The Geographer (ordering his perceptions in a hierarchy), Johannes Vermeer, 1668
When the Music Plays, the Ladder Fades
At the Year 13 Leavers’ celebration last week, two of my A Level students presented me with a wonderful essay which they had written as a rebuttal to an argument I’d made about Milton’s Paradise Lost. I had argued that the ideal nature of Adam and Eve’s relationship is best understood as a harmony. My students disagreed, saying that the relationship is very definitely hierarchical and what’s more, Eve is definitely presented as inferior within this hierarchy.
In one sense, of course, you could argue, as the students did, that the relationship is very hierarchical. Eve is made from Adam after all and at one point she is told to ‘submit to him’. Surely that’s just patriarchy in blank verse? Well, in a word, ‘no’. Today’s paltry words are offered along the lines of an alternative reading where Milton is not the villain of the piece and doesn’t get cancelled before Book IX gets going.
Hierarchy often gets bad press. We live in times where there’s a kind of instinctive flinch at the very notion of it. And it gets associated with power-hoarding, class structures, medieval castles, the sixth-form prefect system etc. But this isn’t the only story hierarchy can tell. In Paradise Lost, Milton doesn’t give us the prison yard or a corporate flowchart. He gives us a cosmos: a world ordered not by force, but by harmony. This divine architecture is musical, not mechanical. God is shown drawing the world into being with golden compasses. Angels, humans, stars, and even Eden’s flora are imagined as parts of a vast polyphonic hymn. Everything has its place, its pitch so to speak, and it’s the dissonance, not the structure, that brings about ruin.
It is, to my mind, therefore, a misread to see Eve as a lesser being. She’s different. And difference, for Milton, is the source of harmony, not its enemy. The Fall doesn’t occur because Eve submits; it occurs because she doesn’t. She seeks autonomy. She wants to go off and do her own thing. Adam, for his part, compounds the error, not by arguing that she should stay, but by choosing to follow her rather than the order he knows is good. It’s all terribly modern really: a couple unable to agree on boundaries, each acting authentically, and everything ending in mutual recrimination and dodgy fruit. I refer you to that cultural icon, Love Island, for further examples along those lines.
Of course, if you want to see what real hierarchy without harmony looks like, you need look no further than the figure of Satan.
Satan, as Milton paints him, is not a hero of emancipation. He’s a narcissist with big wings. His whole rebellion is based not on some principled stance against injustice but on a refusal to accept that anything might be higher than his own will. In a phrase which has passed into much modern discourse, Satan famously declares, Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. This sounds terribly edgy until you imagine someone trying to say it aloud in a staff meeting. Or a marriage. Or a WhatsApp group for Year 8 parents. The Romantics of course, who we have discussed before, loved Milton’s presentation of Satan. But they would, wouldn’t they?
The point is, as anyone who has tried it will know, reigning in Hell is not liberation; it’s self-enclosure. And this is where I think the key lies. When hierarchy becomes about the self-asserting dominion over the other, it becomes tyranny. But when hierarchy is seen as part of a relational order where each element is tuned to the others, it becomes harmony. The problem is not hierarchy itself then, it’s disconnection.
And here’s where the argument deepens. In many ways we kind of need hierarchies. Some would argue that we wouldn’t be able to even perceive the world without them. As McGilchrist and others have argued, perception itself is hierarchical. If you could bear to tear your eyes away from these paltry words for a moment, what would you see? I don’t know. But whatever it might be, I do know it would not be a neutral, evenly distributed sensory field. You would see whatever it was that stood out to you. In other words, what matters to you in that moment. Or in more other words, what you should be paying attention to. So that very act of perception involves ranking, prioritising, and structuring. If everything were equally important, then nothing would be. So in that sense hierarchy is baked into being itself.
And this isn’t just about human perception. The natural world thrives on it. Think of ecological systems: the world wide web of food, for instance, isn’t just a brutal power dynamic. It’s a complex, interdependent structure where each level supports the others. The lion might be at the top, but its existence hinges on the health of the gazelle population (I think), which in turn depends on flourishing grasslands. It’s a delicate balance, where submission to the principles of ecological flow isn’t inferiority, but essential for the system’s survival. Or we can think of our bodies, marvels of biological hierarchy: from cells to tissues to organs to systems, all working in concert. The brain, while perhaps serving as the command centre, relies on the intricate functioning of every other organ. A single cell mysteriously submits to the needs of the tissue it’s part of, which submits to the organ, and so on. This intricate, differentiated order allows for life itself.
That’s not to say hierarchies can’t go wrong, they absolutely can. And do. They can, for example, ossify into classism, privilege, or complacency. This is why the critique of hierarchy is a very useful thing to be engaged in. We all need to hear that prophetic voice that speaks for the dispossessed and the unheard. Hierarchies must constantly be re-evaluated in the light of justice, compassion, and humility. This is where a merit-based hierarchy, where position is earned through genuine skill, effort, and contribution, stands in stark contrast to one based on inherited status or unearned entitlement. A well-run scientific lab, for instance, thrives on the lead scientist’s authority based on their expertise, not just their title and their submission to the scientific method is crucial for progress. Or so I am assured by my scientist chums.
So any decent hierarchy is purpose-driven, with each level contributing uniquely to a shared goal. Think of a well-drilled sports team: the manager, captain, and individual players each have distinct roles and authority, all geared towards winning, probably. The midfield player’s submission to the manager’s instructions isn’t inferiority, but alignment to a shared objective. Such effective hierarchies also include accountability and feedback loops, allowing for refinement and responsiveness, unlike rigid top-down structures. Think of, Tell Us At Tiffin.
