The Juntoo

Of Aristophanes’ eleven extant plays, Plutus—a utopian fantasy of prosperity and wealth—is perhaps his least highly-regarded. Arriving on stage at the Athenian theater toward the end of his illustrious career, Plutus is best known, if known at all, as being the only Aristophanic work in which no trace of the styling of the “Old Comedy” is to be found. That style of comedy, of which, as though a fourth-century chef d’école, Aristophanes was the supreme and unquestioned master and, for which, at least in the minds of a millennium of academics and imitators, he’s still remembered today, was distinctive for its use of the chorus.

The Greek chorus, with its omission or inclusion, was the single, defining component by which the comedies of the Old and New type are to be differentiated. In the Old Comedy, the genre by which Aristophanes originally made his bones and out of which his immortal reputation grew, the chorus was not only present, but, depending on the performance and the height of the author’s ire, rather personal and confrontational as well. It was a chorus by whom, with a frenetic chant of the playwright’s sharp-tongued parabasis, the audience member—thinking himself comfortably distant from the stage’s action and, thus, immune to its assaults—would be directly admonished, scolded, and addressed. It’s unclear if ever the conversation, much less the injury, was freely and mutually communicated between the two, but one must assume that, when the dust cleared from so acerbic a contest of the tongues, the playwright more often than not enjoyed the final advantage and say.   

The absence of the chorus and the exclusion of the parabasis aren’t, in themselves, fully responsible for the low reputation with which Plutus has been treated. As most plays do, it has its other faults, including a lack of the blatant ribaldry, the cringe-inducing scatology, the clever turns of phrase, the convoluted plot twists, and the fantastic theatricality to which a fan of Aristophanes gaily becomes accustomed. But there is a point in the play, located approximately midway through, on which a glimmer of the brilliance of the conversation—if not the entirety of the action (of which, admittedly, when compared with the other Aristophanic productions by which our comedic tastes have been shaped, there’s quite little) hinges. The point is marked by the arrival—much to the horror and intense revulsion of the protagonist, Chremylus and his doting partner, Blepsidemus—of the personified deity of Poverty.

To the Greeks, by another name, she was known as the goddess, Penia—a most horrible and unwelcome deity for whose demise or absence most everyone prayed. Perhaps with the exception of the Spartans, an admittedly peculiar people to whom austerity and privation were considered not unhappy circumstances from which to escape, but—quite to the contrary—teachable trials to be endured, all of the Greek world joined in reviling her. This was the opinion of almost everyone—be they the luxury-loving Sybarites or the overly-refined Athenians. As an aside, for those endowed with a keen etymological sense, perhaps with a Grecian disposition to the language out of whose ancient elements our own modern tongue, like some ineffable atomic reaction, was combined and formed, the name Penia will look somewhat familiar; it prefixes the word “penurious” and “penury”—rather learned terms meaning, what else, “poor”.

Though, indisputably, a lesser goddess among a mighty Pantheon of twelve, Poverty was not a deity of whom any careful and pious man, anxious not only for his own economic preservation, but for that of his family as well, ought to have been scornful. If, in the present, it was his wish to continue in the state of comfort and sufficiency to which he’d become adjusted or, in the future, to ensure the prosperity and gain of which he felt himself so irreproachably deserving, Poverty was not the goddess that he might choose to disrespect. Though little-known and disregarded by us, she was not the goddess of whom the Greek man should’ve been neglectful. Unfailingly, she’d be the one by whom he’d be financially and, thus, most painfully punished. Both the mendicant beggar and the wealthy capitalist, so seldom aligned in action or in thought, took heed of her power and paid her their donations of time and respect. The former saw her as a goddess (though probably, more a menace) from whom he continually sought deliverance; the latter conceived of her as a deity, known but yet unseen, of whose continued absence he was desirous above all other profits and gains.

Exhibiting, seemingly with neither hesitation nor shame, the meanness of her station and the squalidness of her look, Poverty arrives, in an accusatory state of rage, before Chremylus and Blepsidemus to confront the two men by whom she’s been so callously forgotten. What follows is the most provocative and intelligent part of the otherwise mundane comedy—one by whose clever dialogue and rare philosophical profundity the reader is stopped in her tracks. It’s at this moment she’s made deeply to think and fully to consider the consequences of the position of which the goddess Poverty, and the goddess Poverty alone, is so forceful an advocate.

In recognizing Chremylus and Blepsidemus’ brazen attempt to restore to the blind Plutus (god of wealth) his ability of sight, Poverty commands them to stop. “Such an attempt”, says she, “is not to be borne!”. Neither god nor man, she explains in a huff, has ever shown so much impertinence and so much profane derring-do as to try so incredible and subversive a maneuver. None has been so bold as to dare what might be called, in imitation of that most humane of Titans, an out and out Promethean grab—not for fire, as was the case for him whose punishment was the daily vivisection at the beak of a bird, but for the riches of which she’s so disparaging and of which they’re so indefatigably desirous.  

Initially, the men—overtaken by the ghastliness of her pallor and the ugly raiment in which she’s clad—fail to recognize just who Poverty is. This failure of familiarity, however, should be no source of embarrassment for the peremptory, irascible, and surprisingly egotistical goddess of empty pockets and want; the two fail also to recognize Plutus when he appears before them attired in the unprepossessing habit of a beggar. Quickly, though, she removes them from their state of inquiry and fear by telling them that she is none other than Poverty, a goddess who has “lived with you for so many years”. This duration of time, of course, relates not to the length of a single human life (be it that of Chremylus, or Blepsidemus, or anyone else enlisted in the dramatis personae) but of the life of humankind itself, of the long existence of the entire species of which we number ourselves a continuing part, as it’s persisted so many centuries here on Earth.

On this point, the goddess, however unattractively appareled, is absolutely correct; poverty is the original and, excepting the gains to which the world’s community of nations has been treated in the past half-century or so, the abiding condition of life. Hitherto, poverty was all that we as a species had known—and its opposite wasn’t even so much as an image, distant on the horizon of our developing minds, of which we could dream. Contrast this, if you will, with the reality by which we’re surfeited today. A humble acquisition of money, let alone an enviable accumulation of exorbitant wealth, is much more than an ideal, but rather an actualization to which, within the short time-span of a few decades, most citizens of the world can now aspire. Though, of course, it won’t be in all cases an equally lofty position at which we’ll similarly all arrive, it’s one that can be, at the very least, conceived and pursued. This, I have no reluctance in stating, is the happy consequence for which that profitable trinity of capitalism, technological increase, and republican governance can, and indeed should be thanked.

Wealth, represented by Plutus, is a condition to which we’ve become blithely accustomed, and, if we’re to be historically honest, only recently so. It’s a state of being, an ease of living, whose felicity, gentleness, and relative newness we’ve quite taken for granted in recent years. Poverty pounces on this fact and makes of it, not a specious contention through which, without the impeding bulk of any substance, we can transparently see, but a deeply insightful point. Desperate to salvage her falling position as an eminent god and to elevate her importance in the eyes not only of the now-seeing Plutus, but, more importantly, in those of man as well, Poverty makes the argument that her presence, far from being injurious to man’s state, actually produces for it a salutary effect.

