No More Learning

But although economic institutions were now increasingly looked upon as capitalistic rather than feudal, wages being paid for labor rather than service and protection, all the old cultural ways persisted and still flourish.
Marx, in The Communist Manifesto, recognized the capitalists as a new class, superior historically and functionally to peasants, vassals, lords, clergy and the like, but doomed to fall before the holy onslaught of the factory proletariat. Marx, obviously, wishfully accelerated the pace of history, and wrongly anticipated a turn that never took place. Marx's lumpish proletariat, actually, was heading nowhere beyond right where it stood. As matters now appear, it is heading toward liquidation, first split, then part pushed lower into a dismal subproletariat via automation and part pushed upward into the lower middle classes or beyond, perhaps into middle-classness. What made the capitalists superior to predecessors, although not wholly acceptable to Marx, was their greater rationality. But, as Marx saw it (correctly I believe), it was a rationality largely misplaced, wholly in the narrow service of self, to the dangerous neglect of society as a whole. Only the proletariat, oppressed under wage slavery, could in the Marxian view feel the necessity for equitable social arrangements all around. Such arrangements, as Marx thought (perhaps rightly), could be supplied only by socialism. The proletariat has obviously failed Marx and his followers just as the masses have failed the democrats. They represent lost hopes.
As any casual glance around the United States will show, the country is full of mentalities more appropriate to the old Teutonic forests, the Roman arenas and the medieval countryside than to a society of capitalist institutions. One can discard socialism completely. For verification of this view one hardly needs stray as far away as Nashoba County, Mississippi; Selma, Alabama; Cicero, Illinois; or even Bronx County, New York. One need only read speeches in The Congressional Record, where the free- ranging infantile Freudian id reveals itself in full baroque regalia.
The Finpolitan World Preserve
Any hut, any palace, the Kremlin itself is open to the finpolitans, who range the world in breadth and depth. These cannot, manifestly, be ordinary people. They put grand dukes comparatively into the shade.
"What we really have," said one of the Rockefellers to Morris, "is our name. That is our big asset. It opens doors and, as our money is dispersed, it is of far greater value than anything else as long as it remains a good name. Seeing that it does must be our first consideration. There is an old saying: 'Shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations. ' Well, we have to avoid a third-generation anticlimax. We have to put our time and our money to work building something new. " 59
Aptly put. The Rockefellers, as any intelligent person might have suspected, do not feel they have been called upon to preside over the dissolution of the world's largest fortune. They are, like all the finpols, at work preserving and building something new. They have long-term projects. They intend to stay even as their public relations men, imaginatively anticipating socialist intentions, suggest they are disappearing.
As Laurance put it on another occasion, they are concerned "to see to it that the well doesn't run dry. " Two of the fourth generation who have been earmarked to occupy themselves for this reason with family business affairs are Nelson's son, Rodman, and David Rockefeller, Jr. 60 "There are so many Rockefeller organizations extant that it is hard for outsiders to keep them straight. " 61
That their multi-faceted position is at times as confusing to them as it may be to outsiders is shown when Morris says elsewhere that "The Rockefellers always have their guard up against anyone who suggests that their name and wealth give them some special privilege. " 62 Here, on different pages, one can have it either way: Their name alone has great weight in the world (page 36), their name confers upon them no special privilege (page 28). What is the case is that in ordinary behavior they are like anyone else, "democratic," standing in a long line to get a wedding license, eating in a college cafeteria to save pocket money or living as a common laborer in the oilfields on the first job. But when large objectives loom, the name alone opens difficult doors. 63 They appear to be Cinderellas, of lowly station one minute, up in the clouds the next.
The name, however sinister it may sound to leftists, is a primary asset of all the finpols --Du Ponts, Mellons, Fords, Pews, Hartfords, Rosenwalds et al.
Just what the cash value of the name is in each case would be difficult to determine with any preciseness. What, one may ask, would it be worth to a syndicate if converted into the designation of The Rockefeller National Bank and Trust Company, the Rockefeller Insurance Company or Rockefeller Enterprises, Inc. ? Merely for the use of the name in some such enterprise the promoters would unquestionably be willing to assign a sizeable block of stock, the exact dimensions subject to negotiation. With the understanding that the Rockefellers would be associated with the management, bringing into the background their vast connections and holdings, the block of stock would be considerable apart from any contribution of capital by the Rockefellers. They need put up no money at all.
Beyond this, the name is of shadowy intangible value in a project-oriented world.
As to opening doors, indeed, the Rockefeller name is magic. (The names of all the American big-wealthy open doors all over the world. ) Whenever the Rockefellers--or any of the other higher finpols --travel abroad, they are instantly enmeshed in the nets of upper-level governmental protocol. As key figures in American society, they instantly galvanize governmental attention.
Thus, says Kahn in the New Yorker, when David Rockefeller at forty-eight contemplated taking a trip to Russia, he paused to reflect; for he "had heard hints that if he should get to the USSR he would probably be invited to confer with Premier Khrushchev, and there was no telling how explosively the Communist leader might react to a confrontation, on his home ground, with a notorious international banker. " 64
Rockefeller decided to go, and in Leningrad "was told Khrushchev would like to see him the following afternoon at the Kremlin, in Moscow. " There he went with his daughter Neva and for two and a half hours participated in what he later described as "the most intensive conversation I've ever had with anyone. " 65 What the upshot of it all was has not been indicated, but within two years the United States had widened its trade relations with the Soviet bloc. Was there any connection?
