Socrates, Franklin and Malcolm X
Three Models of Leadership; Four Models of Teaching
Leadership is a virtue American elementary school teachers teach with remarkable zeal.
They observe it in their pupils, write of its existence or lack thereof in their records, speak of it
with their parents. It is a quality inculcated by class and school elections that begin usually
from the time the average American student reaches fourth grade. It is a distinctively
American preoccupation, this love of leadership. Perhaps it owes to our continuing awe at our
historical leaders, of the founding fathers, who challenged and usurped a foreign king against
long odds and installed in his stead a native-born, nationally-elected leadership. In its time
this must have seemed as strange on a political scale as the products of genetic engineering
and robotics seem to us today. Now the democratic process is the secular religious training of
every American child and leadership its sacrament.
In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud makes the passing suggestion that American culture may be a victim of "the psychological poverty of groups", in which the "bonds of society are chiefly constituted by the identification of the members with each other while individuals of the leader type do not acquire the importance that should fall to them in the formation of a group." (p.70). Given our mania for popularity and the emphasis placed on leadership from prepubescence to old age, this observation made by Freud seems paradoxical, if not totally bizarre. And yet it remains subversively true. When I have asked students who their heroes were they have asked me back,"Do they have to be human? What else could they be? I have naively wondered. The students quickly disabused me of whatever illusion I had of the power of heroism and leadership in present day America, by citing "Superman" as their hero, or "Mickey Mouse", or "Big Bird." Almost all of their heroes, in fact, need quotation marks around their names. Only a few were human, and these were generally entertainment personalities and sports stars. Could our veneration of leaders be nothing more than a wish-fulfillment, the myth generated by a longing, like the one for Santa Claus in a world where "nobody gives you anything for free"? How much do we really relate to George Washington?
If leadership is almost invisible to college students as a goal, and human leaders not even iconic, what are we to make of the democratic rite of school elections? Of the teachers' stress on leadership as a value? Does it merely establish, as the nurseries in Brave New World do with heavy petting, hatred of nature, etc., a social habit which society deems worthwhile to preserve? Does it indoctrinate children in the fun of elections and voting? To some extent. But more likely, the contagion of school elections and the cult of leadership has more to do with the relationship of leadership to pedagogy. After all, teachers are leaders in their own right (at least in their own minds) and school elections are a vicarious means of celebrating their own sublimated desire\self-image of leadership.
In any case, pedagogy and leadership are entwined whether we hold school elections or not. The highest compliment a student pays a teacher is that "you will be remembered". It turns teacher into a historical figure, like an ex-president speculating on how he will look in history books. It is no coincidence that we routinely study the works not merely of military or political leaders, but of those people whose leadership took the form of teaching. Such is the case in Cores I & II in which we treat the lives/works of Socrates, Ben Franklin, and Malcolm X. All three qualify as leaders and teachers, and most importantly, as leaders because they taught. Among the three there are clear similarities and differences, not merely the obvious historical and biographical ones, though these are worth observing, but in the manner by which they became leaders, the methods they used and the objectives they sought. It may be useful to examine them to determine if, given their disparate backgrounds, any definite pattern emerges toward a universal model of leadership. What are the social conditions under which it arises? How do leaders form themselves? What place do they occupy in the societies in which they teach? What are their objectives?
Since these were all teaching leaders, I will also apply to their methods four models for teaching, provided by Joseph Axelrod in his book, The University Teacher as Artist: Toward an Aesthetics of Teaching With Emphasis on the Humanities (1973).
MODELS OF TEACHING
Model One
Goal: To teach facts and principles to cover as much material as possible and then
test for mastery of it.
Motto: "I teach what I know"
Model Two
Goal: To show how an educated person deals with intellectual questions. Motto: "I teach what I am"
Model Three
Goal: To develop higher levels of cognitive skill: problem- solving, critical thinking, analysis, synthesis.
Motto: "I develop minds"
Model Four
Goal: To develop character values, interpersonal skills, means of making ethical and
personal choices.
Motto: "I develop people"
These models have found their ways into the common debate on ways of teaching composition and other rhetorical subjects. More than ever before, in the past quarter-century, teachers, particularly on the university level, are charged with catalyzing student thought and performance. We are forced to be both leaders of discussion and debate, hopefully opening minds if not chaning them, and teachers of specific skills of reasoning, argument, and yes, mechanics.