When told that she’ll be driven out of Greece and then, if all goes according to plan, from every city and avenue of the world, Poverty responds by asking whether or not, deliberately, you could do mankind a “greater harm” than to rid the world of her? She’s absolutely incredulous at the prospect of being banished from the country, though not, we’re led to believe, for purely selfish motivations; she fears for the health not of her own person, but of the species for whom, in her singular opinion, she’s been so indispensable a benefactor.

That’s right: a benefactor. It’sPoverty’s argument that, contrary to the reasonableness of all opinion, she’s rather been an aid than a pest to the life of man.  

In a strained effort to sway the opinions of Chremylus and Blepsidemus and, having achieved that task, eventually to recruit them to her side, Poverty says that “I am the sole cause of all your blessings, and that your safety depends on me alone”. Naturally, Chremylus and Blepsidemus—who are, mind you, partisans, if not yet possessors of wealth—are suspicious of the claim. Yet Poverty, never impoverished of wit nor destitute of thought, is undeterred. She expounds upon her position, to whose legitimacy and persuasiveness her interlocutors continue to be blind. “Let Plutus recover his sight and divide his favors out equally to all”, says she, “and none will ply either trade or art any longer; all toil would be done away with”. One’s reminded, at this point, of the potential peril and the vitiating effect of something like a universal basic income (a concept with which, as we’ve seen of late, some of our leading politicians are absolutely smitten). Who, she asks—after painting this idyllic, languid, and hypothetical state—would “wish to hammer iron, build ships, or break up the soil of the earth with the plough and garner the gifts of Demeter” if he could, instead, live in an atmosphere of idleness and lassitude—in a boring, emasculating state free from the noble exigencies of work?

Such a Utopia, she argues and we must agree, would be demoralizing for man. To this, and to this fact alone, we offer no rebuttal as Poverty rests her solemn case. Poverty, in Poverty’s opinion, is a needed impetus to work, a requisite incitement to do that for which man was made—namely, to labor by the sweat of his brow (as did our first father upon his descent into sin). Without that inducement, without that pinch of hunger by which the inventor is harried or that pain of need from which the creator finds no escape, nothing great, certainly nothing noble, would ever be achieved. “To the artisan”, she proclaims, “I am like a severe mistress, who forces him by need and poverty to seek the means of earning his livelihood”. For this claim, there is an ounce, perhaps even a pound, of validity: was not Charles Dickens, greatest of all English novelists, brought to the heights of literary achievement on the wings of financial distress? Was not also Herman Melville, leviathan of American prose, also compelled to greatness by his initial, impecunious state? Neither, I think, would’ve ascended to the heights from whose snow-capped summits they now look down upon us had it not been for their meager finances and their monetary states by which, from the outset of their lives, they were severely disadvantaged.

Indeed, aside from being a ubiquitous inducement to work, poverty has its other salubrious effects. Because of her presence, “the poor man lives thriftily and attentive to his work”. He’s neither undisciplined in conduct, profligate in expenditure, nor wasteful of his one and only life. He is simple, frugal, grateful, content, and strong. “He has not got too much, but he does not lack what he really needs”. The essentials without which man can’t live—among which we might name family, faith, occupation, and health—are those of which he’s in the most secure state of possession when unfettered by the burdens of his wealth. Men, when guided by the unerring hand of poverty, are “worth more, both in mind and in body” than when massaged in the sybaritic lap of Plutus. With him, “they are gouty, big-bellied, heavy of limb, and scandalously stout”. They are gluttonous fiends and intemperate brutes, quite undeserving of the virile, rippled, muscular title of man. With Poverty, on the other hand, “they are thin, wasp-waisted, and terrible to the foe”. They are nimble, undeterred, and atavistic in the most commendable of ways.

It’s here that, as readers formerly resolute in the defense of our treasure and the luxuriance of our wealth, we’re made to stop and think. We’re made to re-consider, in what must be for all of us a moment of unusual and discomforting thought, our ancient greed, our newfangled disinclination to work, our love of money, and the avarice by which we’re animated every day. There simply is no way of denying it: Poverty’s argument—at first ridiculously and then compellingly expressed—is one given to us with unexpected force. Its persuasiveness has, I think, caught us on our heels and unprepared. Indeed, it’s one against whose strength we must stand and over which we must deliberate—with a cautious and penetrating mind. And though it’s dismissed, quite without reflection, by both Chremylus and Blepsidemus (who appear, like ossified ideologues, to be completely unmoved), it’s one with which we, an audience of whose decadence and luxury Aristophanes might’ve had only the faintest conception, must contend.

To whom, then, will we pledge our allegiance, fan our incense, and offer our libations when the moment to choose has come: will we go to the altar of Poverty or to that of Plutus, to the proselytes of destitution or to those of wealth? Can we not, I wonder, combine the virtuous qualities by which the two are known? Might we not enjoy the effervescent capital of the latter, springing us to the summits of innovation and the compounding interests of growth, while also being motivated and sustained by the risk of falling into the capacious depths of the former? Might we not be temperate in our desires, humble in our affect, and dismissive of the self-aggrandizement by which our species, and our species alone, is identified, while also seeking the type of financial gain and laboriously-earned remuneration of which, objectively, we can all be proud? I think, in ancient Athens as in modern America, there is in fact room for both: the philosophy of Poverty and the reality of wealth. Though perhaps it wasn’t the intention of Aristophanes, at the end of his literary career, to promote the causes of both, we can, in our own minds and in our own ways, profit from his final conception.

To what height would you not ascend, over what impediment would you not leap, to what distance would you not travel, if only to acquire—by the consequence of your own ingenious exertion and the heat of your own strain—the sweet and restful assurance of perpetual peace? This rather unfamiliar state of which I speak (a state of which, I’ll readily admit, we fistic moderns have but only the faintest conception) is, irrespective of the enticing novelty by which it fascinates the poet and tempts the pacifist, the most desirable of human achievements. It’s also the one, throughout the course of our long history, without which we’ve lived.

In numbering those human achievements, a resume of whose length we’re so rightly proud and to whose crammed and illegible margins we’re continually hoping to add, we exhaust ourselves in the endeavor from the start. No person, hardly a generation, has the capacity of intellect, the endurance of spirit, nor the endowment of time to compile so daunting and celebratory a list. It would have to be a list, plenary in its construction and untarnished by an omission of even the smallest kind, on whose every line those achievements by which our species has distinguished itself might be read, extolled, and felt.

That said, no other achievement, outside that of peace, should be placed in a superior position. It is, if nothing else, the greatest and happiest end toward which all of our endless diplomacy aims. It’s the apotheosis, so gently suspended above our heads, toward which all of our secular, humanistic prayers aspire. It is the goal, at once blissful and hopefully bloodless, of whose sweet celebration all of our political maneuverings hope to partake. As a single and undifferentiated species, a bipedal race between whose constituent members only the minutest and most peculiar of genetic variations exist, mutual affinity and sentiments of peace should be the legs—at once stable, pliant, balanced, and strong—upon which we collectively stand (and, without which, we irreparably fall).

