Introduction to Extreme Virtue: Truth and Leadership in Five Great American Lives

To admire someone deeply can change your life. This book is about the public figures I most deeply admire, people whose lives have informed and transformed mine: the anarchist leaders Emma Goldman and Voltairine de Cleyre, arch-conservative politician Barry Goldwater, the Lakota Sioux holy man John Fire Lame Deer, and black nationalist Malcolm X. These five very different people embody distinct facets of civic virtue and of the meaning of leadership. But I believe the stories of their lives also coalesce into a coherent understanding of these matters. In this introduction, I will introduce these people and the account of civic virtue that will be implicit throughout the book, culminating with the idea of truth as the cardinal virtue in public life.

Civic Virtue and Public Persons

This idea for this book originated in my reflection and newspaper writing about the Monica Lewinsky scandal. I had quite a complicated reaction to the revelation that President Clinton had an affair with an intern in the Oval Office. Practically no one would regard that act as morally defensible. And yet as the congressional Republicans lambasted Clinton's character and declared that his behavior disqualified him to lead the country, it struck me that many people who are widely and rightly admired - Martin Luther King, Jr., Thomas Jefferson, John F. Kennedy, and so on - did things that were similar, as did some of Clinton's rabid accusers. For me, l'affaire Lewinsky did not itself disqualify Clinton from being a man of civic virtue.

But something else did. What I found viscerally despicable about Clinton is that I didn't believe that he believed what he was saying. My gut sense was that there was little or nothing that he believed so deeply that he wouldn't sacrifice it on the altar of his personal ambitions. I suppose that is something that one could say about most successful politicians: the beliefs they avow are for the most part calculated to win votes and keep poll numbers high. Clinton, in my view, lacked serious commitment to anything more important than his own aggrandizement. That single insight - if it is an insight - set off the series of ruminations that led to this book, as I tried to account for the importance to me of the sort of truth that Clinton lacked, and tried to see how far that sort of truth could be detected and understood, and whether it could be made the basis of an account of virtue proper to leadership.

Bill Clinton has many admirable qualities of character. He is extremely intelligent and articulate. He seems to have what is still termed "charisma" or at any rate charm, and the ability to make people feel immediately comfortable and important in his presence. And it is instructive that the qualities that one admires in Clinton are inextricable from the qualities that arouse one's disgust. Even his quick wit, his sheer facility, is unfortunate when it is put into the service of lies or rationalizations. He seems to seduce the people around him one by one or en masse: that is both what made him a successful politician and what almost brought him down. And the idea that one's admirable qualities are also destructive is a fundamental point in this book.

But though intelligence and charm are admirable qualities, they are not morally admirable; they do not at all tend to support the claim that the person who has them is a good person. So my reflection on the Lewinsky scandal led me to reflect more widely on what it is that makes a public person morally admirable. Because I seemed to be rather stuck for any general account of what is admirable in public figures, I undertook to develop such an account by reflecting on lives I admired. That is why this book consists of biographical sketches of five of my heroes. Each is an American I have looked up to in a variety of ways and contexts, and each is a person that I have read and thought and talked and written about in a sustained way. I admired each of them before I thought about why I did; I spontaneously and involuntarily regarded each as a model of what a leader could be. I auditioned a number of other possibilities - John Peter Altgeld, Tillie Olson, Margaret Fuller, Crazy Horse, Henry David Thoreau, Eugene McCarthy, John Brown, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, among others. But I kept returning to my original group.

There is no principle on which the figures discussed here have been selected. The reason they appear here is simply that they are actually my heroes. Indeed I might almost go so far as to say that these are my only heroes; I am not much given to putting people on pedestals. But the structure of reflection in this book is "empirical": I admired these folks before I tried to delve deeply into why I admired them. What I'm trying to do is to take my spontaneous and fundamental admiration and systematize it: to derive from it some coherent and useful way to think about public virtue and moral character. I believe that ethics is an empirical inquiry - that system, if any, follows experience - and I have tried to make that idea my method in what follows.

The list of virtues which I give later in this introduction may seem merely arbitrary, and it would be disingenuous to claim any necessity to the structure I derive or to claim that it can be demonstrated to be the best account. I don't think ethics is that sort of. While my preferences have causes, they do not admit of decisive rational justification. The justification, rather, is inductive, and the persuasion I hope to achieve is of course logically non-compulsory. In fact this book consists of a kind of bootstrapping operation in which the cardinal virtues of public figures emerge from the biographies while the biographies themselves are in part constructed to display these same qualities. I learn what is admirable by observing people I admire and I also learn who is admirable by exploring the question of what is admirable.

