Historical Exemplarism in Short-Lived Empires and Long-Lived Influence
Addendum on Napoleon as Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
In my episode on Napoleon I discussed Huizinga’s essay on historical ideals, and I suggested that probably few young boys today dream about growing up to be Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, or Napoleon. This is something I want to talk about in more detail. More particularly, I want to talk about historical ideals in the context of short-lived empires and long-lived influence. Why was a mosaic of the Battle of Issus installed in a Roman house in Pompeii about two hundred years after the battle took place? Why not a mosaic of a battle from the Punic wars, like the Battle of Agrigentum, rather than a battle fought between Greeks and Persians, both of whom the Romans fought? And why was Albrecht Altdorfer commissioned to paint The Battle of Issus almost two thousand years after the fact in 1529? Aside from claims of the battle itself being a turning point in history, there is the figure of Alexander the Great as what Huizinga called an historical ideal.
I’ve been reading and re-reading Huizinga’s lecture on historical ideals. Each time I read it I derive something more from it. Huizinga’s first example of historical ideals at work in history is Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. Charles lived from 10 November 1433 to 05 January 1477, so very late in the Middle Ages, on the cusp of modernity. Of Charles the Bold Philip de Commines wrote:
“His ambitious desire of glory was insatiable, and it was that which more than any other motive induced him to engage eternally in wars. He earnestly desired to imitate the old kings and heroes of antiquity, who are still so much talked of in the world, and his courage was equal to that of any prince of his time.” (Memoirs, Book the Fifth, Chapter IX)
Another contemporary historian, Filips Wielant (1441/2–1520), wrote:
“He… delighted only in romantic histories and the feats of Julius Caesar, Pompey, Hannibal, Alexander the Great, and many other great and high men, whom he wished to follow and imitate.”
Being motivated in this way to emulate the great generals of antiquity was a source of inspiration and aspiration for Charles, but it had the practical effect of involving him in continual warfare, which did not ultimately benefit his kingdom. In fact, Burgundy collapsed after Charles’ death and thereafter ceased to be an independent political entity. The kingdom of Burgundy had a history of about a thousand years, although it took many different forms during that long history. Strictly on the basis of longevity, the shade of Alexander the Great should have hailed the shade of Charles the Bold when they met in Hades, but that’s not the way it works.
Everyone has heard of Alexander the Great, while only medieval historians know Charles the Bold, and admiration is almost an inverse indicator of longevity.
It has been the ephemeral episodes of history that have been transformed into historical ideals. There have been many long-lived kingdoms and empires in human history, and they attract our attention, but not in the same way. The Hittite Empire lasted about 500 years. The Assyrian Empire lasted more than 1,000 years, though for hundreds of years it was a city-state before it was an empire. I don’t know if it’s accurate to call the Egyptians an empire, but they were the granddaddy of ancient civilizations, lasting almost 3,000 years.
The Roman Empire lasted about 500 years, preceded by hundreds of years as a republic. We can take the Byzantine Empire separately as a political entity that lasted more than a thousand years. If we add the Byzantine Empire as part of Rome, and include Republican Rome, then the history of Roman civilization becomes a competitor to Egypt, lasting more than 2,000 years. The Persian Empire lasted about 800 years before it was conquered by Alexander the great, but, as with Rome, we can sequence the Persian or Achaemenid Empire with other political formations of the Persian people and thereby obtain a much longer period.
These are all empires of the longue durée, and we can assign to them the properties of the longue durée. They are, effectively, the background structure of history against which events occur and conjunctures form. The reign of a given Roman Emperor could be a conjuncture, to use the language of Fernand Braudel, and while it might be possible to identify with a given Roman Emperor, as for example in the way that many people through history have admired Marcus Aurelius, an individual can’t identify with an empire even if one admires an empire. It is worth pointing out that figures like Charles the Bold identified with Alexander the Great because of Alexander’s military successes, while those who have identified with Marcus Aurelius tend to admire him for his philosophy and his governance, even thought Marcus spent much of his life engaged in military campaigns.
