After Chivalry
Class Succession Amidst the Twilight of Virtue
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This post has several forerunners. Some time ago, I posted “The Author as a Case Study of the Educated Elite,” the purpose of which was too introduce not only myself but my class. More recently, “Alasdair MacIntyre and the Lost Tradition of the Virtues” channeled and defended the 1981 classic After Virtue, and retold the story of how moral philosophy, and downstream of that, ordinary people's moral thought, lost its way sometime around or before the Enlightenment, and how the best hope of getting back on track is to return to the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues, as it grew up and echoed down the generations from Homer and Aristotle through the Middle Ages. Then I went on to “The Age of Chivalry,” a vivid retrospective about the High Middle Ages, which seems to have been, in MacIntyre's shrewd account, the last historical period when the tradition of the virtues was in health. When, then, was it lost, and why, and how? And can it be recovered?
Before plunging into that, let me tip my hand a little about what I'm quixotically trying to do here. We live in an age without heroes, an age when it's not really fashionable to admire anyone. That's sad. People need heroes to enjoy and emulate and be inspired by. My own class, the educated elite, or what I prefer call “the information class,” the class of people who do creative mental work and have college degrees and use computers for a living, is actually somewhat virtuous, simply from inheriting good habits. But it doesn't understand virtue, even the virtue that it practices. It doesn't know how to aspire to or strive for greater virtue. So it can't make heroes. That's what I'm trying to fix, by teaching virtue, that long-lost tradition, to the information class.
In the best case, my hope is that I'll give the world something it lost with the fall of the knights and has never regained: a ruling class that models virtue and is admired. Armed with virtue, I want my class to do more for the less fortunate, by giving back not only in the form of money and welfare and good government and well-run companies and consumer products and inventions and jobs– though virtue would enable it to give more of all those things, too– but above all, to give themselves in the form of heroes, lives fit to admire, and the contemplation of which will entertain and edify.
But it will take a lot of historical backstory to set up the challenge. Heroes are, first and foremost, (a) famous, and (b) virtuous, but fame is a chancey affair, and the pursuit of it, though if anything it probably ought to be cultivated more than it is, can be corrupting. Fame, like wealth, is full of temptations, but it is also a means to many good ends, and it should sometimes be pursued for the sake of some kinds of good that can be done with it. But heroism is not one of those goods. Don't try to be a hero. Strive instead to be virtuous, to live so that if the spotlight of fame ever does happen to fall on you, your life will edify and inspire others. At most, try to be a candidate for heroism, ready to answer the call of heroism if it comes, or to be content to practice virtue in obscurity. But whether you are famous or obscure, your life is part of a larger story, and the story onto whose stage it is the lot of the information class to step is a long and intricate tragedy indeed. It had better know about it, in order to play its part well.
When was the Tradition of the Virtues Lost? And why? And how?
To the why, I’ll venture the simple suggestion that the tradition of the virtues was lost because the modern secular, sovereign state emerged, and killed it. The state did not permit people to think clearly about ethics in public, because if they did, they would condemn its misdeeds. But that only leads back to a deeper question why, or if you prefer, how. The state is often jealous of rival authorities such as goodness, truth, and right and wrong, but it is not usually able to make people forget them. Why was it more successful this time? How did it manage it? And when did this happen?
Many dates can be suggested as the beginning of modernity. If you identify modernity with democratic capitalism, a good date to pick is 1776, the year of the American Revolution and the publication of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. If you're more interested in philosophy and history of thought, you might pick 1641, when Descartes published his Meditations on First Philosophy. If you think modernity is above all post-Catholic, you might pick 1517, when Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to a church door and started the Reformation. Even that early date would omit most of the Renaissance, which some feel to be modern.
I am interested in the modern loss of the tradition of the virtues, and that makes it hard to pick a date, because the process was so subtle and gradual. Yet one date does stand out: 1307, the year, so to speak, of the assassination of Sir Galahad. In 1307, the West lost something that it has never, with one important partial exception, regained: a ruling class that was also a moral ideal. Chivalry was deprived, suddenly and violently and thoroughly, by force and fraud, of its apotheosis, the practical expression of its noblest dreams. Knights lost, to use a phrase the wisdom of which is easily underestimated because of its recent faddish popularity, their best role models. Without it, their virtues went astray, their aspiration turned to ambition, their valor to violence, their courtesy to luxury. As time passed, new classes, the bourgeoisie and the bureaucrats, who set their moral sights lower than the knights had done, emerged to mingle with and corrupt, or to rival and eclipse, the waning old nobility. The tradition of the virtues had always learned from experience, and was weakened by the growing lack of practical examples of virtue in high places, paving the way for its collapse during the Enlightenment. And chivalry, thus weakened, lacked the strength to resist the rise of sovereignty.
The Assassination of Sir Galahad
Early one morning in 1307, hundreds of French Templars were simultaneously arrested by agents of King Philip IV of France. They had lent him money, as was their custom, to fight a war with England, and this was, among other things, his brutal way of getting out of debt. To justify the assault, he accused them of homosexuality, heresy, cannibalism, idolatry, sacrilege, and an enormous array of disgraceful and preposterous charges. Confessions were extracted from leading Templars by torture. Long prison terms followed. Finally, in 1314, the Grand Master of the Knights Templar, Jacques de Molay, was burned for heresy, on the basis of his own false confession extracted by torture several years before and thereafter repudiated. The entire Templar order was disbanded throughout Europe, its wealth confiscated or turned over to the Knights Hospitallers, its members mostly tortured and killed.
