The higher the levels of inequality and the broader the subjective horizons of possibility, the less the state supports projects of social equity, the more it abdicates responsibility for material quality of life improvements, the more vital status becomes a seemingly rational social category, a goal to be pursued over any other — reasonable, yes, that deeply unequal societies provoke primal anti-civilizational instincts in people — the widening spectrum of wealth, power, and capital, which we can describe here, rather arbitrarily, as an aggregate through the category of status, registers in people a desire to hoard any and all matter of value.
In resource-scarce structures of life, this hoarding further deracinates the potential for civil society. once enough status is accumulated, it is reproduced with relative ease, barring any exceptional abuse of common sense in posterity; economic, social, political, and intellectual capital are transported onwards through law, educational institutes, bureaucracy, and structures of governments. This is a broadly true axiom, but absurdly so in most broken societies and paradoxically even in certain hyper-financial states that dominate the global circuits of wealth, power, and prestige.
Barring economic interventions — on the individual level, the most potent medication for curing a fling with status is to recognize the rather simple fact of historical contingency. the religious argument is also there, that God provides to whom He wills, but for those who are not inclined towards such beliefs, and covet a more material explanation, a basic study of contingency in historical movement is enough to destroy the edifice of status as a category: a singular displacement of any variable in one’s life can have the cascading effect of stripping one of one’s perceived status.
Discourse has begun fixating on a self-flagellating concept of a permanent underclass, yet those who know other societies already acknowledge the entrenched nature of several slave underclasses, with close to zero ability to have any elastic relationship to material success.
Historical contingency as an attitudinal quality is not something abstract, it is applied humility — humility as a religious concept is rather abused in certain ways, whether it be with the exploitative feudal praising God after devastating his serfs, or seemingly, but not in reality, a more benign hidden arrogance concomitant with an entitlement one may have towards the perceived accumulation of worldly goods as a signifier of divine grace.
Proper humility must account for and acknowledge arrogance as a primal marker of virtuous existence; to reject it is cowardly and paradoxically properly Arrogant. This is because virtuous arrogance is a historically contingent virtue, a good of the now, but Arrogance is a vice true for all time — a pietistic humility in this brilliant age of Arrogance? That remains an idea not well-founded; now, it is not to be argued that pietistic humility has lost its innate virtue, but rather its expression was suited to the age of Piety, where Arrogance, not arrogance, was the key corrupter of souls. But now, we dwell in new world-making times, where Bermanian solids have long melted, and where a new class of technocrats strive to reconstruct the category of status in their image: They are the Arrogant, but the arrogant, with this applied humility we speak of, are the vanguard of life — possessors of an interminable virtue, while Arrogance remains a pyrrhic cascade into relativistic status games: mimetic and petty.
The idols of the now are not mythical symbols of an external ideological philosophy that has taken root in some unitary religious mind; rather they are the expression of the violent discharge of the reaction between a very material hyper-financialized world and its attendant mental dispositions.
Think: Why has religious society developed a fetish for civilizational purity beyond the now rather stale explanation of it being a response to coloniality and modernity, which is true but insufficient; the rejoinder that “traditions” have enough substance not to need “external” umbrellas is hubris and anti-spiritual, if by spiritiual one is to understand the creative spirit of the sensible cosmos. If one may be bold and brave, they would categorize this last line of argument as particularly regressive and almost anti-God — the thinker who advances these casuistic ploys aids the very process that keeps him provincialized — an “adult,” with no sense of childness.
It is not absurd to push for a resuscitation of a proper slave morality that uses the original contextual substance of the past without needing to be a slave to it; so, in practice, if one integrates the substrate of meekness into the marrow of the modern critique of such a morality, we may yet catch some of the sun’s light. Recall what the saint Augustine says to young Dioscorus:
“That first way, however, is humility; the second way is humility, and the third way is humility, and as often as you ask, I would say this. It is not that there are no other Commandments that should be mentioned, but unless humility precedes and accompanies and follows upon all our good actions and is set before us to gaze upon, set alongside for us to cling to, and set over us to crush us down, pride tears the whole benefit from our hand when we rejoice over some good deed. We must fear the other vices in sinful actions, but pride even in good deeds. Otherwise, we will lose, because of the desire for praise, those things that were done in a praiseworthy manner. And so, when that most distinguished orator was asked what he thought one ought first of all to observe in the rules of eloquence, he is said to have answered, “Delivery.” And when he was asked what came second, he said again, “Delivery.” And asked what came third, he said only, “Delivery.” So too, if you ask—and as often as you ask—about the rules of the Christian religion, I would answer only, “Humility,” even if necessity would perhaps force me to say something else.”
The slave morality we speak of here is not the one that the jester lit on fire; the one he had dismantled shall remain in ruin — bother not with rebuilding a rock broken beyond the possibility of repair, for doing so will create something uglier, scars that are not proper scars. But the jester was also modest, and his modesty may still be useful to us if we recruit it to lend us a tether out from the prison constructed on the pillared economies of status. The jester arises in turmoil; recall when one of them noted, with a distrust of metaphysics and the cocktail of civilization and tradition:
“All philosophers have the common failing of starting out from man as he is now and thinking they can reach their goal through an analysis of him. They involuntarily think of ‘man’ as an aeterna veritas as something that remains constant in the midst of all flux, as a sure measure of things. Everything the philosopher has declared about man is, however, at bottom no more than a testimony as to the man of a very limited period of time … but every thing has become: there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths. Consequently what is needed from now on is historical philosophizing, and with it the virtue of modesty.”
Yes, the clowning of destruction also yields a gentle, careful, tactile appreciation of the facts of life. The jester is correct that we may yet conjure an attitude that may discover the shape of the clouds that obfuscate the nature of these times — through a philologically precise method, recognizing that our conceptions, the domains of status, must be ruptured here and now, in the moment, almost like one has to touch it, feel it, what Mr. Proust spoke about when he said:
“Thus it can be only after one has recognized, not without having had to feel one’s way, the optical illusions of one’s first impression that one can arrive at an exact knowledge of another person, supposing such knowledge to be ever possible.”
Touch by touch, we find truth, like strangers in the dark, in the friction between humility and modesty, a meek arrogance we rely upon for redemption from the crimes of seeking what ought not be sought — redemption being the best we may hope for when restoration remains elusive.