A change of heart on men?

Most leftists today are opposed to masculinity, often prefacing it with the adjective "toxic". Their opposition makes sense given their understanding of both freedom and equality.

If you understand freedom as a self-determining, self-positing individual autonomy, then masculinity will be looked on negatively as something predetermined that is limiting to the individual.

As for equality, moderns see this as a levelling process, in which the emphasis is on "sameness" - we are ideally to stand in the same relation to each other, which then requires distinctions to be negated, at least in certain political contexts.

So leftists will sometimes reject masculinity because it is associated with inequality: masculinity is thought to have been constructed as a means to give men privilege and dominance and to oppress women. And sometimes leftists reject masculinity because it is restrictive, e.g. because of the implication that there are social roles or ways of being in the world that are for men alone.

These attitudes have been around for a long time now. In one of the earliest feminist tracts, The Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1791), Mary Wollstonecraft writes,

A wild wish has just flown from my heart to my head, and I will not stifle it, though it may excite a horse-laugh. I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society... For this distinction...accounts for their [women] preferring the graceful before the heroic virtues.

Here you can see the modern understanding of both liberty and equality. She wants to level down the distinctions between the sexes (equality) because she wants to choose a masculine way of being (liberty). 

Similarly, we have Shelley writing in 1811, in reference to men and women:

these detestable distinctions will surely be abolished in a future state of being.

Given this long entrenched approach to masculinity, it is of particular interest that a leftist journalist, Christine Emba, has questioned the modern rejection of masculinity. She has written an opinion piece for The Washington Post ("Men are lost. Here's a map out of the wilderness" July 10, 2023), in which she calls for a more positive embrace of the masculine. Why would she go against the current of leftist thought in this way?

Christine Emba

She gives multiple reasons and these should interest us because they indicate some of the deficiencies in modern ways of thinking about our sex. 

First, as a heterosexual woman she is concerned that unmasculine men are unattractive dating prospects:

She quotes a podcaster, Scott Galloway, who makes the point that women who want men to be more feminine often don't want to date such men:

“Where I think this conversation has come off the tracks is where being a man is essentially trying to ignore all masculinity and act more like a woman. And even some women who say that — they don’t want to have sex with those guys. They may believe they’re right, and think it’s a good narrative, but they don’t want to partner with them.”

I, a heterosexual woman, cringed in recognition.

She wrote the piece, in part, because of laments from female friends about the lack of dating opportunities:

It might have been the complaints from the women around me. “Men are in their flop era,” one lamented, sick of trying to date in a pool that seemed shallower than it should be.

So here is a fundamental problem with the leftist rejection of the masculine. Heterosexuality is, by definition, an attraction of the masculine and the feminine. Women will therefore be sexually attracted to masculine qualities of men. Furthermore, it is through their masculine drives that men make commitments to women and to family. So the political commitments of leftist women (to modern understandings of liberty and equality) are set against fundamental aspects of their own being as women (their sexuality and desire for committed relationships with men). 

Second, Christine Emba is concerned that men are struggling. She makes the good point that women should be concerned for the welfare of the men they are closely connected to:

The truth is that most women still want to have intimate relationships with good men. And even those who don’t still want their sons, brothers, fathers and friends to live good lives.

She does not believe that modernity is delivering good lives to men:

I could see a bit of curdling in some of the men around me, too.

They struggled to relate to women. They didn’t have enough friends. They lacked long-term goals. Some guys — including ones I once knew — just quietly disappeared, subsumed into video games and porn...

It felt like a widespread identity crisis — as if they didn’t know how to be.

...Growing numbers of working-age men have detached from the labor market, with the biggest drop in employment among men ages 25 to 34. 

Then there’s the domestic sphere. Last summer, a Psychology Today article caused a stir online by pointing out that “dating opportunities for heterosexual men are diminishing as relationship standards rise.” 

...women are “increasingly selective,” leading to a rise in lonely, single young men — more of whom now live with their parents than a romantic partner. Men also account for almost 3 of every 4 “deaths of despair,” either from a suicide, alcohol abuse or an overdose.

...cut loose from a stable identity as patriarchs deserving of respect, they feel demoralized and adrift. The data show it, but so does the general mood: Men find themselves lonely, depressed, anxious and directionless.