*
What is a leader? None of the men whom I will focus on held a national public office or would be classified by trade or career. Socrates was what the French call a "fais-neant", while Malcolm X was a laborer turned minister, who created his job as he went along. Franklin, of the three, came closest to having a trade but is more memorable for his avocations than for the way he made his money. The three "leaders" in question were "chameleons", who slid up and down the chain of being, fine specimens of Pico's model for man. Their changeability and violation of our everyday, compartmentalized world of roles and functions, suggests something about the nature of leadership -- that it grows in the absence of other, narrower commitments, breeding in the absence of definite occupation; that it asserts itself outside the pale of that which we socialized humans view as normal, functional, classifiable. By the same token, the societies in which great leaders emerge have always been in periods of uncertainty, at the beginning or end of their best times, unsure of themselves, developing or losing favored illusions. Leadership seems to explode out of a compression of disparate tendencies-- to see now something about this, say something later about that, and always heading forward, often toward a direction unknown.
If energy is delight, as Blake claimed, then leadership is the most delightful entity, for if anything is certain about leadership, it is that if moves people to action, inspires them to thought, makes plain for them what they have only felt. Socrates would never, for all his blasphemy, run afoul of Athenian authority had he not attracted a following of near-worshippers. Franklin would never have been asked to write a book had he not impressed Americans and America watchers that he embodied the qualities that enabled Americans to do that do that which a colony had never done. Malcolm X would never have been executed had his cool charisma and popular appeal threatened the Muslim Nation whose rising influence within the Black community he appeared likely to divert.
However, leadership is not simply a force which flows from individuals lacking specific roles. Energy and versatility merely describe the raw stuff from which leaders are made. The most important characteristics of the leader are his methods and objectives and formation.
Method is style, the rhetorical manner, but it is more than style. Style, alone, is something that originates in the one who possesses it, it is a manner unique to a person, which the person creates. It is innate, the way a signature is innate, or the way an artist strokes color on a canvas. Style may or may not owe something to the environment, whereas the method of the leader always does. Method derives more from the leader's perception than his creativity. Method is only partly transmission. It is far more a matter of analysis, a four-step process. He or she observes the situation, feels there is something amiss, analyses and attempts to demonstrate the problem to others, devising the means to arrive at a solution. And in the midst of all of this, he or she listens to the language of the people, records that language and plays it back with the message intact. The leader is not a dictator, but a medium, mimicking the voice of the people with his own message mixed in their voice.
The "arriving at solutions", the leader's objective, is the most peculiar of the acts of leadership insofar as it identifies the leader most clearly as an individual living at a particular time and place, with particular problems. Objectives also, more than any of the other aspects of the leadership process, differentiate leaders from one another and from the respective societies in which they operate. For while the leader has his objectives, the society has its own. The objectives of a society can be read in its national anthem or in its newspapers. They are society's affects and they fluctuate. Often, even leaders who are adept at reading the society and its needs, misread the objective, or mood, of the majority. The leader states his objective and goes off society's limb. If popularity marks a leader for assassination, his objective makes him a target for surveillance and suppression.
The ways in which leaders have differed in their methods and objectives reveals the pattern of society's change in society. While leaders share the elements above in various permutations, it is impossible to judge one by another's standards. For Machiavelli, who admired Borgia and Pope Alexander, Socrates would not even qualify as a leader, since he lacked the army and political influence to back up his rhetoric, which, itself, was ineffectual as it failed to pander to his audience while concealing his intentions. Franklin would have thought Socrates wicked and contentious and accused him of violating "received opinion." Socrates wouild have mocked Franklin not only for spending all his time making money and thinking up projects, gadgets and institutions, but for writing down proverbs and not even his own. And Socrates would have shredded Malcolm X's eschatology of Dr. Yakub and the destruction of the white devils in 1914 as much as Malcolm X would have condemned Franklin for his quiescence in the slavery clauses of the constitution.
Nietsche identified the ideal leader as skeptical but hard; who sees the vacuity in all human action and acts regardless. Whatever causes and societies they represent and lead, leaders always constitute a minority. Unlike the eternal majority which chooses long life suffering over the risk of death, the leader is hardened in his trial of isolation and aloneness The formation of a leader, that process by which he develops within himself the vitality and concentration to commit to such large undertakings, requires a period of isolation. During this retreat he subjects himself to life devoid of all which makes his life worth living--pleasure and physical freedom. In doing so he proves the supreme value of life and liberty, which he loves passionately to the diminitution of all else, or the utter worthlessness of a life without a total connection with other people, the bottom line of collectivisation.
