I’ve started to think that there’s a lot of confusion surrounding the concept of noblesse oblige. By which I mean that I think it is misunderstood both by people who believe that they are displaying it, or that they ought to display it, and by people who are inclined to judge others for it or for its absence.
In particular: I think people believe that it’s about gestures. That if you’re rich or blue-blooded or privileged or whatever, that every so often you have to demonstrate that you’re a decent person with decent human sentiments by reaching out and doing something nice for some poor less-fortunate schlub. Give a whole bunch to a photogenic charity, or leave a really big tip, or some such.
And the thing is that, as a social strategy, that almost never works.
(There are rare exceptions. If the gesture is really big and really costly and really resonant, it can have some real moral impact. This almost certainly requires anteing up something other than money; poor schlubs naturally assume that big-shots possess functionally infinite money anyway, and aren’t impressed by their financial expenditures. The thing where old-money families send their sons off to war, even when it would obviously be easy for them to get out of fighting if they wanted, is a good example. That said – )
Envy can’t be beaten with moral suasion. If people are inclined to resent you for your wealth or your position, you’ve already lost the social game, there’s basically no gesture you can make that will change their minds. It doesn’t matter how nice you are. The hinge of envy is “I think this person has advantages that he doesn’t deserve,” and no one seriously believes that the way you come to deserve advantages is by being nice.
The way you deserve advantages is by playing a necessary role.
And that’s what noblesse oblige is really about. It’s about demonstrating that the community relies upon you (whatever “the community” means in context), and thus that your wealth/privilege/etc. is an important aspect of The Way Things Work, rather than simply being a random private benefit. It’s about employing two dozen domestic servants in your giant country manor, or maybe running the factory that employs half the breadwinners in town. It’s about being available as a fair and trustworthy judge for people’s disputes. It’s about serving as a private social safety net of last resort, through some means or other. In a very fundamental sense, of course, it’s about taking up your longsword and your plate mail and protecting your peasants from bandits.
This is a lot harder than it used to be. Rich powerful people aren’t the pillars of small communities anymore; they live in all-rich-and-powerful-person communities of their own. Often, they get their wealth and power through arcane methods that have no obvious direct positive consequences for any specific people. I know.
But if you’ve got privilege and you want to keep it, I’d strongly encourage you to think hard about this. The “I’m just a regular guy like you, except with tons of money and influence” strategy is rapidly ceasing to work at all, and it never worked that well to begin with. Stable aristocracies have something to offer.
Hannah Arendt talks about this – not using the term noblesse oblige, just talking about the dynamic – which is why it comes to mind. As she explains the historical precedents, exploiter classes generally don’t fall to revolutions or reorganizations. Exploitation sucks, but it tends to grow out of a stable productive relationship between the exploiter and exploitee, which provides at least some meaningful benefits to both of them. The upper classes that fall are the ones that no longer have any capacity to exploit anyone, the ones that are identical to the lower classes except for being much richer…
Earning your privileges through the the aggregate gains by others resulting from your fulfillment of the duties of your position is an anachronistic framing.
The privilege/duty combination is a feature of hierarchical frameworks and, to my knowledge, these ground themselves in appeal to history or natural law and not to their utility to the masses. Noblesse oblige does not exist in an egalitarian framework because there is no nobility to feel the burden. Importing it strikes me as an ad hoc fix for emergent inequality that the framework is not natively equipped to handle.
I see the rich people in your examples receiving censure either for a kind of category error (charitable giving asserting a social position that an egalitarian society does not agree should exist) or neglect (failing to send your children to war in a hierarchical society). The cure for the first is to act like you’re not rich or perhaps move somewhere where no one notices/makes a point of your wealth. You’re certainly right that gestures from the powerful don’t have the reinforcing social effect of true noblesse oblige.
Hrm. I do agree with most of this.
I think the relevant point-of-bridging is that, while you do in fact need stable hierarchy for noblesse oblige to function as intended, you don’t necessarily need an ancien regime blood-aristocracy or anything particularly resembling one. You just need an identifiable upper class with an actual valued role to play.
(Modern-era establishment Republicans have been trying to cobble that situation together by talking about “job creators” etc., claiming that we get our employment-centric prosperity from the virtue and duty of our contemporary aristoi. This fails hilariously, because (a) our alleged employment-centric prosperity has collapsed into rubble, and (b) insofar as the system is in fact running, it’s obvious to anyone paying attention that the “job creators” as a class aren’t doing anything special to make that happen.)
It’s true that the aristocrats traditionally haven’t justified their existence by straight-up appealing to the welfare of the masses, or even (more relevantly) by appealing to their functional role in preserving a non-frightening status quo…but I believe that, in actual reality, it is having such a role that allows aristocratic classes to exist without being destroyed by revolt or erosion.
And since we actually have identifiable aristocrats who don’t want to get overthrown, and who have giant piles of money and a precarious grip on power, I assert that it would be wise for them to find such a role pronto.
