Part of the genius of the system of government invented by the Medieval West was the incorporation of Fides as the organizing principle of the whole of society. In the period between Pseudo-Dionysius’s Hierarchia and the breakdown of feudalism during the 14th Century, the concept of Fides (faith, fidelity) served as the contextual framework through which Latin Christians interpreted their social, political, and religious relationships. This notion is the common thread that ties together the Warband Society of Tacitus’s Germania, the Christianized Franks and Anglo-Saxons of the early Medieval period, Franco-Norman Classical Feudalism, and to a lesser extent the “bastard” feudalism of the High Middle Ages, which still gave lip service to Faith. Furthermore, it is the essential social bond which links the Two Cities and permits the Christian to move freely between them in a way which is less possible in a society where the religious and secular authorities are mutually hostile.
Any attempt to conceive of a stable social system must address the notion of Fides as well as its fundamental antagonism toward modern will-based systems of government by consent.
The notion of Contract serves as an inferior substitute for Faith, as it implies the inherent untrustworthiness of one’s partner and therefore makes Aristotelian political friendship impossible, thus leaving no other option in modern politics but a Schmittian state of eternal warfare within the state. Modern liberals attempted to weld the idea of “social solidarity” onto consent-based systems to resolve this problem, but the solution is fatally flawed, as epitomized in Edward Ross’s article “Social Control” in the American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 1, No. 5 (1896).
Let me begin by addressing the meaning of the concept of Fides. Fides must be understood as Faith in the broadest sense of the word: not just religious belief, but also faithfulness, holding faith with others, acting in good faith, keeping faith. The ideal of the medieval fighting man was “Semper Fidelis,” an ideal to which only a handful of modern institutions still remain faithful. One of the major insights of Voegelinian scholarship, especially those outside of the dominant, liberal, EVS school of Voegelinian interpretation, is that the fundamental experience of politics for man is not liberty, but obligation to others. For the first few decades of our lives, we are fundamentally unfree in the liberal sense, being subjected to the authority of nearly every person around us, yet those who exercise authority over us do so in a way which is for our benefit. In all but the marginal cases, we experience power with restraint, authority without abuse, and most importantly for this topic, benefit without cost.
For a non-sociopathic individual, this incurs obligation, regardless of whether or not we gave explicit consent to be born, reared, educated, and protected. Please refer to Samuel Butler’s novel Erewhon to see the absurdity of the consent-based attitude towards children and obligation.
This is where Fides fits in; as a consequence of our experience of obligation arising from receiving benefit without cost, we incur a moral duty to ascribe good faith in the future where good faith has been shown in the past, and in return to act in good faith towards others. Thus, we perpetuate a positive spiral of cooperation and mutual good which is sustained solely by our moral choice to participate in a eudaimonious or “friendly” relationship. “Honor thy Father and Mother” is more than a command of Scripture; it is also a command of our very natures to recognize and feel obligation toward our kith and kin. The virtue of Medieval society was the ability to metastasize this to the whole of society, wherein all social bonds, including the political, are treated as personal bonds of friendship between an interrelated web of persons. The so-called “pathological altruism” of European societies can be traced back to this notion of society as a collection of friends, which was anything but pathological in its original context.
There are two more things to place into this context before we move on to the critique of modernity. First, the political bonds of Western-style medieval societies grew out of the folkish warband, which explicitly rested in these ties. The Anglo-Saxon rincman, the warrior who served and in exchange received a ring from the dryhten as a symbol of his oath and trust, is a person whose essential relationship is based on this notion of faith, namely that he hold faith with his hlaford (loaf-giver, lord) and his lord hold faith with him.
The relationship between lord and man was intensely personal and deeply felt, as we see in the historical accounts of men piling up their bodies in an attempt to rescue the corpse of their fallen leader. The notion that one’s oath and reputation is so important that dozens of men should willingly and gladly die to prevent the dead body of their beloved lord from being dishonored by the enemy is almost foreign to the degenerate modern mind. Where scripture says, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,” (John 15:13) few moderns outside of men who have seen actual combat actually understand the significance of this kind of social bond.
This exchange of oaths and the expectation that everyone would hold faith with those oaths sustained all feudal political relationships. The very word felony refers to the act of breaking one’s oaths to society. Those who cannot be trusted, for the medieval thinker, must be relegated to the lowest, most menial rank in society, and many legal codes of the period attest to this principle.
