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That's a weird thing to say standing in the consequences of massive social change.
We did it before and we can do it again. There is nothing mandatory about the sexual revolution, lots of human civilizations don't work like this right now let alone in history. And mores can grow more rigid in response to problems created by liberalization, has happened many times before.
Yeah maybe, at this point we're both vibing given the scope of our discussion (the direction of human civilization).
Human history has been a fairly steady march of increasing liberalism, I think because humans like doing what they want and hate being told what to do. It's open for debate if that's actually been a good thing for us (some ways yes, some ways absolutely not) as a whole. But I have a hard time imagining people wanting to give up freedom and flexibility once they have it.
I could be wrong though, if I was accurately able to predict the direction of entire societies I would be very very rich, and too busy raising children on my private tropical island to post here.
I also added "and unpopular" to my sentence above that you quoted, as it wasn't precise enough before.
This is straight-up Whig history, and I am far from alone in rejecting it.
Edit: and now I see IGI-111 laid it all out much better and in more detail below.
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I disagree with this statement perhaps as strongly as I've ever disagreed with any statement.
The view of history it assumes is wrong, the actual results of the liberal project it assumes are wrong, the whole thing is just 18th century propaganda that history has utterly falsified in a million ways and I think it's appalling that you believe this in the face of the world you live in.
History has no singular direction, and if it has a direction within the scope of an era it is towards greater control, not greater freedom, and if the Liberal project's teleology in practice has been anything, it has been one of ever increasing individual alienation rather than liberation.
A peasant from the middle ages is more free than you are in all the ways that actually matter to the individual experience of the world to a degree that is comical. He pays less taxes, owns more space, has more social relationships, works more for himself, doesn't have to spend much of his life in a school, can't be conscripted into wars, doesn't need to fill as much paperwork... the list goes on.
The liberal project's only true undeniable achievement brought about by mass and scale is one of comfort and pleasure. People suffer much less ever since we relieved the estate of Man, and they are easily amused by marvels nobody could have dreamed of. Calling this an increase in flexibility and freedom when it comes at the cost of levels of constraint, civility and socially imposed burdens that are historically unprecedented is bold on the absurd. It is like walking up to John the Savage and telling him he is less free than genetically modified slaves.
It's a prison liberals have built. A very nice comfortable and safe prison, but a prison nonetheless. Like all ideas, theirs also inverted when taken to their ultimate logical conclusion.
I don't relish this in the slightest and still have much sympathy for the liberal project, but where I find acrimony is when facing denial. Liberalism failed. Pinker style refusal to acknowledge that reality is criminal. And indeed when Pinker himself is faced with such questions, he just shrugs and goes on with the line go up charade as if nothing happened. Please don't be like him.
You cannot be serious. What's comical is your lack of knowledge about the lives of peasants and your idealization of some "free men of the soil" living like Hobbits in Middle Earth.
Peasants paid whatever tax rate their lords set for them, which could range from bearable to crushing.
Peasants did not "own space" - generally they literally owned no land at all, and at best had tenure on it. The dwellings they lived in were tiny by modern standards.
Peasants "social relationships" were generally limited to the village they lived and died in. They had no other options and were often not even legally allowed to move to a city with more social relationships available.
Peasants didn't work for themselves, they worked for their lords, and had very little volition in what work they would do. Peasants didn't choose their careers.
Peasants didn't spend much of their lives in school because school wasn't available to them. Education wasn't available to them.
Peasants absolutely could be conscripted into wars.
Peasants couldn't fill out paperwork because they were illiterate, and thus had no way to even know if any theoretical rights they had were being violated.
Do go on.
But sure, if you would prefer to be a medieval peasant than a modern man, that route is available to you. There are many places yet even in first world countries where you can disappear, build yourself a cabin, and live alone in the woods.
I largely agree with you, but I don't think the last part is true. As with the weirdos wanting to be hunter-gatherers (or worse, raiders), you really can't be those things as they were in the past, because all the good land has been taken by people doing something vastly more productive with it.
And an off-the-grid cabin in the woods isn't really being a medieval peasant. You need a lord for that. But, ironically, for the authentic frontier homesteader experience you really need some nearby raiders to potentially pillage your homestead, otherwise you're benefiting far too much from the peace and prosperity of the modern state surrounding you.
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Every word of this is cope.
Your tax rate is as imposed to you as it was then, and as with every human society it's within a range, but the median and average was much lower in medieval societies. People always try to point to the Ancien Régime numbers as if a post-famine state bankrupted by war was representative of centuries of wide variation in quality of life. It's not.
Most peasants didn't own land nominally, but you don't either and basically nobody does in the modern world. You pay rent on an exclusive lease just like they did, and yours is more expensive than theirs.
