What is Nobility?
Actual Lords and Ladies as the Traditionalist Answer to the Elite Question
Traditional nobility is under-appreciated in Dissident Right circles for a variety of reasons. Some people simply don’t know enough about it to know its advantages. Some have developed elite concepts that pose as explicit alternatives to it. I have always been a proponent of nobility and this essay aims to present what I believe to be its main qualities.
I have finally decided to write it after engaging with Johann Kurtz, who regularly writes about this topic on his Substack Becoming Noble. If you are subscribed to the Counter-Revolutionary Bulletin, you probably know him - if you don’t, please consider subscribing to him as well!
As elite theorists, we, the Dissident Right, know that an elite inevitably exists in society and that a given society’s success depends on the quality of this elite. This is the premise of monarchy and aristocracy: rather than trying to inflate a (faux-)elite, or to distribute elite credentials as widely as possible, society must accept that the real elite is always an organised minority, and invest its resources into improving it.
The quality of an elite is closely tied to its structure, function, rules, to the ways it perpetuates and renews itself. What kind of elite do we want? Who should decide who belongs to the elite? How open should it be to new entrants? Many right-wingers omit all of these questions, preferring to end their argument against egalitarianism with an open-ended statement that some kind of elite will and must exist.
Others, who have a clear understanding of what a state should look like (and not just what it shouldn’t be), attempt to create blueprints for future elites. Neoreactionaries envision a class of shareholders to keep the CEO-monarch in check, naturally selected from people who can afford enough equity. Vitalists want physical qualities to determine social status. Some want IQ, genetic tests or military service to be the primary way to obtain high positions in society.
All of these ideas have in common that they are too one-sided, concentrating on one or two aspects which are usually those that characterise the author’s particular ideology. They either conflate elite status with net worth (just like, to a large extent, it actually is in current society) or completely reject economic wealth and entrepreneurship, sometimes even demanding performative asceticism to justify legal privileges for elite members.
As a traditionalist, I believe that sometimes, instead of trying to create something from scratch, it makes sense to look at the past to find an answer to a complex question. After all, traditional institutions, especially those created before the advent of “scientific” politics and ideologies, tend to be organic products of a naturally evolving civilisation.
What is the past’s answer to the elite question? What is the kind of elite that dominated European society before the advent of the so-called “enlightenment”, rationalism and mass democracy, and that still tends to hold sway in countries less affected by postmodern “achievements”?
Let us talk about nobility!
And by nobility I do not (just) mean the moral dimension of the word - the abstract nobility of the spirit that any right winger should try to cultivate and demand from others. No, let’s talk about actual, hereditary lords and ladies who have coats of arms, live in castles, marry each other, ride horses and hunt pheasants for sport.
Before we examine the advantages of nobility, let us define it.
For the Oxford English Dictionary, nobility is the “quality of being of noble rank or birth; social or political preeminence, usually accompanied by hereditary privilege.”
Wikipedia describes it as “a social class found in many societies that have an aristocracy. It is normally appointed by and ranked immediately below royalty. Nobility has often been an estate of the realm with many exclusive functions and characteristics. The characteristics associated with nobility may constitute substantial advantages over or relative to non-nobles or simply formal functions (e.g., precedence), and vary by country and by era. Membership in the nobility, including rights and responsibilities, is typically hereditary and patrilineal.”
In my opinion, nobility must be:
formal, defined as a class to which one either belongs or does not;
aristocratic, possessing both material wealth and cultural distinction;
privileged, having clear rights and obligations that set it apart from other parts of society;
hereditary, the mere transmission of membership following strict rules, while being easier than its acquisition by outsiders;
exclusive, renewed through a formal appointment process which is seen as an immense honour and reward to the chosen, recognising different types of merit that make ennoblement beneficial both for them and the existing nobility;
virtuous, possessing a common paternal ethos making it suitable for leadership;
distinguished, functioning as a high-level subculture that serves as a reference for the rest of society.
These seven qualities set a functional nobility apart from other forms of elites, both the current elites of modern countries and the various alternative proposals made by the dissident right. Let us examine them one by one, and what it means for the nobility in an organic society.
