From civilization to manipulation: the discrediting and replacement of the Western elite.

• Author: Ryn, Claes G.
• Position: The Dangers of Oligarchy - Essay

Civilization stands or falls with those who set the tone in society. Are they proper models for emulation? Do they inspire others to realize their better selves, or are they schemers manipulating others for their own benefit? Increasingly, those who set the long-term direction of America and the Western world exhibit personality traits and goals that were once scorned as incompatible with a humane existence. They are creating a society very different from that previously understood as civilized. Many of them are politicians, but for the most part politicians act out the predispositions of the larger culture, which are created by those who capture the mind and the imagination and give people their sense of what life is like and what it ought to become. For a very long time the general trends in Western society have been away from the notion of what makes life worth living that emerged from the classical and Christian heritage and gave shape to Western civilization. Those trends have moved into positions of great influence people whom the elites of an earlier society would have resisted and sought to refute. The purpose of this article is to examine an important part of this change and explain how and why it occurred.

"Civilization" is a term of many meanings. It refers here to all of those activities--religious, moral, intellectual, artistic, and political--through which human life is made better, more deeply satisfying, than it might otherwise be. Civilization ennobles human beings, refines their sensibilities and conduct. It fosters the kind of orientation of will, imagination and reason that realizes man's higher humanity. One of the most important fruits of civilization can be summed up in the word "civility." Civilized human beings treat each other as respected partners in a life that matters.

The Well-Rounded Aristocrat

All great civilizations assume that humans are divided beings. They have a capacity for goodness, truth and beauty, but these are always threatened by an at least equal potential for evil, falsehood and ugliness. Only through protracted and often difficult effort to shape self can the higher end be advanced. If societies fail in this task and lose their civilized and civilizing achievements, human beings can turn into something much worse than animals, into devils. To be human is to be not confined, the way animals are for the most part, to instinctual drives. It is to be able to assess the present critically, imagine alternatives, have a choice. At their worst, men can invent intricate schemes for indulging their greed, cruelty or desire for power. They can subject others to horrendous tyranny. A basic purpose of civilization is to protect man from himself. Civilization reins in the less admirable traits of human nature. It mitigates social tension and induces a sense of common purpose. It inspires good conduct--everything from moral integrity to good manners, two traits that are more closely related than many think. In the civilized society, upbringing, education and the general culture help convey the possibility of a life worth living for its own sake.

Crucial to the health of any society are its gatekeepers. In different walks of life and at different levels they embody and enforce the norms of civilization whether as parents, teachers, priests, master craftsmen, or statesmen. They praise and encourage, but also condemn and censure. They let some pass and hold others back. At their best, gatekeepers are not rigid and formalistic. They understand that the spirit of civilization cannot be captured once and for all in precise, unchanging rules. This spirit needs creativity, flexibility and fresh blood.

Even less-than-civilized societies have their gatekeepers; only they are not a humanizing force. They, too, praise and censure, but in behalf of inferior objectives. Societies claiming to champion equality are no less discriminatory than aristocratic ones, may, indeed, be not only disrespectful of true distinction but also more severe and intolerant in their disapprovals. Edmund Burke wrote: "Those who attempt to level, never equalize. In all societies, consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermost. The levelers, therefore, only change and pervert the natural order of things; they load the edifice of society by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground." (1) When the wrong people get to set the tone, the often fragile structures of civilization begin to crumble.

In as much as some human beings will always exercise authority over others, the quality of leadership is for civilization the central question. A strong consensus emerged early in the Western world that authority should as far as possible be exercised by persons of high culture who exhibited virtue and wisdom. The Greek word for such persons was aristoi, the best. Plato and Aristotle paid close attention to the discipline through which the character traits of such individuals were acquired. The members of this natural aristocracy were able, Aristotle argued, to rise above merely personal or other partisan advantage to a genuine concern for the good of the whole. They could achieve true friendship with people similarly inclined. Their nobility of character made possible a partnership in the intrinsically valuable life of the good, the true and the beautiful, whose excellence was exceeded only by the purely contemplative life. Men were prepared for and confirmed in the higher life through schole, leisure, not in the current sense of having free time and nothing in particular to do, but in the sense of actively cultivating the higher human qualities--in morality, the arts, philosophy, politics. Aristocrats stod in sharp contrast to self-serving persons of narrow range and undeveloped sensibility.

We trace back to the ancient Greeks the old Western belief that education and society in general should foster a well-rounded personality, one integrated and made proportionate by the wish to realize life's highest, most deeply satisfying values. This is the context for Aristotle's strong defense of private property. Having material assets, he argued, is a desirable, even indispensable, means to the good life. It liberates men to some extent for the activities that define their highest nature.

But cooperation is possible, Aristotle pointed out, that is not rooted in respect for the higher purposes of human existence. It can be simply for profit or pleasure. Agreements made for those purposes do not require of the partners moral character and a well-rounded personality, only enlightened self-interest. They can be concluded even by bad men who see an advantage to themselves. Because attached to no higher and enduring purpose, alliances of that type are inherently fragile. They dissolve with the advantage to any of the partners. Societies that are held together by such merely selfish calculation are destructive of the higher life and inherently unstable. They disintegrate when the moral and cultural capital inherited from a better society runs out and flagrant partisanship and exploitation produce social conflict.

Since the ancient Greeks, Western civilization has been strongly prejudiced against people of blatantly partisan motives and narrow range. Plato and Aristotle agreed that people are unsuited for leadership in proportion to their having motives that undermine the higher life and the common good. The worst possible regime is tyranny, rule by a single bad individual for his own benefit. Almost as bad is what Plato and Aristotle called "democracy," by which they meant not a form of constitutional, representative government but rule by the majority according to its partisan desires of the moment. "Democracy" is dominated by self-serving demagogues. It is morally akin to and usually followed by tyranny. A third regime that has been scorned in the Western world since Plato and Aristotle is "oligarchy," rule by the rich in their own interest. Devoid of the discipline of the higher life, the oligarchs exercise only such self-control as is needed to remain in power and acquire more wealth.

Though it always defended private property as a means to the higher ends of society, Western civilization had a strong bias against a single-minded pursuit of wealth and a related manipulation of others. The greed and narrowness of "oligarchy" was seen as destructive of the good society. Money people had to be reined in and put in their place. In fact, the less said about money and economic matters, the better. To this day, money is a somewhat embarrassing subject among gentlemen, which may be another way of saying that gentlemen are less common than they used to be.

According to Christianity, those with great wealth had greater responsibilities than others. Property owners should use their resources in a way pleasing to God and consider themselves stewards of assets that were entrusted to them only temporarily. For a long time and in most places Christianity would not even approve the...