The leader reverences life to the extent that wants to make it better, yet so little that he is willing to lose it on the slim chance that he is right. Insofar as all societies have had leaders they have resembled each other, notwithstanding their differences, since a society's use of leaders demonstrates an unchanging aspect of human nature. Leaders arise out of society's need for a way out, freedom from dilemmas that threaten to stop it. The quest for freedom is embodied in the leader; his mind and message are the light society shines as it asks,"Where next?"
Can we take leadership for granted? Will it always exist as a part of society? Not necessarily. The components of the human psyche are changing rapidly, our condition is changing, too. We are victims of no greater nemesis than our own biological processes and the machine of civilization which now dominates us with artificial intelligence, shadows shooting at us, sewage flowing in our water, voices that speak to us from cash registers. Will we, like the people of the Savage Islands, be unable to find anyone among us willing to confront the chaotic elements of our destruction?
*
There are many views of Socrates today and we owe this to the multiplicity of views of Socrates even in his own time. Aristophanes portrays him as a conman and buffoon, obsessed with his ejestive functions, while Xenophon describes him as a sensible old soldier. The cynics saw him meanwhile as a man unwilling to put up with social conditions, who preferred to live "according to nature." The Megarian School's version of Socrates was a formal logician. Another group viewed him as a pre-Epicurian, whose ethical doctrine comprised the intelligent pursuit of pleasure. CBS "You are there" portrays him as a kindly W.C. Fields, passing up a drink.
Two factors account for this divergence of opinion: 1. He taught men to think for themselves; 2. later philosophers, noting Socrates as the protean idealist, living and dying proof that ideals can motivate a person's behavior, used him to support their own idealism.
But whatever else we may think of Socrates, that he was a hero, mystic, anti-mystic, atheist, great spirit, a lout, a pimp, the only true philosopher, a model for intellectual rebellion, a martyr for truth, or the first known victim of a lack of first amendment rights, he was a leader, and a model for leadership. And his model of leadership is a complex one that combines all of the models of teaching above.
We consider Socrates a leader, not in a political but moral context. He was, after all, self-appointed opposition, the quintessential pain in the rectum to whichever political powers existed in his day. In Gorgias Socrates jokes of his lack of political aplomb, recounting that during his term on the Council he was ridiculed for not knowing parliamentary procedure. Socrates epitomizes leadership without control, wisdom without answers. Socrates was perceived as lazy because he thought no trade was worth doing when truth was to be sought. In Gorgias Callicles, the belligerent advocate of elitism, power, and the Athenian way, chides Socrates to "abandon his "pretty toy", philosophy, and turn to more serious pursuits", to "give up argument and learn the accomplishments of active life." But Socrates resists this sarcastic plea with as much resolve as he has the seductions of Alcibiades in The Symposium. He is, as Nietsche describes him in The Birth of Tragedy, a man "who believed it was his mission to correct the situation (lack of understanding, fictions rampant): a solitary man, arrogantly superior and herald of a radically dissimilar culture, art and ethics..." Socrates could not, as he says in The Apology, quit his station, because as Nietsche speculates, he was possessed of "that remarkable phenomenon, known as `daemonin'", which... unlike most creative souls, manifested itself, not as an affirmative force, but as "a dissuader and critic." For Socrates, the role of instinct and reason were reversed from the norm. Instead of inhibiting him, as it does most people, reason was his muse; instinct, a critic; consciousness, a creator.
Socrates followed the life pattern of the leader, delineated above. He spent his first forty years leading the life of a typical Athenian. He was a soldier, an amateur scholar and man about town, going to theater, attending cheap lectures by the travelling orators, conversing with his fellow citizens. Somewhere toward the end of that first period of his life, he became isolated from the mainstream by following with interest the scientific theories of Anaxagoras and the Miletans. Their emphasis on careful, precise observation and logic provided the perfect structure for his critical fire. In the early dialogues much of Anaxamander's theory of "contrary pairs" appears in Socrates' arguments of the early dialogues. Anaxagoras' notions of the mind as pure and unmixed (so that it could know all things without becoming them), the mind as a "fine current" of matter, of matter- as-continuum, world-as-process, were all assimilated by Socrates and used for his rhetorical and ethical purposes. So strong was this influence on him that Socrates for a brief time assumed leadership of the school of Archeleus.
