Troubadours & Princes Yes to a Nobler Europe Trapped Agenda Troubadours & Princes by William Shepherd
There are four main fields of human activity: kingship, peaceship, culture and divinity. These require different forms of administration and no society has existed or endured without them. Kingship and peaceship are the traditional administrative domain of princes while culture and divinity have always been the concern of poets, bards and troubadours in societies where the princes, allied with the little people in their communities, had outmanoeuvred the priests and the lawyers.
Kingship
Kingship is the temporal function of collecting, creating and distributing goods, including slaves, within the society. First of all food, then tools, then luxury goods and finally services, each with its own economics. One of our modern heresies is to seek to apply one set of economic premises to these four different economic systems. Another is to confuse kingship with peacecraft and to exaggerate their administrative importance relative to culture and divinity.
Peacecraft
Peacecraft is concerned with the relationship of the society with other neighbouring societies. Depending on circumstances, such as physical proximity, shared ideas of conduct or the personalities of the governors, these will vary from mutual hospitality and friendship to open war. The peacecraft function is where warriors, diplomats and several species of international traders will be found. Diplomacy is war by other means. Foreign trade invariably involves war and diplomacy as complementary means often with different enemies. Modern war societies adopt such euphenisms as defence, commerce and foreign affairs for peacecraft.
Culture
Culture concerns itself with the relationship of the collective to the individual, many aspects of both being intertwined with the individual unconscious and the society’s collective unconscious. The collective will is traditionally reinforced through instilling a conscious awareness of a shared past handed down in folk tales, poems and history. Invariably this is given actuality by the establishing of rules and codes of conduct and enshrining these in manners, custom and law.
The poet and the legislator often find themselves seeking similar ends but approaching them with two opposing views on the nature of man. The poet appeals to the highest virtues and to the divine in man. The lawyer seeks to circumscribe man’s ‘baser nature’ by prohibiting and punishing his deadlier sins. In mass societies, the media constitutes an independent third party, in conflict with poets and legislators on both means and ends, while indifferent to the fate of both the individual and the society.
When custom is no longer created or modulated by philosopher-poets, who ‘put it all together’, custom no longer touches the hearts of the individuals in society, as manifested by conscience, sensibilities and common sense. Then living customs decay into dead traditions, the society becomes brittle and shatters at the slightest of adverse blows. When law comes to predominate over custom we have a society in which the rule of law rapidly deteriorates into a rule of lawyers. In such societies, poets have no apparent power, but are always the well-spring of society’s revitalisation, a process which often begins with the disgrace, and on occasions the destruction, of the legislative class.
Divinity
Divinity concerns itself with the relationship between the individual as an individual and as a member of his social unit, and the natural, supernatural, sacred and divine. In these realms, the individual and the collective will are ‘subject to fate’. Man is not free. This function has many parallels to the culture administrative function. Often the poet, instead of finding himself at odds with the legislator will find himself disputing with a professional caste seeking to control access to knowledge of the mysterious and the occult, while seeking to persuade the uninitiated that their particular priesthood is in possession of a bag of tricks able to propitiate or intervene or improve the odds.
Priest-ridden societies follow much the same trajectory as law-ridden societies. And just as the poet-philosopher is the saviour of the lawyer-ridden society, so the poet-mystic is the best hope for societies bled white by a professional priestly caste.
November 1992 Cinque Ports Europaper # 6 (reprinted July 1996)
Troubadours & Princes Yes to a Nobler Europe Trapped Agenda