Philip IV seems strangely out of place in the High Middle Ages, as if a man from another time and place had been transported into the skin of a medieval French king. Specifically, Philip IV seems like a man from our times, a man, in different respects, of the 20th or of the 21st century. His use of torture to extract lying confessions in order to destroy his enemies is shockingly reminiscent of Joseph Stalin. Indeed, before Stalin amazed the world by getting Zinoviev, Kamenev, and so many other communists to admit publicly to preposterous charges of conspiracy against the revolutionary regime they had dedicated their lives to building, historians looking back on the Templars couldn’t help but wonder if there wasn’t some truth in the charges after all. Why would Jacques de Molay admit to homosexuality, spitting on Christ, and so forth, if he hadn’t done it? Stalin did an inadvertent service to the science of history by showing the amazing degree to which human integrity can be broken under torture, so we can better understand, and be horrified at, the career of the proto-totalitarian king Philip IV.
Yet it is also revealing that Philip IV accused the Templars specifically of heresy, thus usurping the authority of the Church over the individual conscience. He had made fierce, lying accusation previously against Pope Benedict VIII, in his successful campaign to bring low the mighty medieval papacy. By 1302 [check], a new pope had been picked by King Philip and moved from Rome to the French town of Avignon. The modern state, from Philip IV’s time down to the present, has a perennial tendency to transgress freedom of conscience and set itself up as a kind of church. King Arthur’s knights swore, not to obey his command, but to do what they knew to be right. Thomas Aquinas taught that an unjust law is no law at all. It was the Church, not the state, that had authority to discern right and wrong in delicate, disputed questions of conscience. But Philip IV, in condemning the Templars for heresy, made the state a kind of church, and there has been, ever since that time, at least in Europe, and much more recently in America, a tendency for the state to pose as the arbiter of right and wrong. It is most clearly seen today in the push for gay “marriage,” where the government tries to alter society’s most fundamental institution and even its language in order to compel an alteration in individual consciences about what behaviors they regard as sinful.
Another modern feature of Philip IV was the way he lied—not that he lied, but how he lied. The legends of King Arthur’s court seem to have little foundation, and a character like Sir Lancelot was probably fabricated from whole cloth, yet he was widely believed for centuries to be a real person. That was the fault of the poets and prose writers of chivalry, whose scruples as historians left much to be desired. But there is so great a difference between the lies of the romancer and the lies of the slanderer that they hardly seem to belong in any common category. The romancer elaborates and embellishes and invents in order to entertain and edify. He creates. He is the servant of beauty. The slanderer poisons and disgusts and destroys. He enslaves others to ugliness: they can't get his filth out of their minds.
And again and again and again, modern discourse has tended this way, misrepresenting and willfully misunderstanding in order to fan hatred and tear down people and institutions. At different times, a tide of slander has assailed the Catholic Church, the clergy of many countries, kings and dukes and nobles, merchants and bankers and factory owners and even small shopkeepers and anyone who employed anyone else for a wage, Jews, and more recently, all white people, men who are breadwinners while their wives stay home and take care of the kids, and those who believe, as mankind always did until a few years ago, that marriage is between a man and a woman. Again and again, the slanderers make little or no effort to understand, to give credit where it’s due, or to acknowledge past debts. To slander is so much easier than to try to understand, and safer, too, since if you try to understand why someone has acted as they do, you may discover that they were justified, and that your critique is mistaken, and your demands are unwarranted.
The Templars had long been admired for their piety and courage. The order had grown rich through the donations of the faithful, and was generous in almsgiving. Crusading had been the crowning glory of knighthood and chivalry, and the Templars were the ideal Crusaders, their lives dedicated, their motives purified. Had the last Templars died fighting on the walls of Acre, they would have lived on as an ideal and an inspiration. Instead, a black tide of the most malevolent slander buried their reputation. It was never quite safe thereafter to admire the Templars. It was a defiance of pope and king in France and England. And without this chapter, the whole history of chivalry looked a little different, a little darker, a little less inspiring. Without the Crusades, knights had no great, holy cause to fight for. The fate of the Templars was a disincentive to seek one.
The French kings, blessedly weak in the early 13th century, had steadily grown stronger. There seems to be a pattern in human history whereby benignly decentralized political arrangements gradually give way to centralized sovereignty. Centralized sovereignty has a simplicity about it, which is a very inadequate reason to favor it, yet which can be very persuasive to people who don't give the matter much thought. And so the throne in 13th century France, like the federal government in 20th century America, tended unfortunately to exert a kind of force of gravity, and attract more and more power to itself, banefully culminating in the royal absolutism of the ancien regime that the French revolution destroyed. The growth of royal power was why King Philip could attack the Templars. But why did he?
At the time, and ever since, King Philip has been accused of greed. Perhaps his ultimate goal was no worse than theft. Yet one has to wonder. Why all the extravagant accusations if theft was his only objective? With the pope in his pocket, couldn't he simply have stated publicly that the Templars’ wealth was needed by the crown, and had the pope bless its confiscation? Surely it would have been easier for the pope to justify a transfer of what was ultimately, or at any rate could have been characterized as, Church property, than to abase himself by endorsing Philip's insane slanders against an order of men so long and so rightly admired and reverenced. Why were the charges so extreme? Surely more moderate charges would have sufficed to justify expropriation, and would have been more plausible.
We cannot read the mind of a man long dead. But is it too fanciful to suggest that King Philip knew that the secular sovereign state he was trying to found could never compete for the moral high ground against chivalry unless drastic measures were taken to wreck its splendor, and drag its reputation down from the mythic heights that it had attained? Perhaps it is making King Philip too much of a negative superman to suggest that he knew that, and was waging a battle for popular esteem on behalf of something as abstract as the secular sovereign state against the prior and superior claims of chivalry. Blind envy is a more plausible motive. But blind envy can serve the cause of sovereignty as if by an invisible hand, moving kings to cut down all who are virtuous or distinguished, making a desolation in which the sovereign state can reign alone.
