In a previous letter, I outlined the chivalric virtues—prowess, courtesy, honor, generosity, loyalty, and faith. My point was to show that chivalry is not just a quaint historical relic, but instead a code with serious relevance for any man looking to live a virtuous, vigorous, and godly life. Chivalry is the most lively and demanding vision ever devised of what a man might become. Consequently, the death or decline of chivalry is not just an unfortunate matter for LARPers or those with outdated aesthetic preferences; it is a disaster for everyone. In his great essay on the topic, CS Lewis notes that chivalry is the key to having an actual civilization. If we do not make some effort to reconcile or combine strength and gentleness, as chivalry aims to do, we are doomed to cycles of barbarism and effeteness, contests between wolves and sheep.
In this letter, I want to examine the way modern life undermines chivalry. It’s one thing to make a generalized complaint about the death or decline of chivalry—my aim here is to focus more specifically on the various assaults against each of the chivalric virtues. Addressing the issue this way, we can see how deeply contrary chivalry is to the boring, mediocre, self-serving, enervated, financialized spirit of our age. The examination highlights just what has been lost, and hopefully implies how a few cavaliers might start bringing it back.
Prowess
“Chivalry,” writes Leon Gautier, “is the Christian form of the military profession: the knight is the Christian soldier.” The code most immediately requires that a man be able to fight wrongdoers, especially those who would harm the weak and vulnerable. If a man can’t or won’t fight, he’s not chivalrous, no matter how well-mannered or polite he is. Prowess is the term the medievals used to capture that combination of physical strength, athleticism, courage, and martial skill that makes a man formidable. Chivalry is thus a highly embodied code.
And modern life is an assault on the body, and all the attributes that would make a man physically capable. Despite all the self-congratulatory propaganda about longer life expectancies and diseases eradicated, anyone with open eyes can see that something is not right with us. The human form is in decline.
The reasons are too many to catalogue here. Comfort undoes us. Consumerism turns us into passive and lazy worshippers before the television. Fake foodstuffs balloon our waistlines. Smartphones and paperwork round our shoulders. The Cult of Safetyism impedes the development of courage. Cliches about the the absolute necessity of nonviolence instill naive notions about how the world actually works and discourage the development of fighting skills. Constant titillation fries our brains and leaves us drained and dull, needing constant infusions of caffeine if we are to function. And so on.
The long and the short of it is that necessity no longer forces us to be at our best. If a man would be at his best, it is because he has adopted fitness as an odd hobby—in which case he is suspected of being vain, or being a stupid meathead, these accusations being the fruit of a long-established propaganda campaign against vitality.
Our language even tells the story of bodily decline. When people use the word “strength” today, they most often mean it in the metaphorical sense. To say someone is strong means he has perseverance, mental toughness, etc. We are losing strength as the word itself starts to take on a figurative meaning only.
Courtesy
Courtesy is a disposition of the heart that results good manners. Once upon a time, when going before august persons, you conducted yourself in a dignified manner—showing respect to rank, but also showing your own quality. In this way, previous ages favored aspirational conduct. It is the tension between prowess and courtesy—two qualities that don’t naturally go together—that make chivalry something new under the sun.
The decline of courtesy happened, at least in part, because society came to value “authenticity” over formality. It was determined that there’s something false about formality, something cold—much better to “be yourself” rather than abide by someone else’s expectations about formal conduct.
Maybe there was a point to that concern. Maybe. But it is all too clear that we have gone too far in correction. We’ve attempted to replace courtesy with niceness. Whether this has made social interactions warmer is debatable. I’d argue that it has not. When nobody owes anyone anything in terms of conduct and manners, the result is uglier than the reformers might have hoped.
Honor
Honor is the most difficult of these attributes to define. James Bowman notes that on the level of the elementary schoolyard, honor necessitates that “if you get them, they’ll get you back.” In the larger sense, honor translated to concern for one’s reputation and character, both the outward form and the inward quality. Honor followed from deeds and from public displays of character.
Modern life has ridiculed the concept of honor. Midwits love to point out the possible discrepancies between the outward and inward. The lengths that people once went to in defense of their honor are labelled as crazy. Anybody who, for example, would take offense at the tarring of his name just needs to chill out, we say. No dueling. No affairs of honor. Just let it go. Concern for one’s reputation is now somewhat discouraged. Focus on your character and don’t worry about honor—this becomes the new teaching.
We have proclaimed a virtue of “not giving a f#%k” what people think of you. In a telling way, this became a new sort of honor, with all sort of status attached to it. The people who boast about not caring what others think usually say it hoping to impress you with their indifference.
