That is, elitism is no sin unless practiced as pretense by those who lack the proper background for it. You’ll notice Daniel had no criticism for the elitism of Nebuchadnezzar. And when nobles are truly noble, nobody complains. When middle-class souls gain power, justice dies.
Obviously, a major element in this is the definition of “middle class.” If we fall back on all the standard class warfare terminology of the past, we will forget that merchant and unionist are both middle class, but of different flavors. Give a union member ownership and he will most likely oppose unions. Force a merchant to labor for another and he’ll organize quickly with his fellow workers. The common factor is materialism; in this, both are middle class wanting to use laws to favor their creature comforts.
While it was not the first time humanity had a middle class, what we see today as bourgeois values arose at the end of the Middle Ages. Western feudalism carried the seeds of its own destruction. Perhaps you understand that the Middle Ages was the result of Germanic hordes migrating westward and crushing Roman Civilization, such as it was, and conquering everyone the Romans had not (mostly various nations of Celt-like folk). These conquering hordes were somewhat civilized later by various forces, no small part borne by the early Roman Church. Medieval Civilization was the result.
The particularly materialistic orientation of the Germanic tribes was the key. Western feudalism was turf-oriented, as the means to wealth. The serfs were regarded as part of the land. This is backwards. Fundamental cosmic morality presumes a feudalism that places value in people first, and is not particularly invested in material wealth. At any rate, various forms of moral blindness arising from Germanic mythology made Western feudalism weak, in that it waited only someone discovering ways to increase wealth through trade and manufacturing. It was the birth of merchants that killed feudal privilege, because Western nobles were already greedy. Like Esau, they were ready to trade their birthright for pottage.
So the nobles granted various charters and freedoms to the merchants, who then built their planned trading towns and their own infrastructure and fought to build a social structure that favored their materialism. They wanted noble privilege without having to be noble. Thus, the single defining trait of middle-class society is pretense.
A genuine noble is willing to take personal risk, and leads others from the front. They gain the noble privilege of command by surviving battles. They keep it by cultivating an education and intellectual awareness in their leisure so that their minds, and that of their children, are capable of handling the big picture. In other words, they are basically shepherds who care sacrificially for their people.
The merchants of the suburbs — burghers, bourgeoisie, or however you want to spell it — want the comfort and power but none of the risks. They prefer to huddle in their herds and win, not by moral excellence, and for damned sure not with self-sacrifice, but by calculated political pressure. As they gain those things, despite all the best education in the world, they can never really become noble.
The essence of our modern horrific Western political oppression arises from having no nobility in our government. It’s bad enough when inherited titles and power fall on petty fools; that’s the vagaries of historical and genetic accident. But when the entire ruling elite are ignoble, you get what we have today.
This is the core of the Enlightenment. There was a genuine effervescence of creative intelligence, but the attempt to democratize it was a fatal flaw that destroyed it. The notion that sheep can self-rule is morally fatal. Nothing in the Enlightenment sought to ennoble the sheep, but to feed their lower appetites where they were. There is a difference between letting the sheep wander in search of food versus catering to their whims and appetites. It was all the wrong kind of cynicism that offered nothing but manipulation in favor of the ignoble personal satisfactions of the elite. You don’t have to hide things from the sheep, but you don’t lead them close to threats, either. That I have to explain this at all is a symptom of the grand failure of Western Civilization.
It doesn’t take much to see the moral bankruptcy of evangelical religion (Enlightenment), Reformation religion, Medieval religion, or Classical Eastern church religion, all of which are built on a civilization alien to the Scripture. Each one places in authority a ruling elite who could not possibly be noble.