I do wonder how much the focus on rulership via natural law comes from the fact that most historical writing is by and for the privileged classes, who are likely to be receptive to that sort of argument. This may well just be my own anachronistic thinking, but it’s hard for me to imagine that “this toff owns your entire town because of natural law” went over that much better with the working class back then than it does now. It’s easy to take comfort in the great chain of being or whatever when it’s giving you a stable life seems to be working out pretty well for you, but when it’s not, well.
(It feels like the fact that the evil eye is the most common superstition on Earth must be saying something about the ubiquity of envy toward the upper class, but I’m not exactly sure what.)
Huh. Interestingly enough, noblesse oblige is something of a long term guiding principle for me, one that has endured better than any moral guide per see. This is a good description of it, how it fits in a community, and how it benifits the community, causing them to tolerate the greater wealth of the elite.
Incidentally, this seems to be the missing moral/cultural piece in Libertarianism. It’s so aggressively individualistic that it doesn’t seem to function with the reality of communities.
Rebageling for isaac’s last line.
As an American I’m confused by the OP, as the axioms they’re hanging their premise around just don’t apply to American culture.
Because they’re trying to say that being “the ones that are identical to the lower classes except for being much richer” is bad, when that’s actually exactly what you need to be to have the Americans love you.
Trump’s entire appeal was based on being identical to the lower classes except richer, because as the saying goes, “the poor people in America view themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires”. So they actually worship rich people who get to do their own thing and flip everyone else off because in their minds the rich worked hard to earn every penny and so should get to do whatever they want with it, and in turn the poor people think they’ll be rich one day too once they work hard enough themselves and they certainly don’t want to have to take on any responsibilities or obligations once they get rich.
The only people in America who possess any sort of noblesse oblige and use their wealth and privilege to help others are the Democrats… and they get “rewarded” for their hard work for others by being seen as corrupt elites out of touch with the common folk; i.e. what happened to Clinton.
I’m legit not sure if this is just a case of American culture being uniquely diseased or if it’s a global thing that the view of rich people is changing, but either way it seems kind of disingenuous to think the rich are in any sort of danger from the proles at the moment, as it means we’re likely to either get dangerously lazy thinking that wealth inequality will eventually fix itself once the rich screw up enough, or we’ll come up with the wrong solutions.
…I’m an American, for what it’s worth, and I’m talking primarily about American society.
The short-short version is: the dynamics you’re talking about (”temporarily embarrassed millionaires” etc.) get discussed a lot – and they’re real, at least to some extent, it’s not like those observers made them up out of thin air – but they’re not immutably baked into our culture. They grow out of particular social circumstances, which have been in the process of changing for my entire lifetime, and as the circumstances change the dynamics change too.
You’re right. Americans don’t find easy to believe in class at all. It’s much more natural for them just to believe in rich people and poor people. People have been pointing that out as early as de Tocqueville.
But that model is diverging more and more from reality, and so it’s disintegrating. We do have classes, and the truth of it is becoming impossible for even the most fervent would-be-capitalist-cheerleader to deny. Our employment-aristocracy sequesters itself within walls made of college and culture. At the very least, you basically can’t start climbing any success ladder in mainstream American society without a BA, which is an insurmountable barrier for many. As you start looking at more-and-more ambitious career tracks, there are greater barriers yet. And “career track” is definitely the right concept: we’ve structured our economy such that rising-through-the-ranks, to the extent that it was ever a thing, definitely isn’t anymore.
In theory, of course, you can grab your success the classic all-American way: tell the mandarins and gatekeepers to go fuck themselves and forge an individual path with your own talent. But that is much much much harder than it used to be, and getting harder all the time. Rising population, and global culture, mean stiffer competition for everything (including competition from Big Entrenched Incumbents); increased economic complexity means that making yourself a success tends to require VC, or studio support, or something where you’re going to get gatekept.
The best remaining make-it-as-an-individual-talent path, programming, is intellectually arcane in a way that makes it friendly to the children of aristocrats and unfriendly to the vast majority of people who really need such a path.
(And of course the Internet means that, in some “industries,” you can’t make a living as an upstart because you’re competing with infinite free content.)
This is not a secret to anyone anymore. Almost everyone who was inclined to believe in the American Dream* now thinks it’s dead; almost everyone thinks that the winners have closed ranks into an aristocracy and are keeping everyone else out. Donald Trump got elected on the strength of it.
* Almost every white person, anyway. Minorities and especially black people are more optimistic, because their circumstances have been legitimately improving in recent memory. But, I promise you, minorities understand that America has class issues.
When that filters into the public consciousness…well, people are going to react somehow.
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If you’re going to be an aristocracy, as opposed to a collection of individuals who happened to get rich through high-social-mobility processes, you need to justify your own existence by doing something useful. Right now, we have an aristocracy that doesn’t do anything for anyone except make and spend colossal amounts of money. This seems unstable to me.