It’s from these legs, now crouched and waiting the subtle conversion of potential to kinetic energy, of planned endeavor to executed decree, we leap in hopes of reaching greater heights. Such was the aim of Trygaeus, humorist, protagonist, and—above all—committed pacifist in Aristophanes’ brilliant play entitled, simply, Peace. “‘Tis”, said Trygaeus at the play’s outset, “for the weal of all the Greeks I am attempting a daring and novel feat”. Novel, yes; comical, indubitably so. That which he was attempting to do—that for which, certainly, there was no precedence in the literary memory of man—was to overcome the gravitational pull by which he was bound to Earth, traverse the heavens above to whose Cimmerian depth there was no imaginable end, and, in so doing, arrive at the doorstep of the gods.

Only this time, distrustful of more graceful modes of transportation and uninterested in the loftiness of their use, Trygaeus opted to fly to Mt. Olympus on the back of an insect. More specifically, and, for that reason, more repugnantly (I do apologize in advance), he chose to travel on the back of a massive dung beetle. Pegasus, though fleeter of wing and more agile of hoof, wasn’t, it seems, sufficiently malodorous or economical for this heavenly midnight ride—for this breathless pursuit of peace in the house of god. The hilarity, not to mention the olfactory and gustatory offense, of the giant, horse-sized dung beetle (to whom, for nourishment, the rider’s own excrement would be fed!) is an arresting image of which the dignified, professedly urbane mind simply can’t be cleansed. It is, in every way, filth appropriate for the low brow taste of a philistine or the hoi polloi, yet—that said—we pompous and sterile readers cringe not at being made a little dirty as we roll about in the Aristophanic mud.

This gargantuan dung beetle, a newly-created monster of mythology upon whose back and by whose winged-locomotion our protagonist hoped to reach the god of all gods, Zeus, did his job with laudable determination and celerity of wing. A moratorium, for the gut-churning allotment of three whole days, was placed on the defecation of the citizens below. This was done so that the beetle could focus on his task; the wafting and rising of the fetid stench of which those Athenians below were wont to relieve themselves would not, if Trygaeus could help it, interrupt his upward course. Though dismayed by their inability readily to dispense themselves of their bowels, the Athenians agreed to restrain themselves for the greater good and for Trygaeus’ ascent.

Thus, Trygaeus’ journey was destined to continue as the Athenians adjusted their diets and their stench. But, upon our hero’s arrival at Mt. Olympus, the lord of the gods and the master of the skies to whom he planned to offer his supplications was not there. Along with those lesser deities over whom, for better or for worse, that thunder-wielding Zeus had so long presided, the Pantheon packed up its belongings and moved itself out. They simply had had enough of their old abode and its intolerable proximity to the ungrateful and moribund tendencies of man. Hermes, god of commerce and boundaries, travelling and trickery, winged of foot and staff-wielding of hand, was the only one of those twelve gods by whose presence this previously overwhelmingly divine mountain was to be identified. 

Never hesitant to engage a traveler in pleasant conversation and, perhaps, lend to him his ethereal empathy of which he might be availed, Hermes spoke with the new arrival at some length. He revealed to Trygaeus that, because of the Greeks’ inveterate hostility toward one another and the intractability of their commitment to war, the gods had given up on them. Just like that! They’d thrown up their heavenly hands and looked down in absolute disgust upon the fighting Greeks and their internecine ways. Exhausted by their mortal squabbles, tired of their incorrigible cruelties, and quite done with their insatiable bloodlust for which there was no satisfaction, the gods left both Athenians and Peloponnesians alike to the oversight of the deified personas of “War” and his unfriendly slave called “Tumult”. These two baleful deities, so far as Zeus and the other more benevolent gods were concerned, were the only ones of which the Greeks could now be considered deserving.

Together, this ungentle duo of Tumult and War buried in the ground the goddess for whose intervention Trygaeus was so desperate—the goddess named Peace.

Covered in rubble and smothered in stone, Peace was imprisoned in so thorough a way, that her liberation—and, by extension, the pacification of Greece—appeared to be nothing short of an impossible task. In a desperate attempt to free Peace from the pit in which she was so dreadfully lodged, Trygaeus recruited all of Greece’s sons to his aid. His choice of associates by whom he wished to be helped was surprisingly indiscriminate, so long as they would be willing and able to carry a spade. His Panhellenic team of excavators, by whose concerted efforts Peace might be exhumed, comprised all the people between whom, just hours earlier, nothing but enmity was seen or felt. It was a delightful assortment, a formerly internecine hodge-podge of every Grecian type: feigning Boeotians, tactless Thracians, terse Laconians, laughing Argives, hungering Megarians, and, of course, clever Athenians—at once philosophizing and satirizing in the comfort of their intellectual repose. Some, ignorant or uncaring of the efforts of the men by whom they were flanked, were pulling dirt in one way, while others pushed it in another. It seemed, at least for an exasperatingly long while, that for each step taken forward, two were retraced. Progress was very minimally achieved, and Peace was no closer to their possession.

You see, it was, at first, a laughably unharmonious effort—certainly, at the very least, a discordant venture wholly inauspicious of success. It appeared, by evidence of their inability to synchronize their toils and work as a phalanx of one, that Peace would remain forever buried in her inaccessible depths, to which—much to the frustration of all involved—there seemed to be no bottom. So long as each fellow Greek maintained his prior position of disdain for his neighbor, and showed no intention to bury, not amity, but his blood-drenched sword, no good, certainly no Peace, would ever come about as a result of his labors.

Finally, however, at long last, the radiance of Peace’s light was seen. Contact with her was made. A glimmer of hope returned as the Grecian sun vaulted and shone forth once again. Peace was the acquisition of these tireless labors, and War and Tumult were never again to be seen in the world that Aristophanes drew.

The Greeks, now witnessing with a tentative glimpse the fruits of their joined labors, were able to coordinate their efforts and streamline their resolve. They did so under the rugged and simple direction of the farmers, by whose indefatigable devotion the goddess Peace was ultimately won. The husbandmen, regardless of the province or territory whence they came, were the men to whom this work was definitively most conducive. These were the workers, the backbone of a fundamentally pastoral Greece—a country by whose production of the olive and its sister grape international fame was acquired—upon whom the state would always rely. Those born and reared in the country, unlike those to whom the dank and squalid city was called home, were able to spring forth Peace—and, thus, were able to save their state and to restore to the path of civility that greatest of civilizations.

Thus, thanks in large part to these vigorous and burly farmers, but really, to every son of Greece, Peace was restored. A goddess for whose kindness a simple acknowledgement of gratitude and thanks, rather than a blood-soaked ovine sacrifice, was deemed most appropriate, she was elevated once again to her rightful and towering place atop the world—a pedestal from which she’d only recently fallen. Mind you, that fall—so injurious and consequential to the lives of these men and the women and children (doubtless not the politicians) for whom they fought—was the cause of so much discord and strife, of so much animosity and death. No longer would this be the case, as she once again stood supreme.