Such a rough methodology would perhaps not be satisfactory in a philosophical system of ethics. But it mirrors the process by which, for the most part, we actually do come to learn moral concepts and the process by which our views change over time. That is, people are set up before us as moral examples. We both learn moral concepts from examination of their characters and evaluate moral exemplars with reference to those concepts. Eventually our concepts and their concrete expressions achieve a kind of equilibrium and we have a rudimentary way to make moral evaluations. But in real situations and with regard to real people, roughness within reason is a virtue and rigid system is a vice. We want to be open to learning new moral lessons and to revising our moral evaluations. As Aristotle insisted with regard to ethics, in a slogan that is often quoted and rarely taken with sufficient seriousness by philosophers, we should not expect more precision than the subject matter admits. And where the topic is human lives and values, we had better be willing to tolerate a great deal of vagueness and ambiguity. To the extent that moral concepts can be crystallized and rendered concrete, they are crystallized and rendered concrete in the actual lives of specific people. A metaphysics of morals is not likely, finally, to change the way we live or the way we think about the way other people live. But encountering good people can have an immediate effect.

Strange Saints

Two of the figures discussed in this book - Malcolm X and Lame Deer - might broadly and primarily be thought of as religious leaders, though the differences between Malcolm's Nation of Islam and Lame Deer's traditional Lakota spirituality are immense. Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre, and Barry Goldwater are political figures, though Goldman and de Cleyre were revolutionaries who were many times imprisoned, while Goldwater was precisely the sort of person they were revolting against: a businessman and government official. On the other hand, all three had in common a deep suspicion of state power: each took up an honorable position in an American anti-statist tradition that includes figures as disparate as Thomas Paine, Henry David Thoreau, and Abbie Hoffman. Indeed, I hold - though I will reserve the argument for another occasion - that what makes the five figures distinctively American is a suspicion of power and a vision of individual liberation.

Lame Deer and Goldman conceived of their positions on the political spectrum as progressive, as Goldman showed in her advocacy of feminism and free love, and Lame Deer by his ministry to the American Indian Movement. It is reasonable to consider Goldwater and Malcolm conservative figures. Both of them wanted to invigorate the present by infusing it with what they thought of as traditional values, and both endorsed capitalist ingenuity and traditional moral discipline. De Cleyre occupies that interstitial position where the extreme right and the extreme left meet. She emphasized individual freedom and rejected ideology on the ground that it forecloses the future of human creativity.

None of these five is what we might think of immediately as a saint or as a person of transcendent personal purity. There are no Gandhis or Mother Theresas on the list. One key lesson that these lives teach us is that personal moral perfection of the sort we might associate with sainthood is not required in order for a person to be an excellent example of public virtue. What these people have in common is not purity or even temperance. In fact, though Malcolm and de Cleyre were essentially ascetics, the other three had streaks of what others considered libertinism. But when we think of heroes of public life, we really do not judge them by a standard of purity or perfection. The question is, rather, one of inspiration and emulation, and in order for us really to experience the possibility of emulating someone, they must expose to our view a basic humanity. That basic humanity includes an acquaintance with sin, though what inspires us is what is done with that sin, or how experience is transformed into power.

These people may not be saints, but they are heroes - at any rate my heroes. So we - or at any rate I - need to ask: in virtue of what qualities of character are they heroic? The list of virtues that emerge from religious and philosophical traditions is long: faith, hope, love, friendship, justice, constancy, courage, cleanliness, industry, temperance, charity, chastity, honesty, patience, kindness, and many others. To get from such a laundry list of admirable traits to a useful account of the virtues of leaders, we might start by asking which traits of character distinguish, let us say, Malcolm X from, let us say, Richard Nixon. This procedure, admittedly rather impressionistic, has yielded the following conclusion: that the leaders treated in this book possess in common four primary virtues: commitment to something greater than their own ambitions; self-reflection; integrity; and connectedness. In an examination of the lives of Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre , Malcolm X, Lame Deer, and Barry Goldwater, these qualities of character emerge as fundamental and indispensable, though they are differently compounded in each person. And each figure is aligned, in the chapters that follow, with one of these cardinal virtues: Goldman with commitment, de Cleyre with self-reflection, Goldwater with integrity, Lame Deer with connectedness. I treat Malcolm X as exemplary of leadership and truth in all its aspects.

Virtue

Some systems of ethics start with principles; others, with persons. One thing that can be said in favor of the latter is that they are easier to teach and to apply. Compare the number of people who have committed themselves to Christian morality by an abstract examination of ethical arguments to the number of those who have striven toward goodness through an understanding of the life of Jesus. In fact, virtually all the great religious systems - and surely most morality originates in or is connected to religious life - begin by providing exemplars: lives to be studied, understood, and emulated: Buddha, Lao Tzu, Yudisthira, Moses, Confucius, Muhammad: leaders and sages whose stories have been told and retold, lived and relived.