But to remain a functionary of one school did not appeal to him. Like Nietsche's Zarathustra, Socrates "went down". He moved on from science. Its objective observation and description was incapable of answering questions of self-hood, values, and human excellence which seemed to him the only aspects of philosophy which really mattered.
He gravitated toward the sophists, that group of itinerant orator-philosophers who were more involved with human affairs and society. But the sophists did not satisfy Socrates, for they were interested in philosophy as a means to objectives other than truth. This debate with sophists over values is the meat of the lively early dialogues of Plato. The sophists reflected the Athenian ethic of the day, which stressed success, productivity, and society. The sophists and Athenians, in general, were interested in instrumental values--values that could be used (property, good looks, strength are examples)-- and not intrinsic values (wisdom, courage, kindness), which were worth having in themselves, except, insofar as they could be made to work for the one who practiced them, i.e. to gain a good reputation. In this sense, Athenians had turned the highest virtues, like justice, courage, and generosity, into commodities (consider Crito's plea to Socrates to save his own life so that his friends will not suffer in community opinion). They had, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, committed the final treason, to do the right thing for the wrong reason.
By viewing it as intrinsic, Socrates could posit virtue as a condition of the inner soul, as something pure, and inviolable, a means and an end, both in man's total control, that might resist change from outside forces., as the soul would. This position is nowhere felt more emphatically than in "The Crito", in which Socrates faces death with equanimity, so convinced is he that his soul will move on, and that he will have occasion to meet his heroes from legend.
Almost too good a proposition to be true.
In fact, it was this sort of position which qualified Socrates in Nietsche's mind as "the archetype of the theoretical optimist, who, strong in his belief that nature can be fathomed, considered knowledge to be the true panacea and error to be radically evil."
It was the fight to protect or resurrect intrinsic values in the agora that Socrates undertook, encouraged or goaded by the Delphi's pronouncement that he was "Wise-man Number One" in Athens. Espousing such slogans as "Virtue is knowledge", "virtues are one", "a just man harms no one" Socrates cajoled and assaulted Athenians with that "gigantic driving wheel of Socratism turning as it were behind him,", a force of logic that never turned against him, but always worked with a violent directness.
"...he stepped into a world whose least hem we should have counted it an honor to to have touched...This is why the figure of Socrates disturbs us so profoundly...We are tempted ...to plumb the meanings and intentions of the most problematical character among the ancients. Who was this man who dared singlehandedly to challenge the entire world of Hellenism?"
And Socrates did not merely make his witty war on the values of Athens or for the sake of imperiled virtues. He also fought with the gods, not the gods, per se, but the slanderous tales Greeks told about them. More subversive, though, and what probably made him seem all the more dangerous to authority, was his sniping at the dionysiac strain in Greek culture-- that element which gave the Greeks their dithyrambs, their dance, their tragedies, their most sacred festival. That, rather than his atheism, made Socrates unpopular with the tradition-cleaving majority. That was probably what made them convict him. Attack gods if you will, but not a church, not an institution, not `Oedipus Rex,'not the Dionysus Theater. "The Dionysus" was Disney World and the White House in one. Tragedy and its mythologies and rites were what baseball is to America today.
Socrates' favorite literary genre was said to be Aesop's Fables. In The Republic, Ch. 9, which deals with "education/ children's stories", it is clear that Plato, and no doubt Socrates, believed myths and tragedies were delusive, slandered gods and heroes and were not the proper stuff for a child to hear. (Achilles crying over Patroclus? Goddesses starting wars over an apple? The King of Heaven turning himself into a swan to rape a woman? Sounds like prime time t.v.) Though Plato, not Socrates, wrote this chapter, it is safe to infer that he derived many of his aesthetic attitudes from Socrates, who enjoined his students to forego such "agreeable" entertainments since they were at best addressed to "the backward." Socrates was so persuasive that a young tragedian named Plato burned his manuscripts before entering his tutelage.