What she is pointing to here is that our sex is deeply connected to our identity, our sense of purpose and our social commitments. Therefore, to malign masculinity and to make it inoperable in society is to undermine the larger welfare and well-being of men. For this reason, it is not liberating for a man to live in a society that is designed for androgyny.

Third, and less important for my argument so I will not dwell on it, she is concerned that if the left simply rejects the masculine that the right will step in and provide the leadership that is otherwise lacking. In other words, she fears that the left will simply vacate the field for the right.

Fourth, she makes a partial acknowledgement that our sex is grounded in reality:

But, in fact, most of these features are scaffolded by biology — all are associated with testosterone, the male sex hormone. It’s not an excuse for “boys will be boys”-style bad behavior, but, realistically, these traits would be better acknowledged and harnessed for pro-social aims than stifled or downplayed. Ignoring obvious truths about human nature, even general ones, fosters the idea that progressives are out of touch with reality.

This is an interesting admission, but she herself is not consistent here. It is very difficult for a leftist to hold together, at the same time, the observation that our sex is a "truth about human nature" with the idea that "freedom means being able to self-determine who we are". 

This is her effort to force these two incompatible ideas together:

The essentialist view...would be dire news for social equality and for the vast numbers of individuals who don’t fit those stereotypes. Biology isn’t destiny — there is no one script for how to be a woman or a man. But...most people don’t actually want a completely androgynous society. And if a new model for masculinity is going to find popular appeal, it will depend on putting the distinctiveness of men to good use in whatever form it comes in.

“Femininity or masculinity are a social construct that we get to define,” Galloway concluded. “They are, loosely speaking, behaviors we associate with people born as men or born as women, or attributes more common among people born as men or as women. But the key is that we still get to fill that vessel and define what those attributes are, and then try and reinforce them with our behavior and our views and our media.”

If this is an awkward way of formulating things, Christine Emba does do a reasonable job in defining desirable masculine traits. For one thing, she rejects the idea that a positive masculinity should be men trying to be feminine:

To the extent that any vision of “nontoxic” masculinity is proposed, it ends up sounding more like stereotypical femininity than anything else: Guys should learn to be more sensitive, quiet and socially apt, seemingly overnight. It’s the equivalent of “learn to code!” as a solution for those struggling to adjust to a new economy: simultaneously hectoring, dismissive and jejune.

She begins her treatment of desirable masculine qualities by quoting Scott Galloway:

“Galloway leaned into the screen. “My view is that, for masculinity, a decent place to start is garnering the skills and strength that you can advocate for and protect others with. If you’re really strong and smart, you will garner enough power, influence, kindness to begin protecting others...”

Richard Reeves, in our earlier conversation, had put it somewhat more subtly...His recipe for masculine success echoed Galloway’s: proactiveness, agency, risk-taking and courage, but with a pro-social cast.

This tracked with my intuitions about what “good masculinity” might look like — the sort that I actually admire, the sort that women I know find attractive but often can’t seem to find at all. It also aligns with what the many young men I spoke with would describe as aspirational, once they finally felt safe enough to admit they did in fact carry an ideal of manhood with its own particular features.

Physical strength came up frequently, as did a desire for personal mastery. They cited adventurousness, leadership, problem-solving, dignity and sexual drive. None of these are negative traits, but many men I spoke with felt that these archetypes were unfairly stigmatized.

The discussion of masculinity here is a good one overall. What is particularly striking is the acceptance that men might set out to garner power and influence to put themselves in a position to protect others, as this is a departure from the "zero sum game" attitude to relationships that I have criticised in the past. It is typical for feminist women to see power in liberal terms as a means to enact our desires in whatever direction we want, without negative judgement or consequence ("empowerment"). But if you see power in these terms, then it becomes a means to have my own way rather than someone else having theirs. Therefore, if men have power, women will be thought to lose out and vice versa. There is no understanding in this view that men might use power to protect those they love rather than to act in a self-interested way that deprives others. 

In other words, Christine Emba has a better anthropology here than most of her left-wing colleagues.

However, I do think the discussion of masculinity could be extended. Its focus is on men being good providers and protectors. This leaves out aspects of masculinity that are rarely defended.

