Beyond a
reference to reparations, Jones is vague about exactly what it is about current
left-wing policy that might appeal to the poor.
Is it higher gasoline and food prices?
Being the ones who had to go out and do the manual labor while the
laptop class stayed cozily locked down working from home and watching Netflix? Skyrocketing crime in poor neighborhoods
because of the demonization and defunding of police? Or is it free needles, the license to
shoplift and to defecate in the streets, and other hallmarks of the
George Gascón and Chesa
Boudin style of law (non-)enforcement? But it would be an insult to poor people to think
this anarchy aids or appeals to them.
Here too, it is actually the poor who suffer most from left-wing excess,
while the rich congratulate themselves for their (twisted understanding of)
virtue.
In any
event, Aristotle would agree with Jones about the general principle that a wise
statesman should appeal to the middle class.
Aristotle says that even a legislator who is personally more favorable
to the very rich or the very poor “at all times… ought to endeavour to include
the middle people” and make the laws “attractive to those in the middle” (Politics, Book IV, Part XII, Sinclair
translation).
The reason
is not the cynical one that this is a good way to secure power. The reason is one of basic principle
concerning what is best for society as a whole.
In Book IV, Part XI Aristotle observes that all states are made up of “the
very well-off, the very badly off, and thirdly those in between,” and argues
that those in the middle are best suited to governing:
This condition is most easily
obedient to reason, and following reason is just what is difficult both for the
exceedingly rich, handsome, strong and well-born, and for their opposites, the
extremely poor, the weak, and those grossly deprived of honour. The former incline more to arrogance and crime
on a large scale, the latter are more than averagely prone to wicked ways and
petty crime. The unjust deeds of the one
class are due to an arrogant spirit, the unjust deeds of the other to wickedness…
There are other drawbacks about the
two extremes. Those who have a
superabundance of good fortune, strength, riches, friends, and so forth,
neither wish to submit to rule nor understand how to do so; and this is
engrained in them from childhood at home: even at school they are so full of la dolce vita that they have never grown used to being ruled.
End quote. What is of most interest in these comments is
Aristotle’s insight that the extremely
wealthy, no less than the extremely poor, are temperamentally unfit to
wield power. (This is not only an
Aristotelian insight, but a Platonic one – recall from the Republic that the guardian class are not permitted even to handle
money, let alone amass personal fortunes.)
What makes them unfit is their tendency toward arrogance, softness, and consequent
difficulty following reason or submitting themselves to rules.
A more
perfect description of our decadent liberal elites cannot be imagined. It is not poor or working people, but rather the
affluent and “educated,” who live in a fantasy world in which there are innumerable
“genders,” the bogeyman of “white supremacy” lurks behind every bush, inflation
has no connection to the federal government’s having shoveled out gargantuan
piles of free money, and the rules (about wearing masks and staying locked
down, for example) apply only to the ruled and not the rulers. You need facility in abstract theory to get
yourself to believe such lunacy, and you need the insulation from reality that
wealth provides to avoid suffering the costs of it, at least in the short
term.
Aristotle
notes that a true polity requires some measure of “friendship” or “partnership”
between the different groups that make it up.
This is not possible when the very poor or the very rich dominate,
because “the former [are] full of envy, the latter of contempt.” Now, malignant ideologies like Critical Race
Theory are syntheses of envy and contempt, which make true friendship or
partnership between citizens impossible.
But here too it is not the poor but rather the affluent, the educated,
and the powerful – “woke capitalism,” the universities, HR bureaucracies and
the like – who are injecting this poison into the body politic. And it is these elites, rather than the poor,
who have been the source of the
diabolically cruel regime of general lawlessness that has been
trying to impose itself upon the West in the last few years.
Aristotle
notes that given the defects described above, tyranny is much more likely to
arise out of the rule of the very rich or the very poor than out of the middle
classes. A more effective tyranny still
is that in which the very rich stir up the poor against the middle classes. As
Plato noted, oligarchy tends to degenerate into, and in the short
term profit from, radically egalitarian democracy, with tyranny as the
sequel.
Conservatives
have in recent years increasingly come to realize that the super-rich are not
their friends. As usual, what we moderns
have to relearn, Aristotle already knew 2300 years ago.
Related
reading:
Adventures
in the Old Atheism, Part IV: Marx
Liberty,
equality, fraternity?