The fall of the Templars must have discredited chivalry in four ways. First, if the Templars really did any or all of those horrible things, what, the credulous people must have wondered, motivated them to do it? What horrible mystery must lie at the heart of chivalry if knights had even the desire to perpetrate such acts, let alone the depravity to act on such desires, and the cunning to keep them secret? If the Templars had done such things for generations and only now been discovered, what might others of the knightly class still have been doing in secret?
Second, if the Templars were innocent, why didn't the rest of the order of chivalry come to the Templars’ defense? In the Arthurian legends, Sir Lancelot and Sir Percival and the rest of them are represented as wandering about the country righting every wrong that comes to their ears. Surely they would have made short work of King Philip! But by the early 14th century, the knights of France were so unworthy of their legendary forebears that they let the most grotesque miscarriage of justice be perpetrated in their midst, and against members of their own class too, without hanging King Philip from the highest tree, or even offering any resistance. By their inaction or complicity, they forfeited the honor of true knighthood. The one defense that can be made is that some of them may have believed the charges. The sheer, unprecedented audacity of the lies of King Philip and his pet pope may have outpaced many a good knight’s ability to be skeptical.
Third, the fact that many of the Templars did falsely confess under torture must have damaged their reputation for unshakable courage and honor even among those who didn't believe their confessions. Many hundreds of Templar prisoners had been offered, by their Muslim captors, the choice of conversion to Islam or death, and it seems that all but at most a handful chose death. But now, faced not with Muslim captors but with their fellow monks, Dominicans, in the role of torturers, backed by the pope, though many Templars died under torture rather than speak the horrible lies being put into their mouths, some, including the Grand Master, confessed, and thereby showed that knightly courage could be broken. And fourth, the ease with which the kings of England and France were able to physically destroy the order, though it could be interpreted in the Templars’ favor if it showed that their swords were reserved for the Muslims, must have been surprising, and disappointing to those who had admired their military strength.
King Philip's reign had already broken the order of high medieval Christendom in another way when he took the papacy prisoner in France, beginning the seventy year “Babylonian captivity” of the papacy in Avignon, followed by a brief schism in which there were two, and at one point even three, popes. The 13th century papal Church had been, on balance, a force for good in Europe. It supported the arts and the life of the mind, curtailed the power of overly strong kings, fostered law and political liberty more often than not, sought to make peace among faithful Catholics in Europe and direct their military energies to the Holy Land, or, unfortunately, against heretics, while helping to kindle popular piety by authorizing the work of the mendicant friars. But its wealth and power were somewhat incongruous for the successors of St. Peter the poor fisherman, and its human rights violations, much more so. In the long run, King Philip may have done the papacy a service by shattering its temporal power. In due course, there were new saints, new monastic orders, new revivals of popular Catholic piety. Chivalry proved more fragile. After the destruction of the Templars, the bloom was off the rose for good. Only as a dream did it show a strange resilience, echoing down the ages.
Before we leave King Philip, yet another of his legacies must be mentioned. In his conflict with Pope Boniface VIII, King Philip asked for the advice and support of the people of the realm through representatives who met in a new institution called the Estates General. Members of the first estate, the nobility, and the second estate, the clergy, had often advised the king in the past, but the Third Estate had hitherto had no corporate identity at the national level. In France as in other countries of Europe, some towns had developed self-governing institutions, benefiting in the French case from royal charters that authorized this, but their authority was strictly local. Already these “communes” had a record of anti-clericalism, of a pardonable sort, reacting against bad bishops for example. Now, it was for the anti-clerical purpose of denouncing the Pope and endorsing lying slanders against him that King Philip summoned their representatives and conjured them into the Third Estate. They complied. It would hardly have been safe to do otherwise. Yet there were still risks involved in thus invoking the people, as if appealing to them as a kind of authority. Perhaps the French kings would never have risked that if they hadn't pitted themselves against such a formidable adversary as the successor of Saint Peter, the Vicar of Christ.
Almost 500 years later, this Third Estate, which the king of France had made, made a revolution and beheaded the king of France. Echoing its anti-clerical origins, it went on to murder priests, and dispossessed the Church, and nullified the authority of the pope in France. As if it still remembered the lessons King Philip had taught it, it was cynical, skeptical of good and credulous of evil. It was paranoid and inclined to harsh punishments and extreme abuse of the forms of law. It briefly gained absolute supremacy, but couldn't hold it, and it gave way to a military dictatorship that burnt itself out in wars of conquest, followed by a restoration of the dynasty of the king that it had killed. But it lived on as the revolutionary protagonist in the dreams of the left. On it was modeled the proletariat of Marx, defined, as the Third Estate had been, negatively, by its privations, by its envy, by what it was not. The knights and the clergy had their own peculiar ideals and aspirations to excellence and virtue. The Third Estate had only its material wants and a desire for equality, that is, to bring everyone down to its level. To its admirers, it is the model and champion of modernity.
