Proportional Justice: A Short Definition and Examples of a Judicial Code

Everybody now is an expert on the complexities of the philosophy of justice. The 3-year-old has always been capable of declaiming “That’s not fair!”; only now does every second adult use the same tone of voice in commenting on matters of justice, whether criminal, civil, or political.

If we are to begin to work our way out of the philosophic morass surrounding crime and punishment, property law and civil recompense, political liabilities, and every other topic relating to “civic responsibility”, then we must first provide a definition, an organising principle, and then practically consider the working out of that definition. This I intend to do here, though only briefly for now.

The nigh-universal definition of “justice” is encapsulated in the term “to each his own”. Each person should receive their due; wages in accordance with the value of their work, civil protection according to their natural dignity, and so forth. It is unjust to deprive someone of something they deserve or have earned; it is unjust to accumulate for yourself via deceit or theft.

Implicit in the idea of “to each his own” is that there is a matter of measure in justice. Justice is not a means of providing infinite things to people – justice is intended to secure the right measure of reward (or punishment) to people. If someone works for an hour, they ought to receive a just wage for that hour – and even the most ardent Marxist is not proposing that an hour of shovelling snow should equate to the buying power of purchasing a yacht. (The most ardent Marxist, in power, usually ends up concluding that yachts ought not be available to the average snow shoveller, even in theory.)

Justice must be measured, according to the right or wrong of the individual – that it, it must be in proportion to the original act. To use a scientific neologism, “for every action, there is a equal and opposite reaction”. Newton (or nature) was only, really, emulating the divine Law of Moses – “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”. When it comes to matters of punitive justice, then, the punishment must fit the crime.

(A brief diversion for my Christian readers – no, Our Lord did not abolish the lex talionis in civic matters. Matthew 5.38-42 and parallels are directed at private individuals hearing Jesus – hence why the prospect of being sued is raised, but not the subject of military action. Jesus elsewhere articulates the “sphere of Caesar”, those matters over which the state has proper power.)

Before I proceed to offer some examples of how a judicial code based on such a principle would work, two additional observations are necessary.

Firstly: Naturally, when turning to the active “arm of the state” in justice, I have focussed on “negative justice”, in the sense that punishment is involved – but this is only the practical companion to “positive justice”. Positive justice might choose to in some way protect wage levels, and that is easily conceived of as positive; but positive justice also guarantees life and liberty, and it guarantees them by the use of punitive justice. “Steal from your neighbour, and you will pay them back and more” – that is how the right to property is guaranteed, not by polite request.

Secondly: Even punitive justice is “positive” in one sense for the one punished. Indeed, punitive justice is restorative. It is why we say a criminal at the end of a sentence has “paid his debt to society”. It is on this basis that Weil says that punishment – even the death penalty – restores the criminal to the pale of civilised society. Their crime (or civil wrongdoing) puts them outside the pale; as they are an egregiously bad neighbour, no-one can accept them for a neighbour; but the murderer mounting the steps of the gallows has become a neighbour again. They are submitted to the process of peacemaking we have adopted as a society, and come out in a state of objective peace with society – though they only reap the benefits of that peace by acceptance.

Now, what might be included in a judicial code that actually observed this principle of proportion? I will offer three examples, and then briefly draw general conclusions from them.

MURDER. Unless there be exceptional mitigating circumstances – and obviously excluding self-defence – unlawful killing in sound mind must be punished by execution. A life is paid for by a life. We resolve on this penalty because this is the proportional payment for the actual crime; if we dealt only with extrapolations, we might give murder a financial penalty paid in lieu to the victim’s family, and so on. But murder effaces life without any cover of sombre justice, or the lawful power of states; it declares life merely another commodity to dispose with as the wicked see fit. The only right punishment is the sword, dealt by the swift hand of the magistrate. In cases with severe mitigating circumstances, some other punishment must be found that fits the crime. The most obvious example is exile – whereby the murderer is, in a fitting irony, restored to civil society by his exclusion. In either case, some financial recompense could still be rendered from the murderer’s estate.

THEFT. Theft involves the loss of possessions, and therefore of – additionally – dignity, security, and, occasionally, further earning potential. The punishment must fit the crime. The crime has not cost a life, and so ought not require a life; nor has it permanently removed a limb, even metaphorically, and therefore hand-chopping is disqualified; and there is nothing more ridiculous as a punishment for theft than imprisonment. A man steals from a private citizen – his punishment is to be detained by the state, rendered unproductive, and usually costing the private citizen more money in tax. Imprisonment might be a fit penalty for kidnapping, but hardly for theft – it is disproportionate, humiliating the criminal and rendering them useless, and failing to give restitution to the victim. Instead, the thief ought to pay back the item stolen, or the equivalent value, plus “interest” – in recognition of the corollary damage.

ASSAULT. How do we deal with physical violence that does not cause death? We cannot justly hang the inveterate brawler. Neither can we trivially calculate his debt plus interest. Two routes are left open: either a modified form of debt punishment, or corporal punishment. By the latter we mean flogging or similar – some form of physical punishment to fit the crime. However, I incline to treating assault (without intent to kill) as open to full financial restitution. The victim has been disadvantaged, even if only temporarily, by pain, discomfort, psychological trauma, and so forth; the criminal owes them a debt, and the victim may directly enjoy repayment. The criminal has not effaced life, but dignity and security; let him repay in those categories. Of course, the two punishments (flogging and debt repayment) might be combined.

One objection may be raised and answered here: what if a criminal does not have the means to repay a debt? A vagrant might break in to a house and steal something – but by definition has no visible means to support themselves. Well, debt repayment forms a sort of indenture anyway, in all cases, and so such thieves must be given the means of repayment – work. This could be by the dreaded adult workhouse, but more properly might be found in a large patchwork of small-scale schemes, apprenticeships, sustainable farms, and so forth. Indeed, this would not only allow repayment of debts, but provide training for real and meaningful jobs – and a part of such a scheme could even reserve a portion of the thief’s pay in savings for when they complete their working sentence, to give them a headstart in their new life.

The principles we have outlined can be more broadly applied – rapists and paedophiles deserve death, because their crimes efface life in the most heinous ways, even if they do not end life; fraud and property damage are forms of theft; treason seeks to murder the polis itself, and the rope is the only restorative for traitors (“Nothing so became him in life as the leaving of it”). What is more, such a code would achieve an enormous corollary benefit, providing great benefits to the state and people: retaining the productivity of most criminals rather than ending it, and virtually abolishing prisons. The moral degradation of petty criminals in prison would be ended, their future prospects improved, and their social shame limited. If we could find the stomach to hang a few predators and traitors, by the same measure we would render our populace more settled and offer real restoration and hope to the vast majority of criminals. Where we may find such courage is the question.

A Burkean Proposal for Racial and Economic Justice

Is it depressing or impressive that Burke, writing in the 1760s and 1780s, offered more serious and practicable solutions to longstanding racial and economic injustices than we have often seen since? What should startle the starry-eyed progressive, brimming bucket-ful with ideological purities and dissolving solutions, is that      Burke’s ideas are better than theirs, despite the fact that his solutions included retaining a state preference for a religious sect, and the short-term continuation of the slave trade.

Burke’s “Tracts on the Popery Laws” and his “Sketch of a Negro Code” are both pragmatic but bold responses to the abiding social crimes of Britain, which still cast long shadows – its oppression of the Catholic Irish, and its involvement in the slave trade and slavery. Burke does not offer, in either case, an abstract axiom to be declared as policy. He has taken care to understand why each situation has arisen, and which opposite evils may be unleashed by thoughtless “reform”. Nonetheless, he offers material analysis and policy proposals that, if followed here, may have allowed some partial reconciliation between the British and Irish portions of our Isles, and if followed in the West Indies and by the USA, would have had a far better chance of settling ex-slave populations into tolerably ordered liberty and wealth than those policies which were followed. Listening to him still provides a real route forward.

Burke was a Protestant and white man, yet his sympathies were with the Catholic and black man – and that is enough to note. He was not a wild-eyed secularist or abolitionist, preferring rather to work with the intractable realities of the world than against them or without them. He looked to those historic factors which have caused flourishing and abundance and independence, and sought to apply them to the situation of who suffered unjust (and counter-productive) oppression. His natural and moral sympathies were with Catholics and blacks, but he also knew to make his proposals palatable to Protestant whites – because wider real flourishing benefits everyone, including the richest.

The first work – “Tracts on the Popery Laws” – is fragmentary, and largely consists of a negative analysis of the then-existing Laws. Burke applied his influence over later Governments to the good of the Irish Catholics, and of course another Irish Protestant would make larger steps in Catholic Emancipation. However, the implicit drive of Burke’s analysis in the Tracts (explicit elsewhere, as we shall see) was never really adopted, to the Kingdom’s ruin, and the continuing pain of both halves of that divided island.

Burke’s chief target in the “Tracts” are those laws which disabled Irish Catholics from accumulating or developing property. He lists these in detail, rancid and vile in their enormities as the ink is on the page. A Catholic landowner with multiple sons had to divide his land amongst them, in a sort of gavelkind – which accomplished the reduction either of the Catholic menfolk of a family, or of the unified property of that same family. A Catholic landowner whose sons converted to Anglicanism could be sued by his sons for their inheritance in his lifetime. Various similar ways of robbing the Catholic farmer of land were inoculated into the property code, like poison in the water.

