Speaking of a Credentialed Aristocracy, here's what Julien Benda has to say

It really does feel like we are living under the regime of clerics who betray their own nation and culture.  From Jonah Goldberg:

Who was Julien Benda? He was a French intellectual whose fame has been reduced to a tiny scrap of historical territory: the phrase "The Treason of the Clerks," or as it's often said in America, "The Treason of the Intellectuals." That translation doesn't quite capture completely what Benda was getting at. The French title of the book that spawned the phrase is La Trahison des Clercs, and the "clercs" refers not just to a small band of eggheads, but to the whole class of learned and scholarly people across society who have made the life of the mind a vocation.

Benda was a complicated guy and by no means a conservative in an easily recognizable sense, but when I was working on LF, I found the Trahison des Clercs to be a revelation. (Alas, Benda's name appears but once in the final edit of the book.) No writer better captures the spirit of "Nietzschean pragmatism" that ensorcelled -- that's right, I used the word "ensorcelled" again -- the "thinking classes" on both sides of the Atlantic.

According to Benda, until the 19th century, intellectuals were at least rhetorically loyal to universal ideals. "Humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good. This contradiction was an honor to the human species, and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world." 

Such contradictions are no longer honored, Benda lamented. The intellectuals have forsaken their obligation to side with Socrates and instead salute those who poisoned him. Intellectuals have become slaves to particular populist passions -- German nationalism, the Proletariat, what today we might call identity politics -- and have turned their backs on universal truths and values. 

Now, for me the really interesting discussion here is how this relates to the modern Left's obsession with hypocrisy. It was once considered better to live up to your ideal standards inconsistently, than to consistently live down to your lack of them. The logical upshot of liberalism's hatred of hypocrisy is that it is better for the liar to champion lying, the glutton to advocate gluttony, the adulterer to celebrate adultery, than for someone to preach the right thing if he himself occasionally does the wrong thing. Better to let your failings define you and be happy about it, than to let your ideals define you but then fall short of them, for that opens you up to the charge of hypocrisy (or inauthenticity, or denial, or whatever). 



But I've written tons on that elsewhere. So let's stick with nation-states. Benda notes that kings used to be governed by interests and honor, and they were the sole arbiters of both. A king, in other words, could disregard the will of the people because the will of the people has no formal place in a king's decision-making. This contrasts with modern dictators whose sole claim to legitimacy is their status as the living embodiment of the people's will and the interests of theVolksgemeinschaft. The modern conception of the dictator is one who is an enemy of the people. But the simple fact is that dictators tend to be very popular for most of their time in power, because dictators claim to be the servants of the people and the conduit of national honor, and go a long way in trying to prove it. In other words, the people deserve no small share of the blame for their dictators. "The modern citizen," Benda writes, "claims to feel for himself what is demanded by the national honor, and he is ready to rise up against his leaders if they have a different conception of it."

So if the king cared little about the people's sense of honor, what he did care greatly about was his own. In particular he cared about the prospects for his soul. It's easy these days to watch The Tudors on Showtime or reruns ofBraveheart on TNT and think that kings didn't care about such matters. But they did. That's why Henry begged for forgiveness in the snows of Canossa. Some of these monarchs actually took the idea that they were God's stewards seriously, and they relied upon the clercs to explain what that meant and illuminate the path for them.

"Formerly," Benda writes, "leaders of States practiced realism, but did not honor it. . . . With them morality was violated but moral notions remained intact; and that is why, in spite of all their violence, they did not disturb civilization."

Now, I do not yearn for a return to absolute monarchy and I don't think America has turned out to fulfill Benda's dire prophecies (he called World War II way ahead of everybody else, by the way). But there's still something to be learned from all of this.

When I listen to foreign-policy debates these days, I hear a cacophony of competing claims. We're told that it is outrageous to pursue anything other than our vital national interests. But if you actually propose pursuing our vital national interests in a robust way -- say, à la Donald Trump seizing the oil of Iraq (and let's throw in Libya too) -- the answer from the realists is that that would be crazy because it would destroy our image around the world and be immoral. Um, okay (and I basically agree). But "image around the world" is a cheap way of saying our "reputation" or simply our "honor." And as for the immorality of it, I thought realists didn't think morality and foreign policy mixed.

If I say that Israel is an ally and a democracy and therefore both our honor and our ideals demand that we stand with her, I get eye-rolling from realists and a lot of verbiage about how we can't afford to alienate all of the Arabs and Muslims, particularly the oil-rich kleptocracies (for some reason that line from Meatballs, "Look at all those steaming weenies," kept coming into my head when I wrote that sentence). Then-candidate Obama said that it would be worth sparking genocide in Iraq to get our troops out of there, such was the power of the realist case for accepting defeat.

But when Quadaffhi starts killing his own people, Obama insists that our ideals and, in effect, our honor demand that we stop him. When Bashar Assad starts doing the same thing, our honor and ideals are apparently on a bus to Atlantic City and realism is left manning the office.

This confusion -- which in different ways plagued Bush as well -- seems to stem from the fact that it is now considered dishonorable to speak of national honor yet unrealistic to act on realism. We must take the high road when it comes to our vital interests and we must take the low road of realism when it comes to our national honor.

In short, things are a mess ("Starting with this G-File" -- The Couch).