Distinction and Hierarchy

Ideas Have Consequences, by Richard Weaver

The most portentous general event of our time is the steady obliteration of those distinctions which create society.

Portent: something that foreshadows a coming event; prophetic indication or significance.

Portentous: being a grave or serious matter.

Remember, this was 1948.  Families still mattered; sex still mattered; age still mattered; at least when looking back from today.  Weaver saw the cracks seventy years ago.  While reading this post, try to remain aware of the number of times that you will nod and say, Weaver was right – he saw the future.

Weaver notes that the preservation of society is dependent on the recovery of true knowledge – knowledge as to hierarchy and distinction.

If society is something which can be understood, it must have structure; if it has structure, it must have hierarchy; against this metaphysical truth the declamations of the Jacobins break in vain.

But their declamations are against the first “if”: who says society must be understood or understandable?  And in this we find a key.  Perhaps the first “if” could be: if a society is to be maintained, it must be understood – which means, it must be understandable, or capable of being understood.  Some, of course, do not wish to maintain society; the destruction of society is, therefore, their objective.

No doubt, we live in a society today that is not capable of being understood.  A society of no distinction or hierarchy (or of a distinction and hierarchy that contradicts the nature of man) is not understandable, therefore not sustainable. 

A sustainable structure must have hierarchy, but to have hierarchy requires a common assumption about ends.  Since the Renaissance, and certainly since the Enlightenment, any common assumption about ends has been tossed aside.

Weaver describes the act of overturning tradition as “subversive activity.”  He cites Shakespeare on the subject of subversive activity, from Troilus and Cressida; Ulysses is speaking:

O, when degree is shaked,

Which is the ladder to all high designs,

Then enterprise is sick!

Then every thing includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite;

And appetite, an universal wolf,

So doubly seconded with will and power,

Must make perforce an universal prey,

And last eat up himself.

To which Nestor replies:

Most wisely hath Ulysses here discover'd

The fever whereof all our power is sick.

When all distinctions are erased, all that remains as a goal is comfort; so wrote De Tocqueville.  When reformers set the agenda, they merely substitute a bureaucratic hierarchy for a natural one.  We are left with an undefined (and undefinable) egalitarianism:

An American political writer of the last century, confronted with the statement that all men are created free and equal, asked whether it would not be more accurate to say that no man was ever created free and no two men ever created equal.

Weaver does not indicate the source of this statement; he offers, as an example, Jefferson, who, in his later years went from:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

To creating a university designed to sort out according to gifts and attainment.

Man is not created free and equal.  Man is born into a family.  He is not born free; he is born into a structure, and he is under the authority of that structure.  He is not equal; he cannot command those who provide him the necessary structure.  What do we do with this?  Ignore the reality that hierarchy and distinction are with us from birth, even from conception?  Try to imagine such a world; it will not last one generation.

Weaver makes clear an important distinction: he is not writing against equality under the law – and if laws are limited to protection of life and property, then there is no issue here; he is writing against the notion of equality of condition – whether age, sex, even friends.  Destroying such distinctions is not liberating; it creates, instead, poisonous envy.

In history and geography, it will be found as a general rule that those societies which talked least of equality exhibited the greatest fraternity – a true fraternity, not an artificial brotherhood of all mankind.  Today we are all convinced that we are our own king (“I am a sovereign individual”); hence no one is king (at least not any of us).

Judges 17: 6 In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes.

Talk about chaos.  Someone or something will have authority.  Will it be a natural hierarchy, one that conforms with man’s nature, or a bureaucratic nightmare?  There really aren’t any other choices.

…when Mark Twain, in the role of Connecticut Yankee, undertook to destroy the hierarchy of Camelot, he was furious to find that serfs and others of the lower order were not resentful of their condition.  He adopted then the typical Jacobin procedure of instilling hatred of all superiority.

The way out of our current dilemma is not to be found in any ideology, to include the ideology of “anything peaceful” libertarianism.  As Weaver notes: “some source of authority must be found.”  To be sustainable, this source must comport with man’s natural ends. 

Have I strayed too far from libertarian purity?  Let’s ask Murray Rothbard, from his essay Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature:

…mankind is uniquely characterized by a high degree of variety, diversity, differentiation; in short, inequality…. The age-old record of inequality seems to indicate that this variability and diversity is rooted in the biological nature of man.

Regarding the egalitarian left:

[It is a deeper revolt} against the ontological structure of reality itself, against the “very organization of nature”; against the universe as such.  At the heart of the egalitarian left is the pathological belief that there is no structure of reality; that all the world is tabula rasa that can be changed at any moment in any desired direction by the mere exercise of human will – in short, that reality can be instantly transformed by the mere wish of whim of human beings.

I have written some comments on Rothbard’s essay here.

Returning to Weaver: to the extent we are presented with ends, or a teleology, today, it is that of progress.  But progress toward what?  Daily we see our liberties erode; as we become evermore liberated from hierarchy, we have more reason to complain about the chains that bind us.

Conclusion

 

Source: Paul VanderKlay

We are told to value equality.  We are told that hierarchy is bad.  Yet there will always be a hierarchy.  Always.