You write that an aristocrat will seek stability, and not support revolution. Yet what is to be done in a democratic system that elevates the worst? The example of the Aryan invasion of India also comes to mind - while conquest is not revolution, this was the furthest thing from stability (although it did impose stability), and the social order of the Dravidians was certainly overturned completely. Surely aristocrats do not support every social order - only those worthy of their support, which aim man at that which is highest, can be supported; while by contrast those which drag man down into the mud must be opposed and overthrown.
During law school, I spent quite a bit of time delving into the records of the Constitutional Conventions in conjunction with an academic project on the idea of "civility" in the Early Modern period and its relationship to earlier notions of aristocracy in general and "gentility" in particular. The ideals of the courtly gentleman set down most fully in Castigleone's 1528 work "The Book of the Courtier".
It was abundantly clear to me that the members of the Constitutional Convention were explicitly and self-consciously attempting to create an "aristocracy of letters" to replace the aristocracy of heredity they had just broken away from. You don't have to read between the lines very much to see that a lot of their debates ultimately revolved around how to ensure that it was the Right Sort of Men that sought and held high office.
There were definitely disagreements about what constituted the Right Sort. Everybody agreed that titles of nobility and heredity were out. That was kind of the whole point of the War. But there were differences of opinion about whether the new "aristocracy of letters" was going to be basically a continuation of the ancient institution of the landed gentry with the hereditary serial numbers filed off (Jefferson, et al) or something based more on industry, in every sense of that word (Hamilton, et al), but economic and personal. Still, most of the Founders tended to be looking for a Right Sort that largely answered the to the description you lay out here.
But much if not most of the ink spilled had to do with how to make sure the Right Sort of Men, however conceived, wound up in office. The Founders correctly recognized that there was danger in simply allowing whoever was in power to exercise unchallenged authority. Their solution was divided government, with executive, legislative, and judicial functions split between three nominally co-equal branches. But they still basically assumed that all three branches would be populated by the Right Sort, and their individual failings would tend to be mitigated by constitutional checks and balances. They don't seem to have had a solution for the problems that arise when all three branches are corrupt together. Congressional checks on the Executive are of no real value if Congress can't muster the political will to use them. Or, even worse, actively conspires with the Executive to violate the Constitution.
One issue I have with a caste system is that it is usually based on heredity instead of competency.
History is rife with great leaders followed by terrible leaders because greatness was measured by bloodlines.
An ideal caste system would be one in which competancy determines migration between castes.
One reason the United States became a super power is that innovators were not held back by caste restrictions. Good ideas were not stifled because they came from a "low born" commoner.
Clearly we have gone off the rails but that is in large part due to rewarding incompetency while dis-incentivising competancy. Confiscatory taxes are being used to provide free housing, food, and drug use kits to the self sorted lowest caste people. They can afford to take any Tuesday in November off to vote for the politician that is promising more freebies. Now they can smoke crack while a ballot harvester fills out their ballot and delivers it to the drop box.
This is in large part due to allowing incompetent people the "right" to vote. Certain rights should be reserved for those who attain a level of societal responsibility. People who choose to be irresponsible with their life should only enjoy the bare minimum human rights. Housing, food, health care, and crack pipes should not be among those.
I'm guessing that our current drug addict class would self sort if those current incentives were taken away. True, some would self sort into the dead and buried caste but fentanyl is already doing that in the current system we have.
An arbitrary age (18) at which a person is considered competent and allowed full rights under the law is, in my opinion, a stupid way to go about it.
"At worst, aristocrats are equated with “dictators” or “murderers,” often by the know-nothing dimwits who write our textbooks."
Perhaps because so many measured down to that standard?
"Aristocrats" such as Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great built a Russian Empire by brutality and bloodshed.
Louis XIV of France governed as if the universe orbited around him--not for nothing did he style himself the "Sun King".
The princes who governed the Germanic states committed the atrocity of genocide at Magdeburg during the Thirty Years War.