Reality is marked by a tendency toward entropy, both in the individual and society. By this I mean a declining energy to uphold order, so that there is a slide into decay and chaos. One of the higher missions that men have is to resist entropy, both within their own person and in the communities they belong to. The opposite of entropy, or "reverse entropy", is "negentropy" - in which things become increasingly better ordered. 

The task of bringing the individual and the community into negentropy is not an easy one. It is necessary to consider, and to find ways to harmonise, the tripartite nature of existence, namely the biological, social and spiritual aspects of our natures. It requires also a capacity for prudence - for considering the likely consequences of measures that are undertaken; an ability to rank the goods of life in their proper order; an awareness of both the good and the evil that exists within our own nature; a capacity to learn from history and past experience; and an intuitive grasp of what constitutes the human good and rightly ordered action.

In short, what is required is a certain kind of wisdom. The instinct to exercise this kind of wisdom in the leadership of a community is given most strongly to men. You can see this when it comes to feminism. This movement is, and always has been, a "partial" one, in the sense that it is oriented to issues relating to one part of society only. Nor has it ever taken responsibility for upholding the larger social order or for conserving the broader tradition from which it emerged. It is there to "take" or "demand" rather than to order and uphold. 

One of the problems with masculinity in the modern world is not only the undermining of the provider and protector roles, but even more notably that of wise leadership. The fault for this does not lie entirely with feminism. 

Political liberalism hasn't helped. If the purpose of politics is to maximise individual preference satisfaction, with all preferences being equally preferences and therefore of the same value, then how can a politician seek to rule wisely? It becomes difficult to make qualitative distinctions between different choices and different policies. Urging prudence might be condemned as discriminatory or even as "arbitrary". 

Even worse, I think, is the influence of scientism. In part this is because scientism places limits on what type of knowledge is considered valid. But more than this, modern science, in making the advances that it did, seduced Western men into looking for technological and technocratic solutions to social (and personal) problems. I am reminded of this quote from Signorelli and Salingaros:

Modern art embodies and manifests all the worst features of modern thought — the despair, the irrationality, the hostility to tradition, the confusion of scientia with techne, or wisdom with power, the misunderstanding of freedom as liberation from essence rather than perfection of essence.

I want to underline here the problem that Western man is so oriented to "techne" that he voluntarily withdrew from the field of wisdom, thereby making entropy inevitable.

One further problem is that Western thought became too focused on the poles of individualism and universalism. Wisdom comes most into play when considering the particular communities and traditions that the individual wishes to uphold. If all you care about is individual self-interest, or abstract, universal commitments, then wisdom can be at least partly replaced by "cunning" on the one hand or feelings on the other.

The ideal of the wise father lasted for a long time. It was still present in popular culture in the 1960s and 70s, for instance, in television shows like My Three Sons, Little House on the Prairie and even to a degree in The Brady Bunch. But then it was axed. In more recent decades, fathers have been allowed to be loveable, but never a figure who might wisely order or advise. 

The recent Barbie movie is a case in point. In that screenplay, the three wisdom figures are all female, but none of them have much to offer. The creator figure, for instance, tells Barbie that "I created you so that you wouldn't have an ending", i.e. that there are no given ends or purposes to her life. Barbie herself becomes a wisdom figure at the end of the film, but all she can advise Ken is that he is enough as he is. The men in the movie are uniformly of the "goofy" type that our culture prefers (the opposite of men having gravitas). So there is no-one who is truly fit to lead.

It is in this context that a figure like Jordan Peterson has become so prominent. He is a psychologist and so has status as someone within a technocratic field. But he has pushed a little beyond this, a little into the field of "wise father" dispensing life advice, and this is so missing within modern culture that it has catapulted him to fame. Christine Emba has noted precisely this, that despite the advice being a little thin, he is filling an unmet need:

In 2018, curious about a YouTube personality who had seemingly become famous overnight, I got tickets to a sold-out lecture in D.C. by Jordan Peterson. It was one of dozens of stops on the Canadian psychology professor turned anti-“woke” juggernaut’s book tour for his surprise bestseller “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.” The crowd was at least 85 percent male...