Secondly, for the medieval thinker, faith is a unitary concept spanning the religious and social spheres. To be faithless in secular affairs is to be faithless in religious ones. Prior to St. Thomas’s Dual Order, which paved the way for secularism by artificially dividing virtue and ethics, wickedness is not seen to be “domain-specific.” If a man cannot be trusted by his fellows because he routinely breaks faith with them, there is no reason to expect that he can keep faith with God any better. One can neither be a good Christian but bad citizen nor a bad Christian but good citizen. One’s character is one’s character, which spans the Two Cities, as the medieval mind understood the unitary nature of personality. St. Thomas’s absurd argument regarding the ability to separate these ideas bears the modern fruit of “leave your faith outside the ballot box” and “leave your [right-wing] politics outside the door of the Church.”
The first breach in Fides comes from the bastardization of this kind of loyalty and faith between fighting men from the monetization of the feudal oath. The rise of scutage and the use of fines for acts which previously led to disseisin took a personal relationship between lord and vassal and transformed it into an economic relationship between a landholding oligarchy and a depersonalized Crown. The fundamental character of the relationship between individuals has changed from one of personal trust and personal service to one of economic exchange. Cooperative relationships have become adversarial. War is introduced into the realm, not as the exception to the rule but as the character of the regime. This is not to claim that medieval politics were perfect or without disgraceful actions. In many ways, the anarchy is comparable to the Wars of the Roses, as both involved bribery, betrayal, and the worst elements of human nature on display. The former, however, did not legitimize the evils of civil war with the justification of raison d’etat, as the Tudor tyrants would do.
To conclude, the very notion of the social contract arises out of a situation where individuals cannot be trusted to abide by their word. It assumes a society that is essentially faithless, in which friendship is impossible. The medieval system, resting on the assumption of faith and the harsh censure of public faithlessness, permitted a system in which explicitly legal bonds were unnecessary because the positive feedback of Fides assured outcomes superior to the letter of the law. The modern system of contractual consent over faithful friendship ensures that obligation is only met at the minimum possible level. It creates incentive to defect in prisoner dilemmas, especially if a clever lawyer can find an “out” in the contract. It leads to a perverse motivation to absolve oneself of obligation by twisting and abusing the terms of the agreements publicly made. It legitimizes a system of institutionalized abuse.
The modern mind’s incapacity to practice faith is epitomized in Ross’s article, “Social Control.” Since under the modern understanding, no person can ever be trusted, it must be concluded that friendship in the Aristotelian sense is impossible. Each of us being no more than fundamentally equal and disembodied wills which inevitably come into conflict over objects of desire, the choice to have personal relationships and friendships with some but not others must be delusional and irrational. Ross argues that what we call friendship is merely prejudice in favor of some individuals rather than others, and thus is a barrier to the creation of the modern liberal utopia under the social control of experts who alone are capable of harmonizing the discordance of unrestrained Will through social science. Only by rejecting friendship as a form of prejudice and instead embracing universal fraternity, can the fundamentally untrustworthy world become trustworthy. Ross calls for a perfect equality of sentiment between all individuals, so that in a society where everyone is equally a stranger, he can imagine a common bond in their strange-ness which permits trust.
In complete emotional isolation from one another, Ross expects to find the “fertile and generous emotion” which C. S. Lewis attributes to “men with chests.”
Ecce, absurditas horum temporum.
As a footnote, the description of the concept as ‘Fides’ and the conflation of religious vs societal faith is no accident. This is only possible if I publically share a faith with the next man, because only then do I know whether he means the same thing as I by the word ‘trustworthy’. Men of the same cultus (which is like an ethne, but applied to faith) know they share the shape of the world in common.
This is the origin and meaning of the sense of Christian brotherhood, not the reduced and weaponized interpretation we have today which says we must open our doors and hearts to the world so that we may be robbed and killed by the faithless. Further, Christian brotherhood in this sense doesn’t imply or intend to imply sameness or lack of disagreement, as anyone who grew up with a brother can attest.
As the usual this piece is excellent. As excellence has become a trademark of Gordion’s style.
There’ potentially a lot to discuss here obviously but one issue I would like to raise is the role of St. Thomas himself in Western History. I’m no expert on Scholasticism, so please feel free to attempt to beat me down on this, but his thought does seem to have given rise to Western Secularism. Even the very concept of Natural Law, potentially sets the table for Modern Secularism.
Basically, I think SM should take a very serious look at the AQ (aquinas question.) As I tend to think how you answer it has extremely important implications for any potential restorative project in the West.
Walter Ullmann is the go-to guy for the relationship of Aquinas to secularism. I tend to agree that he never intended his work to be used by secularists because he is assuming a secular society that is fully Catholic. Grotius and eventually the Natural Rights liberals like Hobbes and Locke, however, will take his Dual Order and deprive politics of any religious character, while simultaneously reducing religion to “mere opinion on the hereafter,” to quote Locke’s Letters on Tolerance.