Those who believe in the fundamental inequality of men have gifted the world its most barbaric bloodsheds, from Drogheda to Magdeburg to Culloden to Sand Creek to Wounded Knee to the Armenian deportations to the Nazi Holocaust to the ethnic cleansing of Srebrenicia.
The world has no need of such men or their aristocratic pretensions.
I agree aristocracy is a matter of the spirit. In their ideal form they would be servant-leaders of the people.
"...artificially democratic and egalitarian criticisms of aristocracy centered upon “inequality” are irrelevant. They rest on an assumption (the equality of all people) which is itself unnatural and empirically false.."
I disagree here. Equality of the value for human life - no matter the particular talents, skills, ability etc. comes first. That needs to be the larger context - the value of life itself - and is equal among all who are alive. Then within that larger context of innate equality, we see gradations of intelligence, kinds of intelligence, various skills and attributes, etc. This would naturally produce differences in how that life finds it roles in the larger human landscape. If we collapse the innate value of human life (we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal) into measurements of particular abilities, and talents we start with a mis-step.
Aristocrats are the descendants of a foreign warrior caste who avoid mixing with the rules so as to avoid taking on their characteristics. In England, these were Normans, ruling over Saxons.
I understood the writer was arguing for consideration of a “true aristocracy of spirit”, when “the best of people” of whatever station they have in life, rise up with a good and noble and generous character that marks them out from amongst the general hoi poloi as a “man (or woman) of peace” as they New Testament identifies in Luke 10, I think it is. I consider that I’ve enjoyed the privilege of encountering a few such people in my lifetime and benefited from it. The cultivation of virtue, or nobility regardless of station in life, is how it might be described less controversially.
Is the lifelong cultivation of virtue worthwhile? Worth the time and effort and sacrifice that it’s cultivation requires? I world argue that such is the foundational ethic of the new covenant. And precisely the ethic that post-modern secular culture has most aggressively undermined.
Frankly, aristocrats are similar to woke leftists. Both believe that they are entitled to status, fame, and money due of who they are and not what they do. Both are outraged that "the merchant, the banker, the moneymaker, the tinkerer and tradesman" have more money and live better than them.
I have been working on a Substack titled “Why The French Revolution Never Really Ended” so this was pretty timely. You and I are of similar minds on this subject.
There was a wave of sanity that swept the world with the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Then the countersanity forces sprang into action and have never stopped for breath since. It gets crazier every ten years like clockwork.
Wow. Machiavelli and Malthus infused in one person. That is the most distorted view of humanity I have read since the 1950s.
Aristocracies emerged with farming, because uneven seasons led to crop thefts, which needed to be defended, and defenders eventually realised that the best loyalty is bought with progeny. The dual demands for military and technology eventually produced the technology we witness now, which in the hands of that insane aristocracy (more commonly known today is the "300 families" who rule the world, actually threatens all life on this planet (through toxicity, not AGW). But built into human evolution is the capacity for course correction, the beginning of which we see in the embryonic resistance to the NWO.
When I execute my own part in this correction, I will eliminate any support for a counter correction, an intention which I wrote into by website 13 years ago. Thus your call for kind understanding of medieval fuedalism may well precipitate your own demise because my comprhension is shared globally. Heed carefully what ye sow lest thee reap a harvest of regret.
I like what you've written here overall. I thought it unfortunate though to use the term "worthy." Too self-consciously pompous and to be honest kind of prissy. I'd substitute worthy for one who comprehends the value of "privilege, obligation, honor, custom and divine order."
You write that an aristocrat will seek stability, and not support revolution. Yet what is to be done in a democratic system that elevates the worst? The example of the Aryan invasion of India also comes to mind - while conquest is not revolution, this was the furthest thing from stability (although it did impose stability), and the social order of the Dravidians was certainly overturned completely. Surely aristocrats do not support every social order - only those worthy of their support, which aim man at that which is highest, can be supported; while by contrast those which drag man down into the mud must be opposed and overthrown.