What is honor in 2022? Most people will shrug their shoulders, and this seems like a pretty good answer. We don’t know, so we don’t really worry about it.
Loyalty
For the medieval warrior living in a hierarchical society, loyalty was everything. Knights were loyal to God, their king, their lord, their family, their friends, and to the order of chivalry itself. Civilization depended on it.
But in a modern individualistic society, loyalty is an ambiguous virtue. We like to pay lip service to it, and we expect people to be loyal to us. But where loyalty restricts our freedom, we love to use the personal-autonomy-at-all-costs card to release us from any obligations. Choice must not be hindered. And so loyalty becomes a convenient weapon—something we expect from others but don’t hold ourselves too all that strenuously.
Divorce is likely the most remarkable indication of the rank of loyalty for us. Articles in the New Yorker and movies starring Julia Roberts seem to encourage us to leave marriages that cramp our style. We’ve even attached the term “no-fault” in front of divorces in order to make them easier and more convenient and less judgmental.
The elevation of economics to the supreme science contributes to the decline of loyalty as well. Profit or utility maximization cannot be hindered by outdated concepts of personal attachments.
When I hear “loyalty” today, the word is most often used in reference to shopping. The marketing departments of major corporations have convinced us that “brand loyalty” is a nice thing, rather than an utter abomination. Once again, modern loyalty is a one way street: these same corporations will gladly fire thousands of employees and move their operations to Asia to take advantage of lower wages and tax breaks while at the same time encouraging their customers to be loyal.
Generosity
Noblesse oblige once made demands on the part of the privileged to behave nobly toward those with less. They were to give generously. It was especially important for knights to do so—because the medievals realized that there was great power in generosity. In his biography of William the Marshal, Georges Duby writes, “The knight owes it to himself to keep nothing in his hands. All that comes to him he gives away. From his generosity he derives his strength and the essentials of his power … all his renown and the warm friendship that surrounds him.”
The more individualistic strains of modern life teach us that we don’t owe anybody anything. Economics teaches us that we will be of best service to our neighbors by trying to maximize our own profits.
The “nobility” of our time, rather than giving largesse, does philanthropy. The distinction is crucial. The point of their philanthropy seems less about giving aid to those in need and more about reworking the world in their own technocratic image, while at the same time dodging taxes and publicizing their grandeur. Forbes estimated that the Gates Foundation has allowed Bill and Melinda to avoid between $15-20B in taxes. (This was as of 4+ years ago; the total is surely much higher today.)
Moreover, generosity has become a function of the state. It is much less pressing for any one person to give when there are armies of bureaucrats who are supposed to take care of that.
Faith
True chivalry is the product of a deeply Christian age, and the chivalric virtues are tied together by faith—especially prowess, which is baptized by faith and put to the service of God’s most vulnerable children. The knights of the songs don’t just go to Mass on the Sabbath; they seem to go to Mass every day. To live as dangerously as they did required keeping oneself constantly prepared to meet one’s Maker.
It would be ridiculous to pretend that I have anything original to say about the decline of Christianity in the West. But it’s worth noting that the antagonism is more subtle than the popular narrative leads us to believe. SCIENCE! did not just magically appear in the 18th century and save us from blind superstition. If anything, Christianity gave rise to Western science by positing that the world is intelligible and that one can come to know God better through studying His creation. And rather than outrightly rejecting Christianity, small-L liberalism is a parasite within the former Body of Christ, attempting to co-opt the Christian values and make a church of Christianity without Christ.
Regardless, we have now arrived at the point at which the Faith of our ancestors is a mostly unfashionable thing, discouraged as something intolerant, backwards, outdated, and maybe pointless. At best it’s something completely optional. We don’t really need faith because we don’t think we’re going to die, or we at least do our best to ignore that impending event. We have other things to think about, supposedly.
Parting Thoughts
Chivalry, as I noted, is an ideal suggesting what a man might become, at his best. Our consumerist, utilitarian society is openly hostile to such aspirations, making this code deeply countercultural. In some sense, the chivalrous man is “bad for the economy,” as that brutal phrase goes. Why would you strive for honor and excellence when you could live for Marvel movies and the latest iPhone updates, and be the kind of man who contributes to the maximization of GDP? This is what our supposed superiors expect from us, and this is the direction in which the incentives push.
To be a man of prowess, courtesy, honor, generosity, loyalty, and faith is a serious act of rebellion against the modern regime—and not in the cheap and easy and fraudulent sense. Getting a tattoo is a fake way to rebel or pretend you’re unique. Chivalry is much more difficult and meaningful and needed than that.