Moreover, Socrates waged war not merely against the tawdry and duplicitous features of tragedy, but rather, against its Dionysiac notions of man-against-nature, nature as anarchic and evil, and knowledge-as-taboo. To the Dionysiac Greeks knowledge was "hybris", a challenge of nature and sin against the gods (who were the anthropomorphic refinements of earth spirits). This childish, rebellious game of knowledge, and its process, logic, were thought sufficient to bring the world crashing down on the one who played them. But Socrates asserted that truth was good, benign, and would lead to a good and reasonable life, not the Oedipal disgrace and gouging of the eyes, nor the Promethean loss of hourly liver, nor the "peripatea" (discovery) that always spelled the "remorse in pain, pain in remorse."
For the Dionysiac hero, understanding killed action." Seeing the truth, the eternal condition, was a paralysis. Clearly, this view of intellectual investigation and curiosity would put a pall on a culture. It was a cacoon which would either burst, allowing growth, or choke the civilization. Socrates, seeing this, tried to slice the cacoon with his fine razor of reason, to replace the fatalistic, Dionysiac vision--a fear of vision-- with the scientific, dialectical thought and precision of language he had learned and developed, the kind of thinking which would lead not to his paralysis but to greater freedom and movement.
The irony was that the Athenians turned Socrates into the tragic hero(`sans peripatea'), despite his subversion of that art form, in order to prove once again the Dionysiac formula that "the edge of wisdom is turned against the wise; that wisdom is a crime against nature." Their only excuse, besides that he was polluting the young and vilifying the gods, was that they could think of no other role for a man such as he. To be a Greek hero was to die a tragic death.
And that is what he would have been for us, if slaying tragedy were his soul objective, which it was not, since "Pan was already dead". Socrates mission was not merely to supplant religious belief with reason, to replace the tragedy with "Symposium at the Dionysia." Socrates was not a cold rationalist. He was a moral man, who strove to remove values from the monetary float, to keep virtues "intrinsic", safe for the soul and away from Machiavelli's black gloved grasp reaching back from the distant future to make all values instrumental. He was foremost an innovator of teaching, who applied Anaxagoras' mind as universal-mover and world-as-process to his own pursuit of truth, and turned truth itself into a process, made the means justify the end, turned the means into their own ends. His process of investigation, that daemonic, fervently creative mutant of reason, the notion of truth- as-process, one we teachers still struggle with, is doubtless as great a legacy as his quest for values and the ineffable goals: the good, understanding of self.
Within the framework of this workshop of truth, this philosophy of the streets (for his truth-seeking never took place, as modern philosophers' would, in solitude, but among others, for others) Socrates proves versatile in his method. He assumes many of the pedagogical roles we use today. He was sometimes lecturer (I teach what I know), but more often, raconteur (I teach what I am). He was the "animateur" par excellence, not merely instructing students, but showing them, by his own powers and technique of ratiocination, how the inquiry should be done. In The Apology, he tries to teach the jury what he is, by demonstrating his rhetorical gifts, his personal record, the political situation, and finally, the verdict in, his attitude toward injustice and death. He also teaches what he knows, of his accusers, their possible motives in indicting him, and the ethical grounds on which he should be
exonerated. In Gorgias, which deals with, among other issues, the education of oratory, he uses "Models 3 &4", endeavors to develop the minds and characters of his listeners, by offering problems and analogies to develop critical skills, while, on the second score, rebuking the rudeness of Callicles. In The Symposium, Socrates tells what he knows of love, from his encounter with Diotima, the sorceress who showed him the way to Eros. In Crito he leads and teaches by his own example. In all dialogues where his personality can be truly sensed, Socrates appears to lead and teach by all the pedagogical models supplied above. Most of all, however, Socrates is the quintessential leader who taught what he was, via the brilliance and persistence of his argumentation and the scope of his concerns. Even an adversary as vitriolic as Callicles was obliged to pay tribute to Socrates in this.
**
"You simply never stop talking of cobblers, fullers, cooks, and doctors as if our argument concerned them," Callicles berates Socrates for constantly introducing the common man in discussions of virtue and politics in Gorgias. This tendency of Socrates to mix the natural with the conventional, the high with the low, the banal with the esoteric, is, Callicles supposes, his way of tricking his interlocutors into errors of usage. In fact, Socrates uses the simple trades and issues of everyday life because they were like numbers to him, definite values, on which people could readily agree and test the reality of their abstract statements. Besides, tradespeople were the ones with whom he had the most frequent intercourse. Their minds were the touchstone of his genius. If he could get through to them, to a "testa dura" like Callicles, then he could effect the revolution in thinking and values he was after.