A few loose ends of this sad drama are worth tying up. Legend has it that, from the flames, the Templar Grand Master foretold doom on the wicked king and pope. Within a year, both were dead. King Philip had three healthy grown sons. They each inherited the throne of France in turn, and died young and without sons. The crown of France passed out of his line. Edward II of England, who had first resisted the assault on the Templars, but then joined in to grab the loot, was defeated at the Battle of Bannockburn by a much inferior force under Scottish king Robert the Bruce. King Robert, who was under excommunication anyway and didn't fear offending the pope, had allowed some Templars to take refuge in his kingdom and serve him, and their military prowess probably turned the battle in Robert’s favor. Edward became unpopular among the English barons, who were accustomed to victory, and they sided with Edward’s queen Isabella when she rebelled against her husband in 1325. Edward was imprisoned in Berkeley Castle and died, probably murdered, in 1327. The Templars were suppressed in most of Europe, though many in Germany were merely laicized, or joined the Knights Hospitallers, rather than being killed. In Portugal, they were reorganized as the Knights of Christ and allowed to continue. They were important in the Age of Discovery, and Prince Henry the Navigator was one of their Grand Masters. What might the Templars’ financial acumen and spirit of adventure have accomplished, have they survived throughout Europe, and not just in Portugal?
The Waning of Knighthood, and the Rise of Lesser Ruling Classes
Since 1307, other ruling classes have arisen in Europe, but none have been as admired as the knights once were. To be a knight was to be rich and strong, almost the peer of kings, an actor on the stage of history, and also to be honest and brave, courteous to women, zealous to protect the weak and avenge wrongs. All these abstractions were sworn by oaths, and rendered concrete in ceremonies and rituals and titles, before they were proved by deeds. Today, the “knight in shining armor” is a figure of speech, a rhetorical flourish, a byword for courage and honor and justice. Once, the knight in shining armor was a fact, and also a byword for courage and honor and justice. Once, society had an elite which was admired by the people, nay, an elite the admiration of which was one of the people’s favorite pastimes. That, at bottom, was the dream for the sake of which Don Quixote went mad, and generations of readers have envied his madness. Philip IV destroyed that, and we have never got it back.
This is not to deny that there have been many brave deeds and good people in the course of the last seven centuries. There have been very, very many. It is not even to say that the knights were, on average, more virtuous than other social classes in their own day, or than the many social elites which have succeeded one another during the many subsequent generations since that time. But when a knight was wicked, cowardly, dishonorable, etc., he was definitely departing from an ideal which he had sworn, and society expected, him to uphold. When a knight denounced tyranny, aided the weak, risked his life in battle for his lord or for his God, he was only living up to the ideals that defined his class. No ruling class since the Age of Chivalry has been defined by so lofty a moral ideal that it was expected to live up to.
The two centuries or so after 1307 were the time of chivalry’s decadence. Knighthood still existed, but it was steadily corrupted. Its privileges were detached from duties. Its still considerable energies were diverted into sordid wars among Christian princes for territory and power. It was desacralized, and stripped of its moral independence from secular kings. It became what Douglas North calls a “closed access order,” definitely denying entry to those not of noble birth, whereas the possibilities for entry into the knightly class had formerly been somewhat ill-defined and vague. Meanwhile, the dreams of chivalry grew more intense, richer and more rococo, less moral and practical, more escapist and fantastic. No doubt knights became somewhat militarily obsolete, as first longbows and then gunpowder made armored cavalry less of a battlefield asset, in comparative terms, than they had been during the Crusades. But knighthood could have adapted to changing tactics and technology well enough if all else were well, and in fact, the Knights Hospitallers stayed on the cutting edge of military technology for centuries thereafter. More important was the loss of their freedom of action, their ability to make their own policies and conduct themselves as the peers of kings, which ultimately made a knightly character impossible to maintain.
Yet the knightly class endured, after a fashion, down to the French Revolution and beyond. Knighthood still supplied an indispensable part of the mythic self-image of the European aristocracy. Lords and barons and dukes and counts bore titles that were impressive and honorable because the same titles had been won in the Middle Ages by knights. Nobles still liked to think that their superiority was not merely a matter of economic resources, but was moral. Many of them sought, like some knights of old, to be great men in public affairs. Many achieved glory in military service, though usually not in personal combat prowess like Sir Lancelot. They also continued to refine the courtesy that distinguished a medieval court. They slowly succumbed to luxury, but often tried hard to redeem it by good taste. They increasingly considered many or most types of work, as well as trade and commerce, beneath their dignity. In France, the law even forbade them to engage in it, on pain of losing their noble station. Finally they were little better than parasites, absorbing the surplus of the land and sometimes even then going into debt. Many in France lost their heads beneath revolutionary guillotines, but in England, the nobility held their own in politics throughout the 19th century, and there are dukes etc. in England even today, though they no longer matter.
Bourgeoisie and Bureaucrats
Meanwhile, there emerged a new class, self-made in late medieval and modern times, in peaceful, commercial, competitive conditions, good at being self-reliant and making money, sometimes called “the bourgeoisie.” Karl Marx started a fashion of abusing this class, which has become a habit on the political left and sometimes the political right ever since that time. Deirdre Mcloskey’s book The Bourgeois Virtues does great service to the world by its title alone. The reputation of the bourgeoisie is a bit unfair and unfortunate, for it has never been the greedy, soulless class of Marxist mythology. It has certain characteristic virtues, such as thrift, industriousness, self-discipline, honesty in business, respect for others’ property, and to some extent, entrepreneurial creativity and wholesome family values. It even has an old, optional habit of sparing a bit of surplus cash for philanthropy.