As Kahn pointed out in the New Yorker, the Rockefellers cannot traipse into any country anywhere without ascertaining the political climate in advance. At the wrong time their appearance could cause riots. Thus in Ghana, to which the Rockefeller Brothers Fund had contributed a million-dollar program of developing small local industries, in 1963 they came under heavy ungrateful attack by the Ghanaian Times which said truculently: "Whilst the Governor of New York concentrates on changing the political climate in Washington to open up the trade in nuclear arms, the president of Chase Manhattan is mostly concerned with commodities like copper and bananas. " The paper went on to charge that David was engaged in blocking the Organization of American States and the Alliance for Progress, trying to overthrow (apparently without success) the governments of Bolivia and Peru, providing Portugal and the Union of South Africa with arms, dominating the U. S. Congress with stooges and a kept press, and using the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department as tools to supervise and protect his bank's ramified foreign investments. 66
While all this sounded a bit far-fetched to the conventionally skeptical, the reserved Christian Science Monitor had earlier described Rockefeller as "a businessman who is listened to all over the world. " 67 Apparently they were at least aware of this fact in Ghana.
As Kahn went on to point out, David Rockefeller travels a good deal all over the world, inspecting properties, meeting with the highest government officials--left, right or centrist.
In return, at home, David frequently entertains, in the city and at Pocantico Hills, potentates who visit the United States.
"David's always got an Emperor or Shah or some other damn person over here, and is always giving them lunches," grumbled the doughty Sidney J. Weinberg of Goldman, Sachs and Company. "If I went to all the lunches he gives for people like that, I'd never get any work done. " 68
Not only is he engaged in an interminable running series of conferences with the highest foreign movers and shakers at home and abroad but his schedule takes in without any party discrimination the highest American officials. All of this going and coming, hosting and guesting, may indeed be conducive to a more smoothly running world (and this one devoutly hopes) but it is not a line of activity familiar to ordinary mortals. This, in point of fact, is the way it is on the finpol circuit. This is beyond mere Big Business. This is Super-Business, where the line of demarcation between inner government and upper business is so blurred as to be indistinguishable. It isn't deals but concessions, protectorates and spheres of influence that are negotiated here.
Training for such a high-level life in the case of the Rockefellers began early. Whereas the aim of the routinely upcoming wealthy was merely to get into The Social Register or to marry impecunious nobility, the Rockefellers were early pointed toward much higher game: close-harmony association with the power-elite leadership of nations. Declasse? nobility, whatever aura it carried from the past, never interested any of the Rockefellers; they always went directly for the man who was in charge now. He, they seemed to know through some sort of osmosis, was the fellow to know and understand, whatever his forebears or background. They aren't discriminatory; they would just as soon negotiate with an emperor as with an ex-peasant.
Thus Nelson, just out of college and just married, went on a trip around the world with his bride. He carried letters of introduction to "high officials and distinguished persons," and in India had interviews with the Viceroy, later Lord Halifax, and Mahatma Gandhi. 69 These were, to say the least, rather exalted companions for a collegian. But this was no ordinary collegian. It was a future high U. S. finpol.
With the possible exception of Winthrop, all the Rockefellers when they go abroad are knee-deep during their entire visit in power-wielders, power-elitists and their mentors, majordomos and public relations men. The same is true of other finpols, and of their representatives, the upper managers of the big corporations and banks. In the Orient John D. III is kow-towed to from teahouse to pagoda and palace.
This hobnobbing with the international bigwigs contrasts rather pointedly with Nelson's political campaigning at home, during which thousands of TV viewers have seen sweaty admirers pounding his back at Coney Island and other plebeian haunts and shouting, "Good old Rocky. " There is apparently a difference of opinion between foreign leaders (including Khrushchev and the Emperor of Japan) and the American public about the precise status of the Rockefellers. Can it be that the foreign political sharks, as they muster out the palace guard and diplomats to greet them, are mistaken? My own view of them accords more with that of the foreigners. The finpols are ultra- bigwigs, super-megaton bigshots, Brobdingnagian commissars of affairs. In relation to them the average one-vote citizen is a muted cipher, a noisless nullity, an impalpable phantom, a shadow in a vacuum, a subpeasant.
Whereas at home the contact of these worthies with the pubpols is somewhat veiled, out of consideration for the illusions of the American booboisie, abroad the contact is more open. But for every contact with the power-brokers abroad there plainly are ten to a hundred with the domestic variety, all readily accessible by telephone. The finpols along with the pubpols, rising men of wealth, churchpols, corp-pols and top corporation lawyers, lawpols) are collectively engaged in running the world politico-economic system according to their own peculiar lights. Out of these ranks are drawn most appointed high government officials when such officials are not drawn from the ranks of electorally defeated pubpols.
Public policy is determined by this echelon in the sense that a given stated policy is either implemented or ignored. If it is ignored, like Prohibition, it is dead. Thus, in the 1950's anti-Communism was the policy publicly supported as a means of promoting a lucrative military-industrial complex, and many rank-and-file citizens gleefully joined in verbally strafing Communism and hunting out real and supposed Communists and deviant ideologists. In the 1960's, despite the escalation of the Vietnam war by President Johnson, anti-Communism was allowed to wane, as a diplomatic rapprochement gradually took place with the Soviet Union and trade relations were broadened with the Soviet bloc. The Vietnam war was waged not against Communism but against an amorphous "aggression. " True, many stalwarts tried to pump life back into the anti- Communist crusade of the 1950's but they were more and more ignored by the upper financial-political echelons. These did not repudiate their former anti-Communist position, which might once again be useful; they simply abandoned it and chatted at length with Mr. Gromyko, possibly discussing The Chinese Menace. Soon, no doubt, it will be unpatriotic to eat chop suey and egg foo yung as it became unpatriotic to eat knockwurst, sauerkraut and hamburger (liberty steak) in 1917-18. And so it goes in a fabulous democracy.
