Scaramouche
this post is a sort of garbled reflection on an adventure novel i finished the other day, although you'd absolutely never know it. i just wanted to get words on a screen
Scaramouche or Scaramouch (from Italian scaramuccia, literally "little skirmisher") is a stockclown character of the 16th-century commedia dell'arte (comic theatrical arts of Italian literature). The role combined characteristics of the Zanni (servant) and the Capitano (masked henchman), with some assortment of villainous traits. Usually attired in black Spanish dress and burlesquing a Don, he was often beaten by Harlequin for his boasting and cowardice.
(From the Wikipedia article on Scaramouche)
It has in the past few months, due to current circumstances, become something of a trend for me to colonise the houses of wealthier friends, get quite drunk, and tell them how to live their lives. Sort of like a backwards Manifest Destiny, if you will, which is all the funnier because a) it is not true, and b) I’m American, which inverts the inversion in a gas way. I love explaining my own jokes!
I consider this not just an opportunity, but almost a divine responsibility which makes it sort of like a backwards noblesse oblige, except that I shouldn’t say that because I mean to talk later about normal noblesse oblige. It’s sort of an ignoblesse oblige, which is by equal strokes horrible French, poor English, and bad writing. But it conveys an idea - I do consider myself at least a bit responsible for advocating for my politics, especially to people who have the privilege to do more material good than I can, because I have the privilege of being heard by them. I count myself a poor emissary, but we must perforce allow time to be the judge of my abilities, such as they are.
This post is hard to write because some of the people I am talking about either do or will have access to it, and I have absolutely no desire to repay their generosity by being a little bitch! And yet a little skirmisher I am. But really there’s only one point I want to make here, and it has nothing to do with my more fortunate friends, who at any event have exhibited excellent praxis in their behaviour towards me and wonderful forbearance in their tolerance of my little bitch behaviour.
The Wikipedia entry for noblesse oblige begins like this:
Noblesse oblige (/noʊˌblɛs əˈbliːʒ/; French: [nɔblɛs ɔbliʒ]) is a French expression used in English meaning that nobility extends beyond mere entitlements and requires the person who holds such a status to fulfill social responsibilities. For example, a primary obligation of a nobleman could include generosity towards those around him.
The Oxford English Dictionary states that the term suggests "noble ancestry constrains to honourable behaviour; privilege entails responsibility."
(Again Wikipedia.)
The concept of noblesse oblige fell out of the common parlance as the economic and political trends of Western Europe moved from monarchic feudalism to (loosely) Republican capitalism. Because there was no more nobility, its obligations largely ceased to exist as well. And yet late-stage capitalist narratives around the moral behaviour required of individuals have shoved us right back into this territory! Infographics, thinkpieces and tweets every day circulate telling us exactly how to employ our privilege, if we have it.
This kind of thing hinges largely around identity politics rather than class; so, for example, you frequently see lists of suggestions for how white people can use their privilege to support the BLM cause that include things like where to send material support, but also include more nebulous social acts like platforming Black voices, having difficult conversations with racist family, and proper social media etiquette surrounding the semiotics of protest.
Going back to my previous post, however, I guess one thing I’m trying to puzzle out in this blog is how exactly to untangle for myself the relationship between (and I’m going to go out on a limb and use analytic philosophy terms to describe things that already probably have a name) hard and soft privileges. Describing things as “hard” and “soft” is an analytic philosophy way of drawing out differences between items that fall within a certain category in what I find an intuitive way to understand, so hopefully I haven’t shot myself in the foot here. Hard privileges, to me, feel like: money in the bank, having a home and health insurance that actually meets your needs, and things like that. Soft privileges might be something like: relative number of Twitter followers, being able to feel like you can walk around in public relatively safely, and other things related to privilege along intersectional axes that are real and really impact our lives, but are more difficult to quantify.
To get back to noblesse oblige, I guess as with all things by basic point amounts to: this is So Fucked UP. And what I find fucked up is that the basic surface ontological levelling of citizens that the middle class carried out when it overtook the nobility as the ruling class hypocritically preserved this basic hierarchy without enabling anyone to fucking state that it existed. I guess in a large sense that stating is exactly what’s going on right now, and it’s why this whole thing appeals to me. Capitalism has deprived us of a way of acknowledging the hierarchical structure of society such that those who have the most are able to pretend that it has absolutely nothing to do with anyone else’s misfortune. Noblesse oblige as a highfaluting catchphrase may not have been as obligating (read: legally binding) as it should have to, you know, materially improve the conditions that medieval serfs were living under, but it was an honest admission that people who have the power to prevent other people from dying of starvation with little to no effort on their part have a moral responsibility to do so, otherwise you’re a fucking asshole. And I guess I’m just pissed off that the Left is now faced with the task of coming up with a concept, and a way of convincing literally half of the population that it is true, to describe that fact when a perfectly good one has existed for millenia!
By lame way of connecting the second half of this post with the first, I suppose that you could say that noblesse oblige comes in at the theoretical level of praxis - it’s somewhere between is and ought, between theory and lived reality. I am deeply obliged and even more grateful to all of my housed friends for sharing their privilege with me, and for indulging my occasional spikiness on the level of politics. This is basically an outline of another one of the things that I am constantly trying to figure out - I have the tendency to joke, and sometimes when pushed, seriously allege that part of my activism is radicalising my wealthier friends through debate. But I know that this is stupid; for one, they’re my friends, and they wouldn’t be my friends if I actually thought that their morals were suspect, and for another, they keep putting roofs over my head. I sometimes leverage my slightly more leftist politics in debate because part of what’s at issue, when we debate, is who is doing more to solve things, and conceptualising the dinner table argument you’re engaged in as praxis is a cheap rhetorical shot - but it works.
But to expand slightly, it’s a problem endemic to the left, and one we engage in all the time in things like cancel culture - we are loudest in our criticisms of people that we already perceive as being on our side. This is for a number of reasons that I’ll probably go into in another post, but I strongly suspect that the most important reason is that they are the most likely to listen to us in the current climate. Telling a Trump supporter that Trump hates immigrants and that his policies will result in thousands of people dying is not likely to go very far, because they know all of that and they simply don’t care. Telling a 22 year old who doesn’t really know what they’re talking about that a tweet they made while the world was ending is classist is these days liable to spark all-out war - but it sure as hell will get you heard. At the beginning of this post I tried to evoke a picture of myself as Scaramouche, and I guess what I’m trying to say is that he is kind of what I am - a little hypocrite in black silks who likes to use their wit as a rapier to pluck at people’s shirt hems. And I’m not the only one! We’re all sort of Scaramouche, hiding behind the greatcoats of our politics and painting ourselves alternatively as noble independent warriors and as faithful lackeys to the cause, but usually hypocritically turning our own meagre powers of argumentation onto the people who, by virtue of wanting to be around us, see value in us. Or, and I don’t know which is worse, wasting our time owning inconsequential internet trolls.
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sorry this post is such a mess, this whole blog is literally just me using your eyeballs as scrap paper but i am going to keep plucking away until something emerges, and i guess you don’t have to read it which is what will happen anyway if i don’t get my act together