During law school, I spent quite a bit of time delving into the records of the Constitutional Conventions in conjunction with an academic project on the idea of "civility" in the Early Modern period and its relationship to earlier notions of aristocracy in general and "gentility" in particular. The ideals of the courtly gentleman set down most fully in Castigleone's 1528 work "The Book of the Courtier".
It was abundantly clear to me that the members of the Constitutional Convention were explicitly and self-consciously attempting to create an "aristocracy of letters" to replace the aristocracy of heredity they had just broken away from. You don't have to read between the lines very much to see that a lot of their debates ultimately revolved around how to ensure that it was the Right Sort of Men that sought and held high office.
There were definitely disagreements about what constituted the Right Sort. Everybody agreed that titles of nobility and heredity were out. That was kind of the whole point of the War. But there were differences of opinion about whether the new "aristocracy of letters" was going to be basically a continuation of the ancient institution of the landed gentry with the hereditary serial numbers filed off (Jefferson, et al) or something based more on industry, in every sense of that word (Hamilton, et al), but economic and personal. Still, most of the Founders tended to be looking for a Right Sort that largely answered the to the description you lay out here.
But much if not most of the ink spilled had to do with how to make sure the Right Sort of Men, however conceived, wound up in office. The Founders correctly recognized that there was danger in simply allowing whoever was in power to exercise unchallenged authority. Their solution was divided government, with executive, legislative, and judicial functions split between three nominally co-equal branches. But they still basically assumed that all three branches would be populated by the Right Sort, and their individual failings would tend to be mitigated by constitutional checks and balances. They don't seem to have had a solution for the problems that arise when all three branches are corrupt together. Congressional checks on the Executive are of no real value if Congress can't muster the political will to use them. Or, even worse, actively conspires with the Executive to violate the Constitution.
One issue I have with a caste system is that it is usually based on heredity instead of competency.
History is rife with great leaders followed by terrible leaders because greatness was measured by bloodlines.
An ideal caste system would be one in which competancy determines migration between castes.
One reason the United States became a super power is that innovators were not held back by caste restrictions. Good ideas were not stifled because they came from a "low born" commoner.
Clearly we have gone off the rails but that is in large part due to rewarding incompetency while dis-incentivising competancy. Confiscatory taxes are being used to provide free housing, food, and drug use kits to the self sorted lowest caste people. They can afford to take any Tuesday in November off to vote for the politician that is promising more freebies. Now they can smoke crack while a ballot harvester fills out their ballot and delivers it to the drop box.
This is in large part due to allowing incompetent people the "right" to vote. Certain rights should be reserved for those who attain a level of societal responsibility. People who choose to be irresponsible with their life should only enjoy the bare minimum human rights. Housing, food, health care, and crack pipes should not be among those.
I'm guessing that our current drug addict class would self sort if those current incentives were taken away. True, some would self sort into the dead and buried caste but fentanyl is already doing that in the current system we have.
An arbitrary age (18) at which a person is considered competent and allowed full rights under the law is, in my opinion, a stupid way to go about it.
Rarified wisdom to at least contemplate such things.
"At worst, aristocrats are equated with “dictators” or “murderers,” often by the know-nothing dimwits who write our textbooks."
Perhaps because so many measured down to that standard?
"Aristocrats" such as Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great built a Russian Empire by brutality and bloodshed.
Louis XIV of France governed as if the universe orbited around him--not for nothing did he style himself the "Sun King".
The princes who governed the Germanic states committed the atrocity of genocide at Magdeburg during the Thirty Years War.
Those who believe in the fundamental inequality of men have gifted the world its most barbaric bloodsheds, from Drogheda to Magdeburg to Culloden to Sand Creek to Wounded Knee to the Armenian deportations to the Nazi Holocaust to the ethnic cleansing of Srebrenicia.
The world has no need of such men or their aristocratic pretensions.
I agree aristocracy is a matter of the spirit. In their ideal form they would be servant-leaders of the people.