I’m going to have to strenuously disagree with the idea of the dual order in Aquinas, and make the bald claim that the literal intention is no separation, but rather to extend the claim of the perfection of paganism by Christianity into the political realm. Any reading that promotes a duality is a false, unCatholic reading.
Which doesn’t mean that isn’t what happened.
I could perhaps actually write an article (or several) on this topic, but frankly I’m extremely leery of theological exegesis on the internet (and I’d want to brush up on my Latin instead of just relying on translators).
The problems I find arise from Summa Theologica I-II Questions 95-96 and II-II Questions 57-58, which seem to clearly distinguish secular justice from spiritual virtue.
From II-II Question 58 Article 6:
Et in III Polit. dicit quod non est simpliciter eadem virtus boni viri et boni civis. Sed virtus boni civis est iustitia generalis, per quam aliquis ordinatur ad bonum commune. Ergo non est eadem iustitia generalis cum virtute communi, sed una potest sine alia haberi.
“And in 3 Politics, he [the Philosopher] said that the virtue of the good man is not simply the same as the good citizen. But the virtue of the good citizen is justice in general, by which someone is ordered toward the common good. Therefore, general justice is not the same as virtue in general, but being possible to have one without the other.”
The idea that we can do right by society without doing right by the individuals around us, or that we can be good citizens without being good men, raises my hackles as a Christian philosopher. I tend to side with John of Salisbury who argues Christianity is a prerequisite to justice and virtue, and that the unredeemed soul is incapable of practicing either except by accident. Policraticus seems to be a far more Christian approach to Aristotle than the Summa.
I went back and checked the citation of Politics Book 3, and what Aristotle seems to be saying is that good citizenship is relative to the constitution of the polity. If you live in an oligarchy, to be a good citizen means to be rich. If you live in a timarchy, to be a good citizen means to be valorous. Good citizenship, then, is only “good” relative to the goodness of the regime and bears no relation to goodness or morality in general, in the way that one can be a “good” thief or a “good” murderer because you are proficient at crime.
I can’t help but conclude that Aquinas is fundamentally misinterpreting Aristotle here by taking Aristotle’s best case scenario – to be a good citizen of an Aristocracy means to support the common good – and applying it universally when Aristotle admits that the best constitution is nigh impossible.
Honestly, I’m going to have to punt on a response for the moment. It has been a while since I cracked my Summa, which is rather a crime, but life takes its toll.
However, I look forward to having this conversation in earnest some time.
That said, it wouldn’t at all surprise me if Thomas were misinterpreting Aristotle. The breadth of texts available for criticism was sadly reduced in his day and age.
Something or other about the Turks, I’m afraid.
Probably we should not worry about this or that thought of St. Thomas (although he is a Doctor of the Holy Roman Church, he had an erroneous belief on the Immaculate Conception of Mary, which became a dogma in the 19th century). Fathers and later theologians should be observed together.
On the other hand, heresies arise when certain propositions of eminent theologians are augmented to such an extent that other tenets of the Faith are forgotten or misinterpreted.
If Aquinas is suspect then it is only because Christianity itself is suspect. After all, Christianity does have in itself some inherently “liberal” and “secularist” elements. Obviously, it was far to the left of the Imperial Cult, and however later historical developments affected it, the core remained. However I don’t think these elements are a bad thing, in fact they are good thing as long as they remain on the correct track… after all, Christendom proved more successful than Heathendom.
I think you are wrong. The specific way of life that existed in Germanic realms is a consequence of their Germanicness, not of their Christianess. Christians lived in the ancient Roman Empire before they lived in Medieval Europe, and being a religious minority they had to be secular. Furthermore, the way of life that developed in Early Middle Ages in Western Europe, of course, couldn’t continue forever (it was time and place specific). Instead of blaming it on specific intellectual developments, one should blame it on population growth (and what to say of the eastern Roman Empire then, that never had such a system? can’t go with ‘muh modurnity’ there). Obviously, one cannot expect the same way of life in a barony of 300 people and in a city of 300000 people.
First, after the 4th Century, there is no difference between Germanic-ness and Latin Christianity. I realize this book has been passed around the Reactosphere for a long time, but Russell’s Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity is the go-to book on this topic.
Secondly, the depopulated waste of the 14th Century, from which modernity took root, is not the whole of the Middle Ages. The 12th Century was heavily urbanized and comparable to the Classical world in population density, according to several studies. The medievals dealt with population growth by segregating the cities from the rest of the country. Immigration to the boroughs was allowed but emigration from them was not. Furthermore, burgesses (or the bourgeoisie, if you prefer) were not freemen. They were a special type of serf bound directly to the King who had immense privilege in comparison to other unfree and even some free classes.
