Delphic Maxim 138: Beget from noble roots
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each of the Delphic Maxims for 15 minutes a day.
138. Beget from noble roots
Do you get the sense that we are wading back into Delphic sludge at this point? It shows how much social standards and expectations have shifted that it feels so uncomfortable to hear phrases like ‘beget from noble roots’. The immediate reaction, and to be honest the most likely interpretation of the time, is that the ancients were making an argument in favour of good birth and upbringing — create a noble family.
But I might be a bit ungenerous in saying that. Nobility is a quality of character — one that I’ve explored in an earlier maxim (number 30: exercise nobility of character). So it could probably also be argued that if we ignore the idea of begetting as ‘siring children’, we might get at something a little more…palatable?
For example, ‘begetting’ can also be understood as an act of creation, or inception, or just bringing something about. So you could rephrase this maxim to ‘bring things about from noble causes’. If you understand this maxim in that way, it makes a whole lot more sense to our social world today.
Sometimes perhaps there is a lack of nobility in the way we relate to each other. As I canvassed in that earlier maxim, this doesn’t mean nobility in the sense of coming from aristocratic or privileged birth, but rather a quality of excellence and virtue. It may be a product of selfishness, or perhaps just the way the past hundred years of economic change has forced us to look out for ourselves and not our community. Or it could be something — and I have no evidence for this, it’s pure subjective opinion — it could be something specific to the Anglosphere, and its particular ways of relating to each other. I don’t mean that our…inconsiderateness doesn’t exist in other cultures, it does, but that there’s a particular brand of it that’s peculiar to England, America and Australia (countries, incidentally, that are plagued by populist right-wing gronks for leaders).
I think it’s about time we renovated the idea of nobility — we really do need to start thinking about how we can be grander than just a collection of people looking out for ourselves. The best things we do are our collective endeavours, and the best people are those whose character bursts into the world — engaged with others, and with projects that dignify us all and lift us all up. That’s not the sort of cheap nationalism that we associate with the Trumps and Johnsons and to a lesser extent Morrisons of the world.
(Scott Morrison — forgive the political sledge — just comes across as a hack. At least Turnbull, for a time, sought to raise politics above the mud. Morrison seems to revel in dividing and conquering — he plays the game incredibly well, which is the genius and shame of all these populist characters.)
There are practical ways we can do this, the easiest of which is to take an interest in our past, in our future and in our sense of who we are. You know what comes next: pick up a book. Preferably a book about a noble character, maybe an ancient epic, or a work of philosophy, or a grand history. But make it a relatively serious book. Serious doesn’t have to mean boring, and it definitely doesn’t mean it can’t be fun. Serious is not the opposite of fun — sometimes serious things can be joyful and interesting. But they need to have some quality of gravity to them. Let me recommend a book, just for kicks: Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Start with his essay on lightness, and see where it takes you.
And maybe write about it, just for kicks. Beget some text from those noble roots.