These two starting points - principles and persons - have also directed the history of philosophical ethics. Kant, for example, sought a principle that, acted upon, could guarantee right action. He called it the categorical imperative and formulated it roughly this way: act so that the principle on which you act could be a universal law. But for the ancient Greeks, and most particularly for Aristotle, the primary question was not what made an action right, but what made a person good. They understood right action as what a good person would do in a given situation. One strength of that approach is its adaptability to particular circumstances, because the general principles of right action that philosophers have provided always seem to admit exceptions. For example, according to Kant, the categorical imperative entails that every lie is equally a violation of the moral law. And yet it is not hard to think of circumstances in which a lie is morally permissible or even morally required, as when a small untruth can spare a person a good deal of pointless pain.

But even if one starts with principles, the question of what is a good person cannot ultimately be deflected. For we turn, or ought to turn, to ethics in order to learn something about how we should live. We turn, or ought to turn, to ethics, in order to examine and transform how we act and hence who we are. If an ethics cannot transform our action and identity, it is useless. But then we need an interesting or accurate account of what it is that makes a person good. That is the task that Aristotle set himself in the Nicomachean Ethics. The approach has been termed 'virtue ethics,'and it has undergone a massive revival in recent years, both in academic philosophy (as represented, for example, in Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue) and in popular consciousness (as represented, for example, in William Bennett's Book of Virtues).

I am not an advocate of virtue ethics as an exclusive approach. I think that it is likely that many questions in ethics cannot be answered in terms of virtue, including some questions concerning standards for right action. Good people can do bad things, and indeed all the people discussed here did bad things. Many of those things were actually expressions of their virtues, of their fortitude or frankness, for example. So to fully understand why they were wrong, we would need a separate account of right action. Furthermore, I do not believe that virtue ethics is a sufficient basis for political philosophy. If we are asking questions about how we should organize ourselves collectively and what institutions we want to generate and live within, we can go some of the way in terms of virtue, but not all the way. I do not believe that virtue ethics gives us any reason to prefer democracy to monarchy, for example, though it enjoins presidents and kings alike to be good people. So I favor a pluralist approach to ethics, one that does not answer all questions in terms of virtue, or moral principle, or public justice. On the other hand, I think that in all of these matters, virtue as a fundamental concept is indispensable. Democracy without virtue is a nightmare, but then so is monarchy. But with virtue, either is survivable.

I am not going to enter into the philosophical debate about the definition of virtue in any elaborate way here, though I hope to do so in the future. But to give a somewhat simplified characterization: Virtues on my view are simply morally admirable qualities of character. As qualities of character, they must be comparatively enduring, and not simply momentary impulses or preferences. They are in some sense central to the moral identity of the people who possess them over a relatively extended period of time (say, a period of years, though perhaps, and often, over a lifetime). Civic virtues, then, would be admirable qualities of character suited to and manifested within public life and discourse. The goal of public discourse, at least in the American polity, is the public welfare within the context of democracy, a context that demands access to decision-making procedures and participation.

Philosophers such as Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, and MacIntyre have held that virtue is definable in terms of goals or purposes. Their views, that is, are teleological. For Aristotle the goal in question is human happiness over a lifetime; for Mill, who believes an account of virtue can be compatible with his utilitarianism, the goal is the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people; while for MacIntyre goals are more local and time-bound, articulated within social practices, such as the practice of American democracy. Again, I will not enter the theoretical issues in a sustained way, but here I want to say that, for reasons that will become apparent, my view divorces virtue from goals altogether. Virtues may in a given situation be destructive of one's happiness and the happiness of others, and they may contribute to the destruction of the very social practices in which they arise and are expressed. An American politician who spoke spontaneously and said what she really thought would be displaying an important set of virtues and also contributing to the destruction of American politics as it is currently constituted. Indeed, though I think virtues have histories and are always expressed within a particular social context, I also think that they can have a significance that cuts across practices or even cultures. This is so because persons, though they are in part social constructions, also face within social structures a set of what might be termed existential challenges, including the challenge to resist being entirely swallowed by those very structures.

Four Cardinal Virtues and Their Sum

It is a common observation that the virtues to some extent go together: that, for example, one cannot have sympathy without a portion of charity. If someone claims to be very sympathetic, but is not willing to do anything charitable to demonstrate that sympathy concretely, we do well to be skeptical of the sympathy. Each of the four cardinal virtues I have adduced is accompanied by a variety of other important qualities of character, such as courage, rebelliousness, and passion, but these can be derived from the four primary virtues as deployed in particular situations. To repeat, I generated this treatment or taxonomy of civic virtue from studying the lives of the people treated in this book. But I start with the taxonomy itself, because I want you to bring it to bear on the biographies. That will allow you to see why I regard these figures as exemplary.

