Article

Change

Character

Purpose

Virtues

14 May 2024

6 min read

Life is messy, take part

James Baker's political vocation sheds light on why character counts in this networked world.

Emerson Csorba

Emerson writes on geopolitics. He is also a business executive and holds a doctorate in theology.

Two men in seats adress a pyjamap-clad Ronald Regan.

James Baker, left, briefs a recovering Ronald Reagan, right, in hospital .

White House via Wikimedia Commons.

Few White House Chiefs of Staff have been better than James A Baker III. Nicknamed the ‘Velvet Hammer,’ Baker was originally a Democrat, and only introduced to politics in his forties. But he made up for lost time, serving as the original catalyst behind President Ronald Reagan’s time in the Oval Office. He later served as Secretary of State, helping maintain peace following the Cold War.

In their recent biography of Baker, The Man Who Ran Washington, Peter Baker (no relation to James) and Susan Glasser write that, when called out of his retirement to lead the Republican strategy in the Bush-Gore 2000 Florida vote recount, ‘Baker’s reputation was so formidable that Democrats knew they would lose the moment they heard of his selection.’ More precisely, Baker ‘was not defined by his era; he helped to define it.’

And yet, the calm, cool and collected former Texas lawyer was – by the end of his tenure as White House Chief of Staff – broken. In Chris Whipple’s The Gatekeepers, a history of American White House Chiefs of Staff, a former Reagan staffer reflects that in a conversation long after their tenures, ‘Baker’s eyes filled with tears. He told me what it had been like for him to be chief of staff in a White House riven by different philosophies and ideological outlooks. And every day various people would try to take Jim Baker out.’

Baker, a problem-solver and political moderate, battled with his more ideological counterparts for the ‘soul’ of the Reagan presidency. This battle was ‘more emotionally grueling and deeply painful than almost anyone around him knew.’ His struggles were a harbinger of the more divisive American politics to come. Surrounded by long-time Reagan loyalists, he was an unexpected selection for the Chief of Staff role. He ran the Gerald Ford and George Bush presidential campaigns against Reagan but was recognised by the Reagans as the right person for the job. Baker kept focused within the Reagan Administration despite team members undermining him.

Baker shows that responding to a call requires that a person engage in the world as it is. This realism helps us to reform the world through service.

Through his participation in the world, Baker reminds us that life is messy. This is especially the case when engaging in communities involving competition between multiple worldviews, philosophies, or ideologies. Keeping the ship steady amid such variation comes with emotional cost. But participation is better than withdrawal from the scene of action, and into the safety of technology.

Balancing between perspectives requires a personal sense of restraint. Peter Baker and Glasser note, for instance, that ‘one of the keys to Baker’s success over the years was knowing when to back off’ in meetings. This balancing is difficult. Baker succeeded in his political vocation in part because he participated in this swirling mix of perspectives, but the balancing involved suffering.

What can we learn from Baker on the messiness of life? What does he show us about the living-out of a vocation? Baker was clear-eyed about his calling: that of serving his friend Reagan (and afterwards his close friend George Bush). He put his strategy and negotiating skills to good use as part of a larger life project. This calling strengthened Baker’s persistence, despite the trials and tribulations of participation in the world. Baker shows that responding to a call requires that a person engage in the world as it is. This realism helps us to reform the world through service.

‘Once we remove ourselves from the flow of physical, messy, untidy life… we become less willing to get out there and take a chance.’

Sherry Turkle

How did Baker discover his political vocation? And what is a vocation? The philosopher Robert Adams defines vocation in his Finite and Infinite Goods as ‘a call from God, a command, or perhaps an invitation, addressed to a particular individual, to act and live in a certain way.’ The theologian Oliver O’Donovan defines vocation somewhat differently in his Finding and Seeking. He describes it as ‘the way in which the self is offered to us…. The course of our life that will come to be our unique historical reality.’ O’Donovan focuses on service, where vocation is ‘not a single function, but an ensemble of worldly relations and functions through which we are given, in particular, to serve God and realise our agency.’

Sometimes, as O’Donovan suggests, a calling captures our attention, even if we only know the immediate next step, as if stepping from a quayside onto a boat (a helpful metaphor used throughout O’Donovan’s work). For Baker, it was the death of his first wife that precipitated a call from his friend George Bush. In this conversation, Bush asked whether Baker would be interested in volunteering for a campaign, to help take his mind off his grief. What was initially a way to help keep his mind off a trauma became, over time, a life project.

