Modern Chivalry

A Note on This Argument

This essay is part of the Resistance as Testimony series. Brackenridge is a figure whose satirical intelligence grasped a problem that the founding era’s optimism about democracy preferred to ignore: that self-governance requires a quality of character that political institutions cannot generate, and that the absence of that character is as fatal to a republic as external tyranny.

Democracy and Character

Brackenridge’s satire is organized around a simple but devastating observation: democracy, as practiced in the early republic, tended to elevate men on the basis of their popularity rather than their competence or their virtue. Teague O’Regan — ignorant, vain, and easily flattered — is repeatedly on the verge of being elected to offices for which he is entirely unqualified, and is only prevented by the efforts of his more rational employer. The satire is funny and its target is real.

What makes Brackenridge significant for TLA is that his diagnosis of the problem is implicitly theological even when it is not explicitly so. The republic requires virtuous citizens, and virtue requires formation — the kind of formation that comes from education, from religion, from the cultivation of character over time. The political institutions of democracy can create the conditions for virtue but cannot produce it. Something outside the political order is required, and Brackenridge’s satire keeps bumping against this requirement without being able to name its source.

What Modern Chivalry Reveals

Modern Chivalry is a strange and sprawling book — part picaresque adventure, part political tract, part satirical commentary on everything from frontier religion to scientific pretension. Its incoherence is part of its point: the early republic was itself incoherent, a collection of competing visions and interests held together by a political framework that was constantly being tested by the gap between its ideals and its realities.

The figure of Captain Farrago — reasonable, educated, trying to maintain standards in the face of a democratic tide that cares nothing for standards — is Brackenridge’s self-portrait, and it is a portrait of a man who is right about the problem and has no solution to it. He knows what the republic needs. He cannot provide it.

The Seed of the Woman

Genesis 3:15 describes a conflict whose political dimension includes the question of what kind of community the seed of the woman inhabits and creates. Brackenridge’s satire is a documentary record of the early republic’s failure to create communities of genuine virtue — communities in which the image of God in the human being is developed rather than suppressed, in which the capacity for reason and moral judgment is cultivated rather than pandered to.

His diagnosis is accurate. His prescription — better education, more rational public discourse — is insufficient. The formation of genuine republican virtue requires what the Founders called religion and what TLA calls the gospel: the transformation of the human heart that political education alone cannot accomplish. Brackenridge’s satire is the record of what happens when you build a republic on assumptions about human nature that the doctrine of original sin knows to be wrong.