All roads, as we know, lead to beauty. And as it does with so many things, beauty might help us continue our understanding of hierarchy. As we have discussed, beauty is never bland, symmetrical sameness. It is, rather, the unity of sameness and difference; a kind of resonance that arises when contrasting parts are held together in balance. It’s why a landscape can be beautiful without being useful, or a piece of music moving even when it’s dissonant. Harmony depends on differentiated parts being in relation. Without the tension between differences, there is no melody, no rhythm, no surprise. Without contrast, there is no form.
Friend of the Column, Heraclitus, captured this idea in his metaphor of the bow and the lyre. The bow shoots its arrow and the lyre makes its music precisely because the strings are pulled taut in opposite directions. Collapse them into agreement and the music stops and the arrow can’t fly. We may wish, sometimes, for a world of peaceable sameness, but the paradox is that the most beautiful forms, musical, moral, or human, emerge from tension held in harmony.
And yes, we live in an age of debunking. There’s a certain Tiffinian thrill in declaring that beauty is just evolutionary psychology, that love is just a dopamine rush, and that hierarchy is just a euphemism for oppression. But that kind of cleverness often sees through everything until there’s nothing left to see. The appreciation of beauty, like the understanding of a good relationship, depends not on stripping everything down to utility, but on attending to form, resonance, and relation.
This idea of the primacy of relationships appears again and again in literature. In Measure for Measure, Shakespeare explores the misuse of hierarchy in the figure of Angelo: outwardly principled, inwardly corrupt. Order without mercy becomes tyranny. But it is Isabella’s appeal to justice tempered by humility that ultimately restores moral order. Not by flattening power, but by redirecting it through relationship and mercy. Or we could look at The Merchant of Venice, where Portia’s famous courtroom speech reminds us that the quality of mercy is not strain’d. She speaks not against law or hierarchy, but in favour of its humanisation, meaning its harmony with something higher than itself. Nora too in A Doll’s House expresses disbelief that the law can be inhuman.
And more modern writers also echo this need for harmony between structure and relationship. Toni Morrison shows us again and again that identity isn’t individualism, but something shaped through community and difference and through loss and belonging. Marilynne Robinson writes of families and towns where grace is hidden in duty, and hierarchy becomes beautiful only when suffused with love. Even C.S. Lewis, ever the Oxford don, warned that egalitarianism becomes grotesque when it denies the natural hierarchies of love, of wisdom, of virtue, those things we must aspire to and grow toward, rather than flatten in the name of fairness.
Even in Austen, whom one might not immediately pair with Milton (though imagine the crossover fan fiction), this idea holds. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth and Darcy don’t fall in love by becoming identical, or by erasing their differences. They fall in love by learning to read each other better, to tune themselves to each other’s frequency. The irony, of course, is that the real harmony emerges only after both have surrendered a little of their pride. Submission, in this case, leads not to diminishment but to deepened relation.
In fact, give me a work of literature where these ideas are not present and you can claim a special Director’s Prize.
The idea that we become ourselves through relationships has long found expression outside Western traditions too. The Bantu word ubuntu is often translated as I am because we are. It resists the fantasy of the autonomous self and insists instead on interdependence. Personhood, in this view, is not a possession but a participation. As McGilchrist and Morrison both remind us in their own ways, identity emerges not from asserting oneself against others, but from learning to live in meaningful relation to them. You might even say that ubuntu is what harmony sounds like when spoken, rather than sung. But that might be too much of a Director stretch.
And perhaps this is what I would like my Year 13s to see, that submission is not always a synonym for subjugation. Sometimes it’s the posture of someone attuned to something greater than themselves. Sometimes it’s the tuning of the self to the music of the cosmos. Christ, for example, “humbled himself” not because he was lesser, but because self-giving love is the highest form of power. In Milton’s story, it’s Christ who comes to ‘judge’ the fallen pair. What’s interesting about this judgement is that the first thing he does is call out to the fallen pair, because they are hiding from him. In so doing he points out the primary nature of being in a relationship. And the second thing he does is clothe them; practically helping them in their distress.
Obviously, this kind of hierarchical relation is a tricky line to walk in schools. We are, by design, hierarchical institutions. There are Heads, Deputies and COOs and Year 8s, and the bell is still the most powerful authority in the building. But the best schools are not those where hierarchy rules by fear, but where structure serves relationship. Where authority is exercised with humility; power listens and where difference is respected not erased.
So harmony is not the result of uniformity; it’s the product of well-tuned differences. You don’t get a fugue from playing middle C over and over again. You get it by layering lines that weave in and out of each other, sometimes leading, sometimes following, always listening.
So yes, Paradise Lost is hierarchical. But it’s also musical, relational, tragic, and luminous. And perhaps, like any good piece of music, its deepest truths are not about who comes first, but how we find our place in the whole. The challenge, then, isn’t to dismantle all hierarchy, but to continually strive for well-tuned, just, and responsive hierarchies that serve a shared purpose and foster genuine harmony. It’s about cultivating structures where differences can sing together.
To my mind, a good hierarchy is like a good teacher. If they are both doing their job well, there is no need for either of them. And they just vanish in a whiff of whiteboard marker…
Until next week, Happy Reading/Being hierarchical in all the most tuneful ways!
TPQ #4 If harmony depends on difference, can equality ever mean sameness?
(Thorniness level out of 10? 0.1)