Surrounded by men on a Tuesday night, I wondered aloud what the fuss was about. In my opinion, Peterson served up fairly banal advice: “Stand up straight,” “delay gratification.”...Suddenly, the 20-something guy in front of me swung around. “Jordan Peterson,” he told me without a hint of irony in his voice, “taught me how to live.”

If there’s a vacuum in modeling manhood today, Peterson has been one of the boldest in stepping up to fill it.

I don't want to disparage Jordan Peterson's efforts because he is one of the first to take a step in the right direction. His instincts are right. Note the title of his book: "an antidote to chaos" - he understands that it is not just about "techne" but that men are to be a force for negentropy - for the harmonious ordering of the self and society, and that he has a role to play in providing wise advice to younger men. I might wish that he could draw more deeply on "logos", but even so he has made a welcome start.

When it doesn't work out as you imagined

A woman posted the following video on TikTok, in which she describes feeling unsafe living in San Francisco:

After experiencing an interaction with a man in which she was spat on and threatened with assault, she says of living in San Francisco "I literally never feel safe".

But here's the thing. This woman is living in what is arguably the most leftist city in the United States. And she herself is a young, single childless leftist political activist. In other words, she has helped to create a place that mirrors her own most deeply held values - and she doesn't feel safe living there.

Here is an example of her political views:

As you can see, it is the standard leftist version of equality. She writes "Vote as if you were the most marginalized, oppressed person you know". I wrote about this type of political frame in my last post:

So how, then, do you have equality? One way is to do what modern society formally does, and insist on levelling down any power structures. For instance, if white people have more power in a traditionally white society in the sense of dominating its cultural expression, then this has to be deconstructed, whereas the cultural expression of minority groups has to be supported and promoted.

There is a dissolving logic to this kind of politics. First, when the majority culture starts to think this way, they turn against what is best within their own tradition, in an effort to level themselves down. And so they no longer as effectively promote what is needed to hold things together. Nor do minorities find it as easy to maintain their own cohesion as there is no longer a core majority group to define their own existence against. Instead of what leftists imagine will happen, namely a hundred different groups each equally able to culturally express themselves, you get a loss of cohesion within all the groups and a descent into a more atomised mass consumer culture.

There is an irresponsibility in engaging politically to achieve "equal cultural expression". The focus should be on what is required to successfully uphold the common life of a people, including a regard for the health of the institutions, the supporting cultural norms and moral standards, and the stability of governance. 

If everyone thinks like the woman in the video, and votes and acts according to the issue of leftist equality, then why wouldn't there be a gradual decline in the social fabric? Why wouldn't there be a loss of important social and cultural norms? Why wouldn't the end result be a less safe and secure social environment? After all, who is now focused on maintaining these standards? Who now frames politics around these more traditional aims? Certainly, not the leftist single ladies living in San Fran - not, at least, until things get so bad that these young women "never feel safe".

And, even then, the most likely option is that these women will just move somewhere else, to a place they have not yet made unsafe, and subject that community to the same irresponsible concept of politics.

Trouble in feminist paradise

I saw an interview with the cast of the newly released Barbie film and it demonstrated that feminism is still really a creature of political liberalism.

In the interview there is a discussion of what it means to be a Ken, i.e. one of the male dolls. Two responses were given, both of some interest.

Kate McKinnon, who plays "weird Barbie" in the film, pushed the idea that the point is to reject gender roles altogether. She said "Gender roles deny people half their humanity...we just need to be ourselves". The journalist commenting on this agreed and wrote:

That’s the point, plain and simple: Trying to shove oneself into a category or box, rather than simply being yourself and letting people apply adjectives to you as they see fit, limits yourself as a human being.

Rather than thinking about whether they’re “acting like a Ken” or “acting like a Barbie,” people should simply worry whether they are acting like themselves – that is how you truly come alive.

This is simply liberalism applied to the issue of our sex. Liberalism wants to maximise our individual autonomy, understood to mean our ability to self-determine or self-define who we are and what we do. Therefore, pre-determined characteristics, such as our sex, are thought of negatively as limitations that should be made not to matter.

Kate McKinnon as Weird Barbie

One of the problems with this view is that it makes who we are less meaningful. In the pre-liberal understanding, I as a man get to embody the masculine, which exists as a meaningful category within reality (an "essence"), which then means that my identity and role as a man is connected to a larger, transcendent good that I can strive toward as an ideal.

