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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34961 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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It's that time of year again: The Masters, my favourite dose of noblesse oblige

I've seen it lamented numerous times here and elsewhere of the decline of noblesse oblige. I chalk it up to the internationalization of finance and wealth and the simultaneous decline in nationalism: the peers of the ultra-wealthy are the ultra-wealthy of other countries, not their neighbours or countrymen who they generally try to spend as little time as possible in the company of. God forbid that they might actually have to mix with the unwashed masses. Before you were obliged to in an attempt to forestall some peasant revolt from burning your estates, but now you've got private security defending all fourteen of your mansions, so what would really be the harm even if you lost one?

But at least in Augusta, Georgia there's some vestige of that lost spirit. Every year the Masters is held at the ultra-exclusive Augusta National Country Club, arguably the most prestigious golf tournament (give or take The Open) and the pinnacle of achievement of one of the hobbies of the elites. And every year the Masters goes overboard in creating a prestigious, elevated, and somewhat stiffly artificial environment. No expense is spared, no detail overlooked: the fairways are painted a verdant green, Rae's Creek is dyed its iconic dark blue, and the telecast features a chorus of (not-actually-present) birds so you can't hear the highway traffic. It's pure spectacle, and a treat to watch.

And you can watch it. Rather than hiking ticket prices to the eye-watering levels the open market would demand, the tournament distributes tickets via lottery ($140 for a day ticket, but if they hit the retail market they usually go for multiple thousands). And once you're on-site, the costs for food and drink are almost cartoonishly inexpensive. Oh, you couldn't secure tickets or are too far away? Well they built maybe the single-best website for watching sports: an infinitely customizable setup where you can watch whichever players or holes you wish. I've never used the app for mobile but people rave about it as well. These are both free of charge and have no region locks, and feature not one single advertisement or imposition upon the watcher. It's sporting entertainment at its ultimate best, built not for profit but purely for the prestige of being able to give it to the masses.

Wimbledon has a similar system of providing affordable front row tickets (though by a queue rather than by lottery), while the US Open has no such system.

On the upper end, the US Open main stadium has private rooms available to anyone willing to pay exorbitant prices, while at Wimbledon money alone won't get you the absolute best seats, which are reserved for club members and special royal or celebrity guests.

I always though that was something of a microcosm of the differences in US vs UK culture and their views of class, so it's interesting to see a US golf event more resembles Wimbledon in this regard.

Just an amusing observation - you wrote reasonably long post about golf without ever once using the word golf.

No he didn't

Damn, that one mention of golf, oops

I think the rich try to blend in more than ever, like attire or downplaying wealth, but they are at the same time more detached in every other respect/aspect of life, such as school choice, resorts, secluded homes and such. The goal of designer clothes seem to be to convey wealth as minimalistically as possible to those who are receptive to it, but otherwise oblivious to everyone else.

The prestige of the masters comes not from doing things that are expensive, but from doing things which require effort. When was the last time you went anywhere with a no-cellphones policy that was effectively enforced? If you are seen with a cell-phone at The Masters, you will be thrown out. While watching, you might notice the commentators' use of heightened language. This is deliberate. If you miss the fairway at Augusta, you aren't in the rough, you're in the "second cut". There will not be a single "distance to hole" infographic all weekend. The Masters might be the only organization in the Southern United States with the power to tell a major media outlet what to say on-air. That's prestige.

I would need more evidence to believe that noblesse oblige has actually declined compared to fedual or industrial revolution times, or even compared to say the 1950s. It is not like rich people do not give money for charitable purposes these days. You might be right, you might be wrong, but in either case I think that we would need to look at some data before deciding whether noblesse oblige has actually declined. For all I know, it might be stronger than ever these days.

It's hard to define charity. Is a tax write off sort of thing, a tax shelter?

It is not like rich people do not give money for charitable purposes these days.

Oh, they give money to charity.

Charities are their primary vessels for influence laundering and a literal cancer on society.