So extensive are the affairs of the finpols that all the members of each finpolitan financial syndicate (finsyn? ) require large personal staffs embracing far more than body servants. In the case of the exemplary Rockefellers, for example, "In addition to a special staff that each Rockefeller has to handle his personal affairs, the Rockefellers in mass have a general staff to handle their communal business. There are more than three hundred employees in this establishment, which includes a legal department, an investment department, a philanthropic department, a brigade of accountants, and a family archivist. " 70 Many of these are people of arcane knowledge in near and remote fields, including a specialist on theological education in underdeveloped regions.
It is the general style of this finpolitan world that newcomers to big wealth will in time, whatever their current reservations, come to embrace through their children and grandchildren. Although the more recent Texas oil millionaires do not belong to this world, they are already getting ready for it as shown by their sprouting foundations. Once one has made the money, as old judge Mellon recognized, it is necessary to hold on to it. And the finpolitan style is a way of becoming a permanent fixture, of weaving oneself into the warp and woof of the status quo. The finpolitans, it is evident, are far less concerned with today than with tomorrow.
Finpolitan Sociology
What any sociology of the finpolitan world would be devoted to, it seems to me, would be the outlining of point by point comparisons between the Rockefeller style and that of their contemporaries. There would be shown wherein the established big-rich copy the Rockefeller style and wherein they deviate from it. Variations of emphasis take place throughout. But, despite variations, basic similarities are visible, notably the presence of investments in huge slabs.
In one matter all the finpolitan groups resemble each other: None behaves as though it believed it had been called upon to preside over the dissolution of the family dukedom. All, like the man who came to dinner, act thoroughly at home and as though they intend to stay, even as mass-media propaganda trumpets that the great fortunes are being dissipated. Rather than being dissipated, they appear to be more permanently and acceptably entrenched from day to day. It is only a popular fantasy that the big fortunes are disappearing; but, perhaps like a bad dream, they disappear only in order to appear again.
Fifteen
THE DIVINE SPARK AMONG THE RICH
Pretty much ignored by the public relations artists, who usually have more specific fish to fry, some of the American rich at least have individually performed in ways commendable from strictly critical points of view and in ways that at least occasionally draw indulgent, even maudlin, commendation from outside their class. They have by no means, contrary to leftist propaganda, all been grabbers, wastrels and self-aggrandizers. In what ways they have been brushed by the divine and semi-divine afflatus, as far as they are visible to mortal man, it is the purpose of this chapter to indicate.
Commendations of the rich are by no means rare, especially in the many media subject to their own control or influence. The task, however, is to evaluate them in the light of criteria more widely shared. Results then become somewhat modified.
The public relations fraternity argues that the founding, building up, assembling, directing and managing of any one of the large corporations or banks represent prima facie an important creative contribution to something called The American Economy, a contribution which in the aggregate is taken as comparable to the genetic labors of the
Hebraic Jehovah over six prodigious days. While this may be so in some degree (the element of time to one side) there are a few obstacles to accepting this somewhat florid view--as, for example, whether the economy has been added to or subtracted from, accelerated or delayed. As far as that is concerned, many ingredients happily blended by economists into the potpourri of Gross National Product are pronounced by spoilsports as deleterious: whisky, cigarettes, gaseous industrial fumes, comic books, cheap films, ugly billboards, the traffic complex, misleading advertising, crumbling shelters, shoddy merchandise, slums and industrial wastes conscientiously dumped into natural waterways.
The public relations wizard points to corporation C and asks one to kowtow at least mentally to founder F for what is palpably a creative achievement, giving employment to X thousands of good and prayerfully parental souls of the Great Society who would, presumably, otherwise be living in trees and eaves. This pretty much accords with the foolish popular view of the corporation: a job-giving, life-sustaining entity. Ordinarily left out of such considerations is the fact that corporation C in its majestic rise, by various ruses (some possibly adjudicated illegal), may have blocked the rise of other laudably life-sustaining entities. Until pressured by a slow-moving government to relinquish its absolute monopoly, Aluminum Company of America, for example, certainly stood in the way of the emergence of aluminum-making jobs now provided by Kaiser Aluminum, Reynolds Metals, Olin Mathieson and various others. Corporate managers have not always or solely been concerned about all-out production and full employment. Right now by means of automation they are eliminating jobs right and left. They have been at least occasionally interested in making money for themselves, at times by restricting production and jobs, at times by nonproductive but profitable manipulation at the top. job creation has been quite incidental to the whole process, really has nothing to do with it.
The inimitable Beethoven, writing symphonies, did not have agents in the field impeding other symphonic writers, attempting to trip them up or cause them to write down sour notes. Like most creators he did his stuff and allowed others to do theirs. He did not hold patents on all possible combinations of musical notes, ready to direct his lawyers against other note jugglers. Much of corporate achievement, so-called, has involved sheer frustration of others, hardly creative. The sculptor, too, it is sometimes the riposte of nimble pro-corporate dialecticians here, destroys in order to create; he destroys pristine stone, reshaping its contours. But the sculptor does not destroy other sculptors! If he did he would indeed be the greatest living sculptor; but hardly on grounds of his own creativity.