Just as today, the cities catch population growth due to the inherent carrying capacity limits of rural communities. But by isolating and disenfranchising the cities, the pernicious effects of urban politics was contained, until Edward I was foolish enough to grant them the franchise and seats in Parliament. The French managed to keep the bourgeoisie contained for centuries beyond this.
I’m not advocating “a way of life,” but a single idea which transcends multiple societies and classes, that social order must be built on the concept of Faith if it is to be eucivic. The bourgeoisie ideal of contractarianism is dyscivic, promotes defection, and amplifies social distrust. It creates a culture of legalism and elevated the lawyer, a particularly despicable type of person, to the heights of society. A system of Faith elevated trustworthiness to one of the highest virtues and severely punishes the untrustworthy with social banishment. It elevates figures like religious leaders and military leaders to the head of society.
Yes, our society isn’t capable of handling this. Faith-based societies require homogeneity in religion, culture, language, and ethnicity. They require a willingness to expel members who won’t conform. If people won’t conform to their word, and society doesn’t demand this with utmost force, civil order is impossible. Contracts, social or otherwise, don’t work.
>First, after the 4th Century, there is no difference between Germanic-ness and Latin Christianity
Nonsense. Germanification of Christianity took a long time, and in that same period there were also other currents in the Western Christendom (like Celts). Also, I reject Russel’s thesis.
>Secondly, the depopulated waste of the 14th Century, from which modernity took root, is not the whole of the Middle Ages.
What do you even mean by ‘modernity’?
>The 12th Century was heavily urbanized and comparable to the Classical world in population density, according to several studies
Tomayto, tomahto. Population growth, or Little Ice Age, whatever! The changes happened to which the social order had to adapt to.
>The French managed to keep the bourgeoisie contained for centuries beyond this.
Yeah, right it was the bourgeoisie. It’s not like French kings weren’t the greatest levellers of all, and French aristocracy a bunch of degenerate peddlers of liberalism and Enlightenment.
>The bourgeoisie ideal of contractarianism is dyscivic, promotes defection, and amplifies social distrust.
Which is why Anglos managed to conquer the world?
>It creates a culture of legalism and elevated the lawyer, a particularly despicable type of person, to the heights of society.
Hey, I hate the lawyers as much as the next guy, but are they really so much worse than warlords with muraudering hordes of savages? I mean, yeah, they’re annoying but they won’t kill me, my sons, pillage my home, and rape my daughters.
>A system of Faith elevated trustworthiness to one of the highest virtues and severely punishes the untrustworthy with social banishment
Why, we all know that people before the modern era kept their true to their word! No betrayals, backstabbings, poisonings, rebellions… ever! Nuh-huh.
>It elevates figures like religious leaders and military leaders to the head of society.
Those Borgias man, such a nice people! Attila the Hun, such a fine gentleman!
>Yes, our society isn’t capable of handling this. Faith-based societies require homogeneity in religion, culture, language, and ethnicity. They require a willingness to expel members who won’t conform. If people won’t conform to their word, and society doesn’t demand this with utmost force, civil order is impossible. Contracts, social or otherwise, don’t work.
Which was my point. And since we aren’t going to get Hoppean “physical removal” enclaves anytime soon (or ever), we still need a functioning socity. Contracts based on state-sanctioned force make this possible.
Sorry for being a devil’s advocate here, but this rose-tinted view of history perpetuated by many reactionaries is really starting to get on my nerves.
Devil’s advocacy is always welcome, as long as it’s polite.
Eh, stuff on the Internet is always confrontational. It’s probably, among other things (like it not being a face to face interaction between human beings), because it makes one sound more convincing than he actually is.
____
Identifying what was right about the past is key to fixing the future methinks. Romanticization and idealization are antithetical to that end.
“What do you even mean by ‘modernity’?”
I mean the scholarly consensus – societies in the West dating from the Renaissance on, as epitomized by the works of Machiavelli or Hobbes and their successors.
“The changes happened to which the social order had to adapt to.”
Inevitability in history and politics is nonsense. Hegel is wrong. No social technology is necessary or inevitable. You failed to rebut the statement that alternate social technologies, like the jurisdictional isolation of urban environments from their surrounding counties, can deal with population growth.
“but are they really so much worse than warlords with muraudering hordes of savages”
Yes. You compare best to worst. Anglo-Saxon bourgeoisie society to the Borgias and Attila the Hun. If you compare average to average, then military government looks far better than modern Demotist government. I don’t remember the particular author who said this, probably C.S. Lewis, but the authoritarian leader has to sleep, and his tyranny rests with him, but the modern managerial bureaucratic tyranny never rests and never sleeps.