That said, not everyone joined in celebrating her restoration, as one might hope. Those in the employ of the military-industrial complex, then as now, took the opportunity to mourn Peace’s accession and the waxing popularity of her spirit. They pined for the days, those by whose hours battles were counted and by whose seconds salvos were measured, when their services were deemed the most profitable to the state. Those merchants of wartime armaments, those entrepreneurs by whose blunt or trenchant instruments armies were alternately defended or destroyed, complained of the profits of which, thanks to Peace’s recent liberation, they’d so suddenly been dispossessed. A most unpitiable class of profiteers, we, the audience, lend to them no sympathy, and extend to them no grace. Certainly, Aristophanes cares for them not; his words are an encouragement toward the same callousness by which he himself was animated—when he considered, with unmasked contempt, these profiteers and the post-bellum woes by which they were afflicted. Peace, one re-established, precludes any notion that they might again be, in the calm of this tranquil and beautiful moment, the chief operators of the state.

Alas, the moment—as if compelled by the force of its very definition—was as transitory as it was tranquil. Aristophanes wrote this play, a play at whose conclusion the ideal of Peace was to reign in the ascendant forevermore, in the year 421 BC. Any devout student of history, especially one to whom the adjective “fluent” isn’t too leniently applied, will remember with fondness this date as being the start of the Peace of Nicias—a seven-year breathing spell of which the country was in so grave a need. After what had already been a decade of the Peloponnesian War, this tremulous cease-fire (negotiated, from the Athenian side, by the man after whom the peace is named—the ill-fated statesman, Nicias), sought to restore a sense of harmony to that very nation by whom the West was born.

It’s not hard to imagine, then, the weightless exuberance for the present, nor the hopeful anticipation for the future, that a pacifist like Aristophanes would enjoy—a man to whose gentle sensitivities a war-monger like Alcibiades and a pugilistic demagogue like Cleon were totally repulsive. Perhaps with insufficient foresight, or overconfidence in the intentions of his own state, Aristophanes ardently believed, not only in the restoration, but in the continuation of his beloved Peace. He believed, as he hoped his auditors might, in the feasibility of its preservation. (As an aside, his first play, The Acharnians, is also a work exhorting Greece to lay down its arms and embrace the sweet caress of peace. Less overtly hopeful than this work, Peace, in which Trygaeus is the hero, The Acharnians was written four years prior to the efforts of Nicias but is thematically the same—just as Lysistrata would be a decade later).

But, in the end, the political will power by which the Grecian peace was sustained simply wasn’t there. The war continued and Nicias was killed. Alcibiades, Socrates’ formerly beloved youth, was now a war-enthused statesman to whom philosophy held little appeal. He subverted his country in favor of those Spartans against whom it fought. Sicily, a distant conquest by which the Greeks were tantalized, was maladroitly sieged and inevitably lost. Domestic matters fared no better: crops were razed, farmsteads were deserted, and the Athenian people were brought finally to heel. But in an hour at the Theatre of Dionysius, in the first, albeit fugacious year of the peace of 421, War and Tumult were just as quickly acknowledged and discarded. Trygaeus soared on the back of a dung beetle through whose fetid wings the breath of heaven did flow. A cohort of Greeks gathered, not for hostile activities of war, but for a singular and concerted effort toward peace. As such, Peace was resorted and, in the absence of the other angry gods, she ruled supreme. But she ruled not in perpetuity, and we seek her revival still.

In posing to posterity the following question, Desiderius Erasmus—the Dutch philosopher and humanist whose name, as if to inform of us, without direct reference to his works, of the gentle nature by which his spirit was constituted and the lovable benevolence of which he was made, means “Desired Beloved”—asked what, of all the bountiful creations by which nature is known, could be deemed more mild, sweet, or happy than the genius of Thomas More?

Could there, he wondered, be any such person to whom we might ascribe so endearing a list of attributes? Was there anyone, living in the world around whose circumference his own mental girth so abundantly stretched, about whom we could so exaltingly speak? Assuming that the designation of “genius” was, in fact, an intellectual attainment to which More had ascended and, in the discernment of our own modern analysis (which can be, much to its demerit, so dreadfully scrutinizing and severe), an epithet of which he was fitly deserving, we must answer the estimable Erasmus, that most humane of all humanists, that nothing for whose generation nature is liable could rival the mildness, the sweetness, nor the happiness of More’s immeasurable genius. Thus, unconstrained by the bounds of our ordinary nature and canonized in the eyes of the Catholic Church, it’s no wonder why we persist in calling More, history’s finest martyr and England’s supreme saint, a veritable man for all seasons.

That trans-national friendship of which the English More and the Dutch Erasmus partook, that intellectual fraternal link upon which we moderns, so painfully isolated yet so inextricably linked, reflect so fondly, was one of the few cordialities of what was, on the whole, a remarkably hostile age. It was, from that century’s beginning until its end, not just a tumultuous, but an openly schismatic era of which we have, in the pages of history, few other examples. Mind you, this was the dawn of the age of Luther—a hopeful morning at whose explosive dusk the Church, now unified and resplendent (with Leo X at its helm and Michelangelo on its walls), would be left in tatters and riven in two. Not since that earlier schism between Greece and Rome, between the Orthodox east and Catholic west, had Christianity’s foundation been so violently shaken. Not since then, so long ago in the eleventh century after the death of Christ, had its doctrines been so disputed and its congregants so wildly abused.

John Huss, the Bohemian heretic and proto-Protestant by whom Luther was preceded and, very likely, inspired, was killed for preaching that same cause on which Luther’s later fame would rest. That cause, of course, was the inexorable march of reform—a march by whose individual focus, pious persistence, and eventual arrival the very nature of Christianity would be forever changed. Huss’s was the same sin of which Luther, years later, would be found guilty, though the savvy German would take every precaution to avoid the wretched Bohemian’s fate. A study of his Hussite history revealed to Luther that, if he wanted to extend his days here on earth and stave off that angelic salvation (of which, one might add, he was rather confidently assured) for just a few moments longer, he’d better abstain from attending Catholic councils, however speciously welcoming they may be. 

Religion, at this moment, hadn’t yet been subordinated to the peremptory concerns of the state. The former remained, albeit with a feeling of diminished self-assurance and injured pride, the absolute and unquestioned sovereign under which the latter hoped to operate. The prioritization, that of the giant Church above the fledgling state, was still uncontestably clear; the cross, inarguably, was superior to the crown. The fastening by which the two were bound, so tight and resolutely opposed to tearing, was thought to be impenetrable and their relationship, so anciently established, was not considered amenable to change. He who, in a moment of benighted conjecture, refuted the merit of this relationship, scoffed at the overt avarice of the indulgence-peddlers, or questioned the rampant cupidity of the Pope, would be vulnerable to a very unsavory end: chastisement, excommunication, imprisonment, and death.

The onslaught of time, as always it does, would be the precipitating factor that brought forth change. Time, and the stirrings of the people by whose hours it’s filled, would alter what could only be described as a frighteningly tenuous arrangement that existed between the Church and the state. The nations of the European continent, of whom we might number such actors as those neighbors of Iberia, the electorates of Prussia, the empires of Austria, Russia, and France, and the cantons of the Swiss, were beginning the slow process of recognizing themselves for themselves. No longer were they the vestigial, co-dependent organs of a corpulent belly and an inflated head at Rome. No longer were they to be the withered appendages from whose feeble grips treasure would be extracted and gold would be torn for the aggrandizement of the Pope. They were, forevermore, to be sovereign bodies all their own.