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Sidebar:
The entire American elite has ossified into an aristocracy, and by now I think most people understand that. But it’s true that the Democrat-leaning elite started getting smacked around for it much earlier and much harder, which is largely because the Republican-leaning elite is much better at hiding its ossification. This is partly because it formed a political alliance with White Proles and spent years learning to pander to them culturally. (While the Dems made a political alliance with Minority Proles and spent years giving them something that at least vaguely resembled actual concrete support.) Mostly, though, it’s because the Democratic elites tend to be the ones who are more different from the lower classes, the ones who are sheltered by more gatekeeping. Academics and professionals versus businessmen.
No, the reason the Democratic elite get smacked around more is because your entire premise is simply false in current American culture.
If your premise that the upper class needs to justify its existence was true, then the Democrats would be wildly popular, the Republicans would be highly criticized, and Trump in particular–who is the walking epitome of the “wealthy person who does absolute jack shit that is useful to anyone but himself” class you claim is in trouble–would have never gotten a single vote.
Instead reality is clearly the other way around: The Democrats who follow your advice of justifying their existence by using their wealth and privilege for the benefit of all and generally earn it through halfway decent means are deeply hated and vilified, while in turn the Republicans you claim will be in trouble for doing nothing to justify their existence as wealthy are actually worshipped and loved even as they often exploit workers or just get rich via pushing paper around.
Look at how Occupy was reacted to for another good example of why your premise is wrong; the vast majority of the public, even the lower class ones, saw the activists as simply lazy mooches who really needed to just shut up and find jobs and earn money the “real” way like the rest of us.
Now obviously your premise was true at one point; witness all the revolts by the poor against the idle rich over the centuries in various bits of the world. But it’s not true now in American culture (again, see Occupy’s fate), and I was wondering if that is a peculiarity of American culture or of it’s spreading to other countries.
And the fact that it’s not true in American culture is frightening, as it leaves me scared that wealth inequality will continue to build until it’s too late simply because the poor will take forever to realize that those rich people who exploit workers, make free imaginary money off the stock market, and dodge taxes to freeload off public infrastructure, were not the people they should have been worshipping. Nor were the Democrat “elites” that were actually mostly trying to do the right thing the people they should have been hating.
I mean, in short, I deeply wish your premise was actually true, because then I wouldn’t have to be so terrified.
I don’t think this analysis holds up.
* The stereotypical Trump supporter, meaning “pretty much the median Republican” at this juncture, hates the country-club Republican elites. Trump got a lot of his mileage, early on, by smacking them around. See: every journalistic report and thinkpiece written in the past year about how the Republican base is in open revolt against its leadership. (This used to be a lot less true. For a long while, the country-clubbers somehow managed to disguise that they were a class at all. For a shorter while, after that cat got out of the bag, they managed to keep the base’s sympathy by painting themselves as “job creators” and hammering on divisive social issues. But that era seems to have passed, at least for now.)
* It’s also worth remembering that Trump got a lot of his mileage out of promising to be useful to the masses. He’s gonna bring back the steel-making and coal-mining work, he’s gonna get rid of the immigrant hordes who are taking your job, he’s gonna MAGA. From where I’m sitting (and from where I imagine you’re sitting), these promises were obviously blatant lies from the beginning…but lots of people believed him, and some of those who maybe didn’t quite believe him at least wanted to hear him pretend to be invested in maintaining the social/economic order, since all the mainstream elites are totally failing to display any interest in that.
* There’s some conflation here between the elites themselves and the political parties that represent them.
The Democratic elites are really not useful to most people in any way, and insofar as they are, it’s indirect and well-hidden. We’re talking here about university professors, corporate lawyers, financiers, artists who mostly make stuff for the coastal set…maybe the tech entrepreneurs and a few of the best-beloved entertainers get a pass, but apart from them, all those people could get shot tomorrow and it wouldn’t cause one bit of trouble for your average lower-class American. (NOTE: this is not any kind of condemnation or moral statement on my part, just an attempt to wave my hands at certain realities of class interaction.)
The Democratic party does some amount of vaguely-useful things for people, it’s true. Certainly more than the Republican party does. But –
(a) This doesn’t change people’s underlying perceptions, which are mostly driven by social realities.
(b) The vaguely-useful things done by the Democrats, unfortunately, fall more into the category of “gesture” than into the category of “maintaining the social order.” They have not saved American industry, or created a welfare state on which large numbers of people can meaningfully rely, or any such thing. Insofar as they’ve been trying to do the work of a thriving aristocracy, they’ve failed pretty hard.
I’m not sure what the example of Occupy gets you. The peasantry will despise the shiftless underclass, especially a shiftless underclass perceived to be animated by scary alien (in-this-case-urban) values, while being super mad at the useless wealthy nobles! The claim isn’t that there’s some kind of powerful chthonic anti-elite solidarity going on.
…I am less optimistic than you are, apparently, that seething resentment amongst the lower and middle classes will lead to good outcomes. But for better or worse, I think it’s hard to argue that they’re there.