Kitabı oxu: «Democracy Needs Aristocracy»

One

Others ascribe to me alternately democratic or aristocratic prejudices; perhaps I might have had one or the other if I had been born in another century and in another country. But as it happened, my birth made it very easy for me to guard against both. I came into the world at the end of a long revolution which, after having destroyed the old order, created nothing that could last. When I began my life, aristocracy was already dead, and democracy was still unborn. Therefore, my instincts could not lead me blindly towards one or the other. I have lived in a country which for forty years has tried a little of everything and settled nothing definitively. It was not easy for me, therefore, to have any political illusions … I had no natural hatred or jealousy of the aristocracy and, since that aristocracy had been destroyed, I had no natural affection for it, for one can only be strongly attached to the living. I was near enough to know it intimately, and far enough to judge it dispassionately. I may say as much for the democratic elements…. In a word, I was so nicely balanced between the past and the future that I did not feel instinctively drawn toward the one or the other. It required no great effort to contemplate quietly both sides.

Alexis de Tocqueville

The spark that fired me into writing this essay on the importance of the class system to English democracy was the following paragraph in Richard Hoggart’s final volume of memoirs, First and Last Things.

Democracy is never an abstraction. It has to be rooted in a sense of our own particular culture, of its virtues, strengths, limitations … It arises from the people we have known, loved, respected as we grew up, whether that was among the urban or rural working class, or the conscientious and public-spirited among the middle class, or the upper class.

‘Or the upper class’. Those were the four words that did the trick. For although I knew Mr Hoggart to be a most fair-minded man, I could not stifle the suspicion that he had added them only in a spirit of giving the devil his due – rather as a child feels obliged to add the name of some much disliked gorgon of an aunt to its bedtime supplications. Could he sincerely have believed, I asked myself, that a member of the British upper class had anything useful to contribute on the subject of British democracy except in an apologetic, exculpatory, or at best nostalgic mode? And if Mr Hoggart did so believe, surely he should at least have warned such a person to keep quiet about his own aristocratic provenance, lest readers should dismiss his views as likely to be self-serving and anachronistic, harking back to the ‘good old days’ when everybody knew where they stood but only a privileged few, like himself, enjoyed being there?

But then I had second thoughts. Why on earth should not a member – which I myself in part am – of the very class that, in 1688, created England’s particular kind of democracy, and presided over its glorious destiny for over three hundred years, have something useful to say about its future? True, such a person, with roots in the upper-class culture, would be less qualified than Mr Hoggart, with his roots in the working class, to write about the ‘virtues, strength, limitations’ of English democracy from the bottom-dog perspective of the ruled; but did not that suggest, by the same token, that he would be more qualified to write about them from the equally if not more important top-dog perspective of the rulers?

Democratic top dogs? Is that not a contradiction in terms? Most emphatically not, since this is precisely what English aristocrats were: an organic part of England’s democratic body politic, no more or less an organic part of that body than were the bottom dogs. Was not Winston Churchill, grandson of a Duke, but elected by the people, also, in the English sense, a democrat – someone, like Brutus, prepared to take up arms against tyranny? In England love of freedom, not a lack of quarterings, was and is the true test. Trying to write the aristocratic dimension out of English democracy, therefore, is like trying to write the Prince of Denmark out of Hamlet.

In my youth, of course, they tended to try to do the opposite: to write the working class out of the story. England’s democracy seemed then to consist exclusively of grandees, most with titles. It was a view of democracy from the top downwards. Now, however, the fashionable view is increasingly from the bottom upwards. Thus the success or failure of England’s democracy, which in the old days was largely measured by the statesmanship of its leaders and the standing of the country, is now largely measured by the quality of the man in the street.

