Philhellenism, the European Gentlemen, and the Class Art of Reviving Dead Cultures

Chapter 17 of The Information Class

This is chapter 15 of a book that I’m publishing serially, entitled The Information Class. To get up to speed, read the intro, chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3, chapter 4, chapter 5, chapter 6, chapter 7, chapter 8, chapter 9, chapter 10, chapter 11, chapter 12, chapter 13, chapter 14, chapter 15 and chapter 16. And sign up to get future chapters in your inbox.

The self-preservation of a class through tradition is a phenomenon with close parallels in biology. But classes also have a strange capability that defies biological analogy. Classes can accomplish a kind of time travel. They can reenact the past, bringing dead ages back to life.

Maybe it isn't completely without biological analogy, actually, though it's a thing as odd as if mice were to evolve wings by watching bats. Yet biologists have recently established that genes can “jump” between species. And sometimes one species captures and incorporates another. For example, mitochondria, the power plants of our cells, are thought to have anciently been free-standing organisms, which were “domesticated,” so to speak, by other single-cell organisms, who somehow ate them yet kept them intact, and from then on benefited from the mitochondrial power of covering sugar into ATP, a special molecule that serves as cellular fuel. These aren't very close analogies, but in their weirdness, they resemble the power of classes to capture and adopt exotic characteristics from each other across huge gulfs of time and space, through emulation.

Classes can learn, not only from their own history, but from other history, from histories in which they have neither any genetic stake nor historic descent, but which they admire and immerse themselves in. Classes can study past ages, get fascinated, and emulate people long ago and far away, and in crucial ways become those people, achieving a real continuity with the distant past, even if the fingerprints principle still applies and, having a different history, they can't have exactly the same character.

It happened, above all, when European elites from the High Middle Ages through the 20th century studied the classics and turned into gentlemen.

Individuals can imitate the past, too, of course. But that has narrow limits, because so much of historical experience is interpersonal. You can't really be a Roman patrician or a Japanese samurai or a medieval knight by yourself, because interacting with other patricians or samurai or knights is such an important part of being one. Even in the heyday of those classes, a patrician or samurai or knight who got totally cut off from his fellows would have lost half his identity. “I can't be myself there,” we sometimes say of situations where our personalities can't be expressed for lack of sympathy and understanding in others. Still less can one become a class one isn't when no members of that class are to be found to do it with. Thriving people are embedded in cultures. But classes are cultures. They involve people influencing each other and working together and recognizing each other. If a whole class reenacts the past together, there's a chance that they can really bring back what they admired about the past.

I have a feeling that there are many examples of this class reenactment of the past, and that flourishing classes have often indulged in the dream of history and modeled their ways on times long ago. It seems there was something like this in classical Greece, where the self-governing poles of the eighth century BC and later obsessively studied and often emulated the very different warrior kings of the Homeric epics. Alexander the Great loved the Iliad, and I've heard that his far-flung adventures were in part an attempt to reenact the Homeric heroes of beloved myth.

But I can't really enter into the spirit of such faraway classicisms in order to understand how serious they were.

Again, some modern word-borrowings suggest cross-cultural emulation. Occasionally educated elites are called “mandarins” after the Chinese intellectual bureaucrats whom they resemble, and “pundit” is a Sanskrit word for “learned man” or “knowledge owner.” Here I'm culturally near enough to say confidently that these casual word-borrowings don't reflect large-scale, intentional cultural appropriation. If someone is proud to be considered an American “pundit,” you wouldn't expect them to be modeling their lifestyle on long-ago Indian sages.

But in the case of history’s most important episode of cultural appropriation, I'm near enough to understand it, and how far it was a perennial, passionate attempt to reenact the past. The philhellenism, the obsessive admiration, study, and imitation of the ancient Greeks and Romans by generations of western European elites, formed a tradition that lasted almost a thousand years. Many of those more or less considered the past better than the present, and they wanted to relive it. And they largely succeeded.

