Imagine the history of power not as a battle of ideology, nation states or great armies, but as a struggle between three castes, the sage or priestly caste, the merchant caste and the warrior caste. In Merchant, Soldier, Sage, British historian David Priestland has framed the history of power as an ongoing conflict between these various castes.
Deploying the description "caste" seems vaguely anachronistic to modern western readers. The caste system is often interpreted as exclusively Indian in nature, but this description is too literal. Contemporary Ireland has a caste system and economic power is distributed unevenly within these castes of sage, warrior and merchant, who are always vying for power.
The modern-day [sage class] are the technocratic caste of senior civil servants, scientists, lawyers and economists
The sage or priestly caste are the descendants of the original druid caste from Ireland’s Celtic heritage. These wizards exercised power over the people and the chieftains by their interpretation of the cosmos, their understanding of the Gods and their variety of rules and regulations which governed society.
Over time, this caste morphed from holy men into the Christian priests, clergy and saints, and then into the organised church. Another branch of this caste were the Brehon law makers who laid out the commandments by which the society ran itself. Their modern-day equivalents are the technocratic caste of senior civil servants, scientists, lawyers and economists who make the rules, draft legislation, form policy and set the norms for the nation. Today, these are the “sage-technocrats”. They are an educated elite, always important with significant access to power, but never heroic.
In contrast, the Celtic warrior class were our heroes. These are Cu Chulainn, the Red Branch knights, the fighters, the nobles, the earls who fled in 1607. They are our revolutionary "good guys", the shooters, the brave men who stood up and were counted. They are romantic leaders, shrouded in quixotic qualities, often prosaic and poetic, sometimes doomed, rarely uninteresting. Like ancient Greek heroes, we confer on them traits and passions beyond the ordinary. They are chivalrous, selfless, sometimes arrogant but rarely driven by anything but a higher purpose. These are men of action, bravery, and adventure who took their deserved spoils. Countries which were lucky enough to have the enlightened warrior-leader, counted themselves blessed. These days, the warrior class has been subsumed into politics. To be sure, they continue to exist in the "strongmen" leaders around the world, from the UK to Turkey, Russia and India. When people bemoan a lack of political leadership, it is the warrior caste they are pining for.
The haughty sage caste, who were educated and cultured, looked down – and still do – on the merchants
The third powerful force is the merchant class. These are commercial traders, the buyers and sellers, and the money makers who emerged as a social and political force as the economy became more complex, taking over financially from the agrarian landlord class who were linked umbilically to the warrior class.
In Ireland, this link was noticeable in the huge over-representation of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy in the officer class of the British army. In Europe this trend was evident in all countries, and perhaps nowhere more so than in the Prussian land-owning class within the deepest recesses of Prussian militarism. Incredibly, in order to break this link, the victorious powers after the second World War eradicated Prussia from the European map. To this day, Prussia is the only country ever to be erased after a war. A political entity, a nation state, that had existed for centuries was "disappeared" in 1945, so strong and threatening was its warrior caste.
By breaking the economic link with the warrior caste, the merchants provided a fascinating ballast to the sage technocrats, not least because their medium – money – increasingly became the currency of society.
The merchant caste continued to grow in significance as the West became more peaceful. This caste values trade, tolerance, openness, cosmopolitanism and diversity, mediated by cash and, above all, peace. There has never been a war that enhances prosperity. In fact, war is the quickest route to national bankruptcy and the merchant caste’s main objective revolved around avoiding wars and conflict and getting on with the business of business. The haughty sage caste, who were educated and cultured, looked down – and still do – on the merchants. Such social snobbery was best encapsulated by Yeats’s – arguably the arch sage – denigration of the unromantic but ultimately peaceful shopkeeper, who was “fumbling in the greasy till”.
The shopkeepers of this world, the fumblers in the greasy till, the anti-nationalist, small businesspeople, have switched dramatically to the right
The sages and the shopkeepers were often at odds in this caste war.
Traditionally, once the urges of the warrior class became subsumed into normal democratic politics, a pattern of voting emerged. In Europe, the highly educated, sage-technocratic class voted for the status quo. They were wealthy and well-connected with a perennial weakness for romanticising “isms’ – nationalism, socialism, communism or a whole host of “you-should-do-this-or-that” isms. They prescribed.
In contrast, the small merchant class, freer and looser, wanted to avoid nationalism and tribalism, tending to vote left or centre left, avoiding hard choices and conflict. In Europe and the US, for the 30 years after the second World War, this pattern remained intact. The merchants wanted to avoid the extremes and, therefore, they voted soft, cosmopolitan left, valuing tolerance and integration.
However, in the past 30 years this has changed profoundly. The castes have switched sides. A new paper by Thomas Piketty and others plots this shift. All over the world, the highly educated have turned left in huge numbers. They are now the richest left-wingers ever. In contrast, the shopkeepers of this world, the fumblers in the greasy till, the anti-nationalist, small businesspeople, have switched dramatically to the right. They are now at the vanguard of nativist, exclusionary movements, in direct opposition to the softy-left sage caste.
The Piketty paper found: "Analysis of voting patterns based on socioeconomic characteristics in 21 western democracies, spanning some 300 elections held between 1948 and 2020, reveals a shift from “class-based party systems” to “multi-elite party systems”.
Ireland is an outlier – due, in the main, to Sinn Féin
"In short, support for parties of the left was concentrated in lower-education, lower-income voters in the 1950s and 1960s but since then, such support has steadily become associated with high-education elite voters – what might be thought of as the elite, caviar gauche or champagne socialists.
"Controlling for a host of variables, the analysis finds that, in the 1960s, the most highly educated voters were 15 percentage points less likely to vote for the left than their less well-educated peers."
However, this gap has gradually shifted from negative to positive over the past 60 years. Now the Most highly educated voters have become significantly more left wing.
Interestingly, Ireland is an outlier – due, in the main, to Sinn Féin. It will be interesting to see if the sage caste shifts to voting left in Ireland’s next election as more middle-class parents vote for the party that promises to build homes for their children. If they do, in the words of Yeats, “all will have changed, changed utterly”.