In this essay, mindful of Mao’s dictum about the fish rotting from the head downwards, I try to redress the balance, not, I hasten to say, so as to advocate reinstating the upper class – or anything as absurdly reactionary as that – but so as to highlight the gaping hole left in the head of our body politic by its extinction; its extinction, moreover, without any serious thought having been given to how, and with whom, that great empty hole should be filled. From time to time newspaper commentators amuse us by pretending that ‘Tony’s cronies’ have filled the hole. That only shows how little the role of the old ruling class, in the sense that it is used in this essay, is understood.

The difficulty here, I believe, is that ever since the problems created by the Industrial Revolution, political and social thinkers in Britain, as in the rest of the world, have been concerned exclusively with the condition of the tail – the poor and the underprivileged. And quite rightly so since, thanks to the Victorian reforms of the public schools, of Oxbridge, and of the Civil Service, the elites, by the end of the nineteenth century, were in pretty good shape. What so much more obviously and urgently needed attention was the quality of life, moral and material, not of the few but of the many.

Roughly speaking, that still remains the state of play today. While there have been endless studies of the demoralizing effects of inner-city living conditions, or of capitalism generally, on the poor and underprivileged, there have been none, so far as I know, of the demoralizing effects of gross suburban affluence in such towns as Beaconsfield and Gerrards Cross – where there is a Mercedes and/or a BMW in every garage – and of capitalism generally on the rich and overprivileged.* No, I am not being facetious. Plato has a lot to say about the ideal conditions for nurturing elites, or what he called ‘guardians’. So, of course, famously, did Edmund Burke.

To be bred in a place of estimation; to see nothing low and sordid from one’s infancy; to be taught to respect oneself; to be habituated to censorial inspection of the public eye … to stand upon such elevated ground as to be enabled to take a large view of the widespread and infinitely diversified combinations of men and affairs in a large society; to have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse; to be enabled to draw on the attention of the wise and learned, wherever they are to be found … these are the circumstances of men that form what I call a natural aristocracy, without which there is no nation.

Nor does one need to go back to the eighteenth century or to classical Athens for such comments. For the great twentieth-century thinker and economist Joseph Schumpeter, in his famous Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1943), has this to say:

There are many ways in which politicians of a sufficiently good quality can be secured. Thus far, however, experience seems to suggest that the only effective guarantee is in the existence of a social stratum itself a product of a severely selective process, that takes to politics as a matter of course. If such a stratum be neither too exclusive nor too accessible for the outsider and if it be strong enough to assimilate most of the elements it currently absorbs, it not only will present for the political career products of stocks that have successfully passed many tests in other fields – served, as it were, an apprenticeship in private affairs – but it will also increase their fitness by endowing them with traditions that embody experience, with a professional code and with a common fond of views.

Schumpeter’s words ‘Thus Far’ were written during the war, but as far as I know there has been no evidence since then to suggest that we have found any better ways. Quite the opposite, judging by the quality of today’s leaders. But when did you last hear a contemporary politician – even a Tory one – admit as much? Nor is this in the least surprising, since to do so would be committing political suicide.

While in the old days socialists argued, very reasonably, that it was the duty of the State to improve the conditions of the lower classes, and Old Tories argued, also very reasonably, that it was their party’s duty to maintain the privileges of the upper classes (and the liberals made a powerful case for not feather-bedding either the Duke or the dustman), today all the parties agree, or pretend to agree, that it is the job of the State to do away with class altogether, quite regardless of the fact that our political institutions (c.f. Mao’s head) grew out of that class system and have depended on it ever since for their health and strength.

But having been brought up among the upper class myself, perhaps it is only natural for me to be aware of that class’s strengths and virtues rather than its limitations. I don’t think so. For as it happens, fate dealt me a very mixed hand of class cards, which I like to think has made it easier for me than for others to achieve a degree of objectivity. But in case that is wishful thinking on my part, it is probably wisest to take the opportunity at the outset to lay my class cards face up on the table, so that readers of the essay can swallow it with as large or as little a pinch of salt as they deem desirable or necessary.