What liberalism replaces this with is a notion that our sex is not meaningful in this way, but rather I am just me, not connected to anything outside of my own self. I could be one thing or I could be another, and either way it wouldn't matter. There cannot be, in this view, any ideals connected to being a man or a woman, nor any standards, and in this respect the categories become radically unimportant.

This is not the end of the feminist story. One of the ideas within liberal modernity is that the good in life is a power to enact our own individual desires rather than having to serve someone else's. This then leads to the distinct ideal of female empowerment, which is understood to mean women being able to act in whatever direction they wish, without negative judgement or consequence. 

But this makes relationships between men and women a zero sum game. You either have independent boss babes or you have The Handmaid's Tale. And this comes out in the second comment made by a woman on the Barbie interview panel. Issa Rae said,

I think a Ken for me is just kind of there. I think a Ken is a great accessory. That's what I loved about Greta's imagining of Barbie is that the Kens are just supplemental characters to these Barbies. Barbies can do everything, Kens are there to support and don't necessarily have their own story and I think that's not necessarily a negative thing, it's incredibly strong for a man to be in supportive roles.

Issa Rae is drawing out the logic of the way that feminism frames reality. In a pre-liberal mental universe, men and women served common goods. They did this, in part, because the framework was not so radically individualistic. Instead of attempting individual empowerment, men and women acted to serve the larger common good of the families and communities they belonged to. There was also a common good in the sense that men and women only fully expressed who they were in relationship to each other, as husbands and wives, within a spousal union.

Issa Rae

In the newer liberal mental universe, men and women become competing political classes. There is no mutual service toward a common good. Instead, there is the effort to self-empower to enact our own individual desires. So either the woman gets to empower, with the man serving her, or vice versa (apparently, the plot of the Barbie film revolves around this notion of two such alternative worlds).

This understanding of a zero sum game, in which something that is beneficial to men is assumed to be a loss for women, does not gel well with the liberal emphasis on political equality. Feminists have long proclaimed that they want equality, so how then can someone like Issa Rae endorse the idea of men as being a supporting cast for women?

The explanation I have heard from women is that men are already empowered to do whatever they want and therefore any empowerment for women is just a progressive move toward equality. I have also heard women acknowledge that it is unequal but that it is nonetheless justified because men previously dominated (so that it is a kind of historical balancing of the books).

We are stuck within this feminist framing. We are trapped within the idea that manhood and womanhood are limiting to who we are rather than adding a meaningful layer to our existence. And, perhaps worse, we cannot escape the zero sum game mentality, in which the sexes are radically set apart from each other, in non-complementary roles, and where gender war will proceed eternally because of the lack of any common ground. 

The truly liberating option would be to step outside the frame.

Romance & reason 3

This will be my final post on Eva Illouz's work Why Love Hurts (see here and here for the first two). There is a passage about equality in the book that I think is worth commenting on. The issue being discussed is whether the modern understanding of equality undermines attraction between men and women by eroding differences. Illouz draws on the work of Louis Dumont, a French anthropologist:

As he puts it: “[I]t is easy to find the key to our values. Our two cardinal ideals are called equality and liberty.” And these values, Dumont suggests, flatten out the perception of social relations:

The first feature to emphasize is that the concept of the equality of men entails that of their similarity. [. . .] [I]f equality is conceived as rooted in man’s very nature and denied only by an evil society, then, as there are no longer any rightful differences in condition or estate, or different sorts of men, they are all alike and even identical, as well as equal.

Recalling de Tocqueville, Dumont adds: “[W]here inequality reigns, there are as many distinct humanities as there are social categories.” 

Here Dumont is recognising an apparently strange thing, namely that liberal moderns understand equality to mean something like "sameness". In theory, someone could support equality in the sense of seeing different types of beings as having equal value or worth. But moderns tend to want to erase distinctions in the name of equality. Percy Bysshe Shelley, as far back as 1811, in reference to the differences between men and women wrote:

...these detestable distinctions will surely be abolished in a future state of being

Similarly, in 1837 the American feminist Sarah Grimke opined,

permit me to offer for your consideration, some views relative to the social intercourse of the sexes. Nearly the whole of this intercourse is...derogatory to man and woman...We approach each other, and mingle with each other, under the constant pressure of a feeling that we are of different sexes...the mind is fettered by the idea which is early and industriously infused into it, that we must never forget the distinction between male and female...Nothing, I believe, has tended more to destroy the true dignity of woman, than the fact that she is approached by man in the character of a female.