In so being, they realized, with a feeling of waning reverence and increasing disregard, the importance of the Church. They came to the conclusion that survival, not as a submissive member of a slavish flock but as a will to power all their own, was inconceivable without independence. Nor, for that matter, was growth—so long stymied by desultory decretals made by the pope—possible without territorial expansion. Boundaries, like belts, were crafted to be loosened and to give way to commodious room. And, for these gluttons, foreign territories were meant to be absorbed. The Roman Church had taught them, through the course of a sanguinary semester for which it has to account many years, the art of imperialism. Now, under the direction of the secular rulers of Europe, the moment had arrived to apply those precepts in which they’d been so thoroughly and coercively steeped.

And so, those countries most fortunately and auspiciously placed along the edges of the oceans and the seas began to flex their naval muscles. They began, as if just awakened from the slumbers of a now fully national life, to stretch their imperial tentacles, excitable appendages in whose grasp distant Edens would soon be held. The Portuguese, with implacable greed for the beckoning riches of distant lands and, with that, the unrelenting ability and competence to acquire that which they sought, sent around the southern tip of Africa first Dias and then da Gama. In successive, though not equally successful ventures, they penetrated the Indian spice markets to which, up until that time, only overland Venetians had ever seemed to have profitable and sustainable access. The swiftness of the Portuguese navy, the competence of her intrepid sailors, and the perseverance and rapacity of her merchants ensured a dominant presence in that region’s trade.

The Spaniards, understandably envious of their neighbor’s recent boon, were infected by the contagion of overseas conquest. It was, as all the nations of that age might’ve attested if asked, a most feverish and consuming bug. More than that, it was a fever to which no remedy sufficed outside of conquest all their own. They too needed a piece of the action and the distant lands without which, for lack of internal resources and the scientific ingenuity by which other nations were propelling themselves forward, they’d be rendered a second-tier state. Spain, famously proud though currently indolent, would never countenance lurking in the shadow of those impudent Portuguese—a population over whom they long wished to gain control. Late to seek uncharted routes to India and the east, they decided, with encouraging, if not copious investments from Isabella and Ferdinand, to seek their fortune in the west. To do so, uncertain of the competence of her own Iberian sons, Spain sent a couple of Italian boys—first Columbus and then Vespucci—to find for her a new kingdom and settle for her an exploitable land.

The rumblings of the continent’s oldest religious institution and the discovery of unknown and distant lands—these were but two of the permeating influences in which Thomas More, to return to the subject with which this article began, would be submerged. Another might be his education, specifically his predilection for the classics—a study for which his father had no great fondness, but one from which More simply couldn’t keep away.

He was, in most ways, a humanist—not to be confused with a humanitarian, which—judging by his later political maneuvers—he most decidedly was not. Humanism, rightly and originally understood, described not one’s elevation of this particular species (to which, I hope, everyone reading this claims membership) over another, but the Medieval mind’s preference for Greco-Roman classicism over the European scholasticism that had gained so immovable a foothold in the thinking of the age. It was, in every way, a far more academic affair than we like to think it today, but it was that form of study to which More, at the time, was most passionately attracted.

The patron saint of Scholasticism was the peripatetic Aristotle. With but one reading of Thomas Aquinas, the chef d’ecole of that school of thought, this is made immediately clear. That of humanism, then, was Aristotle’s preceptor, the dialogic Plato. Such was their division; where one existed, the other could not (their current compatibility, however, is much more liberally accepted today). Thus, being that More was a humanist, it should come as no surprise that Plato was the thinker with whom he most closely and intimately associated.

Though separated by a length of a thousand years and the width of an entire continent, the two appeared to be similar thinkers and proximate colleagues—if in neither time nor space, then certainly in thought. More, like Plato, was a fundamentally imaginative thinker—a genius of the pen to whom stories and narratives came with delightful grace and seemingly endless facility. He, like Plato, was an artist veiled in the garb of a politician—a sculpture under whose chiseled marble a flowering portrait of exuberance and sentiment sprang. Much more poetic than polemical, and much less political than might be assumed, the two shared in owning deep creative wells into which they repeatedly dived. In so doing, Plato, in seeking after justice, created his startling Republic. More, in escaping the political turmoil in which his age was becoming engulfed, fabricated for us a Utopia. The latter, it might be said, was a direct descendent of the former, by which, before the birth of Christ, it was conceived.

How did this work, Utopia—now a maxim for Marxists and an idealist’s dream—come into being? What were its constituent parts, how were they combined, and out of what oven did they finally emerge? It was, I contend, a consequence of those four converging factors listed above: the religious instability of Europe that had, at the time of More’s ascent into his political and literary life, begun its infiltration into England; the foreign exploration of unfamiliar peoples and lands that was, at last count, adding line after line of longitude to an ever-growing world; the fascination with the classics and, specifically, with Plato, from whose prescience and eternal wisdom there was, and still is, no real or desirable escape; and the imaginative force by which More’s genius was developed and propelled ahead of his and our time.

Scarcely with a toe dipped in the waters of the second decade of his life, More—having deviated from the ecclesiastical path at Oxford on which his father had set him toward a life of the law at Lincoln’s Inn and, finally, of literature—was still something of an Anglican wunderkind. Awash in the tides of the day, he was a boy, quickly becoming a man, in whose mind most ideas were welcomed, so long as they could be challenged and perhaps, with the deployment of his mental vigor and inveterate creation, changed. Compared with the breadth of learning and the frank geniality for which the elder Erasmus (of whom I made earlier mention) was so beloved, More was in possession of a slightly coarser hide. Somewhat more intolerant to conflicting creeds and evolving mores, More lacked the ease of acceptance and the brilliance of wit for which Erasmus is so fondly remembered. We might attribute these deficiencies of character to the precocity of More’s youth, the gravity of his eventual appointment to Henry VIII’s inner sanctum, and the intensity of his time.

Though still, at least in the mind of Erasmus, More’s genius, in consideration of the totality of all of nature’s produce, was of the most mild, sweet, and happy flavor, his friend’s temperament could be slightly less toothsome. His comportment was stormier and his passions less inclined toward submission. His determination was resolute, his fidelity unfazed, and his obstinacy—even in the face of imminent political doom—was preternatural in such a way that it’s persisted, from his day until ours, as a subject to which our greatest and most inventive writers continually return.

But we dally not, though perhaps we should, to reflect upon his refusal to sign King Henry VIII’s Act of Succession. The Act was, we now acknowledge with the guiding hand of hindsight, a revolutionary fiat by its very intent. It was that corpulent monarch’s attempt to prioritize the English state over the Roman Church—an act of which there was little previous example in Christendom and the European world. And we stop here not to comment on the pertinacity More displayed in discountenancing the king’s illicit marriage to the lovely Anne Boleyn. Insatiable for an heir and exasperated by the stubbornness of his first wife’s infertility, the virile Tudor, eighth of his name, sought through every feasible channel the annulment of his marriage with that maltreated daughter of Aragon and Castile. And while he succeeded in breaking his fruitless marriage vow to Catherine, he broke his country from what was the suffocating embrace of Rome.