Any chance at real reform must focus on preventing international 'charitable' organisations from spreading influence in your country, and preventing such idealistic social tumours from being created in your own land.

Could you summarize that piece?

The article is talking about charitable foundations rather than individual donations. Rich people set them up then hand over the management to professional charity administrators. The article argues that the money then gets diverted to standard leftist causes, regardless of the original donor's intentions, and that this is especially true for foundations that are set up to continue after the original donor dies.

Thanks!

Yeah, I want to know what motte-and-bailey it uses, but I don't care enough to suffer through it.

Having read it, as far as I could see it doesn't use motte-and-bailey arguments, it highlights a real problem (large caritative funds are free money for a class of professional managers to invest in whatever their own pet causes are, uncoupled from any requirement of being efficient, and sometimes clearly against the intentions of individuals who provided the initial capital). The problem with the article imo is how blunt and unsophisticated the author's solution is, pretty much "just ban them". I haven't read anything else on this blog or from this author so perhaps he does not care about setting dark precedents and preserving liberalism. To those of us who do, a more elegant solution to aligning incentives and ensuring such entities either don't spring up or aren't hijacked, perhaps a more social than political solution, would be a lot more palatable.

No, that’s pretty much what I had in mind. Maybe “Bailey” isn’t as accurate as “Strawman.” He’s attacking the worst case for charities—trusts that represent the interests of an entrenched PMC—and damning the whole field accordingly.

I went ahead and read it. Even in his just-so story, the Bill Foundation spends $3M on “handshake worthy causes” even as the globalists (coincidentally all women) start to take hold. Assuming everything after the first year is meant to be rubbish, since the author namedrops Soros, the foundation still spent most of its money on causes approved by the founder!

Of course, to Moldbug fans, this is temporary, and Cthulhu will only make the balance worse. So the author concludes caritas delenda est. Don’t bother building something, not if the leftists will benefit from it. Ford’s trust send some money to racial grievance studies? Can’t have shit in Detroit.

As an aside, Mr. Smoke misses the part where the Ford Foundation was set up by Edsel Ford, son of the rather more famous Henry. It spent its first decade funding hospitals and museums and, conveniently, avoiding a 70% inheritance tax. After the war, it pivoted to a stance of global philanthropy. I have to wonder if the author thinks it was A-OK up till that point.

I get the impression that Mr. Smoke has a very low tolerance for leftism. We can’t really put a number on that, because all his real-world examples are assumed rather than proven worthless. A charity has “Muslim” in the name; surely it provides no value other than sucking welfare?

All in all—abysmal article. 3/10.

Can I take this opportunity to try and convince some mottizens to learn to play golf?

  1. It is a game that you can play until the day that you die.

  2. The benefits to being good at this game are immense. If you are good at golf, other golfers will seek you out as a golf partner.

  3. #1 is especially true for charity tournaments and scrambles, where your ability to produce a winning score gives the person inviting you to play on their team prestige, and the person inviting you is almost certainly wealthy.

  4. The game is an easy route into the rich/upper class parts of society. You can play for very cheap (there are plenty of courses you can play for less $20 or so for 9 holes), but the price goes up from there to infinity.

  5. Even though the price does go to infinity, a $200/round game gets you to top tier courses to play on.

  6. Courtesy is considered a part of the structure of the game. Things like walking in others' "lay" (the path of travel for their ball on a putting green) are things you have to pay attention to.

  7. It's an extremely mental game, you have to slow your thinking down while hitting to be effective. You cannot "force" your way through a game with aggression. The game is more about learning to be graceful than something like basketball, soccer, etc.

I love golf. I was introduced to it at a very young age, luckily. I wish more people played it because I see the benefits large and also accessible.

unrelated: the markdown engine being used on the motte ignores the numbers at the beginning of numbered lists. Interesting.

I don’t care about any of those things. I’m also getting secondhand embarrassment from the obsession with status and recognition evident in your post.

And you can’t convince me that a game with infinite decision making time is more mentally demanding than one that actually requires reflexive genius.

