The Trouble with Unemployed Scholars
Or, How to Stop Sedition
Christian (especially Evangelical) princes and aristocrats seem to have a tough time ruling. By this I mean managing and maintaining their institutions. Perhaps it is their provincial upbringings and corresponding status anxiety. They think they know what it looks like to rule, to command respect, to strengthen their borders, but they don’t. I’m here to offer my services as a purveyor of ancient wisdom, perennial lessons that can help them maintain a firm grip on power though the hour is late in your kingdom.
Stopping Sedition
The main threat to your rule is not foreign invasion but internal decay and discontentment. In a word, sedition or insurrection, if you prefer. Once sedition starts, it’s hard to contain—you’re always on your back foot. Best to prevent them altogether. In your case, Evangelical elite, we’re talking about figures and ideas that circumvent your usual filtration process and conflict with your own established party line. People preaching without a license, teaching without credentials, that sort of thing. You may think you can ignore it, at first. Applying a thick cone of silence—salutary neglect—can work in the near term, but the risk of containment break is ever looming. Once those bats get out of Wuhan, it’s bad news, especially if your attempt to inoculate others only makes things worse. Slapping a parental advisory sticker on the Beastie Boys only increased sales. To combat seditious ideas and their messengers that have broken containment, you’ll inevitably be forced to either cede ground or diminish your own credibility and popularity, or both.
Worse still is that any attempt to jail or execute (metaphorically, of course) insurrectionists will only make you look insecure and desperate. Previously unquestioned methods of gatekeeping will lose credibility altogether and fill the commoners with suspicion. Anything that gets commoners excited is not good. If you must flaunt these things, the credentials, the degrees, the institutional affiliations—any status markers—you’re already in bad shape. At stake here is not merely your own status and institutions but your place within the broader, mainstream elite apparatus of which you are a small auxiliary. If you cannot maintain your rule over your own then you will lose your status, however small, in said apparatus. Again, it is best practice to identify the sources of sedition ahead of time and nip them in the bud. Be warned, however, you might not like what this requires.
Considering the materials of seditions, Francis Bacon (1561-1626) instructs princes to attend to the matter or cause of troubles. (This is your periodic reminder to read Bacon’s essay on the “Unity of Religion.” Ladies and gentlemen, your classical liberal!) The causes of seditions are two, viz., poverty or discontentment. As to the first, “rebellions of the belly are the worst,” but their solution is simple. The question of discontentment is more complicated, for princes should never judge discontentment by whether it is just or unjust, great or small. “The cord breaketh at the last by the weakest pull.”
And yet, whereas poverty moves people briskly, discontentment is usually a slow burn. Common people are only moved by discontentment when “excited by the greater sort” who, being few in number, must wait for “the troubling of the waters amongst the meaner sort” to insert themselves. What is to be feared are “noble persons that are poor and discontented.” The seed of sedition is discovered when there is a “multitude” of unemployed men, but especially when “those that are learned have no employment, for these are more apt to stir than any other.” The “nursery of seditious and rebellious spirits” is scholars “bred without certain maintenance.” Unpaid but capable, these scholars are prone to rebellion.
To avoid the greater riling up the meaner, princes do well to provide moderate pressure release valves regularly, “for he that turneth the humors back, and maketh the wound bleed inwards, endangereth malign ulcers and pernicious imposthumations.” Taken together, the best way to avoid sedition from either poverty or discontentment is to provide both good policy and hope to people. Full bellies and occasional opportunity to air grievances keep people satisfied and subdued. Machiavelli says much the same. This, in part, will maintain the “greatness of reputation” for a prince; it will instill confidence in his rule even with the discontented party.
But the truly wise prince will keep “great persons” close to him, employed in work that supports his rule rather than that of discontentment, great persons of aptitude and education being those who through charisma and speech could excite common people to sedition.
Likewise, Jean Bodin (1520-1596), outlining the causes of revolutions: changes in law or religion, cruelty of tyrants, or indignation of the people when the highest offices become bestial and cowardly, all these are causes of revolution. All these are present today in our own commonwealth, we might add. (“If by any chance some among the poor and humble citizens also wanted a share in sovereignty, they beguiled them with the fable of the hares who wished to command lions… [the danger to aristocracies is] intensified when foreigners are freely admitted into the city and settle in large numbers,” etc.)
