Post a response:
|
The last sentence was a little tongue-in-cheek, I will admit. I am not exactly advocating a return to feudalism, even if I thought that were possible. Diogenes is right to say that what I'm really advocating is a return to an organic conception of human society. Also, I am more concerned with ideology than with social reality. Whether medieval serfs really found their position 'fulfilling' (or even would have understood the concept of emotional 'fulfilment') is probably unanswerable. But what is clear is that - at least from the eleventh century - the position of those who worked the land, the laboratores, was endowed with a certain dignity in the official ideology of the Church. The workers of the land were one of the three main orders of Christian society, alongside the fighting elite (the bellatores) and the churchmen (oratores). I think this contrasts markedly with our official doctrine, where it is so easy to reach for examples of what Django calls "menial dead-end jobs." Flipping burgers might be less physically demanding than toiling over the lord's land, but nobody tries to confer dignity on burger-flippers. They are almost proverbially degraded. My point is not that feudal lords were more benign than modern employers, but that there was at least an ideal of common interest in the medieval world that modern individualism has largeley destroyed. My point is not that fast-food workers are more alienated than medieval serfs, but that there is no ideological effort to overcome the alienation of the "dead-end job." And nothing has been so widely destructive to the ideals and lifeways of premodern societies as industrial capitalism - though of course the origins of capitalism and liberalism lie much earlier in Western history. I have a lot of affection for the Christian Middle Ages, but I acknowledge that a strong case can be made for other historical periods, and even for human prehistory. Some of my archaeologist friends think that everything has been downhill since the invention of farming, and that the golden age of humankind was really the Upper Palaeolithic. But all of that is really incidental to my main point, which is the toxicity and unnaturalness of the economic and ideological world we inhabit today. Mere nostalgia for a lost world is not necessary in order to recognise the violence that is being done to us now. |