Nobility is Formal
Nobility, first and foremost, is a personal quality, it means being noble.
If we try to define nobility in any other terms, it is easy to end up conflating it with being rich, virtuous, having a good character or dressing well. But these are only individual aspects, and not even of nobility but of aristocracy.
If nobility is to be a term to describe a form of actually organising a society’s elite, and if it is to be a positive answer to the elite question, it must offer a clear delineation between the elite and the non-elite. Our acceptance of the fact that an elite must exist demands this; for the existence of an elite can only be affirmed if there is an universal agreement that certain people are part of it.
This must be enshrined in law. There must be people which are legally part of the nobility, and only they should enjoy the privileges and treatment. There should be no uncertainty here: you are either noble, or a commoner, and there is nothing in-between. Either your local court, or a special heraldic body dealing with noble affairs should be able to provide you with a certificate of nobility, and indeed it should be required to procure one enjoy any of the formal privileges and enter bodies restricted to the nobility.
Even in most countries which still legally recognise a nobility, there is only a division between nobles and non-nobles, the latter being the majority of the population. However, the most straightforward and traditional way to achieve this is to divide society into estates, nobility being but one of them, the highest and numerically, the smallest one. Everybody who is not noble would belong to one of the other estates, and would have a different set of rights and obligations.
Noble titles, coats of arms, forms of address such as Your Highness strengthen the legal distinction of the nobility, and if there are several kinds of titles, they can help create a hierarchy within the nobility and furthermore create a motivation for nobles to excel at their noble obligations which can result in the grant of a higher title. However, they are far less important than the fundamental condition of being noble.
Nobility is Aristocratic
The terms “noble” and “aristocrat” are deeply interconnected, and they are often mistaken for each other. And yet, one must warn against considering them identical. If being noble is a legal status, then being an aristocrat is what every noble (or person whose elite status is otherwise recognised by the state) should aim for.
As with nobility, there are many definitions for aristocracy, and some are covered by the other aspects of nobility that will be described in this article. For now, let us define aristocracy as the condition of both possessing material wealth and merits, and the social, cultural and moral foundations necessary to make good use of them. The aristocrat is set apart from the merely rich man by the way he treats his wealth.
The nouveau riche is unable to hide his proletarian origins and must spend his wealth on flashy luxury goods, feeling the need to display the newly acquired fortune ostentatiously because he alone cannot persuade others of his success. The flashiness of new money is an overcorrection of one’s previously destitute condition. Exaggerated luxury, gold-plated everything, fast cars and super-model mistresses are the way the entertainment industry portrays wealth, and those who have only been exposed to this portrayal and had no contact to other wealthy people (perhaps from families that had belonged to the class for several generations) will seek to emulate it in the case of a sudden windfall simply because they think this is the proper way to live a good life.
The aristocrat, on the other hand, does not need to prove anything to anybody. The old WASP saying that a gentleman or lady should only appear in the newspaper three times - birth, marriage, death - epitomises the aristocratic principle of discretion. The people who matter know who you are anyway. If somebody doesn’t, it’s probably not his business. It is no surprise that the aristocrat’s wealth is never purely material in nature, and that somebody who has the misconception that only financial wealth defines social status will have a hard time recognising an aristocrat.
Of course, possessions are necessary to secure the economic influence of a class. In the case of aristocrats, they mostly consist of long-term investments, most commonly land and historical estates, as well heirlooms whose value is more sentimental than physical. Many nobles and aristocrats are cash poor, and instruments such as the fee tail have been created specifically to prevent noble families that encountered hard times from selling off their land to pay off debt, to preserve the right of their descendants (in perpetuity) to live off the land rents. In fact, for the existing aristocracy to accept a merchant (or rather, one his distant descendants) as one of their own, the purchase of land - not a mansion and 5 acres, but actual land - is still considered an important step, and in the past, monarchs who ennobled a subject for his loyalty and service often granted him a manor.
