:After 1547 the republic no longer feared the Doge. Before that date seven Doges had been assassinated, nine blinded and exiled, twelve had abdicated, one had been sentenced to death and beheaded, and two had been deposed. But after that date all was peace inside the republic. (J. Plumb, ed. The Italian Renaissance, chapt. 17):
What is reasonably denied to those in power (and those most able to get there) is not to heads of households. When men strut their patriarchal credentials women can expect to take second, third, fourth, on out perhaps to forty-fourth place. But the theoretical ideal in any dignity-based nation, on the other hand, is parity in all things great and small excepting those natural characteristics most benefiting from stewardship: natural talents and acquired initiative. Democracy is the only political philosophy capable of enabling, let alone sustaining, a dignity-based polity. Our democracy in particular presupposes (in theory) every effort toward equal opportunity, in turn assuming equal and inherent dignity for all alike, just as all are in principle equal before the law. If none of this sounds very patriarchal or only remotely Republican, it's because these two groups have long shared anti-democratic mindsets, but never more so than now. Unlike those voting for them, however, this is not counter-intuitive at all, but is something worth keeping uppermost in mind.
What native societies and Republicans share at root is a presumption that they are islands within a sunny South Seas archipelago: they enjoy being laws unto themselves. These are the operative words whose echo will be heard throughout all else we have to say. The niceties of direct democracy, forced by reality in the primitive band structure, does not apply for the rest of the ninety-nine point nine percent of the world's honor-based population, where there is little sympathy for democratic principles and still less for fancy thought experiments like "inherent dignity'. What today's Republicans do understand is that it is unwise to "share' what invites opprobrium, though on occasion they blow even that.
Ideology, worse even than political correctness, is the enemy of truth, its first casualty. Republicans learn early on to keep a lot close to the vest. Above all, they don't need to be secretly recorded needlessly dissing blacks in boardroom labor discussions. Under their breaths we hear the faint but still distinct plaint, "Goddam courts don't recognize rights of privacy anymore. Screw the law" The Texaco case is proof that liberals are out to destroy civilization.'
Actually,
Republicans do have something up on their patriarchal brethren, since the
namesake honor-based societies expect and often demand obligations to family,
community and nation. Republicans are legally free to aggrandize the
dignity-based cookie jar no less, and to far worse consequences in human
suffering, than some sew Saudi nationals learning the arts of flight, student
visas and etc. some years back. Gives it some badly needed perspective.
Republicans are up front and center to claim and abuse every opportunity that
our dignity-based constitutional system offers, meaning that they can be
shoot-em-up capitalists, laws unto themselves -- and, still more -- islands in a
wide open ocean, feeling no one's waves, nor any felt responsibility to
anything but their private perks, private schools, private clubs, and private
sex lives that are for anyone else illegal.
A steward's view
There are times when honor is noble, but my expose does not reveal its subject matter to be an example. One reason I know this is that I am the chief theorist behind the honor-based / dignity-based typology, as well as the metaphysics of offices and their stewardship, for which, analytically speaking, it only follows that I should know more about than anyone else, but also that I should exemplify the stewardship thus implied. Here again, those who do more, owe more. I could not call myself a Republican and say what I just said. Once upon a time, perhaps, but not any longer.
Anyone with a flair for patterns, detail and analysis can arrive at the cultural facts, just as did Thomas Jefferson two hundred thirty-seven years ago in his off-hand, off-the-record observations written to a friend. And as for stewardship, John Selden originated the legal lapidary, "Ignorance of the law is no excuse." He was officially the Steward of the Earl of Kent and believed that the law for most of what we do in society is concerned with what we are all supposed to know in our breasts, without recourse to professors. That content of the law is just stewardship.
The philosopher generates methodologies to analyze why these commonplaces exist and how we can put them to the best possible use. In the case of stewardship we are reminded yet again that the philosopher so often analyses what we already know. Like so much other scholarship, what I do, both the grand theory and the ferreting of elementary principles, is defaulted to independents when academe proves unwilling or unfit to do what requires a great deal of interdisciplinary knowledge, broad-ranging curiosity, and a flair for stewarding truth, to none of which is academe the adept we would prefer it be. If that sounds snarky, it is also not meant to apply to the top few percent who are true scholars, the genuine contributors to the fund of knowledge; but as the generality it is intended to be, it just happens to be all too true.
Jefferson's observations below illustrate that my words are not indefensible braggadocio, but simple truth.
:With respect to my countrymen " I have studied their character with attention". While on this subject I will give you my idea of the characters of the several states.
In the North they are: cool, sober, laborious, persevering, independent, jealous of their own liberties and just to those of others, interested, chicaning, superstitious and hypocritical in their religion.
In the South they are: fiery, voluptuary, indolent, unsteady, independent, zealous for their own liberties, but trampling on those of others, generous, candid, without attachment or pretensions to any religion but that of the heart.
These characteristics grow weaker and weaker by gradation from North to South and South to North, insomuch that an observing traveler, without the aid of the quadrant, may always know his latitude by the character of the people among whom he finds himself. (Letter to the Marquis of Chastellux, 2 September, 1785, closely paraphrased, the original having been given in list format.)
[The boldfaced locutions are those especially apropos to this discussion. The North shows dignity-based traits predominating in myth, while the South reveals the honor-based. Jefferson confused a thing or two but he was spot on where it counted most for our present purposes. Advanced analysis of the honor-dignity model will explain how Jefferson likely came upon, rightly or wrongly, each of his correlatives.]:
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