As for the size of dwellings, I encourage you to actually go and visit peasant cottages in England or France, divide by the size of a common family at the time and then look for yourself how attainable a home like that is. I've done this myself and that's what formed my opinion.
The idea that the social relationships that you get over your whole life in a village are lesser than those you get with strangers in a city or online because of sheer quantity is something I've only ever heard from people who are stuck in either. I don't really feel the need to refute that because it's just a transparent indictment of itself.
Peasants worked for themselves most of the time, this is pretty much indisputable given that without industry, you had to make everything yourself. But I'm puzzled as to where you may have even gotten the idea that they didn't, given how uninterested most nobility was in agricultural matters in the first place. Perhaps yet more 1800s treatments?
Of course schooling and general vocational choice weren't available, but this is part of my criticism: those were specifically introduced to fill the needs of modern society in both control of the population and production of workers for ever more abstract pursuits. None of this has anything to do with freedom, and as much as I value knowledge and its dispensation as a virtue, we are quite literally arguing for yet more social control in the name of the maintenance of society here. Not for individual freedom, not in the slightest.
So too was conscription invented to serve the needs of the modern state. You're not exactly going to convince me, a Frenchman, that the practice was widespread or accepted in Europe before the French Revolution since our national anthem is about how exceptional it is to do that and how it grew so specifically with the advent of Napoleonic total war. To quote De Jouvenel:
Medieval warfare imposed other ills on civillian populations, but getting entire populations blown up in massive engagements was neither possible nor desirable given the fragility of the food supply.
As for you decrying the inability of peasants to fill paperwork, I think they'd rather argue for their illegibility to the State than against it. How else to explain that a common feature of peasant revolts was a burning of records, so as to deny their rulers taxation. You want "rights" for them, theoretical constructs instead of the practical freedom that is denied to the victim of the Rousseauan panopticon. Yet more talk of liberation that only spells bondage.
And as for your last point. It is provably impossible to build yourself a cabin in the woods and disappear to be left alone, many have tried, all of them ended dead, destitute or in prison at the hands of state funded men with guns. Most places will deny you even the ability to grow your own food or build your own dwelling if it doesn't satisfy the needs of bureaucrats.
The modern state offers no exit rights. This is yet more of consoling fictions that would have one justify a practical enslavement for theoretical freedoms. Please look at man's condition instead of entrusting it to ideas. I beg of you.
Shall we go back and forth going "nuh uh"? I think every word of your response is wrong and frankly ridiculous. Peasants were not living in some proto-libertarian utopia. But yes, you can absolutely aspire to peasantry and a cottagecore lifestyle if that is what you are into, and while no one can completely escape the jurisdiction of a state (sorry, other people exist), plenty of people do in fact live off the grid to varying degrees. No, they don't all wind up "dead, destitute, or in prison." You don't hear about many of them because most people don't want to do that, and those who do are mostly mentally ill, pathologically antisocial, or Ted Kazinski types. (Ted didn't wind up the way he did because he just wanted to live in a cabin in the woods.)
I do not believe you would literally prefer to be a medieval peasant, because if you did, you wouldn't be here on the Internet. (No, that doesn't just mean "Of course we have the advantage of technology and comforts," it means you prefer the technological lifestyle.)
I mean if we disagree on the facts we're surely not going to find agreement on their interpretation. We can drill down on a specific topic if you want, I hold my opinion on this topic to be fairly solid and nuanced, and backed by actual scholarship. But history being ultimately inaccessible to us, we may yet disagree forever, I'm fine with that.
But on exit rights, I speak from personal experience so I can just tell you how you're wrong specifically. I have attempted to live off the grid and succeeded to some degree, in more than one country. And my success has been inversely proportional to how liberal and modern the country in question is, and never total.
Consider the prospect seriously: if you want to live away from society you need enough land to subsistance farm, that's not a trivial amount and it requires some initial capital, so you need already be successful enough in modern society to afford it, as a luxury. I'm lucky like that, so it's on to the next step: you need to get that land and sever every tie you may have.
This is where it becomes impossible and if you genuinely try you end up like Albert Dryden or Vicki Weaver.
First of all there's the taxman, most places require that you pay something to the government for the privilege of owning land, if you don't produce enough to have an economic activity that's impossible and the inevitable man with gun eventually arrives. The good news is that the taxman is lazy, so you can live your whole life waiting for him, that's the story of Ed Brown. But that still means being imprisoned in your own home by the State ultimately.
