Screeds
Saturday, September 25, 2004
Unnatural Aristocracies And Genteel Deceits
January 25, 2004
In a famous letter to John Adams, with whom he corresponded regularly and argued strenuously, Thomas Jefferson wrote of the “natural aristocracy among men.” Jefferson held that the removal of the supports to artificial aristocracies—those held in place by force—would call forth the truly excellent among men to take the helm of the new American Republic. He illustrated his approach with several legal enactments, each of which served to blunt the powers of “traditional” secular authorities while encouraging the development of reason and virtue among the truly gifted, to ready them for high office. He opined that, once the legal protections of the “pseudo-aristocrats” were destroyed, the naturally gifted would displace them from the halls of State.
Jefferson was an optimist.
The studies of economics, of propaganda, and of electoral systems were all newborn at the time of the Founding. Jefferson, though brilliant and far-sighted, did not have available to him many of the intellectual tools and much of the knowledge with which our time is equipped, and so he failed to foresee much that seems self-evident to us. One of these things, sketched out by Friedrich Hayek in The Road To Serfdom and well buttressed by the investigations of the Public Choice school of analysis, is that in any structure for the wielding of coercive power, the worst will rise to the top. Or, as Leo Tolstoy put it:
In order to obtain and hold power, a man must love it. Thus the effort to get it is not likely to be coupled with goodness, but with the opposite qualities of pride, cunning, and cruelty.
“The worst” may be quite able in many ways. Napoleon, for example, was a highly skilled administrator, and apparently very good at designing and populating a bureaucracy. But it is more certain, and more germane, that “the worst” will be more deceitful, more cunning, and more ruthless than their competitors for the seats of power. They will be highly motivated and sharply focused. The most dangerous among them will have a knack for scouting out society’s “levers”: institutions that magnify the influence of those who control them.
Sometimes “the worst” cannot directly lay hands on those levers. In that case, they do what they can to neutralize them: by legal constraint, by intimidation, or by slander.
Courtesy of the invaluable Misha, your Curmudgeon today stumbled over a poignant article about French anti-corruption prosecutrix Eva Joly, whose efforts, though sincere, ardent and sustained, have mostly served to endanger her life. Glenn Reynolds points us toward a scathing column by Canadian journalist Elizabeth Nickson, reminding her readers that Americans can wage a “war of ideas” that Canadians are denied. And who has not heard of the travails of British commentator Robert Kilroy-Silk, fired and pilloried for his article skewering the Arab-Islamic states for their barbarities and crimes against humanity?
These three persons are front-line soldiers in the battle against the genteel deceits of their nations: the fictions that help to protect pseudo-aristocrats against being pulled down by the common man. Joly and Kilroy-Silk have suffered visibly. Given the rising intolerance shown by the Canadian power structure toward anyone who questions its integrity or its policies, your Curmudgeon fears for Miss Nickson. Canadian journalists have recently been subjected to police harassment, simply for doing their jobs. Miss Nickson might soon be compelled to join the great Mark Steyn as an American resident, which would be a gain for us but a terrible loss for Canada.
America is not immune to this disease. We have our pseudo-aristocrats, and they have their bastions, mostly in the Old Media of print journalism and broadcast television. Oftentimes their fire can be withering indeed. Remember Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder, who lost his job on CBS Sports for making a factually true statement about the way slaveowners used to force-breed their slaves? Remember the more recent case of Rush Limbaugh, who lost his job at ESPN merely for giving his opinion that the prevalent high media opinion of Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb was largely because journalists want to see black quarterbacks do well?
President Bush has been cornered into all sorts of evasions and circumlocutions to avert calumnies from the Old Media, or distortions by his political foes. The pseudo-aristocrats hate him desperately. Such is their power to sway popular opinion that Dubya’s every statement must be carefully pre-censored, to deny the ink-stained wretches and blowdried talking heads a new avenue of attack.
(Note that the Old Media didn’t have one unkind word to say about Bill Clinton, to the day he left office. They approved of him. Moreover, his record suggested that he would return any blows dealt him with doubled force. “The worst” had gotten “on top.” Even had the pseudo-aristocrats disagreed with his policy views, they knew better than to court his ire.)
Still, things are better here. One cannot be prosecuted for one’s opinions, nor are the Old Media the only channels for the dissemination of news and views. And we’ve had some success at prosecuting and convicting scoundrels who abused the powers of office. Our Old Media power structure, bad as it may be, does not yet defend an entrenched political elite that will use any means necessary to suppress criticism and maintain its hegemony.
But given our accelerating tendency to rule certain truths unspeakable and certain opinions beyond the pale, Jefferson would tell us to beware. Hayek would remind us how ruthless “the worst” can be. Not every patriot who falls spills his blood on the tree of liberty.
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