Connect: 'A gentleman," says Peregrine Worsthorne, "was the beautiful flower that grew out of a soil manured with privilege". It's a striking sentence. The notion that advantage by birthright (although that idea is admitted to be dung) can help to produce something exquisite, contradicts today's ritualised mantras that insist "democracy" must be the only game in the global village.
Worsthorne, now 79 and a British knight since 1991, is a former Times and Telegraph (Daily and Sunday) journalist. His latest book, from which the above quote comes, is titled In Defence of Aristocracy.
He does not, in fairness, suggest that all manured soil produces beautiful flowers: "Few aristocrats were actually noble; many, if not most, were base," he says. Indeed.
Still, he defends what for him is the ideal of aristocracy. "As long as the outward and visible form of aristocracy - the House of Lords, hereditary titles and the class system in general - were maintained, the ideal itself and the hope for its realisation were kept alive. The nobles themselves are not missed, but nobility - the ideal of self-sacrificial public spirit - that is missed," he says.
Certainly "the ideal of self-sacrificial public spirit" is always to be missed. In this alleged age of the individual - politicians praise the private sphere and deride the public - we could do with more of it. But surely "public spirit" is to be found in all classes. The idea that aristocrats might have a monopolistic hold on that is absurd. Nobility has never been the preserve of any class.
Of course, some aristocratic people do display admirable public spirit; likewise non-aristocratic people. Whether it's easier for the privileged or the non-privileged to display selflessness is impossible to answer. The privileged, after all - though ostensibly they have less to gain - can also better afford a public spirit. Thus Worsthorne's argument isn't utterly pointless but it is utterly partisan.
Across the Atlantic, we can look at soil manured with privilege and see not a beautiful flower but a grotesque Bush. Despite his cheerleading for a putative ideal of global "democracy", George Bush is an American aristocrat. In so far as his family's name, wealth and power conferred on him privilege, including an Ivy League education, he can hardly claim to be an ideal democrat.
Nor can he reasonably argue that he wants to see a democratic world. That, after all, would entail listening to the hundreds of millions of people who do not like what he's doing. The bizarre paradox then unfolds that Peregrine Worsthorne wants aristocrats to act like public-spirited democrats and George Bush wants democrats to act like private-spirited aristocrats.
Consider some other Bush absurdities. On Iraq, he has recently said: "Iraq will be free, Iraq will be independent," just as soon as the "transfer of sovereignty" on June 30th. It won't. Iraq will still have about 125,000 foreign troops in occupation and 14 "enduring" US military bases. With no democratic mandate, the American pro-consul Paul Bremer will implement democracy. (Yeah, right!) On the Palestine-Israel conflict, Bush said: "We're not going to prejudge the final status discussions." All right, except that two days earlier he stood next to Ariel Sharon and did precisely that. Again on Iraq, Paul Bremer has said the Iraqi resistance thinks "that power should come out of the barrel of a gun" before adding that such a notion is "intolerable". (That is insane, Mr Bremer.) What is the world to do when "democrats" become autocrats (and an autocrat pleads the democratic credentials of his class)? The striking aspect of both Bush and Worsthorne is that each claims to be linking power and wealth to ideals of public service. Iraq will have democracy (whether it likes it or not) and democracy should foster aristocracy (whether it likes it or not).
So, nothing is ever 100 per cent pure - there's always some little contamination. But we really seem to be in a dangerously Orwellian era in which words are just as likely to mean their opposites. No doubt, there are larger reasons why language has become so unstable and perverse but the contemporary lack of respect - indeed contempt - for words is part of the problem.
The idea that words are always just inert carriers of information or can be abused without consequences is dangerous. For years, Pentagon-speak, businessese and other jargons have, for their own interests, made language less human. Sometimes it's been funny, more often it's been sad, but attempts to distort the truth by colonizing language invariably result in explosions.
It's painful now to listen to a US president eulogise democracy. It's become as insane as (and even more cynical than) Paul Bremer's condemnation of Iraqi resistance. Orwell's predictions looked to have been unfounded and his novel 1984 seemed merely alarmist. That time came and went but the madness of words coming to mean their opposites should be clear to everybody now.
Whether "democratic" aristocrats or "aristocratic" democrats are to blame is another day's work.