My grandfather, Alexander Koch de Gooreynd, came from Belgian banking stock, his father having emigrated here at the end of the nineteenth century. Having arrived, he bought a house in Belgrave Square and then built his wife another and tried – only being just nipped in the bud by the Astor family – to buy The Times from Lord North-cliffe. After Sending my father to Eton and into the Irish Guards, my grandfather then put the final touches to my father’s rites of passage into the upper class by arranging for him to marry my mother, granddaughter of the 12th Earl of Abingdon – a Catholic family connected by marriage to the Duke of Norfolk, secular head of the Catholic establishment. The marriage, however, did not work since the couple were incompatible, my father wanting to lead the life of the idle rich and my mother, much the stronger character, determined to shoehorn him into English public life. The poor man was found a parliamentary constituency by our uncle Edmund Fitzalan, (younger brother of the Duke of Norfolk), the Tory Chief Whip at the time, and did his best – changing his name to Worsthorne* for the purpose – but it didn’t work. And after several unsuccessful attempts, he gave up the struggle and the name. My mother, who despised the idle rich, never forgave him and they soon separated.

From then on, so terrified was my mother that my brother and I might follow in our father’s self-indulgent footsteps that during our childhood we were scarcely ever allowed to see him. I remember being taken out from school in his yellow Rolls Royce,† equipped ahead of the times with a cocktail bar, at the most twice, and that, alas, was the total extent, until we came of age, of our contact. Not so much a role model, therefore, as an anti-role model. We were brought up to be as unlike our father as possible, even to the point of not being sent to Eton and not being allowed to join the Irish Guards.

Then, in the 1930s, our mother got her heart’s desire. She married the man of her dreams, Montagu Norman, then the great interwar Governor of the Bank of England, as dedicated to public service as our father was to private pleasure. Norman, unlike our father, was Protestant, which meant divorce and remarriage in a registry office, both repugnant to our recusant Catholic relations, from whose presence my mother – to her great relief – and her children were summarily banished for life: for my brother and I, this meant, in turn, no more Christmases and holidays with Uncle Edmund at Cumberland Lodge, his grace-and-favour home in Windsor Park – where guests included George V and Queen Mary, as well as the then prime minister, Stanley Baldwin – or at Arundel Castle; and no more eavesdropping as our elders and betters discussed ad nauseam the Conversion of England, the future of the Catholic schools, and other such burning public issues of the day. But instead, being thenceforward under Montagu Norman’s roof, we soon became equally accustomed to hear talk about more secular public issues – the Gold Standard, unemployment, etc., with visitors like Dr Schacht, Hitler’s economic guru, Sir John Reith, the first Director General of the BBC, and Maynard Keynes. So from a very early age, res publica, ‘the public thing’, was part of our lives.

I can remember quite clearly when I was made aware that it was not part of everybody else’s life. The parents of a fellow pupil at my prep school had taken me out and in the course of the outing my friend’s father, who was in the rag trade, had waxed indignant about a Neville Chamberlain Budget. Always anxious to find some precociously grownup subject to write about to my mother in my weekly letter home, I passed on this conversation, mentioning in particular the father’s objection to a tax rise that would hit the retail trade particularly hard, only to receive a long handwritten letter – the first and the last – from the Governor himself. Sadly, I haven’t kept the text, but its gist left a lasting mark. The Chancellor’s job, he emphasized, was not to please the rag trade, or any other private interest, but rather to take care of the nation’s solvency. A good Budget was almost by definition an unpopular Budget. He went on to cite his friend Walter Lippmann’s view that it was a government’s job to tax, conscript, command and prohibit, punish, and balance the budget, none of which responsibilities could usually be safely fulfilled without offending many individual members of the public. Inevitably, the conflict between the public interest and the private interest was most acute in time of war, when the balance had to be got right between the public interest in victory and the private interest of millions of mothers and fathers that their boys should return home alive; but in peacetime, too, there could be almost equally agonizing conflicts and he instanced his own recent duty at the Bank of England to take actions in the national interest that had inflicted cruel suffering on the unemployed.