Continetti
on post-liberal conservatism
Woke ideology is a psychological disorder [on Plato’s analysis of democracy]
Elucidating post, boss.
ReplyDeleteI think it's very hard to make Aristotle's discussion of people "in the middle" in terms of wealth as having much to do with today's middle class. The bourgeois is surely a production of non-Christian modernity, associated with the sovereign state, secularism, and civil society itself as its own, self-referring end (as Roger Scruton explains at length, with approval.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, as Christopher Dawson tells us, even "proletarians" are today consumed by bourgeois values. Wealth might not be the main factor to consider here now, I would suggest, but ideology.
And on the ideological score, nobody concerned about middle class values has anything to fear in the West - it's completely dominated by them. The argument between liberals and conservatives is an in-house, post Enlightenment barney on just what the secular utopia is and how to get it. Christianity has no part in this debate. There is the faith. Then there is politics and society; something else, but determined by the ultimate end known by the faith.
St. Thomas has that well-know metaphor of the politician as captain who needs to make sure the ship remains intact and functions as well as can be, but whose function is to make sure it gets to harbour. Conservatives and liberals alike see their mission as endlessly arguing which colour to paint Nelson's "Victory" in dry dock.
I think that's probably true: the bourgeois is mainly concerned with a comfortable life in this world, although he retains some virtues that were handed down to him by Christendom. Nonetheless, the peculiar hatred that the Revolution (in all its manifestations) has for the middling type of person is interesting. It tends to be far greater than its hatred for the very rich, for all the rhetoric against the latter. Of course, this is partly because the Revolution is led by the very rich.
DeleteIn general, the middling types tend to espouse the least insane type of liberalism as their political views. (Of course, as Zippy might say, this just means they have the best unprincipled exceptions. All liberalism is insane and wicked, and tends to the destruction of virtue and goodness, both natural and supernatural.)
I think it is a mistake to employ "bourgeois" in this context. First, the term in modern parlance is meant to be derogatory, but the origin of that derogation was a marxist view of property. Nobody who owned property could escape the "bourgeois" net as used by the marxists, but plenty of people who own property can be (and are) not guilty of liberal foolishness that is common on both the left and the "right" of modernity. To be "neither poor nor wealthy" is not to be a liberal (whether of the left or "right"), nor to be a bourgeois as that term's current connotation implies.
DeleteSecondly, while it is of course sad and damaging to our nations that so many people ARE liberals of stripe or another, Aristotle's point is not so much that those in the middle will be paragons of virtue (and therefore our middle groups fail to match his ideal), but rather that those in the middle will tend to avoid SOME of the vices that tend to inhabit the extremes, and therefore it is useful to pull them into government to take advantage of (whatever, relative) virtues they have. That many in the middle classes are materialistic and selfish is an unhappy fact. But in spite of that, those self-same materialistic and selfish people ALSO tend not to be arrogant as well, as the rich tend toward.
Did Aquinas share that opinion? If so, how did he reconcile it with the idea that the best political system is the monarchy?
ReplyDeleteThomas suggested that the best political system is a monarchy - considering the issue in the ideal. As a practical problem, though, he thought that the best political system was that of a MIXED government - one that had elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. And, interestingly, this is exactly what we have in the US (and in many nations, in varying degrees of mixture). The US president has far more executive power than that of a mere "presider" over the legislature. The upper house of our legislature was envisioned with some aristocratic aspects, though those were partly undermined when we put voting for them directly into the hands of the people.
DeleteAristotle, like Thomas, thought that a monarchy was in theory the best system, but he has an odd, almost completely out-of-the-blue comment that this only works when the king not only has more virtue than the rest, but when the king has more virtue than all the rest put together. Since he fails to support this comment by an argument, and it is indeed not very supportable even had he tried, I take this to have been in Aristotle a flash of inspiration by God, a hidden prophecy of the kingdom of Christ, the God-man whose perfections do indeed exceed that of all the excellences of other humans put together - but only because he is divine. That is, Aristotle happened to be right about what kind of monarchy will work exactly rightly, but his correctness was not due to a principle he could have elucidated, but due to divine inspiration guiding his words.
John Kennedy O'Tool did the best take-down of monarchy:
DeleteMrs. Reilly: A king? You want a king?
Ignatius Reilly: Oh, stop babbling at me!
Mrs. Reilly: I never heard of nobody wanted a king.
