Part 1: The Gentleman Lawyer

This is Part 1 of the 3-part series on the work of Thomas Shaffer, an American lawyer and writer on ethics.

There is a powerful scene at the end of a West Wing episode. The fictional President Jed Bartlett had spent almost the entire episode agonizing over whether to commute a prisoner’s death sentence. In the end, not wanting a political backlash, he let the prisoner go to his death despite the many pleas from his advisers.

Now, earlier in the episode, President Bartlett had a casual conversation with his old parish priest in which he requested to be called “Mr President” rather than by his first name. “It’s not ego,” he had said – but as president, he had to make tough decisions – “It's helpful in those situations not to think of yourself as the man but as the office.” Yet very pointedly, as the episode closes, and President Bartlett kneels in the Oval Office to make confession, the priest calls him simply, “Jed.” The point is that ultimately, he was accountable to his Maker for all of himself.

            This scene encapsulates on the highest level the schizophrenic selves our professional lives have become. We hold to one set of morals for our personal lives and another for our work lives. This observation is a centerpiece of the scholarship of Thomas L. Shaffer. [1] Shaffer, a lawyer and a Catholic, argues that the separation of legal ethics (in the form of codes and regulation) from personal ethics (which appeals to conscience and character) is undesirable.[2] We don’t need more principles or statements. We need stories. We need teachers. And ultimately, we need heroes – heroes that even better the likes of Jed Bartlett.

            In this series of blog posts, I will explore the major themes of Shaffer’s work. In this first post, I will discuss Shaffer’s idea of the gentleman-lawyer – one who makes no distinction between private and public morals. In the second post, I will discuss Shaffer’s model of the lawyer-client relationship. In the final post, I will discuss Shaffer’s idea of the servant lawyer.

            There was a time, Shaffer observes, when there was no separation between a lawyer’s conscience and regulation. In his native America, that was in the colonial days until the end of the Civil War. Lawyers were typically affluent, erudite and powerful. Theirs was a righteous and noble profession. Their ethics was the ethics of a gentleman. [3] These men carried the same set of morals in private as in public. Atticus Finch (To Kill a Mockingbird) typified the gentlemen’s ethic when he said, “I can’t live one way in town and another way in my home.”[4]

            And yet, for all his apparent integrity, Shaffer recognizes that the gentleman-lawyer is given to hubris – “I am my client’s conscience keeper”,[5] he would say. And for all his appeal to Scripture, the gentleman-lawyer is only nominally Christian. The Bible is a source book for legal philosophy but has little relevance to day-to-day moral behavior. Judge Sharswood speaks of the “high and pure morality that breathes from the Sermon on the Mount” but goes on to say that morality is of no use in a law office.[6] Further, a deeper idolatry was present – a worship of the American civil religion.[7] The gentleman-lawyer is above all a patriot, with a Jeffersonian sense of responsibility to his country.[8]

            With the rise of the robber barons in the late nineteenth century, lawyers found a way to separate their personal ethics from their professional duty.[9] According to Shaffer, lawyers in New York City developed the adversary ethic to justify working for these industrialists.[10] The adversary ethic says that lawyers should single-mindedly advocate for the interest of their client, and justice will result when all lawyers do the same for their respective clients.[11]

 Another factor that contributed to the separation of religious and professional life has to do with the positions of in middle-class families.[12] Increasingly, the world of commerce and professions were occupied by men while the moral education of children were left to the women. The result, Shaffer argues, was “feminine control of ... the critical years of moral formation for boys who would later become doctors and lawyers.” Home became a place of relative purity while the professional world became a place of relative callousness. This explains why morality became an increasingly private matter not useful to the professional world. Another lawyer, Joseph Allegretti, argues that code and regulation filled the void that religious wisdom used to occupy, resulting in a legalistic, rationalistic mindset that excludes questions of character and virtue.[13]

            The theological justification sometimes given for this separation of private, religious life and public, professional life is Luther’s doctrine of the two kingdoms.[14] Paul says in Romans 13:1:

“Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.”