The merging of companies, too, is usually hailed by the mass media as a stupendous creative act, a titanic generative copulation, which indeed it may in some cases be. It is, however, hardly creative in every single case or even in a majority of cases. What was created when a collection of existing steel companies were merged into the United States Steel Corporation by the elder J. P. Morgan other than a profitable opportunity to issue a vast quantity of watered stock? The constituent companies marched on under the triumphal arch of the new stock issue. The same is true of General Motors and many others.
While admitting there is creativity on the corporate circuit in peculiarly corporate matters (human creativity being hard to quell), I merely suggest that it should be specifically shown rather than uncritically assumed with respect to the panorama of corporations. Despite public relations puffery there are grounds to doubt there is much creativity in this quarter and instead much sedulous copying and overreaching (as shown by widespread corporate espionage), and I simply want to leave this phase out of consideration as a clear-cut social contribution. Most of what is remarkable about
corporations, as I noted earlier, is specifically noncorporate, technological, and derives from science and engineering rather than the business and financial offices. What is alone generally impressive about corporations, despite the glamour of the executive washroom and the keys thereunto pertaining, is their purely engineering aspect.
It is, therefore, of some interest to notice that when corporations put themselves on display in their best party clothes at world's fairs and in conducted tours of their premises they provide, no doubt in all innocence, only an engineering display. The ordinary visitor innocently thinks, as he is innocently expected to think, "This is a marvel of Big Business. Wall Street is really great. " The sophisticated observer, however, thinks, "What a marvelous exhibit of engineering skill! M. I. T. and Cal Tech are certainly great schools. " To the latter observer the business side of it all is comparatively dull and uninteresting, heavy-handed and simple-minded.
In the case of the foundations the situation is much the same. Concrete contributions may indeed have been made by mobilizing funds at strategic points and times, as in the case of the Rockefeller foundations; but far from all foundations have made parallel contributions. Most have as their end financial manipulation behind a sentimental screen.
Corporations manufacture, distribute and sell lifesaving penicillin, at a profit. But no corporation discovered penicillin. Corporations never discover, invent or create anything--are never any more than tools, as often for ill as for good.
The Philosophers on Wealth and Power
While public relations virtuosi busily confect their tales to lull the broad public in its belief that everything is for the best in the best of all possible deliriously free worlds, it may be of some interest to take note of the powerful cultural undertow these virtuosi, apparently unaware, are working against.
The rich, thanks in major degree to press agentry and the intellectual sinuosities of the mass media, currently appear to enjoy high status in the United States that will not diminish, presumably, as long as there is almost full general employment, the retention of which is a basic aim of national policy. As long as general employment keeps the populace moderately content, only a scattering of deviant and no doubt justly uncelebrated mentalities will be inclined to dissent from the image of the rich as public saviors and heroes. Hardly anyone except an obvious outcast or deviant presumes to venture doubts. From what quarter, if any, do these pathetic nay-sayers get their wrongheaded cues? What warrant have they for their nonadmiring and surely nonadmirable attitude? Have they indeed strayed from a nice, clean, healthy and wholesome disinfected Americanism owing to the insidious lucubrations of a tele- hypnotic, despicably fiendish Karl Marx sending aberrant messages from the documentary depths of the British Museum?
The simple fact is that the most reflective minds of western civilization, practically from inception, have looked with jaundiced eyes at the rich and the powerful. So to look is quite in harmony with the culture; to think otherwise is to step outside the intellectual boundaries of western civilization. All slick-paper public relations palaver in obeisance to the rich, indeed, is alien to the deepest currents of this civilization and represents nothing other than misbegotten ideological perversity, wrongheadedness of the nth degree.
Concededly one of the greatest minds of western civilization, teacher of Alexander the Great and still casting a broad shadow over us all, notably in his single-handed invention of logic, was Aristotle (384-322 B. C. ). On the subjects of the wealthy and the
powerful the great Aristotle resolutely put it into writing as follows (Rhetoric, Book II, Ch. 16, W. D. Ross trans. ):
The type of character produced by wealth lies on the surface for all to see. Wealthy men are insolent and arrogant; their possession of wealth affects their understanding; they feel as if they had every good thing that exists; wealth becomes a sort of standard of value for everything else, and therefore they imagine there is nothing it cannot buy. They are luxurious and ostentatious; luxurious, because of the luxury in which they live and the prosperity which they display; ostentatious and vulgar, because, like other people's, their minds are regularly occupied with the object of their love and admiration, and also because they think that other people's idea of happiness is the same as their own. It is indeed quite natural that they should be affected thus; for if you have money, there are always plenty of people who come begging from you.
Hence the saying of Simonides about wise men and rich men, in answer to Hiero's Wife, who asked him whether it was better to grow rich or wise. "Why, rich," he said; "for I see the wise men spending their days at the rich men's doors. " Rich men also consider themselves worthy to hold public office; for they consider they already have the things that give a claim to office. In a word, the type of character produced by wealth is that of a prosperous fool.
There is indeed one difference between the type of the newly-enriched and those who have long been rich: the newly enriched have all the bad qualities mentioned in an exaggerated and worse form--to be newly-enriched means, so to speak, no education in riches. The wrongs they do others are not meant to injure their victims, but spring from insolence or self indulgence, e. g. , those that end in assault or in adultery.
