Leadership and the limits of paternalism

A fascinating talk by Dr. Gary Sheffield on military leadership in Britain's armies in two world wars. He hones in on the centrallity of paternalism in the British officer class.

As Americans we are reflexively antagonistic to “paternalism” in all its forms. Sheffield offers a thoughtful defense of paternalism and deference as well as its practical limits.

In contrast to the “lions led by donkeys” myth, the paternalism of British officers led them to care about their soldiers well-being. Life for the Tommy in the trenches was vastly better than for the soldiers of egalitarian France.

The deference of the enlisted ranks was largely automatic given Britain's class system and the social mores of 1914. Deference, however, does not make an officer a leader. As Sheffield points out, soldiers had certain expectations of those in command. Officers were supposed to be fair, to be courageous, and to be competent.

Those three qualities make a pretty good basis for effective leadership in any context.

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Winston Churchill involved himself deeply in military matters as Prime Minister – much more than did Asquith or Lloyd-George in the Great War. He understood he was breaking with precedent and was not shy in explaining why:

Norman Brook, secretary of the Cabinet under Churchill, wrote to Hastings Ismay, the former secretary to the Chiefs of Staff, a revealing observation: "Churchill has said to me, in private conversation, that this increased civilian authority was partly due to the extent to which the Generals had been discredited in the First War-which meant that, in the Second War, their successors could not pretend to be professionally infallible."

Call it irony or call it karma, but voters came to feel the same way about Churchill and his party. Sheffield believes that the unbroken litany of “defeats and retreats” from 1940 to 1942 undermined the culture of deference and helped doom Churchill's Tories. Just as those defeats marked the death of the Empire, they also undermined the foundations of conservative paternalism and popular deference.

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It is impossible not to notice that most of our political class and public health bureaucracy failed this leadership test during the covid times. They demanded unprecedented obedience at the beginning of the crisis and largely received it (“deference”). Yet, over time it became obvious that both groups lacked any concept of fairness or honesty, were shockingly devoid of courage, and were less competent than they claimed.

Sheep ruled by donkeys?

Any discussion of “covid amnesty” must address this problem as a first step.

It may be optimistic of Oster, and others of the Virtual class, to try to restore public faith that Science Is Real. But it’s also understandable. First, for reasons of self-interest: those who drove Covid policy presented themselves not just as people doing their best, but as the sole bearers of rational truth and life-saving moral authority. Doubtless the laptop class would prefer that we judge Covid policy by intention, not results, lest too close an evaluation result in their fingers being prised from the baton of public righteousness.

A disaster becomes a catastrophe when social capital and communal trust is squandered. (“When do disasters become catastrophes?”). If the West is to avoid a near-term catastrophe, that trust needs to be restored. That cannot happen until we have an honest accounting and a reckoning.

But the rot goes deeper still, for the very foundation of that moral authority is a shared trust in the integrity of scientific consensus. And Covid has left us in no doubt that there is a great deal of grey area between “science” and “moral groupthink”. Where “science” shades into the latter, British care workers and American soldiers and police officers dismissed for refusing a vaccination that doesn’t stop transmission can attest that science is sometimes “real” more in the sense of “institutionally powerful and self-righteous” than in the sense of “true”.

This touches on another source of rage that many would doubtless like to forget: the asymmetry in whose shoulders bore the heaviest load. It wasn’t the lawn-sign people who bore the brunt of lockdowns — they could mostly work from home. Rather, lockdown shuttered countless small businesses permanently, or burned them to the ground in lawn-sign-endorsed riots that were justified on public-health grounds even as others were fined for attending Holy Communion in a car park.