Prior to a few months ago, I had heard of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s expedition to Antarctica because of the notes to T. S. Eliot’s modern anti-epic The Waste Land, but I knew nothing of the particulars. A friend of mine shared a copy with me and left written in the endpages a note that this story—in Alfred Lansing’s classic telling, Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage—had often been suggested to her as a great book on leadership. Even given this thematic cue, I was shocked at the theological depth of Shackleton’s care for his crew. They encountered enormous difficulties after their ship, the Endurance, became locked between two floes of ices and crushed in its embrace, prompting a journey which traversed over 850 miles of antarctic ice and sea, but in collaboration with providence, Shackleton ensured that all twenty-eight men aboard returned alive to tell the tale. While his extraordinary story may seem far removed from our comfortable lives, several elements of Shackleton’s sacrificial care should speak to those of us who want to revitalize a Christian culture in our country today: his curious hiring practices, which were more unique than those “best practices” promoted by our “human resource” experts; his care for the particularity of his men; and how his men promoted authentic leisure in the darkest of times.
When Shackleton selected newcomers for his expedition (in addition to the veterans with whom he had already traveled), despite having received “more than five thousand applications” for a crew of less than thirty, he did not conduct an intense, multistage interview process with preset questions but conducted remarkably brief interviews, where his intuitive sense and knowledge of human nature was on full display. Lansing reports that Shackleton’s hiring “decisions were made with lightning speed,” with no interviews on record which “last[ed] more than five minutes.” How could Shackleton do this? He trusted his intuitive sense of the person in front of him and only asked what he needed to, taking for a revelation what the man responded.
As Lansing notes, “Dr. Alexander Macklin, one of the two surgeons, caught Shackleton’s fancy by replying, when Shackleton asked him why he was wearing glasses: ‘Many a wise face would look foolish without spectacles.’” Why is this remark endearing? To be a good fit for such a tight-knit endeavor—especially as a surgeon, who has to deal with men in their suffering—it is not enough to have technical expertise in one’s field; a sense of humility and humor is necessary. Shackleton evinced this search for humility especially among the scientists again when he questioned Reginald James, who would become the ship’s physicist, asking him not only about his physical health but also whether “he was good-tempered—and if he could sing.”
To lead, one must be in a habit of associating with one’s fellows, not as a superior but precisely as a fellow, whether a fellow shipmate or a fellow Christian—who is but a fellow shipmate in the barque of the Church.
Lansing tells us that James was puzzled by this last question. How is it necessary for a physicist to sing? “‘Oh, I don’t mean any Caruso stuff,’ Shackleton reassured him, ‘but I suppose you can shout a bit with the boys?’” Shackleton’s question wasn’t whether James was a singing virtuoso but whether James had the virtue that Aristotle and St. Thomas called eutrapelia, charm, playfulness—whether he could sing with his fellow crewmates as part of their common good, the leisure of their life together, not keeping aloof as a “superior” but truly engaging in a common life. This virtue is necessary for us as human beings, but particularly for leaders in small institutions. It is not enough to be an esteemed professor of philosophy, or theology, or classics (as good as such expertise is), but to lead, one must be in a habit of associating with one’s fellows, not as a superior but precisely as a fellow, whether a fellow shipmate or a fellow Christian—who is but a fellow shipmate in the barque of the Church.
It is this common association among Christians that should most truly mark the distinctiveness of Catholic organizations—an understanding and a practice of the reality that the hierarchical distinction between the president and the handyman is less fundamental than their common belonging to Christ, and thus their common belonging to each other. Each has his place in the institution, but his dignity exceeds his job, and thus for the leader to do his job well, he must be cognizant of and his actions reflective of that simple truth. As the provost of Dartmouth, Santiago Schnell, recently said to the USCCB, a number of Catholic institutions have lost their distinctiveness, such that “both Catholic institutions and non-Catholic institutions have become very secularized, and they’re doing this through imitation.” While Christendom College president, George Harne, in a recent essay has examined “the rise of administrative offices disconnected from the core educational mission of colleges and universities [and] the lack of institutional vision among college leaders,” Schnell’s comment suggests it is not simply a lack of vision at play. As reporter Gigi Duncan summarized his remarks, “Schnell warned that Catholic character can erode when faculty and administrators do not actively share the Church’s mission.”
Failing in that active participation in the mission of the Church to “restore all things in Christ” (see Eph 1:10) can come about through either negligence of the active duties of charity or hypocrisy; Shackleton demonstrated neither. The leader of the expedition “wanted to appear familiar with the men. He even worked at it, insisting on having exactly the same treatment, food, and clothing. He went out of his way to demonstrate his willingness to do the menial chores . . . and he occasionally became furious when he discovered that the cook had given him preferential treatment because he was the ‘Boss.’” Shackleton’s entering into the common life of the ship in this way seems charitable, even humble, but one could stick to that word Lansing wrote above, “appear.” King Duncan in Shakespeare’s Macbeth insists that “there’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face” (1.4.13–14). How do we know a leader isn’t simply pretending, feigning a familiarity with the crew that he doesn’t really desire? Only through it becoming a settled habit, something which can be witnessed perduring throughout time. While Lansing attributes a kind of mental aloofness to Shackleton on account of his awareness of his grave responsibility, he makes sure we know that he took “part in all the men’s activities . . . spen[ding] hours teaching them to play bridge.” Shackleton demonstrated fidelity, constancy, endurance, which Monsignor James Shea, the president of the University of Mary, recently exhorted us to see as the necessity of the Christian life.
The inescapable necessity for the Christian leader is the inescapable necessity for the Christian in general: care for the particular men and women placed in his or her care.