As to Power: here too it may fairly be said that the type of character it produces is mostly obvious enough. Some elements in this type it shares with the wealthy type, others are better. Those in power are more ambitious and more manly in character than the wealthy, because they aspire to do the great deeds that their power permits them to do. Responsibility makes them more serious: they have to keep paying attention to the duties their position involves. They are dignified rather than arrogant, for the respect in which they are held inspires them with dignity and therefore with moderation--dignity being a mild and becoming form of arrogance. If they wrong others, they wrong them not on a small but on a great scale.
Good fortune in certain of its branches produces the types of character belonging to the conditions just described, since these conditions are in fact more or less the kinds of good fortune that are regarded as most important. It may be added that good fortune leads us to gain all we can in the way of family happiness and bodily advantages. It does indeed make men more supercilious and more reckless; but there is one excellent quality that goes with it--piety, and respect for the divine power, in which they believe because of events which are really the result of chance.
This account of the types of character that correspond to differences of age or fortune may end here; for to arrive at the opposite types to those described, namely, those of the poor, the unfortunate, and the powerless, we have only to ask what the opposite qualities are.
Nor is the earnest inquirer given a less severe view if he turns to Plato, the other great cultural legislator whose shadow is imbedded integrally in western civilization. All European philosophy, said Alfred North Whitehead (no radical), is but a footnote to Plato. The "divine Plato" took an extremely dim view of wealthy people and personal wealth. Dipping into the excellent Hamilton-Cairns one-volume edition published by the Bollingen Foundation, a Paul Mellon enterprise, we find the following nuggets:
"So, when wealth is honored in a state, and the wealthy, virtue and the good are less honored. . . . Thus, finally, from being lovers of victory and lovers of honor they
become lovers of gain getting and of money, and they commend and admire the rich man and put him in office but despise the man who is poor. " (Republic, 8. 551b. )
As to democracy, "the insatiate lust for wealth and the neglect of everything else for the sake of money-making were the cause of its undoing. " (Ibid. , 8. 562b. )
The arts and crafts are corrupted by the co-presence of great wealth and poverty. (Ibid. , 4. 421d. )
"Wealth and poverty" should be kept out of the good society "since the one brings luxury, idleness, and innovation, and the other illiberality and the evil of bad workmanship. . . . " (Ibid. , 4. 422a. )
Those most successful in the pursuit of wealth become the targets of the drones, become "the pastures of the drones. " (Ibid. , 8. 564e. )
". . . it is the evil life commonly led by the sons of autocrats and men of extraordinary wealth. Such a training will never, never lead to outstanding goodness in boy, or man, or graybeard. " (Laws, 3. 695e. )
"But to be at once exceedingly wealthy and good is impossible, if we mean by the wealthy those who are accounted so by the vulgar, that is, the exceptional few who own property of great pecuniary value--the very thing a bad man would be likely to own. Now since this is so, I can never concede to them that a rich man is truly happy unless he is also a good man, but that one who is exceptionally good should be exceptionally wealthy too is a mere impossibility. " (Ibid. , 5. 742e. )
"One arises from the passion for wealth which leaves a man not a moment of leisure to attend to anything beyond his personal fortunes. So long as a citizen's whole soul is wrapped up in these, he cannot give a thought to anything but the day's takings. Any study or pursuit which tends to that result everyone sets himself eagerly to learn and practice; all others are laughed to scorn. Here, then, we may say, is one reason in particular why society declines to take this or any other wholly admirable pursuit seriously, though everyone in it is ready enough, in his furious thirst for gold and silver, to stoop to any trade and any shift, honorable or dishonorable, which holds out a prospect of wealth, ready to scruple at no act whatsoever--innocent, sinful, or utterly shameful--so long as it promises to sate him, like some brute beast, with a perfect glut of eating, drinking, and sexual sport. " (Ibid. , 8. 831c,d. )
A soul stung to savagery by unsatisfied lusts "is chiefly found concerned with that on which most men's longing is most permanently and sharply set--wealth, with the power wealth gets alike from native bias and pernicious wrong education to breed countless cravings for insatiate and unbounded possession of itself. And the source of this perverse education is the credit given to false praise of riches alike by Greek and non- Greek; they promote wealth to the first place among good things, whereas in truth it holds but the third, and thus they deprive not only themselves but their posterity. " (Ibid. , 9. 870a. )
Plato has a great deal more to say about the wealthy, most of it disparaging. His remarks, indeed, foreshadow the Aristotelian position that the best society is one dominated by a middle class of the moderately affluent, with neither extremely rich nor extremely poor. In both the Platonic and Aristotelian perspectives the United States is a monstrously lopsided entity, a veritable Gorgon, a chamber of horrors.
What is perhaps of paramount interest is that no subsequent major thinker has departed essentially from the script as laid down by these giant pundits. It may be that thinkers in following Plato and Aristotle here merely felt rivalrous toward those with a claim to power other than intellectual, as Plato indeed unquestionably felt rivalrous
toward the poets. Yet intellectuals in general have not felt so uniformly against nonintellectual power rivals like soldiers, politicians, explorers, religious leaders or artists as they have against the rich, a feeling that by no means reached its apogee, as commonly supposed, in the writings of Karl Marx.
Marx has clearly been topped in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, the stylish French metaphysician, who refers to the wealthy and the respectable in general as salauds (filthy beasts) because he believes they have it in their power to produce alterations for the better but instead work assiduously to perpetuate ancient swindles while professing humane goals.