Luther argues that in the kingdom of law, civil authorities are instituted by God to keep peace and order. But in the kingdom of the Gospel, believers are not subject to the state but subject to God. Luther’s doctrine arose in his historical context, at a time when princes and popes were embroiled in political as well as theological battles. Luther’s doctrine means believers should obey civil authorities, just as Paul commanded. But Luther also taught that the kingdom of law is limited in its authority whereas the kingdom of Gospel is one of salvation. Even princes were subject to the kingdom of the Gospel in their hearts. And unlike medieval Christianity, Luther did not accept that the Beatitudes were “counsels of perfection” for nuns and monks, they were also commanded for ordinary working Christians.

The righteousness that Jesus teaches, a righteousness that exceeds even those of the Pharisees, is perhaps why many lawyers shy away from taking the Bible seriously in their professional lives. But Shaffer wisely does not prescribe legal ethics from the Bible. He eschews any codes made by associations he calls little more than pressure groups.

Shaffer advocates a better way, a way that maintains a person’s coherence and integrity – stories.[15] Fictional stories, he says, communicates morals to a community more quickly than biographies.[16] They describe the deeds of a hero, and heroes teach and inspire in a way principles or statements do not. After all, most of us were attracted to the profession by a hero, a compelling character who embodies for us the goodness of the profession. Shaffer says,

“I have claimed that lives are prior to principles. I do not appeal here to logic. The sort of story I’m talking about speaks to its reader directly, from life to life, without the mediation of concept or of explanation... We are formed by their stories in a way that is analogous to the way we are formed by the lives of people in our families.”[17]

John Yoder acknowledges the value of narratives in loosening up the rigidity of rules, but disputes that we can dispense with rules altogether.[18] In his view, once you know the rules, stories are powerful to heighten empathy, imagination and able to teach more effectively. But both are required.[19]

The gentlemen-lawyers of stories and film, like Atticus Finch, teach us by the coherence of their professional and personal lives. But the actual gentlemen-lawyers of history, by Shaffer’s own analysis, could not survive the abstraction of principles from the person. John Yoder justifiably retorts that “good stories about good people” are at best a corrective to the rule-based approach to ethics.[20] But that in itself is very valuable. Like Shaffer, a Catholic growing up in Protestant America, Christian lawyers stand somewhat outside of the fray and offer a powerful dissenting opinion that can save us from the cynicism and moral paralysis of the profession.

---

[1] This theme is present in two of his major books, Shaffer, Thomas L. Faith and the Professions. Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1987.and Shaffer, Thomas L. On Being a Christian and a Lawyer: Law for the Innocent.  Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1981. It is also explored in his journal articles Shaffer, Thomas L. "American Legal Ethics." Theology Today 59, no. 3 (2002): 369-83. and “The Christian Lawyer – an Oxymoron?” America 175, No. 16 (November 23 1996) 12-17

[2] Shaffer, “American Legal Ethics,” 370

[3] An overview of the history of the “gentleman-lawyer” and his subsequent demise is discussed in Shaffer, “American Legal Ethics”, 369-375 and in Shaffer, Faith and the Professions, Chapters 2 and 3

[4] Shaffer, Faith and the Professions, 76

[5] The sentiment is attributed to Judge George Sharwsood, a nineteenth century judge of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Shaffer, “American Legal Ethics”, 374

[6] Shaffer, Faith and the Professions, 40

[7] David Hoffman, the father of American legal ethics, set the federal constitution beside the Bible and referred to the lawyers he trained as “ministers at a holy altar”: Shaffer, “American Legal Ethics,” 374

