In search of nobility

Peregrine Worsthorne

Any call for denying noblemen a hereditary right to a seat in Parliament is certain to seem sensible in the present democratic climate. So Lord Home's committee, which is about to make recommendations towards this end on behalf of the Tory Party, can expect to run into little opposition. If even an erstwhile fourteenth Earl wants to reduce the political role of the old nobility, then who gm Ito cavil?

Nor indeed am I tempted to do so, since there is really no case to be made any longer for having hereditary nobles in Parliament. But this is not because they are nobles. It is because they have ceased to be nobles, except in name. It is because they are now commoners, not nobles, that they no longer deserve to enjoy this special privilege.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, a noble is someone showing greatness of

character, who is splendid, magnificent, stately, imposing, impressive, excellent and admirable. If the nobility really were all these things, then it would make per fect sense to allow them privileged access to the seats of power and influence. But very few of them do measure up to this description, being, for the most part, quite indistinguishable from everybody else.

This point needs emphasising, since it would be very unfortunate if people were to conclude that the idea or ideal of nobility in public affairs had been made less relevant by the advance of demo cracy. Nothing could be further from the truth. For if democracy really does mean reducing the public influence of those showing greatness of character etc etc, then so much the worse for democracy.

In fact, of course, the supposed conflict between the ideal of democracy and the ideal of nobility is based on an unfor tunate confusion about the meaning of the word 'nobility' which, in popular par lance, has come to mean exactly the opposite of what it ought to mean, and originally did mean. Originally it was applied to those who had proved themselves by some outstanding service to the public weal, either on the field of battle, as warriors, or in the council chamber, as statesman, or at the altar, as priests, to those, in short, who had chosen to live lives of exceptional rigour and risk. Far from the nobles being people who enjoyed exceptional security and ease, they were people whose merit lay in their conscious choice of danger, in their willingness to submit themselves to a far greater measure of discipline than the ordinary mass of men who made no effort to excel.

Nobility, in short, was not so much a favour as a conquest, something won, not given, and far from being associated with a passive life of ease and indulgence, it was associated with an active life of struggle and exertion. Ortega y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher, put the point superbly: 'Contrary to what is usually thought, it is the man of excellence, and not the common man who lives in essential servitude. Life has no savour for him unless he makes it consist of service to something transcendental. Hence he does not look upon the necessity of serving as an oppression. When, by chance, such necessity is lacking, he grows listless and invents some new standard, more difficult, more exigent, with which to coerce himself. This is life lived as a discipline — the noble life.'

Or, as Goethe wrote: `To live as one likes is plebeian: the noble man aspires to law and order.' Confusion on this score only crept in with the advent of hereditary nobility, which in some ways is a contradiction in terms, since no one who inherits nobility, without having made any effort to acquire it, can be noble in the full sense. His nobility is imitative — in the sense of wanting to emulate an ancestor — rather than original, in the sense of wanting to be inherently creative in his own right. Precisely because he has inherited his privileges effortlessly, he lacks the true distinction of nobility which comes from the will to achieve. In that respect, the hereditary nobleman is rather too much like the common herd, since the absence of a will to achieve is what distinguishes them.

Thus it was that the idea and ideal of nobility suffered a process of degen

eration, by being associated in the public mind with inherited privilege. So far as Britain was concerned, this process of degeneration was much slower than on the Continent, since our hereditary nobility did succeed, much longer than their counterparts in Europe, in sustaining a genuinely noble — that is to say, outstanding — tradition of public service. But even so, no hereditary system of nobility can permanently justify itself even according to its own principles, since too few of its members are likely to be noble, i.e. outstanding. Slowly but surely, the effect of inheritance must be to dilute the quality of nobility until it is no longer sufficient to command respect.

So a hereditary nobility is not destroyed by an opposing principle — democracy — but by its failure to live up to its own principle. In other words, it destroys itself. It destroys itself not by being untrue to democracy but by being untrue to aristocracy. For the inevitable fate of an inherited nobility is to include among its ranks too many commoners who are not noble at all.

What democracy has got to understand is that the need for a nobility has not been disproved by the failure of hereditary aristocracy, because that failure was due not to the falseness of the principle but to its corruption. That noblemen, in the true meaning of the word, should exercise more influence over public affairs than commoners remains a permanent principle, as valid for a democracy as for any other political system, and the unfitness of inheritance as a method for producing noblemen must not be allowed to disguise this truth. For if inheritance is seen as an unsatisfactory method, so also is election, since this democratic process, which allows power only to those with the gift of popularity at the polls, does not produce many of the genuine noble article either, judging, at any rate, by the composition of the present House of Commons. Neither hereditary aristocracy, nor democratic election, meets this crying need.

How it could be met is much more difficult to say. But the first necessity is for modern democracy to recognise the true nature of the problem, which the existence of a hereditary aristocracy only serves to disguise. For so long as the idea of nobility was associated with inherited privilege, it lent itself to caricature and mockery, to the point where the very concept came to stand for rule by the least active and dynamic and the most passive and effete instead of by those

most willing to struggle and strive. As a result, democracy found itself enjoying a free run, since aristocracy had discredited itself.

But with the hereditary system now Passing into history, democracy will have no further excuse to delay incorporating into its own system the ideal of genuine nobility, by which is meant, quite simply, finding a better way to facilitate the emergence in public life of superior people. Aristocracy failed, not because it did this too well, but because it did it too ill, and democracy will fail for the same reason, unless it gives its mind to doing better.