Tuesday, September 21, 2021
More on medieval mode
John Horvat, writing in Imaginative Conservative, makes a strong case for the CORRECT UNDERSTANDING of feudalism. I've been hammering this point for quite a while in the context of agrarian vs sweatshop "slavery".
Horvat starts with an unconvincing example from current events: soldiers who helped evacuate their Afghan assistants last month. The military has always maintained a special form of teamwork which doesn't readily extend or apply to normal life.
He brings the point home here:
As shocking as it may sound to modern ears, these ties have something of a feudal nature. The historically misunderstood feudal bond consisted of mutual ties that bound people together in friendship and service. It was a flexible and creative bond inside a family-like relationship where each party agreed to be at the disposition of the other—even risking life if necessary. Unlike the cold bureaucratic relationships that bind people today to abstract corporate and governmental structures, the feudal bond was extremely personal. Each party seriously assumed duties and responsibilities to the other and saw it as a sacred duty.Starting in 1700, London and NYC financiers ripped these bonds asunder, and simultaneously turned the definitions and stories upside down. All propaganda and all written history since then has told us that feudal bonds were "slavery", which was uniformly horrible for the slave and wonderful for the owner. The same propaganda instructs us that impersonal NON-CONTRACTUAL relationships give freedom to the employee. Madman Lincoln was acting for those financiers, who had prepared the ground for his holocaust by sending bands of ascetic RELIGIOUS activists to spread sweatshops in the West. Outside of agrarian serfdom there were other commercial bonds, equally strong and bilateral. Apprentices were BOUND to the masters for 7 years. Some bad masters exploited the apprentices in the same way that a wage-paying capitalist exploits his "free" employees. But other masters recognized the talents and skills of their apprentices, and sacrificed profit to develop the skills. The latter story shows up repeatedly in the biographies of inventors and scientists and leaders, from Carver to James Ferguson.
Labels: 2000=1000, Carver, Equipoise, the broken circle
¶ 1:51 PM