[8] According to Shaffer, the gentleman-lawyer is typically a Jeffersonian Republican lawyer. They were neither secular nor biblical. The Bible was carefully included in what they did, but it didn’t mean anything that couldn’t have been based just as well on Jeffersonian American Civil Religion: Shaffer, Faith and the Professions, 40; Shaffer, “American Legal Ethics”, 374-375, Shaffer, Thomas L. “Legal Ethics and the Good Client”, (1987) Scholarly Works Paper 645. http://scholarshiplaw.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship/645, 319-330, 320-321

[9] Shaffer, Faith and the Professions, 72

[10] This claim is made in Shaffer, “Legal Ethics and the Good Client”, 323

[11] Shaffer, “Legal Ethics and the Good Client”, 323

[12] The argument is set out in Shaffer, Faith and the Professions, 44-45

[13] Allegretti, Joseph. "Lawyers, Clients and Covenant: A Religious Perspective on Legal Practice and Ethics  ". Fordham Law review 66, no. 4 (1998): 1110-29, 1108.

[14] The theology of two-kingdoms and its relevance to the professions is set out in Shaffer, Faith and the Professions, 78-92

[15] This is discussed in the opening chapter in Faith and the Professions (Chapter 1). An indication of Shaffer’s reliance on stories is seen in the extensive index of stories in his book. The index of literary characters run to nearly 5 pages and are found in novels including George Elliot’s Middlemarch, Anthony Trollope’s The Orley Farm and of course, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

[16] Shaffer, Faith and the Professions, 22

[17] Shaffer, Faith and the Professions, 33

[18] John H. Yoder “The Scholarship of Thomas L. Shaffer: A Retrospective and Response” Journal of Law and Religion 10, no.2, 331-337 (1993-4) at 337

[19] Yoder, “The Scholarship of Shaffer”, 332

[20] Yoder, The Scholarship of Shaffer, 332

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Found an old book review of "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" while dredging through old files. It reminded me of what a lovely story it was, so here it is again.

* * *

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Jean-Dominique Bauby
Harper Perennial 2004

I heard of “The Diving Bell” the film before I heard of the book. The film was an adaptation of a memoir by a "locked-in" patient -  someone who is paralyzed but lucid. The author, a former fashion editor, dictated the entire memoir by blinking his left eyelid - the only part of his body he could still control. A therapist would point to each letter of the alphabet one by one (A to Z) until he blinked at the one he wanted. The process was repeated again, and again, to form words and sentences.

The film, like the book, is a collection of stories, memories, sounds and images. It was stunning and bewildering to watch – the whole film was shot through the perspective, literally and visually, of the memoirist, Jean-Dominique Bauby or “Jean-Do”, as his friends called him. Each blink, each tear was replicated, down to the frightening moment when his limp right eyelid was sewn up.

Reading the memoir years later was something else altogether. For one, the words themselves bear witness to the labour that had gone into producing them. It is as if words formed so painfully carry an exaggerated meaning, more love, more sorrow, than mere “love” and “sorrow” would imply. In the least they merit a second, perhaps third and fourth reading; and certainly a slower one.

I have always been drawn to narratives of the voiceless – like the fictional Fish Lamb in “Cloudstreet”, retarded in life, but in an act of literary resurrection, revealed as the novel’s lucid and omniscient narrator. So too Jean-Do in “The Diving Bell”.

I often find it difficult, when reading a memoir, to separate the writing from the circumstances in which it was written, so that you are left wondering whether you are marvelling at the life lived, or the life as presented on the page. In the case of “The Diving Bell”, there is a further dimension – it is the life imagined, the life Jean-Do would have liked to have lived, but could not.

It is in this realm of imagination that the memoir truly gets me – say for example, his private joke with the Empress Eugene, the hospital’s patroness whose marble bust inhabits the main hall. I love the humour and delicateness with which Jean-Do describes these flights of fancies – and the fact that these flights of fancies were born of an absolute stillness.