These long-lived empires, although known to us well enough, and perhaps admired for their role in development of civilization, didn’t inspire the admiration of individuals like Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, and Napoleon, and their short-lived empires. I am reminded here of a verse from the Wisdom of Solomon:
“For the hope of the ungodly is like dust that is blown away with the wind; like a thin froth that is driven away with the storm; like as the smoke which is dispersed here and there with a tempest, and passeth away as the remembrance of a guest that tarrieth but a day.” (5:14)
Nietzsche quoted the part about the remembrance of a guest that tarrieth but a day, as did Christina Rossetti in her poem “At Home.” This line has always stuck with me. The conquering heroes who tarried but a day on the stage of history are often better remembered than the civilizing empires that ruled for centuries. Alexander the Great’s entire career would fit neatly within a Braudelian conjuncture. Charlemagne’s empire, like Alexander’s, was divided as soon as he died, and the divisions came to define the longue durée of historical time in Europe, again, similar to the case with Alexander. Napoleon’s empire blew up like a balloon that burst as soon as Napoleon was defeated in battle.
France had a lot of rough years after Napoleon’s empire came to an end, with the Bourbon restoration, the July Revolution of 1830, the February Revolution of 1848, and the Paris commune of 1871. And all that was merely prelude to the world wars of the twentieth century. I could argue that these events have been romanticized every bit as much as Napoleon himself, and, like Napoleon, these were short-lived spasms of revolutionary violence with colorful figures of their own. What might we take as the antithesis to colorful figures like Alexander the Great or Louise Michel, the “Red Virgin of Montmartre” famous from the Paris Commune?
Here’s one example: did any child ever aspire to emulate Justinian? John Roberts said in his The Triumph of the West:
“Justinian seems to have been thoroughly unpleasant — deceptive, mean, suspicious, ungrateful — but he was also ambitious, and behaved as an emperor was expected to behave: vigorously and despotically.”
Justinian and his wife Theodora were made notorious by his own court historian, Procopius, and it could be argued that this set the tone for later historical treatments of Justinian. I could argue that Belisaurius’ re-conquests of Roman lands under Justinian were as short-lived as the empires of Alexander, Charlemagne, and Napoleon, but Justinian didn’t merely oversee conquests of land. He commissioned Hagia Sophia and the Corpus Iuris Civilis.
Byzantium, positioned between the West and Islam, shaped civilizations on both sides of that divide. The architecture of Hagia Sophia has influenced Islamic civilization as profoundly Western cityscapes — the dome on a square became the standard form of a mosque after Constantinople was taken by the Turks. And Roman law became the standard to which the Western world aspire. Roman law was drawn up in its definitive form under Justinian with the Corpus Iuris Civilis. Hegel said that this body of law, “still excites the admiration of the world.”
For all these contributions, Byzantium has been treated unkindly by historians. Before history began to reconfigure itself to appear more scientific, and it was a more transparently moral endeavor, the Byzantines were stereotyped as being cruel, corrupt, and decadent. My quote from John Roberts shows how some of these attitudes remained current into the twentieth century. In western scholarship it has been the tradition to write off the Byzantine Empire as essentially unworthy of historical study. E. R. A. Sewter, the translator of Michael Psellos’ Chronographia, which is a history of Byzantine emperors from Basil II to Michael VII, covering about a century, wrote of the impression of Byzantium he received in his school days:
“The miserable Byzantines were pale reflections of decadent Greeks: their art was stereotyped, lacking in inspiration, and stiff; their form of government was static and inefficient, their literature debased.”
But this characterization begs the question, further along in the same paragraph:
“…if they were so inferior, how did these wretched Byzantines manage to survive so long after the collapse of the West? and what about Santa Sophia? and wasn’t a millennium rather a long time for a sustained decline?”