... Until our intercourse is purified by the forgetfulness of sex...we never can derive that benefit from each other's society...

So, from early on equality was conceived as the abolition of distinctions between men and women, i.e. as a shift toward sameness. Why? I think it went something like this. There was once the idea of a great chain of being, which was on the one hand a hierarchy of being, with those at the top having a qualitatively higher nature; however, each creature in the chain was necessary to the function of the whole, so each had a secure dignity for this reason. 

This idea of a chain of being meant, potentially at least, that those higher up the social scale might be thought to be more noble than those who were common. This meant that the noble class had to distinguish themselves not just through money or power but also through nobility of manner, character and behaviour. It meant, too, that most people would look "upwards" for social and cultural leadership to this noble class.

With the demise of this idea of a chain of being, a reaction took place, in which the emphasis was on "all men are created equal". Understood in historic context, this meant not only "equal in value" or "equal in the sight of God" but equal in the sense of there being no qualitative distinction in being: there was no class that due to birth or breeding stood higher in nobility.

I suspect that some moderns hoped that what would result from this loss of distinctions would be a net gain, in the sense that everyone would now stand equally in a condition of nobility. But clearly this is not what happened. Instead, we got what Dumont recognises as a "flattening" not only in social relationships but in the way that moderns think about "ontology" - i.e. about categories of being. We have increasingly lost the ability our ancestors had in discerning what is noble and what is base within the nature of things - leading to a cultural drift downward.

With the insistence on ontological sameness we have also lost a sense of "thick differences":

Dumont is an advocate of the kind of thick differences that are played out between different social and cultural groups in India, for example. In his view, the right and the left hand are not simply polar and symmetrical opposites; rather, they are different in themselves because they have a different relation to the body. What Dumont suggests, then, is that equality entails a loss of qualitative differences. He uses the analogy of the right and left hand because both are necessary to the body, but each is radically different from each other. In the nonmodern, non-egalitarian view, the value of each hand – left and right – is rooted in its relation to the body, which has a higher status. 

This shunning of subordination, or, to call it by its true name, of transcendence, substitutes a flat view for a view in depth, and at the same time it is the root of the “atomization” so often complained about by romantic or nostalgic critics of modernity. [. . .] [I]n modern ideology, the previous hierarchical universe has fanned out into a collection of flat views of this kind.

The regime of meaning to which Dumont points is one in which transcendence is produced by the capacity to live in an ordered, holistic and hierarchized moral and social universe. Eroticism – as it was developed in Western patriarchal culture – is predicated on a similar “right-hand/left-hand” dichotomy between men and women, each being radically different and each enacting their thick identities. It is this thick difference which has traditionally eroticized men’s and women’s relationships, at least since these identities became strongly essentialized.  (pp.186-87)

So our difficulty runs as follows. We have inherited an understanding of equality, whose origins we are no longer self-consciously aware of, but which pushes toward making men and women the same (i.e. a flattening of the social relationships and a "thin" rather than a "thick" expression of sexual difference). This then contributes to a failure in the culture of sexual relationships between men and women.

The solution? It's important not to over-correct. There will always be both a horizontal axis of society as well as a vertical one. Even so, there does need to be a reassertion of "an ordered, holistic and hierarchized moral and social universe". It is one aspect of what constitutes the core of the West - the capacity to rise toward transcendent goods - which cannot even be attempted whilst we still, as a culture, believe ourselves to be inhabiting a flat cosmos.

To break the chain?

Earlier this month a young biracial woman denounced her white father at his funeral. In her speech she said of her father:

You’ll never be what you could have been, but only what you are. And what you are is a racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, Trump-loving, cis, straight white man. That is all you will ever be to me.