When Romanesque architecture emerged in the midst of the Dark Ages, or when German emperors adopted a Roman imperial title, it was a somewhat superficial affair, the mere natural footprint, so to speak, of the past, gradually being weathered away. But from the time that Aristotle was translated into Latin, not by the ancients for whom Latin was a native language, but by medievals for whom it was a dead language painstakingly preserved as a lingua franca of the Church, and then these translated Aristotelian works were used as the foundation for a new philosophy, something else had begun. Something more intentional. And this intentional classicism not only persisted but grew, reaching ever new heights. If the medieval scholastics were content to learn their Aristotle from Latin translations, the Renaissance humanists had to read him in the original Greek, along with Plato and all the rest. By the 19th century, the classicism of great intellectuals like JS Mill and Friedrich Nietzsche probably surpassed anything in the Renaissance. And of course, it would hardly be possible to conceive two thinkers more different and opposed than JS Mill and Friedrich Nietzsche. Even in the early 20th century, it could still be almost taken for granted that a gentleman's education would include Latin and Greek.

Hardly anyone regrets the classical influence, because every school of thought seems to have its own debts to philhellenism. Aristotelianism is the preferred Catholic philosophy down to the present day, but historic liberalism is full of classical influences, too. Liberals admired the Greeks and Romans for being democratic and republican. Some admired them for not being Christian. Some admired them for being particularly rational and scientific. But romantics like John Keats and William Wordsworth admired them for being imaginative and full of beautiful myths, free of the dead hand of Enlightenment reason. The Americans admired Roman law and liberty and Athenian democracy, but also, the Nazis admired the Spartans for their heroism at Thermopylae.

There were a few, like Hobbes and Bastiat, who regretted the influence of the ancients. And again, as with JS Mill and Friedrich Nietzsche, two thinkers more different than opposed than Hobbes and Bastiat could hardly be conceived.

So diverse are the lessons that medieval and modern Western Europeans learned from the ancients that it hardly seems possible that the ancient Greco-Roman civilization could have contained so much. Ancient Greece, at the zenith of its genius, was tiny in space and time compared to the vast sweep of Western European Christendom. And from the 17th century on, at the latest, but probably well before, the moral, material, military, commercial and scientific superiority of the new Europe to the old Greece was immense. Yet the paradox is that Christian Europe learned more from the ancient Greeks than the ancient Greeks ever knew. They became commercial, democratic, and philosophical, not only like the ancient Greeks whom they emulated, but more so than the ancient Greeks had ever been, without (say, as of the 19th century) at all becoming pagan, sexually perverted or slave-owning like the ancient Greeks. It took a lot of work, but Europeans recovered all the best of the Greco-Roman past while leaving behind the worst.

If it seems impossible to learn more from the Greeks than the Greeks knew, consider that it wouldn't be surprising at all if a doctor learned more from observing a patient than the patient ever knew. Western Europe’s position with respect to ancient Greece was not quite like that of a doctor with respect to a patient. Europe was long the pupil and Greece the master, yet the pupil knew, and knew that it knew, many things that the master did not. Its business was to take the good and leave the bad, and then to synthesize ancient wisdom with much that had been learned since, and build on both. But even that doesn't do justice to why Europe's intellectual borrowings from Greece were so profitable. Classicism was a shortcut to enriching the conceptual and imaginative vocabulary of the European intelligentsia and aristocracy. The labor of penetrating imaginatively into the ancient world was good exercise for the mind, and a refuge from the tyranny of local rulers, beliefs, and customs. Classicism continually broadened the mind.

Indeed, I'm ashamed to admit that one of the best reasons to admire the past escaped me until I began writing this post. To people living under oppression, the past is resistance. The past is beyond the reach of tyrants. In 1984, when Winston Smith meets the resistance to Big Brother, and has an opportunity to propose a toast, he says, “To the past.” Yes. The past is fixed, like a rock, immovable, immune to the corruptions of the present. In the face of horror and degradation, it stands as a proof that things might be different, that another world is possible. Memory is hope.

We will not forget that through twenty generations, US presidential candidates accepted electoral defeats. They didn't lie and stir up violence. They conceded. And the nation expected that of them. Such virtue is possible, even if we've lost it. In a similar way, subjects of the absolutist monarchs of the 17th and 18th centuries could look back on ancient Rome and ancient Athens as proof that it was possible for public officials to hold office subject to the law, by popular election, for a limited time, and relinquish power when the time came, in the midst of a free citizenry practicing free speech. The memory of the past is a powerful reproach to the present, and it's hard to suppress all of the old books and old stories and old names. It's hard to kill the past. It's hard to make everyone forget.

