The Necessity of Nobility

We live in a rather odd time of history, and even to those who admit to change happening with great reluctance, there appears to be a storm about. My own battle standard for analysing this has become raised to Mount Everest height. We are midst a tumult of rapid and variegated change – such that our vision, our thinking, and our assumptions – lie askew. We are groping in the dark. We are the princess sleeping in the castle waiting for a prince to break through the enchantments and brambles.

How discombobulating is our situation? In his dystopian novella Night Operation (written in the 1970’s), the philosopher Owen Barfield posits that the velocity of progress can become indistinguishable from chaos. His hope, nonetheless, is that we are participant in an evolution of consciousness, and that good will emerge from our asymmetry, bringing about a Final Participation. But what is this asymmetry, can it be analysed? Part of the answer I think, is to consider something counterintuitive.  That it is we who are inhabiting a ‘middle-ages’; and dark ages may be the better term. In our past, what “we” call the Middle Ages was defined as such only by our own Modern era, during the Enlightenment. Yet ‘enlightenment’ was also an invented term of the 17^th and 18^th centuries and may itself be questioned. Why did this ‘enlightened’ era call the previous centuries, ‘the Middle Ages’? Echoing historian Tom Holland’s work in his 2019 book Dominion, there really does seem to have been a concerted effort to diminish a system both pagan and Christian (Christendom) and claim it to be a form of darkness after an age of Classical light. Conveniently this helped to justify the radical changes of the new ‘enlightened’ era.

What were some of these changes? The Age of the Self-Made Man captures some of it. Community versus individualism (their dialogue best captured by Shakespeare in King Lear). Localism versus the centralising and ‘unifying’ nation state.  The intense charge into interiority and subjectivity. The Cartesian split of Reality into two separate underlying substances (the view before had said there was only One, though differentiated). The increasing denial of Aristotelian Animism or Platonic panpsychism. The turning of the world into mechanism and object. This captures more of it. The long and short of this was the loss of the word Spirit. Loss of what? In an age bounded by Boethius (d. 524 AD) and Aquinas (d. 1274 AD), and enamoured of Grammar as a science, the highest and most honourable word to describe humanity was Spiritus.

In his 2018 book, In the Shadow of the Machine, the philosopher Jeremy Naydler has said that to our ‘medieval’ ancestors this term meant both intellect and intuition. So, the highest form of knowledge was of intellectual and intuitive human life, captured and understood by investigating the meaning of words (the science of Grammar).

By contrast, in Modernity, there has been an increased denial of Spirit and a favouring of the ‘philosophy’ of materialism. This ideology asserts that only the quantifiable and the measurable are science, and that all else is subjective and ephemeral – at best a byproduct of a byproduct of quantifiable processes. Little room for a science of the meaning in words in such a worldview. Admirable and less admirable attempts have been made to escape the crisis of meaning philosophical materialism has put us into. Various forms of post-modernity attempt to find again the meaning of meaning, or of what it is to be human. On the admirable axis Husserl’s Phenomenology has argued for a science of all that is experienced – the qualitative and the quantitative. On the axis of the less admirable – chaos – there have been attempts to claim that universal or objective meanings do not exist, and all that exists “meaningfully” is ephemeral subjectivity. Consider Existentialism and the early writings of Foucault, now key markers in the crisis of meaning surging through our society, helping justify terms such as Wokeness or other such placeholder terms.

But it is the recently deceased Egyptologist John Anthony West who perhaps best captures the claim that it is we who are in a ‘middle-ages’; or perhaps a dark age. In terms of intellectual and intuitional knowledge – Spiritus – our culture parades a childish ignorance. As West grew in understanding of Egyptian wisdom, religion and culture (which the age of Boethius and Aquinas had likely little departed from), West said that only one term could capture Modernity by contrast. Our era should be called, Shiny Barbarism.

Now of course, there is more to say. Other Great thinkers have attempted to read the patterns of change here interpreted. Hegelian philosophy is another powerful consideration. Even in its Marxist interpretation there is captured the notion of dialectic: that the clash of opposites and their resolution helps us perceive the nature of change. One aspect of dialectical analysis that may very deeply matter to understanding our era, is the notion of class struggle. Such is not the purview of Marxists alone. Christopher Lasch – more a Hegelian than a Marxist- has cogently pointed out that when a new ruling class emerged in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries – from an emerging liberal capitalist bohemian upper middle class – it need work out some way to preserve its position. His 1990s book The Revolt of the Elites predicted that to preserve its power the new ruling class would stage its own revolution. By doing so it would be able to contain and control the revolutionary spirit of the working classes. It need only act out that revolutionary spirit itself. The 2020 UnHerd article by Ed West – How a 1990s book predicted 2020 – has gone so far as to suggest that Lasch was proved right. West points to the protests of 2020, where graduates and professionals were its main component, and were backed by enormously wealthy corporations of the western world. Little was said about class, poverty or unemployment. Instead, the demands were for more diversity and racial equality.

So there seems to be some other aspect here, helpful to explaining the chaos of our time. Looking back, we can perhaps perceive how 18^th and 19^th century merchant families may have too readily looked with envy upon the ruling class of their time – the nobility or the aristocracy – and how many came to believe that they could do better. One wonders if they were correct. Is a thousand years of experience so easily discarded?

The recent chaos seems to be in part informed by a much worse lot of people being in charge: I.e., rulers who do not really know what they are doing. The new ruling class appear to be people little versed in the nuances of ruling and far too enamoured of the rules of money and of their own personal lifestyle.  By contrast, is character and ability nurtured from birth – and trained to rule using ancient values – easily bettered? When a class has a sense of tradition – a specific job, and a time-honoured trust given to them – this may have a far greater impact than we are wont to think. No group is perfect of course and our present education is handily proficient at pointing out the aristocratic flaws of the past, whilst glossing over its successes. Yet, recall, unlike the merchants’ who formed the core of the emerging upper middle class, money was not statedly their master, and it was expected that they should have a sense of duty to protect the lower classes.

It is of note that many ancient and ‘medieval’ societies saw the necessity to have a class devoted to the art of ruling and not to the art of money making. Merchants were strictly kept from the reins of power, even if – often – their wealth exceeded the nobles and aristocrats who ruled. China and Japan anciently even had merchants as the lowest rung of society. By contrast, let us ponder the work that nobles in many cultures did. Their art, architecture, and legacy arts are still found, still travelled to, still felt in awe of. Now consider the alternative. What happens when the money people – the old merchant class – become the ruling class? What is their noblesse largesse? What are their priorities? Have they truly brought about a better world?

Chaotic times suggest otherwise. It is time to re-consider nobility. Of course, we cannot go back to the past. Each of us – if we wish good – must then do what we are able. Endowed with means, with knowledge and with education, we must take up that old baton. Be a noble. Prioritise art, poetry, literature, beauty, a Greats education, decent architecture, and the targeting of virtuous behaviour; or support these. Be philosophic, reflect the Socratic desire for the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Raise families that believe likewise. Furnish the young with beauty. Host dinners that cultivate the art of food and help others to remember important calendar dates. As I write, it is harvest-time in England. The call to bless food and honour this time of year is ready to be nurtured. In this our era of chaos, the non-rational reigns (Marshall McLuhan like), and there is no powerful Church or other spiritual body to pushily remind those with influence to be noble in their behaviour and actions. In our time, in this age, it is our personal responsibility to act. Not to save the world by oneself, but to do one’s own small part within the tapestry, within the orchestra.

Ensayo publicado también en Syre Byrd’s Word Emporium en Substack, que recomendamos visitar.