Big Boned, Poetical, and Bearing a Harvard Degree: The Aristocrat, Ancient and Modern

Housekeeping

Please skim. If anything seems relevant to you, stop. If nothing seems relevant to you, please proceed to the main essay.

First, thanks to Bog-Host and KL Cooke, my first commenters, for their kind remarks. Weak and fleshly as I am, injections of interest and encouragement are all that will keep this project going—I won’t even try and deny it. From this point on I’ll make a conscious effort to reply to every commenter. For now I will leave comments un-moderated, on the assumption that none of my readers need moderation.

Second, I want to apologize for my erratic approach to the blog thus far, and to confirm my dedication to the project. It was something of a whim when I started; I did not expect to attract anyone’s attention. However I’m getting a surprising number of page views and a surprising amount of positive feedback, so from this point on I’ll discipline myself into a responsible posting schedule. I’ve had a major change in my prospects since conceiving this project, as I’ve been admitted to a masters program at Oxford. There may be some disruption in my posting schedule while I am flying across the pond and setting up my English digs but Aristotelian accidents aside, the Platonic form of my posting schedule will be one essay of a few thousand words every Saturday evening.

Third, I want to direct your attention to the Tumblr I set up to advertise this blog. I did this on something of a whim as well, but I’ve found I rather enjoy the format, since it makes posting quotes and pictures so easy. Digging up pithy quotes and peculiar portraits in the abandoned sandlots of the historical record has always been one of my passions—we’ll see if anyone else concurs. It will also host the less—um—substantive manifestations of the blog theme. For instance, I just posted a brief reflection on why Tywin Lannister is Edward I of England, Malleus Scotorum. (The bad guy from Braveheart). Similar essays, like my recent post "The New Optimism," will no longer appear on this blogspot site but on the Tumblr. Go check it out if you like silly pictures of men in wigs, assorted quotes I find wedged in the couch cushions of the chroniclers, and other things that don’t fit here.

http://www.tumblr.com/blog/thesacrificinganimal

Fourth, I'm trying a new text format today: large type, single spaced, with frequent paragraph breaks. Do people prefer this? Or should I switch to the old format, or a third format I am not thinking of that is superior to either? Advice would be appreciated.

But enough of that. Here’s today’s essay.

Big Boned, Poetical, and Bearing a Harvard Degree: The Aristocrat, Ancient and Modern

In which the One Percent grows wary of potential Caesars, a capering pussy-willow fails to take up his father's sword, snobbery is thereby invented, and Americans discover an aristocracy living within their borders

Occupy Wall Street is the most interesting thing in American politics this decade. Not because it has been especially inspiring or effective—or uninspiring and ineffective—(allow me to shelve that argument for a different time and place)—but because it marks the rediscovery of class in the United States of America. Occupy’s proponents claim solidarity with "The Ninety-Nine Percent", while its opponents wring their hands over the spectre of “Class Warfare.” But nobody tries to claim that class does not exist anymore. Those days are over. We have abandoned the ancient canard of America’s “classless society.” An epoch of innocence has finally come to its close.

The rhetoric of "The Ninety-Nine Percent" reveals something else: We are not just acknowledging the existence of a class society in the sense of distinctions between the poor, the working class, the middle class, and the upper class—with an appreciable chunk of the nation's wealth and population occupying each of these categories—no, we are acknowledging the existence of an aristocracy. Although there are no hard and fast rules for its usage, “aristocracy” is a word that should really be reserved for societies where a very small chunk of the population, say between 1%-3%, owns a huge preponderance of its wealth, say 25%-50%.

In this elementary sense, America is now an aristocracy, because 1% of its population owns roughly 40% of its wealth. I don’t want to bog this post down in the details, so I will delegate the burden of demonstration to a brief and quasi-non-partisan source, the following article on Business Insider, which unpacks a recent video on wealth inequality by Politizane that seems to have gone viral.

http://www.businessinsider.com/wealth-and-income-inequality-in-america-2013-4?op=1 

My purpose in this post is not to demonstrate or to bemoan the existence of an American aristocracy. Instead, I want to sketch the broad outlines of what an aristocracy is and how it works, using historical examples drawn from the Western tradition to which Americans prefer to trace their roots. If we are acknowledging the existence of a homegrown aristocracy, we should probably know how aristocracies operate, right? So, free of any openly political interest, here is my historical primer on The Aristocrat, Ancient and Modern.  There are four primary facts about the aristocrat.