Nonetheless, the standard of bourgeois respectability is definitely a limited standard. If there is an ideal bourgeois, he is much inferior to the ideal knight. When Andrew Carnegie, towards the end of his life, set out before his death gradually to give away all his money to philanthropy, he was doing a good deal less than many saints who, in the middle of life, have suddenly and swiftly given all their money to the poor, then lived more ascetically than the poor themselves. He was doing much less, not only than a knight who dies in the Crusades, but than a knight who first takes his oath, committing himself in advance to all the perils and privations that his promise might turn out to demand. Nonetheless, even Andrew Carnegie did rather more than was expected of him, simply as a bourgeois. One could hardly say, “Well of course, as a bourgeois, he could have done no less.” Being a good bourgeois involves some sacrifice. One has to work, make goods and services that people want enough to pay for them, save for a rainy day, and pay one’s debts. But it is hard to imagine any circumstances in which one would have to die in order to live up to the standard of bourgeois respectability. Circumstances in which a knight would have to risk death in order to live up to the lofty ideals of chivalry happened all the time. That may be why the bourgeoisie, though it presided, in the 19th century, over times of rising prosperity and civilizational creativity that rivaled and in many ways surpassed the Age of Chivalry, was never very popular.
A third elite class, still less popular and less characteristically virtuous than the bourgeoisie, always tends to emerge in the shadow of power, when power becomes too big to be merely personal. It appeared first in the shadow of absolutist kings like Philip IV, or arguably before that in the shadow of the powerful papal Church. Later, it emerged in the shadow of “sovereign” democratic states, as well as in the heart of large corporations. If knights are characteristically brave, and the bourgeoisie is characteristically thrifty and resourceful and greedy, the adjective that naturally attaches itself to the bureaucrat is faceless. The bureaucrat’s humanity is defaced: he is a man emulating a machine. As such, he refuses to accept accountability for the rules which he enforces. If the knights of King Arthur’s court vowed not to take the wrong side of any quarrel, the ideal bureaucrat, in effect, vows to take the wrong part of any quarrel, if his master tells him to. “I don’t make the rules,” he says, and he doesn’t break them either, even if he knows that they ought to be broken. The archetypal knight avenges injustice; the archetypal bourgeois neither avenges nor perpetrates injustice; but the archetypal bureaucrat implements injustice if such is decreed from above.
Where the rules are fair, the bureaucrat may be innocent, in the sense that wrongdoing is not his job, but even then, he characteristically is, and in a sense is obliged to be, unimaginative and uncreative. Creative departures from traditional product lines are the glory of the bourgeois if they succeed, and an honest mistake if they fail. Creative departures from traditional regulations make the bureaucrat inept if they fail and corrupt if they succeed. In this respect, too, the bureaucrat is defaced: he has surrendered his human faculty of creativity.
Since the 18th century, a key pattern that can be discerned in the politics of Europe is the struggle between the bourgeois and the bureaucrat. Before the French Revolution, the bureaucracy predominated in the absolutist kingdoms of Continental Europe, while the bourgeoisie had more sway in England. The middle decades of the 19th century was the heyday of the bourgeoisie, as laissez faire reduced the bureaucrats to night watchmen. Beginning towards the end of the 19th century, the bureaucrats, under the banner of outright socialism or compromises with socialism, made a sweeping comeback.
What about the clergy? They have carried on through all revolutions. Even the French revolutionaries and the Bolsheviks never destroyed them. They have been of varied moral caliber, but few even in the worst of times have been wholly without virtue, and every generation has had many who were loving, sincere, temperate, just, and faithful. If the tradition of the virtues must nourish itself by contemplating the lives of contemporary heroes, why, after the good knights were gone, couldn't it simply contemplate the clergy instead?
Often it has. But the clergy can never really be a ruling class because it is not fitting for priests to fight. It is their vocation to live by the Sermon on the Mount, turning the other cheek. They have not always done so, of course, but when they fight, it is an exception at best, a scandal at worst. Yet the world needs force to be used in defense of justice, and those who use it or direct it must comprise the ruling class. The clergy are generally marginal in public affairs, as they should be. They ought not to be of this world, but rather, ambassadors of the King of Heaven.
Meanwhile, people living in the world, scrambling to make ends meet, have to think a lot about the ruling class, or rather about certain specific members of the ruling class who happen to be their employers or political rulers. It is very advantageous to the learning of virtue if the anxious study of these individuals by their social inferiors, for purposes of trying to meet their expectations and please them, also fills the minds of their inferiors with virtuous characters who are worth emulating. People who have to work for greedy, foolish, or cowardly employers, or live under vain or dishonest rulers, and only get to see examples of virtue on the weekends, living lives too special to be easily emulated, will get a rather meager ethical education. Of course, it makes matters much worse if, as is usually the case, it's dangerous to criticize the vices of the ruling class, and worse still if the best examples of virtue available are rebels, or condemned heretics, such as the Templars became after 1314, whom it's dangerous to admire.
Moreover, there is wisdom in an ancient Greek tradition that distinguishes in the soul, alongside logos, reason, and eros, appetite, a third aspect, called thumos, which is usually translated “spirit,” in the sense of that word that has nothing to do with “spirituality,” but is close in meaning to enthusiasm, excitement, inspiration, with a dash of honor, glory, triumph. Plato held that logos and eros are not enough, that reason should not govern appetite alone. Thumos, too, is needed. It is a principle that applies far beyond the battlefield, yet the battlefield is the easiest place to see it. Appetite does not like to fight. It would rather sit at table, eating and drinking, or lie in bed, making love. Reason sometimes sees that fighting is necessary. It may override appetite and compel a person to advance, reluctantly and grimly, into battle. But spirit rejoices in the battle, feels the thrill and the glory of it, pursues it wholeheartedly. More generally, it's sometimes demoralizing and sad to give up something you keenly want, just because you rationally see that you should. But if you're inspired to achieve something or go on an adventure, the sacrifice becomes easy. Sometimes it's not enough to know the right thing to do. You need to be inspired. You need thumos.