Baker thought carefully about the world and the people around him as precursor to action. He epitomised the thinking of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who writes that individuals should participate ‘in the times and places which confront us with concrete problems, set us tasks and charge us with responsibility.’ We must remember that people are multidimensional. This is not easy, Baker as a case in point through his political vocation.

Unfortunately, while recognising this is a realm of considerable debate, aspects of our culture discourage genuine engagement in the world. Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, describes ‘networked life,’ where individuals use technological devices (we might think today of WhatsApp or Instagram) to withdraw from hard, in-person conversations. She says that people nowadays tend to communicate with others on their own terms. It is easy for people to engage – or disengage – others whenever convenient.

Yet, as Turkle writes, ‘Once we remove ourselves from the flow of physical, messy, untidy life… we become less willing to get out there and take a chance.’ Networked life is for Turkle an escape from the messiness of life. It prevents encountering others as they really are. This leads to weak personal foundations: personal characters built on sand rather than on rock. It helps to be tested by conflict with others that are different than ourselves. This testing helps to reduce narcissism, in which we think more about ourselves than about the wider world.

Marshall McLuhan, in his Understanding Media, reflects on the Greek word narcosis meaning numbness. The service of networked technologies, to which Turkle alludes, is in McLuhan’s eyes a worshipping of these technologies as God. This numbing via the worshipping of technology is contrary to Baker’s more engaged way of life – encountering others in person in their complexity.

We can remind ourselves that life is messy. What we think we see upon first impressions may evolve upon continuous examination. And what is previously unseen may become evident over time. Jesus states that ‘For nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed, nor is anything secret that will not become known and come to light’ and later, that ‘Nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known.’

The genius of James Baker was found not in academic intellect, but in his ability to understand others through real engagement in the world. This understanding of others, serving them, was the cornerstone of his vocation. Former White House speechwriter and now-columnist for the Wall Street Journal Peggy Noonan once commented – as reported in The Gatekeepers – that Baker ‘was a guy who didn’t seem to move forward with a lot of illusions about life or people or organizations or systems.’ Baker embraced the messiness of life, but also the importance of taking part to serve others and help restore the world.

Explainer

Creed

Virtues

3 March 2023

6 min read

Justice: a premium virtue

In the third of his series on virtue, Andrew Davison weighs what justice says today, particularly on impartiality.

Andrew Davison

Andrew works at the intersection of theology, science and philosophy. He is Canon and Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford.

A statue of Justice holds a sword aloft in one hand, and set of scales in the other.

The statue of Justice on London's Old Bailey court.

Sang Hyun Cho, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Next after prudence comes justice. Our guide in this series on the virtues is Thomas Aquinas and, for him, virtue is about justice. Indeed, it is in justice (quoting Cicero) that

‘the lustre of virtue appears above all.’

Placing such a premium on justice might seem a little deflationary. Yes, we might think, by all means be just, but is that enough? Later in this series, we will see that Aquinas does, indeed, think that all human virtues – including justice – need to be set aflame with faith, hope, and love. But that doesn’t stop him from also thinking about the virtues from a human point of view, at least as a first pass. And within that frame – one in which he might also talk to a non-believer, for instance – he insists that to be virtuous is to be just. Indeed, we could make that comment even more deflationary, and say that the gold standard of justice is simply to be fair. Justice, again drawing on Cicero, is simply to give to each person what is due.

‘However true it might be that our communal life cannot attain its fullest realization through just exchange alone',

wrote the German writer Josef Pieper,

‘it is no less true that it is in the exemplary form of just this sort of justice that the irreducible core of social relations finds expression’.

We can wish for something that outstrips justice. Nonetheless, there is a steely realism in Thomas’s insistence that the foundation for virtue is acting justly, even simply being fair. Fortunate is the country at the moment where day-by-day newspaper coverage need not draw attention to people in positions of public trust failing to live even by that standard.

I once attended a lecture course as an visitor in Rome on ‘Justice and Allied Virtues in Thomas Aquinas’ that lasted for an entire semester, so there’s a lot that can be said on this front. I will limit myself to three angles: impartiality, dues, and the role of a useful minimum.

