This latest column culminates all that I have come to appreciate in your writings of India. In a similar vein, years ago I reflected on my experience with pernicious forces. Here’s what I wrote:

“This is a good place to offer some expanded thoughts on a theme present throughout this journal, namely, individuals trying hard to succeed with, and within, institutions, which generally comes down to the struggle between opportunism and principle. These present-day reflections are gleaned from observing and thinking much about such experiences over the course of my life and include references to others who have offered their own, often eloquent, perspectives on the subject.

“Whether in a branch of military service, a Fortune 500 corporation or an academic institution, in all of which I have been employed and from all of which I ultimately withdrew, the same general patterns of behavior can be observed. Dominant among them are the machinations for power and competition for dominance. This norm includes a critical moral aspect, which, at its best, effectuates and reveals the courageous and inspiring, and, at its worst, seen among those who display an extraordinary diligence in looking out for their own personal advancement, often manifests itself in the ethically sordid, ranging from mild obsequiousness to careerist-driven dishonesty.

“When presented with a matter of personal advantage that would require abandoning principles, the human mind goes to work overtime to rationalize taking that advantage. Every participant must make an implicit or explicit decision with respect to whether he prefers winning ignobly over losing honorably. “For,” as famous sports writer Grantland Rice wrote, “when the One Great Scorer comes to write against your name, he marks—not that you won or lost—but how you played the game.”

“Practically speaking, the best that those members not devoted to advancement by any means can do—those who decline to capitulate to those in circles of power and are willing to pay the price—is to defend themselves when their integrity requires it. In refusing to sacrifice a higher value to a lower one, and in doing so often ineluctably furthering the ends of the self-indulgent “winner” at a personal cost, the moral act of the defiant “loser” nevertheless has this beneficent attribute: it does more to advance the general welfare.

“Historian David McCullough, in his Landon Lecture, Kansas State University, February 2002, cited a statement by John Adams that speaks to these divergent attitudes.

“In a letter to his wife, Abigail, written by Adams at Philadelphia in what seemed one of the darkest moments of the whole story (the American Revolution), and he knew how worried she was, how frightened she was of what the outcome of all this might be. And he said to her, ‘We can't guarantee success, but we can deserve it.’

“And when I read that I thought how different that is from our time, when all that matters is success, being number one, being at the top, irrespective of how you got there, what devices, what elbows and knees and the rest you used to get there. They're saying something exactly the reverse. And when I read that sentence, I thought what a mind he had and what a moral lesson that is.”

“Harvard historian James Hankins has studied and written extensively on this topic (“Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy” (2019); “The Case for an American Revolution in Morals,” Wall Street Journal, August 20-21, 2022), one he has described as a divide between followers of Machiavelli (1469-1527), who counseled a more calculating and venal approach to leadership, and followers of the ideas developed by the Italian humanists, including Petrarch (1304-74), who counseled “virtue politics.” While the former think they are virtuous, Hankins suggests “they’re enjoying the approval of their own consciences without training their minds in any serious way through moral effort. … The humanists were opposed to the scholastic idea that you could argue someone into good behavior. They thought you needed the whole person—you had to engage the passions and appetite … precision of language and eloquence in the service of nobility.”