Recent scholars, in trying to redress the historical wrongs against Byzantium, instead deny that it existed at all, asserting that it was Roman and nothing but Roman and should receive no distinctive, separate recognition. Hegel at least acknowledged the existence of Byzantium, and he begins on a note that sounds somewhat sympathetic:
“The Byzantine Empire is a grand example of how the Christian religion may maintain an abstract character among a cultivated people, if the whole organization of the State and of the Laws is not reconstructed in harmony with its principle.”
After this, it all goes downhill, and the picture he painted of Byzantium wasn’t very pretty:
“The history of the highly civilized Eastern Empire… exhibits to us a millennial series of uninterrupted crimes, weaknesses, basenesses and want of principle; a most repulsive and consequently a most uninteresting picture.”
To illustrate how the spiritual had become unspiritual in Byzantium, Hegel attributed the following to Gregory Nazianzen:
“Constantinople is full of handicraftsmen and slaves, who are all profound theologians, and preach in their workshops and in the streets. If you want a man to change a piece of silver, he instructs you in which consists the distinction between the Father and the Son; if you ask the price of a loaf of bread, you receive for answer, that the Son is inferior to the Father; and if you ask, whether the bread is ready, the rejoinder is that the genesis of the Son was from nothing.”
Hegel was probably quoting from memory. I wanted to find the source of this, which was a remembered quote, translated from German into English. Finding this was not easy. I checked all three English language translations of Hegel’s Philosophy of History and none of them footnote this passage. I searched in several works by Gregory Nazianzen and found nothing, but then had the idea of looking up the German edition of Hegel, edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Here I found the passage footnoted and a reference I could follow up.
One thing that I learned in this search for the source of this passage is that there has been no English translation of the German critical edition of Hegel’s Philosophy of History. That surprised me. Even if philosophy of history is poorly represented in Anglo-American analytical philosophy, and Hegel only serves as a stalking horse and Bête noire, I expected that someone at some time would have taken the trouble to translate the definitive edition of what is arguably Hegel’s definitive book (or notes for his lectures, if you want to split hairs), or even that there might be an annotated English edition somewhere that explained all of the references that Hegel made, but no. The series Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought includes a good edition of Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right, with textual apparatus and variant readings, so I checked the Cambridge University Press website to find what I thought would be a parallel edition of other Hegel texts, but there was no edition of Hegel’s Philosophy of History.
In any case, the quote is not from Gregory of Nazianzen, but from Gregory of Nyssa — an understandable conflation as they were contemporaries and both are known as Cappadocian Fathers, along with Basil the Great, who was Gregory of Nyssa’s older brother. So here is the quote that Hegel misremembered and misattributed:
“…Everywhere, in the public squares, at crossroads, on the streets and lanes, people would stop you and discourse at random about the Trinity. If you asked something of a moneychanger, he would begin discussing the question of the Begotten and the Unbegotten. If you questioned a baker about the price of bread, he would answer that the Father is greater and the Son is subordinate to Him. If you went to take a bath, the… bath attendant would tell you that in his opinion the Son simply comes from nothing…”
This is from Gregory of Nyssa’s Oratio de deitate Filii et Spiritus Sancti, which is not an easy text to find, but it is included in the Patrologia Graeca, which is now in the public domain. I found a website that has the Latin text, the Greek text, and a couple of English translations. The study of Byzantium is now considered more legitimate than was ever previously the case, but the point remains that no child dreams of emulating Justinian, Nicepherus Phocas, or Alexios Comnenus.
But if the Byzantines were bad, then the Holy Roman Empire was regarded as something altogether much worse. We can trace the origins of the Holy Roman Empire to Charlemagne being crowned emperor by Pope Leo III on Christmas day, 800 AD, and Charlemagne is one of our exemplars of an historical ideal. Charlemagne’s attempted resurrection of the Roman Empire, if that’s what it was, wasn’t very successful, as I have noted Charlemagne’s empire was divided up immediate upon his death, and the divisions of the empire eventually became, after many transformations, the Franco-German rivalry that resulted in the world wars of the twentieth century, and for which the European Union was supposed to be the solution. Charlemagne’s resurrection of the Roman Empire was itself resurrected by Otto I in 962 AD, and thereafter it enjoyed a degree of historical continuity even if not much historical legitimacy.