These, perhaps, were the cruel realities of life from which the adventurous, idealistic, and unflappably Catholic More wanted to escape. What better way to do so, he thought, than to create out of the fecundity of his own brain a foreign and inconceivable land? At first, he called this clever terra incognita, this undiscovered place of quintessential bliss, Nusquama. When translated into the English with which we’re all generally familiar from the Latin of which he was so fluently a master, we come to know of his land as “Nowhere”—a hint toward the unlikeliness of its discovery, if ever pursued. Indeed, the entire work—conceived, one might add, in the year 1516 as a private amusement without the intention of being made public—was written in Latin. It was only after More’s death, a full decade and a half later, before this great and inestimable piece of Anglican art would be made legible to an exclusively English eye. Happily, for the purposes of both euphony and time, the name Nusquama was tossed aside in preference for that of Utopia—the title by which we know the work today. The latter, one might guess, was Greek, and while retaining the same meaning of the former, it was undoubtedly the more memorable of the two.

So ingenious was More’s conception of this “No-Place”, so descriptive was his foreign mise en scene, that—once set before the eyes of a parochial and credulous reader—his Utopia was thought truly to exist. Most considered its history purely authentic, albeit only recently received. The verisimilitude to what might be cognizable lands (the “New World” and the supposed “Antipodes”, mind you, were only discovered a mere decade prior) with which he colored its lines fascinated even the most highly trained of cartographers. The manners and associations by which he described the Utopians’ unique culture piqued the curiosity of even the subtlest anthropologists. And clerics, eager not to lose out on what seemed a missionary opportunity laid out before them, planned ventures to convert those heathen Utopians of whose existence they were, just minutes before, entirely unconscious.

Perhaps with the exceptions of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, and, as previously mentioned, Plato’s Republic, no other utopia conceived by man has inspired such fascination and induced such scrutiny as has the Utopia of More. Surely, no other work has awakened in the hearts of Marxists and Communists and, by another, slightly less repulsive name, radical social democrats, the spirit of imitation of which More’s Utopia is an original source. His work is a looking glass out of whose reflection nearly every radical reformer, from Marx to Trotsky and Castro to Mao, has extracted his idealized state—a state from whose visionary boundaries inequality is to be excluded and where money is to have no practical use.

That More, as Erasmus proclaimed with so laudatory a sense of glee, was a genius, there can be but little doubt. And who knows, considering the years by which his life was cut short, what further intellectual summits he might’ve climbed had he been given the chance. The advantage of a long and productive life was something of which, for obvious political reasons, he was prematurely dispossessed. That, I think, is a pity for which time will offer us little consolation. One can only imagine the works to which we might’ve been treated.

That said, the consequences of his genius, seen from a perspective at an altitude higher than his or Erasmus’ own, can be called neither happy, mild, nor sweet—as Erasmus characterized them. His Utopia, his harrowingly egalitarian and non-existent place, is the very concept upon which Marxism and Communism based themselves. These, we well know but too readily forget, are the political philosophies and the idealized states of whose specters of mildness, sweetness, and happiness we must continually be disabused. Yet still, for reasons unknown to the modern mind, we persist in seeking them. We navigate our ship of state in hopes of anchoring upon their shore, failing, ultimately, to remember that this destination is Utopia—a land that is, literally, no place.

Retentive of our British history—a deep but nourishing well into which we Americans must on occasion plunge—we mustn’t be startled to learn that a royal member of that republican land has committed, if all the accusations with which he’s been confronted are to be believed, a most heinous transgression: the predation of an underage girl.

The mere reflection upon what Prince Andrew is alleged to have done is, I think, an inducement to a violent physical reaction—a sickening response over which the body, so long as it be of a decent and civilized bent, can offer little control. Such a twisting and wrenching of the gut, such a stimulus to an emetic upheaval was the response by which, after watching in horror the Prince’s interview with the refined and eloquent Emily Maitlis of the BBC, I was fully overcome. What came of the interview was, irrespective of the strength of your stomach or the callousness of your will, nauseating in the extreme. It was, in a word, disgusting, and it ought to be a source of that family’s abiding shame. That being said, that which was revealed was also enlightening—a sobering upshot for which we might be quietly grateful.

That of which the ignoble prince is accused, I’m sure you’ll agree, is a crime for which there ought to be no absolution—even if his elderly aunt, the honorable Queen Elizabeth II, is and shall be until her abdication or her death the official matron of the state’s Anglican church. Since the age of Luther’s Theses and her island’s subsequent schism with the Pope, she, as the nation’s chief monarch, has been the sole figure by whose every edict the church has been run. She holds, if you will, the apostolic keys, the inheritance of that vicar, Peter by which the peculiar, quasi-Catholic faith of her country turns. She’s responsible for the bishoprics, the rituals, the sacristies, and, yes, even the failing religiosity of her increasingly secular state. That said, not even she, though in service to that island as intermediary between man and God, can peer upon her naughty nephew with a blameless glance. From his sin, there is to be no exculpation—neither up above in heaven nor here on earth. Likewise, from his aunt, there ought to be no nepotism; familial relations can’t, and as we all hope, won’t be an impediment in the British police’s effort to prosecute this reprobate of a man.  

The profligate Prince, it’s long been known, was an intimate friend and a constant confidante of the recently-deceased hedge fund manager, Richard Epstein. The former, royal by blood and, quite like the rest of those wearisome Windsors, inutile in function, is known to have enjoyed an enduring friendship with the latter—to whom an unnatural death recently, inexplicably, and, for the sake of his multitudinous victims for whom there will be no justice, frustratingly came.

Prince Andrew seems to have profited immensely and, until just a few months ago, rather clandestinely from his relationship with the enigmatic Epstein. From tete-a-tetes to formal galas, from sojourns to Manhattan and trips to the very non-virginal island of Little Saint James, the two often met and passed together their time. Yet it wasn’t only their time that was being passed between the two; had it been so innocuous an exchange, there’d be nothing of which to speak. Epstein, it turns out, was almost certainly providing the lascivious Prince with underage girls of whom, without any fear of repercussion, he could take carnal advantage. Insatiable for the taste of nubile meat and aloof to the possibility of punitive measures, Prince Andrew’s appetite was satisfied by the work of Epstein—himself a gourmand in the consumption and a chef in the production of underage girls.

In the wake of Epstein’s fatal act of self-violence, the men with whom he once associated have been exposed to the penetration of the news media’s eye. Admittedly, less unblinking has been its gaze when turned upon the likes of former President Bill Clinton—a man of so upright and chaste a temperament (to which his impeachment and history will prove as confirmation) that no sexual impropriety could be suspected of him. By and large, the media has chosen quietly to overlook the fact that Clinton, after having departed his high office ten years before, flew in the presence of Epstein on multiple occasions. Scorning commercial travel, he opted instead to fly on the sex-trafficker’s private jet. He did so over two dozen times, but the details of their shared voyages are cloudy, to say the least; the corruption of the travel logs by which their mileage was supposed to be confirmed makes nearly impossible the task of trying to learn the people, probably the young females, by whom these two sexual deviants were joined, surrounded, and pleasured.

