Aristocrats are elites by birth. They are not required to demonstrate any exceptional talent, ability, training, intellect or morality (though of course many do) in order to maintain their exalted status in society.

But it hasn’t always been that way. As William Manchester explains:

Royalty was invested with glory, swathed in mystique, and clothed with magical powers. To be a king was to be a lord of men, a host at great feasts for his vassal dukes, earls, counts, barons, and marquises; a great giver of rings, of gold, of landed estates. Because the first medieval rulers had been barbarians, most of what followed derived from their customs. Chieftains like Ermanaric, Alaric, Atilla, and Clovis rose as successful battlefield leaders whose fighting skills promised still more triumphs to come. Each had been chosen by his warriors, who, after raising him on their shields, had carried him to a pagan temple or a sacred stone and acclaimed him there… Lesser tribesmen were grateful to him for the spoils of victory, though his claim on their allegiance also had supernatural roots…

Hereditary monarchy, like hereditary nobility, was largely a medieval innovation. It is true that some barbarian lieutenants had held office by descent rather than deed. But the chieftains had been chosen for merit, and early kings wore crowns only ad vitam aut culpam—for life or until removed for fault.
–William Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire

As Manchester goes on to point out, with the passing of time primogeniture became more common. Secular leaders tried to “maintain the fiction that sovereigns were elected,” but by the end of the Middle Ages “this pretense had been abandoned.” With the triumph of Christianity, religion replaced merit as the justification for rulership. “The conspicuous sacerdotal role in the crowning of kings, who then claimed that they ruled by divine right, was characteristic of Christianity’s domination of medieval Europe,” Manchester tells us.

I am not by any stretch of the imagination arguing against elites or elitism. Quite the contrary, I am in total agreement with Robert Hughes when he writes:

Democracy’s task in the field of art is to make the world safe for elitism. Not an elitism based on race or money or social position, but on skill and imagination. The embodiment of high ability and intense vision is the only thing that makes art popular. Basically, it’s why the Rijksmuseum is full of people and the remedial art-basements of Amsterdam are not. The greatest popular spectacles in America are elitist to the core: football games, baseball games, basketball, professional tennis. But nobody is going to pay to watch Hilton Kramer and me swim the 800-meter freestyle in 35 minutes flat, despite our privileged position as not-quite-dead white European males. Like sport, art is an area in which elitism can display itself at a negligible cost in social harm.

Or when he writes:

For when the 1960s animus against elitism entered American education, it brought in its train an enormous and cynical tolerance of student ignorance, rationalized as a regard for “personal expression” and “self-esteem.” Rather than “stress” the kids by asking them to read too much or think too closely, which might cause their fragile personalities to implode on contact with college-level demands, schools reduced their reading assignments, thus automatically reducing their command of language. Untrained in logical analysis, ill-equipped to develop and construct formal arguments about issues, unused to mining texts for deposits of factual material, the students fell back to the only position they could truly call their own: what they felt about things. When feelings and attitudes are the main references of argument, to attack any position is automatically to insult its holder, or even to assail his or her perceived “rights”; every argumentum becomes ad hominem, approaching the condition of harassment, if not quite rape. “I feel very threatened by your rejection of my views on [check one] phallocentricity/the Mother Goddess/the Treaty of Vienna/Young’s Modulus of Elasticity.” Cycle this subjectivization of discourse through two or three generations of students turning into teachers, with the sixties’ dioxins accumulating more each time, and you have the entropic background to our culture of complaint.

Our political and economic leaders today are not elites, they are anti-elites. They are vulgar, immoral, uneducated and incompetent clowns. Think of them like the idiot kings of old, invested with a title–which today may come in the form of a PhD–but grossly lacking in mental horsepower. Perhaps no one put it better than Hannah Arendt (and forgive me skippy, for I know I am sinning again):

For abundance and endless consumption are the ideals of the poor: they are the mirage in the desert of misery. In this sense, affluence and wretchedness are only two sides of the same coin; the bonds of necessity need not be of iron, they can be made of silk. Freedom and luxury have always been thought to be incompatible, and the modern estimate that tends to blame the insistence of the Founding Fathers on frugality and ‘simplicity of manners’ (Jefferson) upon a Puritan contempt for the delights of the world much rather testifies to an inability to understand freedom than to a freedom from prejudice. For that ‘fatal passion for sudden riches’ was never the vice of the sensuous but the dream of the poor; and it has been so prevalent in America, almost from the beginning of its colonization, because the country was, even in the eighteenth century, not only the ‘land of liberty, the seat of virtue, the asylum of the oppressed’, but also the promised land of those whose conditions hardly had prepared them for comprehending either liberty or virtue. It is still Europe’s poverty that has taken its revenge in the ravages with which American prosperity and American mass society increasingly threaten the whole political realm. The hidden wish of poor men is not ‘To each according to his needs’, but ‘To each according to his desires’. And while it is true that freedom can only come to those whose needs have been fulfilled, it is equally true that it will escape those who are bent upon living for their desires. The American dream, as the nineteenth and twentieth centuries under the impact of mass immigration came to understand it, was neither the dream of the American Revolution—the foundation of freedom—nor the dream of the French Revolution—the liberation of man; it was, unhappily, the dream of a ‘promised land’ where milk and honey flow. And the fact that the development of modern technology was so soon able to realize this dream beyond anyone’s wildest expectation quite naturally had the effect of confirming for the dreamers that they really had come to live in the best of all possible worlds.