The tradition has been to sneer at the Holy Roman Empire as Voltaire did when he said it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire, but its institutions endured for almost a millennium. Nevertheless, it was a workable political framework for much of the Middle Ages. Kenneth Clark said of the late Middle Ages prior to the Protestant Reformation that the civilization of northern Europe seemed to be designed to last forever, with no material reason for change. He cites wealthy merchants, self-satisfied guilds, and a conveniently loose political organization as reasons for this interpretation. (This aside on the unlikely origins of the Protestant Reformation does not appear in the book, only in the television presentation.)
In any case, the political organization of the Holy Roman Empire was indeed conveniently loose. It was so loose that it is difficult to say where the Holy Roman Empire left off and some other social formation began. The Holy Roman Empire was also a loosely democratic institution, by which I mean that the emperor was elected. The franchise, however, was quite narrowly conceived. Originally there were seven electors in the electoral college of the Holy Roman Empire — three ecclesiastical Electors, which were the Archbishop of Mainz, the Archbishop of Trier, and he Archbishop of Cologne, and four secular Electors, which were the King of Bohemia, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the Duke of Saxony, and the Margrave of Brandenburg. These arrangements changed repeatedly throughout the history of the Holy Roman Empire.
As I said, Charlemagne is one of our exemplars of an historical ideal, but his grand strategy to revive the Roman Empire was not successful. Frederick Barbarossa of the Hohenstaufen dynasty has had his admirers, though he was never as famous as Alexander the Great. The Middle Ages, which produced Frederick Barbarossa, had a particular love of historical ideals. One formalization of this admiration of historical ideals is provided by The Nine Worthies, which included three pagans — Hector, Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar — three Jews — Joshua, David, and Judas Maccabeus — and three Christians — King Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillon. The desire for symmetry of the medieval mind dictated that there should also be nine female worthies, and there are several different lists of Nine Worthy Women, or Lady Worthies, to this end.
In the Nine Worthies the Middle Ages brought together the passion to personalize history through the recognition of exemplary men and women throughout history, and not limited to Christendom, and their love of spectacular and colorful ceremonies. When Henry VI entered Paris in December 1431 to be crowned King — the only English King crowned both in England and France — he was preceded by 25 trumpeters, images of the total slate of 18 worthies, and a personal guard of at least 2,000 men. As jaded as we are today, I suspect that any one of us, had we been present, would have been impressed by the scene.
I’ve often quoted Joseph Campbell to the effect that a ritual is an opportunity to participate in a myth, and, during the Middle Ages, myth enjoyed an unbroken continuity with history, and was in fact transported into the present with rituals like this, in which every bystander participated vicariously. We can learn something from this identificatory and immersive relationship to history, which is a very human way to grasp the past. One might even say it was a human, all-too-human way to understand one’s place in history. Spectacular pageantry and rituals drew great crowds, so that the body politic participated in the activities of the great figures of contemporaneous history.
In the modern period we came to view this in a dim light, as though the mass of people were excluded from history. Everything in the Middle Ages, in fact, came to be viewed with condescension verging on contempt since the renaissance, and even more so since the Enlightenment. But the ongoing human interest in historical ideals couldn’t be completed erased from history. Thomas Carlyle was famous, or notorious, for proposing the great man theory of history, which we can see as a return to historical exemplars. In Carlyle’s hands the great man theory of history seemed a little vulgar — John Romer called Carlyle among the barmiest of the Victorians — but in other hands the great man theory of history can and has been formulated in more subtle terms, and historical exemplarism hints at this possibility.