“Why, we all know that people before the modern era kept their true to their word!”
Lex non curat de minimus. Laws are made for the ordinary case, not the extraordinary. I could just as easily point to the abuse of lawsuits and the costs imposed on society.
“And since we aren’t going to get Hoppean “physical removal” enclaves anytime soon (or ever), we still need a functioning society.”
And my point is that we don’t have a functioning society. We have a society devoid of widespread violence. That’s not good enough. I don’t share the post-Libertarian monomaniacal obsession with a violence-free society. Violence is not the summum malum.
>I mean the scholarly consensus – societies in the West dating from the Renaissance on, as epitomized by the works of Machiavelli or Hobbes and their successors.
Well, if that’s the definition, then certainly, count me in anti-modernist camp.
>Inevitability in history and politics is nonsense. Hegel is wrong. No social technology is necessary or inevitable. You failed to rebut the statement that alternate social technologies, like the jurisdictional isolation of urban environments from their surrounding counties, can deal with population growth.
Who said anything about inevitability? Let’s put it this way, if nuclear warhead, with no possibility of deactivation, is in your town you’ll die unless you evacuate i.e. adapt to the present circumstances. Now, you might have liked your old circumstances better, they might have been objectively better too, but things are the way they are.
>If you compare average to average, then military government looks far better than modern Demotist government. I don’t remember the particular author who said this, probably C.S. Lewis, but the authoritarian leader has to sleep, and his tyranny rests with him, but the modern managerial bureaucratic tyranny never rests and never sleeps.
I agree, but modern demotism is not what I had in mind. What I had in mind was the rugged families that colonized the Old West. They certainly were Anglo bourgeoisie, and quite possibly the most contract-based society that has ever existed (even though it did not exist for long). But they actually stood affront to the courts and lawyers, and in some ways, both good and bad, mirrored feudalism – there were small scale private wars – feuds, for instance.
>I could just as easily point to the abuse of lawsuits and the costs imposed on society.
You don’t have to tell me twice. I am probably even more extreme than you in that regard, given that I hold even the entire concept of IP bogus. Still, is it worse than peasant rebellions? Is it worse than fighting to the death in the arena?
>And my point is that we don’t have a functioning society. We have a society devoid of widespread violence. That’s not good enough. I don’t share the post-Libertarian monomaniacal obsession with a violence-free society. Violence is not the summum malum.
Well, I agree with everything you said here. But why don’t we have a functioning society? Is it because of the existance of contracts or perhaps some other things? I like to construct it as a pyramid of needs. In my opinion, first and formost, for the functioning society the institution of patriarchy is necessery, with legal enforcement thereof. Secondly the legal enforcement of family values and moralism. Thirdly, and most importantly because it is the base of the pyramid comes religious faith which needs to be strictly enforced, because it’s ineffective unless taken seriously. There are some other things, but IMHO they’re less important (for example, I think people need to believe that tomorrow they’ll be better off than today, that their children will be better off than them, which is one of many reasons why I disagree with your economic views that promote poverty and stagnation as somehow good and fulfilling, but that’s entirely different topic), for people can endure much (even crippling poverty) with contentment when they have their faith, and their family.
Nathan Duffy just cited Houellebecq the other week over at Thermidor:
“Children [in past ages] existed solely to inherit a man’s trade, his moral code and his property. This was taken for granted among the aristocracy, but merchants, craftsmen and peasants also bought into the idea, so it became the norm at every level of society. That’s all gone now: I work for someone else, I rent my apartment from someone else, there’s nothing for my son to inherit. I have no craft to teach him, I haven’t a clue what he might do when he’s older. By the time he grows up, the rules I lived by will have no value—he will live in another universe. If a man accepts the fact that everything must change, then he accepts that life is reduced to nothing more than the sum of his own experience; past and future generations mean nothing to him. That’s how we live now.”
Nowadays, I am a proletarian with a PhD. Even with those more close to the top, a top class lawyer or MD uses his influence to get his son a job close to the top: he does not make him a successor in his company because he does not own one.
While we may criticize the Boomers, it was the generation born in the 1910s and 1920s that survived the Great Depression and WW2 and then allowed their children to become hedonistic nihilists: yes, in a span of several decades every home had enough food and a washing machine. And a TV to watch Armstrong and Aldrin walking the moon…
Well, personally, I am still a peasant: hard-working, quite ascetic and thinking that one wrong move (long-term unemployment, divorce, illegitimate child, luxury) will throw your family into dire straits (in my county, peasantry was informally divided into a better, struggling, hardened-people class owning some small pieces of land and a low class of alcoholics who lost even those peaces of land given to them after the abolishing of serfdom and went around as day-to-day laborers).