Sadness is rare in this memoir. Even though Jean Do mentions his past life, the memoir is very much about the present – petty annoyances like his inability to change TV channels and pleasures like the simple foods he imagines himself lovingly prepare, salivates over, and eats. Funny things happen. He has a keen sense of irony and can be endearingly sarcastic. He speaks of the richness of everyday emotions that are often neglected by ordinary, busy people who tend to focus on the activities rather than the meaning behind them.

It is tempting to draw moralistic conclusions about quality of life in suffering but I believe Jean-Do never intended to, nor should I regard this book as anything other than a story about himself, an expression of that which he cannot voice, a gift to his children and ultimately, a thing of beauty.

6 March 2010

Why gender equity at work starts with gender equity at home (and not the other way round)

I was educated in a girls-only school from the age of six until I entered university. My husband was educated in a boys-only school from the age of eight until he entered university. He comes from what I call a “boy household” – two brothers. I come from a “girl household” – two older girls, then a much younger boy (8 years my junior).

I mention these personal facts to make the point that is at the heart of my argument – that our childhood experience of the different sexes is the most influential factor as to how we regard the sexes in adulthood. If we want to change discourse between the sexes in society, we need to start at age 5, not 35, or even 25.

When I entered the world of co-education aged 18, I was a champion of single sex education. I was brimming with confidence in the female ability (and statistically, girls are more academically able than boys). Girls from my school earned a negative reputation and I could not, for the life of me, understand why.

Fifteen years later, I can see the deficiencies in my understanding of the other sex and indeed, my own sex. So far as the actual study or work is concerned, perhaps I was not disadvantaged. But outside the classroom, where most of life occurs, I was terribly naïve.

From my observation, people from single sex upbringing can become either: over-developed in their sexual identity – identifying strongly and perhaps exclusively with the external characteristics of maleness (e.g. athleticism) or femaleness (e.g. beautification); or they can become under-developed in their sexual identity – that is, they do not appreciate the complex differences between the sexes or do not particularly enjoy their own gender, having developed their personhood in the absence of the opposite sex.

I belong to the latter category. I walked into my course expecting to be judged as a sexless human being but I could not negotiate the dance between the sexes. I admired my female peers who could be confident without being feminist, feminine without being a fading violet.

Project this to age 40, is it any wonder that aspiring women still complain of discrimination and objectification in the workplace? Could it not be due to the fact that the established majority, the men, have an overdeveloped maleness and naturally incline towards the all-boy culture that they knew in their formative years?

Perhaps one way to dismantle the old boys club is to rethink the old boys school. Of course, school is but one facet of childhood but for some, like myself with little socialisation outside of school, that was my entire world. I think boys too would find great relief in the company of girls. The all-male culture can be mercilessly aggressive and men, like women, occupy the whole spectrum of personality. They will find a space to be masculine without being macho, manly without being muscle-ly, a leader without being a jock.

When children from mixed-gender upbringing enter adulthood to interact with both men and women, they can be respectful and confident. Theirs is a confidence that comes from a deep understanding and acceptance of the other, and not an arrogance that comes from empowerment in the superiority of their own kind.   

And we would all get along better at age 45.

香港的行人天橋

行人天橋 - 是香港其一的特色. 因香港人多擠迫,大厦向高發展,駕車和行路都向上搬,整個城市已變得立體,有3D的感覺.

我家有個有趣的講法,當要步行到謀地方,會接着問,'懂得行馮'? 因為行人天橋從一幢大一厦穿出來,又到另一幢大厦鑽進去.有時要去的地方眼見到,但腳行不到,碰錯路.

假日,銅鑼灣軒尼詩道的行人天橋聚滿了正放班的菲傭丶印傭丶泰傭坐在一塊塊的野餐膠布上,佔了每個角落,甚至在榴梯上,尤其在雨天,那怕難找到有瓦摭頭的地方.她們有些在吃零食,有些在聊天,有些在化裝.這天是整個星期中唯一天可以去見同是獨在異鄉的朋友了.她們快樂嗎?這是個我完全不能插入了解的世界,没有語言是其中之因素.但對我這愛静的人來說,放假被迫趕出街, 實在覺得有點可憐.天橋, 畢竟對無家可歸的人是一種避難處.

