We
have spoken before about the ideal of Yankee America that all people be at
least of middle-class status. We did not
delve too deeply into the reasons why this is a bad idea at the time, but we
will do so now. One of the chief
arguments against promoting this idea is that it engenders dangerous vices
within the hearts of those who hear it:
They become unsatisfied with what they have and envious of what others
have that they do not. Jeremy Beer
speaks to this in his warnings about destroying old inherited social classes
and replacing them with a fluid, classless society where positions are open to
all, and who is hired is determined by competition amongst the applicants:
Warnings and prophesies against the follies of meritocracy have
been voiced since the eighteenth century. Consider Justus Moser’s “No Promotion
According to Merit,” published in 1770. Moser, a high government official in
Westphalia, was writing in response to reformers’ efforts to create a civil
service in which positions would be open to all according to merit, not birth
or rank. Moser claims that the only honorable thing to do in the face of a
system that distributes offices and honors solely on the basis of merit is to
withdraw yourself from consideration, since if you were rewarded, your less
honored friends would be humiliated, while if you were passed over, you would
be so ashamed and disgraced that it would be utterly destroying.
As long as humans have their “present nature and passions,” says
Moser, a system of doling out awards and honors according to merit alone can
only produce confusion and resentment. As things stand now, on the other hand,
“people can think to their comfort: fortune and not merit has elevated these. .
. . But if everything went according to merit, this so necessary comfort would
completely disappear, and the cobbler [who] can flatter himself that he would
be doing something entirely different from mending the Lady Mayor’s slippers if
merit were respected in this world could not possibly be happy.”
Similar warnings were issued by others. In England and America,
the case against meritocracy descends clearly from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France.
Burke begins with the assumption, as do all critics of
meritocracy, that there really
are natural, meaningful, and generally ineradicable human
differences. In ignoring these, Burke warned, the French revolutionaries were
propagating a “monstrous fiction, which, by inspiring false ideas and vain
expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life,
serves only to aggravate and imbitter that real inequality, which it never can
remove; and which the order of civil life establishes as much for the benefit
of those whom it must leave in a humble state, as those whom it is able to
exalt to a condition more splendid, but not more happy.”
Burke’s assumption about individual differences has, at least in
my opinion, been thoroughly confirmed by the psychological research of the last
half century. We’ll come back to this, but it certainly seems true that
there is “real
inequality” among men that can “never” be erased; and that to contend that
it can be
erased is to inspire false hopes, which when dashed will no doubt lead to
bitterness and resentment. For Burke, the old class structure humbled some and
exalted others, but by making deliberately obscure the mechanism by which this
separation occurred, it allowed the man of low social status to blame his
estate not on himself, but on the randomness of birth, and it removed a major
source of pride for the man of high social status.
A century and a half later, the Swiss economist Wilhelm Röpke
insisted on the same point. It “deserves to be stressed,” he wrote, that if
everyone is supposed to have
“the same chances of advancement, those left behind will lose
the face-saving and acceptable excuse of social injustice and lowly birth. The
weakness of mind or character of the overwhelming majority of average or
below-average people will be harshly revealed as the reason for failure, and it
would be a poor observer of the human soul who thought that this revelation
would not prove poisonous. No more murderous attack on the sum total of human
happiness can be imagined than this kind of equality of opportunity, for, given
the aristocratic distribution of the higher gifts of mind and character among a
few only, such equality will benefit a small minority and make the majority all
the unhappier.”
Now, Röpke was no Spencerian social Darwinist who delighted in
the social survival of the fittest. As a decentralist and ardent supporter of
small-scale and peasant agriculture, Röpke holds much in common with Wendell
Berry. But on individual differences and their primary source-nature-Röpke was
what I would call a realist.
The same is true, I think, of Berry. In Life Is a Miracle, he
assails the meritocratic lie propagated by our schools. In words reminiscent of
Burke’s and Röpke’s, he writes:
“Young people are told, “You can be anything you want to be.”
Every student is given to understand that he or she is being prepared for
“leadership.” All of this is a lie. You can’t be everything you want to be;
nobody can. Everybody can’t be a leader; not everybody even wants to be. And
these lies are not innocent. They lead to disappointment. They lead good young
people to think that if they have an ordinary job, if they work with their
hands, if they are farmers or housewives or mechanics or carpenters, they are
no good.”
The
older Christian view of classes which Mr Beer is touching upon teaches us to
appreciate where we are, to be content, to value what is, not what we
desire. It teaches each class the duties
it must practice towards the others. F.
Allan Hanson explains:
In the
early Middle Ages the condition of poverty, or being "poor"
(pauperes), was not necessarily defined in terms of economic destitution at
all. In England and northern France of the 9th and 10th centuries thecategory
pauperes referred to free commoners: people who were neither nobles nor clergy.
While they were certainly not well off economically, their most distinctive
feature was that they did not bear arms. Thus, they stood in need of
protection. This was the duty of the king and men at arms in France, while in
England the king was bound to protect them against "knightly
violence" (Mollat 1986: 95, 98-99, 296; Hyams 1980: 261-62).
Even as
poverty became associated with economic hardship, it was not viewed as a social
pathology. To the contrary, the poor formed an intrinsic part of an organic
society, the three orders or estates of which--warriors, clergy, poor
agricultural and other workers--were thought to reflect the order of heaven
(Duby 1980: 3-4). Thus around the year 1000 people had a "mental image of
a society one and triune like the divinity who had created and would ultimately
judge it" (p. 5).
Given the
divine origin of the social order, the poor were not held individually
responsible for their condition. Prosperity and poverty alike were attributed
to the grace of God, and all should accept their lot with humility. Nor were
the poor stigmatized. If anything they were thought to be morally superior to
the rich, particularly if they had voluntarily renounced secular wealth and
power. Monks, nobles, and wealthy persons would wash the feet of the poor and
invite them to dine. St. Louis, King of France in the 13th century, cut bread
and poured drink himself for the paupers whom he fed at his own table. In a
society that condemned this-worldly things, the poor represented a religious
ideal. Moreover, they were downright useful to the rich and powerful as an
outlet to atone for their sins through the Christian charity of alms-giving
(Geremek 1994: 7, 17-20, 42; Waxman 1977: 73-77; Mollat 1986: 44).
--'How Poverty Lost Its
Meaning’, p. 3, https://academic.mu.edu/phil/jonesj/courses/HOPR140Hanson_HowPovertyLostItsMeaning.pdf , via Pravmir, http://www.pravmir.com/not-yours-but-you-almsgiving-in-the-modern-age/
The
modern American way of life, i.e., mercilessly trampling over each other in an
attempt to climb the economic ladder, is far from the Christian ideal. Mr Hanson’s words are quite illuminating, but
let us hear the even loftier words of the Golden-Mouthed, of St John
Chrysostom. In commenting on certain
verses in 1 Timothy 6, St John says,
Having said, They
think that godliness is a means of gain, he adds: But godliness with
contentment is great gain, not when it possesses wealth, but when it
has it not. For that he may not despond on account of his poverty, he
encourages and revives his spirit. They think, he says, that godliness is a
means of gain, and so it is; only not in their way, but in a much higher. Then
having demolished theirs he extols the other.
. . .
The
rest is at https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/need-classes-society .
--
Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England,
South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð,
unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
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