The Real Ruling Class May Not be Whom You Think

Con artist, or just dumb?

Marx misidentified the ruling class. He claimed the bourgeois were in control, and before them the landed gentry. Neither were ever in charge. They were just the wealthy class. The ruling class, the class that governed, and had the highest social authority, was always the educated class—the clerisy. The aristocrats and the bourgeois were subject to the law; even the king, since Magna Carta. And while kings might sometimes issue edicts, for the most part, who made the laws and stood in judgement? The clerisy—that is, the lawyers and the judges and the bureaucrats. Even the aristocrats were under their control. The bureaucrats always run the government—any government. If anyone else has power, either in an aristocracy or a democracy or a monarchy, they act only as a partial check on the clerisy, who manage most things day by day.

In pre-revolutionary France, when Louis XVI was required to summon the Estates General—required by the law, which he too had to obey-- who was the First Estate? Who was acknowledged as the top of the social scale? Marx’s bourgeoisie was jumbled in with the peasants in the Third Estate. The landed aristocracy was the Second Estate. The First Estate was the clerics, the clerisy, the educated class. 

Do not assume this meant just priests in the modern sense. Anyone who graduated university, in those days, was ordained. Cleric = clergy, but also clerk. Most of them spent little of their time in church. They held all the desk jobs; they were the civil service. They were the ones who knew how to read and write, how to keep accounts, how the system worked. Cardinal Richelieu, Cardinal Mazarin, Cardinal Wolseley, Thomas More, Cardinal Cromwell, and so on down.

In India, with its rigid caste system, who was the highest caste? Same as in France. Not the bourgeoisie; they were Vaishyas, third rank, above the Sudras, who were the manual labourers. Not the aristocracy, the Kshatriyas. As in Europe, they were second class. Highest caste was the Brahmins, the priestly, the educated class. They ran everything, and had to be deferred to by everyone else.

In pre-revolutionary China, the aristocracy was barely a thing. They were usually looked down on as uneducated boors. It was the Mandarins who ran the show.

This educated clerisy is the same group that form the backbone of the “progressive” movement in North America, which emerged in the early 20th century—the core “progressive” idea was rule by “experts.” The clerisy formed the backbone of the Nazis and the Fascists in Europe—it was the universities and the civil service, promoting state power: meaning power to the bureaucracy. In Russia the clerisy formed the Bolsheviks, as a supposed “vanguard of the proletariat”: like Marx, mostly well-educated pencil pushers. 

The continuing program of the clerisy in modern times is to consolidate power, to suppress any rival authority. For power is their coinage; telling others what to do, controlling them, governing them. By contrast, the capitalists are mostly only interested in making money. 

Social Science Professions

Don't buy it.

I remember reading somewhere the calculation that, up until about 1924, physicians did more harm than good. They killed George Washington by letting blood. President McKinley died not from being shot, but from the surgeons expanding the wound and fishing for the bullet with dirty fingers. Patent medicines relied heavily on things like cocaine and heroin.

Even today, estimates are that only 27% of what physicians do is justified by any science. The rest is mostly tricks of the trade to reassure the rubes—er, “placebo effect.”

On this slim foundation rests all the immense prestige now enjoyed by the medical profession; and extended, on their example, to so many other professions that claim to be “scientific.”

Most of the rest probably still do more harm than good. I submit that most of them—those based on “social science”—always will. Psychology and psychiatry, modern education, human resources, sociology, social work, modern journalism.

First, scientific methods do not work on human subjects, who are too unpredictable and too conscious of being studied. Studying people as objects is nonsensical, as well as intrinsically dehumanizing.

Second, any profession exists on the basis of a claim of special knowledge not available to the general public. It is therefore essential for such professions to gin up some body of knowledge that would come as a surprise to the uninitiated.

This means that they must from the start reject all conventional knowledge and common sense about their subject—all that we legitimately do know about it.

This makes them systematically harmful. We would be vastly better off if they were prohibited by law. They are actively doing harm, and demanding huge sums of money to do so.

We are seeing proof of this all the time, if we care to look. The Internet is daily demonstrating that the mainstream media, the professional journalists, are less accurate and less reliable than the amateurs, the "citizen journalists." All the studies show that homeschooled children do better than those professionally educated.

My hope for mankind is that these social science professions will soon become casualties of the Internet.