Not only these, but their ability to acquire land was crippled. They could rent passels of land for 39 years, and no more. They could not buy. Breaches of various laws punitive only against Catholics could lead to forfeiture – so, for instance, if a rental had verbal clauses in it that breached the Popery Laws, the whole contract would be void and the Catholic lose further land by it.

Burke execrates these Laws utterly. They put strife in the family, the base unit of civilisation – a son was encouraged to defraud his father, a wife to sue her husband. They reduced families to penury as penalty their very fecundity, the very quality that ought to have allowed them to cultivate and acquire. They prevented skill and labour to acquire its proper reward – not by any negative lack, but by positive ban. They, further, condemned much land – whether owned or rented – to deteriorating condition, with short tenures and the inevitability of division rendering improvement a poor investment. These are Burke’s comminations, and they are damning. The Laws attacked the dignity of man, they rendered Ireland poorer and less commercially valuable, and they failed in their very purpose – they did not render the populace more likely to become Protestant, or to be serious in obedience to the Crown, and so did not help secure religious or political peace.

In his early work on Ireland, those were Burke’s criticisms; in some of the last political letters of his life (1793-1795, particularly), he returned to the topic, again taking the side of the Catholics, but with an added urgency. Now, the intransigence of the Protestant Ascendancy risked putting the Irish into the hands of the Jacobins, those great destroyers of peace and decency in France. Burke saw as only prophets see; in 1798, of course, the Revolutionary Government would aid the United Irishmen (who were led by exactly the sort of disaffected radicals Burke predicted would arise). This is how he put it to Sir Hercules Langrishe:

“Next to religion, property is the great point of Jacobin attack. Here many of the debaters in your majority, and their writers, have given the Jacobins all the assistance their hearts can wish. When the Catholics desire places and seats, you tell them that this is only a pretext . . . but that their real view is, to strip Protestants of their property. . . If you treat men as robbers, why, robbers, sooner or later, they will become.”

The “Tracts” sum up the destructive effect the Popery Laws had; the later letters sum this up positively, as a need to provide Irish Catholics with the means of acquiring and developing property. Indeed, Burke considers that civic disqualifications – from Parliament, from officer rank in the army, and so forth – were foolish but of much less importance than property. Virtually no Catholics would be returned to an emancipated Parliament, but most Catholics would benefit from the easing of those laws opposing Catholic property. The development of Catholic property would be a bulwark against Jacobin influence in Ireland.

Burke did not give a particular programme for developing Catholic prosperity in Ireland, except in that he supported measures easing persecutory laws. He did offer a programme for providing Negro slaves in the West Indies simple and realistic routes to mass freedom and property ownership. We should not be surprised at Burke’s boldness in this direction; like most educated Christians of the time, he abhorred slavery, but moreover, he considered civic freedom at the heart of the English Constitution. He told Parliament, in his “Speech on Conciliation with America”, that Britain had much still to offer America, if only it surrendered its illegitimate demands:

“Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil . . . But, until you have become lost to all feeling of your true interest and your natural dignity, freedom they can have from none but you.”

The United States did not, finally, have freedom as a gift of the English Constitution, but at the blood price of 700,000 young men and the suffering of millions of blacks.

In “Sketch of a Negro Code”, Burke outlined first several measures to regulate, ameliorate, and diminish the slave-trade and the conditions of slavery itself – including, most boldly, the building of mission-cities on the African coast, to regulate and reduce the trade, to offer educational and economic opportunities to the locals, and so forth. Providing economic security and developed property to local tribes would surely (Burke thought) undercut their economic preference for the slave trade. After that, he turned to how to create a property-owning class of blacks in the West Indies, which was his solution both to vindicate the natural dignity of the slaves, but also to wither away the economic desire for slavery.

The key provisions were these:

(1)   (a) younger slaves must have access to a school three days a week;

(b)   that any who were particularly able should be emancipated at the cost of the crown, and sent to be educated to London to be educated til the age of twenty-four, or if their intelligence not be sufficient for academic pursuits, for them to be given a position in the trades as an apprentice, and later returned to the West Indies as a free black businessman;

(c)    In a related measure, the protector of the slaves was able to emancipate technically skilled slaves and provide them with a craft living on the island itself.

(2)   That marriage amongst slaves should be propagated, honoured, and rewarded as a route to freedom – as Burke put it, “a state of matrimony, and the government of a family, is a principal means of forming men to be a fitness for freedom, and to become good citizens”. On that basis:

(a)    That common-law marriages should be recognised by a church marriage, opportunities for marriage actively advanced by slave-owners, and married men be given more time off;

(b)   That families be protected from separation by sale, as happened so widely in the American South;

(c)    That on top of a day and a half off a week guaranteed to every slave, married men and women with children should gain more and more free time as they get older;

(d)   That masters must provide good houses for every family, and if the plantation were large enough, land as well for the family to maintain in their own right, free from any tithe to the slave-owner;

(e)    That slaves should have the right to pass on an inheritance;

(f)    That fathers may purchase the freedom of their families at 50% of market value.

Now we may react to these with the outrage of men and women of a different time, but I can only say that modern slavery is often quite as bad – just look to the Uighur camps of Sinkiang – and that its problems are often quite as intractable. Burke offered a way to produce a dignified, property-owning population out of those who had heretofore been seen as chattel. His code placed them rather in a position of indenture than outright slavery; he near-guaranteed the withering of the plantation system, by propagating a homestead system in its place; he provided a formal and approved route for Caribbean blacks to gain a higher education, and that in 1780.

What relevance has this for us, anyway? We must draw out the principles of Burke’s Irish and Negro advocacy: government support for stable families, enabling them to more easily accumulate property, incentivizing them to develop it, rewarding them for success; and the provision of educational opportunities of the highest quality.

Now, I must say this need not only apply to African-Americans, or the descendants of Windrush in the U.K. By many measures the most disadvantaged group in Britain is white working-class boys. This Burkean proposal might just as easily be made to them.

First we identify those groups which suffer from structural disadvantages – I do not mean the vague bogies of silent racism or cultural hegemony, but where people are born into poverty, heading for bad schools, and seemingly destined to bad outcomes. The key thing which will nurture the innate dignity of these people, lead to wider societal flourishing, and circumvent the present resurrection of Jacobinism, is property.

Not property via radical redistribution – where every property owner learns that property is as easily taken as gained, and incentives for success are severely depressed or perverted – but property via honourable accumulation, with assistance given for those who have not the early economic resources which accelerate such success. Nor ought this assistance come in the way of unmediated “seed money” or gestural reparations. It ought to be concrete and directed to provide multiple future generations with the agency of their own destiny, and therefore it must be cultivated like the vine.

First, we must provide the educational and trade opportunities that will expand the leadership and business classes of these disadvantaged groups. How many articulate, learned, dignified, rough-background North-Easterners do we have in British politics now? I have written elsewhere, and will write again, at how unfit our educational system (here, and I suspect mostly in the U.S.) is for providing real opportunity for excellence, whether for the rich or poor. We need new systems, new schools, new colleges, new trades schemes – but with enormous scholarship and training funds for those from poorer backgrounds.

We must build thousands of new urban schools, run on principles where children are not seen as either a problem of behaviour management, or a machine for achieving good grades, but instead schools that send out every boy a gentleman and every girl a lady, socially integrated and able to hold their own with those born to much greater privilege. We must guarantee training in plumbing or electrics or some other genuinely dignified and lucrative trade to any of these young people who show a willingness to apply themselves.

Second, we must incentivize marriage and faithful parenting, and provide opportunities for ownership, not renting. Let one hundred thousand urban homesteads flourish in the decayed remains of America’s inner cities, in the vast empty lots; tell poor young men and women that, like Adam and Eve, they may step into a garden rich and productive if they commit to their own dignity and each other.

Let our governments fund golden handshake retirements for the 50% of farmers about to age out of the business, and – rather than seeing Agribusiness buy more and more land and adulterate it further and further – enact new Homestead Acts. Let there be a direct relation between the revenue of corporation tax and the funding of business opportunities and the purchasing of vital equipment for young poor people seeking a start in business. Create competition at the expense of the oligarchic near-monopolies, by putting opportunity in the hands of the poor to innovate.

No freedom will come from Autonomous Zones; no peace will come from Radical Redistribution; no healthy constitution arises from the destruction and humiliation of the old. Since 1789 we have never seen a successful experiment along these lines. But perhaps the pragmatic, realistic, but visionary and bold principles of Burke may aid us.

Exams: A Short Reflection on their Downside

John Galston has written a good defence of exams as a means of assessment in education here. I think so far as it goes it is convincing – exams may be dry or cold or narrow but they are rarely accused of being “unfair”, or “underchallenging”.

 

But that is not the real problem with exam-directed education – that is, education that is designed to conclude in exams which assess the achievement of the student, who then uses those exam results to move on to other activities. Indeed, this is a description of any assessment-based education, but I believe it is most pointed with academic exams. What is the real problem, then, with exams in History or Philosophy?