In the figure of Ben Franklin, we find the product of that hybrid which Socrates sought to create so many centuries before--the tradesman with a philosophic mind, although he would not have perhaps been satisfied with the result. A thinking man worrying about the dust on London Streets? That is not the sort of truth the mind was meant to move toward. And yet it was progress of a kind.
Although Socrates was the prophet of the age of reason, and Franklin its exemplary product, a profound shift had taken place in the very quality of reason between Socrates' musings on it and its realization in the eighteenth century.
"The more each person strives and is able to seek his own profit, that is to say, to preserve his being, the more virtue does he possess; on the other hand, insofar as he neglects his own profit...he is impotent..."
"To act in conformity with virtue is, in us, nothing but acting, living and preserving our being, as reason directs,
from the ground of seeking our profit..."
Ben Franklin never said it better and he didn't have to. In fact, it is not clear that he knew it had ever been said before him, by Baruch Spinoza, in the previous century. Strange it is on the surface that a penurious Jewish pariah in Holland should have much, anything, in common with the prosperous, peripatetic, and gregarious Coverboy of American Success and Industry and Liberty and Virtue. And, yet, beneath that surface of resumès and biographical data the similarity is readily understood. Both men were enamored of the advent of science as THE revolution of thought, the new religion of man. What Socrates had died for had finally transpired. Reason, plying the tools of science, had become the dynamo of culture. Tradesmen, applying scientific advances to their self-preservation, became the new priests of reason and ethics, based on reason and self-reliance. Spinoza, the lens-crafter, and Franklin, the printer, earned their bread and dabbled respectively in philosophy and invention and were spared the kind of fall that befell Socrates on the thorns of political and legal miscarriage.
Ben Franklin was a tradesman down to his shoe-buckles. Even his kite-flying was purposeful. His name suggests sagacity, pragmatism, plyafulness, a knack for planning anything, an ability to cut consensus out of disparate interests, optimism and the relentless pursuit of political cooperation. If Socrates made the critical spirit more than a tragic compulsion, Franklin turned it into an engine of industry and action. From the time of his apprenticeship, he used his critical acuity, in the form of his writing ability and psychological insight, to publish his work in his brother's paper. When his brother's domination and the political heat in Massachusetts, grew too severe, he used the same judgement to abscond for freer air in Philadelphia. Even later, in his youthful journeys, he remarked the behavior of others, judging which manners and approaches were most likely to produce desired, i.e. self-preserving, effects. This rendered wisdom and all other virtues--useful.
Of Dr.Brown, the keeper of an inn he stayed at, he mentions that "he wickedly undertook ...to travesty the bible in doggeral verse...By this means he set many facts in a very ridiculous light and might have hurt weak minds if his work had been publish'd, which it was not." Now Franklin does not say the Doctor's verse was unamusing, or false. He does suggest, and this attitude emerges time and again, that going against "received opinion" is, to quote Huey Newton, in another context,"revolutionary suicide."
In fact, the only time Franklin goes against public opinion, at Watts press shop in London (he refuses to contribute to "the beer pool") he backs down, although he gains considerable influence
over some of his co-workers' breakfast habits.
The young Franklin evinces a fusion of Socratic criticism (he prides himself on it) and Puritan parsimony. His ultimate message is more than the sum of these parts. Though it is difficult to trace the precise time that he withdrew from society in order to develop his unique leadership, that trial must have occured during his stay in England. At first, the whole purpose of his mission was undermined by false promises. Then he tried to insinuate himself with his friend, Ralph's, mistress, in expected repayment for kindnesses, which led Ralph to welch on a considerable debt. This stranded Franklin in England. He had to overextend his stay. Meanwhile, his intended, Deborah Read, married another man, a circumstance he Franklin did not know of but certainly could have sensed. Career shipwrecked in England, and he residing far from the view of those who would shape his career, Franklin went "wilding", permitted himself the excesses of a provisional morality, characterised by opportunism, deism, and skepticism, a condition summarized in a passage preceding his "public appearance in business."
England was the Franklin's laboratory for this philosophy and life-style. It proved a failure. Franklin's inward-going phase, characteristic of leaders, and the change of direction and hardening of purpose that resulted, happened in England, on the voyage home, before setting up his own shop. He renounced the "free-thinking" skepticism which, like a spider, had drained him of
purpose and carried him and Collins and Ralph adrift. "Tho' it (free-thinking) might be true," he says,"It was not useful."