First let’s review what historical examplarism is not. A history that focuses on heroes or geniuses or exemplars is the antithesis of social history. One of the most significant developments in history in the later twentieth century up to our time is the growth of social history, also called history from the bottom up. Social history was unknown before the Enlightenment, and now in the 21st century its influence all but overshadows every other approach to history. History had earlier focused on elites, not least because there are records of elites, and therefore a documentary basis for history.
The rise of social history is probably at least partly a consequence of the increasing prominence of archaeology in history. Traditional historians didn’t want to acknowledge any evidence other than texts and inscriptions, but as archaeology became more sophisticated, and began to make systematic use of scientific dating techniques for artifacts uncovered in archaeological digs, archaeology could no longer be ignored as a source of evidence for history. But the evidence that archaeologists uncover is largely the evidence of the ordinary lives of ordinary people. This isn’t exclusively the case, since archaeologists dig up palaces no less than ordinary houses, but there are a lot more houses than palaces to excavate. And the archaeological record is quantitative in an important sense. The life of the bulk of the people represents the bulk of the evidence. This is obviously true with the excavation of garbage dumps, which have proved to be a fruitful source of evidence for the reconstruction of past life. A garbage dump is the antithesis of a museum collection, in which every object is carefully selected for preservation. Garbage dumps are catchalls for everything thought unworthy of being preserved. A dump is an eminently democratic record of any society, and from this democratic record of society we derive (something like) a democratic history.
So far, so good. We have only gained from social history. But since social history usually comes to us coupled with a critique of traditional history focused on the great figures of history, as the tradition of social history has grown, it has in some quarters taken on an edge of ressentiment. With this ressentiment, the transition from what Nietzsche called monumental history, which recognizes the exemplars of history, to what he called critical history, which brings history before the bar of judgment in order to condemn it, is complete.
We have learned a lot from the efforts of social historians, but with the growing ressentiment stoked by these accounts, it is probably time to push back against the relentless denigration of our heroes and our ideals. It’s time to incorporate what we have learned from social history as the context within which more momentous events transpired. Exemplars of greatness stand out against a background of mediocrity. We couldn’t see the greatness were it not for the mediocrity that serves to frame it, but that doesn’t mean that mediocrity is greatness, or that it is noble and inspiring. Let me suggest a way to do this.
Just imagine how differently we would view Thomas Carlyle if, instead of the great man theory of history, it had been called an exemplarist theory of history, or historical exemplarism. In fact, there’s a theory of moral exemplarism. Linda Zagzebski’s book Exemplarist Moral Theory develops this idea, and we can in turn apply her examplarist moral theory to history for an exemplarist philosophy of history. In many episodes I have discussed the disconnect between philosophy of time and philosophy of history. Another important connection is between ethics and philosophy of history. Here we can’t really say that there has been a disconnect — I said earlier than history was a frankly moral endeavor before it gained pretentions to scientific status — but systematically integrating an ethical theory into philosophy of history or vice versa is rare.
Zagzebski’s exemplarist moral theory provides an opportunity for this when we understand that our moral exemplars are historical figures. It is also easy to see the close connection with virtue ethics, since the qualities we admire in moral exemplars are their virtues. However, the figures I have been talking about — Alexander, Charlemage, and Napoleon — are not usually admired for their virtues, though we could say that they have been admired for what Machiavelli called Virtù. Machiavelli’s Virtù is as likely to be misunderstood as Nietzsche’s Übermensch. It has been translated as “power,” but I would prefer to frame it in terms of the character expected of a gentleman, that is to say, Machiavelli’s Virtù can be understood as an aristocratic virtue.
These are the virtues we want our historical ideals to possess. Charlemagne, for example, was depicted as an ideally virtuous monarch by contemporary chroniclers. Zagzebski’s moral exemplarism identifies three classes of exemplars: the hero, the saint, and the sage. Charlemagne doesn’t seem to fit in any of these categories, and probably Alexander, Charlemagne, and Napoleon would belong to a distinct class of heroic exemplars, if we were to widen Zagzebski’s exemplars by adding further classes to her three.