There are two striking things about this. First, it demonstrates clearly the changed understanding of the virtue of justice. In the ancient world, justice meant giving someone their due. This meant giving due respect to those entities who gave us our existence, including God, our parents and our larger national family. "Honour your father and your mother" as it says in the Bible. In Ancient Rome, this was considered to be an aspect of the natural order to be upheld through the virtue of "pietas", defined by the Encylopaedia Britannica as "a respectful and faithful attachment to gods, country, and relatives, especially parents".

Justice in our own times has mostly lost this ancient meaning. It is now focused on notions of social equality. You can see this in the daughter's speech: she castigates her father for his transgression of modern ideas of equality, i.e. for being racist and sexist and for belonging to supposedly privileged groups (white, male, cisgendered etc.)

In her mind, she is fighting to make the world a better and more just place. To more ancient minds, she is acting unjustly in disrespecting her own father at his funeral. A key question here is why this transition in the meaning of justice has taken place. I will give a possible explanation shortly, but it will help first to look at another striking aspect of the speech, namely what it demonstrates about social class.

The father in question is Donald Foss. He was worth $2 billion at the time of his death and so was part of an upper class elite. His daughter was raised in a position of immense class privilege, living in mansions and attending elite private schools.

And yet his daughter, with a furious energy, chooses to present herself as being at the bottom of the social hierarchy and as being a victim of privileged forces, such as white, male, "cisgendered" men like her father.

Again, there has been a transition here in how the upper class justifies its privileged social position. In the past, the elite would signal its status through refinement (of manners, of speech, of taste); through displays of wealth (homes, clothing, banquets); and through cultivating knowledge and an appreciation of the fine arts. There was also the important concept of noblesse oblige, meaning that if you were noble in status you should act nobly in character ("Whoever claims to be noble must conduct himself nobly"). Noblesse oblige was also understood to mean that those in a privileged social position had a duty toward those less privileged - so this concept connected the upper classes in a positive way toward those of other social classes.

The older justification of wealth and privilege barely exists today. It is true that modern day billionaires do sometimes commit to philanthropic causes, although these are often international efforts to promote some form of "identity equality". What is increasingly common, though, is for upper class people to seize upon identity politics to claim to be suffering from some form of oppression, i.e. to present themselves as lacking privilege rather than enjoying it.

Which brings me to my theory of why this change has taken place. If we consider the world picture that existed in the ancient world, and compare it to that of modern times, one significant difference is the loss of the idea of a great chain of being. There were two key aspects of this chain of being. First, it was hierarchical. Those further up the ladder had more elevated attributes. Second, every creature in the chain was necessary to hold it together and so, in this sense, each was a vital link.

It has to be remembered that this chain of being was thought of, in concrete terms, as representing the way that the cosmos was structured. In other words, reality was understood through this idea of a chain of being.

One of the consequences of understanding the world this way, is that there was both an "above" and a "below" when it came to man's position in the cosmos. Above man were the angelic beings and God, below man were the animals and the inanimate forms of creation. There was a vertical realm of existence within which man could look upwards, but also could feel set above and therefore dignified in his position.

What I would like to conjecture is this: that if your world picture included the great chain of being, then it was possible to believe that if you were higher up the social ladder that you represented something higher in the scale of being. If so, the major distinction between the social classes, of nobility and commoner, would be a relatively profound one. It would not just rest on money or power, but would signify also an "ontological" difference, i.e. of being formed in some higher way.

In the American Declaration of Independence there is a famous phrase that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal". This is not obviously true. Men are clearly not equal in many respects. It is possible that the emphasis here is on men having equal rights. Perhaps, though, it is also a move away from the older view, in which the distinction between nobility and commoners really did suggest men being created unequally.

This elevated view of the nobility can be seen to have had both positive and negative consequences (sometimes intermixed). For instance, it makes sense in such a social situation for people to look up to and to seek to emulate the culture of the upper classes, since this culture will be thought of as being higher up a scale of existence. This is clearly preferable to the situation in our own times in which culture looks downwards, so that the middle-classes begin to ape behaviours once associated with bikies, sailors or "gangtas". 

On the other hand, when you have an elevated upper class, the possibility emerges of people fawning to this social class. It's interesting in this regard that nineteenth century Australian culture strongly rejected this aspect of old world culture and replaced it with a more egalitarian "mateship" ethos (Australian soldiers in WWI had a reputation for not respecting officers as they were supposed to).