However, land and old houses, after all, are still things that anybody can buy. And even a title can be granted to anybody. The bulk of the aristocracy’s wealth comes from things that you can’t simply acquire by ticking off some bucket list. Aristocrats are well-connected - nothing says “old money” like being given an internship because the boss is your distant cousin. Aristocrats have a distinctive style, they are well-groomed and seem to blend in in all situations while still having a certain aura that sets them apart from the common people surrounding them. Their manners are impeccable, and unlike the newly rich, they don’t look down upon their inferiors - only on people who frantically try to pass off as an aristocrat without actually being one. They know their Brahms and Bruegel from childhood and can give anybody an impromptu tour of their castle or any important landmark. And while anybody can win the Nobel Prize or become his country’s President or Prime Minister nowadays, the aristocrat descends from multiple people who did and knows his genealogy well enough to be able to show how. A lot of this will be discussed later in this article.
An aristocracy will always form if elites are allowed to become somewhat hereditary, start intermarrying and expected to develop a certain ethos around it. Aristocrats exist in monarchies and in republics, and they can be noble or not. Often, only part of a country’s aristocratic families are formally recognised as noble. This situation can arise when titles used to be granted in the country but aren’t anymore.
A nobility that is not aristocratic becomes a husk of its former self (as such a situation almost always follows the nobility’s economic decline or violent displacement), but an aristocracy that is not formally recognised as noble cannot unleash its full potential and cannot be systematically controlled and improved by the state. Noble titles are a powerful tool to mediate and regulate social status, and as they are (ideally) not subject to purchase, ennoblement can serve as a filter limiting social mobility to prevent elite overproduction and to select only those who truly deserve it for elite positions.
Nobility is Privileged
In recent times, insofar as the nobility survived legally, it shed all of its privileges and membership became purely a honorific award. Many monarchical constitutions created in the 19th century allowed the ruler to bestow titles but not to attach any privileges or exemptions to them. This often turned out to be but a step on the path to abolishing nobility altogether.
While the lustre of fancy titles, being called “Your Highness” or the prestige of a coat of arms is an honour in itself, nobility’s raison d'être has traditionally been to be a functional class composed of aristocrats which are then put to work in the interests of the state and given a special legal treatment in return for this. If organic society embraces the idea of class, which it must to be organic, then the nobility must be accorded its rightful position as one of the higher Estates. A nobility that is an actual Estate of the Realm is an institution which produces and refines aristocrats and provides a structure to their life, not unlike a monastery which fulfills a similar role for those who have chosen a life devoted to God. Nobility, in the true sense of the word, must therefore become associated with rights, but especially with duties that the rest of society does not have: Noblesse oblige.
From times immemorial, nobility has been associated with military service, and the surest way to become noble until the end of the Middle Ages was to become a knight. Many nobles were freed from monetary taxes and instead paid a blood tax, readily following their lord whenever he went to war. Albeit by the advent of modernity, the nobility had lost many of its martial aspects, its structures still betray its origin as European society’s warrior caste. A Duke used to be a military leader - the title only later became hereditary. Orders of chivalry still technically make one a Knight, even without a horse and shining armour, and even if there is no formal dubbing ceremony. The title of a knight’s apprentice - esquire - also survives in many modern honours systems.
It is, therefore, only natural for any restored nobility to first and foremost reorient itself towards a military role. When Peter the Great created the modern Russian nobility in the 18th century, he made military service both an obligation for the scions of existing noble families, and a way for commoners to join their ranks.
Depending on how an organic society will come to be in the future, and whether it will follow a period of chaos at first, those who voluntarily take up the responsibility for the physical security of their communities will gain an easy path to elite status. Many qualities that make a good noble also make a good officer. The implications of this can go both ways. Young noblemen, especially younger sons not set to inherit the family estate, ought to be encouraged to join the army and the law should make them preferred candidates for officer posts. But whenever men of lesser means rise through exceptional bravery or long, loyal service, their integration into the nobility should be a self-explanatory consequence. The readiness to spill blood for the Fatherland, to risk one’s life and limb for King and Country is universally accepted as a mark of a virtuous man, and whenever it is time for the nobility to replenish itself with some new blood those who have proven themselves on the battlefield should be the first in line.