The Coventry Welcome

St. Michael's (Anglican) Cathedral, Coventry.

On the doors of England’s Coventry Cathedral, I am told, there is a sign or poster that reads:

“We extend a special welcome to those who are single, married, divorced, widowed, straight, gay, confused, well-heeled, or down at heel. We especially welcome wailing babies and excited toddlers.

“We welcome you whether you can sing like Pavarotti or just growl quietly to yourself. You’re welcome here if you’re ‘just browsing,’ just woken up, or just got out of prison. We don’t care if you’re more Christian than the Archbishop of Canterbury, or haven’t been to church since Christmas ten years ago.

“We extend a special welcome to those who are over 60 but not grown up yet, and to teenagers who are growing up too fast. We welcome keep-fit mums, football dads, starving artists, tree-huggers, latte-sippers, vegetarians, and junk-food eaters. We welcome those who are in recovery or still addicted. We welcome you if you’re having problems, are down in the dumps, or don’t like ‘organized religion.’

“We offer a welcome to those who think the earth is flat, work too hard, don’t work, can’t spell, or are here because granny is visiting and wanted to come to the Cathedral.

“We welcome those who are inked, pierced, both, or neither. We offer a special welcome to those who could use a prayer right now, had religion shoved down their throat as kids, or got lost on the ring road and wound up here by mistake. We welcome pilgrims, tourists, seekers, doubters -- and you!”

This represents the common modern sentiment: that the Church is for everyone.

Yet this is actually not the Gospel message. It is not what Jesus said. He divided mankind into sheep and goats, or wheat and chaff, and welcomed only the sheep. The rest, he said, quite literally, could go to Hell. He defined his flock in the Beatitudes, as “the little people,” the burdened, the suffering, and followed this up with an equally clear definition of those he did not want: the scribes and Pharisees. When some of them came to see John baptize, arguably the first Christian service, John basically told them to get lost: “You bunch of snakes! Who warned you to run from the coming judgment?”

Who were the scribes and Pharisees? Most literally, the intelligentsia, the educated professional class: the lawyers, journalists, accountants, teachers, professors, ministers.

It is perhaps worth noting here that, contrary to Marxist theory, this professional class, this clerisy, has always been the ruling class.

And the priests? That’s not clear. Properly, the priests of that day were the Sadducees. While Jesus’s relations with them were also difficult, he did not single them out in the same way. The phrase was “Pharisees,” or “scribes and Pharisees.” He might have added Sadducees, and generally did not. Whether or not the Sadducees of Judea can be equated with the Christian priesthood, they were not so condemned.

Instead, it was the professional “clerisy.”

I think we can also assume Jesus’s condemnation did not apply to an entire class as class; that would be arbitrary. There are some good Pharisees in the Bible. Some think St. Paul was a Pharisee in this sense. What Jesus was condemning seems rather to have been the pervasive attitude among such ruling groups that they are better than the “little people,” the laity, the Trump voters and the rednecks, the ordinary folks, and had the moral authority to tell them what to do: the self-righteous. “Pharisee” means literally “set apart, separated.” More or less, “elite.” This attitude no doubt is concentrated in the professional classes, but narcissism of a similar sort can of course appear elsewhere.

My portside buddy Xerxes proposes his own list of undesirables who should not be allowed in the cathedral--not, at least, without changing their views: “racists, misogynists, white supremacists, anti-gays, anti-Muslims, anti-immigrants.”

All of these things are indeed no doubt sinful, gravely sinful if indulged in with full understanding, since they violate human equality, and so the Golden Rule. But they are not the sins Jesus considered deal-breakers. Sin per se is after all no reason to bar anyone from the church. As Jesus said, he came for sinners, not the righteous.

And from either a Christian or human rights perspective, Xerxes’s list is incomplete. It condemns misogynists, but not misandrists; white supremacists, but not black supremacists, brown supremacists, Amerindian supremacists, or Asian supremacists. Anti-gays, but not anti-heterosexuals. Anti-Muslims, but not Muslims who might be anti-Christian, anti-Hindu, or antisemitic. Anti-immigrants, but not “anti-natives” who condemn or scorn their host culture.

Instead of opposing discrimination, this list, and any similar list, is discriminating.

And looks very much like the sort of list the Pharisees might impose on the great unwashed. Hypocritically; or as we more commonly call it nowadays, as “virtue signaling.”