Commitment to a cause greater than one's own ambitions does not entail that one is not personally ambitious; indeed all these figures with the possible exceptions of Lame Deer and Voltairine de Cleyre were conspicuous by their aspiration to go down in history. But real commitment does entail that one's ambitions are not merely personal, that one hopes to transform the conditions under which other people live. Emma Goldman and de Cleyre advocated a profound liberation of the human body and the human spirit that they called anarchy and associated with joy. Malcolm X tried to instill a sense of identity, purpose, and discipline in an oppressed people, so that they could transform their oppressive conditions. Barry Goldwater sought a revival of self-reliance by dismantling world communism and government control over people's lives in the United States. And Lame Deer tried to formulate a way to affirm the world profoundly - even or particularly in its wild and questionable aspects - and to draw us into that affirmation with him and hence to transform our lives. They fought hard for these goals throughout their public lives.

Commitment is not primarily something cognitive; it is a passionate state and its strength varies with the strength of passion. It is fueled by empathy for others, and it is focused into constructive action. It motivates and underlies a capacity for hard work. But in itself it is an emotional relation to certain beliefs and projects and persons. Thus I disagree with those who hold personal morality to be primarily a form or result of reasoning. The commitment that these figures bring to their projects might be involuntary: it is experienced as a calling or even a trial to which they are subjected. And it easily enough can lead to moral lapses. For example, Goldwater deeply regretted his neglect of his wife and children for his political career. Malcolm X retracted some of the extreme statements he made as a spokesman for the Nation of Islam. Nevertheless, the achievements of each of these people would have been impossible without an absolutely serious core of belief. Their commitment was certainly a key part of what in them inspired others, of what made them leaders. And in a leader, the quality of commitment separates true inspiration from mere seduction: separates the people discussed here from, for example, Clinton.

Commitment cannot be manifested without courage. But the courage is derivative from the commitment. It is perhaps obvious from my title and selection of figures that I am drawn to extremes. That is partly because great public virtue is more obvious in cases where one has to advocate one's views over the objections of a majority, or in the face of authority, or both. If one was a courageous advocate of, let us say, Keynesian economics, or "targeted tax cuts," one's courage would have no opportunity for expression. And the heroic quality of these figures derives in large part from the courage with which their commitment was expressed. What separates them from their own followers is that they said what they believed in public at great risk to themselves. And it is commitment that underlies their endurance, their ability to hold to their course over the long haul and despite seemingly or actually insuperable barriers.

Brutally frank, each of these figures was fundamentally unafraid to take controversial positions and stick to them in the face of withering attack. They were all rebels. Though each attracted a group of like-minded souls or of people drawn to their force of personality, each would have held to an advocacy of their fundamental beliefs even if he or she had been completely alone in doing so. They had a basic response of rebellion to what we might broadly term the social consensus, and I find that admirable. Indeed, one of the fundamental ways we might categorize people is by whether they essentially seek to belong in a consensus or whether they instinctively attack accepted opinion. I'm afraid that no one could be a hero of mine who simply embodied or reiterated a consensus, even if I were in agreement with it.

To me it matters less what these people believed than how they believed. I realize that this is problematic: it seems to involve a kind of abstraction from content to form. And yet I think it is a perfectly reasonable claim that good people could have radically different positions on the same issues, and that, on the other hand, fundamentally despicable people could take up the right positions, or at least positions with which one agrees. Often it seems to me that people confuse their own disagreement with the views of some public figure with the evil of the figure, and often they make the inverse mistake and believe that whoever agrees with their own positions or tries to enact them must have an admirable character. Indeed, when I told various friends of mine that I was going to write about Barry Goldwater as an exemple of public virtue, they seemed shocked, as they believed his political positions to be false or immoral. (Most of my friends could be broadly described as leftists.) But what I admire about Barry Goldwater is his commitment and his honesty, and those qualities may be displayed even by opponents of the Great Society.

Of course there are limits to an approach that associates character with the way a position is taken up rather than the content of the position itself. If someone is advocating genocide, for example, that is obviously an immense moral failure. But short of truly extreme cases, there is wide scope for disagreement among good people. As I already admitted, the people I admire had an extremist streak. And yet their near-fanaticism is absolutely inseparable from what made them admirable: that they had certain fundamental beliefs that motivated them to be public figures in the first place, and which they were, finally, unwilling to compromise. At the same time, all of these figures took up positions I disagree with or took actions in the expression of their beliefs that I think were wrong.

Emma Goldman, for example, advocated terrorism and participated in a conspiracy to commit assassination. I think that is a terrible moral error. But it is inextricable from the things that made Emma a profoundly admirable and liberating figure. Malcolm X for much of his public career declared the superiority of black over white people and often edged toward something like an advocacy of race war. But that position was inseparable from what enabled him to redeem lives from drugs and violence and to instill pride and purpose in thousands of people. Lame Deer was a womanizer, a drunk, and a thief. And yet he himself declared that to be holy, a man had to experience everything that life had to offer, had to learn to love life even in its most questionable aspects. Barry Goldwater lent comfort to segregationists and racists by declaring that federal enforcement of integration laws violated the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution. When he ran for president just as Jim Crow was breathing its last, he carried only his home state of Arizona and the five deep south states most resistant to racial justice. Yet Goldwater's strict constitutional constructionism is inseparable from what enabled the movement he founded to achieve a renaissance of American culture and beliefs.