The nobility’s leadership role is not limited to war, however. Gentlefolk’s skills in leading people are just as applicable to the civilian world, whether in the state bureaucracy (historically often modeled after military structures), in cultural fields, or even in business. Historical empires could administer their enormous territories in part thanks to poorly-paid noble officials who lived off the passive income of land rents or even forewent wealth altogether because they regarded service as a matter of loyalty, tradition and devotion. Britain is an outlier: until 1999, all hereditary Peers could sit in the House of Lords, and it is only now that Keir Starmer is kicking out the last ones.
Service - whether with the sword or with the pen - was seen both as an obligation and a privilege, never as a tedious obstacle to one’s career as it is seen by young men in countries which have a military draft. Some prestigious military units were created specifically for the sons of old noble families. Many of them had to spend some time as a servant in the royal palace. In Russia, before Peter the Great created a Western style household, jobs at the Tsar’s court in Moscow were fiercely fought over and sometimes hereditary. Special courts were created just to determine who has the better right to, say, carve up the Prince’s meat during lunch!
To secure the nobility’s loyalty and make sure that it could compete with the merchant classes not bound by its ethos, monarchs often provided nobles with land or stipends to make sure they did not sink into poverty, especially in countries where nobles were not allowed to work with their hands. In the time of feudalism, knights were provided farms and peasants to secure their livelihood. The paternal connection between a noble family and its land is always also a connection with the local peasantry, which the lord leads and protects. Land is a secure investment, more suitable to guarantee a family’s long-term prosperity than any other commodity or business. It is absolutely not surprising that one of the main privileges of the nobility that drew the ire of the Left is the ability to entail one’s estate, to make sure that it passes to the senior male descendant in perpetuity, undivided, and cannot be sold. But even though in most countries, they have been dissolved and the government tries to do everything to force the gentry to divide their estates between all of their children until little is left for the individual heir, noble families still count among the principal landowners in all countries except the formerly Communist ones where “redistribution” was done more aggressively.
Service (particularly in prestigious positions which need not be well-paid) and property (particularly land), these are the main privileges of the nobility, for which it historically paid in blood. But even if a regime decides to do away with these, the nobility still retains its mindset and self-consciousness for many generations to come, and the following principle helps it do so.
Nobility is Hereditary
Nothing triggers all factions of the Left more than the hereditary principle. When liberals admit that total equality in all regards cannot be achieved, they will inevitably say that as long as inequality exists, it must be grounded on “merit”, a vague notion that includes not just good deeds but also passing exams or otherwise somehow succeeding in the System. And of course, “merit” can never be transmitted from father to son, everybody should ideally have to start from scratch. In short: if a leftist does not want material wealth to be abolished altogether, he at least demands that it is limited in its size by what can be achieved in the course of a single lifetime. Even many defenders of nobility on the Dissident Right adopt such egalitarian talking points by demanding that titles are made conditional on each new generation “proving itself” in some overtly sacrificial way.
In reality, the very point of nobility, at least in its Western conception, is that it is hereditary. We should not question whether titles ought to be inherited, but whether nobility that is not hereditary is nobility at all or just the perception of nobility, a perception that is created when somebody is given a title or coat of arms and certain rights to enjoy only for his lifetime. While standards for nobles should be undoubtedly higher and every privilege must be met by an obligation, the ultimate reason why somebody is noble by birth is not because he has done something but because his ancestor did something he was ennobled for and he can prove that he descends from that person.
The standard condition for the son of a nobleman is to be noble himself.
Making nobility hereditary is certainly founded on an expectation that somebody who inherits it is better suited to enjoy the privileges or do jobs reserved for the nobility than commoners. Aristocratic upbringing positively correlates with success in an elite position. But this alone requires for at least the fundamental privileges of nobility and for its social lustre to be present from birth.
Sure, nobles need to pass exams, pay taxes (if not freed from taxation) and do national service as well, and some positions, while being exclusive to nobles or favouring noble applicants, would still require applications and interviews. And sure, living in conditions that might be acceptable for other classes but are incompatible with the noble dignity might be grounds for the suspension or even permanent derogation of noble status. Crime should result in the loss of a title, just like it can result in the loss of other honours. But there should be no question that nobility is inherited by default, and then maintained for life if you do not screw up, and that being born to a noble family should in fact be the default way to become noble.
