The ancient code guiding Mueller's Russia probe

by MaxEntropy_Man Sat Mar 10, 2018 4:19 pm

https://www.salon.com/2018/03/10/the-ancient-code-guiding-robert-muellers-russia-probe/

The code that Mueller has followed since boyhood is an American iteration of the ancient one that governed Plato’s “guardians,” for whom the republic was “so closely bound up with oneself that its interests and fortunes, for good or ill, are held to be identical with one’s own.” Plato’s guardians were hereditary aristocrats, not democrats, and in the latter half of the 19th century, American elites with aristocratic, patrilineal pretensions founded college-preparatory schools — such as Mueller's St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire — to train youth as what Thorstein Veblen called “gentlemanly stewards of the ‘kept classes.’”

At St. Paul's and other such schools, students like Mueller learned that self-denial for the common good demands self-scrutiny, plain living and a quiet readiness to take responsibility without reward and bear its burdens with grace. Sen. John McCain, son of a Navy admiral, invoked that code at least momentarily last summer when he voted against repealing the Affordable Care Act. Richard Nixon’s attorney general, Elliot Richardson, exemplified it by resigning on republican principle instead of obeying the president’s order to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, another elite republican guardian. (Yes, even a democracy sometimes needs these guys, even though not all of them are as reliable as Mueller.)

by MaxEntropy_Man Sat Mar 10, 2018 6:10 pm

I think the code referred to in the article is closely related to the anglo-french notion of noblesse oblige. It's good there are still upstanding examples of individuals, though in vanishingly small numbers, who aspire to noblesse oblige.

The ancient code guiding Mueller's Russia probe

The ancient code guiding Mueller's Russia probe

Re: The ancient code guiding Mueller's Russia probe