Thinking about a New Nobility

Part 1. Philosophy

Thinking about New Nobility.

Hello and Welcome!

This week I would like to unpack the article that JL Roberts graciously wrote and shared in August for us. You can read it on the New Nobility Tab on Syre Byrds Word Emporium above this article! As expected, for we had mentioned this central idea of a new nobility in previous conversations, I found it a stimulating piece of writing. It deserves to be taken seriously and unpacked, examined, critiqued.

It is expected and hoped dear readers that you too would respond and perhaps engage with us in your own written responses. We welcome all voices upon a companionable discourse and journey! Consider how can this conversation continue, perhaps even advance, to the betterment of all our minds and lives?

For I believe that we, and our esteemed readership, are not in the business of arguing for arguments sake. Nor interested in flying academic kites merely to see if they will actually fly and for how long. You already have Social Media and the millions of minds doing that aplenty if you so desire with such popular but meaningless slogans as “Trans Rights are Human Rights” and “Terf Island” and “Just Stop Oil” which are repeated ad nauseam at the moment in the viscous Western Civilisation.

Apparently the West is being asked to purge itself of language and shared meanings like some contemporary version of a medieval Flagellant: warding off the mind virus that is akin to the Black Death. The black death of broadly liberal democratic values. So that the word ‘woman’ for example is now disputed and seen as a test to be applied to commentators and politicians alike before a conversation can take place.

Western Civilisation will thus, once we are purged and purified, be replaced by other civilities and cultural anchors that have purer power structures and equitable outcomes and less oppressions. Though I notice at that point, none are referred too as exemplars.

We here on this SubStack do not want to be merely the hot air that fills a balloon for a little while before the inevitable deflation and be left with, as it were, mere shared photos and memories on instagram; before we need the next fix, the next flight, the next posting. I know, because I have done that-so often in my life already. Without lasting or satisfying results. Rather I would like to consider the words that Plato writes about his teacher, mentor and friend Socrates. These reflect and find an echo within my own lifelong personal quest and I assume faintly seen across my SubStack postings on occasions.

For I have read Plato since barely out of my teens. Socrates, I instinctively knew before I understood a grain of philosophy, was onto something. I liked his dialectical methodology. I could see the quest he was embarked upon. The challenge that the god Apollo gave through the poetical words of the Pythia at the Oracle in Delphi,

‘This time he {Charephon} actually went to Delphi and had the face to ask the Oracle whether anyone was as wise as Socrates?’ The Pythia duly replied “No one was as wise as Socrates’’

(Plato, Apologia 21a, Translated Christopher Rowe, Penguin Classics, 2010)

These words Socrates insisted were a sacred challenge to him personally to seek out wisdom. He knew he was not in possession of wisdom and therefore was being challenged to seek it, to uncover it, wherever it was to be found. A sacred quest that ultimately would cost him his life. Yet he did not falter, right up until the state sanctioned death penalty coursed through his veins and took his life.

In the discourse called Crito, Socrates says the following,‘‘Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued’. He carries on later to say that it is not the appearance of the good that we are after, but the good itself. Since my youth those words have been a constant challenge to me.  Perhaps more consistently over my life than any other text, including religious texts.

For my life is one where sacred and profane have (far to readily?) shared mastery over my tongue, habits and choices. A warfare for mastery. Socrates words have challenged me my whole life. Still do. These words are the heart of what I would in tandem with Mr Roberts perhaps, call the essence of nobility. Happily for me Mr Roberts article sent me back once again to read and sit at the feet of my ancient didaskalos.

Our joyous task is to contrast and compare (as every new and wide eyed 14 year old IGCSE History student is now learning) what we have inherited in terms of our societies; our cultural developments; the nature and utility of our political institutions; our epistemic foundations and boundaries and perhaps imminent explorations; our understanding of the vastness that is the Universe of our inner lives alongside the pursuit of the Stars themselves beyond Mother Earth  and ever onwards to the Galaxies.

A wide and impossible remit you might reply with justification! Yet the journey friends, the journey!