And of course, when somebody is ennobled, his elevation is usually the product of a lifelong career and his age is advanced - nobility makes sure that the memory of his achievements lives on in perpetuity even if successful generations might not immediately surpass them. And even here, the probability of the latter happening is increased, not decreased, when nobility is hereditary.
We know that intelligence is at least partly hereditary. We know that certain genes make a person more suitable for certain roles, including leadership. And insofar as nurture is involved, it is the first years of one’s life that are the fundamental ones. If a person of humble origins rises in an extraordinary way, it might not be just luck but a product of a positive mutation or some recessive gene. This all speaks in favour of nobility being acquired at birth, and coming with a special upbringing to activate the gifts passed down biologically from the Great Men who made the family noble. This also speaks in favour of a certain level of endogamy: if genes determine success, then let the descendants of extraordinary people interbreed, so that the genes that led to their success in various fields concentrate in the following generations and help young nobles develop extraordinary abilities in the most various fields.
People who are not the immediate heirs to a title or fortune should not be deprived of the fundamental rights nobility brings. In the European tradition, nobility is always passed on from the father to all of his children, even if the mother is not noble, as long as her condition is not so destitute that the marriage would be considered a total mesalliance. Younger sons of nobles and their descendants are the reservoir from which the state can recruit devoted officers and civil servants. They might not be privileged (or burdened) by a landed estate, but the qualities of an aristocrat are present in them just like they are in their eldest brothers. This does not mean that all family members should have the same title or rank.
And Great Men can rise not just from the ranks of commoners with resolve, but often are minor members of great families, already descending, very distantly, from other Great Men. Letting hereditary nobility pass through the male line universally is an ideal and time-proven compromise between non-hereditary “nobility” or nobility limited to a single person in a family at a time, and nobility that passes to all descendants regardless of the line which would make everybody noble in due time. It provides a sense of perpetuity, and it is in line with the principle of patriarchy.
We must remember that, if the state uses the instrument of nobility to institutionalise its elite, it can also harness it to influence the composition of the elite and improve its quality. It will do so by choosing who should be ennobled under which conditions instead of letting wealth alone determine elite status, and then giving their descendants the ideal conditions to thrive in an elite position, something to which they will already be predisposed by their birth.
Nobility is Exclusive
We have established that the nobility should follow the hereditary principle, and that most nobles at a given time should be so by virtue of their birth. But the nobility cannot be a completely closed class if it is to succeed in the long term. To become a reservoir of aristocratic genes it must subject itself to the injection of fresh blood from men who have demonstrated extraordinary qualities from time to time. The pursuit of hereditary status is one of the most natural instincts that a man can have, and the state can harness it, connecting particular virtues with elite membership. If the monarch does not degrade himself to the level of outright selling titles (which has, unfortunately, happened in history), the prospect of obtaining one can, for example, encourage merchants to become less merchant-y and adopt aristocratic values, to make long-term investments and contribute to their communities.
There should be no illusion that new noble families wouldn’t mostly come from classes already adjacent to the aristocracy. Merchants are one of them, along with officers, high-ranking civil servants and any other people who, despite not being noble, have professions typically associated with the nobility. Nevertheless, some of the greatest historical houses had exceptionally humble beginnings, and as long as a person’s achievements result in a general feeling that his accession to the nobility is justified, there should be no obstacles. The acquisition of nobility at the end of a multi-generational process is more common or organic, but there is no doubt that Great Men, whatever their station by birth, must be able end their lives as noblemen.
As a defender of estate systems, let me clear up that ennoblement is not a meritocratic attack on the hereditary aristocratic principle.
First of all, it is absolutely clear that even families allegedly noble “since times immemorial”, the nobility of blood that tends to look down on families ennobled by letters, were not yet noble at some time in the past themselves. Their entrance into the nobility was a process that was much more gradual, informal, and predates their written genealogies. Even if a family were to prove descent from a Roman patrician or from Caesar himself, it still stands the ancestors of Roman patricians, and yes, even the ancestors of Caesar moved from the plebeian into the patrician order at some point. Therefore, while it must be a crucial element of Right-wing thinking to demand healthy and very strict limitations for social mobility, their purpose can never be to maintain a completely frozen system. Rather, it is to improve the quality of elites by making it harder to become one, and by encouraging excellence within estates as an alternative to the cult of “education” and careerism for all but the truly best of the best.