"...artificially democratic and egalitarian criticisms of aristocracy centered upon “inequality” are irrelevant. They rest on an assumption (the equality of all people) which is itself unnatural and empirically false.."
I disagree here. Equality of the value for human life - no matter the particular talents, skills, ability etc. comes first. That needs to be the larger context - the value of life itself - and is equal among all who are alive. Then within that larger context of innate equality, we see gradations of intelligence, kinds of intelligence, various skills and attributes, etc. This would naturally produce differences in how that life finds it roles in the larger human landscape. If we collapse the innate value of human life (we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal) into measurements of particular abilities, and talents we start with a mis-step.
Thank you.
There are two caste systems:
Jati & Varna.
Jati or Tribal Endogamy predates Aryans.
Varna is technically a Vedic system, but this predates Hinduism.
For example, non-Hindus consider Kshatriyas superior to Brahmins - ie Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains.
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You're better off looking to the Khalsa for a republican aristocracy that can nevertheless exercise Monarchal authority over the mass.
Also solves the problem of heredity as one cannot be born into the Khalsa.
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Blind loyalty or fealty to a worldly King is foolish - a theocratic Aristocracy is superior.
This is less stable short-term, but more long-term as a King is often overturn when he passes peak.
The concept you're searching for is Maryada - from Marya or martyred young warrior.
The bounds, rules or norms of social conduct past which is death.
Cow slaughter, cowardice, inter-caste marriage.
ਅਕਾਲ
Aristocrats are the descendants of a foreign warrior caste who avoid mixing with the rules so as to avoid taking on their characteristics. In England, these were Normans, ruling over Saxons.
I understood the writer was arguing for consideration of a “true aristocracy of spirit”, when “the best of people” of whatever station they have in life, rise up with a good and noble and generous character that marks them out from amongst the general hoi poloi as a “man (or woman) of peace” as they New Testament identifies in Luke 10, I think it is. I consider that I’ve enjoyed the privilege of encountering a few such people in my lifetime and benefited from it. The cultivation of virtue, or nobility regardless of station in life, is how it might be described less controversially.
Is the lifelong cultivation of virtue worthwhile? Worth the time and effort and sacrifice that it’s cultivation requires? I world argue that such is the foundational ethic of the new covenant. And precisely the ethic that post-modern secular culture has most aggressively undermined.
Frankly, aristocrats are similar to woke leftists. Both believe that they are entitled to status, fame, and money due of who they are and not what they do. Both are outraged that "the merchant, the banker, the moneymaker, the tinkerer and tradesman" have more money and live better than them.
I have been working on a Substack titled “Why The French Revolution Never Really Ended” so this was pretty timely. You and I are of similar minds on this subject.
There was a wave of sanity that swept the world with the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Then the countersanity forces sprang into action and have never stopped for breath since. It gets crazier every ten years like clockwork.
Wow. Machiavelli and Malthus infused in one person. That is the most distorted view of humanity I have read since the 1950s.
Aristocracies emerged with farming, because uneven seasons led to crop thefts, which needed to be defended, and defenders eventually realised that the best loyalty is bought with progeny. The dual demands for military and technology eventually produced the technology we witness now, which in the hands of that insane aristocracy (more commonly known today is the "300 families" who rule the world, actually threatens all life on this planet (through toxicity, not AGW). But built into human evolution is the capacity for course correction, the beginning of which we see in the embryonic resistance to the NWO.
When I execute my own part in this correction, I will eliminate any support for a counter correction, an intention which I wrote into by website 13 years ago. Thus your call for kind understanding of medieval fuedalism may well precipitate your own demise because my comprhension is shared globally. Heed carefully what ye sow lest thee reap a harvest of regret.
I like what you've written here overall. I thought it unfortunate though to use the term "worthy." Too self-consciously pompous and to be honest kind of prissy. I'd substitute worthy for one who comprehends the value of "privilege, obligation, honor, custom and divine order."