Nobility's Extinction In the West

The English speaking world was much effected by the creation of the Church of England. The poorer and less intellectual migrated to various Protestant denominations, and due to the conflict between Protestant and Catholics, Catholic rhetoric, especially in the United States, tended toward a pro-democratic, anti-aristocratic stance. The Anglican church became the church for English aristocrats. This turned out to be a very good way to render them ineffectual.

Under natural conditions particular families gain a reputation for administration of property, people, etc...- while others gain a reputation for drinking, gambling, and generally managing to spend their paycheck way too fast. The distinction was noted, and sometimes formalized. If nothing else, property changed hands, generally going from the wastrels to the prudent. Obviously, in the midst of this, folks sometimes got up to no good, and went about appropriating the lands of the prudent and imprudent alike with violence.

In the fevered imagination of the modern egalitarian mind the occasional, personal violence of the previous age justifies the systematic violence of the modern age. Indeed, to, for instance, the feminist, the entire past is a systematic oppression of women, despite there not being any sort of conditions for that sort of thing to be even possible. Men were generally trying to keep themselves, their wives, and their children alive by scratching out whatever sort of living they could.

One can easily imagine what would happen if the Earth were magically blessed with a non-coercive anarchy. No matter how equal people start off, the prudent eventually manage to get into a position where they are wealthier, while the imprudent pay rents and work for a daily paycheck- largely because they are paying someone else to the long term thinking for them.

So, we desperately need these people- the noble- but what we have instead are bureaucrats.

The egalitarians see inequality and instinctively believes at all times and everywhere that inequality is evidence of oppression. This oppression is supposedly relieved through revolutionary means. Once a revolution occurs, the administration of things by the people who own them can no longer be allowed to occur. Nor can it be any longer acceptable to allow the tradition of father, eldest son, or eldest of a clan to exert natural authority. No, the bureaucrat is the end of revolution; there is no other. This is one of the reasons revolutionary thought fails people who want to change this society. The revolutionaries have already won and are choking us to death with committee meetings.

As of yet, anyway, the Christian image of patriarchy has been almost as unhelpful as the feminist one. In most denominations patriarchy has been emptied of its temporal meaning. Even as the feminist seeks to crush the natural leadership of the father, those who should know well enough to be loyal to fathers and resist this modern culture of bias against fathers (especially during divorce) seem happy with the current state of affairs.

The true ecumenical task would be a return to nobility.