Comment by imbnwa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by imbnwa | Hacker News Reader

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I sometimes consider the notion that, socially, Western modernity was just reified feudalism: everybody's a lord now! Up until 30 - 40 years ago, men were regularly addressed as Mister/Herr/Signor/etc [insert name], titles which were originally reserved for landed gentry and royalty in their respective locales; it use to be said that a man's home "was his castle"; "Rights" were something that nobles worked out with the monarch, see the Magna Carta, not something meant for everybody, the peasantry in particular. Within The Federalist Papers it was still being debated whether it was a good idea to ennoble everyone, whether a democracy where everyone has a say was a good idea(which, then, meant the mass of unenslaved men); today, people colloquially refer to themselves as a "queen" or "king", also "boss".

The presumption of a distinction is pivotal to Western subjectivity, again, particularly in America; "class distinction" is an ornament of the individual.

Not saying, like Carl Schmitt, that we need to bring back actual, explicitly stratified distinction between the people and the people who make sovereign decisions, but that perhaps we need to reconsider the way we relate to ourselves in the form of some sort of socio-political mastery.

Then again, this idea of the self as master is as old as Aristotle, but the ancient Greek polis was a whole political organization built for that idea.

"this idea of the self as master is as old as Aristotle"

IIRC Aristotle's writing tends to explicitly exclude slaves (i.e. the majority of population) and women from moral reasoning, so the idea of self is discussed in the context of literate (so not very poor) free adult male citizens, perhaps the top 5-10% of the population at most. Quoting Aristotle, "The slave is wholly lacking the deliberative element; the female has it but it lacks authority; the child has it but it is incomplete".

In that time and place they invariably are literal masters of a household that's quite larger than modern households, including slaves, women, kids and younger male adults; so for the target audience of Aristotle's work it's never about just them alone as all of them have quite significant rights (and some responsibilities) over multiple other people; Aristotle was not writing for or about the "lower 90%".

> Then again, this idea of the self as master is as old as Aristotle, but the ancient Greek polis was a whole political organization built for that idea.

I was hoping the latter part of that statement was a pointer at what you would go on to elaborate on, but wholy agree. Nichomachean Ethics, for anyone who's closely read that text, is an aristocratic parenting guide more than anything else.

But what's more, much of modernity's discourse of rational agency is built upon this master/slave metaphor; up to today where we still refer to whole demographics as 'incapable' of self-mastery.

  I sometimes consider the notion that, socially, 
  Western modernity was just reified feudalism: 
  everybody's a lord now!

I figure historians of the future will view it like this: there were people in Europe who practiced feudalism domestically for several centuries. Eventually they developed the technology to outsource serfdom to the rest of the world.

For most of my life, people in the 'third world' lived in barely imaginable poverty while the rest of the world walked off with oil, lumber, precious metals, gems, historical artifacts, slave labor, etc. I was well out of highschool before I appreciated the connection between the squalor elsewhere, and the four or five previous centuries of pillaging that contributed to it.

That unpleasant state of affairs tempers my ability to feel triumphalist about 'first-world' nations ridding themselves of feudalism.

If you're thinking that global poverty was invented by European exploitation, you're pretty severely overcorrecting. For most of history, the vast majority of people were even poorer than what we call "barely imaginable poverty" today.

That way of looking at things is mostly wrong, but it is a belief that suited the winners, so it is a wide-spread belief.

I'm not keen to rebut it at much length because my previous comment already leaves the wrong impression: my point is less about the morality of the past few hundred years than the stupidity of the narrative we built around it.

If I did expand on things, I'd list off the usual examples (Conquistadors and gold, Chinese opium trade, slaughter of native Americans, ad nauseum).

I don't know how to make those points without sounding like I'm appealing to emotion. The actual point is that - though the Steven Pinkers and Hans Roslings might disagree - people subject to those conditions clearly are worse-off than before (and than today, compared to the nations who plundered them).

To the original point of the thread, the colonial powers attained such obscene wealth (ie: by stealing gold, oil, farming cotton with slave labor, etc) that even the poorest among us, until the past decade, was rich compared to the rest of the world.

My concern is that people tend to lean into the "noble savage" trope; I've seen a lot of people who imply or outright state that wars of conquest are a uniquely European concept. But I do agree with the narrative issue you're pointing at. It's wrong to see colonial-era violence and oppression as a side show to the "main plot" of history, especially given that the majority of the global population was on the receiving end of it.

Well, that seems perfectly reasonable to me. Just to clarify, I don't think I'm particularly prone to romanticize societies that Europeans colonized.

What changed my view about the world is thinking about the economics.

Take the US, for example. In the popular imagination, the success of America is all about entrepreneurial spirit, etc etc. But the other aspect is... four million square miles of (in a manner of speaking) undeveloped land! Entrepreneurial spirit is great, but literally having more natural resources than you know what to do with (didn't get around to developing California till the 1900s, for example) seems at least as important.

Given the past several centuries were a free-for-all for nations with empires, it doesn't surprise me that the colonized societies, whatever their inherent strengths and weaknesses, wound up in bad shape.

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