On impartiality

On the first, Aquinas offers an extended discussion of justice in terms of being no ‘respecter of persons’: which is to say, in terms of showing impartiality. His example strikes home for anyone, such as myself, who works in a university:

if you promote someone to a professorship on account of his having sufficient knowledge, you consider the due cause, not the person; but if, in conferring something on someone, you consider in him not the fact that what you give him is proportionate or due to him, but the fact that he is this particular person (e.g. Peter or Martin), then there is ‘respect of the person’, since you give him something not for some cause that renders him worthy of it, but simply because he is this person… for instance if a man promote someone… because he is rich or because he is a relative of his.

As I write this, the newspapers are full of a story about an ex-Prime Minister promoting someone to a position of public honour and trust in a torturous story that involves both wealth and a relative.

On dues

Justice is the lodestone of virtue, according to Aquinas. Above all things, ‘do justice’. Justice is not quite the foundation, however. Justice looks beyond itself to ‘right’, or ‘what is due’. Justice is secondary, because it recognises and responds to ‘right’ or ‘due’ (today, we might say to ‘rights’ or ‘dues’); it does not create them. Those comments would mean a great deal to a group of Spaniards in the sixteenth century, all followers of Aquinas, who rose above the rapacious expansion of the West, and fought for the rights of indigenous people. They left the foundations of international law as part of that legacy. Among them were Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566) and Francisco de Vitoria (c. 1483–1546), both Dominican friars. They offer, to my mind, perhaps the most glorious moment in the whole history of the river of writing and thinking that has sprung from the life and works of Aquinas.

Opposing, at various time, pretty much the entire establishment of the Spanish Empire, they argued that the indigenous people of the ‘New World’ had inviolable rights, such that justice required Europeans to recognise their right to their lands, and to self-government. This rested on the idea that justice deals with what is due, or right. We do not make this up; we are confronted by it. It is attached to, it springs from, human nature simply as such. And, ultimately, it springs from the fact that to be faced by a human being is to be faced with a creature, which is to say, by the handiwork of God.

When he was still in his twenties, and earning his spurs as a teacher, Aquinas had tackled this subject:

something is said to be just not only because it is willed by God, but because it is due to a certain created thing according to the order of creature to creature. For nothing can be due to anything except by reason of its own nature or condition. However, the cause of a thing’s nature and properties is the divine will; and therefore the whole order of justice can be traced back to the divine will as to its origin.

Justice is secondary to right, is responsive to right, and justice is the backstop of the virtues precisely for that reason. If it set its own terms, if it ruled its own roost, it might determine, for instance, that dispossession is just. Who would be to say otherwise? But justice does not set its own terms; it bows before what is right or due. That is why, in the estimation of those Spanish Thomists, it inclines its head in reverence before the dignity and rights of native South Americans, rather than to the Spanish Crown: or at least, it should.

The useful minimum

Approached another way, we might say that justice is a sort of minimum, but also that minima are important because they mark out the limits of human relationships. The twentieth century Dominican Herbert McCabe wrote compellingly about this. The Ten Commandments are all about justice, and while they don’t lay out the beating heart of a good and cohesive social life, they do mark its limits. McCabe (again following Aquinas) thought that the best emphasis in thinking about ethics ought to be on friendship, since that is characteristic of human life at its fullest. It’s clearly not enough, for friendship, simply not to steal, bear false witness, or commit adultery. Nonetheless, those precepts are of enduring worth, because we can be sure that to transgress those bounds is to bring friendship to an end. It’s because of that emphasis on friendship, and guarding against whatever endangers it, that ‘bearing false witness’ was such a major concern for Aquinas. In his long treatment of justice, the subject of theft or murder each receives only a single section. On the other hand, misrepresentation of others – sins of the tongue (and, today, of the keyboard) – receive four (on ‘reviling’, ‘backbiting’, ‘tale-bearing’, and ‘derision’). As the Book of Proverbs has it, which Aquinas quotes at this point, ‘A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches’. The weakness of so much writing on ethics in the past century has been a tendency to make it about difficult problems that are so rare that it’s usually other people who face them. The niggling, awkward glory of the virtue tradition is that it lands squarely in the middle of life, for instance in being just – simply fair – in what we next type on Twitter.