Man as Machine.(a conclusion)
TARQUIN O’FLAHERTY.
As the English 19th century folded its tents and fled, there was justifiable optimism abroad as to what the the new century would offer. The Industrial Revolution had changed the world forever. The rise of the middle class was offering unprecedented opportunity to every level of society. The generally held belief was that some sort of vague, Utopian/Socialist/Fair Shares for All type of society would inevitably emerge. A whole new future was gathering speed, an astonishing new and unstoppable society was being created before our eyes.
What none of this unbounded optimism allowed for was the nouveau riche.
The term ‘Noblesse oblige’ is French and means, literally, ‘nobility obliges’. The Dictionary of the French Academy explains this as meaning that those who claim to be noble must conduct themselves in a noble manner. It is the responsibility of the nobility, the more fortunate amongst us, to set the best possible example by helping those who cannot help themselves. In other words, to be truly noble is to be automatically responsible for those less fortunate. These responsibilities of nobility cannot be sidestepped. As far as the aristocratic rules of conduct are concerned, honour, respect, generosity, and helping others (service) is primary, and frittering away your time in comfortable idleness is unthinkable.
These are good decent and honourable rules and did not happen by chance. Their origins are directly traceable to the effect Arabic culture had on the West during the period of the Crusades.
The Crusades failed to reclaim the Holy Land from the barbarian Muslim. Quite the contrary, the Arabic belief system had such a profound effect on our culture that this effect has lasted right up to the present time.
Saladin (1138-1193) First Sultan of Egypt and Syria, presided over a way of life, an Empire, so civilised as to be initially incomprehensible to the Crusaders.
When we, the Crusaders, arrived at the gates of Jerusalem (1096) we were confronted with something wholly new; a tolerant, civilised and sophisticated society. All of the great disciplines, Philosophy, Mathematics, Science and Medicine were available for study, and a rigid code of honourable conduct was practised. There was no discrimination whatever. Jews, Negroes*, Spanish, Arabs, it made no difference. The intellect was all that mattered, the pursuit of knowledge paramount.
Understanding nothing of this,we entered the barbarian city of Jerusalem triumphantly and butchered Jews, Negroes, Christians and Arabs indiscriminately. Then we burnt the place to the ground.
Saladin broke the back of the Crusading habit by systematically destroying the carefully built network of Crusader strongholds. In Europe, enthusiasm for Crusading slowly waned so that by the end of the 13th century, the Holy Land had rid itself of the new barbarians.
The Crusaders went home, irredeemably tainted by civilisation. For almost 200 years they had been exposed to, and had lived alongside, a way of life unthinkable in a West dominated by an increasingly sin and sex obsessed Christian Church. Saladin’s society, it’s generosity, it’s loyalty, it’s requirement that the weak be protected, that women be respected, that service be paramount, profoundly affected Western noblemen, and could not be shaken off. There can be little doubt that the Arabic way of life awakened profound echoes in Europeans, reminding them perhaps of what the real, forgotten priorities of Christianity were.
Schools were quickly established all over Europe where all of the finer feelings we nowadays associate with Robin Hood and the Knights of the Round Table, honour, service , generosity, etc. were inculcated into the sons of the nobility. The very need for these schools amply demonstrates how the Christian Church, in it’s pursuit of power, deliberately turned it’s back on it’s own most basic precepts, and how the Arabic way of life re-established the importance of these precepts in the West.
By the late Middle Ages, these notions had expanded beyond the nobility. They now included the sons of wealthy traders, who were allowed to attend these ‘nobility schools’ to be taught to conduct themselves as ‘gentlemen’.
TO BE CONCLUDED
* Negro is used in this context to refer to “member(s) of a dark-skinned group of peoples originally native to Africa south of the Sahara.”