How Good is Your Eye? Discernment in Politics
By Andrew Sullivan
Stuck in bed, a shattered leg in traction, a Spanish soldier had time to think. He was thirty years old, his fighting days behind him, and big choices loomed. Where would he go, what would he do, how would he serve? Imagining the possibilities, a mix of feelings flowed. Love and anger, joy and sadness, hope and despair. Could the soldier work through these emotions, remove his own bias, and make decisions that serve a higher purpose?
The soldier was Iñigo Loyola; the year 1521. A dozen years later, in a dusty Paris basement, Loyola and six colleagues would form a new company: the Society of Jesus, the Jesuit Order. And the deep thinking Loyola did while injured—grappling with the complexity of life, choices, and consequences—would become the spiritual exercises, a set of practices to clarify one’s path through life.
Central to the spiritual exercises is the concept of discernment. For Loyola and the Jesuits, discernment is the hard-earned ability to grasp God’s higher purpose through the thicket of conflicting human impulse.
While discernment originates from a spiritual context, it applies to other areas, especially politics. And that’s why assessing a political leader’s ability to discern—how good is her eye?—can help us better understand the thought process that sets apart our most skilled politicians.
Future governor Jerry Brown in 1958 as a Jesuit seminarian
How clearly do you see?
Few people embody the overlap between religion and politics like California Governor Jerry Brown, a Jesuit seminarian turned politician. In a 2020 oral history, Brown describes discernment as a question of “how clearly do you see? How good is your eye? How do you discern the consequences [of a decision]?”
In Brown’s view, discernment springs from a blend of knowledge and experience. Knowledge, you gain by observation; experience, you gain by living. None of this is guaranteed, regardless of what you learn or how long you live. Discernment is hard to come by. The greatest challenge is the introspection it requires: the weighing of tradeoffs, the removal of one’s own bias to anticipate the consequences of a chain of future decisions.
Discernment in action: Kennedy and Biden
Governor Brown cites President John Kennedy as a leader with a high degree of learned or “knowledgeable discernment.” Citing the Cuban missile crisis, Brown says, “every single one of the people who knew best said to bomb [Cuba]. I think [even Secretary of State] Dean Rusk was on the side of the joint chiefs of staff. And Kennedy said no. Where did he get that?”
There’s no simple answer to Brown’s question, but Kennedy biographer Fredrik Logevall suggests a few factors behind Kennedy’s discerning eye. He describes JFK’s boyhood as “imbued by the political legend of his beloved grandfather John Fitzgerald…[JFK] relished hearing stories about the feats and foibles of earlier generations of Irish Catholic pols in Boston.” Logevall also calls Kennedy an “insatiably curious individual, a poised and discerning analyst who treated serious things seriously yet largely avoided—thanks to his highly developed sense of irony and the absurd, and his self-deprecating wit—the trap of self-importance.” Further, Kennedy’s “historical sensibility and his recurring health travails taught him that life was capricious and fraught. These hardships deepened his determination to follow his parents’ exhortation, to contribute to society, to believe in something greater than themselves.”
President Biden offers an intriguing contrast to JFK. Like Kennedy, Biden has a rare ability to discern the larger, long-term goal—and then absorb intense, shorter-term pain to achieve it. Consider the debt ceiling debate of the spring of 2023. As the deadline approached, a narrative took hold that Biden was mishandling the negotiation. “Is Joe Biden Botching the Debt Ceiling Fight?” asked New York Magazine. "Biden risks 'huge backlash from left' in debt ceiling talks" said Axios. But when details of the president's agreement with House Republicans emerged, it was "hard to conceive of an outcome more favorable to Biden," wrote Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post.
Simply put, Biden does not take the bait. It's hard to overstate the value of this political skill. What’s its source? In contrast to JFK, Biden’s discernment appears largely experiential: decades of leadership in Washington merged with profound personal pain. Biden understands how crises approach, how they crash over you and ultimately, how they recede. He’s a walking symbol of perspective, empathy, personal strength—and that gives him an extraordinarily discerning eye.
Other discerning eyes
Biden and Kennedy are not alone. Other recent standouts include Angela Merkel, the longtime German chancellor. One example of her discernment was her response to the 2015 European migration crisis. Clearly and without drama she reminded Germans, "Wir schaffen das" (we can manage this)—and they did. She saw at the earliest stages of the crisis the complex humanitarian and political dimensions behind migration, and the vital global message Germany could send with a nod to inclusivity and humanitarianism.
Nelson Mandela is an unmatched symbol of resilience and political discernment. After 27 years in prison for resistance to apartheid, Mandela emerged a unifying figure. He could have chosen a path of retribution but instead he chose reconciliation. He discerned a better long-term outcome for the people of South Africa through forgiveness, mercy, fairness—even if that required setting aside a natural inclination to vengeance. The peaceful transition to democracy and inclusive governance was a pivotal factor in South Africa's transformation.
Back in the United States, Nancy Pelosi, as House Speaker, displayed political discernment when she helped save President Obama’s signature healthcare reform initiative. At a moment when many were ready to embrace a watered-down version of reform—including the President himself—Pelosi was resolute. She recognized a fleeting legislative opportunity and shrewdly navigated it. The result was newfound healthcare access for millions of Americans.
To come full circle: Jerry Brown. His eye is sharpest on climate change. In his first term as California governor—at age 36—Brown displayed knowledgeable discernment, introducing solar incentives decades ahead of other leaders. In his fourth term—at age 79—Brown renewed his discerning climate eye amid rumors that incoming President Trump would cut climate research at NASA. “If Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch its own damn satellite to figure out where the pollution is and how we end it,” said Brown.
Jerry Brown and climate change offer a clear view of the moral underpinnings of discernment—the search for a higher purpose—a principle Iñigo Loyola would have recognized. “This isn’t about some cockamie legacy. This isn’t for me; I’m going to be dead. It’s for you and it’s damn real.” Like many others, Governor Brown discerned a threat to the flourishing of humanity, and he did something about it. We can’t ask for anything more from a public official.