Table Of ContentOn the Decline of
the Genteel Virtues
From Gentility
to Technocracy
Jeff Mitchell
On the Decline of the Genteel Virtues
Jeff Mitchell
On the Decline
of the Genteel
Virtues
From Gentility to Technocracy
Jeff Mitchell
History and Political Science
Arkansas Tech University
Russellville, AR, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-20353-5 ISBN 978-3-030-20354-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20354-2
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In memoriam: To my friend, mentor, and colleague, Dr. Michael Link,
who—to borrow Kant’s fine phrase—roused me from my dogmatic slumbers.
Preface
The following monograph is perhaps best described as an essay in virtue
ethics informed by the sociology of culture. Two distinct sources served
to inspire the undertaking. The more immediate of them was provided
by Hans-George Gadamer’s analysis of taste in his magnum opus, Truth
and Method (1960). In that work, Gadamer points out that originally
the idea of good taste was more of a moral concept than an esthetic one,
especially as presented in the thought of Baltazar Gracian. Furthermore,
he insightfully describes the ethics of Plato and Aristotle as an ethics
of good taste. The more proximate inspiration came from the work of
Alasdair MacIntyre, who has done perhaps more than anyone else to
rehabilitate the approach known as virtue ethics among contemporary
moral philosophers, particularly through the publication of his After
Virtue (1981).
A word of explanation is perhaps in order as to why I designate
MacIntyre’s thought as the more proximate of the twin stimuli. Despite
the fact that I was fortunate enough to take several courses from him
as a graduate student, I was initially far from conceiving of the current
essay as directly involving virtue ethics. This realization only gradually
dawned on me over the course of writing the present book. Let my
vii
viii Preface
admission here serve as both a recognition of intellectual indebtedness,
and as testimony to the fact that sometimes our teachers—even those
whom we quite consciously hold in high regard—influence us more
than we know.
In what follows, I will argue that what we think of as “moral con-
science” is essentially the exercise of reflective judgment on the goods
and ends arising in interpersonal relations, and that such judgment con-
stitutes a form of taste. An historical survey will make plain that the
constant pendant to taste was an educational and cultural ideal, namely,
that of the gentleman, whether he was an ancient Greek citizen-soldier,
Roman magistrate, Confucian scholar-bureaucrat, Renaissance courtier,
or Victorian grandee. In each of these instances, good taste was part
and parcel of a unified pattern of social life which was, to a significant
degree, the result of conscious design. The pattern of life was unified
in the sense that the various aspects of the individual’s existence—e.g.,
the personal and the civic, inner convictions and outward manners, the
useful and the esthetic—were, as far as possible, harmonized with each
other so as to be mutually reinforcing and form a coherent and even
attractive whole. Central to this genteel ethos or ethos of good taste was the
identification and ranking of the key human goods by a given commu-
nity of competent judges, who thereby set the standards of taste. Thus,
the very idea of good taste presupposed the existence of such a com-
munity, and although each one had its own distinctive cultural pattern,
in the total absence of any such elite community good taste would not
have been possible. In the latter part of the monograph I argue that this
is actually the case today. Although contemporary societies are largely
run by various elites (read in, the Establishment), I will show that the
latter have long since ceased to constitute a community capable of effec-
tively setting and transmitting standards of taste.
As a general benchmark for behavior, good taste directly depended
upon the existence of a class whose members were destined for leader-
ship, and who consequently were groomed from an early age for dis-
tinguished office. It was, in fact, the gentleman’s social function which
lent unity and coherence to the canons of taste. Consequently, the con-
cept of taste has shared the fate of the social class which provided it
with its moral meaning. With the decline of the gentility, it has either
Preface ix
degenerated into mere personal preference, or has been subsumed into
expert opinion. In the sense of a general capacity for discernment and
sound judgment in the various departments of life, resulting from
upbringing, formal instruction, and peer-group interaction, “good
taste” has virtually vanished from the contemporary world and from
popular linguistic usage.
Hence, the book concludes on a somber note, and the reader may
well wonder in what sense the monograph constitutes a work in moral
philosophy if its interest is primarily historical. One reason is that,
despite the fact that the civic ideal of the gentleman flourished in
various times and places, it has actually received scant attention from
philosophers (no few of whom were actually gentlemen themselves!).
They have generally focused their efforts on grounding morals on a law
or principle or set of natural rights, and so have failed to perceive that
it was neither an ethical doctrine nor methodology which provided the
high cultures with moral and political leadership, but rather an elite
social order. In their perennial quest for self-knowledge, philosophers
would have done well to heed the lessons of twentieth-century cultural
anthropology:
In all studies of social custom, the crux of the matter is that the behaviour
under consideration must pass through the needle’s eye of social accept-
ance, and only history in its widest sense can give an account of these
social acceptances and rejections. It is not merely psychology that is in
question, it is also history, and history is by no means a set of facts that
can be discovered by introspection.1
While the gentry in the traditional sense no longer exists, it neverthe-
less made significant historical contributions, and insofar as we are con-
cerned to understand the present state of human affairs, we need to
grasp the nature and import of said contributions. In other words, the
undertaking at hand bears roughly the same relationship to contempo-
rary moral philosophy that paleontology does to biology. Any theory
1Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1934) 232.
x Preface
of living organisms which would fail to account for their genesis in the
natural history of the planet would be incomplete, as would be any
moral philosophy that would ignore the rise and extinction of the gen-
tility. It is in this spirit that the reader is invited to discover the follow-
ing paleontology of genteel virtue.
Russellville, AR, USA Jeff Mitchell
March 2018
Acknowledgements
A special word of thanks is in order to Arkansas Tech University, which
provided me with a year-long sabbatical, during which I was able to
write a significant portion of the present book.
πόλις ἄνδρα διδάσκει. (Polis andra didaskei. The city-state teaches
=
the man.)
–Simonides (Greek lyric poet, 557/556-468/467 B.C.)
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