Now assuming you find a nice tax free jurisdiction or make enough that that's never going to be a problem, comes the much more serious problem, and true enemy of the homesteader, and that's the municipal council. There's a building full of people whose sole job it is to prevent you from doing what we're proposing here, and as soon as they get a whiff that you're building a dwelling on your land, leaving a prebuilt or caravan on it for extended periods of time, or god forbid, engaging in agriculture, then they will send legions of cops, inspectors and various other officials your way.
Here you have a choice, either you comply or comply sufficiently that they leave you alone, making you tied to society in ways that strictly limit what yo can do and ultimately force you back into the system, or you ignore them like you did the taxman. The problem is that the councilman is not lazy. So when you start a war with them they do eventually send the men with guns to arrest you and/or kill you on your property.
Since I like to stay alive, my personal strategy to deal with this has been to leave for more enlightened shores that don't turn all ownership into renting from the government and where local officials are corrupt and lazy enough that they'll let you do whatever you want on your own land for a price.
That's still not really exit. But the Desert Trash lifestyle or equivalents is the closest that's practically possible.
And by the way, I have no qualms with technology qua technology. I find the internet to actually be tremendously useful in my ability to do these things. And I am not at all convinced that technology requires liberal states/empires to exist. Some forms of it certainly do. But not the ones I desire or enjoy.
I find it's not technology that stands in my way in the slighest. It's men and the nature of power.
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I'm not here to defend liberalism uncritically. Many issues you illustrate here are 100% correct. Alienation is one of liberalisms most profound legacies (I think this is probably a feature to the elite, not a big).
But I'm not with you on a bunch of them. I'm significantly more free than I would be in basically any other time, and I'm a white straight male, so the delta for literally any other mix and match of traits here is even higher.
I actually have a chance to improve my station in life, which was famously not something peasants did frequently.
I could marry a black woman and not risk her being murdered.
I can say things that piss people off without being ostracized or jailed or killed (although this is steadily getting worse).
I can vote despite not being rich or owning land.
It is easier than ever to literally move around the world, both temporarily and permanently. I'm pretty sure peasants frequently literally weren't allowed to leave? Also if they moved somewhere else they'd just be destitute.
I have no idea what medieval effective tax rates were so I'll defer to you there. I also don't consider taxes to be a horrible burden though. They buy me amazing healthcare, functional infrastructure (which enables a lot), infinite amounts of the cleanest drinking water in human history, much lower chances of dying a violent death, on and on.
Did peasants own land? I assume it depends on time and place but I thought that was the whole point of Lords.
I am quite happy with the quantity and quality of my relationships, but that is something out society is struggling with.
I'm so confident that peasants got drafted. Isn't that what peasant levies were? Did fighting age men get to opt out of wars? If so, why did any go?
I don't consider the quantity of paperwork I do to be a freedom constraining issue in my life lol. Although I used to be an accountant so my bar is low.
I really can't imagine how I'd be more free in basically any time period that isn't now, not excluding the post war boom in North America when life as a western man was straight easy mode
Social mobility has increased. I won't deny that. There's a lot of mitigating factors on what exactly that means, but in theory the next shitcoin bet I make can make me a billionnaire and there's few social stigmas that would go along me not being an aristocrat.
I think you could go either way as to whether increased cosmopolitanism is a good thing or not. You can do certain things a homogeneous society can't and vice versa, at best it's a sidegrade.
I personally know people that are disgraced, in prison and/or dead for doing that, so I find this claim unconvincing. It's as it ever was. Just with different idols.
And have basically no effect on how the affairs of your community are conducted because that has been thoroughly insulated from that particular ritual.
It's certainly has become far easier to move, but it was actually pretty common for peasants to move around, and the people who couldn't that you're thinking of, serfs, were specifically created as a class to prevent this problem for landowners or as part of specific cultural practices. Shopping around lords for a better deal is not at all unheard of.
It depends. Most did not outright but owned a perpetual lease. (much like people still do in the UK) Most of them owned their dwellings though (or at least their family did).
The history of the practice is actually pretty complex, with early middle ages armies being more like bands of peasants called directly by kings. And the extent to which they were replaced by professional knights and men at arms is debated.
Still, it's pretty consensual at this point that for most of the period armies were composed of professionals fighting limited battles. With peasant levies filling more of a militia role or last resort stopgap than that of a real fighting force. Which I must concede is actually similar to how a lot of Europe treats conscription these days. Perhaps less so as military threats start to loom.
In contrast the the total wars of the modern era that would mobilize huge amounts of men and empty whole countries to the degree that it require women take over industrial production, it's incomparable. That level of discipline was simply impossible with the logistics of the time, and you have to go back to the empires of antiquity to find practices that compare.
Here's a nice article on the topic.
Thanks for this comment, I've learned a lot
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