Self-reflection is a force that moderates or tempers commitment: a quality that prevents commitment from degenerating into mere fanaticism. For one thing, knowledge of self underlies all humility, and leaders become dangerous in proportion to their self-inflation or grandiosity. An acute consciousness of the limits of one's knowledge and abilities mitigates commitment with realism and introduces a healthy dose of hesitation.

One thing that I will not be able fully to convey in writing is the gleam of humor in Malcolm X's eye as he called white people devils on national television. There is no doubt that Malcolm had a lot of rage. I personally believe that his rage was, given the circumstances, itself a virtue. But Malcolm always had a slight distance from his rage: he saw himself as enraged, cultivated his rage. And thus he could use his rage and the rage of his audience rather than let it use him. White people heard or read the words of Malcolm X with fear and anger. But when they met him, they experienced a certain gentleness generated in his self-reflection, and a certain comfort generated by the fact that he did not take himself perfectly seriously.

Malcolm's development after he left the Nation of Islam was an adventure in self-reflection. Seldom has any person wrestled so publicly with developments in his own belief system. And the power that is manifest in Malcolm's autobiography derives from the power of his amusing and withering self-awareness. He was not a fanatic, because he knew the sources of his beliefs and his rage, and because he maintained a sort of self-deprecating humor. If demagogues such as, say, George Wallace, had had Malcolm X's power of self-reflection, the character of their public advocacy would have been entirely transformed, and what they advocated could itself have been transformed, as Malcolm's beliefs were in the last two years of his life. And, in fact, George Wallace did undergo such a transformation, but in his case it occurred after he had left the public stage, and after all the damage he could do to American race relations had been done.

Self-reflection is closely related to sense of humor, because the distance humor yields on the self opens possibilities of reflection. A sense of humor is not a luxury in our world: it is essential for sanity. Humor is at once the outcome and the fuel of reflection, and the true fanatic regards himself and the world as an utterly serious thing. Humor lends one a lightness or deftness of touch that affects the meaning of all of one's words. And it lends living in this world with all its absurdity and evil and suffering a sense of openness and possibility and joy. If we try to conceive of a profound human liberation, we have to conceive human life as potentially the arena of comedy, because if one stares squarely at the world without some admixture of humor, all one sees is pointless pain. Thus, humor is redemptive, and it absolutely does not preclude one from acting or also taking the world's pain seriously. A humorless person does not see her own foibles and errors as the stuff of comedy. Such a person is fundamentally dull or fundamentally dangerous or both.

Indeed, Lame Deer was as much a comedian as a spiritual leader, and for him these were intrinsically connected. To find joy and irony in the world was essential to Lame Deer's experience of the world as God's presence. Lame Deer thought of himself as the Great Spirit's clown or jester. And humor is certainly central to the effect that Lame Deer has had on others. It makes his own autobiography a delight to read, and will keep Lame Deer Seeker of Visions on people's shelves and in people's hearts for a long time.

The English word integrity derives from the Latin "integer," meaning whole or complete. A person who possesses integrity is of a piece: "integrity" indicates that the person who possesses it holds together. The sort of wholeness relevant here is achieved by keeping faith with oneself in the public sphere. That is, one shows oneself in public to be the person one is in private. The public persona of a person of integrity is not a sham or a mask or an act: it is the reality of oneself. Public life is a constant challenge to integrity in this sense. It is a constant temptation to manufacture and deploy a false self that can be presented on the hustings and in the media. This is the most conspicuous moral failure of American politicians. When people say they don't trust politicians, they don't only or even primarily mean that they don't believe what a politician says. They mean that there is a pervasive failure of reality in the politician's public persona. It's not that you don't believe what he says; it's that in some sense you don't believe what he is.

What finally attracts me most deeply about all these figures is that they wore no mask: their commitment was not fundamentally or not only to a set of positions, but to be absolutely themselves. They were not actors or performers; they had the guts not to try to be what people wanted them to be, but try to see what they could do in public as themselves. Al Gore, for example, is not present in his public persona, which is why people refer to him as an automaton or robot. They sense the carefully-constructed and focus-grouped false self which Gore performs on the public stage. That is in exquisite contrast to, say, the approach of Barry Goldwater, who was a hilarious, straight-talking bastard in public, just as he was in private. Gore can't be a real leader because he's not there; it is essential to the quality of leadership that I find admirable that it bears an intrinsic connection to the identity of the person who wields it. So one could think of integrity as entailing a certain kind of honesty. It is an honesty of truth-telling, of the courage to tell hard truths, but it is more deeply an honesty of being, of keeping faith with oneself.