  

1.    The Aristocrat has Aristocratic Parents

2.   The Aristocrat is Super Special

3.   The Aristocrat Loves: Liberty

4.   The Aristocrat Hates: Tyrants and the Mob

1. The Aristocrat has Aristocratic Parents

This is an obvious fact, but probably the most important one. A concentration of political and economic power doesn’t mean anything unless most people don’t have it. The whole point is for the labor of the many to produce things that are enjoyed by the selected few. If an aristocracy lets itself be diluted, the concentration of wealth and power on which it rests bleeds away, and eventually it stops being an aristocracy. Combine this logical imperative with the biological imperative to invest in your children, and you have the basic mechanisms for a hereditary aristocracy. 

A hereditary aristocracy does not maintain itself. You have to work at it consistently, or the cumulative effect of aristocratic daughters running off with broad-backed barley farmers will fritter away all your hard-earned gains. If you comb through the historical record, you’ll discover that aristocracies have been endlessly creative in finding ways to “keep it in the family.” The patricians of the early Roman Republic took the direct route: they made it illegal for a patrician (aristocrat) to marry a plebeian (commoner). The German tribes that swarmed over the dying Roman Empire had customs that were less well suited to the aristocratic models of the Greco-Roman civilisation they settled down to ape. Kingship was elective, meaning the tallest-talking, biggest-beefing, hardest-hitting son-of-a-bitch would eventually rise to the top of the pile. This was good if you were a mobile tribal group living in a rough-and-tumble world, but unfortunately for would-be dynasts—kingly and aristocratic—there is surprisingly little generational continuity in tall-talking, big-beefing, and hard-hitting (whereas large-living is a trick that practically anyone can pick up).

Even worse, family property was split impartially between all sons (and sometimes even daughters). Four hundred years after the Western Roman Empire fell, the Germanic warlord Charlemagne built an enormous central European kingdom through a colossal effort of violent will. He was lucky enough to have only one surviving son: Lewis the Pious; but unlucky Lewis had several sons by two different marriages, and even his own reign was marked by civil war between them. After his death, three of his sons split the kingdom between themselves. It took another two hundred years for the emerging European civilisation to confirm kingship and other aristocratic titles as hereditary properties and to establish the custom of primogeniture (whereby the lion’s share of the family patrimony goes to the firstborn son). Only then did they establish their family businesses—the medieval state, earldom and manor—as going concerns. But at this point, they ran headlong into the necessity of aristocratic feature number two.

2. The Aristocrat is Super Special

People don’t like giving you extra slices of the communal pizza if you haven't made a disproportionate contribution to purchasing it. Medieval Europeans felt the same way. If a lord or king was visibly rendering an extraordinary service to the community by binding them together with the force of his personality and hewing down smelly Vikings, Arabs and Magyars at the head of his warband, well then well and good: he could have an extra portion at the feasting table and the title to his lands. But if his son turned out to be a capering pussy-willow who couldn't discipline a Viking if he was bent over a railing with his pants down, people would begin to grumble about those extra portions and extensive lands. 

This was unfortunate for would-be dynasts, because the platinum jaw, steel-toed temperament, iron right-arm, and indescribable chutzpah that marks the leader of men is not a reliably heritable set of qualities. Even when you throw in the advantages born of wealth and leisure—military training with the lance and longsword, expensive military technology like plate mail and the destrier—you cannot count on the regal je ne sais quoi to make its appearance. European aristocrats were forced to find alternative justifications for the enduringly exalted status of their descendants, features that could be impressed into their children more reliably than military skill and valor. 