我呢?我愛站在天橋中央,望着下面來來往往的人和車,覺得城市已包溶了我,我也擁抱着城市.在這個地方,没有寂寞,没有空虛,因眾人的忙碌给我力量.

香港 - 究竟是一個怎樣的地方? 它沒有巴黎的羅曼蒂克,沒有纫约的童話雀躍,但處在天橋中央,我感到它有與別下同的浪漫親密.

My favourite radio shows (and podcasts)

In this age of media interactivity, one of my favourite habits, still, is listening to a good radio show. I like them partly for practical reasons - it's easy enough to bung on whilst doing some mindless chore or in the car. But mostly, I still very much enjoy the pure, unadulterated spoken word.

Stripped of the distracting allure of the face, the naked human voice is very engaging. I would argue that more can be said (that is, communicated) in 5 minutes on radio than on most other mass media. It is matchless in its sincerity. There is something conspiratorial about focusing on someone's voice, with its tremors and inflections. Some people call it a confessional medium - case in point are the lonely hearts who ring up on a late night show to pour out their troubles.

Here are three of my favourite radio shows (or podcasts) to entice you to fall in love with radio all over again.

Interviews with Margaret Throsby (ABC FM)

To me, Margaret Throsby has the best job. She spends an hour every weekday talking to some of the world's most interesting people, from ex-Prime Ministers to Masterchef winners and everyone in between. The conversation is interspersed with music chosen by the guest which often becomes a springboard to discussing the guest's personal life.

Such is the sensibility of Margaret Throsby (she's dubbed "The Velvet Throat") that you feel like you are eavesdropping on a conversation between old friends. Plus it is highly educational - she has a wonderful, curious layperson way of drawing out fascinating facts from experts. 90% of my general knowledge - science, music, history, anything - comes from my loyal audience of Margaret in the last 10 years.

Move over, Andrew Denton, Michael Parkinson; in my mind, Margaret is the best of them all!

A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor (American Public Broadcasting Service) 

Garrison Keillor might not be very well known in Australia, but in America, he is beloved enough to have a movie made about his show, starring Kevin Kline, Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin and Lindsay Lohan.

I first came across Garrison Keillor's comedy through "A Young Lutheran's Guide to the Orchestra" his parody of Benjamin Britten's "A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra". One thing led to another and I stumbled upon the (free) podcast of a segment of his show, "News from Lake Wobegon".

It's a 15 minute fictional news broadcast done in the form of a monologue. It is wonderful, wonderful story telling - funny, evocative, spontaneous, wistful. His northern American accent (and occasional singing) tops off the small town nostalgia. So vivid is his cast of characters from Lake Wobegon that they have spawned novels - of which I have bought one - though not as good as the show.

You might laugh out loud, you may even shed a tear, but you will be smiling inwardly long after the closing credits: "That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where the women are strong, the men are good looking and the children are above average."

Thank God It's Friday (Radio Sydney)

I love Richard Glover's column and I love the show he hosts. TGIF is a variety show of the good old variety with guest comedians, guest musicians and people ringing up to answer quizzes. Sometimes, the reason we start following a show is entirely fortuitous. In my case, I happen to always be driving my son back from his grandparents, and in a terribly good mood after a day off. One of these days I will be in the studio audience cheering and laughing out loud.

* * * 

For my 30th birthday, my husband bought me a professional quality microphone complete with a pop-blocker - a circular mesh screen to accentuate your consonants and make you sound like love god Richard Mercer - to start me on my podcasting career. We did make a hilarious episode explaining Chinese idioms. It even had Kirby's original composition as opening credits. I think we quickly realised that a radio career would not be forthcoming but by golly it still sends me into fits of laughter - for the wrong reasons. Back to the listener's chair, for now!

