What Is Charisma? continued

Charisma and dictatorship

Political and pre-disestablishment religious leaders never rely wholly on charisma – backing them is the power of their regime, the power to punish or reward to ensure compliance.

Even where a leader has dictatorial power along with a mesmerising persona, there remains the question: what difference did he or she really make? Put another way, had Adolf Hitler not been born, would the Second World War and The Holocaust still have happened?

This is the old debate about determinism. Hitlerism did not arise in a vacuum. Germany was suffering economically, socially and geographically from the demands imposed at Versailles by the victors of the First World War. The German ruling and middle classes were paranoid about communist insurrection, and Jews were the perennial scapegoat. Hitler was part of a movement that reacted to all this. It is conjecture that, had he not existed, someone else might have fulfilled his appalling historic role.

Charisma and democracy

Charisma can certainly be a telling factor at election time. In 1960, 70 million Americans tuned in to watch senator John Kennedy and vice-president Richard Nixon try to out-gun each other in the first-ever televised presidential debate. Kennedy, super-charismatic, sexy, a progressive, came over like the good guy in a Wild West shoot-out, whereas Nixon had something of the demeanour of the arch-villain he turned out to be.

So Kennedy vanquished Nixon in the debate and in the presidential election. He was unable though to vanquish another great charismatic, Fidel Castro, whose personality has surely had something to do with holding Cuba together against fearsome odds over the last half century.

The Kennedy-Nixon showdown forced us to ponder the role of our celebrity-obsessed media in democratic life. These days, as in this year's general elections, spin-doctor-primed party leaders invariably embark on relentless media-savvy charm offensives, the charisma manufactured if it is not inherent.

Manufacturing charisma

Can charisma be created though? Professor Joanna Kozubska thinks so. Her book The Seven Keys of Charisma instructs corporate types on how they can transform from managers into 'leaders'. She says: 'We may not be able to learn to be charismatic per se, but we can identify particular behaviours that appear to achieve the particular results we desire.'

Confidence is one of her 'keys to charisma', a quality Kozubska says that everyone is born with but that can easily be knocked out of us: 'Parents are not always loving and supportive, adults are not always kind and reliable, teachers do not always have our best interests at heart.'

Inspirational charisma

A particularly charismatic English schoolteacher is part of the reason that I – growing up a working class boy bereft of confidence – ended up as a journalist, writing articles such as this for Channel 4.

My teacher had that young 1960s Room at the Top aura about him, a twinkle in his eye, and he really brought our language and literature alive. Ideally, all teachers would have that touch, because formal education has a knack of making dull the fascinating phenomena that should fire up kids' natural curiosity about the world.

Like my teacher, Channel 4's new presenter needs to use her or his charismatic abilities to awaken our wonder in an intrinsically interesting and important subject – modern science and its role in 21st century society.

< Back