 

In essence, the problem is that exams becoming the goal of education – and exam results certainly are the functional goal of virtually every secondary school in this country, and many primary schools – empties formative education of its real purpose. The problem is not that exams fail to achieve what they set out to do – measure achievement – but that they succeed.

 

I have written recently about a conservative idea of education – I refer you there for more detailed thoughts – but the general point is that education transmits a culture. There is no entity known as Education, which is better or worse achieved – there are educations, and each instils values and hands on a tradition to the next generation. The right formative education for a free people is one in the “liberal arts” – those things which stimulate the mind and body, which broaden horizons, which renders them socially integrated without losing their identity. The alternative education is in the “servile arts” – skills passed on for utility. They train you to serve. These are noble and necessary arts – we need surgeons and plumbers and farmers and data analysts – but they are not the same as the liberal arts.

 

As assessment-based education aims to give the student a certificate proving competence – ultimately to future employers, via whatever educational route an individual takes – and therefore is a servile education, no matter the content. You only need to listen to defences of Theology or Philosophy degrees as “employable” to see how true this is – as if reflection on the deep things of God and the mind was ultimately really about getting a graduate-entry role at a cyber-security firm or in the Civil Service!

 

Exams exacerbate this problem dramatically, because they create an “end-point” to the education – one day of battle, a day of real achievement, but an objective quite distinct to the process of learning itself. The person who goes to the gym as physiotherapy for an injury does so for a fundamentally different reason to the person who does out of sheer pleasure in the burn of training. Everything academic that happens in the school year – to return to our subject – is subordinate to and intended as utility for the final exams.

 

Yes, of course a student can enjoy what they are reading, or be fascinated by a historical period, or enjoy the purity of algebra, all whilst training for an exam. But it is impossible that their chief focus will be on enjoying these things; and it is ridiculous to believe their teacher’s focus is on that a majority of the time. The exams are all. (This can all still be said to a lesser degree for coursework and similar assessments, of course.)

 

Furthermore, the mass examination system is industrial in scale and in mode; it is in that sense inhuman, and channels education into an inhuman and industrial system. Even a class of 12 children with two teachers – the ratio avoiding an on-the-ground industrialisation – will be coarsened and corrupted by mandatory engagement in the exam industry.

 

Of course, if we were to abolish exams (and their parallels) tomorrow, we would be left with a void. How should any educational or professional or trades body determine the qualifications of an applicant? Here is my suggestion, in outline: abolish all forms of mandatory school-end assessment; let universities, colleges, professional apprenticeships, trades bodies, etc, introduce flexible entry assessments – perhaps with the help of Government. These can be partially standardised, of course, but this method would render at least four great advantages:

(1)   Both the decoupling of schooling from “final assessment” (including exams) and the increased variety of the forms of entry exam on offer would allow academic education to focus on the proper end of academic education - intellectual excellence and a liberal mindset. With curricula no longer serving the end of exams, better generalization and personalization of what is learned is possible – a universal shared common core, with individual interests dictating further learning.

(2)   Employers, universities, and so forth will be able to present entry exams or assessments better fitted for their specific purposes, rather than relying on the generalities of three A Level grades, or Maths and English GCSEs. Their institutions will benefit from this change, too.

(3)   To the degree the same approach is taken with Universities, with entry exams and perhaps with a general Tripos-style exam at the end, Universities can reclaim their proper position as the finishing school of intellectual excellence. Ironically, I suspect this will render their graduates – fewer of them now, of course, because our proposed system would de-emphasizes University as an end-goal for many people – MORE employable, not less, precisely because we refuse to make that the point of University.

(4)   Finally, we could tinker more widely with where children go to school and when. If a child is resolutely unacademic, and has enjoyed whatever they may in their liberal arts education but has no natural aptitude, why should they not move to a more technical education at 14? Why should we not have even more apprenticeships available at 16? We have gutted the Endless Education Industry of its product – exam results – and so are free to actually give our children the education that best fits them.

These are idle thoughts, certain not to be adopted. They would require a great deal of work. But – if only for those of us considering a different course in education for our children – perhaps they may serve as a spur to the true ends of education.

Is it legitimate to rent out property?

“Landlording is not employment income, it is investment income. If you rely on stealing your tenant’s labor value (through rent) to survive, you are a societal parasite. Being a landlord is not a job.” – some Lisa Simpson meme

A clever friend of mine shared the epigraph on social media. The claim is fairly simple to understand: if one party offers labour value into an exchange, and the other does not, the relationship is parasitical by definition. Fairly simple Marxianism, really – it’s the same dynamic as a factory owner and his workers. The owner does not develop the value of the goods, he merely owns the equipment; those “creating value”, on the other hand, lack the means of production and have the surplus of their labour value stolen from them in exchange for a  partial wage from it.

I’m not getting into whether Marxian labour theory “works” or not. I would say that my own view is that, generally, smaller scale “workshop industry” and wider property ownership are morally and socially healthy things. But it is still worth asking: is it legitimate to rent out property? The matter is best addressed, I think, not via debate of abstract theory, but analogy and thought experiment.

To determine if the very act of renting out property is parasitical, we must create a level playing field for our parties beforehand. Of course if one person has £1m and another has £1k, then the former is much more likely to own any sort of property, whether housing or equipment, than the latter. The fact of their prior state does not determine whether the act of renting is parasitical, even if we believed the wealth disparity was unjust.

So let us say both our workers have £150k – they shared a winning lottery ticket, or they worked together and sold a business, or they are brothers with a moderate-sized inheritance from their parents – in the North-East. Here is what they spend that money on:

*THE HOMESTEADER: An end-terrace house with an above-average-sized garden (£90k, cash), family car (£5k inc. insurance), large variety of sheds, agricultural and building equipment, seeds, etc (£10k – this stuff is expensive!), solar panels (£6k), council tax and utilities (£2.5k). They have £46.5k left, and so bid on an auction property in poor condition, getting it for £45k in the ‘Rona bear market. They decide to do most of the work themselves, and renovate it slowly, based on cashflow. They also take over their dad’s allotment for pennies a year.

*THE BUSINESSMAN: Rent of a city-centre shop and an industrial unit (£22k annually, two years set aside = £44k; assumes rates holidays), sprinter van (£20k inc. insurance), family car (£5k inc. insurance), furnishings and start-up stock (£20k), six months’ running costs set aside (£20k, and that’s cutting it fine). That’s £41k left – great, plenty for a mortgage on a decent property, setting a little bit aside for renovations.

At this point, both workers are living on cashflow (including anything from their other halves). We’ve already hit our first problem, though – the Businessman has had to enter a mortgage arrangement, where a bank has extended credit (which is money that it does not, of course, have in cash, because we have a fractional reserve system). Is the bank being parasitic? Is the businessman being robbed? He is paying a form of rent on the part of the house “owned” by the bank. Well, in our hypothetical, he could have made different decisions and owned outright, but he wanted to go into commerce, not homesteading. He has chosen to split his funds a particular way. He has chosen to exchange his labour value for the bank’s investment value, in return for greater financial flexibility.

Now imagine the following:

(1)   A year in, the businessman’s shop is making a loss but can still run month-to-month with a small cash infusion, and may soon turn profit. He takes out a loan secured against his assets. He is exchanging his labour value, again, for the bank’s investment value. Without that possibility for investment his business would have folded. Is this parasitic on the part of the bank?

(2)   Three years in, the shop is beginning to make money, but to expand the businessman needs money. He offers friends the chance to invest in his private company. Several accept, turning their labour value (i.e. their wages) into investment value. Who is being the parasite, here, anyway? Presumably the investors – except it is their labour value they are exchanging for future dividends.

(3)   Six years in, the market crashes horrendously and the shop goes under. With a serious debit problem, the businessman sells his house, clears his debts, and rents out the house from the homesteader. Is the homesteader a parasite at this point? They have made choices that all this while have left them debt-free and ticking over, whilst renting out the second house for a small amount of extra income monthly, and slowly building his land portfolio. The homesteader is now providing a need in good faith.

(4)   The businessman finds out the homesteader has had very good fortune with his lifestyle, and decides to grow more of his own fruit and veg in the garden, whilst raising chickens (of course, the homesteader is very supportive!). He buys a few of his own tools with his pay from his new job, but for a few complex pieces of equipment he turns to the homesteader. Now either he could pay for the labour value (including equipment value), for the homesteader to come and do the work – or he could just rent the equipment and so it himself. So he does the latter. Is the homesteader being a parasite for hiring out the equipment without his own labour? Why would it be productive if he made the whole deal more expensive by requiring he be paid to labour, too?

You see the general point I am making. In a controlled environment, any number of rental/loan situations seem reasonable. The businessman cannot make the free decisions he does without the ability to rent/mortgate/lend instead of buy/labour-hire in each case. Yes, his gambles haven’t entirely worked out – partly for reasons beyond his control. Maybe what has happened is his fault, and maybe it isn’t. But once we get to situations 3 and 4, at least, how is it the homesteader’s fault that he has succeeded? The left-winger does not think it a reasonable idea of charity that every man surrender his labour for free – so why ought they surrender the fruits of their labour for free?

On a related note, we see it becomes hard to clearly classify the hire or loan of different things. Why, in absolute terms, is renting a home different from renting equipment to provide food for your family? Why, indeed, is renting equipment to provide food for your family better or worse than buying food from a shop that has not itself produced the food, but is acting as a middle man?

