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Tuesday, October 15, 2019

Offsite Post: ‘The Need for Classes in Society’


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).


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.   . . .


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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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