Very recently, in Louis Menand’s excellent book The Metaphysical Club – mostly about late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century American philosophers – I came across a ruling of the famous American Civil War veteran and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was also one of my stepfather’s correspondents, and its chilling note had such a familiar ring that I am sure it was also included in that letter. Certainly it is in its spirit and comes in the course of a 1927 opinion by Holmes about a Virginian law permitting the involuntary sterilization of mentally incompetent persons. Menand rightly describes it as Holmes’s most ‘notorious opinion’* and it went as follows:

We have seen more than once that the public welfare may well call upon the best citizens for their lives.† It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices.

Whether or not that was the same quotation as the one recommended to me by my stepfather I shall never know; but, if not, it was certainly another equally stupefying.

And then at about the same time, as if to pile Pelion on Ossa, the critic John Davenport – whose war work was to teach English at Stowe for the duration – recommended me to read Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, wherein I came across a passage that included the following quotation from Boethius:

If any were visited with the falling sickness, madness, gout, leprosy, or any such dangerous disease, which was likely to be propagated from the father to the son, he was instantly gelded; a woman kept from all company of men; and if by chance, having some such disease, she were found to be with child, she with her brood were buried alive: and this was done for the common good, lest the whole nation should be injured or corrupted [my italics].

To which Burton had added:

A severe doom, you will say, and not to be used amongst Christians, yet more to be looked into than it is. For now, by our too much facility in this kind, in giving way for all to marry that will, too much liberty and indulgence in tolerating all sorts, there is a vast confusion of hereditary diseases, no family secure, no man almost, free from some grievous infirmity or other, when no choice is had.

It was a heady brew. Clearly somebody, ‘lest the whole nation should be injured or corrupted’, had to do the nation’s dirty work; had to authorize difficult and sometimes cruel actions for the common good; had to be on the side of realism against sentimentality; had to resist giving way not only to every grievance (which was relatively easy) but also to manifestly worthy causes as well; had to rub society’s nose in the painful realities of keeping a great nation on course. No less clearly, careerist politicians – whose careers depended on retaining popular favour – were the last people who could be relied upon to grasp these nettles. So who were these indispensable somebodies who had to bear these public burdens? The inference from my stepfather’s letter was unavoidable: those indispensable somebodies most definitely included me.

I don’t remember being in the least pleased by this realization, still less proud. It seemed, at first, a terrifying prospect. All my schoolboy inclinations at Stowe were inclined towards private pleasures – particularly the pleasure of burying my head in a book – and against team spirit, which was the boarding-school idea of public duty. The last thing I wanted – at any rate in these early years – was to be made a prefect. Neither did I want to forgo the protection that the prefects – or at least the decent ones – provided the weak and cowardly (i.e. me) against the bullies.* So I wanted the best of both worlds: authority figures who at one and the same time both protected me and left me alone; who came to my aid in emergencies but otherwise allowed me to mind my own business. Officious busybody prefects who kept an eye on one all the time were more a liability than an asset. But unofficious prefects who noticed what was going on from a corner of the eye were the opposite. Even more to be desired were the few older boys who turned down the office of prefect but were natural authority figures on the side of justice and order requiring, by virtue of strong individual character, no official badge of office. Those paragons, however, are always very few on the ground and, not being among them, I did eventually accept being made a prefect, because one of that office’s privileges was frequent contact with the great founding headmaster, J. F. Roxburgh, who exercised authority with the lightest of reins in the manner of a connoisseur who appreciates quality and style in all its forms, as much in the dilettante aesthete who refuses to play games as in the captain of the school rugger XV who refuses to do anything else. He believed a well-ordered boarding school should not aim to turn out leadership material of a uniform sort but quality material for every different walk of life – quality top dogs and quality bottom dogs, quality politicians and quality voters, and even quality revolutionaries. ‘Don’t talk of a ruling class,’ he would say. ‘Call it a quality class, a class that contributes to the good society just as much by “being” as by “doing”.’