We could frame quite high-level critiques of the situations we’ve discussed. We can say housing and food are absolute rights, and must be provided for free by the Government; we can say that all business development should be funded and secured by the Government; we can seek to define categories in various ways, monitored by the government (investment value developed by labour is good, investment value developed by speculation is bad). None of these seem particularly viable unless we want a vastly more authoritarian, centralised state than we already have. Absolute revolution and highly agglomerated control is required – well, that, and a high level of trust in government agencies to efficiently dole out investment money to the right opportunities.

Tolerably ordered liberty requires scope for a variety of combinations of decisions and finance, and the capacity for success and failure. Focussing attention on the specific concept of “rent” – rather than on, say, why property accumulates value the way it does compared to labour, or the at-birth disparities to do with e.g. health and educational opportunity – is a very good way to fail to solve any actual problem whilst birthing a whole brood of new ones.

Splendour, Independence, and Freedom in the Constitution of the United States

In the following I intend to search the U.S. Constitution (both the strict word, and the implied life) for the “Three Ingredients of Good Government” I have written about elsewhere in these pages. To make sense of this, you ought to read that essay. This will only be a preliminary sketch, in part due to my lack of expertise on the matter, and in part as a marker for a longer work in the future.

Briefly, John Adams summed up the three healthy qualities of the British Constitution as splendour, independence, and freedom, and connected these in turn to the three Aristotelian modes of government – monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. This is, in essence, the theory of the Mixed Constitution – where the weaknesses of each form are mitigated by the strengths of the others. Splendour (monarchy) enjoins respect and reverence, independence (aristocracy) provides various bulwarks against arbitrary power, and freedom (democracy) protects the rights of the weak.

These may sound like strange qualities to seek out in the United States, where there is no monarch and no formal aristocracy, and never has been. However, it is not as if the Framers of the Constitution lacked insight into these matters, or that they in general favoured any sort of pure democracy. Both Federalists and Anti-Federalists sought to form a limited republic, not a direct or even delegated democracy. The entire concept of the “Separation of Powers” ultimately descends from the argued advantages of the Mixed Constitution, even though it seems opposite to it, seeking as it does to quarantine constitutional components rather than mix them. Yet both are proposed as sources for “Checks and Balances” – not an Enlightenment idea, but one pursued in both the Roman Republic and Medieval England (thus Fortescue’s distinction of England as “a kingdom both regal and political” compared to the entirely regal France).

Nor is it the case that the Founding Fathers themselves did not have great sympathies with the Mixed Constitution. Adams, after all, praised it in various ways.  Adams and Hamilton were both accused – largely libellously – of seeking to turn the United States into a monarchy or an aristocratic republic. Even bad old Tom Paine suggested crowning the Constitution, before breaking up the crown and distributing it – because the concept of Liberty Under Law belonged to every citizen.

How, then, does the US Constitution – again, both as written and as executed – provide these qualities, if at all?

Well, for splendour we might naturally look to the executive, to that most revered of posts, the Presidency. It has been hallowed by impressive men, not least its first, that “first citizen of the world”, General Washington. Even after a man vacates the office, the convention is to address them as if they still held it – “Mr President”. No British Prime Minister can claim the same honour! The President is part of the most impressive civil ceremonies of the Republic. In retirement, he ordinarily founds a Library or some other fine institution, putting his name upon the public weal.

Yet the President cannot be said to fully embody Splendour in the United States. He must face the electorate every four years, and therefore must please as well as impress – and this is right, because the enormous power he holds must be checked in some meaningful way. Similarly, he is subject to the most abject scurrility in the press, no matter his party, demeanour, or behaviour. This can only tend to degrade his splendour in the eyes of the populace. The nearest to a constitutional monarch a President approaches is in his retirement, by which point he is sidelined from public life and cannot be a legitimate central focus of public reverence.

In American political terms, Splendour actually comes, where it comes in any healthy form, from the Constitution itself. Paine divined this, as we have seen; reluctantly admitting there was some need for reverence, he identified the common compact as the object. We see the adoration offered the Constitution by the Romantic wing of the Originalists, and the centrality of “Constitutional rights” in the discourse – for both sides of any given argument – is telling. The written Constitution wields no material power, and yet is submitted to, though sometimes more in subtle breach than strict observance. The paper of the Constitution is the tangible embodiment of the dream of a nation – flawed in execution certainly, without commenting on conception – but nonetheless, with the Declaration of Independence, a relatively stable marker of a people’s values.

There is some cause for doubt here, though. I do not mean doubt as to the Constitution’s political value – I am not concerned here about its Amendability or any like thing. Rather, the Constitution is not living – at least, it may be “living” in the judicial sense, but it is not a person. It can inspire a species of deep respect, but I do not believe any American has died for it – rather they have died for the nation it articulates. Personal affection would be peculiar where it existed. And the very inclarities of the Constitution – of its Framers’ intents, of the right way to adjudicate it, and so forth – make it too often a bauble for factions rather than a person of fixed values. Though it fulfils its role in part, the proof is there that it does not sufficiently overawe the vandals who would mutilate it.

Now, what of Independence? There is no titled aristocracy, of course, and no role for any hereditary or consecrated group in government. Independence is found, in our terms, in the existence of disparate power centres able to legitimately counterbalance central government. Naturally, in the United States, the States were and are conceived of as providing this. States joined the Federation, not persons; States carry equal representation in the Upper House of Legislature (itself more insulated from popular agitation by its 6-year terms), regardless of their population or size; States send blocks of electors to the Electoral College, and so may elect (as they have done several times) a President who did not win the popular vote. Perhaps most theoretically important, it is States which must – by popular vote – approve Amendments. A minority coalition of small States can therefore counterbalance a majoritarian impulse.

Some strength still lies in the States – as demonstrated by the relative independence they have had in handling Coronavirus, over matters as diverse as hospital policy, restaurant opening rules, and mask-wearing mandates. Additionally, States can function as meaningful localities within a Union, where there is no overwhelming sectional divides. This makes them differ from the devolved governments of the United Kingdom, which exist in large part to sate sectional rancour (they fail utterly in this task). As abiding and corporate concerns, the States provide a partial balance to the efforts

Yet States have been stripped, one by one, of their powers, by one means or another. The Constitution was Amended to require States elect Senators by popular vote – preventing the indirect democracy previously favoured. Supreme Court decisions have repeatedly restricted State discretion on “Rights issues” – notably Abortion. Now, aside from public campaigning on the matter, many States in themselves are seeking to surrender their rights in the Electoral College, by aiming for a functional enforcement of the popular vote. All of these are examples of the relocation of power from States to other bodies, usually of a (structurally) Democratic form.

If we are to look at where many Americans now seek a bulwark of Independence against that which is popularly enacted, the obvious example seems to me to be the Supreme Court. This body is not elected, but selected via a multi-branch process requiring qualified approval. It can make decisions that bind the other branches. Its technical task is to adjudicate the law, not create it in favour of special interests.

Yet – setting aside any specific partisan criticisms of it, or judging on the matter of whether it overreaches – it is still a bureaucratic rather than an aristocratic body. Accordingly, it is necessarily invested in the maintenance of the status quo of the central elite. On that note, we must observe it is a singular and central body, not a disparate series of centres of power, spread across the centre and localities. Finally, it is a strictly limited body – it does not have the wide range of action the generic Aristocrat does, with capacity to engage directly in politics, sit as a Magistrate, patronise artists, and so forth.

Finally, we may consider how the component of Freedom operates in the US Constitution. What we learn from the emphasis on the popular vote is that the Democratic component, if taken too literally, can become a serious danger to minority rights – to put the matter bluntly, a plebiscite on slavery held in the fifteen Slave States in 1860, assuming somehow black slaves were permitted to participate, would very likely still have returned a result that kept them shackled. The Democratic component in the US Constitution is better identified in, particularly, those Amendments which relate to particular enumerated rights – first the Bill of Rights, and then later iterations such as that abolishing slavery. Whilst the Rule of Law exists, minority rights are preserved in the USA in large part by this hard-to-eliminate “moral property”. Of course, some of those rights are deeply controversial – whether the Second Amendment’s protection of gun ownership, or that interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment which permits abortion. Yet nonetheless here the “distance” of the Constitution itself from everyday political decision-making provides a better bulwark for individual liberties than a thousand plebiscites.

Nonetheless, before we close, I must sound a note of caution. Where mediating institutions between governing power and mass populace are eliminated, Caesarism is always a risk – and this slide is as much a trend in the United States as it is elsewhere in the West. Ever greater demands for ever greater powers for simple majorities of voters may give you a Rousseauian General Will, but then Rousseau is the grandfather of every great modern tyranny. Where the limitations of representative democracy become intolerable – for good reasons or bad – you see the sort of paramilitary direct action many cities in America are presently experiencing. America risks discovering a new overweening Monarchy or Aristocracy, and losing the very Freedom it claims as its special national possession – because it has idolised Freedom to the detriment of the other legs of the stool, the whole thing looks at risk of falling. May it never be!