The other men (alas, more so than Clinton) into whom the news media has decided it worthwhile to take a look include the businessman Les Wexner, the actors Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker, the entrepreneur Elon Musk, and none other than the current president of the United States, Donald Trump. The last, as expected, is the one about whom the media, inveterately disdainful of his every move, has been the most curious. Reflective of our curiosity and perhaps emboldened by its own agenda, he’s the person to whom the media has devoted most of its time, with less than fruitful results. The relationship between Trump and Epstein seems to have been innocent of any sexual indiscretions—a revelation, considering the profligacy of Trump’s sexual past, by which we’re frankly surprised. Indeed, as is the case with any unobjectionable relationship, theirs seems to have begun and ended over their shared infatuation over golf.

Still, with all that star power listed above, Prince Andrew is the biggest fish to have been caught up in the media’s net. Coincidentally, of them all, he’s the public figure about whom we Americans know the least. Out of them all, he’s the one, especially after the recent airing of his disastrously illuminating BBC interview, by whom we’re all so thoroughly disgusted. But, as I mentioned in this article’s first line, we mustn’t forget our British history as we settle upon our judgment of this reprobate of a man. We mustn’t be remiss in assessing today’s events and Andrew’s lechery without reference to the past. In levying our odium upon Prince Andrew, in condemning him to the pits of hell—be they heated by Catholic or Anglican fire—we must keep in mind the family and the history of which he’s so inextricably a part.

He’s a member of a monarchy, after all, which is sprung from the loins of Henry VIII—that tumultuous Tudor from whom, so many years later, these wild Windsors collectively spring. Henry VIII, as our attention shifts from Andrew toward the man by whose accession his line was established, was the paterfamilias of this perennially naughty clan from whom, for the better part of four centuries, so much uniquely English scandal has been produced. He was the king, an incumbent for nearly four decades, under whose massive weight and overwhelming pressure the entire nation’s future creaked and moaned. It was a result of his influence, at once sanguinary and resolute, myopic and self-serving, that the Britain of modernity was built. If not in philosophy, then doubtless in biology and theology, Henry VIII was the man in whose burly, corpulent, and inebriate image all of these current royals were made.

However diluted, this most recent display of sexual impropriety for which Prince Andrew has lately become infamous is, so to speak, in his regal blood—red, fiery, and corrosive to the last of its drops. Sexual promiscuity, an apologist for him and that fallen family might claim, is in fact wholly predetermined. It’s all but written in his bones, entrenched in his destiny—a genetic, indelible imprint of which he can’t be dispossessed. The fact that he indulged his sexual perversion and bedded at least one underage girl is, you might hear said, an ineluctable act of fate. Such, though, is to be expected of Andrew—a direct inheritor of the misogyny, mischief, and indecency of his progenitor, Henry VIII.

Henry VIII, of course, is the one English monarch outside of George III about whom we Americans know a little something (albeit, our encounter, study, and appreciation of the latter is experienced through the lens of our own Revolution; yet what better lens is there, I ask, through which a tyrant might be seen?). In thinking of Henry VIII, if we know anything about him, we know that he was a fantastic and inexhaustible collector of wives. Indeed, his accrual of partners with whom he shared his bed (if only fleetingly) nearly matched the roman numerals by which his Christian name was followed: he was the eighth in his lineal succession, while his wives numbered six. An account of them in full would be better suited for displays of pedantry and unwanted erudition—to which, for hope of retaining your devotion as a reader, I’ll not here condescend.

Yet we know, be it by years of bar-room trivia or daily Jeopardy! observance, at least the first three of the total six: in order of their appearance, they were Catherine of Aragon (the daughter of the same Ferdinand and Isabella under whose auspices Christopher Columbus sailed), Anne Boleyn, and Jane Seymour. Those by whom this first fifty-percent was succeeded (Catherine Howard, Anne of Cleves, and, finally, Catherine Parr) are unknown to almost all readers of history, save those bothersome and meddling pedants by whom we’re so insufferably annoyed. Though seemingly an exhaustive list for a man who lived but fifty-five years, Henry VIII appended to these half-dozen ladies the amours of so many other mistresses, so various a collection of lustful lovers, that history has stopped keeping count.

Yet for all his efforts (and no one can doubt that he didn’t earnestly try), the game of biology—that universally human competition of which we all take part—was not one at which he was especially adept. Certainly, one can’t say that he was a victor in this struggle to transmit one’s genes, characteristics, and name. Between the wombs of six youthful and, more or less, willing wives, he begot only three children. At least there were only three for whom the perils of a Medieval infancy weren’t too overwhelming. Infant mortality rates, in that era, were discouragingly high; Henry VIII’s only legitimate son, Edward VI, died at the tragically premature age of fifteen. Likewise, his most cherished bastard, Henry FitzRoy, died three years before breaking into his twenties. “Bloody” Mary and Elizabeth I, of course, would survive long enough into their adulthood to come into possession of their father’s throne and quarrel amongst themselves, but neither proved sufficiently fertile to carry a son, much less Henry’s name.

One might suspect of these Tudors that most ungenial curse of sterility. Perhaps, in fact, their barrenness and their inability to reproduce was a punishment meted out by an understandably angry God. It was, we might surmise, the response of a piqued deity to whom, through years of irreverence and the killing of Thomas More, the practice of Anglicanism, an admittedly newfangled and heretical creed, was nothing short of an abomination. Thus, contemptuous of Catholicism, that gift of whose possession Abraham was continually assured until end of his days (that of a philoprogenitive nature) was removed from Henry VIII’s Tudor descents.

You see, Henry VIII, not unlike Prince Andrew, was painfully indiscriminating when it came to the ladies by whom he was to be pleasured and amused—and hopefully, by whose fecundity his lineage was to be extended. On this last part, both Henry and Andrew seem to have failed. Had it not been for Henry’s sister, Margaret and the Stuarts and, eventually, the Hanoverians, and the Windsors who continued in her path, there’d be nothing to speak of Henry VIII outside of his infamy. Prince Andrew, it seems, has only this. Infamy, and infamy alone. There is no contribution of his to history by which he might be reconciled. And, despite what I’ve said, we ought not to judge him leniently—though lechery be in his blood.

Far from being someone in possession of a reactionary bent, I wouldn’t call myself—at least not by the exigency of this binary choice—a revolutionary. Between these two poles, that, to the north, of progress and that, quite behind, of regress, a neutral temperament such as mine finds its solitude. It stays there, quite to itself, happily appreciative of the state of its repose. In this assumed posture of placidity and calm, in this moment of tranquility and peace, such a person as am I observes with dispassionate comfort and acuity of mind both the benefits and harms of revolution and, of its opposite, reaction.