The clergy have often been models of reason, temperance, and moral judgment. They are good at helping people see the right thing to do. But they tend not to exemplify thumos, at least not in a way that can fire the popular imagination. With only clergy, not knights, to admire, boys in particular would grow bored. They tend to turn to any other source they can find to satisfy their thirst for thumos. They dream, like Peter Pan, of savage Indians and pirates. They join gangs. Or in wartime, they become soldiers, and fight for “my country, right or wrong.” Perhaps they admire firefighters or cops or athletes, and there's nothing wrong with that, except that, with all due respect to the emergency services, it doesn't help them accomplish anything really great or historic. Their pastors would like them to become saints, but that's a dull prospect for most young minds. There is no thumos in it, at least not that they can understand.
There is a very revealing exception to this rule, and it comes from the Age of Chivalry. Saint Francis of Assisi is one of the great ascetic saints, yet unlike the ascetics of the ancient Egyptian desert, he makes a perfectly natural appeal to all manner of ordinary people, not only when they are in a pious or penitent mood, but at any moment that they might recall one of the wonderful tales about him. Why? It matters, I think, that Saint Francis’s very name, though he was Italian, means something like “Frenchie,” a trace, one must suppose, of an admiration for the land of chivalry on the part of Francis's bourgeois parents. The young Francis, like Don Quixote before his madness, read chivalric romances and dreamed of being a knight. He tried to be a knight, made a fool of himself, then miraculously turned that disgrace to his eternal advantage by becoming a fool for God, the court fool, as Chesterton said, of the King of Heaven. From then on, he was the gentlest soul that history remembers, yet he was still full of the dash, the daring, the spirit of adventure of the knight. As a knight on a quest knows not what the morrow may hold, so Francis, and the Franciscans after him, obeying the quixotic biblical command, took no thought for the morrow, begging only enough bread for the day.
St. Francis’s popularity is a credit to the 13th century. If there were such a man today, I doubt we would know about him. He would not appeal to many, and fewer yet would have the audacity to imitate him. We are too cynical and ungenerous to admire anyone as the 13th century admired him. We would see only mad improvidence. It took an age whose tastes had been edified by admiring knights and dreaming of chivalry to appreciate a wandering saint who made his asceticism into a romance with “Lady Poverty,” who was courteous to his sisters the birds and his brother the wolf, who went on a peaceful crusade of persuasion and tried to conquer Islam by words instead of swords, who prayed for and was given the wounds of Christ, who in so many ways transposed the ethos of chivalry into the adventure of the Gospel. The 13th century admired him, so we are alerted to his merit, and can do so as well. But it took the Age of Chivalry to produce an ascetic with thumos. Don't expect it to happen often.
The Americans
Long after the fall of the Templars, there was still an active crusading order in the world. They fought alongside Cervantes and the Spaniards and Venetians at the Battle of Lepanto. The Knights Hospitallers had had a checkered but often glorious history through the several centuries since the Crusades, defending Christian positions in the Mediterranean against the advancing Ottoman empire, from their strongholds first of Rhodes, later of Malta. Against them sailed the Barbary pirates, from the North African ports of Tunis, Tripoli, and Algiers, formally attached and presumptively allied to the Ottoman Empire though practically independent, who not only raided shipping in the Mediterranean, but attacked coastal towns in Spain and Italy and took their inhabitants captive. More than a million people are estimated to have been enslaved by the Barbary pirates over the course of three centuries of Mediterranean raiding. Against this terrible, ongoing atrocity, the Knights were not always as stalwart as might be wished, sometimes, for example, serving under the king of France who was an Ottoman ally. When revolutionary France captured the Knights’ last stronghold of Malta in 1798, the Barbary pirates were still in business, terrorizing the seas.
But then there appeared in the Mediterranean the ships of a feisty young nation from far away, and did the Knights’ work for them at last. It fought one somewhat inconclusive war in 1801-1805, then came back in 1815 and did so much damage that this scourge of the Mediterranean, for fear of which parts of the coasts of Spain and Italy had been largely depopulated for centuries, soon ceased for good.
It was the Americans.
The Americans defined themselves from the beginning by disdaining to put up with a European-style nobility. A privileged and parasitic class still nourishing itself on the echoes of the dream of chivalry was not welcome in the New World. Yet the Americans had plenty of an egalitarian sort of chivalry about them. Symptomatic of this spirit was their habit of street fighting. It shocked European visitors, but it would have felt like home to Sir Lancelot, who once borrowed the armor of the lesser Sir Kay so that four knights he met on the road, who were actually his friends from King Arthur’s court, wouldn’t be afraid to pick a fight with him. The Americans liked to carry guns. They liked to go adventuring into wild frontier country. They were full of brave visions of “manifest destiny,” of a vast continent brought into law and order and civilization by their cowboys and settlers.
King Arthur’s Round Table was a symbol of equality, and knights had once been peers of kings, but since Philip IV they had been degraded into subjects, and consoled by a more entrenched superiority to those below them. In America, the old ideal of equality came back. That’s not to say that everyone had a seat at the round table of American equality—in the 19th century, blacks and Amerindians were not given a seat, while today illegal immigrants are excluded—but those who had a seat at all, were equals. America had no ruling class that was also a moral ideal, because it had no ruling class at all. Every man might become governor, and the governor might become everyman at the next election, but everyman was a good thing to be. The nation itself, the whole people, were a moral ideal, a chosen people, a nation founded on a commitment to liberty. One nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all. The city on a hill that cannot be hid. America was mankind’s best hope, an education to a benighted world.