But Bodin, like Bacon, observers that revolutions befall aristocracies and popular states often because
“There is no more common occasion than the ambition of proud men, who cannot obtain the rewards on which they have fixed their desires, and so constitute themselves the friends of the people and enemies of the noblesse… This is all the easier to accomplish when unworthy persons are preferred to positions of honour and trust, and those who are worthy of them excluded.”
Unrewarded or unemployed men of ability and ambition will destabilize a ruling order, especially when coupled with a disgruntled underclass—their grievances are, at root, the same. As I’ve pointed out before, this was the lesson E. Digby Balzell supplied in the wake of the WASP collapse.
At the same time, as Bacon cautions, turning learning or acquisition of knowledge into a “lucrative or mercenary occupation” will itself breed sedition in those denied patronage and, more pressingly, corrupt knowledge itself. So, keep the promising scholars close if you want to maintain your regime, but do not turn them into obvious toadies—something Bacon discusses in Advancement of Learning—nor fence the boundaries of patronage too tightly. It’s a delicate balance, to be sure. But even if you, a leader of a regime, do not care about learning for its own sake, you must care about potential rebels, especially if they are smart and ambitious and charismatic, and especially if, as an unemployed scholar, they articulate things to the masses that expose your own incestuousness, corruption, and sophistry or degradation of learning.
These upstarts might not possess the gentility, respectability, and credibility of your court tutors, but it is advisable to keep them on your side through your benefaction if you want to maintain power. Being a monarch or an aristocrat—welding power—is never as simple or gratuitous as it sounds. You have to tolerate a lot of unsavory people of low birth, it turns out. “Off with his head!” isn’t usually a successful, sustainable style of governance, especially if used unsparingly and against those unemployed, discontent, charismatic, and capable scholars. Exile is an even worse solution for these types. Consider the cases of the apostle John, Cicero, Calvin, and Napoleon.
Even if short lived, Savonarola can do some damage; Hus can do more; Luther can do even more. And you can’t freeze out all of them forever. Machiavelli might have died an exiled country scholar, uncredentialed, self-publishing books for friends on how to LARP the ancients, but how many regimes did he topple, create, or re-invent posthumously? Had the Medici kept him close and employed after 1512, they could have spared future despots from seditions.
You, aspirant aristocrat, really can’t be too careful out there. Keeping scholars employed and ensuring that modes of redress are open and intact are key measures. Absent these measures, revolt or invasion are inevitable. The disgraced Florentine (on Livy) provides an illustrative example. He tells of how in Chiusi, “a very noble city in Tuscany in those times,” one Arruns claimed that his sister was violated by a man named Lucumo. There was no outlet of redress for Arruns “because of the power of the violator.” And so, Arruns appealed to the French in Lombardy.
“He urged them to come with arms in hand to Chiusi, showing them that they could avenge the injury received usefully to themselves. If Arruns had seen that he could avenge himself with the modes of the city, he would not have sought out barbarian forces.”
Such discontent is to be avoided at all costs. No matter how righteous and legitimate your regime may be, such sedition is a threat if you do not reward the deserving and pacify the aggrieved.
Patronage Problem
Returning to the case of the Evangelical elite, what we are talking about, in plain terms, is a patronage problem. You, Evangelical elite, most definitely have this problem. You are not rewarding the right people or redressing the right grievances. You are only enriching yourself. Your standard of inclusion and exclusion is off. This is not good unless you want disgruntled scholars riling up the masses and leading barbarians into the gate. Let’s describe what this problem looks like in your context a bit more.
