Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction, стр. 40

As if when men quitting the state of nature entered into society, they agreed that all of them but one, should be under the restraint of laws, but that he should still retain all the liberty of the state of nature, increased by power, and made licentious by impunity. This is to think that men are so foolish, that they take care to avoid what mischiefs may be done them by pole-cats, or foxes, but are content, nay think it safety, to be devoured by lions.The priesthood

Priests are not generally persons of either wealth or military strength. So whatever gives them security, and not just security but often very considerable power within their society or religious group, must be something else. It arises from what their people think about them, what they take them to be able to do for them, the value that they put upon them. In other words, it arises from philosophy. The less tangible and immediate the benefits and the dangers, the more powerful the apparatus needed to maintain belief in them and faith in those who confer or avert them.

This isn’t a matter of intentional deception—though it would be absurd to suggest that no such thing ever occurs. It isn’t even a question of whether what the priestly class would have the laity believe about them is true or false. The point is that it should be believed: otherwise, no priests. So plenty of writing exists which promotes their status.

Illustrations exist everywhere, so since we haven’t set foot outside Western Europe for the last few chapters let’s return to India and look at the opening chapter of one of the major Upanishads. By the time The Questions of King Milinda was written, the Bŗhadāranyaka Upanishad (BU, see References) may well have been as old as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales today. It belongs to the world of the Hindu Vedas, a world of ritual, sacrifices, and chants that are highly beneficial, though only if correctly performed. To ensure correct performance, you need an expert learned in Vedic matters; for a major ritual you even need a super-expert who makes sure that the other experts are performing correctly. Such expertise needs to be accorded due respect, and no doubt a due fee. (‘I wish I had wealth so I could perform rites’ is said to be everyone’s desire (1.4.17)). This expertise—and the perks attaching to it—is the hereditary privilege of a particular social class or caste, the Brahmins. No mere social convention, this caste system, as 1.4.11 tells us—apparently it arises out of the way the gods themselves were created. Read 1.4.11 very carefully: notice how it ascribes a certain superiority to the Kşatriya, the ruling aristocratic warrior class, whilst maintaining a certain priority for the Brahmins. Their power is ‘the womb’ of the power of the rulers—that from which it issues. So it’s a bad idea for a warrior to injure a priest, for he harms the source of his own power. This is philosophy and theology, but clearly it is good practical politics as well.

18. Dwarfing everything, Hobbes’s Leviathan rises out of the billowing hills of the English countryside. Can this really be safety? No wonder Locke was worried.

19. The Raja consults his priests.

A reader new to this tradition of thought will find much that is strikingly alien. There is the doctrine of the correspondences between the parts of the sacrificial horse (this was the most prestigious of the Vedic sacrifices) and parts or aspects of the world: the year, the sky, the earth.

There is the faith in etymology, as when a longer word is shown to be made up—approximately—of two shorter words, and this fact is taken as indicating the genesis or inner nature of whatever it is that the longer word describes. The knowledge of this strange lore, the text repeatedly insists, is highly advantageous: ‘A man who knows this will stand firm wherever he may go’; and ‘Whoever knows this, . . . death is unable to seize him . . . and he becomes one of these deities.’ So we should value this knowledge, and therefore we should value the people who guard it—the priests.

It isn’t necessarily what the priest can do for you—it may be what he can do to you. Don’t go messing about with a Brahmin’s wife. As BU 6.4.12 makes abundantly clear, he will know just the ritual for getting back at you. And ‘A man cursed by a Brahmin having this knowledge is sure to depart from this world bereft of his virility and stripped of his good works. . . . Never try to flirt with the wife of a learned Brahmin who knows this, lest one make an enemy of a man with this knowledge.’ You have been warned.

Of course it isn’t just priests who need to be needed. It’s also doctors and dustbin men and game show presenters and advertising consultants. And—I almost forgot—philosophy professors. They all exist because of people’s beliefs and values, hopes and fears.The working classes

The industrialization of Western Europe brought wealth to a few and the most deplorable conditions of life to many. The many quickly found a champion in Karl Marx, whose work, it is no exaggeration to say, changed the political face of all those parts of the globe where there was such a thing as politics at all. Only quite recently has its influence begun to wane. It may have been a victim of its own success—after all, there is no test of a theory like actually trying it out. (That’s the principle which underlies the enormous power of the experimental method in the sciences.) And no political theory ever gets a proper trial unless a lot of people are already convinced of it.

Here we have an opportunity to spot some of those connections which are to be found all over the history of philosophy. Marx was no disciple of Hegel—in some respects he