“What I had in mind was the rugged families that colonized the Old West. They certainly were Anglo bourgeoisie,”
I think the issue we have here is one of terminology. Fischer’s Backcountrymen, from Albion’s Seed, are not bourgeoisie except by the standards of modern pop Marxism. I would also recommend Richard Weaver’s The Southern Tradition at Bay, which demonstrates the character of the westward-moving settlers in the American South and the intense focus on personal integrity and honor which formed the basis of relationships, especially in contrast to the Yankee ideal of the money-obsessed banker. Until the Reconstruction, Southern law, unlike Northern law, was centered on public law, as opposed to Yankee focus on torts and contract law. Southerners dominate the Supreme Court up to the War, and in the wake of the war, Southern narratives on constitutional law still predominate. The consensus up to the 60’s (when real history was purged) is that the South lost the war but won the peace, through the legal writings of men like Alexander Stevens and Jubal Early.
In both texts, the key element is the way untrustworthy or dishonorable individuals are exiles from society, deprived of social status. This is the largest part of a social technology of Fides we are missing. We refuse to exile the undesirable from polite company, so we can’t trust our neighbor at his word.
The bourgeoisie, or in English the burgesses, are the city-dwellers. Literally, they’re the people of the boroughs or burgs. Marx is far more rigorous than his followers, limiting the bourgeoisie to the hyper-specialized money-economy individualistic owners of capital. The petit-bourgeoisie, the small landowner or small merchant, is a distinct class which the Marxists fear as counter-revolutionaries and reactionaries who need to be co-opted and bought out in order to prevent them from establishing a fascist regime against the Communist movement. In The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx explains the distinction between these two classes in Marxist theory and the consequence of ignoring the interests of the P-B (ie, Louis Napoleon’s reactionary[ish] regime), although his modern followers tend to ignore the inconvenient elements of his theory, since it requires them to play nice with the petit-bourgeoisie.
@Marcus Montisursinensis
See that is where I think romantic reactionaries like Duffy cross the line… into becoming anti-Christian even! Nothing in this life is certain, and nothing in this life is ours. We are but travelers. We came with nothing, and will leave with nothing. Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal
I mean I am probably the biggest advocate of property concept and market mechanisms around here, but in the end it’s all just a social technology for solving the problem of scarcity. Put no faith in salvation through the political order. Augustine of Hippo once said. And I now say put no faith in salvation through the economic order.
I would argue, contrary to Houellebecq, that life these days is actually far more certan than it was before. In Medieval times perpetual malnutrition was omnipresent, famines were fairly common, and half of your children died before the age of ten, and every chance was that you will follow soon too. Death was always looming around the corner. These days one of the biggest problems of the poor is morbid obesity! Modern medicine and material prosperity absent the guidance of culture and proper authorities have made people forget even the very existance of death. As a consequence people tend to act recklessly and chase after excitement, and hedonism on the one hand, and frivolous pursuits, and escapism on the other. So it’s really the other way around – the problem isn’t uncertainty, the problem is that we’re way too certain.
@Gordian
Well, terminology certainly is problematic. Many a word in politicalc has so many meanings as to render it completely useless.
@Michael Rothblatt
While no particular economic (or particular) order can guarantee heaven for someone as a singular person, there are orders that make smaller or greater impediments for a majority of people to live a proper life of a Christian. We live in a society where fornication and divorce are not only normal, but where having your spouse as the only sexual partner in your life is a curiosity. We live in a society that tries to make infanticide a “fundamental human right”. We live in a society where (in Europe) the majority of people dies alone in hospitals (“with the best care, provided by experts”) or old age homes. Their children and grandchildren have more important tasks to do… their careers, their jobs, their friends. Assisted suicide (a highway to hell) will become more and more frequent: no one wishes dying slowly, alone.
We are inclined to sin. If Christian virtues are high status, some people will try to struggle for his soul. Not everyone, of course. There will be hypocrites and there will be both scoundrels and indolent who will not bother even to try. But if Christian virtues are low status, while sin is high status, much fewer people will enter the struggle.
You say, rightly, that, death was always looming around the corner. It is of the utmost importance how a society understands an ordinary (non-violent) death of its member. Will a be at my mother’s deathbed like the two of use were at my grandfather’s? Or will I be on the other side of the globe when some clerk phones me to tell me that my mother has passed away, and then I will feel self-pity for all troubles I will have because of urgent flight arrangements?
The possibility of dying of malnutrition or due to some epidemic disease is indeed almost nonexistent. But much greater uncertainty exists regarding one’s identity. Working on a farm with one’s father, learning various crafts, the father’s identity slowly becoming the identity of the son.