Zagzebski says that moral exemplars are identified through admiration, and that admiration is an emotion. A full exposition of this would require a deep dive into the theory of emotion, but Zagzebski does give a sketch of her account of emotion. Zagzebski says that the object of admiration is “imitably attractive,” which means:
“(1) the object appears attractive, not repulsive or evaluatively neutral; (2) the way in which the object is attractive typically gives rise to the urge to imitate or emulate the object, assuming certain practical conditions are satisfied.”
We could say that moral exemplars show us embodied virtues engaged with the world, and in doing so the show us the reality of moral action. Zagzebski writes:
“Narratives of exemplars reveal what they hope for, what they dread, what (if anything) they worry about, what they aim for, how they organize their lives around other persons and projects, how much they care about non-moral goods such as aesthetic values and physical health, how much they enjoy life, and what, in particular, they enjoy.”
This brings exemplars down to Earth, and maybe a little too much, since one of the reasons that we admire exemplars is because they seem elevated above the ordinary. Historical ideals have been additionally removed from us by their historical distance. Like myth, legend, and folktale, historical ideals belonged almost to another order of being.
In my episode on Napoleon, I argued that we have made a shift from historical ideals to future ideals. Huizinga also made this observation: “…historical cultural ideals of a general human purport have apparently passed out of the picture.” While we have made a shift away from historical ideals, they haven’t entirely disappeared. What has happened, rather, is that our historical frame of reference has become much shallower than it was in the past.
In a couple of episodes, and most recently in my episode on Carl Becker, I talked about how the conceptual framework and the lifeways of the Middle Ages remained largely intact in Europe through the 18th century. This is why I often identify the industrial revolution as a macrohistorical change, since it represents the greatest change in human lifeways since the transition from hunter-gatherer nomadism to settled civilization with agriculture and cities. Any individual who lived prior to the industrial revolution could identify with another individual, whether from their own civilization of from some other civilization, finding much of the ordinary business of life intact across comparisons over hundreds or thousands of years. The life of a general in the fourth century BC was more like the life of a general in the 15th century AD, than the life of a general in the 17th century was like the life of a general in the 19th century, despite or order of magnitude greater historical distance in the former case.
Discontinuities in history create these disproportionate differences and similarities. I previously discussed this historical disproportion in my episode on Giovanni Gentile. The result of a great historical discontinuity is to cut us off from the past, and especially to cut us off from the deep past. This has happened previously in human history, when settled agriculturalists rapidly forgot their nomadic hunter-gatherer lifeways. The industrial revolution was a discontinuity that has cut us off from the lifeways of agricultural civilization, which we are rapidly forgetting as the past becomes increasingly foreign to us.
However, today, while we entertain many future ideals, we also retain some historical ideals, but these historical ideals are overwhelming drawn from the recent past, and, in particular, they are drawn from figures of science and technology. Our historical ideals are likely to be men like Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, or Manfred von Richtofen, the Red Baron. The Red Baron is an interesting example insofar as his life was even shorter than the life of Alexander the Great, since the Red Baron died in aerial combat at the age of 25 on 21 April 1918.
War is an ancient institution, but planetary-scale industrialized war making use of the newest technologies, technologies that rapidly changed even during the course of the war, was a new formation of history. By the end of the First World War the Germans were building the enormous Zeppelin-Staaken R.VI, which was a four-engine enclosed cockpit bomber that crossed the British channel for bombing raids. The sword used by Alexander the Great was not qualitatively distinct from the sword used by Charles the Bold, but the Fokker Triplane flown by the Red Baron was qualitatively distinct from any weapon used by Alexander the Great or Charles the Bold. I would even say that the difference between these two classes of weapons, those produced before the industrial revolution and those produced after the industrial revolution, can only be explained by the macrohistorical difference between these periods of human history.