Imagine all the physics that lie in between us and the Stars in that vast dark canopy I gaze towards. I am not scared by it. I hear it begging to be explored. To be understood and comprehended by minds vastly superior to my own, and yes as far as I am able, even mine! How, if at all, can we metaphorically lift anchor and pursue knowledge? How to seek within the kernels of truths that bring, if not perfection, at least recipes for lives led nobly? Of knowledge that can be trusted to build our understanding and our principles upon? To build human societies that enable and ennoble individual pursuits within a thickly woven, rich, complex community of mutual obligations and duties to each other?

As I read Mr Roberts article at this juncture my mind recalled Immanuel Kant. My mind then forked along two paths and avenues of thought. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant sought to answer just such a question. His argument (in brief) was that mathematics fulfils the criteria of giving us propositions of a pure a priori nature. Thus unalloyed from experiences and empirical pollution from our senses.  A foundation therefore to build frameworks of knowledge and understanding of our world and universe. More revealing than Humes forever contingent world.

Secondly and more importantly for this article I recalled Kants treatise on the Enlightenment itself published in 1784. For Mr Roberts is quite clear in his argument about the teleological costs of that paradigm shift in Western thought that we call ‘The Enlightenment”. The costs have been exponentially greater than the rewards. I will talk about the historical frameworks and responses in part two in the next few weeks. First, however, I reread that Kant treatise itself.

For those of you anxious or turned off by philosophy, I can heartily recommend this work. It is accessible. It is clear. It is here On Enlightenment. Kant. It will be well worth the 30 minutes of your time to read it completely and mull over. In fact I personally think that only Descartes Meditations is as easily read and Wittgenstein's’ Tractus Logico Philosophicus is as beautifully presented and expressed.

Kants’ point is that enlightenment is freedom. Freedom to think for yourself. We all need teachers and tutors and role models. Yet there comes a day when you strike out on your own. You use your knowledge and skills and understanding to make your own decisions. That is enlightenment. To often we cede this to religious people, political people and governments, doctors, scientists. The experts.

This enlightenment requires nothing but freedom--and the most innocent of all that may be called "freedom": freedom to make public use of one's reason in all matters. Now I hear the cry from all sides: "Do not argue!" The officer says: "Do not argue--drill!" The tax collector: "Do not argue--pay!" The pastor: "Do not argue--believe!" Only one ruler in the world says: "Argue as much as you please, but obey!" We find restrictions on freedom everywhere. But which restriction is harmful to enlightenment? Which restriction is innocent, and which advances enlightenment? I reply: the public use of one's reason must be free at all times, and this alone can bring enlightenment to mankind.

Such an enlightenment is a project well worth our time. After all I am a teacher. I believe fundamentally that my job is to help students engage in my subject and learn to do it for themselves. Further more I believe this is a good, in and of itself. Alas, I am a man out of time. Yet the enlightenment that Kant sees of his own age, is not it either. It is as he says, just an age of enlightenment.

Where the possibilities are open in some places. Mostly, not? Also it struck me how Kant sees both the individual and the state as essential elements working together. There would be a recognition of our place in societies. As a free part of a greater whole guaranteeing freedom of thought. Yet boundaries do exist, they have to exist, for freedom to have the kind of purchase in our lives. Here is a recognition of our social traditions; our religious traditions and even modes of being. If your free, decide these for yourself honestly and without fear.

This, I thought to myself, is not the rampant individualism that we have in this century. It never struck me before this reading what the links between the aforementioned Socrates and Kant were. Socrates good life, and Kants enlightened being would share a lot in the life they would seek to lead. That would be noble to pursue.

So why have we inherited an enlightenment that is pot marked by the French Terror where Maximilen Robespierre is allegedly quoting Jean Jaques Rousseau at the the top of the scaffold as people are executed at the Guillotine? The interminable Napoleonic Wars within just a few short years after Kants Treatise?

Then later the inheritors of his own Germanic culture forever stain that culture with an inherently evil twentieth century ideologically driven, ruthless, Holocaust? Repeat for Lenin and Stalin’s Russia and countless shameful episodes from humanity in this past 200 Years or so often pitched as Great Leaps forward. When in fact they are death, famine, destruction often on an industrial scale. Witness the killing fields of Cambodia.

Even the United States of America failing to practice their own enlightenment infused founding documents and requiring a bloody Civil War later to clarify. The purposes of which were to fight over what that articulate and codified vision of the nation actually meant. That vision, though secured with a Republican win: still hamstrung by racism at State level run by Democrats for a century or more even after that loss of the Civil War.