And secondly, in repeating that nobility always carries obligations, let us note that the ennoblement of a new family must only occur if it benefits the nobility more than it harms the estate which it will leave. For every new noble, a good peasant or burgess might be lost. Remembering this should further serve to limit the number of titles a sovereign grants. But if the observation has been made that elevation makes sense, the act is then warranted by the needs of the state, which would rather have the commoner who has excelled in some form, and his descendants, excel as members of the nobility, rather than remain in the condition of their birth which might limit their usefulness to the regime. In the context of noble service, ennoblement is an act of recruitment, a draft of new elites. This indeed also means that it is right to question whether somebody who is offered a title after prudent deliberation should be able to turn it down if for some reason he does not want to take up the responsibilities of nobility. He has proven that he would thrive in this role and this is where the government wants to see him, whether he wants it or not. Just as the best King is one that never wanted to be the King, the best nobles might be those who do not join the nobility voluntarily.
Ennoblement has two components. It both recognises and instills qualities, apart from conferring a purely legal status. Somebody can be spiritually noble but not aristocratic in the more material sense, he is ennobled for his deeds and hopefully, his descendants will, in time, make use of the opportunities that membership in the nobility gives to become real aristocrats. When a merchant is ennobled, the main qualities recognised are probably material ones, even if there is a prerequisite to perform certain acts of distancing from the merchant mindset and lifestyle (such as donations to charity or entailing your fortune into illiquid assets). Ennoblement serves as a humbling fact: an entrepreneur who is granted a title and then invited to an aristocratic gala for the first time in his life will find that certain things simply can’t be bought, no matter the price. His family will have to earn, develop and refine them through many, many generations.
Of course, the nobility should not overly favour one kind of achievement, and officers, bureaucrats, businessmen, scientists and even artists should all have a shot at new titles whenever they are granted. The military path to nobility is the most natural one, but does not mean that all new nobles have to rise through military service. Rather, such service can be an intermediate step in the process of ennoblement: the state could encourage merchants to give their sons a military education to improve their families’ chances of eventually being ennobled. Ultimately, the function of the nobility as an aggregator of genes, abilities and heritage conductive to leadership depends on the identification and integration of elites from various walks of society, from various industries and fields.
Even the mistaken ennoblement of somebody who has “earned” it through sheer luck is beneficial: his immediate progeny might lack noble genes, but through access to noble circles and endogamy (in this case, marriage with women from families that have been part of the nobility for some more time) they are likely to come into the family. They can then make the difference between a successful business being squandered and persisting through the generations. Thus, nobility can even be a self-correcting institution.
The most important aspect is that the number of new ennoblements stays limited: an elite that opens itself to an influx of people who have little to do with it is replaced just like a completely closed one that is actively overthrown by outsiders. The best, only the truly best, the best of the best, must be considered for ennoblement: the number of paths into the aristocracy may be high but they cannot be easy.
Nobility must be a mountain, which can be climbed from various sides, which all pose their hardships and dangers selecting for the best among those who chose each path. A noble class that is too open will eventually be diluted by admitting families that are not excellent enough and will simply become a subset of the bourgeoisie with a bit more pomp and pageantry, and being noble will simply be a formality.
Nobility is Virtuous
The aspect of virtue is somehow covered by the aristocratic qualities of the nobility but nevertheless deserves to be addressed separately because, if anything, virtue is what justifies the existence of a socially elevated order in society, it is the central asset. Those who have privileges and power benefit society if they use them virtuously which. Therefore, the nobility as an institution must select for virtue and must cultivate virtue in its members. This is the rationale behind having a nobility. Groups that are purely self-selecting rarely select for virtue, as seen in the degeneracy that often follows the takeover of a society by merchants who base membership in the elite solely on wealth.
But what is virtue in the context of a nobility and how is it achieved?