And you can’t convince me that a game with infinite decision making time is more mentally demanding than one that actually requires reflexive genius.

Did I try to?

When you use it as a point in golf’s favor, obviously in comparison to other sports, then yes.

Is this a game for people with compromised shoulders? If I can't do an overhead press without subluxing, will driving stress that failure point again?

I'm not sure but I would really encourage you to try it if you can! Keep in mind there are plenty of people playing golf well into their 80s.

You and @johnfabian have convinced me. I went and made plans to visit a driving range with my dad. We'll see if I can't pick up some basic fluency again.

How did it go?

Haven’t been yet. We did Korean BBQ instead and planned to go one of the next two weekends. I’ll ping y’all with an update when we do!

I'm sure your dad will love it. Playing golf with my dad is one of my favourite things to do, and definitely something we'll both remember as we grow older.

Golf is perfect for business because it's slow enough paced that you can hold a conversation

I just bought new clubs. I golfed in high school, and occasionally over the years, but picked it up again in earnest in 2020, when some of my friends also started playing more. It's really nice to have a 4-some to play with regularly, or a roster of regulars from which to pull the group.

I can play with my dad, which is always a pleasure. I walk with a push cart, and there's very little else that can get me out of bed at dawn on a weekend, or that can make me spend 4 hours outside before noon, or that can make me walk and be on my feet for that much time.

I don't agree about the social/upper class aspect of it, but that's probably because I'm playing with old friends, and we're all poors playing muni courses. Not a lot of fresh blood in my groups.

I don't agree about the social/upper class aspect of it, but that's probably because I'm playing with old friends, and we're all poors playing muni courses. Not a lot of fresh blood in my groups.

I don't mean to say that golf is exclusively an upper class thing. The course I spend most of my time at is $20/round 9 hole course. I just mean that if you wanted a route into that group, that golf could provide it, and the path is well laid out.

Golf's "eliteness" varies from region-to-region. In the UK and Ireland it's very much also a working man's game. In Canada and Australia it gets a little more expensive, but there are still plenty of clubs to join in that $500 to $1,500 price range for a year's membership. In the US it gets even more expensive still, especially down south, but still affordable to a wide range of the population. Then in continental Europe it can be quite expensive and in east Asia it's truly an elite thing

In North America it's much more the country club setting that is elite than the game itself

The thrift store near where my mom lives always has a ton of golf clubs available. I have long considered putting a bag together out of them. What would be the next step? What's the very first thing you need to do in order to start?

Like - when I took up tennis as a kid, I got a buddy, two racquets, and some balls, and we went to a local court when it was deserted and hacked around all day until we started figuring it out. I don't wanna go take up room on the golf course when I have no idea how to hit the ball straight.

Head down to your local driving range, pick a lane off to the side if you can, and just start whacking some balls. You can get enough of the basics to have a good time just by watching a few basic youtube tutorials. Your swing will suck, you'll be slicing and hooking all over the place, etc., but it's a fun experience trying to iterate on each swing to improve. You'll probably want to book an hour or two of lessons at some point before you build any truly terrible habits, but golf is actually a lot easier than it looks, as long as you don't mind being terrible. Your best bet is to book the cheapest hour lesson you can find and/or find a buddy who can give you some tips, spend a couple afternoons at the driving and putting ranges to develop a little bit of technique, then just book a tee time and go golfing. It can be a little stressful when you're first starting out and you feel like everyone's waiting on you, but try not to let that get to you. If you notice someone waiting, offer to let them go ahead of you, or if you don't really enjoy putting and/or want to focus on your drives, just pick your ball up when you get to the green and move onto the next hole. I'd take my time, relax, drink a few beers, and not really worry about keeping score while you're getting the hang of things.

I second and amplify @firmamenti's advice below. A day or two at the driving range learning to thwack the ball squarely and cleanly is the "hacking around until you start to figure it out" of Golf and once you're at point where you can hit the ball in the direction you intend at least semi-reliably, then you can go to a local short course and focus on the rest.

