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The 4th Commandment is to honor your father and your mother. Traditional reading of this commandment expands that honoring in two directions. The first is in the people honored - not just mom and dad, but anyone in a position of authority - principle, teacher, pastor, boss, senator, etc. The second direction is the sphere of honoring. What does honoring mean? Luther puts it in both positive and negative terms. We should not despise out parents or superiors nor provoke them to anger, but honor, serve, obey, love and esteem them. As a child it makes great sense, even if your parents are messed-up idiots, they still have a wider authority. The trouble comes in the adult world. What do you do when serving and loving look like they are at odds with esteeming and honoring. There were many times in the business world were I would have a boss I dearly loved and esteemed his/her judgement, but they had certain blind spots (we all do). Serving that boss meant calling it out. It meant not honoring their judgement.

The key question is - when you think your “leadership” is lacking judgement, missing the boat, way out of line or killing prime opportunities what does the 4th commandment require in the modern world? The modern world has two things that level the advantages of experience: the pace of information and a default egalitarianism. The diligent 20yr old can be much better equipped and informed than the mediocre 55 yr old. The hard working entreprenuer can have much better insight than the corporate executive. The latters would appear to be the “superiors”, but the formers actually are in the better position. Does the 20 yr old shut up and obey, or is the better part of honoring to speak up and bear the consequences if there are any? Does the entreprenuerial spirit fall in line to the corporate thinking, or do skunk works become the correct response.

This is also mixed up with the fact the the Baby-boomers, a group that as a collective disregarded the 4th commandment, and still often act like juvenilles, are in many of those “superior” positions. Is stupidity a requirement of the 4th commandment?

There is a corollary to the 4th commandment given to mothers and fathers. Don’t provoke your children to anger (Eph 6:4).

Right now, to me, the better part of honoring seems like the old National Review slogan - Standing Athwart History, Yelling Stop! The hierarchical postions are not ours. The “leaders” should be allowed to make their mistakes. But that honoring stops at the active need to further something that makes one angry enough to spit nails. Argue, warn, cajol and act to minimize the damage both direct and colateral.

Tags: Behavior, Church, Culture by Agricola
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Wikipedia changes daily and the targets of this post hate it (it doesn’t pay them), but here is the link to Calvin Coolidge, another guy the Thinkers would hate. A couple of quotes from that article.

As his biographer (Fuess) later put it, “he embodied the spirit and hopes of the middle class, could interpret their longings and express their opinions. That he did represent the genius of the average is the most convincing proof of his strength.”

After graduating from Amherst, at his father’s urging, Coolidge moved to Northampton, Massachusetts to take up the practice of law. Avoiding the costly alternative of attending a law school, Coolidge followed the more common practice at the time of apprenticing with a local firm, Hammond & Field…Coolidge was able to open his own law office in Northampton in 1898, where he practiced transactional law, believing that he served his clients best by staying out of court. As his reputation as a hard-working and diligent attorney grew, local banks and other businesses began to retain his services

The next year, 1904, Coolidge met with his only defeat before the voters, losing an election to the Northampton school board. When told that some of his neighbors voted against him because he had no children in the schools he would govern, Coolidge replied “Might give me time!”

Coolidge often seemed uncomfortable among fashionable Washington society; when asked why he continued to attend so many of their dinner parties, he replied “Got to eat somewhere.”

Representing the genius of the average, skipping grad school to save money, actually working as a transaction lawyer, losing an election to the school board, coming back with a quip, uncomfortable with Washington swells…hmmm, sound familiar. And that is before getting to Cal’s cleaning up his own party’s ethical problems.

The main gist of this post is more a question. Will the US ever see another man or woman of action and real integrity in high political office? Or have we as a people decayed to the point: where we can’t discern real straight talk from high sounding words, where we can’t discern a person of real integrity from fluffy claims, where we can’t muster the personal fortitude to care? Kathleen Parker, Christoper Buckley, David Brooks, and other “Thinking Conservatives” have all jumped on Sarah Palin - a cancer, an embarassment, and other snotty phrases. Roger Kimball answers many of those writers with roughly the argument that they overvalue their own trade - thinking.

The modern world seems to have built a very thick filter around political office. What that filter does is clean out all men and women who are primarily disposed to action. That filter selects based on your facility to think, or at least mimic thinking. Please note that this thinking is not the thinking that engineers do, or that businessmen do, or that mothers do to raise children. This thinking is restricted to “big thoughts” and “big themes”. The kind of thinking done at say, Harvard.

Let’s look at some past great presidents: Washington - soldier and farmer, Lincoln - lawyer entreprenuer, Coolidge - lawyer entreprenuer, Reagan - success in highly competitve Hollywood. The common thread in almost all great past presidents is success in something else before politics, and success that necessitated taking risks. (Not all fit this. FDR appears an exception, but TR was clearly an action based risk taker who happened to be able to “Think”.) The “Thinking Pols” of today have much handed to them with the fat envelope to Harvard. Not everything, but that is the start of the filter. Anyone, other than a general or a combat veteran who the Thinkers have to hold their manhoods cheap next too, who does not have something approaching this is mercilessly attacked.

Questioning if that filter is appropriate, or supporting someone who doesn’t make it through that filter, either by skirting it in the frontier of Alaska, or in the military, or by making a forture and using it, does not make someone anti-intellectual. It does not disdain thought. It puts “Thinking” in its right place. It places character, actions and successful experience before thinking. Would anyone like to also have a holder of high political office who could be a big thinker? Yes. Is the lack of that a major disqualification? No. A high view of virtue, a strong sense of personal character, a knowledge of what risks are good and what are foolhardy in the path to success are much more important. The Thinking can be outsourced when you have those which give you the ability to choose the right thinkers.

The reign of the thinkers is not good for the U.S. Until the country returns to its fundamental character in favor of people of action it will not be well served.

Tags: Culture, Politics by Agricola
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