Again, if I am right here, and the nobility thought of themselves as being a breed apart, this would anchor their identity, in part anyway, on the possession of higher attributes of character that they would then have to live up to. Yes, it might justify snobbishness as well, but it softens the idea that class privilege is only about power or money. It provides a foundation for more positive ideals of what it means to be upper class.

The older concept of the nobility still retained some influence in the modern period, at least until the early 1900s. For instance, if you look at the magnates of the American Gilded Age you find a mixture of modern sensibilities (e.g. technocracy), with some admiration for an aristocratic past. J.P. Morgan, for instance, built a beautiful library in a traditional style and collected older European manuscripts. The Vanderbilts married a daughter, Consuelo, to the Duke of Marlborough. John D. Rockefeller built a museum in a traditional European style in New York, The Cloisters, and purchased many medieval artworks for display. 

The Cloisters, New York

The Morgan Library

If the secular order of the pre-modern West had a built in, inegalitarian social hierarchy, this was balanced to some degree by the clerical or religious order. I mean this not only in the sense that commoners could rise through the ranks of the church, and not even in the sense that the Christian belief that man was made in the image of God supported the dignity of the common man, but more fundamentally that the possession of the virtues most highly regarded within the religious life and the clerical orders did not depend on birth. Ascent within the clerical orders or the realm of religion was measured by faith, love, piety and sanctity, and these did not depend on birth (the New Testament, of course, emphasises that the poor are not disadvantaged in their spiritual fate). 

In this way, the existence of a hierarchical social order was most likely of great benefit to the Church, as it made Christianity that order of life through which the common man could ascend or in which he stood on equal ground. This may help to explain the discontent when the Church hierarchy too closely mimicked that of the aristocracy, as it might have seemed at odds with the true function or role of the Church.

There were radical religious movements which rejected the idea of two orders, and which wanted to abolish the hierarchy within the social realm. They sometimes pointed out that in the prelapsarian state of man, in the Garden of Eden, there were no social classes. They were levellers of one sort or another. Looking back, they seem to have missed the symbiotic relationship between the secular and religious orders. What Christianity offered was made more compelling by the existence of a hierarchy within the social realm. To put this another way, there was an important space made available to Christianity, one in which Christianity was a necessary component of a working order of life, because of the existence of a hierarchical social realm. 

Marx got it wrong in claiming that religion was the opiate of the masses. It was not anything like the bread and circuses of the Romans, nor the distractions of the modern era (Netflix, food courts etc.). Religion in Western civilisation undergirded the dignity of being for the common man - it was the order of life in which the common man held no inferior status of being.

So what do we make now of the great chain of being? I think the loss of this concept has, overall, been damaging. John Lennon boasted about the loss of an above and a below ("no hell below us, above us only sky") but this flattening of our metaphysical horizons has had mostly negative effects.

The great chain of being gave man a distinct place between the purely spiritual realms and the material. (This is, in my opinion, an accurate description of what man is made to be in this life: a creature who experiences, in a profound way, the confluence of the spiritual and the material.) The position of man spanned both realms, with space to be grounded within this material world but also then to reach into the spiritual - without which there is a disenchanting of the experience of life. 

The loss of any above or below represents a hemming in of man's being. It is, perhaps, little wonder that so much emphasis was then put on an ideal of autonomy, in which it was thought that man could be less straitjacketed or caged through a freedom to self-define or self-create. This is reasserting some ontological space but more as a subjective expression of will rather than as an objective feature of existence. 

What I would emphasise, however, is the effect of this metaphysical flattening on social class. We were clearly better off when the upper class set the tone, not only in manners or fashions, but by attempting to live as a more "noble" class ought to live. And we were better off when this upper class accepted the reality of privilege but compensated not through virtue signalling but by accepting responsibilities and duties to others of their own community. 

It is not that the concept of a chain of being can, or should, be recreated exactly as it was in medieval times. We are clearly not, for instance, going to think of the physical cosmos in terms of such a chain as was once the case. We do, however, need to assert more than a horizontal dimension of existence - there is a vertical one as well, which if denied or obscured has damaging consequences.