Virtue must be useful. This was Franklin's message. Virtue works. This is borne out in his Autobiography. "Actions might not be bad because they are forbidden...or good because it commanded them; yet probably, they were forbidden because they are bad for us..." (p.63-64) The edicts of common sense and law are to harkened to because they happen to be true, and if not true, then powerful enough to persuade, since a great many others believe them. If Socrates' truth was a continuum, Franklin's was a tool-chest. He brought them out in his wheel-barrow of rhetoric: first, the three virtues that would be the hubs of his life: "truth, sincerity, and integrity." Later, he would wheel out his twelve precepts of virtue. And these too, he recommended, not merely because the virtues were good, but because they ineluctibly lead to success.
Yet, their very instrumentality makes these notions of virtue less than solid, far from rigorous. Franklin admits that he stopped carrying his diary of improvement with him and ascribed this to his travels. Hardly "sincere". Nor was Franklin's distaste for contradicting "received opinion" or open disputation, with anyone but Keimer, a man he held in light regard. However, economic self-sufficiency was the basis of his tradesman's morality. All of the virtues he named in his twelve-fold code of conduct, are ambiguous and temporary, founded, like any commodity, on their cost and the ability to afford them. Even humility, that virtue he could never master, would recommend itself to Franklin by its usefulness in debate.
On the other hand "humility is not a virtue, that is to say, it does not spring from reason," writes Spinoza, "since humility is a sorrow which springs from this, that a man contemplates his sorrow."
What were the pedagogical methods of Franklin, by which means did he lead? Although his intention was to instruct, Franklin imparted little information, aside from the account of his life. He did not explain printing, or the difference among the various jobs of the trade. At one point he recounted his advice to Rev. Gilbert Tennant on raising funds to build a meeting house. "Apply to all those whom you know will give something; next to those whom you are uncertain whether they will give anything or not; and then show them the lsit of those who have given: and lastly do not neglect those who you are sure will give nothing for in some of them you will be disappointed..." This is perhaps the only practical lesson Franklin gave in the whole memoir. Otherwise, he attempted to guide the characters of his reader with moral precepts, and by "teaching what he was", with some of his errata, toward the end of "developing people". His deliberate attempt to instruct his reader morally is humorous at best. But, in the first section of the book and in the last, we do learn from Franklin, the man, of his intellectual curiosity, his zest for knowledge, and for sharing it, his civic sense, that made him the founding father of many of the instittutions of Philadelphia, and which inspired him to give away his patent to the stove that bore his name. One gets the sense from reading of his various adventures that wherever he went and whatever he saw posed itself as a problem for him to solve. And though, he did not, as Socrates did before him, demonstrate for the reader the way his mind worked, he provided by the sheer weight of the evidence he produced about himself, a convincing model of thought as a practical, profit-making force.
* * *
There is a third leader in this equation. Malcolm X shares many of Socrates' and Franklin's qualities. He was constantly in search of/and usurping a father, was a leader, a traveller, and a rhetorician. But Malcolm differs from the other two in that he never actively seeks truth. He is always sure he has arrived at one. Truth always seems to come to him, as he moves, evolves, as a biproduct of living, part of an overall plan of which he is only, in light of the final result, the telling of his tale, partially aware. And it comes to him more often than not as a jolt when he least expects it. When he sojourns in Boston as a teenager, having fled the white world of foster homes in Michigan where he was a mascot, he is as sure of his shoeshining, hip, conking, zootsuiting, lindyhopping life-style as he will later be of his "Detroit Red" persona of the Harlem hustler.
While serving six years in prison, doing his Satan imitation, a cursing, malevolent, violent person, of whom inmates are afraid, a fellow inmate, Bimbi, with light skin like Malcolm's, approaches him in the yard with the proposition that he learn to read. This advice triggers Malcolm to rebegin his life. It is here where he he "goes down" as Nietsche says, "goes inside", immmersing himself in study, from the word-by-word raking of a dictionary for definitions and roots, to the systematic digestion of every book in the prison library. It is this act of self-education where Malcolm X, leader and teacher, stands out among his fellows.