Another way to get at the notion of integrity is through its opposite: hypocrisy. The Greek term hypocrits essentially means "actor." Of course there is nothing wrong with being an actor, but according to the structure developed here for understanding leadership and civic virtue, those functions have nothing to do with acting. Indeed, though acting and leadership both involve public performances, one could think of them as opposite ways of taking up those performances: one is a craft of deception, the other a craft of truth. Or if acting, too, can bring us truths, it does so by way of deception, whereas civic virtue comes straight out of reality and heads straight at the truth. I hold hypocrisy to be the cardinal vice of public life, and we might characterize it most generally as a detachment of private self from public persona. In hypocrisy, we might say, self and persona are at war, and the values that one violates the other espouses. That is simply the everyday reality for most public persons. They get the suit on and take the stage and start muttering platitudes that they themselves don't believe when they get home. People like that shouldn't (and usually don't) inspire others no matter what positions they advocate, and their hypocrisy is, by and large, evident precisely in their public personae.

This notion of integrity seems to presuppose an account of the self as a unitary thing, as an authentic identity that can be displayed or betrayed in public space. The notion of the self as unified - what is sometimes called "the Cartesian self" - is out of fashion in the academic world, even if it still passes for something like common sense elsewhere. People whose work falls broadly under the rubric of postmodernism hold the self to be "multiple," "fragmented," "contested," and so on. I too reject the notion of the self as a single unified field or force or entity.

But I think the notion of integrity can be retrieved almost no matter what one's account of the self turns out to be. I do not think the human self is necessarily consistent over time, and I think it really is constituted by its relations to other people and to the world. And yet I have had the experience of being called into a social role and feeling that I myself am absent or false in the performance of that role. If you have had that experience, then you know what I mean by integrity because you know what it's like to fail at it. Obviously that experience is itself compatible with any possibly true account of what the human self is, since it's an experience that people very commonly have.

Finally, all of these figures possessed very intense connections to people, to places, and, if they were believers, to God. Connectedness allowed these figures to avoid power-madness even in cases, such as Malcolm's, in which they wielded great power over a group of people. Indeed, one could even account for self-reflection and integrity as connections of the self to itself. The sort of connectedness I refer to takes many forms. Voltairine de Cleyre's powerful empathy with and compassion for the poor, immigrants, even animals - the compassion and empathy that were the driving force of her career as an agitator and writer - manifest connection, as does Goldwater's attachment to the land of Arizona: its rivers, mountains, animals, and sky. All of these figures had considerable capacity for loyalty and friendship, which are modes and expressions of connection. Social and spiritual connection to the Nation of Islam and its members and its Allah allowed Malcolm X to transform himself from drug addict and thief to minister and inspirational figure. But it is Lame Deer, above all, who lived in a total devotion to connection. Every aspect of his politics and his spirituality, and even his clowning, even his drunkenness, was about losing a sense of the separation between self and world. "Connection" expresses the deepest teachings of Lakota spirituality, and all ceremony and prayer is devoted to becoming part of what is, or rather, to breaking through the delusion that one is separate from what is.

The philosopher/novelist Iris Murdoch argues that whatever intensifies the self, makes it into one's entire world, locks one up inside it, is evil. The self, she says, is narcissistic, obsessive, a trap that ensnares one and slowly makes the people and places and ideas that surround one seem unreal. Once the world seems unreal, one can be tempted toward any enormity; one experiences one's own acts as moves in a game and the people around one as pawns. Goodness for Murdoch consists of an emptying of the self into the world. To make oneself transparent to reality in this way is to open the possibility of seeing the truth. Such transparency is the prerequisite of knowledge, as knowledge is of goodness. The intense self is delusory. When one ponders the monsters of history - its genocidal killers such as Pol Pot or its dangerous madmen such as Rasputin - one sees people who were utterly trapped within themselves, people for whom the reality of others has lost its moral claim. They lived in a shadow play in which people and the earth were reduced to props or puppets. Respecting persons and respecting the earth require the acknowledgment of their reality - a sense both of their genuine externality to and of their profound connection with the self. And those who feel and acknowledge that reality with particular intensity become moral heroes.

This series of thoughts, which Murdoch associates with Plato, is present in many of the world's great ethical and religious belief-systems. The golden rule of Jesus and Confucius is a version of the idea: it enjoins an experience in which, through empathy, one is taught the reality of other people. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" requires permeability to the experiences and ideas and emotions of other people, acknowledging the reality of other people as being the same as one's own. The practice of meditation in Zen and other traditions is a discipline of self-clarification, a discipline of rendering oneself transparent, of emptying and clarifying the self until one is no longer separate from the world. The highest expression of these approaches is reached in an experience in which one feels one's connection to all things simultaneously, in which the delusion of the ego, the self's bondage to itself, is dissolved. With the exception of Lame Deer, none of these figures achieved that sort of sagacity. But they each achieved very intense forms of connection, and much that was great about them emerged from that connection. Their connection was both a source of their passion and what tempered it. It was the center of their effect on the world and of the world's effect on them.

