DO WE LOVE the Cavalier? The English royalists who escaped to Virginia during Cromwell's victory in the Civil War, and who were the direct ancestors of one Thomas Jefferson, would seem to be little more than an obscure mascot to us -- even more obscure than a fish that can drink three times its own weight. To the extent we know anything about the Cavalier, we probably dislike him for embodying all those qualities we find so unjust today: patrician, haughty and anti-democratic, as we can see for ourselves in the portraits by van Dyck.
True, we may like the Cavalier more than his Puritan opponents, for his wit, his merry-making, his long-flowing hair, his rich dress and elegant style and even, I'm sad to say, his debauchery. But as to the source of these traits, the essential character of the Cavalier -- we hate that, or think we do.
We are democrats, even more than we are Americans: We are so deeply attached to the justice of equality that we have difficulty recognizing when something opposed to it might be good. Yet it is precisely if we really care about justice that we should try to give everything its due and see things for what they are, including justice, or our brand of justice, itself. The Cavaliers reveal not only that men who lorded it over others can have admirable qualities, but that they have these qualities because they lorded it over others. The pride, the self-command, the love of honor, the chivalry, the loyalty to family, peers and king -- those qualities that we may still have some appreciation for -- are developed to such an extreme pitch in the Cavalier exactly because he was a member of an aristocratic caste.
Despite our emphasis on diversity, it is unlikely that we have come across anyone like him. We are unfamiliar with the moral habits of someone who belongs to a long-established leisure class that is small in size and yet confidently believes itself to rule as a matter of right over a much larger class. If one is accustomed from birth to receiving honor and respect, to looking down on others and being looked up to in turn, and to exercising the highest military and political command, then one's entire understanding of justice, and with it one's moral outlook and character, will be the opposite of our own.
Whereas we view with suspicion any distinctions that place one person over another, even when there are real differences to support those distinctions, they sought out distinctions of all kinds, even when they were arbitrary or absurd -- hence the peculiar codes of honor we see among the Cavaliers and the punctiliousness concerning genealogy and precedence. Dishonor was more terrible to them than death. We, on the other hand, get indignant if someone dares to expel us for cheating, and allow lawsuits against our airlines for the 9/11 attacks, by those not ashamed to call themselves "victims." Probably the closest we come to a dim reflection of the old order is in elite groups such as the Marines ("the few, the proud"), or in the lives of certain Southern officers such as Lee or Jackson.
It is obvious what evils we avoid as a result of our political and moral orientation; the question is whether we can dispense with the virtues of our own opposing orientation and still have good lives or a good society. It used to be that democracy drew its strength from those who wished to raise people at the bottom up to their standard; we see this attitude, for example, among the Victorian reformers who led the temperance movement. They had no doubts about their moral superiority over those they were trying to help.
Now such zealous do-gooder types have doubts about the justice of imposing any standards, and their task has instead become "empowerment:" not contradicting the tastes or wishes of any group of people, but simply providing them the rights or wherewithal for them to do as they will. The predictable result has been the downward social pressure to the lowest common denominator, or in some cases, to a standard even lower than that, such as "gangsta" culture. But a democracy that believes it has no just claim to educate or elevate, that views itself simply as a vehicle for catering to the desires of its citizens, or rather to anyone who walks in, may not be a democracy for long.
Manuel Lopez is a Cavalier Daily viewpoint writer. He is a visiting graduate student studying political philosophy.
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