The key to this is perhaps found at the beginning of the text: nobility is formal and therefore, both the nobility and other social classes know that they are noble. Unlike purely moneyed oligarchies or technocratic elites, the very identity of nobles demands that they embrace their elite status instead of rationalising it away or even denying it. You are noble because the state says so, and you are privileged because the state says that the nobility must be privileged. The kind of official elite status that nobles are guaranteed by the state demands a different kind of accountability than elections or “merit”. Most nobles are nobles by birth and therefore, their status is, in the eyes of the modernist, “unearned”.
The virtue demanded of the nobility boils down to what they make of this status. A bad elite collects rents without giving the nation a second thought. A good elite sees itself as an estate with a distinct role in society, one of many. The labourer works, the peasant farms, the merchant sells, the priest preaches - and the noble leads. This is not an attempt to diminish the nobility’s exalted position: leaders are, obviously, less replaceable, there are less of them than there are workers, and thus, it is justified that they are treated as more important people and enjoy a more sophisticated lifestyle with less material worries to distract them from their actual work.
Distinct things are especially virtuous for every class: for the peasant or the worker, it is obedience and humility; for the noble, it is responsibility, and the qualities of leadership. Of course, a noble also needs to be obedient to his superior (the monarch) and humble because these are Christian qualities demanded of everybody, but most importantly, he needs to be a reliable leader who can be trusted by those beneath him. The decisions of a leader affect thousands if not millions of lives, and this is what both the nobility and other classes must understand in order for an organic hierarchy to work. As a noble’s decisions influence the fates of others, he must show an exceptional level of self-control, restraint and willpower. And leadership, in the traditional, chivalric sense, must also mean leading the charge, the readiness to risk life and limb for the greater good.
Again, it is good if commoners also demonstrate these qualities, but they are most important for the aristocracy, and when commoners are selected to become aristocrats, it also happens on the basis of them demonstrating these qualities to a higher degree than ordinarily required. It is simply more important for a noble to be a good person because so much more depends on the quality of his character. Just as the most intelligent people are selected to do science, the most virtuous people are selected to lead.
This system result is a mutual respect between nobles and commoners: the former realise and embrace their superiority to care for the latter who accept their inferiority and submit. The relationship between the classes is paternal. It echoes the traditional relationship between parents and children, and between men and women. This is not a coincidence - all are forms of traditional hierarchies required for the organic society to function. A good child obeys his father because he knows that he is more virtuous than himself, and a good father will seek to guide his children, knowing that they are less virtuous, helping them develop the same virtues he possesses to bring them closer to God.
Nobility is Distinguished
The distinction of the nobility from the rest of society is a synthesis between all of the above. Nobles have a generalist leading role and certain privileges applicable to various situations and therefore, they are the only truly universal form of elite, not confined to a single professional or mercantile realm nor to spiritual affairs. A noble is recognisable as noble regardless of the field he works in, which is encouraged by the use of titles in protocol, but also by the ethos and (sub-)culture that an organised nobility will eventually assume. If nobles are distinguished and visible, it will be easier for them to obtain the everyday courtesies they deserve from a society that respects them, but they can also be held accountable: they do not have a choice to demonstrate their nobility today and keep it secret tomorrow. This somehow contradicts the understatement associated with nobles mentioned above, but ultimately, a real noble will find it very hard to consciously hide those qualities that allow any reasonably intelligent person to recognise that he is special.
Nobles and aristocrats are more refined and particular in their characters, in their manners, in their lifestyle, and appearance. This is a consequence of all the other qualities of nobility. As nobles are wealthy, they can afford better clothes and live in larger houses - and those who are not can still afford it thanks to the art of genteel poverty that is a characteristic of the class. As nobles are brought up to be virtuous and good people, they will maintain manners that others might find antiquated or unnecessary, but form an intangible cultural heritage and bring class to all functions the noble appears at. As nobility is hereditary and forms the identity of entire families, nobles will value children, marry early and have lots of them.