The sum of the virtues of commitment, self-reflection, integrity, and connection is truth. This is the elusive but immediately recognizable quality that Malcolm X, Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre, Barry Goldwater, and Lame Deer all share. In order to be true to oneself and the people one loves and the world, a person must have the capacity for self-examination that allows them to avoid self-betrayal. And that requires the most serious moral commitment not to betray oneself, not to "sell out." But it requires as well a distance from the self that allows a wedge of self-deprecation: if one understands oneself truly, one's sense of oneself will be leavened with a core of humor, humanity, and humility. And it also requires a deep sense of situatedness in a world of people and of things. Where integrity emerges in a resolution within the self, truth in the sense I use it also requires connectedness: it is in part a transparency to the world. Living and leading in truth, one is true to other people and the world, keeps faith with them.

Leadership

We should think of true leadership as a legitimate form of interpersonal power. Leadership must originate within the self of the leader and it must transform the selves of the led, else it is tyranny or emptiness. Leadership without truth is either sheer demagoguery or sheer bureaucracy. And the kind of truth I am talking about is not primarily a matter of what one says or what one believes; it is a matter of one's relation to what one says or believes. It is not a coincidence that the one position that all these figures were equally committed to was liberation. This follows directly from the way they exercised leadership: not by constraining other people to behave as they ought, but by inspiring them to. All of these people had a deep respect for the autonomy of the people they inspired: none of them was a dictator in waiting. Goldwater is sometimes referred to as a "fascist," but this is a deeply disingenuous misapprehension. Indeed, it was Goldwater's opponents who favored beefing up the authority of the state, while Goldwater always pursued its dismantlement. And Malcolm X's leadership finally became incompatible with the authoritarian structure of the Nation of Islam. He found that he himself could no longer commit himself to a deference to that authority, and that he could no longer impose it on others.

True leadership is something we give to people, not something they seize from us. Thus, ultimately, it is incompatible with dictatorial power, not because we can't voluntarily cede dictatorial power over ourselves, but because if that power is indeed given voluntarily, it can always be taken back. None of these figures in their most thoughtful stage ever claimed power over anyone that the person over which it was exercised didn't give enthusiastically. For each of them, their own leadership had to be compatible with the autonomy of the people in collaboration with whom it was generated and exercised.

Power over other people that is seized or exercised by force and in violation of their autonomy is illegitimate power and hence not leadership as I am using the term. That is why, for example, the power of the American government is supposed to derive from the consent of the governed. And it is why many theories of the legitimacy of the political state reach for some sort of social contract: because it there were a social contract of this kind, it would derive the power that is wielded over people as deriving from the autonomy of those people themselves. These are acknowledgments that true leadership must ultimately be compatible with freedom, that where leadership is exercised by force rather than inspiration, it is false.

Reconceiving Virtue and Vice

But if this sort of truth is key to understanding the character of public people, then character must be considered holistically. It is not enough, in evaluating character, to list a set of virtues, even the list I myself gave above. The most important question is whether and how the aspects of someone's character hold together. Kant famously objected to Aristotle's virtue ethics in the following way. Aristotle said that courage was a virtue. But courage in an evil man simply makes that man more dangerous: he would better have been a coward. Aquinas, as also some recent philosophers, argue that, contrary to appearances, a disposition to do good (which is essentially how they conceive virtue) cannot cause or explain a bad act. The arguments for that defense of Aristotle (for example that what appears to be physical courage in, let us say, an act of terrorism, is actually a kind of cowardice), it is fair to say, are strained. The conclusions that Kant drew from his objection need not divert us here; the conclusion I'd like to draw is that people's characters are usually all-or-nothing propositions: if they're courageous, then they're potentially dangerous as well as admirable. And a closely related conclusion is that the very things that make a person good or admirable or even great can also be the most dangerous, bizarre, or even evil things about them. There is no quality of character as it is manifest in real people that does not have this double-edged quality. Nowhere in nature or in human nature does one find pure goodness. And where some saint or hero does approach that condition, their very purity is problematic. You'll find a fanatic, or someone who is terribly boring, or someone who seems to transcend the human altogether, and hence to be of limited use as a moral example. Characters come whole or not at all; virtues are vices and vices virtues. Even the summing virtue that I ascribe to these people - their truth - while it is what I most deeply admire, is double-edged. It is the great achievement of these figures, but it is also perhaps their downfall.

The insight that virtue is vice and vice virtue, which is related to the insight that greatness brings great suffering or great danger or violent death is a fundamental ethical insight. It is the tragic sense of life. It is the subject of much of the world's great art and literature, but it has not been sufficiently appreciated within the tradition of virtue ethics. I hope to illustrate the tragic sense in this book, and to bring it back into the ethical tradition.