Sartre, like Aristotle and Plato, is rather remote from most Americans. Nearer home, a recent expression of the attitude, deeply etched into American radical and dissenting literature, can be sampled in the summary by the Marxist, Herbert Aptheker, of the non- Marxist C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite as "filled also with burning attacks--as passionate but not as muted as that of his mentor Veblen--upon the social and personal immorality of the rich, their coarseness, cruelty, hypocrisy, greed, and lustfulness. " 1
One could, it is true, assemble examples of the rich from the American scene who apparently fit different items of these characterizations. But, straying outside the circle of the rich, one could unquestionably find proportionately as many cases for each count in the indictment at all except the most refined levels of society. And seeking examples of virtuosic cruelty, one would find it impossible to discover any rival among the American rich to such a Marxist redeemer as Josef Stalin, to say nothing of Lavrenti Beria and a swarm of power-crazed leftist midgets from the lower depths. "Practical" Marxists like Dr. Aptheker, while launching their shafts of criticism, seem blissfully unaware of what their own affiliations and loyalties commit them to defend.
The Aptheker-Mills indictment of "the rich," as formulated above, is clearly far too broad and obviously loaded. It reveals and perhaps prescribes an attitude rather than describes.
But if one turns to the influential Alexander Hamilton among the Founding Fathers, one finds, contrary to Plato, Aristotle and almost every other considerable political thinker in western history, that government should belong to "the wealthy, the good and the wise. " As to the last two, Plato and Aristotle would have agreed; as to the first, we know what they thought.
Social thinkers down through the centuries have all had favorite classes, which they took to be the instruments of deliverance. With Plato it was the intellectuals, with Aristotle the middle classes, with Jefferson the small farmers, with Marx the factory workers, with Hamilton the wealthy and so on. In this boxing of the class compass, one contemporary writer, Nelson Algren, has oddly found his favorite social group among what Marx called the lumpenproletariat --thieves, pimps, prostitutes and down-and- outers.
But, in his admiration of the wealthy, Hamilton, political father of the American plutocracy, virtually represented an historical minority of one among political thinkers.
The Problematic Rich
Who, in the first place, are "the rich"?
Included in the designation are trust-fund infants who at the moment of birth are incalculably rich (and presumably no more offensive than any other infants), trust-fund children of various ages, women young and old of mixed capabilities and outlooks and men ranging from inane idlers and wastrels through routine performers to the intensely but not always laudably active. Whatever else one can say about most of the rich, one
cannot reasonably say they are especially coarse, cruel, greedy or more than commonly hypocritical or lustful. Money in a special place of high honor to one side, a person of ordinary sensibilities would much prefer to associate with many, perhaps most of them, than with the average run-of-the-mill politician, labor leader, advertising impresario or gospel-monger.
What Mills focused his attention on was the active rich, particularly the policy setters, and among these one could not deny the presence of the immoral (tax manipulators, for example), the coarse, the cruel, the hypocritical, the greedy and the lustful; but even among these, that all or most are of the order indicated can be easily shown to be fictional.
What is problematic about the rich is more as follows: The possession of wealth, inherited or acquired, itself informs the possessor that he is special, that he holds winning cards over most people in most social situations. He can, for one thing, finance a greater number of amorous episodes--a big advantage in the estimation of the simple- minded. He holds a social advantage over most others which, unluckily for him, may so turn his head as to give him delusions of inherent superiority, as is often the case in the possession of anything rare and desired. One hugs one's advantages--health, strength, intelligence, learning or wealth--and tends to take them as marks of invidious excellence: snobbism. In some rich families, the Rockefeller notably, the children are carefully reared in as middle class a way as possible to prevent their developing such common delusions; yet the fact cannot be concealed for long that they are special, that they hold a fistful of aces in worldly goods, and that others surely define them as different. They are different; they are rich--in effect, noble--in a society replete with poverty and degradation, Their wealth makes it possible for them to mobilize more effective power than most people at particular points, at times to their own undoing. Money is like a spirited horse in at least this respect: One must know how to ride it, which few really do.
Like anyone else, the rich person may experience frustrations and a sense of being unduly limited; but he does not usually feel it in as many ways nor as frequently or humiliatingly as the nonrich. He feels that he has, in general, more elbow room, a wider range of choice. And he has indeed more elbow room, geographic and psychological.
As to the active policy-making rich and their agents of the power elite (for these latter are mostly agents): Like nearly all people they are usually heedless of whatever is not before their eyes, either lack sufficient imagination (like reckless motorists) or have their attention fully absorbed (like nearly everyone else) by their personal problems and projects. The doers of the world all have projects, and one is either a doer or nondoer. And doers all derive an intense feeling of satisfaction from any project carried to success, whether it consists of writing a book, leading a revolution, creating or managing a corporation or winning an election. Absorption in one's own project, whether it is building a corporation or writing a poem, leaves one unable to play one's attention over other aspects of reality. Probably the greatest harm in the world comes of the simple fact that nobody is able to pay full attention to everything at once. One really should, yet it is impossible. Although this is so, it does not follow that attention cannot be focused on a wider horizon than immediate, specialized interests--a marked tendency of the rising rich at least. The basic offense of most of the active rich, if it is an offense, is that they usually pursue their own visions, skillfully or crudely, not only to the neglect of the rest of the world (as does the poet) but, at times, because they have power, against or indifferent to the needs and wishes of the rest of the world. Not only do they have power but, like most people, they are thoroughly egocentric.