When his brother, Reginald, introduces Malcolm to Islam, the future chief spokesman of the Nation, balks at the inititation, then rushes headlong into the association that would, as Leonardo Davinci said of the Medicis, make him and destroy him. When Elijah Mumhammed is exposed as a fornicator (while his followers, like Malcolm have barely had time for women, and have adhered to the strictest rules regarding fornication; while malcolm's own own brother, Reginald, who initiated him in Islam, was expelled from the Nation for illicit relations with a Muslim woman, and eventually went insane as a result of the censure and Malcolm's own rejection) Malcolm begins to turn away. But it is actually the Nation's excommunication that drives him to seek another truth, this one, the international brotherhood of Islam which he experiences in Mecca, and where his life in his autobiography pretty much concludes.
Malcolm X never searched for truth, but always received it, in various forms, openly, blindly. For all the insightfulness of his self-account and his perceptions of the racial problems in the U.S., he was not primarily a man of reason, but of faith. He zealously adhered to systems, of life-style and then religion. Only when his faith in these was shaken did he move on. Furthermore, the shaking did not come from within, but always from without. He was the human body in motion, by the laws of inertia. Malcolm X was never neutral, but always committed, nor did he operate or reason in an aura of skepticism. Rather, his path was less a road than a hopping pattern, leapfrogging from certainty to certainty, each provisional in the final telling, but absolute in the episode in which he relates it.
That is not say he was not critical in this thinking. Reason was an important tool for him, but in his autobiography, at any rate, it takes a denunciatory, not inquiring, form. His critical mind had a specific social target, it was not, as he said,"free-ranging", but sharply focussed as the cross-hairs of a shot-gun. He used reason as a means to affirm himself and establish a territory of faith for his people, that they were not inferior to, but superior to whites, in the American racist context. Very often, in the more rhetorical segments of his autobiography, one loses track of reason, altogether, and it becomes apparent that what is at stake here is not to convince by the word, itself, or by any line of reasoning, but by the extremity of his exemplification, the outrageousness of his mythology, the violent urgency of his claims.
When he speaks of his mind, Malcolm X focusses on the way others accept it, appreciate it. There is a kind of childlike vanity in this, to be expected of someone who did not believe he had one, or was surprised to find he had one, or had always been told he did not.
As for which teaching model he employs, it differs depending on his audience, deliberately. To the white audience, his intent was to demonstrate who he was, but more importantly, to impart information on the thought patterns, behavior, and attitudes of black men like himself. In a sense, he was doing exploratory brain surgery on himself for the enlightenment of all of us in the surgical gallery. Even in his malicious humor, and his observations on the White woman-black man taboo, or on the way women like to be treated, he is not informing the reader so much about the way things are as the way he, a black man, thinks they are.
For black readers, however, Malcolm X surely intended to pose himself as models two, three, and four. By describing his self-education he intended to develop the minds of his most marginal readers, and show them, they, too could meet the challenge of education. To the "so-called Negroes" living the American, or integrated, or traditional Christian values, he clearly intended to preach the value of Islam and separatism. In this regard, he is "developing people", model four.
Reason emerges from the ocean of blind faith, wanders the land of data and stimuli, clothed in skins of commerce, finds uses, proliferates, and becomes so confused by its own relentless ambiguities and misuses that it loses its way and submerges back in the ocean of faith. Socrates, Franklin, and Malcolm X mark the three levels of the tide. Socrates saw the way out of faith, through reason; Franklin alloyed reason with commercialism; Malcolm X, burned by commercialism, used reason to bring us back to faith. Now that the first age of faith and reason have been exhausted did Malcolm X, a child of Rimbaud's century of assassins, and graduate of Jean Genet's school of outcast iconoclasm, augur the next great phase in leadership and teaching? Logic as a muezzen of faith?
How do we teachers respond to the challenge of teaching freedom and the lessons of leadership in a world which has supplanted ideals with sensations, to students who view leadership as an abstract and unworthy goal if they view it all? Do we use logic to call students to faith, by using rhetoric as a tool to persuade them of principles we wish to espouse? Or do we retreat from our present ambiguous roles, back to pedagogy's age of faith, the hoary times when teachers were imparters of information? Still another option: we pursue our current trend, of turning our lives and selves into books, to be perused conveniently, like computer roms, by a student's' questions. Or do we follow K.Patricia Cross'suggestion: develop minds and people through problems of critical and ethical thinking?
We seek answers. We need leadership.