A Proposal for a Citadel of the Permanent Things III: The Schoolroom

A Proposal for a Citadel of the Permanent Things

I.          The Home

II.         The Shadow Society

III.             The Schoolroom

IV.             The University

V.                The Night School

VI.             The Workshop

VII.      The Smallholding

Now we have imagined the sorts of homes we ought to build and the “Shadow Society” needed to protect the Permanent Things au milieu de le deluge, the very serious topic of education arises. Indeed, I had wanted to address it at the beginning of the last essay in this series, but there was an order of priority to observe.

No-one disputes “education” is absolutely vital to the maintenance and furtherance of society as a whole, yet it seems to me the whole concept is very ill-defined. What does it mean to receive “an education”? Is there any meaning attached to the word other than the vague or subliminal?

Chesterton comes to our aid, in What’s Wrong With The World:

But education is not a word like geology or kettles. Education is a word like “transmission” or “inheritance”; it is not an object, but a method. It must mean the conveying of certain facts, views, or qualities, to the last baby born. They might be the most trivial facts or the most offensive qualities; but if they are handed on from one generation to another they are education. . . Mr Fagin was quite as educational as Dr. Strong; in practice probably more educational. It is giving something – perhaps poison. Education is tradition, and tradition (as its name implies) can be treason.

Education is a method, the handing on of tradition. No matter what you are teaching, it is education, and it is, therefore, tradition. The most modern and progressive education in the world is a tradition, and therefore a demand upon the recipient. That might sound unpleasant to our modern ears – isn’t education about cultivating the natural genius of the child? – though perhaps it is less surprising now, as the Deconstructivist educational project parades its forces in the streets like so many Soviet tanks. Chesterton addresses this point too, of our fears that an “education into tradition” is forcing something upon the child:

The educator drawing out [natural qualities] is just as arbitrary and coercive as the instructor pouring in; for he draws out what he chooses. He decides what in the child shall be developed and what shall not be developed. . . The only result of all this pompous and precise distinction between the educator and the instructor is that the instructor pokes where he likes and the educator pulls where he likes. Exactly the same intellectual violence is done to the creature who is poked and pulled. Now we must accept the responsibility of this intellectual violence. Education is violent; because it is creative. It is creative because it is human.

So we know what education is. We know it is necessarily forceful – to use a present example, it is quite as forceful to teach children that racism is evil as it is to teach them that God is real. No-one expects “religion and ethics” classes to go into detail on fringe cannibal cults, or to give a deeply sympathetic hearing to white supremacist terrorism. Of course, as the Deconstructivists are clear-headed enough to acknowledge, this applies in every field. The books you teach in literature – the canon you thereby set up – pass on a tradition, an idea of value and beauty. The argument goes, after all, that we have too many dead white men on our syllabi.

So if we have concluded that all education is forceful, and no area of the syllabus can be “neutral” in the way we might sometimes pretend – though of course we may be fairly generally settled around mathematical operations and the findings of experimental science – we must decide what tradition we wish passed down in juvenile education, and why. That may sound a strange way to frame the discussion – surely we should pass down “good things”, and that’s that?

But of course as education is a method, different educations have different purposes. The education of a joiner ought to involve geometry and certain structural physics and physical hardening and precision tool use; that is a tradition, and a noble one, to carry on. But that is not what our 7-year-olds should be learning, and no-one claims it. What is the point of the education of a 7-year-old?

Prior to that age, usually and traditionally (there’s that word again), the focus prior to that is on the three Rs – reading, riting, rithmetic. These are very basic tools for engagement with the world. They provide a surprising degree of independence on their own – particularly reading, which in a sense offers the whole world to every man and woman.

Even in those first few years of directed education, there will be a “bias” in the types of material presented to the child – even concrete examples in mathematics will have a bent, with the familiar chosen rather than unfamiliar. Very few maths problems for six-year-olds ask anything like: “The Cardinal sends eleven men to capture the Musketeers. The Musketeers defeat four of the men before escaping. How many of the Cardinal’s men are left?” accompanied by a visual depiction of the battle. The questions are usually about portions of fruit. (More’s the pity.)

But undoubtedly the selection of materials for the humanities and arts becomes wider, more formal, and more directed as schooling goes on. It may be that there is an attempt at reading classic books to the children during carpet time, or perhaps something newer and glossier; they may learn “Frère Jacques” as a sort of introduction to French, or they may learn world geography via different dishes. Different instruments and musical styles will be listened to or even tried out.

The point is this: children at about seven or eight begin to be much more receptive to directive education, and can more consciously begin to engage with the tradition you are (necessarily) handing down to them in their schooling. This why the ancients often saw the age of seven as the a time to begin teaching; it is why Elyot and other Renaissance Humanists said the same; it is why in many Western countries now formal schooling doesn’t start till six or seven.

So, I repeat, what is the point of the education of a 7-year-old? Well, our great project is the construction of a Citadel of the Permanent Things, and no-one doubts juvenile education is of vital importance in the formation of wisdom, ability, and character in the child. Our educational project must aim to cultivate a love for the Permanent Things in the child, and an understanding of the true nature of the world. It must inculcate good aesthetics, a moral sensibility about events, a coherent understanding of the interaction between individual moral action, politics, and history, and so forth. Every education is training the child for one cause or another (even the “drawing out” of the natural genius of a child, on its own, is training the child for something – egotism). As this is a civilisational project, Western civilisational canons – in art, literature, and so forth – are central. Morality must match the wellspring of Western civilisation – “Judaeo-Christian values”. Given my own convictions, I would naturally add God Himself to the list, both as to His reality and His plain importance in Western thought and history. (Naturally, some of my fellow travellers may aver on the former quality!)

Before I offer our “imaginative objective”, we must assess, briefly, the current state of affairs. If – for some reason – our juvenile education already does the job described, then we need not tinker, and we may have great hope, because in the decades to come a great number of recruits will be joining our side in the fight.

Yet, of course, we know it does not. Even the fevered imaginations of the most demented Deconstructivists cannot quite pretend that what we teach now is the same – as evil, as wicked, as racist, as sexist – as what was contained in the education of Shakespeare, or Newman, or Arnold, or Lewis. There was a substantial identity in what they were taught, in mode, in subject, and in specific content; there is virtually no similarity between their education and ours. The only objection of the Revolutionaries is that the Revolution is not finished, and so their substantive grievance – over the very existence of the previous culture – is still unsatisfied.

The great canons are now to be finally dissolved – I saw a pressure group complain just the other day that the prominence in English Literature syllabi of Shakespeare, undoubtedly by far the greatest dramatist in the English language, destroyed racial and sexual balance in that area of the curriculum – and the growing demand from every quacking meat duck on the Internet is that history must be solely taught as a litany of the villainies of our ancestors. At the very fringe of the discussion, for now – but such is the speed of ingress we may quickly see even this insanity elevated to sober importance – is the suggestion that basic arithmetic and our concept of number is Western intellectual imperialism.

A new world is to be created through the means of education; it is mandatory in Britain that our 7-year-olds learn about the beauty and validity of all manner of family unit – not merely so that they are kind and accepting of their fellows from all background, but so that they know the changed public morality, even if their parents disagree. The British State, in its present response to coronavirus, is happy for young friends to play with each other if they go to state-approved nurseries, but not if they go to each other’s houses; childcare may be provided by state agents, but not by your brother and sister-in-law. This latter policy, of course, is only incidental to the present crisis, but it is perfectly exemplary of the Tradition being handed down. The State is mother. The State is father. The State provides; the State decides.

Now, remember that juvenile education only exists to provide a worldview – to create, in a collaborative but managed way, the future person. No education does anything else. If it seeks not to do so, it merely does so badly – like offering medicines at random to a sick person, without even describing their benefits. The education on offer from virtually every school in the United Kingdom – including most private schools – does not seek to inculcate a love for the Permanent Things into the seven year old, nor the seventeen year old. It is servile and not liberal, insomuch as it seeks as a matter of first importance to render the child practically employable, or at least move them on to University on the conveyor belt; it is moral, as all educations must be, but in a largely and increasingly immoral manner, not in any wholesome way; and, perhaps most contemptibly, it is barely thought through, being an almost random agglomeration over 60 or 70 years of every new idea, of a carousel of quickly forgotten new books, or the rising and falling in importance of subjects.

Of course, many teachers fight the good fight in the face of this; some few schools may take a much more morally, culturally serious view of the matter; there are noble projects afoot to provide better education for future generations (I know of one nascent Classical School in the West Midlands). But the fact of the matter is that the parent looks out upon a darkling plain, and chaos, and dark intellectual violence. For the one who avows allegiance to the Permanent Things, it is virtually inconceivable to send a precious child – one’s own Tradition transmitted to posterity, in double-helix – into the jaws of Leviathan, faintly hoping that the few hours they have at home each evening are enough to buttress an utterly decrepit, nigh-collapsing cultural edifice, or counteract the poison of the snakes in the grass who now rule the whole field. For most of us, home education is the only escape (so, naturally, three-quarters of the political class are now calling for that to be onerously regulated out of prospect).

Yet I shall still spin the imaginative alternative – not that it can be quickly accomplished, though I hope it might provide inspiration for parents building domestic monasteries, complete with a homeschool, as arks amidst the floodwaters – but because we must know at that which we aim. We must know what body of learning to attain and conserve and propagate, what human scale to aim at, and what moral purpose to attain. If those of us who are young now are to hope to build schools in our senescence – or to see our grandchildren do so, victorious at last – we must dream now.