Although now woven by means of large enterprises into the warp and woof of all society, the rich, like nearly everyone else, put their own enterprises first in the narrowly reasonable effort to preserve their social advantage, by means fair or seemingly questionable. Without that social advantage they would, like the common people, be at the beck and call of almost any self-appointed messiah presenting himself as the latest in the line of the Apostolic Succession or, perhaps, a spiritual representative of a freely prescribing Karl Marx or even, like Adolf Hitler, as the offspring of Wotan. Being rich is basically defensive in a rough world, although the defensive position has its own hazards.
What is perhaps most irksome about the rich to the intelligent nonrich, particularly to those with some other vision of how society should be arranged, is not actually what any rich individual may or may not do. True, by behaving outwardly like a gentleman the rich man may temper animosity; but he cannot, even by gentlemanly behavior, mollify persons like Plato, Aristotle, Marx, Sartre and others acutely aware of his necessary role, which is much like that of a character in a Greek drama enacting the capricious will of the gods.
The rich, the plain fact is, confront the rest of society as a solid, semicorporate phalanx, buttressed by law and public policy. By law they hold their positions legitimately and hence can feel complete rectitude. When the national anthem is being sung they can feel it is being sung in celebration of the legal system that supports them, for the aggrandizement of which every man, the poorer especially, may be called upon to offer his very life simply by presidential order, without any declaration of war by Congress. Beyond this, existing policies under the law favor them; they have been adopted largely by their agents with their corporate permission.
The existence of this solid phalanx is sharply noticeable only to those who have some proposal to make with a view to adjusting policy in order to accommodate some large number of people who are, in one way or the other, supposedly being unduly inconvenienced by any number of things. Whenever any public proposal is made for any change (however slight), it is bound to encounter opposition. Upon inquiry it turns out that the opposition ordinarily stems from one or more affluent or rich people, usually referred to euphemistically as Interests. While there are indeed many interests in a society, the most assertive is surely the property interest.
Even a case about a trivial question, adversely affecting only one propertied person, may have wide implications for many or all propertied because it may set a precedent upon which further more extensive similar actions may be taken. The entire phalanx of the propertied becomes agitated and makes its displeasure known to legislators, judges and other officials. After all, one cannot have unsound decisions approved. Again, the entire phalanx of the propertied may be committed by simply one among the propertied, who presses deviously for and obtains some tax concession. This concession thereafter applies to all, whether they asked for it or not.
Thus it happens that even minor, purely common-sense proposals for reforms often precipitate fierce political dogfights.
In a relevant case, early in 1966 C. Wright Patman, the powerful chairman of the powerful House Banking and Currency Committee, decided on the basis of a committee vote to investigate the entire question of how trust funds are used in corporate and bank control. When subpoenas began to go out to banks requesting information there was suddenly called on June 7 a meeting by 17 of 33 committee members, who required the recall of many subpoenas; on a showdown, however, the right of the chairman to issue subpoenas was upheld.
This checking of a committee chairman was a very unusual action, which obviously had its source in some of the entities being investigated. Not many citizens, it is true, are alert to this situation or probably care very much.
What the final outcome of the investigation will be, whether it will be muted or not, is not yet known. Whether light will be thrown on what Chairman Patman claims are some $215 billion of trust fund holdings one cannot yet tell; all this is terra incognita right now.
By the end of the year, at any rate, Chairman Patman on the basis of subpoenas already returned was able to announce that three-quarters of the banks of the country had at least 5 per cent of their stock held by other banks through trust funds managed for beneficiaries and that this percentage of stock ownership represented a long step toward control. The very largest banks, he said, operated under this sort of interlocking ownership, were all more or less in the same ownership bed--one big happy incestuous family. 2
The information needed in this area is as follows: identifications of trust-fund holdings, book values and current market values, nature of trusts and length of time they run, beneficiaries of a multiplicity of trusts (reducing income taxes), cost of operation of trusts, validity of investment selections for trusts, etc. Whether the named beneficiaries or the managers benefit most is an undetermined question.
The propertied, for one thing, are mostly especially sensitive to anything about taxes-- how much shall be the total levy and, more important, how shall the collection be proportioned? In general, the propertied interest in the United States, sheltered behind technician-spokesmen, has been opposed (whatever some individual property owners felt) to government levies for the sake of the domestic comfort, convenience and necessity of the broad public (its own comfort and convenience being apparently assured) but has been generously unstinting in any military or semi-military expenditures that gave government a strong argument abroad in assuring access to markets, raw materials and trade routes. At present, with military and space exploration budgets inflated to record proportions, the cities internally are literally falling apart. It has been estimated by insiders that 75 per cent of the military budget is rationally unjustifiable.
Beyond the desire to keep down tax totals (hence the fiscally sound objection to "reckless government spending") there is the collective desire of the propertied to shove a disproportionate part of the tax burden over onto the lower labor force which, imbued with patriotic ardor, is presumably happy to support a democratic paradise that freely allows them to go and listen to happy tidings of the afterworld from the likes of Billy Graham and Fulton J. Sheen and to rub elbows with the rich at Coney Island. As we have already seen how deftly this tax burden is shouldered onto the pious, patriotic and not-too-bright lower labor force, the point need engage our fascinated interest no longer.
