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Certainly not in the current welfare-state environment. It seemed like a stable norm, when combined with shotgun weddings, in previous environments.
I mean okay?
Any proposed policy or solution that requires massive (edit: and unpopular) social change to work isn't a very useful proposal, but it's a nice dream I guess
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.
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.
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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