How To Find The Better Angels

By Tim Howard

People often ask just how do we find better leaders.

The answer I arrived at had nothing to do with politics, it came from my father.

I was still a young man and, like many young men, convinced I had everyone worked out. We’d been talking about people we both knew and I’d been relentlessly critical of most of them.

One after another, I’d explain their faults, their weaknesses and why they disappointed me.

Dad listened patiently before interrupting.

“Why are you putting these people down all the time?” he asked.

I don’t remember my answer. I do remember his.

“You know them,” he said. “Tell me what it is you like about them.”

The conversation was short, but I’ve remembered it for more than 50 years.

And it took a fair few of those years to understand what he was really doing.

Dad wasn’t trying to rescue the reputations of the people I was so confidently judging. He was trying to rescue me.

He knew that fault-finding had become too easy. My opinions weren’t especially perceptive; they were simply cheap. Anyone can catalogue another person’s shortcomings. It requires no imagination, very little wisdom and almost no generosity.

He wanted me to develop a different habit.

Instead of asking, “What’s wrong with this person?” he challenged me to ask, “What is good about them?”

Not because their faults didn’t exist.

But because if criticism became my default way of looking at people, it would eventually become my default way of living in the world.

He understood something I was still too young to appreciate. Generosity is not primarily a gift to the person receiving it. It is a habit that enriches the person who practises it.

I’ve often thought about that conversation while watching modern politics.

We live in an age that rewards criticism. Every problem has someone to blame. Immigrants. Elites. Bureaucrats. Billionaires. Trade unions. The media. The courts. Depending on your politics, the list changes. The habit doesn’t.

There are politicians of every persuasion who have discovered that grievance is politically profitable.

They are remarkably skilled at identifying frustrations and giving them a target. It wins attention. Sometimes it wins elections.

But governing is not easy, finding fault is.

History tends to remember the leaders who understood the difference.

George Washington emerged from the American Revolution with the affection of a grateful nation and the loyalty of its army.

Few men have ever held such power. Yet he surrendered it, establishing a principle more enduring than any battlefield victory: in a democracy, institutions must always be greater than the individuals who occupy them.

Abraham Lincoln inherited a nation tearing itself apart. He could have appealed to revenge. Instead he appealed to “the better angels of our nature” and, at the end of the Civil War, urged “malice toward none, with charity for all”. His ambition was not merely to defeat an enemy, but to heal a nation.

John F. Kennedy confronted a world divided by ideology and threatened by nuclear war. Yet he reduced the human condition to three simple truths.

“We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

In just a few words, he reminded us that before we are conservatives or progressives, Australians or Americans, we are human beings who share the same fragile existence.

Australia has produced leaders who also invited us to think beyond ourselves.

Robert Menzies spoke of “the forgotten people”, recognising the quiet aspirations of ordinary Australians who believed they had been overlooked.

Gough Whitlam challenged the nation to imagine a broader future through education, health care, science, the arts and a more confident Australia. Many opposed his policies. Few doubted the scale of his ambition.

Menzies and Whitlam disagreed profoundly about how Australia should be governed. Yet both offered more than a catalogue of grievances. They asked Australians to imagine what the nation might become.

Perhaps that is the distinction we should be making.

Politics will always require criticism. Democracies depend upon people willing to expose corruption, incompetence and bad ideas.

Dad was never suggesting that faults should be ignored. He was warning me against allowing criticism to become a habit of mind.

The same warning might apply to politics.

This is hardly a new idea.

More than two millennia ago, Socrates made a habit of asking awkward questions. He distrusted easy answers and believed that the quality of a society depended upon the quality of the questions its citizens were prepared to ask.

Perhaps that remains one of democracy’s oldest lessons.

Before we cast our vote, perhaps we should ask ourselves

Does this leader ask us to become better citizens, or merely angrier ones?

Do they strengthen our institutions, or mainly themselves?

Do they encourage us to understand our fellow citizens, or simply to resent them?

Do they offer solutions, or mostly people to blame?

Do they appeal to our fears, or to our better angels?

History cannot answer those questions for us, but is has given us examples.

Washington’s restraint.

Lincoln’s generosity.

Kennedy’s humanity.

Menzies’ respect for ordinary Australians.

Whitlam’s faith in what Australia might become.

My father’s lesson was humbler than any of theirs, but no less enduring.

The quality of our democracy depends not only on the character of those who seek to lead us.

It depends on the habits of mind we choose to reward.

And really, every election is a choice about what sort of people we wish to become.