A noble family’s life is more ceremonious than the life of an ordinary family. Royal christenings and marriages, balls and galas are the antithesis to the bourgeois cult of rationalism. These events are held not only to mark important milestones in a nobleman or noblewoman’s life but also to perpetuate noble traditions. Horse races or grand hunts are occasions on which you can see fashion that has stayed roughly the same at least for a century. Such functions are not a form of cosplay, they actuate heritage that has been passed down authentically for dozens of generations. All of this is incomprehensible to a merchant who seeks to “optimise” his life, who might indulge in luxury for his personal pleasure but will not understand the purpose of inviting seventh cousins to a child’s birthday. And to the petit-bourgeois, the dreary people who take pride in being “middle-class”, all of these are grave excesses.
This is not a monopoly of the nobility: anybody can dress well, hold black-tie parties, be polite and try to start a big family. As membership in the nobility (or at least the appearance of such membership) is desirable and connected with high status, the nobility serves as a reference group. Whatever values or traditions are promoted within the nobility will inevitably trickle down: both to the ambitious who see adaptation as a way to increase their own chances of becoming noble, and to ordinary people without such ambitions who will nevertheless regard certain things as proper because their betters do so. This is where the state’s policies relating to the selection of the new nobles find their purpose. Nobles serve as examples of what it means to be a good person, and social advancement becomes connected to conforming to that model of a good person.
The material aspects of nobility and the codes of dress and speech become interconnected with aristocratic status and noble virtues. Even if they won’t wear military uniforms in their everyday lives unless they are on active duty, nobles will be recognisable by a certain uniform, the timeless style of a true Gentleman, and this uniform will mark a man who has conquered himself, a good man who is suitable to lead in any situation.
These seven qualities are, in my opinion, the things that make real nobility work. Of course, few aristocracies, even few actual nobilities in history, and even fewer in the modern day demonstrate all these seven qualities perfectly. The Left’s Terror of Quantity, its fight to make everybody equally poor and destitute finds its ultimate enemy in nobility. Hereditary status is the ultimate affront to any kind of egalitarianism, and even liberals who believe that people should be allowed to gain status through “merit” are opposed to its transmission to descendants.
Nobility endangers the Left. All right-wing values can be considered noble values. This is no surprise because the very term “right-wing” originated with the aristocratic factions that opposed the great European revolutions. The gallant knight is the prototype of the alpha male, the noble mother is the prototype of the tradwife. This is why throughout history, leftists have always displayed a propensity for incredible violence against nobles, particularly for ritual executions of royals. Nobility offends the Left not simply because it is the ultimate form of inequality, but because nobles tend to believe in what the Left hates, because they are men of quality and not quantity.
A real nobleman, by definition, is a man of the Right (or, a “Sensible Centrist”, if you prefer this term used by parts of our circles). A real nobleman loves God, his King and his Nation. A real nobleman is ready to fight for what is right and to create a heritage. A real nobleman combines faith, tradition and vitalism. All the aspects of masculinity praised by dissidents converge in the archetype of the nobleman. Nobility even allows us to balance and reconcile those that are seemingly contradictory. Nobility is the best answer to the elite question because it combines all other answers!
The current political regime makes it excruciatingly hard to live a noble life, even if you belong to an existing noble lineage. It is hostile to noble titles, it seeks to evict families from the land they held for centuries through a tax regimen and inheritance laws aimed at breaking up “unearned wealth”, and it replaces aristocrats with celebrities as the reference class to promote not refinement but degeneracy. Displaying the qualities of a real nobleman makes it harder, not easier, to advance socially in this society.
This is not a reason to give up the concept of nobility. Perhaps we do not live in a time in which the people call for counts and barons to lord over them, but God always calls for nobles to carry out His will and to serve Him. The current situation calls for a purer form of nobility, one freed from all vainglorious and materialistic aspects, less recognisable to those who have been taught to value the vile and base. Titles and castles will undoubtedly return when the disease of modernity has been defeated, when the foul Cathedral of Satan has crumbled and a new, authentic, organic human civilisation has emerged from its ruins.
But until then, it will be the responsibility of every man who yearns for this day to cultivate nobility in himself, and for the men of the Right to join forces with the remaining historical families that have stayed true to their ancient pledges to carry on the torch until better times come. For titles may be the gift of a king, but what qualifies one for them is earned through devotion to ideals that require belief not in a King when there is none, but in God.
good writing!