My son will learn his working skills at school. My job is nothing for him. My father’s job did matter nothing for me. Just money brought home to support the family.
My best friends from high school I do not see for years. My closest faculty colleagues once or twice a year for some small talk about our kids and jobs (possible job offers are probably the only reason we stayed in touch). Exactly the same with the colleagues from the previous job… Those I have frequent contacts with either live quite near or are my Latin Mass congregation. With those I try to build a männerbund. Ideological compatibility and physical proximity.
Of course I am not against technological progress. We must think carefully to discern what aspects of economic changes cause spiritual decline, whereas others may be a matter of pure coincidence.
My working experience in large systems (academia and multinational corporations) brings me to a conclusion that half of the low and middle management positions at best do not bring any additional value, or, at worst, cause internal struggles and coordination overload. I agree with Jim Donald that we should stop the degree inflation. And, more important, females employed outside family-owned enterprises should become low-status again.
The identity crisis is a problem, but I am not sure it’s because children aren’t doing what their parent’s were doing. IMHO it’s because there’s no local community anymore, there’s only bunch of neighboring houses, just like there’s no more family anymore, only a bunch of roommates, sometimes blood-related.
I am pretty sure that not even in earlier times would someone draw their identity from their job (with possibly some exceptions). It’s not like people thought “I am first and foremost a gong scourer!”
@Michael Rothblatt
Good point. I should refine my thoughts.
A personal feeling of identity with a group comes as an organic process, when people spend a lot of time together, when they earn for living together and when this occupation produces broader social implications, much broader than a simple private contract between an employer and an employee.
People doing white collar jobs together are a random bunch, the peers always fighting for a promotion. Treason and a knife in your back is more probable to expect from your peer than loyal cooperation. As long as the treason is quiet enough, not bringing a particular scandal, it is rewarded.
People spend a half of their life doing a job somewhere and travelling to their working place, separated from their family. Kids spend much of their time in a useless education system (even harmful, if you take into account the ideas they are taught). They mostly do not dine together, except for weekends (it is even worse with lower classes who work on Saturdays, Sundays…). Yes, they become accidental roommates.
People do not drive their identities from their jobs, but from how they spend their time together: people they interact with and social obligations that arise from this interaction (if any). A job takes a lot of our life time. Nowadays, our jobs do not seem to produce a positive impact on our family life and on our identity as a whole. It seems that we have become a set of irreconcilable (or at least orthogonal) partial identities. A positive feedback for the vision of Rousseau: a random bunch of isolated individuals with no collective identity at all (after all, he had his kids brought up in an orphanage).
>Treason and a knife in your back is more probable to expect from your peer than loyal cooperation.
And in some Medieval guild you would have expected the same, except in a quite literal sense.
Humans are human, always and everywhere.
Yeah, schools should be gone and apprenticeship put in its place. Women should be taken away the right to work (they also shouldn’t be able to own property, nor travel without husband’s permission). And finally, real gold standard and full-reserve banking should be instituted so that paychecks reflect the current productivity level. Fiat currency inflation has eaten up all the productivity increase gained from foreign trade and technological advancement. Without fiat currency it would be possible today, at least in the West, to work much, much less, while maintaining the same standard of living, thus freeing up time for friends and family, church and community, etc. But, this I think requires entertainment industry to be banned, otherwise people would use all that free time to watch TV and play video games.
Several points for @Rothblatt and @Gordian
The system of faith sometimes produces good spiritual leaders and sometimes does not.
The greedy merchant and a Marsilius-of-Padua-style men-of-letters sell their soul and the bodies and souls of others for a small portion of vain glory and much less pieces of silver than thirty.
Regarding the problem of how Power got above Reason and Virtue:
– about 1050 the monks of Cluny became high-status
– the life of St. Thomas (a dominican) coincides with the life of St. Bonaventure (a franciscan) and the life and reign of St. Louis IX of France
– before Black Death, it was Philip IV of France who brought the pope to Avignon
– population growth may be connected with heresies such as albigensians, waldensians and Joachim of Fiore (late 12th, early 13th century) and fraticelli (1290s, 13-aughts)
– Black Death came in 1340; regarding France as the most populous European country until the end of 18th century, the population of 1340, about 20 mil. people was reached again several times and then dropped, and would finally be surpassed only in the 1740s (see Wikipedia Demographics_of_France: Historical_population_figures)
– the Western Schism (1378-1417) did not make a good picture of the Roman Church
– early 15th century: the hussites in Bohemia
– middle 15th century: Aragonese intervention in Naples;
– 1494: during papacy of Alexander VI, French intervention for the throne of Naples
– 1498: French-Aragonese-Castilian treaty on a new intervention if Italy; and did the series of Italian Wars last until Spanish supremacy in 1559
– 1517: Luther
– 1545-1563: Tridentine council; Jesuits become high-status among Catholics like the Cluniacs did 500 years ago (St. Francis Borgia, St. Robert Bellarmine, Francisco Suarez; Clavius the astronomer…)
Now, considering some very recent developments (Francis), the Jesuits seem more adaptive than we would expect having the benefit of their souls in the regard.