The best recommendation I have is to find a short course, executive course, or par 3 course. It will probably be less pressure, less crowded, and it will focus you on approaching the greens and holing out once you're there. It's also much less time commitment. Nine holes of par 3 golf can be played in under 75 minutes.

Find a cheap golfcourse near you, and go to the driving range (which is where golfers go to practice).

When you get there, you are going to look for the "pro shop" (this is a place that will have stuff for sale like clubs, shirts, etc. You can buy stuff from here, but...I wouldn't, unless you are buying stuff that has the course's branding on it and you want it as a sort of souvenir).

Tell them you want a bucket of balls. There is usually going to be two sizes, either small or large. Get a small one.

They will either hand you a bucket of balls, or a receipt that has a number on it. If they give you a receipt you take this to a machine near the driving range which will dispense the balls into a bucket for you.

In the driving range area, you'll see some sort of markers that show you where each individual person should stand while they hit their balls. Stand between the markers.

There are also tons of videos on youtube that will instruct you on things like how to grip the club (which is pretty important!).

Start with a club like a 9 iron[1]. Hit the ball much, MUCH more gently than you think you should. I'd highly recommend just swinging the club pretty slowly and concentrating on making contact with the ball. Seriously, how hard you hit the ball has way less of an effect than it would seem (this is counterintuitive).

When you're done with this, go back to the club house and sit at the crappy little restaurant they have a drink a beer. Congratulations, now you're a golfer!

Here's an intro golf lesson video you could watch that covers how to grip the club, etc: https://youtube.com/watch?v=1iOa2ZwGhbU

[1]: There are essentially two types of clubs. "Irons" and "Woods", so named because of the materials they used to be made from. Irons are smaller and wedge shaped. They are also shorter. "Woods" (which are no longer made of wood), have a more bulbous appearance, and much longer shafts. The numbers on the club indicate the angle at which they will strike the ball. Irons typically go from 3-9. 3 is the flattest angle while it contacts the ball, and 9 is the sharpest angle. 3 hits the ball the farthest, and 9 hits the ball the highest (and least far). When I say to get a "9 iron", this means the wedge shaped club with a 9 on it, and I'm telling you to hit with this club because it is the most forgiving.

Watch? The way you ostentatiously described it I'd think I could play there.

I don't have well-articulated thoughts on it yet, but the entire industry of golf, even outside the professional players, is maybe one of the last vestiges of 'elite' culture which hasn't been commodified down to a complete premium mediocre experience. Okay, we have to acknowledge that places like Topgolf attempt to distill the experience down to a mere amusement in the vein of bowling, but nobody, I wager, would consider it a substitute for actual golfing.

As you indicate, the lack of profit motive is obvious because the core of the industry is supported by the wealth of it's patrons, it has no need to scramble for peasant dollars. It stands to gain far more by catering to whales than relative minnows.

It is accessible to the common man in a way that, e.g. polo or downhill skiing (or on the extreme high end, Formula One Racing) certainly are not. You can practice the skills for <$20 a day at your local driving range. But it also has a near infinite cap on how much you could spend on the hobby, from top-of-the-line clubs made of exotic alloys and carbon fiber, to customized golf carts, to weekly lessons with top-skill experts. Somehow both the image of beer-chugging frat boys tooling drunkenly around the course in carts and the image of staid professionals, including CEOs of billion dollar companies and heads of state hashing out the details of vital financial/political matters between strokes can coexist here without contradiction.

And yet, AND YET, a guy who puts in the hours of practice using thrift-store clubs (that's where mine came from, growing up) will almost always win over the player who merely spent the first guy's yearly salary on equipment.

The very existence of golf courses are effectively a huge signal of the excess wealth your country produces. "We spend exorbitant amounts of money on meticulously maintaining 150+ acres of land not for growing crops, or industrial purposes, or even mass recreational games, but rather to let people wack tiny balls around in groups of 4." When you can literally devote huge swaths of prime real estate to 'nonproductive' use, you are flexing quite the surplus of capital.