I have defined three decisions to make: the BODY OF LEARNING, the SCALE, and the MORAL PURPOSE. Let us begin with the second of those.

The scale must be a HUMAN SCALE. A class of 30 may seem inefficiently small to Mr Gradgrind, but it is a creation of his type. It may just about do for a class of clever and motivated children, but nobody else. It is industrial in scale, packing in the meat until harvest, sending it out to the consumers pale and drained of real value. It is a subversion of the family, inverting the social priorities proper to all children. It is justified by every false economy possible – as if a child in 1700 wasn’t “socialised” because they didn’t attend an air-conditioned warehouse daily! We have, thank God, vastly improved the prospects of their physical health in that time, whilst making every effort to degrade their moral health.

No – the scale must be proper to the task, which is to render our children ever more human, ever more connected to real things, ever more alert to transcendence. Now, of course, homeschooling or small private schools answer this in part; but let us cast our thought forward. We must provide for small-scale, bespoke education. Children must be able to follow their natural bent, and have plenty of free time in which to explore the world. Their specific strengths and weaknesses must be addressed not as “one of thirty”, but in their own right. They must not be to the teacher a paperwork burden; they must be an object of craft.

All societies have social gradation, and our imagined future will own the fact – therefore we must imagine two contexts, for the richer and for the poorer parent. Both must be healthy and good; a social design which neglects the education of the poor (as ours does, and has since the evisceration of Grammar Schools) deserves to die a death.

Naturally the richer man’s children can enjoy the benefit of household tutors and governors. That “school” can be operated on the scale of the household with every benefit attaching. The structure of the school day can be thoroughly flexible in such a case – with ratios of 1:1-1:4, each child can comfortably attend to their own personalised studies, seeking help where needed, without requiring the whole group to be corralled.

Wider social mixture can be found with other households, in church, and elsewhere; shared learning is certainly possible, with joint trips. But the richer man can afford the violin and violin teacher off his own back – his house-school can be fundamentally self-contained.

What of the less rich mother or father who desires to teach at home, to emphasize the natural unit of the household, to enjoy that time with their children, to direct the flow of their education? A network of home-school co-operatives – like those that already exist – is vital to this. Formal, state-supported networks of parents committed to this project would allow the pooling of resources beyond the individual household – so that every child can have access to musical and artistic opportunities gratis, and be able to lounge in a comfortable library surrounded by good books (which never get expelled for never being read), and gain quality teaching in those areas on which their parents demur. If I am not a confident physicist, that does not disqualify me from managing my child’s education, as the State-adoring pigeons would claim; it means I must seek specialist help. In a healthy society, why should this process not be state-supported?

Finally, we must reckon with the need for schools. There will be parents who, for one legitimate reason or another, are simply unable to directly manage their children’s education; there will be orphans; there will be the children of derelicts. Indeed, we must assume that a small majority or very large minority of children will still require at least partial schooling outside of the home. The great challenge here is how to retain a human scale. The great difference between our time and that of Shakespeare is the sheer quantity of people to be educated. Yet of course the solution lies in the statement of the problem; we must simply embark upon a dramatically ambitious teacher training programme, centred on a transcendent and beautiful canon and morality, to provide many more teachers than today, each fit to both pour much more in to their students, and with much more relative independence. Now we have a diffuse and garbled curriculum, with endless flexibility, but where it comes to management, the control maintained by leadership is crushing; we need the precise opposite.

We need teachers for the Village School and the Grammar School. Even in an urban context, categorically no great moral value can be assigned to the agglomeration of children from a wide area into the industrial process; why not rather build many smaller schools, constructed from fine materials, with airy, high rooms? A Village School for every urban neighbourhood! We have all seen the merging of schools, the aim for the economy of scale (again, children-as-units-of-production); we must reverse this. Now it will be argued that this will surely only multiply the paperwork, and our new corps of teachers will be sucked under by each needing to act as a Head or Deputy Head – but of course most of the paperwork of the Late Nanny State will be consigned to oblivion. Given it has not conduced to the teaching of better moral character or aesthetic judgement, and even improving results are a mere fata morgana operating on our reduced ambitions and requirements, we will lose very little by binning 90% of the bureaucratic superstructure.

No. Let there be thousands of little schools built, each with at most a half dozen staff. Set aside a lovely garden for each building. Let the teacher once again truly rise in social estimation – not as an object of state-ordained reverence, but as a stakeholder and necessary leader of the local community. The Inspectorate for such schools would need much less expansion than the teaching staff, unless we judged that we wanted to render much more “roaming help” to those schools (and well we might).

What about the BODY OF LEARNING? There are three requirements: that it be uniform, that each element be proven, and that the whole cultivates the mind and soul.

It must be uniform because the whole point of education is to transmit a world. A shared body of learning offered a shared world; that shared intellectual world, drawn largely from the past, becomes the shared lens by which we consider the present world we physically share. We accept the importance of shared experiences, bafflingly, when it comes to popular culture consumption, but not when it comes to education. No – for the first several years of formal education, we should teach our children a smaller, narrower curriculum, the contents determined by the two remaining requirements. We can excel at training teachers in teaching this smaller body of learning; there can be a much higher quality of discussion upon it; children will in due time be able to discuss these very topics with their parents and grandparents, who learned them aforetimes. We will discover that the less learned the better, if it be better learned.

The body of learning must be proven. “Canon” means “rule, measure”; what we pass on must have proven itself in fair and open battle, over many decades and centuries, to be worthwhile. Let discerning adults read and analyse the latest novels. The vast majority of the body of learning must be made up of cultural classics. What is longest proven, of course, is the learning of Greek and Latin – mentally disciplinary subjects which then provide the ability to read many of the greatest works on politics and philosophy, a great share of the greatest literature, and some fine histories. Why shouldn’t every bright child begin to pick up some of these old languages from the very earliest time? Why not at 7, or 9? Even a smattering is elevating.

Similarly, there will be no shame about affirming a canon largely made up of “dead white men”. Indeed, I should say that – in literature, history, and other arts and humanities – the first of those qualities is virtually a requirement. Only the very greatest and longest-lived writers become benchmarks in their own lifetime. The moss must grow on their graves before most writers can be judged. Today’s artistic darling is very often forgotten tomorrow, if not tonight. This does not prevent us from including a small selection of cultural classics from elsewhere, especially from integrated migrant cultures; the Bhagavad Gita is old and noble and strange enough for a British child to relish. Only an obsession with novelty, a chronological snobbery, leads us to eschew the classics and constantly update the curriculum. Of course we will need some new textbooks, and a rotation of reading for younger children including some newer books, but when we read in Elyot that the 7-year-old should begin with the Iliad, we must ask ourselves the question: do we believe our children thicker than hose-wearing smallpox-ridden medievals? If we are to be true chronological snobs, we really ought to read even more highly than they did; if we are to be humble in the face of eternity, we ought to bow to their proven judgement. They produced Shakespeare, we produced Rupi Kaur.

It must also be a cultivating body of learning. We do not simply want a body that is uniform and contains good writing. We want to structure learning to inculcate virtue; remember, the Deconstructivists want this too, only they want anti-virtue instilled. We want our children to read of bravery and know how to be brave, and to read of decency so as to learn decency. The order and manner in which we teach the canon must encourage courtesy, social order, courage, kindness, self-sacrifice, self-restraint, home-building, child-raising, God-fearing. We must therefore order our teaching to accomplish this. This is also a secondary way of demonstrating the provenness of a book; Ovid and Byron are obviously great, but their more adult works are not what must be presented to the 9-year-old. The same applies even more clearly to visual arts. As an aesthetic sensibility must be cultivated, but cultivated carefully and morally, trained like a delicate flowering plant up the manse wall, we must be sure not to overstrain the plant too early; we must not gorge the child with a surfeit of rich aesthetic nourishment, or demand stern moral insight from those still forming their analytic capacity.

Under the head of cultivation it is worth briefly commenting on the ways in which the body of learning is to “connect” – within itself, and to the world around the student. If the whole purpose of education is to gift over a world to the child – and, for the Christian, specifically order them in relation to God – then each subject must connect. Each subject is not some separate box of papers replete with knowledge, but essentially its own empire; there is only one subject, and that is Wisdom. Every topic must connect. It is useful, then, to look to topic-based rather than subject-based learning in as many instances as possible (once basic literacy and numeracy are established), teaching meaningful geography alongside history, for instance. Why has the Walloon plain been vital in wars since before the Renaissance through to the Second World War? Why was there a Rush for Africa, and why is China assaying the same now – and does it have anything to do with the continent’s vast mineral reserves? Geometry can be taught alongside architectural theory; for the warlike younger boy, much mathematics can be brought in by way of military exemplars. Why not study Marlborough’s campaigns by way of not just narrative but statistics, geometry, and so forth? Why not teach probability via a simple wargame of Blenheim? Why not turn formal logic to the analysis of the public declarations of the Sun King and his opponents? All this, of course, becomes vastly easier when teaching on a non-industrial scale, as teaching can be catered to the child in this respect.

