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| Visions & Revisions |
A Distant Mirror
Douglas McWhirter
08/02/2004
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Inheritors of aristocratic privilege in 19th- and early 20th-century Britain
did not have the discipline, brains or will to preserve their families’
fortunes.
This brings us back to the question of whether decline is inevitable.
The aristocracy in Britain had, and has, a huge range of personality types of
abilities—some seriously malfunctional personalities and some stupid people,
and, on the other hand, some seriously high-minded individuals and some
seriously clever people. One cannot simply say that they are all lacking in
discipline or brains or will.
How far individual efforts were the key to
survival is not altogether clear. A large part of it had to do with accidents:
people died at the wrong time, and families got hit hard with death taxes. This
has nothing to do with brains; it is just accident. The notion of personality
shortcomings or merits, or of ability or lack of it, is a complicated one. It is
not clear that the survival of a social group as a whole is dependent on
collective efforts, even though the survival of particular families may depend
on individual efforts. What is true is that members of the British aristocracy
are not as politically active today, in part because many of them have to work
hard to earn their livings. In the old days, members of the leisured classes did
not have to earn a living. Today, many of them do, and that is a full-time job.
War and imperial overstretch contributed to the decline of Great Britain and
its empire, and consequently, the decline of its ruling class.
There is a connection in the sense that they happened at the same time.
If one takes the period from the 1880s to the end of the 20th century, that is
the period in which Britain declines as a great power and its empire goes, and
that is the same period in which its aristocracy ceases to be a coherent
governing class.
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