Very interesting. I can say the we see that same phenomenon here in Italy, albeit on a lesser degree, until now
ReplyDelete*that we see
DeleteGreetings Italy!
DeleteGood article. I agree about the health of a society's tie to the health of its middle class. I don't buy it, however, that the ancient descriptions of the wanton very-rich apply only to "liberal elites" and not also to "right-wing elites."
ReplyDelete“ Those who have a superabundance of good fortune, strength, riches, friends, and so forth, neither wish to submit to rule nor understand how to do so; and this is engrained in them from childhood at home: even at school they are so full of la dolce vita that they have never grown used to being ruled.”
ReplyDeleteExhibit 1: Donald Trump
Yes, and I think it is the case for authoritarian leaders in general. In his Social Contract, Rousseau J-J followed Aristotle in that respect, and the methods he wanted to adopt for government were aimed at avoiding the most affluent and the least ones from taking power.
DeleteGeorge LeSauvage:
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid I no longer believe that, at least not very strongly. I am increasingly inclined to think that classes are largely imaginary. Or at least that they exist only to the extent we take them seriously.
The above cited definition, note, mentions only how much someone has. No consideration of HOW people make their livings. And surely that matters too. If anything, it can matter more. Are the "middle class" yeoman farmers (as Hanson* and Jefferson thought?) Or are they artisans? Or tradesmen? Those are different, you know. Their interests do conflict. A fisherman's interests do conflict with a restauranteur's, whether he has just one boat, or Mr Snow's fleet.
Another point is that status is very often more important to people than money. It's noticeable that, in our society, a chef is the only person who works with his hands, but has a fairly high-status job, at least for the better eateries.
Again, how much did the classes as Plato and Aristotle saw them resemble those of Aquinas's day? Or ours? To my eyes, they are very different. (In Aquinas's case, there is an added dimension, that of how much European societies varied by place. While the causes are different, the polis and our electronic village seem more uniform.)
The bottom line is that we have all been taught to see things in this manner. I question whether that is a distortion.
*I'm referring to his good early work, before he jumped into politics.
I notice that, as is commonly the case, people seem to equate "middle class" with "bourgeois". That's certainly an anachronism in Aquinas's day, and probably in Aristotle's. It means, after all, city dwellers. But surely the most common in earlier times would be small landowners.
ReplyDeleteOf course, that hasn't stopped people from reading their Marxist preconceptions onto earlier times. See J H Hexter's "Storm Over the Gentry" for a good (and well written) discussion. Unfortunately, Marx's categories have so dominated our thinking that it's hard to even try to do without them.
- George LeSauvage
The distinction between city-dwellers and landowners itself is anachronistic, as in Aristotle’s time all Greeks were inhabitants of a polis. There are multiple layers of error at work here.
DeleteNevertheless, Aristotle’s fundamental insight remains sound and generally true today: If you want to find people fit to govern, you are least likely to find them among the irresponsibly wealthy or the irresponsibly poor. The ability to buy one’s way out of personal trouble does not prepare one for public office; the inability to get out of perpetual trouble, still less.
Of course in the Bible a big city (Jerusalem) was the center of Jewish worship. And Christianity was a religion for urban people ("Pagan" originally meant country folk). And in the end all the just will be living in a big city (New Jerusalem).
DeleteI'm not convinced. Yes, the polis did involve a connection between urban and rural which largely disappeared later. So the term "bourgeois" isn't quite right. Yet it was used (above) by people in comments as meaning "middle class". Which is how most use it today. In Aquinas's day it was very different.
DeleteBut it's also true that, to have the amount of leisure Aristotle thought necessary, one would have to be pretty high in the upper middle. (Are the gentry who ruled England from the 17th well into the 19th C upper, or middle?)
But the bigger problem I have is that there just is too much difference between various types of occupations which fall within a given income/wealth range. Farmers can grow crops or livestock, like Cain and Abel. Even herdsmen can be very different, as US history shows in sheep and cattlemen.
There is very good reason to see a commonality of interests among all the seafaring peoples, from the lower deck to the captain. Really. Yes, there were conflicts within, but to any landsman, it was a clear and distinct culture.
The trouble is that we have all been taught to see things through the lens of class. I question that; at a minimum, it's worth taking a look from a different perspective.
- George LeSauvage
It is impossible for me to contribute to excellent posts on practical (modern sense) posts.
ReplyDeletePost China face masks and the people who love being ruled, I think the idea of freedom in solidarity will not die. I just hope philosophers will not let us down.