A clue might be in the entry in great enlightenment work from the France; Encylopedie, Dictionnaire Raisson Des Sciences, Des Arts Et  Des Metiers published in volumes from 1747 and finished in 1772. One of the editors, Denis Diderot presents the facts about a mysterious plant called the “Vegetable Lamb Plant” (“Agnus scythicus”). In reality, as his readers well knew, he was undermining the mysteries of religion and tradition and belief. Surely an enlightened being needs no such prop or belief system after all? Myths are to be replaced. A lamb that bleeds?

Tear down and build….what exactly? In this I think Mr Roberts is right to reject such enlightenment values. Their inheritors have been ideologues and ideologies forever questing for the perfect state. Failing miserably in the pursuit. Inflicting misery as a result.

Contrast that with the enlightenment play of Gottfried Ephraim Lessing of 1779. Whose play, Nathan the Wise, portrays a world in conflict over religion. Yet is a clarion call for tolerance. Nathan the Wise in English. In the play Lessing sets the time as when Jerusalem has just been taken by Saladin. Yet Saladin cannot bring himself to execute a young Christian crusader. Nathan, a Jewish merchant, has a fine adopted daughter.

A Muslim. A Christian. A Jewish girl. Find family and kinship at the hands of an old Jewish Merchant with a story. The freedom to give each other the freedom to live and exist lie in the hands of a Victorious Muslim leader guided and heeding the words of a Jewish merchant who has a story of three rings.

They discover a human tie that acts as a predicate for any claims that might be proposed as to how to live the best life. It begins, it seems for this enlightenment playwright, with Family. With recognition of diverse religious belief. Of diverse opinions. Acceptance of difference and the willingness to grant each other the space to live differently but bounded by common, perhaps universal laws that create and foster and make possible such freedoms.

We seek to uncover, explain, and yes perhaps even crack that most adamantine wall of all: that which surrounds our cosy settled minds and sincerely held ideas, if warranted. Examine our personal and collective ethos and its hidden principles and the morality we build upon them so that we can live, presumably, as fulfilling lives as is possible. Live nobly.

So the subjects of history, philosophy, psychology, science, the religious quest, are raised by Mr Roberts in his call for a New Nobility. Yet readers will have discerned that Mr Roberts foundational point is language.

What is this tool that we all use? How does it help or hinder our pursuit of the goods of life in the more practical aspects of life? From necessities such as shelter to food to procreation and rearing of our young.  Through to the systems we create of disseminating knowledge in schools? How does it help or hinder, shape and frame the very desire to know and explain ourselves and our world?

How does it offer the possibilities of our minds sharing and comprehending one another? Or perhaps shatter our ability to create understanding! As if the next being and mind you meet is akin to a person standing perplexed at the base of the Tower of Babel. Who even now after a life of companionship with you, no longer comprehends your language and what you are talking about regardless of your clarity of expression and articulation.

Or the Lion in Wittgensteins Philosohical Investigations. That even if you heard the Lion speak, have no contextual apparatus to understand the Lion.

Imagine the chaos within a State today, pulling itself apart and unable, unwilling even, to hear of alternatives or comprehend the other. I have witnessed much in the UK and USA in the last month in just such a way. Purposively using language to obfuscate, confuse, blur, detract and ultimately deceive?

Mr Roberts uses a reductio ad absurdum argument when he skilfully and with brevity challenges the consequences of the Enlightenment on the spirit de corp of not only our discourses but our aspirations and social structures. We have lost much. The cost as been to high with none of the payback and benefits. The consequences of the Enlightenment have been to shed ourselves of those tried and tested frameworks of humanity developed over thousands of years such as understanding our collective duties and responsibilities. Using the family structure as first port of call for-us all in learning expected behaviours and civilities from our closest and trusted teachers, our biological parents. Of shared religious rituals that punctuate, mitigate, enhance our lives through collective worship.

The Enlightenment replaced-these with what? Individuality. Consumerism. Economics as trump cards in policy making. Ultimately a disconnection from all-the other newly enlightened individuals who also now, are pursuing their own defined goals and happiness. That may include prohibiting your, and all of the rest of us, the ability to do so.