A kind of benign statelessness reigned in early 19th-century America, as it had in France in the Age of Chivalry. The federal government, like the 12th century French kings, had a kind of mystique and prestige that made it important to people’s identities, but it didn’t have much practical power. Local governments, townships and counties and whatnot, were more important, and the states were sometimes called “sovereign.” Until the Civil War, it was widely and plausibly held that, having consented to be part of the Union, the states had a right to secede from it at will. And like France in the Age of Chivalry, 19th-century America was a thriving, creative place. Like medieval France, the whole character of America depended on a thriving religiosity at the popular level, which supplied a sense of community, inculcated private virtue, established family values, and created culture. Consequently, the government didn’t need to do any of those things, and could remain much more limited than it was in the comparatively decadent countries of Europe. As the Catholic Church once provided the ceremony of knighthood, now Christian churches provided legislative prayer to sanctify the young republic. The government didn’t try to be a church or appropriate and direct people’s consciences. People were expected to do what was right, and it was the law’s job to conform to the resulting conduct, not the other way around.
“Every man a king” was the slogan of the demagogue Huey Long, which is stupid, because a king has subjects, and if every man is a king, then no one is a subject, so no one is a king. But “every man a knight” is a decent description of 19th-century America. Every man was a peer of governors and presidents. He probably carried a gun and was ready to fight against Comanche raiders or for his own honor. Eventually, World War II came along, and became to the American people a little bit like what the Crusades had been to French knighthood: the great cause for which, in retrospect, their whole history seemed to have been preparing them. It displayed to the world the glory they had always felt inhered in their life together, and it healed many quarrels, reconciling and justifying them to one another.
But that was long ago. And now, we are beginning to realize that American equality has passed away, never to return, sunk as deep as the lost city of Atlantis. It’s not just that income inequality is growing, but that great cultural gulfs are opening up between this and that group of Americans, so that we can hardly imagine one another’s lives, or understand each other. Much could be, and has been, written about this. I may revisit it in future posts. I touched in it a little in my post “The Author as Case Study in the Educated Elite.”
The Age of Gentlemen
Meanwhile, one more episode needs to be told to bring the story of the aftermath of chivalry up-to-date, and it is the most hopeful one to recall. I mentioned before that there is one important partial exception to the claim that the West since the Age of Chivalry has never had a ruling class that was also a moral ideal. It is the gentleman.
From 1700 or before, down to the present day, the word gentleman has had about it a benign ambiguity, for it means both (a) a man of certain social class, wealthy enough not to work, and (b) a man with certain virtues, such as honor and honesty, politeness and good manners, modesty and generosity. In origin, the word referred to the lowest ranks of the nobility, and the status was more or less hereditary. But its boundaries were vague enough that it wasn’t too difficult for men of trade and commerce to come to be regarded as gentlemen, with the passage of time, if their conduct was appropriate.
If the knight received his best literary expression in the Arthurian legends, the gentleman received his defining literary tribute in the novels of Jane Austen, whose heroines suffer much to win him. The gentleman is a somewhat pallid figure compared to the knight. He is polite, refined, and careful, a pleasant addition to any high society party, disinclined to hurt the feelings of others, with some moral discernment. His character is such that he can be relied upon to sustain a calm and orderly life. He does not seem to be a man of action, or a righter of great wrongs, though Austen appreciates him very highly for righting small wrongs, such as a girl being snubbed at a dance. Sir Lancelot, as represented in the stories about him, is more glorious, and far more useful to the realm, at least when he does right, than Jane Austen’s gentlemen are, but perhaps most modern women would prefer Mr. Darcy or Mr. Knightly as a husband.
Yet in a sense, for all her admiration of him, Austen does not do justice to the gentleman. For the gentlemen of England were not the idle sportsmen and stay-at-homes that one might think from reading Austen’s novels. On the contrary, during the two centuries or so that they ruled England, and intermittently ruled much of the rest of Europe, the gentlemen accomplished a great deal.
It was in England, in the Age of Gentlemen, that modern industry was born, sending the productivity of one industry after another skyrocketing, and enabling mankind to meet one need after another with revolutionary ease. It was England, in the Age of Gentlemen, that curtailed and constrained and finally defeated the conqueror Napoleon, imprisoned him at Waterloo, and then, disdaining to avenge itself upon the French aggressor, established in Europe a peace that was just enough to be durable. It was England, in the Age of Gentlemen, that abolished slavery in the British Empire and then used the royal Navy to suppress the slave trade throughout the world. It was England, in the Age of Gentlemen, that faced up to the loss of its American colonies and befriended them, while at the same time it established, with remarkably little bloodshed or even effort, and then maintained, with remarkably little coercion, a globe-girdling empire on which the sun never set, with hundreds of millions of subjects, most of whom had never before been ruled as moderately and justly as they were by the English gentlemen, and who were led slowly but steadily in the direction of reason and enlightenment under their rule. It was England, in the Age of Gentlemen, that established ever greater freedom of speech, that rationalized the electoral system and then extended the franchise until England became a democracy, yet all the while avoided bloody revolution. It was England, in the Age of Gentlemen, that built the first railroads. As other nations emulated England, absolutism waned, and freedom of speech spread, and industry and commerce raised living standards, and science and technology accelerated, giving the common man a growing mastery over nature and ability to meet the needs that had tormented him from time immemorial, while pursuing excellence in ways that had formerly been reserved for the rich or simply unavailable to anyone.