Our last great requirement was a MORAL PURPOSE. Education always has some moral aim and purpose, we have established. Part of the purpose is the inculcation of the standard: honour God, protect the weak, preserve order, love beauty, and so forth. But there is a practical purpose, too. The man or woman of a rich, connective, classical education is a free person; they are fit to be freemen in the Kingdom. They can manage or own property in a trustworthy manner. They share with each other a worldview which allows effective collective action. They have not been trained on passing fads, and so may take a long view of matters; they know that there is a time rising and falling, joy and sorrow, sowing and reaping. They are secured to the anchor of their ancestors – they can turn to Lewis, Newman, Burke, or Shakespeare, and know that they have sat in the same classrooms and imbibed the same air. They can even look to old Augustine and remark, as they read the Confessions (perhaps in Latin!), about how much knowledge they share, how many joint delights they have had, and how similar their moral imagination is.

If education now produces half-conceited half-despairing units of economic production, intellectually unarmed for the fight, lacking analytic skills but having been provided a surfeit of half-baked analysis – well then, let us provide an education which morally orders the child, which accepts the need for trade skills but categorically defines them as secondary to the cultivation of the spirit, which renders every man and woman as capable of freedom as they can be, and which moreover enables them to pass on the same to their children and grandchildren in turn.

Let us, then, imagine the scene: we see the tiny urban school in front of us. The Khans and the Johnsons each send their little brood there each morning, limited as they are by health and employment concerns. A few other children gather. Their two teachers do the headcount and bring the children to the carpet. The day begins in prayer, and turns to studying the Anarchy. We hear of Empress Maud’s determination and King Stephen’s overkindness to her; we learn about the battles; we consider how a monastery at the time would have worked (perhaps with mention of a certain clerical detective); we look at how Stephen’s father went off on a Crusade.  Some of the children wish to put on helmets and shields and pick up swords and pretend to refight Lincoln – so one teacher takes them out to the garden, an excellent excuse for what used to be called P.E. Other children wish to colour in or annotate maps of the monastery they learned about – in fact, one of them takes to a writing desk to write a story. One of the children really struggles with reading, and so – with the other children temporarily occupied, at least when they’re not skirmishing over crayons – the other teacher reads from the Children’s English History they use.

In the afternoon, after a hearty lunch, other topics are brought in – though on the day’s theme. Latin drills might centre around words to do with God or worship; what did those old monks say in their prayers? Sturdy wooden blocks and plastic bricks are brought out to build castles and monasteries, according to set plans, with counting and geometry necessary – indeed, the older children are called to design their own and ensure the thing can stand after building.  The day finishes by listening to some troubadour music, and then making their own (finally, an acceptable excuse for a teacher to bring a guitar in to school!).

Meanwhile, at thousands of other tiny schools in the city, something similar is happening. The Kings and Queens are memorized, the tale of our folk learned by heart. The more curious children – of whatever age, sharing as they do a classroom with many a mixed age group – begin to ask questions of the constitution. Why ought a King or Queen inherit, and when? The most alert and mature might be directed to Fortescue, or at least a little primer. As these children grow, they will have a shared body of learning with nearly all of their neighbours, allowing a cultural idiom to arise which is hearty and healthy; it will value and validate the Permanent Things, teaching reverence for home, aspiration for wisdom, and moral virtue. They will be men and women fit to secure their nation's place in the world, to deserve the ordered liberty that they will contribute in building, capable of joy and restraint. They will be Permanent People.

Of course, that is the future; we are led there by dreams. How may we begin today? What writing or teaching or campaigning or building can you contribute to the cause today?

The Training and Profession of the Man of Letters

The man of letters is largely an extinct class. (I note hastily that, of course, a woman might be a Man of Letters; Madame de Stael certainly was.) Why? Those generalist dilettantes are relics of an age where specialism was not so vital, perhaps. The idea of some gentleman writing, as Chaucer did, in such genres as poetry, spiritual tract, mechanical science, and philosophy translation – well, there was so much less to know, back then.

In a sense there is something undeniable about this – certainly in the physical sciences there has been so much work done in the last 600 years, and the highest theorems are so technically complex, that the aspiring generalist cannot hope to attain greatly in those subjects. However, the classic man of letters was never best known for his scientific speculations; yes, Elyot published on medicine, and Bacon on science, but it is perfectly plausible that now a medical doctor might also read widely in philosophy. The particular fusion in the “Renaissance man” of an interest in practical investigations of the world and careful reflection upon it is neither universal, nor even lately extinct – Sir Roger Scruton was a notable expert on music and architecture, both technical as well as aesthetic subjects.

No, the man of letters is extinct, or largely extinct, for a wide array of other reasons. The core class from which the profession drew in every nation – that is, Good Old Families – is much reduced. Independent wealth and generous allowances are sniffed at, now – and yet without them, no Mirandola, no Burke or Wilberforce, no Teddy Roosevelt, perhaps not even a Russell. And the idle rich now have other interests, less intellectual curiosity outside of the technical arts, and consider that they have paid their greatest contribution to society via the revenue.

Where else might we turn? It is nearly unthinkable that someone from the lower-middle/upper-working-class could now attain the same quality of education available to Sir Roger in his day, given the widespread vandalism and dissipation in the world of education. Even a cursory look at the progress in curricula over the last 60 years (or more – More and Babbitt were fighting this cause in 1900) shows a great decline in the riches set before the student. Perhaps teaching liberal arts to the poor so as to educate free men was too much of a danger to the paternalist progressivists.

The wellsprings of the traditional MoL are stopped up, then, in large part. The responsible rich have been driven from the land to the city and lost all quality, becoming moral slackjaws, and the intellectual elevation possible via a rigorous classical education has been taken away from those of more modest origin. (Well, indeed, taken away from everybody.)

Is the Man of Letters worth resurrecting? How could he come into being now and how would society benefit from his presence?

Well, the words one most associates with the MoL – whether a Kirk or Lewis, a Stein or Arendt, to offer but four more modern exemplars – are “erudition”, “breadth of learning”, “learned”, “of catholic taste”, and their like. There is both a broadness and a deepness in the Man of Letters – broad in sympathies and knowledge, deep in understanding.

How can you or I aspire to that rank, given that many of us have lacked serious intellectual training, and time seems to slip away so quickly? Perhaps more importantly, why bother?

You cannot hope for the financial rewards some very few receive; most of us will need to find a profession or trade to support the life of the mind. The flesh being weak, it needs sustenance. The appeal of the life of the Man of Letters is an issue of temperament, not career prospects. Do you long to gain an overview of matters, of being able to see the whole landscape of the human experience, knowing that Wagner’s Parsifal is Ser Percival of Breton lays and Malory; understanding how these might connect to the Fisher King, that wounded fey dominus; being able to move from that to the longaevi, the medieval faeries, neither good nor evil; and thence to the two types of medieval magic, explaining why astrology was noble and alchemy anathema; and then back again by many returns to the basis of the Romantic movement, and its effect on music, and how that nationalism which had seemed so noble then which seems so evil to us? Do you desire a refinement that burns away grossness and burnishes whatever God-given spark of insight you possess? Do you wish to make a legion of friends amongst the dead, knowing that their long arguments in the salon of your mind will be more stimulating than any graduate seminar? Indeed, when you find amongst the old writers friendly voices, and in the histories high and noble figures, you know that walking the narrow path you are never alone; saints and soldiers and Socrates and Sidney go along with you.

If that appeals, then you must have the training – above all for your own sake, for the sake of a soul hungry for such bread; after that hunger is sated, there is the matter of your bounden public duties, but first, you must nourish the spirit given to you. How?

The unfit man or woman changes their diet and habits to become fit; the same must apply with the late-coming aspirant to Letterdom. It approaches a cliché – because of how true it is – but electronic entertainment is a born enemy to intellectual development. Of course there are beautiful movies well worth seeing, and great televisual novels, and enlightening documentaries, and so on. I don’t want to offer any grand aesthetic here! But really – another binged series, a third watch-through of Breaking Bad, 3 hours a day in the cinema on an annual pass (though I write this as it seems cinemas may be about to finally be euthanized), or 100 hours in a month on Crusader Kings – can anyone honestly claim that there can be any attainment to greatness from those? Not that there might not be some good – but nested in much evil, as your sand runs down the timer’s neck, and never returns.

There must be real discipline and attention given to reading as the primary (though not exclusive) school for the adult desiring a late education. Yes, there must be concerts and galley visits and walks along fossil-strewn beaches and knocking at the doors of rural chapels and even, with all else done, The Wire and Civilisation. The cultivated mind cannot be a paper mind only; the demented heresiarchs of our time are detached brains that have floated around half-understood books for too long, without ever turning to the stubbornly real world outside. Idealism cannot bear much reality, and so avoids it by all ventures.

But I assert that to build the cathedral of the mind, you must have a sturdy understanding of building principles. You must quarry out the best of human wisdom. In short, to be a Man of Letters, you must, well, have read a lot of sentences made up of words made up of letters! So there must be discipline exerted to guard time and mental space for study.