Snobbery proved to be the most effective tactic. Romans and Germans learned to distinguish their children from the others by giving them Culture: poetry and perfume, dancing and deodorant, T.S. Eliot and table manners. Make sure that your children are familiar with these things, and that the peasants’ children are not, and the chances of silly Susan running off with handsome Hal the reeking stable-boy go way, way down. “Why, father, he’d never even heard of Virgil!” Every time you see an enlightened Redditor pissing from a great height upon that most sodden of straw men—the ignorant Christian redneck—you are watching the machine at work. Voltaire's letter to the “enlightened despot” Frederick William of Prussia frames the basic sentiment quite nicely:

“Your majesty will do the human race an eternal service in extirpating this infamous superstition [Christianity], I do not say among the rabble, who are not worthy of being enlightened and who are apt for every yoke; I say among the well-bred, among those who wish to think.”

Contemporary Western aristocracy, operating as it does in a society where “aristocrat” has become a dirty word, does its heaviest lifting using something you might call “credential capitalism.” The jobs with the biggest pay-checks—corporate management, high finance—are extremely difficult to gauge in terms of performance, so people rely on personal recommendations and academic credentials. The places where you get those contacts and credentials are the big name universities. Between their price tags and their policy of legacy admissions, these institutions can reliably ensure that the children of the wealthy are always the most qualified candidates for the job. And that patina of qualification allows American aristocrats to capitalize on the post-Enlightenment fetish for intelligence, ingenuity, and innovation by arguing that their social class has a monopoly on these prosperity-generating characteristics (I mean look, he has a degree from Harvard). And it's always easy to find an aristocratic lapdog like Steven Pinker ready to construct a solid scientific argument for why this is so:

“[W]hen a society becomes more just, it will also become more stratified along genetic lines.  Smarter people will tend to float into the higher strata, and their children will tend to stay there.” 

(This is in Pinker's book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. His more recent book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, establishes that the United States and the rest of the West is just such a just society).

In the end, all the tactics surveyed above amount to an attempt at finding a reliable way of authenticating aristocracy's claim to be exactly what its Greek etymology would suggest: “rule of the best.”

3. The Aristocrat Loves: Liberty

Americans have a hard time understanding this point, because our default historical narrative is the eternal cage match between "liberty" and "tyranny". This narrative equates liberty with freedom, which is usually painted as the enemy of king and aristocrat alike. But this is not the original meaning of liberty, and it is probably not a very useful meaning either. For most of its history, liberty was used in a sense equivalent to the way we now use the word "privilege," which we habitually contrast with the word "right" as in "healthcare is a privilege, not a right." Modern constitutionalism—and thereby the liberal-democratic nation-states erected on its foundation—can trace its birth to the "charters of liberties" forced upon medieval and early modern kings by their aristocratic subjects. These were frequently imposed either as "accession charters" (which a prince would have to sign before he could secure the consent of the landed magnates to his taking up his father's crown) or as sets of "provisions" drawn up by the nobility after a successful military rebellion (the most famous example being the Magna Charta, signed by John Lackland in 1215 after a revolt of the English earls and barons). 

These liberties could and did involve practically everything under the sun, but they usually boiled down to a guarantee that the barons could keep on having what they were having and doing what they were doing. What they were having was a very great deal of land and a very great deal of latitude in how they treated the peasants working on it. What they were doing was scheming and skirmishing amongst themselves in the interests of getting more land and passing that land down to their children. They needed to insulate the titles to their domains from the risk of royal taxation or expropriation, while at the same time securing the help of the whole realm in the event of unrest among the lower orders. The medieval evidence suggests they did a very good job of doing this, because whatever degree of strife might prevail among the landed magnates, a peasant rebellion would always suffice to bring them together for a nice relaxing horseback ream through those revolting peasants, (as the German farmers who read Martin Luther's pamphlets on apostolic equality a little too closely learned to their sorrow, in 1525). Magnates also wanted the right to dispense royal justice and collect royal taxes from their subjects in the name of the realm, since this gave a huge boost to their prestige and was not a bad thing for their coffers either, since it gave them the opportunity to do a little expropriation of their own. 

