On the Decline of the Genteel Virtues From Gentility to Technocracy Jeff Mitchell On the Decline of the Genteel Virtues Jeff Mitchell On the Decline of the Genteel Virtues From Gentility to Technocracy Jeff Mitchell History and Political Science Arkansas Tech University Russellville, AR, USA ISBN 978-3-030-20353-5 ISBN 978-3-030-20354-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20354-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland In memoriam: To my friend, mentor, and colleague, Dr. Michael Link, who—to borrow Kant’s fine phrase—roused me from my dogmatic slumbers. Preface The following monograph is perhaps best described as an essay in virtue ethics informed by the sociology of culture. Two distinct sources served to inspire the undertaking. The more immediate of them was provided by Hans-George Gadamer’s analysis of taste in his magnum opus, Truth and Method (1960). In that work, Gadamer points out that originally the idea of good taste was more of a moral concept than an esthetic one, especially as presented in the thought of Baltazar Gracian. Furthermore, he insightfully describes the ethics of Plato and Aristotle as an ethics of good taste. The more proximate inspiration came from the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, who has done perhaps more than anyone else to rehabilitate the approach known as virtue ethics among contemporary moral philosophers, particularly through the publication of his After Virtue (1981). A word of explanation is perhaps in order as to why I designate MacIntyre’s thought as the more proximate of the twin stimuli. Despite the fact that I was fortunate enough to take several courses from him as a graduate student, I was initially far from conceiving of the current essay as directly involving virtue ethics. This realization only gradually dawned on me over the course of writing the present book. Let my vii viii Preface admission here serve as both a recognition of intellectual indebtedness, and as testimony to the fact that sometimes our teachers—even those whom we quite consciously hold in high regard—influence us more than we know. In what follows, I will argue that what we think of as “moral con- science” is essentially the exercise of reflective judgment on the goods and ends arising in interpersonal relations, and that such judgment con- stitutes a form of taste. An historical survey will make plain that the constant pendant to taste was an educational and cultural ideal, namely, that of the gentleman, whether he was an ancient Greek citizen-soldier, Roman magistrate, Confucian scholar-bureaucrat, Renaissance courtier, or Victorian grandee. In each of these instances, good taste was part and parcel of a unified pattern of social life which was, to a significant degree, the result of conscious design. The pattern of life was unified in the sense that the various aspects of the individual’s existence—e.g., the personal and the civic, inner convictions and outward manners, the useful and the esthetic—were, as far as possible, harmonized with each other so as to be mutually reinforcing and form a coherent and even attractive whole. Central to this genteel ethos or ethos of good taste was the identification and ranking of the key human goods by a given commu- nity of competent judges, who thereby set the standards of taste. Thus, the very idea of good taste presupposed the existence of such a com- munity, and although each one had its own distinctive cultural pattern, in the total absence of any such elite community good taste would not have been possible. In the latter part of the monograph I argue that this is actually the case today. Although contemporary societies are largely run by various elites (read in, the Establishment), I will show that the latter have long since ceased to constitute a community capable of effec- tively setting and transmitting standards of taste. As a general benchmark for behavior, good taste directly depended upon the existence of a class whose members were destined for leader- ship, and who consequently were groomed from an early age for dis- tinguished office. It was, in fact, the gentleman’s social function which lent unity and coherence to the canons of taste. Consequently, the con- cept of taste has shared the fate of the social class which provided it with its moral meaning. With the decline of the gentility, it has either Preface ix degenerated into mere personal preference, or has been subsumed into expert opinion. In the sense of a general capacity for discernment and sound judgment in the various departments of life, resulting from upbringing, formal instruction, and peer-group interaction, “good taste” has virtually vanished from the contemporary world and from popular linguistic usage. Hence, the book concludes on a somber note, and the reader may well wonder in what sense the monograph constitutes a work in moral philosophy if its interest is primarily historical. One reason is that, despite the fact that the civic ideal of the gentleman flourished in various times and places, it has actually received scant attention from philosophers (no few of whom were actually gentlemen themselves!). They have generally focused their efforts on grounding morals on a law or principle or set of natural rights, and so have failed to perceive that it was neither an ethical doctrine nor methodology which provided the high cultures with moral and political leadership, but rather an elite social order. In their perennial quest for self-knowledge, philosophers would have done well to heed the lessons of twentieth-century cultural anthropology: In all studies of social custom, the crux of the matter is that the behaviour under consideration must pass through the needle’s eye of social accept- ance, and only history in its widest sense can give an account of these social acceptances and rejections. It is not merely psychology that is in question, it is also history, and history is by no means a set of facts that can be discovered by introspection.1 While the gentry in the traditional sense no longer exists, it neverthe- less made significant historical contributions, and insofar as we are con- cerned to understand the present state of human affairs, we need to grasp the nature and import of said contributions. In other words, the undertaking at hand bears roughly the same relationship to contempo- rary moral philosophy that paleontology does to biology. Any theory 1Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1934) 232. x Preface of living organisms which would fail to account for their genesis in the natural history of the planet would be incomplete, as would be any moral philosophy that would ignore the rise and extinction of the gen- tility. It is in this spirit that the reader is invited to discover the follow- ing paleontology of genteel virtue. Russellville, AR, USA Jeff Mitchell March 2018 Acknowledgements A special word of thanks is in order to Arkansas Tech University, which provided me with a year-long sabbatical, during which I was able to write a significant portion of the present book. πόλις ἄνδρα διδάσκει. (Polis andra didaskei. The city-state teaches = the man.) –Simonides (Greek lyric poet, 557/556-468/467 B.C.) xi