The Italian futurists were among the first to see the radical discontinuity in history that had appeared. Filippo Marinetti wrote in his Futurist Manifesto in 1909:
“We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath — a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”
This was published in the same year as the Benz 200 PS Blitzen was built, which embodies what Marinetti imagined, and which set speed records first in Europe, and then in the US, where tracks were longer and higher speeds were possible. In a couple of episodes I’ve quoted Marc Bloch’s Strange Defeat, which was about the collapse of France in 1940, and how Bloch recognized that modern war was about speed. The Benz Blitzen, then, foreshadowed blitzkrieg.
This world of speed rapidly came into formation with the industrial revolution, and it will be maintained as a form of continuity within our industrial civilization for as long as it endures. We can imagine a time in the future, if our technological civilization endures for a thousand years, or two thousand years, or three thousand years, that future technological civilization will then possess a deep past of its own, distinctively technological in character, and early representatives of technological civilization like Edison, Einstein, and the Red Baron will be ancient men who nevertheless share with others from a technological era the same essential structures of life.
In my episode on Ernst Jünger I talked about how industrialized warfare was the boundary condition of a novel form of experience — the essential structures of technological life as iterated on the battlefield. In industrialized war, the soldier becomes a machine operator, with the output of the production being death and destruction. During both the First and Second World Wars German soldiers had a reputation for being able to coax the best performance from their war machines. The Germans, of course, have a reputation for engineering, and it was the same meticulous precision and eye for detail that makes a Mercedes or a BMW a great car that made German tanks, aircraft, and submarines the extraordinary weapons that they were.
And it wasn’t just the Red Baron who became a war hero because of his mastery of the new technology. We tend to think of Aces as being exclusively fighter pilots, but there were also tank aces like Michael Wittmann and Franz Bäke, and submarine aces like Joachim Schepke and Günther Prien. These men possessed technical virtues that made them especially effective in a technological age. Should we admire them for their technological prowess? It is easier to romanticize generals since they are farther from the killing, but generals like Napoleon and soldiers like the Red Baron were both engaged in the enterprise of war. And the Red Baron is a romantic figure in his own way, a legend in his own time, and a legend for us who understand life in an age of technology.
Ernst Jünger in describing the distinctive experience of industrialized warfare revealed another, unexpected face of this technological age. But everyone isn’t cut out for this world in which mechanical aptitude is a selection pressure. In my episode on Simone Weil I mentioned her factory journal, from when she worked at a Alsthom plant on Rue Le Courbe in Paris, which was once an industrial suburb, so that she could share in the tribulations of the workers. Alsthom made rolling stock for the railways and they’re still a major industrial concern in Europe.
If you read between the lines of Weil’’s factory journal it is obvious that she knew she wasn’t good at the work and that others around her had to pick up the slack for her lack of performance. What this means in real terms is that she made the life of other workers more difficult so that she could get the experience from them that she wanted. This, in turn, shows us how completely unable Weil was to understand the working class, whose privations she supposedly wanted to share, because anyone who has actually lived a working class life knows that don’t make someone else’s job more difficult unless you have a beef with them and you’re trying to pick a fight. There is very little difference between Marie Antoinette pretending to be a milkmaid and Simone Weil pretending to be a machine operator or a soldier.
For those who are cut out for life in a technological society, for Edison, Einstein, the Red Baron, and Ernst Jünger, there is also the difficult problem of translating aristocratic virtues, whether the virtues as they appear in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics or as they appear in Machiavelli’s Virtù, into virtues appropriate for a democratic age. It could be argued that we ought to leave aristocratic virtues in the past and cultivate democratic virtues for a democratic age, but I believe that we need the aristocratic virtues more than ever, and that our historical ideals of industrialized civilization, however shallow the tradition, are what can symbolize this for us. But I have gone on long enough, and I will leave the further development of this theme for another time.
