A great disappointment in our country’s politics is that it no longer requires adequate knowledge, experience, and wisdom from those considered worthy of election to public office. For so many years now, we have chosen to lead us not just a few men and women whose only claim to ascendancy over us is popularity not from achievement but from media exposure. The point has been reached, in fact, where we no longer demand that those aspiring for high public office to at least define themselves, tell us their political ideal, mission, or vision, or assure us that they have a clear idea of what they are doing in the first place. Gone indeed are the days when people who sought elective office could at least talk to us convincingly straight from their own minds and hearts, without the benefit of script or idiot board.
The tragedy of it all is that this is happening at this very time that we need mature, intelligent, and enlightened leadership to turn the nation around. More than ever before, we need men and women not only of action but of words—words to tell us in the most precise terms why this country is not moving forward at all, words to spell out concretely the crucial things to be done or undone to get us out of the hole we are in, and words to inspire us to close ranks and propel this archipelago to the greatness that has eluded it for more than half a millennium now. We need thinking leaders with the priceless gift of language, not necessarily stentorian, but who can define, articulate, and pursue the national agenda intelligently and purposively, with words that ring true whether spoken off the cuff or clothed with the rhetoric that important state occasions demand. For these big tasks, our country can ill afford any more individuals with very scant vocabulary—whether in Pilipino, English, or any other language or dialect—and much less those with no experience whatsoever in governance and public affairs.
How perilous it is that for the sake of political expediency, this country’s electorate is again being prodded to gloss over the importance of intelligence and good grasp of language in the art of leadership! All the more disturbing that our supposedly more intelligent political leaders and opinion-makers could tell us without mincing words that popularity and perceived honesty is a fair trade-off for ineptitude. When are we going to learn that the most powerful determinant of intellect is the breadth and depth of one’s vocabulary, and that the higher one’s responsibility, the wider and deeper the vocabulary needed to be effective on the job? One could not even name things in context—much less frame a decent sentence or meaningfully analyze or conclude about anything—if one didn’t have at least a decent grasp and understanding of the totally new activity or enterprise one ventures into.
In his 1993 essay collection, “The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt,” the well-regarded American economist and writer clearly captured the importance of vocabulary in good thinking in these words: “A vocabulary increases and sharpens our observation, as sharp observation in turn leads us to increase our vocabulary. The student of nature who is learning to recognize bushes and trees finds his observation increasingly sharpened as he is told how to identify respectively an oak, maple, elm, beech, pine, spruce, or hemlock. The name both fastens down the results of observation and tells him what distinguishing traits to look for. As a result of his knowledge, a countryman very seldom calls a specific tree simply a tree. The professional forester or nurseryman habitually makes even finer distinctions, such as that between red oaks, black oaks, and white oaks, or between Norway maples, Schwedler maples, and sugar maples.”
Perhaps we can avoid the costly political mistakes of our recent past if only our countrymen and our presumptive leaders get more keenly aware of this insight about the importance of good thinking in national leadership.
This essay is a condensation of an 820-word column that I wrote in The Manila Times
in December 2003 at the start of the national election campaign period in the Philippines. Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in
The Manila Times:
Our need for thinking national leaders with the gift of language---------------------
(Next:
The historical, literary, and eternal present tense) December 21, 2023
Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and X (Twitter) and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.
