which was extremely corrupt at that time. "You weren't going to reform society through the church," Mr. Hankins explains. "What you could do is improve the sort of person who occupied high positions in city-states, in kingdoms, in the church. . . . And you could do it through a certain kind of education. This is why the humanities were invented."

These days that term "the humanities" signifies a hodgepodge of squishy disciplines, from literary theory to cultural studies.

 For the original humanists, "it meant you understood the true potential of human nature to be good, to achieve nobility -- true nobility, not inherited nobility." They wanted students at their elite institutions to be immersed in works that turned the mind to nobility of character. "The 'Aeneid' of Virgil, which was full of examples of noble behavior. Also the 'Lives' of Plutarch. They wanted men and women -- and humanism addressed both men and women, unlike [medieval] scholasticism -- to know what it's like to be noble. . . . These are the core disciplines of the humanities: grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, moral philosophy. Why history? Because history is the teacher of prudence."

Mr. Hankins calls what the humanists proposed "political meritocracy." Americans usually use "meritocracy" (coined by the British writer Michael Young in his 1958 book "The Rise of the Meritocracy") to mean a society run by high-achieving people with superior technical proficiency.

What the humanists envisioned was rule by the wisest, most virtuous people.

Our ruling class certainly think they're virtuous. Walking through Somerville and nearby Cambridge on the way to Mr. Hankins's house, I noted many yard signs proclaiming tribal membership in the inane language of modern progressivism: "Science is real," "Love is love," "Black lives matter," "Embrace diversity," "Empower the powerless." Mr. Hankins's interpretation of his neighbors' strange fragments: "They're enjoying the approval of their own consciences without training their minds in any serious way through moral effort."

Clear and precise language, Mr. Hankins notes by contrast, was at the center of the Renaissance humanists' program. Lucidity of expression, Petrarch wrote, was "the highest proof of intelligence and knowledge." For the humanists, the good and wise ruler was able to draw on his skills in language to persuade people to act for the common good. "The humanists were opposed to the scholastic idea that you could argue someone into good behavior," Mr. Hankins says. "They thought you needed the whole person -- you had to engage the passions and appetite . . . precision of language and eloquence in the service of nobility."

What would a modern Petrarch say about American elites? "That they're contemptible," Mr. Hankins says. "I keep a list. Whenever someone in Washington does something admirable, something not for political advantage but for the country, I write that person's name on the list." I know the punch line, and I wait for it: "It's a short list."

Part of the problem is what Mr. Hankins calls "scientism." Meaning? "The belief that science will solve all your problems, that you can abandon judgment, that you can abandon what the Greeks called phronesis, practical wisdom, which comes through the study of the past and from reading the great works of the past, like Aristotle's 'Politics,' which is about the art of making wise decisions."

We saw the abandonment of phronesis most clearly, Mr. Hankins says, in the Covid response. "It became evident very early on that science didn't speak with one voice on the subject. There were different opinions about what it all meant, different views of the data. But elites determined to subject themselves to the science." He emphasizes the definite article. "That's always the giveaway, when you call it the science."

Mr. Hankins's book was published a year before the Covid pandemic came to the U.S., and so he notes but doesn't emphasize Petrarch's experience of the Black Death of 1347-49. The great humanist scholar lost close friends to the plague, as virtually all survivors did. Was his dim view of Italian elites shaped by that experience? "He tended to see the plague as God's punishment for the corruption of the age, but I think the answer to that question is yes. Petrarch was highly critical of the learning of his day, which he always compared unfavorably with that of antiquity. In general he thought the sciences of his time -- natural, legal, medical -- were arrogant, corrupt and venal. He thought doctors were arrogant and overconfident about their own scientific knowledge. His main criticism, though, was reserved for astrology, which was part of university curricula back then. He thought it was completely fraudulent. I'm not sure what he would say about some social sciences of our own day."

In one sense, the Italian humanists' argument, as Mr. Hankins explains it, is both apposite and unassailable. At a time when nearly everybody worries about the perceived legitimacy of our most important institutions -- Congress, the Justice Department, the presidency itself -- it's refreshing to hear somebody say it out loud: These institutions are losing their legitimacy because the people who run them are bad and stupid. But in another sense the obvious counterpoint is that it's naive about the human capacity for virtuous behavior.

The American constitutional order, as Mr. Hankins acknowledges, is profoundly Augustinian in its outlook -- it reasons from the fallenness of humanity. The U.S. Constitution assumes, as the Founders did, that bad rulers were a normal and inevitable part of political life. The way to deal with that reality -- so an Augustinian like me might say -- would be to erect legal checks on political power and not, as Petrarch and other humanists thought, to cultivate a more virtuous ruling class.

Mr. Hankins considers himself a classical liberal -- "I think less government is better than more." But he doesn't see Anglo-American constitutionalism as the final word on political thought. "Look at the humanities George Washington was trained in," he says. "If you read about Washington's education, it was basically on a Renaissance humanist model -- not only memorizing moral maxims but reading Plutarch and Roman history and the famous plays of antiquity that were so crucial in communicating proper forms of behavior."

I try to suggest a compromise: Surely we're not going back to virtue-based politics, but maybe there are things we can learn from the humanist tradition? Mr. Hankins rejects the premise. "I'm not sure I agree with that. You need a moral revolution to make it happen, but political meritocracy is something that can be revived, in my view."

Mr. Hankins, 67, has been teaching at Harvard for 37 years and speaks with affection about his students. "The younger generation out there is disgusted with the older one," he says. "The people who get all the attention from the press are the woke, but there's another big part of the young population that's ready for a moral revolution."

And not just in the U.S. He has traveled and taught in China and says "it's happening there, too, subterraneously. It's building. The scientism. The abdication of moral judgment. The idea that our leaders are just following the science, following the algorithms, following the experts, and we're not even going to look into the faces of people who are losing their jobs because we shut the economy down? We're going to let our grandparents die in isolation and talk to them on iPhones as they're dying? It's obscene."

All this talk about venal, incompetent leaders made me wonder about that short list of Mr. Hankins's. Who's on it? "I think, for example, of some genuinely accomplished people who went to work for the Trump White House out of a sense of duty, knowing the hell they'd take for it. James Mattis, William Barr, Mike Esper, Don McGahn, some others."

On the subject of Donald Trump, we each lament the inability of some otherwise serious people, on the left and the right, to talk about the 45th president in anything but the language of civilizational catastrophe. Why is Mr. Hankins, the author of a 700-page book on virtuous political leadership, not similarly undone by Mr. Trump? Because his profession has prepared him to take the long view.

"I think of it as an historian," he says. "Many people don't think deeply about what it would be like to live in a different time. They have no sense of comparison. Thinking long about history, you get a much broader view of human life. History is a road to sanity."" [1]

1. The Weekend Interview with James Hankins: The Case for an American Revolution in Morals
Swaim, Barton. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 20 Aug 2022: A.11.