But what if a Catholic leader fails in this steadfastness, either making a crucial managerial mistake due to being overcome by his passions or, more tragically, forsaking his post entirely? What then is to be done? This time, it is not Shackleton’s actions that show us the way but those of his crew.
On a particularly desperate morning, March 28, 1916, after the crew of the Endurance had struck out on the frozen terrain, taking sledges and boats away from the ship they had to abandon, when their food stores were low with little hope of finding more, a fight emerged among the senior officers in Shackleton’s absence. “In the midst of it, Greenstreet [first officer] upset his powdered milk,” and turned to blame Clark, the ship’s biologist, who “tried to protest, but Greenstreet shouted him down.” But when Greenstreet “paused to get his breath,” a general silence emerged in the tent, and “without speaking, Clark reached out and poured some of his milk into Greenstreet’s mug. Then Worsley, then Macklin, and Rickenson and Kerr, Orde-Lees, and finally Blackboro.”
Clark, though apparently unjustly targeted by his superior, wins him back through charity, charity which brings back to the tent the tranquility of order as all the other men also contribute to Greenstreet’s mug, professing implicitly the truth that Elder Zosima in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov never ceases to proclaim, that we each are responsible for the sins of each other, because we belong to one another, being members of the one body of Christ. Because, as provost of the College of St. Joseph the Worker, Andrew Willard Jones, argues, “Every human encounter bears the marks of the archetypical father-son relationship”; when the one in the position of the son is wronged by his “father,” he must not respond as an enemy but in charity, hoping it will call the other to repentance, “heap[ing] coals of fire on his head” so as to bring the fire of clarity to his mind and purify his thoughts so that he may both know and live according to the truth (see Rom 12:20).
The inescapable necessity for the Christian leader is the inescapable necessity for the Christian in general: care for the particular men and women placed in his or her care. Treating one’s employees as so many replaceable “human resources” rather than unique persons sharing a common destiny—our life in God—should be repugnant to the leader who strives to live the Gospel. Shackleton knew his men well, and carefully weighed both their strengths and weaknesses when choosing who would go with him as members of a five-man crew in a boat on a desperate journey to bring help to the rest of his men, consulting his second-in-command, Frank Wild, “not only as to who should be taken, but who should not be left behind.” Shackleton did not take his favorite men on the James Caird, but he took the men who needed to be on board for the common good both of the boat and of the larger crew who stayed on Elephant Island.
Such decisions were possible because he knew the men closely, and knew how they related to each other. As Shakespeare and Thomas More scholar Nicolas McAfee reminds us, in his Politics, Aristotle called the good city eusynoptos, a term which means that it can be taken in—seen and known—in a single view; this quality seems essential for a leader to exercise what the tradition of Catholic social thought calls subsidiarity, which includes the ability of a leader to leave each member of a hierarchy with his own proper task unless that member is unable to perform it. Being able to recognize when he needs to intervene requires that a leader know intimately the members of his crew, so that he understands when his leadership team might be acting unreasonably and so that he might restore right order when it is threatened.
Many forces in our contemporary life seek to diminish the reality of particularity, however, making it harder for persons to be known as they are. We can consider a variety of present unrealities, whether the legalistic, bureaucratic practices in the workplace which reduce the possibilities of real friendship between people; or the “aesthetic emptiness” which the scholar of the particular Annemarie Krall has noticed when it comes to the “instagram chic” that many new restaurants and businesses incarnate, effacing the local character of the cities they come to dominate; or the loss of particular institutions in small communities which draw people together, away from the illusion of social life they encounter on social media. One of the final examples which Shackleton’s expedition might give us—though in its antarctic splendor and suffering it might seem so far from our life—is that of leisure, not imposed from above by Shackleton himself but emerging from within the particular character and initiative of his men.
Some of this leisure arose apparently spontaneously, when the men turned necessity into hilarity. When Wild and George Marston, the crew’s official artists, decided to give each other haircuts, they got carried away and ended up shaving each others’ heads entirely. It prompted a trend, and the whole crew had their heads shaved—including Shackleton himself, who in the pictures that survive of him, was particularly well coiffed. This began a reign of “many pranks,” including a mock trial of Worsley, the captain, for “robbing a Presbyterian church of a trouser button out of the offertory bag and having turned the same to base and ignoble use.” Rather than despairing of breaking out of the ice’s captivity that held their ship, the men turned to jollity, even celebrating Midwinter Day with farcical skits and verses they wrote themselves. A particularly notable performance was that of A. J. Kerr, second engineer, singing “Spagoni the Toreador,” a song which would recur on their next Midwinter Day together in 1916, long after they had abandoned the Endurance but continued to endure, despite the departure of Shackleton and his crew of five to seek help on the island of South Georgia.
What the crew’s efforts to promote true leisure show us is that while it is needful to educate the Christian leaders of the future, to raise up an elite which will understand its mission as service of the common good and love of the poor rather than exploitation of its power for its own selfish pleasures, it is also necessary for us to teach all of those in our care, whether as the fathers and mothers of children, the teachers of students, or as leaders in the workplace, to possess the virtue of eutrapelia, of social charm, which leads to a more vivacious sociality than that which can be procured with the endless scrolling or swiping often characteristic of our so-called “leisure.” Social charm and charity go hand in hand, as both flow from and reinforce the beauty of particularity in the men and women around us, beautiful in their being unique reflections of God’s own image. Anxiety, so often produced by a disembodied attachment to the digital “cosmos” addictively produced by social media, will unfit both leaders and crew for the difficult task of sailing together. The real test of Catholic institutions will be whether people can actually live within them, precisely as Catholics in hot pursuit of the holy. By this, and only for this, will we be known among our peers and fellow citizens, as it is self-sacrificial charity which makes us a new creation in the image of Jesus Christ and him crucified.