@Miguel
ReplyDeleteI appreciate your post and understand your contempt for modern secularism; however, as a child of multiple divorced people and all the rest I must protest your idea that somehow the West is just some product of (in polite language) “post-Christian Utopianism.”
I think Christian Utopianism will save the West and humanity. Antichrist will come but before he does to hell with him.
This blog has really gone down. I miss the great discussions on God, evil, metaphysics, epistemology,
ReplyDeleteetc back in the day.
Not sure what you’re talking about. I post on those topics as much as I ever did. Most recently, see e.g. the posts on May 14, May 23, May 31, and June 6. And the next post will be of a metaphysical nature.
DeleteBut perhaps you mean that there aren’t as many people leaving comments? That has been my impression over the last few weeks, though it might reflect a beginning-of-summer drop-off, which I think has happened in the past. On the other hand, traffic to the blog is as high or higher than ever. I have wondered whether some people who are still coming to the blog are choosing to comment over at Twitter rather than here, but I’m not sure.
Dr. Feser, I myself have often had trouble getting comments posted, as I can’t seem to log in to my profile through your site. Sometimes it seems important enough to jump through the extra hoops and make it work, but often I just give up and remain silent.
DeleteIf this is happening to other commenters also, that might explain the apparent decline in activity.
Hmm, thanks for the heads up, Tom. Blogger seems recently to have changed the comment input system. I didn't realize it was making it more difficult to comment (as opposed to just different).
DeleteStrange, I'm actually finding it easier to post comments than previously, through my google account.
DeleteDoes this comment come through?
DeleteJust a trial.
I have found the opposite. After over a year of almost all my comments vanishing, a few have gotten through lately.
DeleteAristotle insight is very interesting, but i wonder if his points against the rich leading are not weakned today thanks to our modern tech plus consumeristic mentality.
ReplyDeleteThe middle class today has way more conforts and pleasures that on the metic day, not only hardly going hungry but having the capacity to eat a awesome variety of tasty stuff, has more ways to deal with the elements, has apps that allow food, transportation etc to being easily get, can easily not face oposition online by choosing who to interact with, has a way less solid relation with the extended family(giving more freedom to choose relations), everyday is bombarded by propaganda with the intention of creating in it new desires, has the State to protect it from not having somethings and is taught things like that fullfiling all desires is being happy, that there is no need to answer to anyone for our personal lifes, or that law is just a human creation.
Anyway, the point of this rambling is: looking at the way than the middle class lives today, it is not what we have today way more vulnerable to having the rich-person vices than on Aristotle day?
Definitely a bit off topic, but how does Aristotelian realism deal with new things coming into existence/actuality? If the form of something cannot exist prior to that thing’s actuality in matter, then how can there be a potential for it to exist? (Ex. Did the form of a dog have to exist prior to a dog’s actual existence for it to be a potential?)
ReplyDeleteThe "potential" refers to something that IS, i.e. it's potential to be something that it is not now. That's what the matter is, for a matter-form being: the matter of a rabbit has the potential to be the matter of the wolf. The form of a substantial being doesn't EXIST before the being exists, waiting for matter, so it doesn't "have the potential" to become (the form of) the being. The form is the form of the being when the being itself starts to exist. We don't need to speak of there being "a potential" for the form to exist.
DeleteIt would be better, perhaps, to say that there is a "possibility" of the form existing (because there is a possibility of an event happening wherein an agent cause will cause the thing to exist), but nobody thinks that that "a possibility of an event happening" is some THING that inheres in, say, the agent. After all, it is possible for God to create some new thing from nothing, but that possibility is not an existing thing, and so it is not a potency of such a thing.
It also seems like a mistake to ask "what (prior) stuff does the form come from", since the (prior) stuff is precisely the point of matter, i.e. the material principle, not the formal principle.
(1) "sound like cult members in need of deprogramming, and certainly of electoral defeat."
ReplyDeleteCertainly true. If only the opposition had an articulate, principled spokesperson not associated in any way with former president Trump. Any nominations?
(2) "Thor Was Awesome!!"
I guess we have to agree to disagree. There aren't many movies which make me want to disavow an entire genre, but the most recent Thor movie has turned me off from any desire for more Marvel movies.
I can't really speak for Prof. Feser, but I'm almost positive he does not think of himself as "getting old."
ReplyDelete