The importance of gentlemanly politicians

Magnanimity is the virtue most needed when we least feel like exercising it. After a bitter and divisive general election, during a divorce, after a bad quarrel with a lover or friend, to be great-hearted is the obvious ideal.

In the first and still one of the greatest treatises ever written on moral philosophy, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics—so called because the philosopher’s son Nicomachus edited what had been lecture notes into the text we now have—a portrait is given of the ideally ethical individual. He (predictably “he”) is a deeply thoughtful individual who works out, for each situation of dilemma he finds himself in, the middle path between opposing vices. He is courageous because he chooses the middle path between cowardice and rashness. He is generous because he chooses the middle path between meanness and profligacy. He is continent because he chooses the middle path between inhibition and excess.

But the chief and defining characteristic of Aristotle’s ethical individual is magnanimity. This word, in its very etymology, sums up his ideal. The word derives from the Latin magna anima, which means “great soul” or “great mind”—or, even better at capturing its intention, “great heart”—in the sense of tolerance, kindness, sincerity and generosity. It is the origin of the concept of the “gentleman” in the ethical rather than social-class meaning of this term: it is the concept, as we still sometimes say, of the “real gent.”

The original Greek word used by Aristotle, from which Cicero and other Latin writers adapted their term, was the rather frightening-sounding megalopsychos, which sounds more like a description of Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining than a real gent. But it, too, simply means great mind or heart, and Aristotle’s point was that such a person would more often than not work out the right thing to do in situations of dilemma, using the distinctive human gift of reason, rather than relying on a fixed code or set of rules handed down by an authority, whether human or divine, which commands what everyone must do.

It is often extremely hard to be magnanimous, but if much turns on it—the needs of a country’s economy and security, the interests of the children in a failed marriage, the future of a treasured relationship—all the alternatives are much worse than swallowing one’s pride or resentment, and being a mensch.

Throughout the recent election campaign all politicians had to contemplate the idea of coalition because the opinion polls made a hung parliament seem certain. Magnanimity would have been much in order had that happened. But against the odds, one party achieved a majority. Does that mean business as usual—namely, hard-ball—and does that make magnanimity irrelevant?

It had better not mean this. After all, the percentage of votes cast meant that the winning party has a positive mandate from just a quarter of the country’s population (37 per cent of the 60-odd per cent of the electorate who turned out). This is the artifice of our very undemocratic electoral system, and it places a moral responsibility on the government’s shoulders to respect the fact that a majority of the country is almost certainly not with them on every single one of their pet projects. Where policy is a matter of partisan doctrine rather than necessity or good sense, the humbling reflection that one governs on the basis of an unjustifiable arithmetical trick should serve as a restraint: that is magnanimity in action too.

If we were ever to get electoral reform, coalitions will be the norm. Whatever one’s political persuasion, a just estimate of the last coalition would concede that it functioned rather well politically and as a government, which means that coalitions can work in the British environment, otherwise electorally and historically hostile to them. Magnanimity played a big part in making that possible over the last five years: it does the coalition’s leaders credit that this happened. Magnanimity could do so again in future.

The point of this most Aristotelian of virtues is that it enables fair compromises, it ignores whatever differences it realistically can, it seeks to get the best out of situations of difficulty. In truth, this applies just as much within a single political party forming a government with a majority, as it does in other circumstances. For parties are themselves internal coalitions, and the same links, often tenuous, across boundaries of difference have to be forged. When a zealous minority holds a whip hand it has to be magnanimous, too, in subordinating its sectarian desires to a more inclusive aim.

There will be need for magnanimity in all these senses, then, as the next five years unfold. Perhaps the greatest test of a government is whether it demonstrates that virtue in all it does.