In this respect, physical periodicals are preferable to electronic ones, where possible; certainly physical books are preferable to PDFs on your laptop, though a dedicated e-reader has its virtue (though – and we will not argue about this! – it is still inferior to the reassuringly real heft in the hand of a real book). You need space and context for study. That might be in a study, or out on the hills, or the living room after the kids go to bed, or even on the toilet! Though elevated surroundings can elevate the mind, the important thing is that you build a little dyke against the waters of ordinary life, behind which you can retreat and cultivate your acre.

Time is, of course, a precious commodity – but I do not believe there are many people who, in all honesty, could not find half an hour a day for serious reading if they desired it. The mind made for this service desires it; it drives itself to exhaustion to find it; it denies itself other lesser pleasures for its sake. And indeed serious reading is a habit – it must start somewhere and be persisted in if it is to stick. So find your half hour a day, at least. That is less than two hours a day, of course – that’s basic numbers – and you will fit correspondingly less into it, but we must each cut out cloth to budget.

What to read, though? Well, in a sense, everything! Yet there must be selection – both practically and pedagogically to begin with, and then later as a matter of discernment. Practically, no-one has the time to read as widely as they would like, or take in every major periodical, or deeply investigate every field of learning. Pedagogically, the unformed mind can be corrupted by ugly or evil material if it does not know how to parse them, and it can take quite some remedial work to undo the damage. You do not feed a weaning toddler a diet of oven pizza and Coca Cola; do not feed your nascent mind trash, either. Once you have attained some judgement, of course, you might go to the Index of Prohibited Miscellany and study some select works – but even so, a selection is necessary, for time reasons and to avoid an over-coarsening of the soul. Stare into the abyss too long, and all that.

So there must be a selection – a selection of old books. Fewer fashionable new books, more books by dead people. Many of the classics are not overhard to read, and you can create a small reading list with real variety. A Platonic dialogue and a Shakespeare play and a classic sci-fi novel (say, The War of the Worlds or Hyperion) can be fit in to a few months at the longest for most people, and none are overly difficult in terms of comprehension. Research them – many editions of (to take our examples) Plato or Shakespeare also include good critical introductions. Add a decent periodical or two to that list, picking one that is only monthly or quarterly if you lack for time (Apollo, New Criterion, Analog, etc). Read less news – not that an engagement with current affairs is improper, but an absorption into the 24-hour news cycle can only drain your energy and divert your focus. Imagine the initial years of training are your monastic novitiate – you must learn to separate from the world before you can healthily engage with it again.

Follow the natural bent of your desires over reading, bearing in mind the principle of avoiding the crass or over-recent. At the very beginning it is better to take guidance from someone else as to some “starting points” – but if you are engaged by On Liberty by Mill, you might choose to read his Utilitarianism to fill out your conception of his thought, or you might read Liberty, Equality, Fraternity by Stephen, that devastating response to Mill. If you enjoy Shelley, perhaps turn to Keats. Dive into natural law. In one sense, you must be like he hummingbird, flitting from topic to topic and author to author, supping a little of everything so as to get an idea of the possibilities and range; yet at times you must be like the badger, which can dig up to 14 feet down for its sett. When the spirit takes you, obsess – shine a light on every corner of the topic, and squirrel away what you find for a latter day.

As a corollary to this, if at all possible, build your library. It may be you lack money or space for a great collection, but even a couple dozen good editions of excellent books provide both a comfort and a destination. You know you have directly succoured the Permanent Things by enshrining them in your home, and you know that here are books to read and savour in the future. On which point, if at all possible, be rather overambitious with your book-buying than over-cautious – you declare to the world your allegiances by your proven desire to learn and understand.

Find friends to discuss all this with – somehow, anyhow. Use the Internet or your old networks or book clubs or anything. Find companions to share your thinking and reading with. This is frankly much more challenging than either finding time or picking good books – “a true friend is hard to find”. Yet it is vital – “iron sharpens iron”. The solo intellect quickly becomes demented; loneliness breeds both egotism and solipsism, and these result in a narrow bigotry that quickly loses any learned skill of real understanding. You are a pilgrim; better to go in caravan to avoid banditti, and for mutual solace on what can be a lonely road.

Enough for those two – I will write more about possible courses and networks in one number of my Citadel of the Permanent Things series.

Once you have begun to gather the raw materials of your cathedral, the question must follow, how are they to be put together? You are reading as widely and as deeply as you can; you are settling new territory in the wilds of your mind, taming the harshness of Natural Man; you are undertaking a toble task.

The next stage is to learn to “connect the dots”. Of course, some will have the natural component of this ability in greater quantity than others. Some will have a naturally agile mind which enthusiastically seizes contradictions within arguments and common themes between books, which surgically draws out the implications of propositions, and so forth. However, some of us are not so blessed, and – without entering fully on the distinct subject of the training of the mind – such will need to specifically enter a regimen that improves the skills of analysis and connection. Formal logic is a great aid here, as is the simple act of reading widely – good writing accompanied by attentive reading is as powerful an educator as any. Finally, you would do well to – either with your intellectual intimates or by self-set essays – set out the strengths and weaknesses of what you have read, always balancing charity and humility on the one side with boldness and vigour on the other. Is Rousseau right to believe man is free and peaceable when in a state of nature, with the superstructure of enforced social life? Why, or why not? Do you know any counterarguments from other writers, or can you see proof or disproof in the world around us? Can the state be trusted with any economic planning, or is Hayek right when he says that even the slightest creation of that sort of oversight inevitably leads to a wider tyranny? Set aside your own first emotional preference for now; you may believe in the genius of the state or be an ardent Objectivist, but you must affirm or deny Hayek by means of argument.

You see the general plan. A wide course of reading, a curious mind given scope for deep-dives, a conscious discipline of reflection upon the mass of learning you are accumulating – these are the stock-in-trade of every truly great mind ever, and are replicable even for those of us of smaller capacity. Insomuch as they do not require genius to be at least partially effective – they are achievable via diligence and enjoyment – they are not “jet pilot” tools, dangerous to the amateur. They are basic nourishment for the mind.

Now, the practical question is, what purpose does this have, beyond pleasure? Pleasure must come first by way of necessity; if the life described is not pleasurable, it will never fruit. Yet there is a point where what we might call the Lettered Man – who has undergone the training above – becomes the full-fledged Man of Letters, the contributor to society, the master of those Letters.

What is the public profession of such a person? Well, they may have another job – a doctor or a bricklayer, even! – but this is, ultimately, a vocation. One is called to public service by dint of one’s qualifications, despite the common antipathy to such people. Let me offer three roles that come to mind – which one trains for via the wide reading and conscious reflection discussed above.

The Man of Letters fulfils, most practically, the role of a LATERAL  ANALYST. They are peculiarly able to draw inferences from situations – whether by historical comparison, or artistic expression, or the record of written controversy – that illuminate that situation. You see the incompetent, would-be MoL do this by comparing every leader or regime they dislike to either Weimar or its successor. The Man of Letters does this competently, by genuinely wider and reflective reading. Someone who has competently learned to connect different eras and complex arguments already is surely a sounder bet in our unpredictable era than someone who has only learned a narrow, technical trade.

The Man of Letters, too, is an ARSENAL OF AUTHORITIES. Given the neglect of the better books in many libraries, including university libraries – how else could I have amassed such a fine collection of good hardbacks at low prices, except for their mass expulsion from institutes of higher education across the world? – the MoL has the unique opportunity to become a sort of shaman or skald, carrying forward the ideas and tales of old in an intellectually enfeebled age. The tribe can come to the Man of Letters for old wisdom, for good precedents, for heroes and villains to emulate or dread. Now, like the shamans of some tribes, the Man of Letters may be forced to live at the edge of the village, but the vocation is its own reward, both in pleasure and in the fulfilment of duty. Even if public esteem is low today, it may be higher tomorrow; better to store up what is needed in the Arsenal.

Finally, the Man of Letters is the chief HUMANE INFLUENCE. Humaneness and humanitarianism are not the same thing; humanitarianism has its use, but it does not humanise. (Sometimes it animalises via a wrongheaded species of paternalism.) The humane influence is one which sets everything in a right place, gentles the harsh contours of social life, locates the human being as a creature of dignity in a complicated world. The biologist cannot do this via biology, for that only tells us the goop that we are made from. The lawyer cannot do this via law, because the law is a machine or tool aiming at a given end. Even the philosopher cannot do this strictly via “philosophy” in the generally accepted sense, because formal philosophy lacks so much of what truly makes us humane: art, music, wine, trees, birdsong, prayer. The generalist can connect all these aspects of the truly humane life and offer them to the world. I believe that influence is all that could now resist the street militias and anarchy threatening the Anglo-American world with utter ruin – if it but existed in strength.

Well, then, there is the task. Would you be an artist of analysis, a granary of good things, a humanising force? Would you be a walking library and sage? This is all very pretentious, yes; it is beyond any of our power. But all the better. We are ill-equipped, and there is little economic gain or social prestige on offer. Good! Even a noble failure in such a case will be a worthy entry in the Annals of the Good. It is better to pretend to a life from a dream, and thereby hope to make make some fragment reality, than give in to the untrammelled barbarity of the Late Electronic Age. Perhaps we will find that others live in the dream, too; perhaps we will discover that It was waiting to break in to overtake cold reality, only wanting for midwives to draw it forth.