On The Treatment of Inferiors

A gentleman is one who treats his inferiors with the greatest courtesy, justice and consideration, and who exacts the same treatment from his superiors. — New York Daily News. (H/T: Quote Investigator)

The true measure of a man’s character is how he treats his inferiors. This ethical principle has a long pedigree but why is it so important, especially from an Orthodox Christian perspective?

First, let me make the usual disclaimer when it comes to theological posts: Although I consider myself well-studied and my opinions well-thought-out, I am neither a hierarch nor a priest and I do not speak for my Church in any official capacity. None of what I say is dogma, unless it’s quoting an official source, etc., etc.

That being said: I think the key thing to bear in mind here is that man is made in the image, and ought to be conformed to the likeness, of God. As such, it would behoove us, when considering how we ought to treat our inferiors, to consider how God, Whose ikons we are, treats His.

To a Christian audience, or an audience familiar with Christian mythology (in the proper sense), I need not belabour this point too much. Our Lord gave His life for those in His charge, and those of us who are called by God to a position of authority are also called by Him to imitate the sacrificial nature of Christ’s rule.

An aside here: The notion of ‘servant leadership’ is heavily promoted among Christian leaders, especially evangelicals, in our modern, egalitarian time. The concept is not entirely without merit; certainly, Our Lord did say ‘He who would be great among you, let him be your servant.’ However, in our time this idea is perverted into a negation of authority per se. The idea often seems to be juxtaposed with Biblical commands for, for example, servants to obey their masters, or wives to submit to their husbands, and although it’s not explicitly said, the implied addendum is ‘but that’s not really what it means.’ ‘Yes, wives are commanded to submit to their husbands, but the husband is called to be a servant [so none of that really applies and the wife is still fundamentally in charge].’

However, this is not how Our Lord operated, it is not how the Apostles operated, and it is not how Christians in positions of authority today, whether they be husbands, fathers, kings, or priests, are called to operate. Christ washed the feet of his apostles, to be sure, but at the same time He never hesitated to give them orders, nor did He beat around the bush when it came to the condemnation of the wicked. The Apostles too wrote in clear consciousness of their own authority; even at their most humble they brooked neither disobedience nor disrespect from the faithful. When it is said that the ruler must be a servant, this is true, but it must not be taken in such a sense as to negate the proper hierarchical relationship between the ruler and the subject.

With that aside complete, let us return to the question of how those who are called to positions of authority should deal with those who are placed below them. As Christians, we ought first of all to honour the image of God in which we are created, and second of all to attempt to conform ourselves to His likeness. As such, His treatment of His inferiors ought to be the model for how we treat our own.

And to me, anyway,  That there is a Being of infinite power Who created and transcends the universe may be on some level a hard concept to grasp, but on the other hand it is on some level intuitive that there must be such a Being. But that He would become a man, that he would suffer, not just pain, which to a being of His magnitude must be a rather small and petty thing, but the infinite humiliation of being tortured to death by His own creatures; this is the truly shocking thing. This is the thing which we must, in our own small way, imitate if we are to be conformed to the likeness of God.

St. Paul writes:

Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it;

But this does not apply only to husbands and wives directly. One of the points I like to hammer on is that authority is of one nature. There is not a fundamental difference between the authority of the husband/father and that of the king or the priest.

The reason that a man is measured by the way he treats his inferiors is that there is a mutual exchange in the right cosmic order: respect and obedience flow up, while love and self-sacrifice flow down.

What does not flow down, by the way, is submission or compliance, and what does not flow up is judgment. A woman does not get to say ‘I dont have to submit because I dont feel like my husband is loving me well enough’, for example. This is a side note because I know if I dont throw this in I’ll be accused of making excuses for wives who dont submit, etc. That’s not the point. We’re not talking about them now.

The point here is simply that wherever there is a hierarchy, it is the duty of those who occupy a higher place in the hierarchy to see to the welfare of those under them, even at the expense of their own. The superior man treats his inferiors with compassion; the inferior man, insecure in his position of authority, abuses them to prove to himself that he is in charge,  or disregards them because he is concerned only with his own pleasure.

That’s why the treatment of inferiors, not equals, is the measure of a man.

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Sam Harris On Scientific Morality

I recently found this video of Sam Harris giving a TED talk in 2010 about how science can answer moral questions.

tl;dw Morality is the science of maximising the wellbeing of conscious creatures, we can measure wellbeing, so there goes religion.

There are actually parts of the video where I think he makes good points, such as when he says we have to have a consensus on morality and cant simply tolerate and respect all points of view.

However, what I think we must note here is the degree to which that which Ryan Faulk calls ‘humanism’ has taken over. (Harris actually extends the concept beyond Faulk’s definition to include animals.) Harris automatically assumes that morality is concerned with maximising the ‘wellbeing of [all] conscious creatures.’ This is, of course, a value judgment, and not one rooted in any scientifically verifiable fact, at least not any such fact that Harris has stated or provided evidence for.

Now, if I were writing this to critique atheist morality, I might stop here. I’ve made my point; Harris epically failed to show that ‘values reduce to facts’ but simply inserted a single, all-encompassing and somewhat arbitrary value (‘maximising the wellbeing of conscious creatures’). Of course once you have a single overarching value that covers everything, other values do reduce to facts. Is X good? Well, it’s good if and only if it contributes to the maximal wellbeing of conscious creatures. This may be difficult to measure, but Harris posits that in principle it’s measurable. (Personally, I think you get into trouble when trying to compare hedonic satisfaction levels among different individuals, but we’ll overlook that for the moment.) The fallacy here is obvious. What if I only care about human wellbeing? Or white human wellbeing? Or tall human wellbeing? Or bald human wellbeing? Or my own wellbeing? Heck, I could pick any arbitrary group I want and make its wellbeing the standard of morality. I’d probably be wrong, but science could not prove me so. And what if my standard isn’t based on wellbeing? What if I say ‘what adheres to the Ten Commandments is good, regardless of hedonic effect’? How can Harris possibly disprove these ideas ‘scientifically’?

But what I find far more interesting is that he surely does this unconsciously. He simply assumes humanist (or consciousist or something) values as a fact, and proceeds from there.

This is actually to be expected. It’s normal. People think these are facts, that they’re settled, that no one could question them. What we are up against is not simply ideologues, but ideologues who have no idea that there is anything but their ideology. It’s not that they’ve consciously rejected it. It’s not even that there’s honest censorship (which at least lets you know there are other ideas to be censored). To the modern man, universalist utilitarian morality is no more to be questioned than the necessity of breathing.

This is the problem we have to overcome. This is why it’s such a shock when you take the ‘Red Pill’ and are exposed to reactionary ideas for the first time. And this may be our greatest asset. Never having been exposed to anything but liberalism, how can the modern man have built up any immunity to competing ideas? He cant have.