I am a nominalist about virtues: the general concepts are parasitic on the characters of particular people. The question is not about courage in general; the question is about Emma's courage. Courage enabled her to throw into question many of the beliefs about gender, sexuality, art, and government that were presumed to be natural or inevitable in her own time. But courage also led her to something approaching fanaticism. It is impossible to conceive Emma without her courage. Without it, she would have been someone else. But on the other hand, it is impossible to conceive the particular courage that Emma displayed outside of the context of her character as a whole and, for that matter, outside the social and geographic contexts in which she lived her life. Moral concepts have histories; meanings shift slowly over time in response to external-world conditions and human connections to those conditions. Emma's courage expressed itself in a questioning and defying of social conventions. That is not just one way in which the universal notion of courage can be expressed; it is essential to Emma's courage. A warrior might have the courage to face great danger in combat, but not to disobey a direct order from his superior officer. I have no idea how Emma would have behaved in combat, but I know that ordering her around was literally impossible. She would have chosen death rather than submission.

And it is not simply that there are several varieties of courage. "Courage" is an abstraction from the real characters of real persons, and each such person's courage is unique in its composition, its relations to other aspects of character, historical circumstances, and expressions. The usual treatise on philosophical ethics proceeds backwards from abstractions to the real world, but here we see that the abstractions can only constitute a derivative of that world. They are simplifications or, as it were, shadows of the real world and cannot be understood in isolation from it.

Aristotle held virtue to be a mean between extremes. Courage, for example, was supposed to be a midpoint between cowardice and foolhardiness. Yet none of the people discussed here were people of moderation: in fact they were all drawn powerfully to extremes. And the point at which they drifted to the extreme is the point at which their essential characters were manifest. Contrary to Aristotle, it is also the point at which they are most interesting and admirable. But compatibly with Aristotle, it is the point of their greatest failings. In Barry Goldwater's famous dictum that "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue," we see the man encapsulated. That sentence shows why Goldwater was a unique and inspiring public figure and also why he could not win the presidency. It was Goldwater's commitment to liberty that made him inspirational, and that fueled an evolution toward a belief in women's and gay rights late in his life. But Goldwater's extremism also, as we shall see, goes a long way toward explaining the great failure of his character: his fitful blindness to the oppression of people whose experience he did not understand. Barry Goldwater's extremism was at once his greatest virtue and his greatest vice, and one cannot edit people the way one edits a document - simply deleting portions of the existing text and refining others. By the time people are mature, and even well before that, they come all of a piece. Would Goldwater have been a better man if he was more moderate? The simplicity and seeming good sense of that question mask the basic misapprehension that underlies it. A more moderate Goldwater could not have taken up the position in public life that the real Goldwater did.

One thing that follows from this is that the virtues cannot be inculcated as abstract concepts. Bennett and MacIntyre are right, in other words, to suggest that one should start with characters and narratives. It is worse than useless to tell my child to be courageous, then perhaps set out some definition of courage. One needs to show her particular instances of courage, courage as it expresses itself in somebody's life. And so one tells her stories and shows her exemplars.

What I am aiming for in this book is a way to affirm the people I admire in their wholeness, to show that greatness and rebellion, moral purpose and extremism are inseparable as they are expressed in these personalities. This book is an attempt to affirm my own heroes, but where that affirmation takes us is into a rethinking of heroism itself. I want to show that, somehow, the moral wrongness or even evil of the people I discuss is redeemed because what makes them great is also precisely what makes them wrong or even evil. This is a dangerous undertaking, obviously, at least if anyone takes what I am saying to heart. But it is a necessary undertaking in that anything else is destructive of human personality because it purports to break it down into component parts. This distinction of persons into bits or traits is uselessly abstract because no person actually comes separated into bits. My experiences of the people I am writing about have transformed my life, and I believe that with all their mistakes and incoherences they can show us all how to be a little more true, that is, a little better. And they can help us see that, for all of us, what condemns us is also what redeems us. That is our tragedy and our hope.

Sources

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, e.g. trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985). The classic treatment in the Western canon of matters of virtue and character.

William Bennet, ed., The Book of Virtues (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993). This collection of moralistic tales is as superficial a popularization of virtue ethics as could be imagined, or for that matter tolerated. This book has given rise to the virtue industry.

Roger Crisp and Michael Slote, Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). An excellent introduction to virtue ethics and a good anthology of the basic papers in its revival, this volume includes texts by Murdoch and MacIntyre. John McDowell argues for the position that virtues are varieties of knowledge, which I deny, since I regard some virtues as passions and all virtues as involving passions. Philippa Foot argues that when courage, e.g., is used for bad purposes, it is not a virtue. Again, that's a position I reject. I hope eventually to develop and defend an account of virtue in relation to these thinkers and issues, and others.

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2^nd ed 1984) . Probably the locus classicus of the revival of virtue ethics in contemporary philosophy.

Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Penguin, 1997). With regard to the themes explored here, see especially the essay "On 'God' and 'Good.'"