Front and Center Newsletter – Vol. 2, No. 1, January 2024

In an essay titled “On Remembering Who We Are,” the late Melvin Bradford observed the following: “Yet as [Michael] Oakeshott insists, moral conduct is an art, insofar as it concerns the relations of men—an art learned by apprenticeship. And society is the necessary context of that learning.” The point that is made here is meant to stand in contrast to the modern idea that morality is learned by studying theories, principles, and precepts which ideally are worked out intellectually free of the constraints of a living moral tradition. For Bradford, and the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Christians, too, morally good behavior is learned in practice, and this is best done when people are young so that when they reach adulthood, and are able to understand the reasons for behaving as they had been taught, there are no, or few, bad habits to overcome. Thus, Plato’s insistence that education is first of all training in the habits of goodness. Of course, this requires some agreement on what those habits of goodness are, and this is the product, most often, of a shared understanding of what a community or a people exist in history to do, that is, an understanding of who we are.

Marines understand what they exist in history to do: make Marines, defend our country, and return good citizens to our communities. In pursuit of this purpose, we find the third of the Corps’ eleven principles of leadership: “Know your people and look out for their welfare.” This principle is described as among the most important principles of leadership. The importance of knowing the people one leads is crucial because an organization of people is an organization of people and not a machine. The various parts of a machine do not think for themselves or do any of the other uniquely human things that we do, and thus to regard and to lead a human organization as if it were a machine, and the people understood as interchangeable parts within it, is a serious mistake. Marines, and all people involved in missions or projects with other people, have families with the loves and responsibilities they entail. They each have personal histories that condition how each one interprets and experiences his or her life. We each have aspirations for our futures which, among young people especially, occupy a significant part of one’s daily reflections. In short, while we are each human, we are each individual human beings with our own personalities and our own strengths and weaknesses that give us custom-made paths of personal moral and intellectual development. This is why it can be extremely disruptive and counter-productive to treat a human organization as a machine because the important human personality of each member of the group is treated as insignificant in defiance of the clear truth of the matter. This generates frustration, resentment, anger, and contempt for the leader, all to the detriment of the unit and its mission.

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