Albert coten, anders jaikies, frank relleau, and Harold Kames—the four sat in a row. On one end was Coten, his cuffed flannels, tailored in gray-purple Super 150s, falling finely over his crossed legs. He sat up in his chair and pulled it imperceptibly forward before settling back. An old Monte-grappa cut across the blank legal pad in his lap. The ruby celluloid of the pen held the light, glowing as if lit from within.
Kames, at the other end, reset the sleeve of his blazer to a half-inch of his shirtsleeve. He fingered a cufflink as his watery gaze met the broad doors at the back of the auditorium. Relleau and Jaikies, sitting between the other two, only looked into the stage lights.
Men and women, middle aged and primly dressed, had filled most of the seats, except for the rows in front, which were occupied by younger men, mostly students wearing the off-duty uniform of the well bred: loafers, shaggy-dog sweaters, and button-downs with rumpled collars. Two generations of Halsley wealth.
The hundred odd seats, arranged in several tiers, were three-quarters full now, and the flow through the doors had slowed to a trickle. Kames stood and took the podium.
“Let’s begin, I think,” he said. “To start, then, a brief statement of tonight’s theme. My colleagues and I—some of you will know this—have been thinking through, over the last months, a few of the contrasts that give shape to political orders, social orders. Tonight we want to see if we can throw a bit of light on that between the mercantile and the martial. By mercantile we mean not the economic theory of that name so much as the broader orientation of the merchant toward life, and of societies that take the merchant’s outlook, if only implicitly, as the primary mode by which to apprehend the world. Societies that treat the merchant as offering a template for citizenship, you could say. In the same way, by martial we mean the outlook of the warrior—not only the brutish or rapacious conqueror, but equally, the defender, the guardian.
“Except for our revolutionary period, and not even then, really, this country has never known anything resembling a martial order, or its common descendant, the royal order, the earliest monarchs often being triumphant warlords themselves, if they are not backed by them. The martial and the noble, the royal, these are really one category.
“Now, to put it in the crudest, quickest way, one which I can only hope we will improve on tonight, the merchant’s life is built around a particular ethos, we can say, one that invests certain notions with special importance. Among these: exchangeability, trade, consumption, profit, calculation, consensus, negotiation, persuasion, dissimulation, connivance.
“The values of the noble are, as we said, molded by the demands of war. So we have the knights of Europe, the samurais of Japan, the kshatriyas of India. The appealing qualities first: courage, honor, loyalty in action. And then the less approachable ones, which are nonetheless bound up with the others: an acceptance of the necessity, and the permanent possibility, of violence; of the unequal distribution of virtue and wisdom among men; and of the reality of unexchangeability—of seeing some matters as musts, whatever the cost, personal or social, which you can call, in a language that will be familiar to our philosophers, the deontological limits on action and citizenship, ones that cannot be gainsaid or inputted into any broader moral calculus.
“This is much too simple, of course, but it gives the flavor, I hope, of what’s to come.” Kames looked back on the other three and lifted his brow. “Anything to add, then, just at the start? Surely I’ve muddled things. Albert, will you help?” There was mild laughter.
Coten put his hands on his thighs and cleared his throat. “Sure. My own training,” he said, still seated, “is in the philosophy of politics, as Harold’s is in law and history. I would just add the following. If—if—you think virtue and wisdom should have pride of place in our social decision-making, there is, and it’s distressing, there is no guarantee that decisions made that way will yield popular consent. The ‘wisdom of crowds’ is reassuring, and if you look hard enough you can find cases that seem to substantiate it. But there are too many negative results to sustain the idea. It just doesn’t look like the popular bears an inherent correspondence to the good. We take this as a truism in domains outside politics. In art, of course, but also in science. We don’t take polls to decide on the load-bearing capacities of bridge designs. We leave it to the people who know better. Should we assume politics must be different?
“So this is another way of seeing the dispute between the noble and the merchant, for whom popularity, in the end, not goodness, accuracy, quality, strength, beauty, and so forth, must be the guiding principle. And that’s just because the most valuable product, from the merchant’s point of view, must be the one that sells. Otherwise, well, he goes out of business.”
Relleau, a political correspondent for Halsley’s newspaper of record, with a master’s-level training in both history and anthropology, brushed blond curls from his eyes before taking his turn. “If one looks at our situation, where conceptions of the good are now beyond number, and where the communities answering to many of these conceptions are perpetually stymied in the elections, simply for lacking scale, numbers, it’s difficult to tell them that our political arrangements are as they should be. Anyway they aren’t listening, are they? Coalitions in the legislature, and between interest groups, are the obvious route in situations like this, and we have gotten that for some time. But what is more interesting, and newer, is how the last decade has seen a kind of turn toward other approaches, in particular, to certain forms of aggression, not always of a bloody sort, or mounted directly against the people, but against state institutions. Infrastructure—assembly halls, schools, and so forth. But that is still violence, dead bodies or not. And it might be a more potent one in the end, we don’t know. The elections, in November, might tell us. We’ll see how many are brave enough to show up at the polling stations.
“In some ways, however, it isn’t an altogether different approach, because this extra-democratic aggression has itself turned coalitional. We hear of libertarians, and also the advocates of direct democracy, collaborating in some of the destruction—in its funding and sometimes its execution—of voting booths, subways, public monuments. We hear even of Muslim and Christian groups acting jointly. And they are targeting not just abortion clinics, but scientific institutions more generally: the flooding of UCLA’s genomics center, most recently. This sort of collaboration was unthinkable just ten years ago. But today they are agreed on something, the substance of which isn’t totally clear, even to them, one feels.
“But this is getting pretty speculative, so I think I’ll leave it there. What do you make of this, Anders? Your research intersects with this in interesting ways.”
The young sociologist with the burgeoning reputation, formerly of Bonn but now full-time at the Wintry Institute, leaned over the arm of his chair toward Relleau. “For just the reason you mention, I’m going to save my remarks for the discussion. If that’s all right,” he said, smiling broadly.
“That’s just fine, Anders,” Kames said. “I think they’ve had all they can take of general remarks, anyway. So, we’ll all do just twenty minutes or so, and at the end we will open up the discussion to our very patient audience, for an hour or beyond, whatever we are feeling like.
“And I did mean to say at the start—I’ll say it now—thank you, to our guests, fellows, and regular attendees, for coming to these sessions of the Wintry Institute. And of course to our founding donors, who have put us in a financial position to forget about finances. It’s left us free to follow the argument wherever it leads, to examine our homilies open-endedly, without thumbs on the scale. We are very lucky to be what we are. Let’s see where we go tonight.”