The fact with the Anglos conquering the world is quite complex.
First, Spain conquered quite much larger portion of territory in the Americas before the English established their colonies in the present USA and Canada. The waste of the former Spanish Empire seems to devour slowly the conquerors of the world. Who conquered whom?
Why did the Arabs conquer the Persian and largest part of the Eastern Roman Empire? Because those two empires were exhausted by a horrible war, until one of them prevails (the Persians captured Jerusalem and took the True Cross but eventually lost).
The Plantagenets lost the Hundred Year’s War and England became see-oriented. With the adoption of Reformation, it was useless for the English to make any substantial invasion of France (promoting Spain) or Flanders (promoting France). Until Marlborough at the beginning of the 18th century.
Henry VII and VIII were proto-absolute rules like Louis XII and Francis I in France or Charles I in Spain. Even Mary Tudor was quite strong.
Had Henry VIII a son with Catherine of Aragon or had Edward VI reach majority and rule for 40 years… well in both cases there might have been a much stronger monarch in England; in the former case, even a Catholic one. Would the situation be different? Who knows.
What would happen with the present-day USA had France won the Seven Year’s war (the French and Indian War) in the European theater? With Quebec still a part of France, would there be all of the story with the Boston Tea Party and the Declaration of Independence? On the other hand, the British discussed to take Guadaloupe and Martinique, which brought enormous profit in sugar, instead of New France… Which reiterates the same question of the very foundation of the USA.
Spain and France were busy fighting each other for the top position until France prevailed; and then stubbornly fought the entire European continent to stop the perpetuation of Habsburg rule over Spain, Spanish Netherlands, Milan, Naples and Sicily. Too much…
Persians and Romans were weak from wars. France’s weakness was self-made however. France never stood a chance of becoming a world hegemon, for king Louis XIV and Jean-Baptiste Colbert have turned France from a monarchy into a corrupt mess of cleptocracy that makes post-Soviet Russia look like a paragon of virtue and efficient statecraft in comparison. King Louis XVI, unlike his two predecessors, was a man of virtue and good character who could’ve fixed the mess he was left with had he been stronger and more resolute.
Indeed, Louis XVI was a man of virtue, but not of a strong character.
I am not sure what he would have achieved, for the momentum of the ideas was with the Enlighteners. Let us view the surroundings: Joseph II, his idiotic reforms and his attack on the Christian Faith, given his successor’s (Leopold II) parallel work in Tuscany (the synod of Pistoia and some reforms of temporal matters) and the reign of Frederick the Great in Prussia (I am generally not a fan of Prussia, and particularly not of this royal friend of that forger and adventurer Voltaire). Similar things in Portugal and Spain.
So, what could Louis do? Leave Turgot as minister? Make a cabinet of several people like Turgot and Malesherbes?
That might have saved a possibility of French hegemony over European soil (still, I think it was lost after the War of Spanish Succession and the Seven Years’ War). Much worse, I believe, Louis could not have challenged the Enlighteners in any way, even if he were a person of the strongest character.
It seems to me that despite the best efforts of absolutists, it was only the French Revolution that gave impetus to the most destructive, and corrosive of ideas (if Moldbug is right, then absolutists wouldn’t have pushed for any more nonsense than they already did, because they already wrestled all the Power away from the hands of nobility and the church). Preventing the Revolution would have alone counted for much (and made him one of the greatest men who have ever lived, though nobody would’ve been aware of it).
The mortal foe of fides is positive law and (((legalism))).
Fides: Word is bond. I promised to do such-and-such and shook hands on it- so now I have to.
(((Legalism))): My lawyer said the courts won’t enforce this clause of the contract- so I’ll just say I’m going to do such-and such to the sucker, and then turn around and not do it.
Fides is nice, if you can have it. It requires certain conditions (one of them being, of course, a firm conviction of eternal damnation if you break your word), and when you don’t have the priviledge of having those conditions, when you can’t unconditionally trust, you still need to ensure in some way that people respect their obligations. That being said, there was that saying in the Old West that there was no crime until courts came, and that they needed no law until the lawyers came.