In conclusion, one can hardly deny that Crevecoeur was right when he predicted that ‘the man will get the better of the citizen, [that] his political maxims will vanish’, that those who in all earnestness say, ‘The happiness of my family is the only object of my wishes’, will be applauded by nearly everyone when, in the name of democracy, they vent their rage against the ‘great personages who are so far elevated above the common rank of man’ that their aspirations transcend their private happiness, or when, in the name of the ‘common man’ and some confused notion of liberalism, they denounce public virtue…as mere ambition, and those to whom they owe their freedom as ‘aristocrats’ who (as in the case of poor John Adams) they believe were possessed by a ‘colossal vanity’.
–Hannah Arendt, On Revolution

Like a seductively dressed vixen who has researched the life habits of a celebrity, arranged to meet him in a bar, seduces him and accompanies him to his hotel room one evening, moans with pleasure, then cries rape the next day while filing her civil law suit, so to are there are plenty of so-called “innocent” victims of the “financial” rape that winked, nodded, and otherwise enabled the perpetrator.

There are too many of us that, to one degree or another, have some personal responsibility for this financial/moral crisis, if for nothing else than our silent response to “the good times” when the moral decay began to permeate our government, business environment and general culture.

Not that it matters but many (certainly not all) of the real aristocrats I know tend to be quite conservative (in the true sense of the word – wanting to go back to the ancien régime) in both art and politics and reject any developments in both areas after the French Revolution.

Fear of kitsch is what is driving collectors and artists towards bizarre and mediocre art. Today, the value of art is not determined by the intrinsic quality of the piece in question; no, art’s value is determined by how different it is from anything Thomas Kinkade would produce.

How about the “Plunge Protection Team” (aka the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets). From Kevin Phillips book Bad Money:

p. 58 — “The Working Group’s purposes, as elaborated in a 1997 Washington Post article, were to enhance ‘the integrity, efficiency, orderliness and competitiveness of financial market and [maintain] investor confidence.”

KP notes the lack of interest in the domestic press about this government entity set up to manipulate markets and goes on to say:

p. 59 — “The Telegraph in London ran several articles, in 1998 and 2006, eventually describing the Plunge Protection Team as a ’shadowy body with powers to support stock indes, currency and credit futures in a crash.”

The PPT gets my vote.

Art is a tyranny of talent and beauty.

And while aristocrats have never comported themselves like angels, at least the aristocrats of old knew and patronized good art. Their legacy included the Pietà, the Statue of David, the Sistine Chapel, the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper and The Birth of Venus, just to name a few of the better-known examples.

But this current crop of incompetent buffoons? What will be their artistic legacy? A medicine cabinet? A formaldehyde-filled tank with a pickled shark inside? Testaments of politics-as-art conceived to glorify greed and the “red in tooth and claw” ideology of the ruling class?

Robert Hughes tells the following story to illustrate how, even though some Renaissance art patrons were degenerate scoundrels, they nevertheless were sublime aesthetes:

Nobody has ever denied that Sigismondo de Malatesta, the Lord of Rimini, had excellent taste. He hired the most refined of quattrocento architects, Leno Battista Alberti, to design a memorial temple to his wife, and then got the sculptor Agostino de Duccio to decorate it, and retained Piero della Francesca to paint it. Yet Sigismondo was a man of such callousness and rapcity that he was known in life as Il Lupo, The Wolf, and so execrated after his death that the Catholic Church made him (for a time) the only man apart from Judas Iscariot officially listed as being in Hell—a distinction he earned by trussing up a Papal emissary, the fifteen-year-old Bishop of Fano, in his own rochet and publicly sodomizing him before his applauding army in the main square of Rimini.

William Manchester in A World Lit Only by Fire picks up on the same theme:

In an ideal world, genius should not require the largess of wicked pontiffs, venal cardinals, and wanton contessas. But these men of genius did not live in such a world, and neither has anyone else. In art the end has to justify the means, because artists, like beggars, have no choice. Other ages have provided different sources of support, though with dubious results. Five centuries after Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli, and Titian, nothing matching their masterpieces can be found in contemporary galleries. No pandering to popular tastelessness, adolescent fads, or philistine taboos guided the brushed and chisels of the men who found immortality in the Renaissance. Political statements did not concern them. Instead they devoted their lives to artistic statements, leaving time to judge their wisdom.

It is uncontestable that the Continent’s most powerful rulers in the early sixteenth century were responsible for great crimes. It is equally true that had this outraged the painters and sculptors of their time we would have lost a heritage beyond price. Botticelli pocketed thousands of tainted ducats from Lorenzo de Medici and gave the world The Birth of Venus. In both temperament and accomplishments Pope Julius II was closer to Genghis Khan than Saint Peter, but because that troubled neither Raphael nor Michelangelo, they endowed us with the Transfiguration, David, the Pietà, and The Last Judgment. They took their money, ran to their studios, and gave to the world masterpieces which have enriched civilization for five hundred years.

Now look at the “masterpieces” today’s rulers are buying with their plunder. How many centuries do you think they’re going to “enrich civililzation”? To repeat what Orwell said again: “You have to be an intellectual to believe such nonsense. No ordinary man could be such a fool.”

Please see my “5-easy step recipe for continued health and wellbeing”, which I posted in the “Elizabeth Warren on Bank Bonuses” thread above.

If you are not already working on step “D”, may I politely ask, “What is wrong with you?”…

Vinny G.