Modern multiculturalists have the right idea, up to a point, when, rather than remaining tamely chained to their own time and place, they launch a cosmopolitan quest to find truth, beauty, and goodness anywhere in the world or in history. They tend to err, however, in thinking that all cultures are of equal worth, each with as much to offer to the seeker after wisdom as all the others. That is far from being the case. Also, multiculturalists bite off more than they can chew. It's not possible to imagine one's way into every culture that has ever been. Such overambitious cultural appropriation can only be shallow and selective to the point of randomness. It takes engagement on the order of the centuries-long philhellenic obsession of European elites to produce a class of people who really embody the best of what a past culture was.

The long obsession with the ancients was always mainly an elite affair. That seems inevitable. It takes uncommon resources to learn to live successfully in one's own day and also to have a rich understanding of a favorite faraway culture. Often, classicism functioned as a form of mere snobbery. And yet classicism can be a school of humility for people who justifiably feel superiority to most of their contemporaries. A man might feel superior to his domestic servants, or the workers in his factory, because he knows Latin and Greek, but that would hardly make him feel superior to the ancient Greeks and Romans, who knew Greek and Latin better than he could ever hope to do. It's a wise and ennobling business to compare oneself to, and look for good ways to emulate, the best people who have been, other than oneself and one's class.

The philhellenic obsession was an important part of what created the European gentlemen, a kind of loose leading class in modern England and other European countries, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was typical for gentlemen to claim, and take pride in, descent from medieval knights, though that wasn't a strict requirement in practice. But in knowing Latin and Greek and being well educated in the classics, the gentlemen were unlike medieval knights. The philhellenic obsession had begun in other classes, starting with monks and clergy in the Middle Ages, and then with the merchant elites of late medieval and high Renaissance Italian cities, who patronized the humanists. But gentlemen took up the tradition and carried it on for centuries.

Gentlemen tended to be the inferiors of their knightly forebears in the kinds of virtue most characteristic of the knights. They were less renowned for high adventure and personal combat, and they had lost the prerogative of the kind of honor that had once made them the peers of kings. They were often subservient to sovereigns in a way that the knights had never been. But their classical educations made them far better suited to civic leadership in urban, commercial societies with mass participatory politics, such as were common among the ancients, then rare in the Middle Ages outside Italy, but increasingly common in modern times, partly due to philhellenic influences. The gentlemen helped bring about such societies and long provided most of their leadership. Thanks to their efforts, the terms “republic” and “democracy,” borrowed from Rome and Greece, respectively, became fully native to modernity and truly described the political practice of the most prestigious and successful polities.

The gentlemen, never quite well-defined enough to be a class, dissolved into the population in the mid-20th century as income taxes rose and bureaucracy and technocracy took over business and government. The term “gentleman” was democratized into near meaninglessness, yet this semantic loss reflected at least in part a moral gain, for under the tutelage of the gentlemen, the broad mass of the people did acquire some of the gentlemanly virtues. At least to some extent, the legacy of the gentlemen was a society in which every man was a gentleman. But a copy rarely matches the original. Meanwhile, classical education was devalued in favor of more scientific and specialized education. And the old feudal aristocracy, whose sons had been presumptively gentlemen yet felt a strong need to live up to it through education and conduct, and thereby did much to define the looser but broader class, were destroyed or disempowered by revolutions and evolutions throughout Europe. Christendom was the poorer for the gentlemen's passing. While they led, through so many generations, they did a lot of good.

Maybe the time has come to show my hand a little. What an I up to in trying m telling these stories? Well, if the truth be told, I want the contemporary information class to embrace a similar collective project of diligent cultural appropriation from the past, answering the philhellenism of the gentlemen of yesteryear with a philo-medievalism (love of the Middle Ages) of equal intensity, stubbornness, and creativity. In a word, I want the information class to become knights. But I'll come back to that.