Whatever the call may be for social adjustment will either cost tax money or intrude more or less adversely on some propertied interest--that is, upon the revenues of some collection of rich persons. More public housing will tread on the toes of private landlords. And as this call for adjustment is fought by the "interests," some proponents are irked. The purely commonsense proposal, for example, to place effective health warnings on cigarette packages was fought to a standstill and defeated in Congress, with the result that the tobacco industry through intensified advertising is selling more cigarettes than ever before in the teeth of repeated formal government findings that they are a clear menace to health. Similarly there was fought tooth and nail suggested mandatory automobile safety equipment and there have been fights in the state
legislatures against attempts to limit in any way the free resale of unroadworthy second- hand cars. One could cite thousands of similar cases.
To be sure, when it is said that an "industry" opposes something, the source of the opposition is kept sufficiently abstract and remote. An industry is not something subject to sense experience. One cannot see it or feel it. "Industry" here boils down to no more than several boards of directorsperhaps fifty to a hundred men--who represent stockholders, mainly large stockholders--in brief, rich people. These latter are, somewhat poetically, as adversely affected by automobile air pollution as the poor although they can resort to air conditioning or retreat to remote fresh-air estates and ranches.
It is this consistent opposition to proposals for reasonable as well as unreasonable change that the propertied have offered down through history, opposition more effective than argument, that has caused the rich to be looked upon as problematic ever since Plato. It is not that they are necessarily vicious, as the Marxists often postulate; it is just that they are blandly or uncomprehendingly selfish, and not always very intelligently. The unpropertied person may be just as selfish but he has no telltale instrument such as property with which to reveal his selfishness so completely.
Like the small band of Greeks in the pass at Thermopylae the selfish rich hold back by their skill of maneuver in an entrenched position (always in the name of sound policy) huge disorganized armies of sansculottes and descamisados (among which, thoughtfully, they have their own friends haranguing on all manner of irrelevancies dear to the same sansculottes and descamisados). It is all much like a disciplined Roman legion against a barbarian rabble.
Because virtually everything has an economic aspect and because the rich, as we have seen, own and control the foundation and prime stages of the economic system, practically anything that anyone is likely to propose in the way of a new arrangement is going to strike some among the propertied and the rich adversely, and hence lead them to invoke the law defensively or work for a new self-serving public ordinance. Often the mere attempt to reroute traffic by local ordinance causes merchants to spring into tigerish opposition, presumably in defense of property rights.
Again, many individuals who engage in entrepreneurial action, hoping to become rich, find that the way is barred by persons, propertied or rich, already in established positions. As Henry J. Kaiser discovered, there is no room for another automobile manufacturer. True, there are interstices into which newcomers may insert themselves with success, particularly the area of new technology but, in the main, the road is blocked to all except the very clever--and lucky--among newcomers.
The rich, then, come to seem to those who have encountered their resistance like part of a single corporate entity, a special class, or, as the Marxists say, a class interest. Because they are each part of this class interest, embalmed like a fly in plastic, there is not much they can do to earn credit in the eyes of critics. Owing to the saying of Jesus in Matthew, XIX, 24, that "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God," there was no way out for a rich man for hundreds of years except to give his property to the church. The result was that in the late medieval period the churchpols in the name of the church held tightly more than half the land of Europe; the latecoming kings were far less gullible than the earlier gentry. In the eyes of the Marxists there is nothing a rich man can do except, like Frederick Engels, devote his wealth to the promotion of Marxism; anything less will fail to gain credit. The rich could, to be sure, turn all their wealth over to the government where it would at the present time fall under the benign jurisdiction of Lyndon B.
Johnson, in which circumstances few judicious moralists would see any particular gain for mankind.
Castigation of the rich, however, arises less from envy, as commonly supposed, than from people who have in some way been blocked or frustrated by the massed class interest of the rich. The rich man may be a really nice guy; but his very interests, indeed his whole being, force him to present himself in a certain stylized way. Most of the critics of the rich have themselves been power claimants, who know the rich and powerful can readily trump their cards. Plato, Aristotle and a long line of independent intellectuals have known that their carefully reasoned arguments are subject to political defeat less by sound counter-arguments than by the power of inertia, money and entrenched position. As any practical politician knows, in going before Congress on any question it is better to be backed by lucre than by a bullet-proof argument. Money will win almost every time on crucial questions, such as intruding from afar into World War I, and the only way apparently to defeat it is by some other brute power. Hence, as the Marxists say, revolution. The proffered cure here, though, except in cases of complete war-induced social collapse as in Russia in 1917 and China in the 1940's, is clearly worse than the disease because serviceable institutional restraints are swept away in the uproar and a clean slate is open to an unrestrained set of new power seekers, not at all squeamish (as history has shown) about how they apply their power. Leninist Communism is clearly a modern receivership in political bankruptcy.
Where those counts in the Aptheker indictment are best sustained is with respect to certain uneducated men of the poorer classes who have by book or crook made themselves rich: the original grabbers. In this country these are the "Robber Barons" of the nineteenth century and later replicas. The record on these is by now fairly well known. While many of the established rich, normally lacking imagination and perhaps sufficient sapience, have been normally heedless, the clear-cut depredations of the rich have in most cases been carried out by founders, newcomers, in panicky flight from poverty. It is the ex-poor among the rich who have been the most active social offenders. This was the crowd Veblen largely wrote about in all their vulgarity.
All of which is not to say that there is nothing of an overbearingly objectionable nature about the general policies since World War II contrived by Mills's insidiously bland power elite on behalf of remote principals. Those policies have been, on the whole, immediately self-serving, broadly neglectful of visible internal social decay and in that sense actually inimical over the long term to basic upper-class interests.