Two inconsequences of getting older

How long do you persist with a book before giving up? A while ago, I came across a handy rule of thumb that tells you how many pages you should read before deciding whether to stick with it or leave it:

(100 – your age) divided by 2

So for instance, if you’re 30, you would read 35 pages ((100-30) ÷2) before you guilt-freely give it the boot. And if you live to be 98, well, you can justifiably judge a book by its cover.

What is the basis of this rule? I’d like to think that the older we are, the better able we are to judge a book’s worthiness - to ourselves at least. But I suspect the simple reason is that we have less and less time. The stakes get higher with each passing year. There are only so many books, articles, blogposts you can fit in a lifetime. A sobering thought for those contemplating on doing the “100 books you must read before you die” challenge!

Da Vinci, a man of art and a man of science

Or perhaps we just have less stamina. I remember my adolescence when I would faithfully wait till the very last page of any Agatha Christie novel to find out whodunit. Plus I had good book hygiene. I would patiently go through one novel before starting another – why dilute the experience? But it all started to go awry came the HSC, when I never finished reading my English text, Emma. (Got up to the bit when Emma realised she loved Mr Knightley; Clueless and Cliff’s Notes filled in the rest. It’s very hard to keep the dramatic tension going once the sexual tension is resolved, isn’t it?)

Reading fatigue is not helped by the array of words plying for our attention. A friend used to say that we only have a certain amount of reading energy each day and if that is taken up by reading bullet points and legalese all day, there is precious little left for the important or pleasurable.

And so sadly I am putting this rule of thumb to good practice without intending to. Still, I can’t help feeling a pang of disappointment at not being able to finish what I started.

* * *

On a radio interview some time ago, a scientist made an interesting observation. He said that scientists usually do their groundbreaking work young, while musicians and artists continue producing into their old age.

Case in point: John Nash famously came up with his most important contribution to game theory in his 20s; whilst Picasso painted great works into his 80s.

Why is that? The same scientist postulates this is because in science, you need to be constantly interacting with new information in order to come up with a novel idea. An aging scientist is ill-suited to do this, not least because he or she is taken up by administrative tasks like running departments and applying for grants. Whereas in the arts, the information you need to create and keep creating is acquired in youth, and growth occurs internally.

Interesting. We don't choose our vocation based on its longevity – how a businessman might last longer than a barrister, who might last longer than a surgeon, who might last longer than a footballer. And at this rate of increasing life expectancy, we might all need second or third careers to round out our working lives. So it is natural that many people turn to writing and teaching in their retirement.

There’s a saying in Chinese tradition, “if you read ten thousand books, you might as well walk ten thousand miles” – meaning – it is better to step out, travel and experience the world firsthand than to read about it in books.

But when reading ability is in decline, and the wanderlust is gone, it’s good to know that the final and most thrilling journey happens inside.

Tango lessons

Now and then, in the spare minutes of the day, I would think wistfully to the days when my husband and I used to take ballroom dancing lessons. It was a wonderful ritual. Two or three nights a week, we would meet up in Crows Nest, down a wonton noodle soup, then disappear into one of those one-room office suites that had been transformed with disco lights and loud music into a dance fantasy land.

Of all the dances we learnt, our favourite, without a doubt, was the tango – not the ballroom tango, with the arched backs and jerky heads, but the Argentine variety – heads bowed, hands clasped, faces and sides touching. Think Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman. (Regrettably, the only dance we were any good at was the stiff-legged foxtrot, but this did not discourage us from setting our hearts on the tango for our wedding dance!)

