Noblesse Book Pdf

[Christian Swindler]

Amongour upper class, reticence is rare. Instead, there seems to be constant self-promotion. Outrageous and extravagant behavior dominates, especially on social media with its constant whirl of influencers, celebrities, and the loud rich flaunting their possessions and their bodies.

In the town of Gibbsville, your class is set by who your parents and ancestors are. Then, your behavior comes into play. Money is generally a correlation with where you rank, but money is not the determining factor.

My great-grandfather Samuel Rottenberg 5 left behind a record of doing the right thing, preserved in precious stories. During World War Two, he took over the business of a friend who was trapped in Europe. After a long absence, the friend returned and received from Samuel his business back and all the accumulated profits. My father, then a teenager, complimented his grandfather on his honesty. Samuel looked askance at my father and said,

Conversely, we should give positive reinforcement and praise to those who act with honor. Taylor Swift gave huge bonuses to all the working members of her tour. LeBron James has used his money and influence to do wonders for his home city of Cleveland.

A society functions best when its social upper class has the characteristics of noblesse oblige. Giving away money is the least of it. What\u2019s crucial is embracing the responsibility to be models of honorable behavior and to be ashamed when the behavior falls short.

Our role models are not those with virtue but those with money and fame. All Americans can be virtuous on their own terms, but gaining status through exceptional money and fame is out of reach for almost all of us. So, trying to imitate today\u2019s upper class is a sad and hopeless quest. We tilt at a \u201Cluxury lifestyle\u201D or try to gain fame through social media, sometimes at the expense of our own honor. We all swim in this water now, and the result is unhappiness.

There\u2019s a sense in our modern America that honor is an old fashioned relic. That nice guys do finish last. With American life expectancy going down and surveys of loneliness pointed skyward, I\u2019m afraid and ashamed that the Hobbesian observation of life in a primitive society applies to more and more Americans:

How far America has drifted away from a sense of noblesse oblige struck me as I was rereading John O\u2019Hara\u2019s \u201CAppointment in Samarra,\u201D set in 1930 in a small town with a minutely precise social hierarchy. 2 The novel is part journalism, part fiction, and a faithful representation of the place where O\u2019Hara grew up. 3

One late night at the Gibbsville country club, Harry O\u2019Reilly, the richest man in town is holding court, repeating tiresome stories to the cream of young Gibbsville society. These men despise Harry as a a nouveaux-riche, social-climbing, preening boor. But Harry is feared because of his money, made all the more potent by the Depression. They\u2019re all in debt to Harry. So, they sit and listen in silent misery.

But there\u2019s one man, Julian English, the novel\u2019s young and glamorous protagonist, whose resentment at Harry builds and builds until he can no longer contain his anger. Julian flings his scotch and soda into Harry\u2019s face.4 That one act is the Chekovian gun that sets off the subsequent events of the novel.

I see Julian\u2019s assault against Harry as a rebellion against the idea that money can elevate a crude person to the highest rank. A reckless, brave protest. But foolhardy because it will sabotage Julian\u2019s business and social interests. Julian\u2019s rebellion backfires because no one wants to cross Harry.

I\u2019ve been around quite a few wealthy people whose faces I\u2019d have loved to splash with a drink. People who are so transparently smug about the false virtue of their money. Who brag about cutting corners on their taxes. Who feel entitled to hold court because everyone kisses their ass, just like Harry O\u2019Reilly. Who give little to no credit to circumstance for their financial success. Who are proudly ignorant about anything other than business and money. I remember one billionaire telling me, \u201CI never read books; it\u2019s a waste of my time.\u201D

In the novel, Julian\u2019s father, Dr. English, represents the virtuous social upper class. Dr. English\u2019s own father embezzled money from a bank and then shot himself rather than face the consequences. To remove that ancestral stain, Dr. English worked tirelessly to pay back every dollar his father had stolen. By doing so, he re-established his honor and social position and that of his family, one that traces its lineage back to the Revolutionary War.

So many to choose from, but I\u2019ll single out Bill Clinton. He used his power as president to seduce the young intern Monica Lewinsky, lie about it and then destroy her life. A polite, or virtuous, society ought to have shunned Bill Clinton, at least until he made sincere amends to Monica Lewinsky and asked for her forgiveness, something he has never done.

To end on hope, I sense on Substack a vanguard of rebellion against our society\u2019s obsession with money and fame as well as an earnest desire to think of individual success on more virtuous terms.

I know I struggle with Pride, more than any of the other seven \u201Cdeadlies.\u201D The other six are Greed, Wrath, Envy, Lust, Gluttony and Sloth. Okay, I\u2019ll also admit to Gluttony when there are sweets in the house.

I note that there is terrible bigotry in the novel, consistent with the era it describes. Catholics are not as good as Protestants, and Jews are almost as untouchable as anyone who isn\u2019t white. But that\u2019s the way it was in 1930, so I can look past that and still consider it one of my all time favorite novels. And be glad to see the progress we\u2019ve made.

Here are two illustrative journalistic details in the book from the mind of a mobster who may be my favorite character. In a boxing match you should always dent your protective cup before the fight begins in case you want to falsely claim an illegal blow, below the belt. When driving through a poor town and needing gas, you can find the house of that town\u2019s doctor who, singularly, will always have a car out front with a full tank that can be siphoned.

My grandfather Alfred changed his name from Rottenberg to Roberts because of the anti-semitsm of the 1930s. My great-grandfather Samuel wasn\u2019t pleased. He wrote, \u201CYour name is your flag to carry forth in life.\u201D The name change has made me want to self-identify as Jewish whenever I can.

I mean that the answer to everything was noblesse oblige. Maybe it was because Andrew Carnegie, who made money on the backs of many mill workers in Pittsburgh, once said, "The man who dies rich, thus dies disgraced. "Maybe he was trying to draw some parallel from how he treated his workers like serfs during the Homestead Strike in 1892, which resulted in Pinkerton agents and strikers being killed and injured.

Mike and his counterpart in class, "the other Mike," were constantly asking for the nobility to step in under the term noblesse oblige, applying it to almost every case study. It was tough to sit through some of the discussions concerning the nobility.

As I remember those classes, I still relish the moment when one of the case studies was about the Memphis sanitation worker's strike in 1968. I was in Memphis as a business agent for a union from 1972-1974, so I knew all the players in the case study.

The term philanthrocapitalist is now used to identify capitalists wanting to do social investing. Most times, an up-front developers fee makes it worth cashing out for people experiencing poverty. "Yeah, we are going to help the poor but don't forget to give me $1 million off the top." In most cases, these are affordable housing in low-income neighborhoods.

I thought that maybe there should be a different way of thinking. I understand two things as I deal with my baseball park project, which I will try to do in Norristown on the 68 acres which was the former home to the criminally insane. The first is that 16.7 percent of the population of Norristown is at or below the poverty income designation. There is little appetite for more low-income housing to be built to accommodate this population.

As a person who has spent much of his public life helping low-income and underserved populations, I am sensitive to the needs of that population. I spent time analyzing what benefit low-income people would have by creating more housing for low-income. It is a clustering of low-income and marginalized people, which I do not favor.

Although trying not to be "like Mike" but consider taking a "Mike-like Solution," I have derived a new paradigm for dealing with these situations. I call it Capitaliste Oblige. I had my wife go over it with me as she speaks French, and I want to recognize her contribution to my being verbally correct, although I am seldom politically correct.

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