The Scattered Fifth

Engaging Across the Moral Classes — No. 10 of 13

This series has sorted people by a single question: how a man responds when his convictions require real sacrifice. Holding beliefs is necessary but insufficient. What a man will pay for tells you nearly everything, and cuts across creed and class. It leaves five kinds of person on different ground. At one end, a few who deliberately harm others, perhaps one in twenty. Beside them, a larger group who serve themselves at everyone else’s expense and sleep well and live happy lives all the same. In the middle, most people: well-meaning, movable, holding whatever the room rewards at any given point. Nearer the far end, a smaller group who are trying and paying for it, but not yet steady on their feet. And at the far end, no more numerous than the cruel few, the men who hold under load and do the work against their own decline whether or not anyone is watching.

I am probably repeating myself ad nauseum but want to stress the prime differentiators for where we land on the moral distribution. First, do you rationalize harm or callous exploitation of others for gain, or do you refuse and resist certain acts that you know will rob others of dignity, respect or safety? Second, do you reason your way to sound principles and deliberate on actions that cohere to those principles, or follow whatever example of the people you idolize and seek acceptance from? Lastly, are you willing to endure risk and loss to uphold those principles, or will you submit to any credible threat that assaults those principles? The top fifth, the formed and those climbing toward them, share many of their neighbors’ opinions and differ only in how hard they earned them and what they will pay to keep them.

If you are one of them, you have probably reached a conclusion about your own numbers, and it is wrong. You look around your office and you are the only one who will not submit to bullies, tyrants or management sociopaths. You look around your family and your trade and you seem to be the last man holding your position on fully reasoned stable principles. From this you decide that your kind has all but died out, a remnant of breed of men that only exists in fiction and historical accounts. The feeling behind that is honest. But it is wrong.

You are not rare so much as isolated. The men who would know you on sight are real and many, and each of them mans their own lonely outpost, each certain he is the last of his line. They stay invisible to one another because vice and virtue behave differently in a crowd. Appetite gathers. The men who trade on decay are drawn to the same industries, professions and venues from the same hungers, they find each other quickly, and they say plainly what they want. Conscience has no such pull. The man who holds his line holds it in his own corner, wanting nothing and announcing nothing, giving off no signal another man like him could follow. So the corrupt end up organized and mobilized and the decent end up scattered and weak.

It was not always like this. For most of history the formed did not have to look for one another; they were made and gathered in a single motion, by institutions that laid claim to a man’s whole life. Craftsmen had their guilds where the young would apprentice for many years under the strict discipline and tutelage of masters in their art. A knight was the work of over a decade of hardship, sworn to a lord and expected to die if the oath asked it. The military orders demanded that and more. A Templar or a Hospitaller surrendered property, a wife, and sons of his own, and took in return a rule, a habit, and a company of men under the same vows in every kingdom of Christendom. A man bound that way never wondered whether others like him were out there. He ate beside them.

That world also had somewhere to put the men it could not otherwise place. Under the old inheritance laws the whole estate went to the eldest son, which left younger sons, the illegitimate, and the orphaned to choose between the cloister and the sword. It was hard on them, and we were right to end it. But it carried a man born with no prospects, almost by default, into an institution that would form him and hand him brothers. The monastery took the boy nobody else could place, taught him, disciplined him, and made him part of a body with a rule and a memory. Even the man with nothing got a training and a home.

War did the rest, at a cost no one should look back on with longing. The great wars of the last century were catastrophes, and a catastrophe sorts men. Under fire, character stops being a matter of opinion. It shows at once, to everyone nearby, and the men who hold rise in the eyes of the men who watch them do it. The battalions of the Second World War produced such men by the thousand and bound them into brotherhoods that outlived the peace, so that fifty years on they still gathered, still knew precisely which of them had been the real thing. The war was a horror. It still made men and bound them better than anything we have managed since.

These arrangements shared a shape. Each made men by laying on them a cost they had not chosen, and each delivered the made men into a standing body they could see and join. Modernity has undone both halves. The institutions have thinned or secularized or closed, the channels that fed them are gone, and the steady hardship that once tested men in bulk has given way, for most of us, to a life so safe and comfortable that it asks almost nothing and so reveals almost nothing. That comfort is a mercy, and few who have it would give it back. It came with an unpaid bill all the same. The world no longer makes the formed in company or gathers them anywhere. Formation goes on; it has only gone private, one man at a time, each in a separate trial, with nothing to turn the many into a cohort and nowhere for a cohort to meet.

Some of the old machinery still runs. A church gathers a certain kind of serious man and sets others beside him; so does a hard regiment, an old trade that keeps its standards, a few institutions that have not forgotten how to demand something of a person. If you belong to one of these, you already hold part of the answer, and you should prize it more than you do.

But a church reaches only the churched, and its share of the country slips a little further each year. More and more men carry real moral weight and belong to no congregation that could hold them. They have the conscience and none of the housing for it. No building takes them in, no rule tells them they have found their own, no name exists that another of their kind would answer to. They are as formed as any monk or knight, and there is no house that will have them.

So the problem is new only in the sense that its old answers have expired. Earlier ages solved it without meaning to, through arrangements most of us are glad to be free of. Take out the cruelty, as we have, and the machinery that happened to make and gather good men leaves with it. What that hard world produced for free, a soft one has to build on purpose or do without. The tempting build is a club: collect the interested, set out the chairs, and trust shared concern to hold them. It holds nothing. A club asks nothing, and whatever asks nothing forms no one, which only reproduces on a smaller scale the failure of the comfortable age it meant to answer. Whatever finally gathers the scattered fifth will have to ask of a man what the old orders asked, a real cost, given freely now that no lord or bishop or war remains to compel it, and it will have to ask without demanding that he stop being the Catholic, Protestant, Jew or other, or the officer or enlisted, or the private citizen he already is.

That is the work the last three articles of this series takes up. For now one correction is enough, because everything after it depends on the correction being made. The formed man is not the last of bygone order or breed. He is one of a scattered many, isolated only because the age no longer makes such men in company, save for a few exceptions, and he stands in a longer line than he possibly realizes. What older and harder ages handed their kind without being asked, his age will give him only if he and his moral kin set out to build it. They are out there. The critical question is if they can be rallied or not to counter the amply observed social effects of the Selfish and Malicious. Let us turn to how this might be possible next.