Filthy Rich
The Unnoticed Gift of Trickle-Down Decadence
The ancient Romans had a deity for everything, even for the system of channels
whereby the daily refuse of a million inhabitants was flushed out of the city.
Maybe the goddess Cloaca was worshiped by the rich more than by the poor, since
the rich derived most of the benefits from her, and the poor shouldered most
of the noisome burden. That’s because the sewers emptied out at the Esquiline
Gate.
I’m not sure whether the Romans arranged it so that the end of the
sewer line would be located in the poor quarter. More likely, it became the
poor quarter because people don’t want to live near a sewer, and will
spend money to avoid it.
Emptying the Sewers
Be that as it may, I think that Port Esquiline can serve as an allegory not
for the separation of the rich from the poor, but for their disconcerting sameness.
Let me be clear about whom I mean here by the “rich.” By our parents’ standards,
and by any practical measure of health, nutrition, disposability of time, and
ownership of luxuries, most of us in the middle class are rich, and therefore
bear the responsibilities of the rich, whether we like it or not.
And our first responsibility is to not bring undue hardship upon the poor.
That is, we should go out of our way not to empty our sewers among them—our
moral sewers especially.
The rich can afford their vices, for a time anyway; the poor have no such
margin for comfort. They are, in fact, endangered by the vices of the rich.
I don’t simply mean that the rich man can extort his will from the poor,
or wield the law as a club to keep the poor man in his place. He can do worse:
He can infect the poor man with his vice, and that may be the quicker way to
destroy him.
That’s because the rich set the example for the poor. Their vices attain
celebrity; a Casanova or a Don Juan sets the petty rakes of a nation to school.
Now the rich can buy their way out of entanglements. They can raise a bastard
child, or bribe an offended lady.
Their powdered periwigs and snuffboxes and civet can cast the sweet air of
civilization over their ruffian ways; their very debaucheries can sparkle.
But when the poor emulate them in vice, as they emulate them in most things,
the result is disaster: not a man at the club, mooching a claret from his friends,
but a man in the ditch, or behind bars.
So in Dickens we have the miserable corpse-robbing thieves at Old Joe’s
pawnshop, and they are but Scrooge himself, and his money-hungry class, shorn
of top hat and watch fob and man-of-business etiquette. So in imperial Rome
the senatorial class had succumbed to a fatal indolence, ceding to the emperor
all authority and responsibility; and the proles in the city flocked to the
circuses to quell their boredom in bloodshed.
When my grandparents were children, they looked to the pillars of American
society. But even then they looked to them not for strong moral example, but
for the diminished thing (a matter of money and manners more than morals) that
moral example had already become: “We may be poor,” said one, “but
we can at least be clean.”
We Strut About
Doesn’t the relationship continue to hold, but with the moral standard
diminished yet further? We strut about and claim a “right” to be
gratified in whatever desire we please, and no doubt even now some man is stalking
the alleys of his city with exactly the same thing in mind, someone who lacks
the polish and ease that money confers, and who therefore lacks the glitter
of hypocrisy that money can afford.
Some whores vie to appear in the pages of People or Cosmopolitan or Entertainment
Weekly; the more honest whores walk the street. Those we lock up, yet
we shell out good money to buy our daughters all the gear and tackle and
trim of that old profession. We even take a cruel delight in emulating that
poverty in our dress and our manners—we go a-slumming, like Nero, and
leave chaos in our wake.
Or consider the fashionable cruelty defended in the coffee shop: I mean the New
York Times, or NPR, or a faculty lounge. Let the offspring die. Grandma
wouldn’t have wanted to last like this. We have to take into account
the welfare of everybody. It’s a clump of cells. It’s a vegetable.
It’s an it.
Isn’t that the same cruelty staring at us from the violent lyrics of
the street? If you see a young man from one of our own Esquiline districts,
with pants sagging two feet beneath his torso and face studded with pins and
trinkets, looking for all the world as if only his lack of ambition prevents
him from slipping a knife into someone’s back, you should consider him
an excellent student. He has learned the slack self--gratification that the
rich and the middle class have taught.
Many of the well-to-do are too sophisticated now for religious belief, except
as a “lifestyle choice,” like vegetarianism, or a decorative reminder
of their history, like quaint old wreaths on the doors. Among the Esquiline
gangs we see no such half measures, but nihilism acted out with guns and knives,
not only against the weak but against each other, and themselves.
The Meaning of Our Vices
The poor teach us what our vices mean, because we have not the self-knowledge
to see through the disguises we ourselves have given them. When we see the
poor doing what we would not, let us not say, “There but for the grace
of God (or family, social class, or education) go I.” We must say, “There
are my vices, walking.”
The most bountiful alms that the rich can give the poor, apart from the personal
donation of their time and means, are lives of virtue to emulate. It is their
duty. But when they use their means to buy off the effects of vice, or, worse,
to celebrate it, that is an offense against those whom Jesus called “little
ones,” and no amount of almsgiving can lighten the millstone.
— Anthony Esolen, for the editors |
