To keep priests in check: prefer nobility to churlishness

When secular authority fails to restrain virtue experts, vice signaling becomes tempting

The opposite of virtue is vice, not nobility. Pop Nietzscheanism often errs by mistaking this, but draws on accurate insights as well. Vice signaling may be misplaced heroism.

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This post is one in a series on nobility as a way of being. I mainly explain nobility archetypically, historically, and allegorically. That is the language of story. It reveals patterns that unconsciously shape our feelings about current social arrangements. Making the mythic background explicit can help us understand contemporary movements and events—and opens better future possibilities. I’ll say more about that later in the series.

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In “Nobility and virtue are distinct sorts of goodness,” I explained that they may correlate, and do not inherently conflict, but they don’t always coincide. In “Priests and Kings,” I suggested that experts in moral virtue (“priests”) tend to arrogance and overreaching. They lack a sense of the limits to legitimate demands for virtue. Given free rein, they may seize secular power to enforce their morality. The priesthood will establish theocracy if they are not kept in check by secular power (“kings”).

Priestly virtue is often renunciative: life-denying. Virtue, priests may say, is selflessness, restriction of pleasure, and abstaining from involvement with contaminating worldly concerns. Some priests will deny commoners a full life if they can.

Nobility is life-affirming. It advocates self-development, whole-hearted enjoyment, and adventurous activity in a wondrous world.

These may seem irreconcilable opposites—although we naturally feel the rightness of both their claims. Friedrich Nietzsche characterized these as “slave morality” and “master morality.” His analysis was confused and partially mistaken, although his pointing out the contrast was valuable. “Master morality,” nobility, is not about morality at all. And that means that the two do not necessarily conflict, and we should aspire to combine them. I explained this in “You should be a God-Emperor.”

Kings must also keep courtiers in check. Courtiers, for better and for worse, have no independent sense of greater purpose. Their role is to attend upon the king and do his bidding. If not kept busy with purposes given by the king, their attention turns to the court itself. They devise elaborate rules of courtly etiquette, and vie for position within its structure. Given excess rein, they promulgate ever-more-complex, restrictive, and arbitrary codes of behavior; then enforce them outside the court as well; and eventually get in everyone’s way of doing anything. Some remain loyal to the king. But—like priests—courtiers may take on independent secular power if they can get it. Then they too become a threat to the throne, and to the well-being of the common people.

The modern analog of courtiers are administrators. A faithful administrator simply applies a rational system’s rules as given. It is not an administrator’s role to judge what should be done, only to ensure that it is done. This is proper in a rational system. Excluding considerations of purpose, which necessarily involve subjective judgement, is a large part of why rationality works. It is also one of its critical limitations, and the reason it has stopped working well.

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people. Firstly, there are those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy and many of the engineers and scientists at NASA. Secondly, there are those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers’ union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

It is a critical function of nobility to reverse the Iron Law by force. Holding a sense of higher secular purpose, and inspiring devotion to purpose in others, is essential to nobility. Magnificence, an attribute of nobility, proceeds from success in that.

When courtiers and priests gain excessive influence, decadence and decline ensue. To foreshadow a future post: The American elite universities once aimed to train the sons of the elite to be noble. For several decades, they have instead aimed to graduate administrators and virtue experts. Harvard turns out courtiers and priests, in mythic terms. So we have too many administrators, too many virtue experts, and not enough honor, wisdom, dignity, or clarity of purpose. Nobility is sorely lacking in public life.

Pop Nietzscheanism claims to follow Nietzsche in extolling “master morality” (roughly: nobility) over “slave morality” (roughly: virtue). Pop versions often further distort Nietzsche’s confusions and errors. Sometimes they dumb down to a simplistic justification for self-interest, resentment, hatred, or sadism. Those are not nobility.

Virtue and nobility are not opposites, nor incompatible. The opposite of virtue is not nobility: it is vice.

The opposite of nobility is churlishness. A ceorl in Anglo-Saxon society was a free commoner. The other two categories of men were eorls (aristocrats) and slaves. Our word “churl” derives from ceorl, and “earl” from eorl. “Ceorl” was an honorable status, but its contrast with “eorl” eventually made “churl” a pejorative. One might accuse an eorl of behaving “churlishly” if they failed to maintain noble qualities.

Virtue signaling is acting or speaking to claim moral virtue—not to embody it. It is a means of personal advertisement. Virtue signaling is not virtuous. It is churlish, and a vice. Nobility needs no advertisement; virtue is modest.

Churlishness opposes virtue as well as nobility, because ideally they are combined. Churlishness is a temptation that some in the American right have given in to.

Vice signaling loudly proclaims one’s own greed, cruelty, intemperance, irrationality, and selfishness. Vice signalers may say they are exercising “master morality,” by negating virtue, which they mistakenly equate with “slave morality.” Vice signaling is typically the height of churlishness.

However, an important correct insight may also motivate pop Nietzscheanism and vice signaling. The king (legitimate secular decision-making power) may fail to restrain priests (virtue experts) and courtiers (administrators) from preying on commoners.

Then what? It falls to ceorls to oppose them, in the king’s stead. But the common folk may fear to act, or speak. Especially if courtiers and priests have usurped power gradually, boiling ceorls like frogs. Every frog sees that no other frog is jumping, and won’t risk going first out of the pot, perhaps into the fire. This is preference falsification, in political theory. Everyone publicly supports a repressive regime, while most oppose it in the privacy of their minds. Usually, eventually, preference falsification suddenly collapses. A few brave people speak up, or violate the regime’s rules. When it turns out that the regime is too weak to stop them, others see that it is safe, and join in.

When ceorls are too fearful, it may fall to churls to act. Churls may be habitually self-interested, resentful, hateful, and sadistic. They have no good reputation, and perhaps little else, to lose. Flagrantly violating the demands of virtue experts comes naturally for them. But they may also recognize that being seen to transgress priestly and courtly strictures is a way to gather and coordinate opposition to them.

That may just create an underground oppositional subculture, a criminal “pirate utopia” or Temporary Autonomous Zone, relatively free from priestly interference. (But membership is risky! And may require grossly unethical activities, by any sane standards.)

Alternatively, though, being seen to be getting away with it may catalyze preference falsification collapse. It can result in broad popular defiance of excessive, unreasonable priestly demands. If that is the motivation, ostentatious violations of virtue may be brave, and even noble. And this seems to be part of the motivation of some in the alt-right.

To recognize and understand this is important. It may even deserve praise.

That is, however, not to advocate it. Such action might be necessary as an emergency measure. It’s not adequate or sustainable beyond that, because most people do see it as churlish. It also has immediate harms, and degrades social trust in the longer run. Virtue is good, and trampling on it is bad, consequentially as well as deontologically.

It is better for ceorls take up the responsibility of nobility when the aristocracy has failed.

(How?)