A few months ago, Aaron Renn inquired into why there are so few “Evangelical elites.” He didn’t mean an Evangelical elite like yourself, that is, someone with “elite” status within Evangelical institutions or social circles. Renn was talking about Evangelicals who occupy “the senior most positions of the key culture shaping domains of society” writ large. At least one reason we don’t have Evangelical elites like that is “a lack of patronage or support for non-ecclesial work.” Evangelicals do not invest in non-pastoral, non-ministerial talent. Evangelicalism is largely driven by clerical personalities. Renn demonstrates with several examples of “200% respectable” people: Brad Littlejohn has only been employed by Roman Catholics and Jews; James Wood had to find an academic job in Canada (after working for a Roman Catholic magazine); Brad Vermurlen found employment at a Catholic university (and then converted to Rome). Renn pulled these names from the broad, informal community formed around the Reformed Irenics mailing list where, 10 years ago, all the serious, “high potential” Reformed Evangelicals were hanging out, trading notes and debating historical theology. It’s a good case study for this point.
Renn could have added Miles Smith to the list who is also respectable and credentialed. He teaches at Hillsdale College which was founded by Free Will Baptists but is officially non-sectarian Christian and unofficially Anglo-Catholic. It’s not an Evangelical institution. And though its acceptance rates are consistently decreasing, it ranks in the top 50 liberal arts colleges, has good graduate school placement, and its endowment has ballooned, it is not elite. Meaning, it’s not a top research university and it doesn’t have little Ivy status. There are scholars there like Tom West and Paul Rahe who have produced top tier scholarship and published books with leading presses, but both are aging and nobody else at Hillsdale is likely to match their accomplishments. Insofar as the college has begun to garner more (deserved) prestige it is limited to conservative ecosystems and expedited by its affiliation with the populist politics of the Trump era, i.e., not because it has acquired the elite badge.
All of these people are credentialed, scholarly, and talented but received little to no support from Evangelical institutions. Why didn’t said institutions either snatch them up for themselves or work to propel them to “mainstream” posts? Renn provides more commentary on how the network of Evangelical “mafias” function, contrasting it with the superior performance of Roman Catholics in elite development.
Thus far, Renn. That’s one part of the patronage problem. You, Evangelical elite, are not retaining potential talent, those people who fit the bill, who are “200% respectable,” as Renn put it. If you fail in this regard, you will not be able to reproduce or extend your rule. You aspire to elite status, you take all your cues from the broad mainstream elite world, but you neither staff your own colleges (i.e., elite production) nor staff those outside your predominantly clerical institutions. This makes Evangelical institutions and networks look weak and unattractive.
Wolves at the Gate
There’s another more pressing part of this problem, worse than ceding talent to foreign or papist institutions. Retaining the 200% respectable people should be easy. They come readymade for your institutions. Their ideas are, by definition, not seditious. Dealing with the less respectable, subversive scholars is harder but more necessary. It requires, shall we say, toleration. That is, if you want to keep your enemies close and project confidence and power. This may sound counterintuitive, but to maintain your standards, whether supplied by the broader elite apparatus or developed in-house through the timeless exegesis of the 20th century, you must tolerate, embrace even, those who would threaten that very thing. Unchained and ravenous in the wild, wolves will show up at your gate eventually. You could have just fed them well. Domesticating wolves is tough but it’s better than the alternative.
Remember, unemployed scholars are your biggest problem; a close second is unaddressed grievances. As detailed above, what’s not effective is snubbing dangerous men who have dangerous ideas, especially if those dangerous ideas are true, fresh, and compelling. If you cannot tolerate such associations, then seditions will envelop you. That you are not fit to rule, that your dogma is stale, that you have no idea where you are going becomes apparent to everyone. Ruthless gatekeeping might keep the rabble out. That’s easy. It will not work against able men. Incessant denunciations of them are also ineffective, as are incessant recitations of the dogma being challenged by them. If you try that, you will only further incite the mob and expose your own weakness. Able men will find other means. They will circumvent your fortifications and conquer the countryside. It is much better to warmly embrace promising unemployed scholars. Until Evangelical elites do that the discontent will mount, commoners will riot, and barbarians will incircle the city. Actually running things demands for what Bullinger called a “princely stomach.” Of course, you can go down in a flame of glory, clutching your purity tightly. Politics is dirty after all. But this letter has been about how to rule well, not how to lose badly, of which you need no instruction.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.