Why does anyone obey orders?

 Isaiah Berlin said that the first question of moral philosophy, which includes political philosophy, is why one human being should obey another. Why obey laws that other people make? Why obey orders?

While I should have been going to high school, I instead grew up in the navy. For a while, I was the lowest ranking sailor at Pacific Fleet headquarters. There were far more admirals than ordinary seaman. I was there because I had been trained in cryptography. Aside from those specialized skills, I had no business being there.

I’ve spent a lifetime musing about what I saw. I’ve been puzzled by the question of leadership — why people follow some human beings and not others.

I wish theorists such as Berlin had considered the behavior of navies, of ships and the people who sail them. It seems to me that naval service is fundamentally different from service in the army. Senior army officers are usually safe in the rear, away from the fighting. But if a ship goes down, everyone goes: the captain along with the lowliest seaman.

There is a beautiful passage in one of Rear Adm. Alfred Thayer Mahan’s essays. When he was a midshipman before the Civil War, Mahan was assigned to USS Congress, one of the last great sailing ships. And though Congress was tiny by today’s standards, it had a big crew, including at least 400 to handle all that canvas.

Off the coast of Argentina, the ship hit rough weather — “scudding, in fact.”

Unsteadied by wind on either side, she rolled deeply, and the sight of the faces of those four hundred or more men, all turned up and aft, watching intently the officer of the deck for the next order, the braces stretched along taught in their hands for instant obedience, was singularly striking.

On a ship, everyone has a job. The officer in charge couldn’t do half of them. But for a ship to survive, everyone has to do his own part and also has to do it as part of a team. Only a coordinated effort will do.

When an officer who is not a leader is in charge, you can sense the dread. When a real leader is onboard, all eyes focus on one person. Oddly enough, it seems the most natural thing in the world. 

• Source: Alfred Thayer Mahan’s “Old-Time Naval Officials” was published in Harper’s in October, 1917, three years after he died. It’s in Harper Essays, edited by Henry Seidel Canby; New York: Harper & Brother Publishers, 1927, pp. 13-26.