The gentlemen never, perhaps, quite equaled the knight in the glory of the legends that surrounded him. His characteristic virtues were a bit too moderate for that. Real heroism was a little beyond the call of duty for a gentleman. A man who did something really heroic, who once might have been sufficiently praised by saying, “He was a true knight,” would be insufficiently praised by saying, “He was a true gentleman.” Moreover, the gentlemen were a derivative class, vaguely associated with the old nobility and deriving some of their social status from the old glory of knighthood. A gentleman might be assumed to be the descendant, physically or morally, of the old knights, but he was not quite a knight. It is symbolic that Jane Austen’s most ideal gentleman was named Mr. Knightly, not Mr. Knight. It is symbolic, too, that gentlemen liked to sign their names “esquire,” derived from the word squire, which meant a sub-knight or knight’s servant. The gentlemen fell a bit short of being knights.
But they imbibed enough of the tradition of the virtues to do a lot of good. One reason for this was that gentlemen were typically educated in the classics of Greece and Rome, and knew something of the Middle Ages and the legends of chivalry as well, so they were in touch with the tradition of the virtues even as the cutting-edge moral philosophy of their own day had lost touch with it. A gentleman might come from a bourgeois or bureaucratic family. He might even spend much of his time engaging in characteristically bourgeois and/or bureaucratic activities. But his gentlemanly virtues lifted him above such origins and such activities, so that they did not define him. That is vague, yet the age felt it knew what a gentleman was, because it spent so much time and thought admiring him, and it really was largely ruled by him.
The gentlemen were gradually eclipsed, first by the acceleration of capitalist growth to the point where its scale and pressures crowded out the gentlemanly virtues, then by evolutions or revolutions towards socialism, and the growth of bureaucratic regulatory and welfare state. But while they were in charge, they did a lot of good. They presided over and fostered a lot of peace and prosperity and culture and freedom, which continued by a kind of institutional momentum for decades after they set it in motion. Long afterwards, the 1950s American suburbanites for whom the gentlemen were a relic of an obsolete past, enjoyed their affluence thanks to technologies born in the Age of Gentlemen, such as electricity and airplanes and cars. The more bureaucratic and populist regimes that dominated the mid-20th century had not the gift for governing lightly and leaving space for initiative and creativity and enterprise that the gentlemanly governments of the past once had, so progress gradually gave way to stasis, and the long trend of improvement dwindled, and the habitual expectation of Americans that each generation would live better than the last, is now being disappointed.
The Information Class
And now let me turn to something more actionable. We have had a glimpse by more of how much good a virtuous ruling class, a ruling class that is also a moral ideal, can do. Well, today we have a new ruling class, for which I my proposed label is the “information class.” This label captures its two great defining symbols: (a) college, and (b) computers. The information class has largely escaped the worst ravages of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. It stays in school. It gets and stays married. It does not spend its life inhabiting the social wasteland created by the Sexual Revolution. It is the offspring of the middle class suburban home and the university campus, as the knights were the offspring of Norse pagan warriors and the Church. In place of shining armor, the sword, the lance and the cavalry charge, it has Microsoft Office and Google and search engine optimization and blogging and social media and podcasting and computer programming and all the amazing powers of the internet. Certain technologies give the information class today, as they once gave the knights of yore, an amazing productivity advantage in an activity of supreme societal importance, namely, fighting in the case of knights, and running large capitalist, governmental and/or nonprofit organizations in the case of the information class.
The virtues are permanent, but they can be embodied in many different social types, of which the gentleman and the knight are only two. If I can inspire the information class of the present age to conceive and seek to live up to a moral ideal, a new type might arise, a transformed ruling class that has become a moral ideal also. I don't want to go too far in attempting to sketch what it would be like, for it would be the task of a whole age to discover and elaborate that. What I do want to say very loudly is that the moral education of the information class is disordered, misguided, and unhelpful, for all the reasons MacIntyre elucidated. The information class has a lot of valuable capabilities and good habits, inherited from its bourgeois upbringing and inculcated in universities, that has not gone all to the bad. The information class has, to get to the heart of the matter, a lot of virtue, though it doesn’t know what virtue is. When it is just rolling along by habit and self-interest, it’s one of the better ruling classes that mankind has seen, but habit and self-interest have never been enough and are not enough today. Meanwhile, as I plan to show in future posts, the information class’s principles and aspirations are pretty worthless. It is at its worst when it tries to be good.
The information class is a little like a builder who is looking out on a splendid building site, and has large stocks of first rate construction supplies and a strong and eager construction crew at his side. Unfortunately, he holds in his hand blueprints for, and is ready to start work on the basis of, a horrible blueprint by an incompetent architect, which could not possibly stand, and if it did stand, would be a joyless dungeon.
That is why there is a small bit of truth and wisdom amidst the ugly squalor of contemporary populism. The populists build nothing and have nothing to offer, and the leader they have chosen for themselves, an incredibly self-obsessed and peerlessly amoral huckster who has made a career out of fame gained by amazing people with his shamelessness and immaturity, is a peculiarly fitting symbol of the white underclass born of the Sexual Revolution, harrowingly documented by Charles Murray in books like Coming Apart, that seems to have been crucial in voting him into power. While Hillary Clinton expressed a very important truth when she called a portion of her opponent's base “a basket of deplorables,” Murray provides a valuable reminder of what poor opportunities for character formation many Americans have had. Let us of the information class not judge those who lack our advantages, but instead, ask ourselves why we have failed to fill others with spontaneous admiration, as the knights once did. For the populists are right that there is something wrong with the elite. Western civilization needs a better ruling class, but it won’t get it through a populist revolution. If it gets it at all, it will come through the information class transforming itself from within by learning true virtue.