So what business does an Asian, un-co tomboy have with this unashamedly sexy Latin dance? To begin with, I love tango music. I was captivated the very first time I heard the dramatic run of notes on the bandoneon. (A bandoneon is like an accordion, used often in tango music, along with strings.) Those who are familiar with the songs of Astor Piazzolla will know that they typically juxtapose a slow, sweet, dreamy melody in major key with a fast, dark, agitated melody in minor key. So in the space of three or so minutes, these songs traverse the entire landscape of a passionate affair – the innocence and the betrayal, the tenderness and the violence, the glory and the tragedy. It is indulgent, irrepressibly sensual, sure to capture the complete attention of any romantic.

But the most appealing thing about the tango, is the dynamic it creates between man and woman. In the Argentine tango, the woman never steps forwards, always backwards. Now, before jumping to the conclusion that it is a chauvinistic dance, note this is also a dance where the woman gets to do all the flourishes – from the seductive “ochos” – where she twirls in front of her partner in a figure of eight; to the aggressive “gancho”, where she steps to her partner’s side and deftly flicks her ankle backwards between the man’s legs in a kind of momentary leg embrace. And most unusually, compared with other dances where patterns and timing are everything, the woman is completely at liberty to do whatever flourishes she likes for however long she likes, until she decides to return to the waiting arms of her partner, or when he wants her back! So the whole thing is less like a structured dance and more like a free and natural conversation. The tango maestros call it simply, “walking”.

How then does the man communicate all the subtleties of movement without a word, with his gaze obligingly averted? How, in the words of our instructor, does the man “create the space for the woman to walk”? By nothing more than the momentum of his body! Any ballroom dancer will tell you that a man leads not by his arms or hands, though he embraces the woman with these, but with his chest – they way he carries himself, the way he moves, the way he – well – creates a space where a woman might feel completely protected and encouraged to take a brave stride backwards (hopefully not onto someone else’s foot). This is a much harder task than the heavy lifting! If you have ever seen a live tango performance, you will feel the extraordinary tension and release between partners. But if you have seen a husband and wife perform (as our instructors were), that is altogether something special. With expressiveness like this, who needs to talk?

This is where I think dance imitates life. Leading your partner in a tango, is much like leading another person in real life, especially in the context of an intimate relationship, like a marriage, in at least 3 ways that I can think of:

1. Leading is about having vision. In the tango, this literally means being able to see where you are going when your partner has no idea and trusts you completely. In the same way, leading in life requires vision – a goal for the future that is big and high and real enough to inspire through the good times and bad times.
2. Leading is about encouraging and bringing the best out in the other person. In most dances, and especially in the tango, the woman is often the one who dazzles the crowd with her costume and her flourishes. But she is still following her man's lead. Leading is not about being in the limelight, or being dominant, but being supportive, encouraging and when necessary, pushing the other to be the best they can be. This is as much about courage and confidence as it is about modesty and humility.
3. Leading is not by strong-arming but by the consistency and integrity of your person. If a man tries to lead his dance partner by pulling and pushing her arms, he actually makes it impossible for her to follow him, even if she wanted to! This is because he is not maintaining a consistent “frame”. A frame, in ballroom dancing lingo, is the poise of your upper body, primarily your head, neck, shoulders and torso. A man keeps his frame still when moving; he therefore leads with his whole body. I see the same principle at work in real life. Leadership is not by compulsion. Leadership is about opening up your mind, your heart, your soul to the other person and winning them over with your honesty and integrity.

* * *

But the tango is not just a dance for intimate lovers. In the milongas we frequented (milongas are social dances; in Sydney they are put on in RSLs and community halls), seventy-year old grannies in sequenced gowns and silver heels “walk” together with dapper, olive-skinned young men in white suits and a rose in their lapels. It is, in Argentine culture, a family affair.

* * *

There is a grey, pony-tailed busker who sometimes sings and plays tango music on his bandoneon outside Chatswood Westfield. In between numbers, he would jovially court conversation of passer-bys. I can’t help but feel he is underappreciated there. But transport him to the town square in Buenos Aires, in the cool of the night, I imagine they must, surely they must, stop in their tracks and break into passionate dance.