Contemporary aristocrats are also big fans of liberty. The outward dynamics are a little different because we live in a financialized industrial economy rather than a monied  agricultural one, but the tectonic fundamentals are more or less the same. Aristocrats still want to protect their property from the expropriations of the central power (which like the European kings of old is usually hungry for revenue to cover the costs of foreign military adventures and the administration of justice) while simultaneously guaranteeing it against any re-distributionary odors arising from the lower orders. They would also like access to new markets and the right to self-regulate the quality and safety of their products, which have replaced lands as the bearers of their stream of revenue and the guarantee of their patrimony. They've done very well for themselves since the 1970s, when the American aristocracy successfully conflated free trade, corporate deregulation, and the shrinking of the welfare state into a unitary program of Liberty, otherwise known as neoliberalism.

4. The Aristocrat Hates: Tyrants and Mobs

Now we can understand the two biggest threats to the aristocrat: the tyrant and the mob. The tyrant and the mob are natural allies. The tyrant wants to seize absolute power for himself, which means appropriating it from the aristocratic class where it is currently concentrated; the mob wants to stop being desperately poor, which means appropriating wealth from the aristocratic class where it is currently concentrated. The biggest threat to a sitting aristocracy will always be a violent mob animated and directed by a tall-talking, big-beefing, hard-hitting demogogue. (Curious isn't it, how this circles us round again to the je ne sais quoi that earned the aristocrats their oats in the first place, so very long ago). This is what most historical revolutions amount to: the breakup of an aristocratic class and the redistribution of its properties into different hands.

The founders of the American state were very much aware of this connection, and they took many pains to safeguard against it. They had been raised on Greco-Roman history, and they knew how this dynamic worked. The Roman Republic had also been founded on an aristocratic governing class, whose members competed for land and office amongst themselves. At some point, ambitious but impoverished members of the aristocracy and up-and-coming newly rich men without patrician status learned they could use redistributionist rhetoric to mobilize the urban mob against their enemies. Thus were born the two political factions of the late Roman Republic, the Optimates and the Populares. Ambitious Populares like The Gracchi brothers, Gaius Marius, and eventually Julius Caesar learned to use military victory, redistributionist rhetoric, and mob violence to appropriate the aristocratic pizza for themselves in the name of the people, (making sure to dole out a few extra crusts to their loyal supporters in the urban mob). Their descendants were still doing the same three hundred years later, when panem et circenses—a free grain dole for all citizens living in Rome and regular gladiatorial fights at the Colosseum—guaranteed their place in hearts of their subjects and the folds of the imperial purple.

Fresher in the minds of todays aristocrats are democratic, socialist and communist demagogues like Napoleon Bonaparte, Vladimir Lenin, and Mao Tse-Tung. This accounts for much of the apocalyptic jazz hands at the election of Barack Obama. He proved a relatively docile servant of contemporary aristocracy, but he did at one point make dangerous noises about banker's bonuses and economic justice, and a slippery slope can always terminate in a long slide down the hill to the guillotine. Obama actually is an excellent illustration of what many heads of state have been doing ever since Julius Caesar, playing the aristocracy and the mob against each other in order to secure the maximum benefit for their own agenda. 

The absolutist monarchs of the 17th and 18th centuries played a very similar game, with some success, since they could more often than not count on the mass of the peasants being royalist in their sympathies. For example, the traditional sentiment among the Estate of the Peasants in the short-lived Diet of 18th century Sweden was "better one king than many!" The entwinement of fear of tyrants and contempt for the ignorant poor—who are held accountable for desiring a tyrant to alleviate their misery (born of laziness and ill-breeding)—is entirely traditional, and much in evidence among today's America's aristocracy.

Conclusion

So—that's as comprehensive a primer as I can give on the nature of aristocracy in a post this short. Of course, I did not spend any time talking about the American class currently headed for extinction, the middle class. The middle class, or something like it, has often been something of a dream for human beings. It rests on the thesis that we would all be happier if we shelved our propensity for status games, suppressed our desire for limitless material accumulation, and tried to live in a society where the vast majority of people have enough to live comfortably, raise a family, and nothing more. But then, humans have always been curiously immune to the attractions of the simple life. Like so many other historical cultures, Americans have been willing to sacrifice a society where you will probably have enough, for one where you might just have it all.