Tragic or Comic

Dan Russ

Two Visions of Life and Leadership

Many of us are awakening to the reality that we are in the midst of a cultural crisis, not merely a financial crisis. While there are many causes of our current crisis, none is more pronounced than a faulty vision of life and leadership. I am not speaking only of political leaders, who often have less influence on profound cultural changes, for good or bad, than they and we like to think. In every arena of our culture, our leaders and we have lost our way and need to recover our sight.

In the early 1970s, Donald Cowan, then president of the University of Dallas, said to the parents of incoming freshmen, “We are here to educate your children, our students, to be leaders at 42, not merely to get jobs at 22.” He went on to say that we need young people educated in a classical Christian tradition because those being educated on the trendy and shallow curriculum of the post-1960s would not have the philosophical depth or the historical perspective to guide us through the coming decades. Those trained through such a curriculum, he added, would come into powerful positions of leadership in the early 1990s, when we will face huge upheavals in our culture, and we will then need those with moral imagination, grounded in the old verities, who can stand in the breach.

My own attempt to understand this cultural blindness has been to re-vision our culture in light of the contrasting lenses of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, those two classic stories that founded our ideal of the epic enterprise and heroic leaders.

The Iliad is a tragic epic about the clash of two civilizations, their ideals and their leaders. I call it tragic because the story ends with one civilization destroying another and with the Greek champion Achilles brutally killing Troy’s Prince Hector. Not only must Hector die, but Achilles is told by the gods that his life will be glorious but brief. While Achilles is glorious and the Greeks sincerely fight for the ideals of hospitality and honor, the reality is that their vision of life had become one of war and, therefore, their vision of leader is that of a warrior. What began as a means to an end has become the end in itself.

In contrast, the Odyssey is a comic epic story of a man who believes in relationships and ideals worth living for. I call it comic because, like the Bible and Shakespearean comedy, it ends in the restoration of a kingdom, the reuniting of the royal family, and the recovery of deeply held cultural values. While Odysseus indeed engages in battles with men and monsters and struggles with deities and demigods, sometimes killing them but more often outrunning or outwitting them, he manages to do so as a means to an end: Penelope, Telemachos, his household, and his beloved Ithacans and the right order of things they embody. In short, the Odyssey sees life not as a tragic conflict but as a comic journey and leaders as shepherds or guides for the journey.

There are certainly times in the life of a people when war is necessary, but there are too many cultures around the world, including our own in the last several years, where life has become war, and hostile leaders take charge. When a people come to envision life as fundamentally warfare, and leaders as warriors, we soon forget that just war, as Augustine reminds us, is for the sake of peace: shalom, the right order of things so that humans can flourish.

Leading in peacetime is far more complicated than warfare, because a culture at peace recognizes the complexities of life and the importance of giving all people honor and justice. So much of our modern world with its global cultures in constant crises, real or sometimes manufactured, reminds me of the Odyssey’s Ithaca at the end of twenty years of warfare: a wife without her husband, a son without his father, a people without their leaders, all because war took away a generation of brave men and left a gang of entitled hooligans to fill the vacuum. But Odysseus embodied a vision of life with a clear understanding of what he was fighting for. By his wit, courage, and the aid of a motley crew of people and gods, he journeyed home and restored the old verities for which so many had died.

War is sometimes necessary but always tragic. However, when a people envision life—their biological existence, their economy, or the relationship of sexes, generations, ethnicities, or ideologies—as war, as the survival of the fittest, it can only lead to tragedy in every realm of life. General Dwight Eisenhower understood this; General Douglas MacArthur did not. While “culture wars” may be a helpful sociological description of the conflicts within our society, it has not served us well as a vision for life or a strategy for leadership.

Martin Luther King, Jr., no stranger to conflict and confrontation, was in the Christian tradition of leaders like Augustine and described a vision, a dream of racial harmony and peace. He reminded us that “The arc of history may be long, but it does bend toward justice.” He did not embody a tragic vision of life as war, as a zero-sum game. He was a sojourner and a guide on his way to a future the final chapter of which is not Armageddon but a Marriage Feast in an eternal and perfectly ordered city. Our culture is starved for such a vision and for leaders who can lead us into it. 

Dr. Dan Russ, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, is the director of the Center for Christian Studies at Gordon College and author, most recently, of Flesh-and-Blood Jesus. He and his wife Kathy live in Danvers, MA.

0 Responses • Features, Arts and Culture, Being Human, Leadership, Wed 12 Nov 2008