The quantity of revolutions and reactions by which our world has been shaken and, consequently, stilled beggar enumeration. There are, we’ll admit from the very start, too many from which the student of eruptions in the lives of states and men might choose, but it can be said of most revolutions that they have a very specific chronological beginning and end. they can be marked from start to finish. They are born and, just like the human beings by which they’re roused, they die.

Not every revolution, however, offers so discrete and obvious a beginning and an end. Some are quietly, perhaps even imperceptibly taking place. Such is the condition of the revolution about which I’d like to talk below. It was not one induced by the crumbling of a political regime nor the raising of a governmental coup, nor was it specifically a social upheaval by which the normal intercourse and demeanor of man in respect to fellow man was riven apart. It was, instead, a revolution strictly of an industrial type.

The Industrial Revolution, at least in my opinion, is still very much underway. It hasn’t a definitive beginning and end. Doubtless, I think it’s not yet come to its fullest completion, though it began over two hundred years ago. One could even argue, as I do, that this revolution of industry conceived in the second half of the eighteenth century is ongoing in a modified and, perhaps for that reason, a more salubrious fashion, and its continuance is a momentum from which we’ll persist greatly to benefit. Absent the billowing smoke stacks on whose exhaust our forebears choked, exempting the immiseration and the child labor by which their lifespans cut themselves short, and forgetting the fuliginous mines of coal into whose depths so many of our parents plunged, I think we are still in an age of, if not purely industrial, then technological revolution. It’s an age onto whose rapidity of motion we can barely hold, and it moves with any sign of slowing down, much less of stopping.  

I think of this, and it strikes me most intimately, as I conduct nearly all of my commerce online. I am, admittedly, one of those millennials from whose laptop’s entanglement he can’t be freed. I’ve witnessed, as have we all, the yearly diminution in days required to send an Amazon package from points A to B and, if said package and its contents are not in accord with our fleeting tastes, directly back again. What once was counted in weeks has come now to be expected in hours. Distance, logistics, supply chains, and the technological cords by which these three things are bound are only on the very rarest of occasions considered by the majority of us.

It is, in every way, a technologically revolutionary age. As such, I’m reminded of that other revolution, the Industrial Revolution, by which this one of which we’re all passive participants was preceded. Both, the technological and the Industrial, must be viewed as having impacted our species with commensurate force. The Industrial Revolution, that great leap forward from human to mechanical power and from Medieval to modern times, is the event, spanning nearly two centuries, out of which this current internet boon to which we’re all witness first emerged.

Without discounting its benefits for the world of exchange, nor understating its importance to the commercial life of man, the emergence of the Industrial Revolution brought with it more than a few adverse effects. Industries, once considered inextricably entrenched, were uprooted seemingly overnight. Institutions, once thought inviolable to the crude probing of a machine, proved vulnerable to the mechanical touch. The environment, unaccustomed to the saturation of its atmosphere with so copious an output of soot, wheezed its way into a distressful respiratory state by which it—and, by extension, we—are still ailed today.

All of these consequences could be discussed at length. For the sake of brevity, though, that upon which I’ll focus below is one specific industry for whose end the Industrial Revolution is to thank.

Antique in its establishment, exclusive in its admittance, profitable in its practice, and—most important of all, as it pertains to our theme—vulnerable to the march of time and the winds of change, the guild—that long-lived phenomenon of artisan craftsmanship and parochial trade—was one of the many victims to which the Industrial Revolution made a claim. The guild, so fondly placed within the memory of our past, long preceded but very quickly succumbed to that century of industry out of whose mechanized labor and unslakable smoke stacks our beloved modern world was born.  

The guild had long since fallen into a state of disrepair. Of course, it had available to it a rather long time to fall. You see, the guild is quite old in its existence; it’s only recent in the commercial life of man that it has fully disappeared. Present, from the first century till the nineteenth, in the throbbing urban centers of the continent, ubiquitous in each entrepôt along the Mediterranean Sea, the guild was of uniquely European origin. As an institution, it began with the exuberance of commerce (the same by which we’re still intoxicated today) in the streets and waterways of Imperial Rome. There, in that land of the Latin tongue, the guild went by the name of collegia—as our colleges (whose main purpose, notwithstanding all the drivel and corruption in which they’re seeped today, is the teaching of a profession or a trade) do today.

Over the course of the next few centuries, the guild evolved into an institution upon which nearly every Medieval European economy was built. At least they were partially. Along with the foundational blocks of feudalism, cheap labor, tillage, pasturage, and a peasant class out of whom nearly every inch of life was extracted, the guild became an essential piece by which the grand edifice of Europe was ultimately to be raised. The guild became an inextricable aspect of that era’s progress and its movement away from penury, toil, and the harsh occupational conditions to which the workers of that age had become woefully inured. It was a movement toward a more genial atmosphere of job security, safety, and a reliable income on which, if lucky, the workers employed in its trade might happily retire. It influenced, among so many other things, the production of goods, the output of crafts, the employment of artisans, the openings and closings of careers, the leanings of politics, and the proliferation or control of commodities, luxuries, and trade.

The guild’s problem, however, was its resistance (an often quite open and shameless one, one might add) to the ineluctable forces of advancement and innovation. Creativity, enterprise, vitality, and change, these were the forces—cosmic in their scale, economic in their scope, though ultimately purely human in their application—for which the guild suffered no allowance. All of these things, we happy capitalists now realize, are to be, and indeed must always be, highly esteemed. They must be protected and welcomed, as if vulnerable and salutary guests. They are the forces without which we moderns simply would have none of the luxuries in which we currently, though sometimes thoughtlessly, indulge.

As gatekeepers to this economy of indulgent, useful, and beautiful goods, these guildsmen played the role of vulgar and inhospitable conservatives. They were the impregnable walls of complacency through which no novelty could flow. They formed a static, if not to say, completely reactionary segment of society into which few, if any, innovatory ideas could penetrate. No such innovation could pierce the hidebound insensitivity of their stubborn wills. They shackled their unpliant wrists and calloused fingers to the ancient and stagnant regulations of which they were the inheritors, and permitted the flexibility of nothing new.

This was their ideological impediment. Along with this, they suffered a practical disadvantage as well. When contrasted with the burgeoning capitalists by whose ambition, lack of deference, comparative verve, and competitive spirit they were so infuriated, the guildsmen lacked far too much to be long sustained as a commercial class. By the weight of their own inability to adapt to the changing industrial winds, they were bound soon to topple over and to collapse.

They simply hadn’t the competence in action nor the industry in scale to be able to satiate the demands of a swelling populace whose demands were growing by the day. They were situated rather for provincial than international trade, for hamlets rather than empires. Municipalities were their markets, neighbors their negotiators, and they knew nothing worthy of their enterprise beyond what they could see. All the while, the capitalists were busy circumnavigating the globe and literally forging new horizons. As such, the guildsmen lacked the ability for the procurement of such raw materials as cotton, tobacco, sugar, and indigo of which, increasingly, their domestic, artisan goods were expected to be made. Capitalists, on the other hand, were able to secure investments, augment productions, and reach lands in whose soil these resources sprang—and they were able to do so with far less effort. The guilds simply couldn’t compete. The converging forces of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution rendered the institution of the guild, already old, incorrigibly obsolete.