It is also one of the few sports where traveling around to play at different facilities really means something as each one is designed to have unique features that will actually challenge you to adapt, rather than rigid uniformity.

There's also a delightfully nerdy aspect to it, given how many independent variables one encounters during the course of play, and slight alterations in any one of those variables (wind speed, the deflection angle of your wrist upon impact with the ball, the slope of the green, to say nothing of which club you select) can have outsized influence on the result.

And I'm not even a golf aficionado. I prefer Disc Golf as an actual hobby. But as hobbies go, there's virtually no downside, in our current culture, to being moderately competent at golfing and at least minimally conversant in the current professional scene (i.e. be able to name a few top players other than Tiger Woods, and their recent performance), since the interest can cross so many other cultural barriers, and you genuinely never know when you might get invited on a golf outing by someone influential whom you might want to make inroads with.

And yet, AND YET, a guy who puts in the hours of practice using thrift-store clubs (that's where mine came from, growing up) will almost always win over the player who merely spent the first guy's yearly salary on equipment.

The game's inherent volatility is also such that the outcomes are variable enough (especially when combined with the handicap system) that it can work as a good social game in terms of the best golfer not always winning, which IMO figures into it's popularity. A bunch of more modern techy sports kind of have the issue that there's pretty huge skill demarcation. I do some bouldering and a lot of jiu-jitsu, which are both sports in which there's a good kind of conviviality but it's very hard to create a competitive game between enthusiasts and hobbyists.

Indeed, if you have your handicap dialed in you can have a 'competitive' game with even the most skilled of players.

But nobody will walk away with any illusions over who is better.

Even among the pros there's enough variability that the worst player going into a 140+ strong tournament can put together four great rounds and win. It happens time-to-time even at the major championships

The very existence of golf courses are effectively a huge signal of the excess wealth your country produces. "We spend exorbitant amounts of money on meticulously maintaining 150+ acres of land not for growing crops, or industrial purposes, or even mass recreational games, but rather to let people wack tiny balls around in groups of 4."

While he's far better know for his culture war posts, Steve Sailor's golf architecture posts are consistently excellent.

Absolutely agreed with everything here. I've only ever played a full 18 hole course once (was invited by a friend who's really good, lost to him with my handicap 30 to his hanidcap 6) but I had a very very positive view of the whole experience and would have picked up golf seriously if I had the free time for it. If someone reading this does have free time to actually get good at it, from my almost total beginner point of view it seems to be very worthwhile.

Forgive me for not being all that impressed with a class of people spending money they themselves did not earn for the public good in a manner that could not possible threaten their privileged lives. It is certainly better than if they had not done this but they're only marginally better than some beaurocrat spending my tax dollars because of their skin in the game and they fulfill the same role.

What would the moral option be? Is it able to be universalized?

Moral option? That's not really what I'm saying. I'm not judging them hugely negatively for continuing a pro-social tradition, I'm just also not giving them much credit. And I find the notion that these people are my 'betters' by an accident of birth completely ridiculous. It's like thinking that men deserve heaps of praise for using their greater strength that they gained from an accident of birth pro-socially instead of using it to subjugate women. Sure, the alternative would be much worse and there is something to clearing that bar, but it's the kind of grateful I feel about not having my home destroyed by a tornado, not the kind of grateful I feel about a good friend making a real sacrifice for my benefit.

To me inheretance is a right of the one passing on the wealth and speaks nothing of the person receiving the wealth. The social contract and debt society owes is to the originator of the wealth. That originator happened to decide that it would be best for his wealth to be passed down Patrik I early and that was his or her business and society should respect that use. The current heir is not significantly different to me than a government employee who got a cushy nepotism job where they don't have to do anything at all but are heavily encouraged by tradition to use at least some of the department's resources for pro-social ends.

Patrik I early

Was that supposed to be "patrilineally"? Huh, my spellcheck doesn't recognize it either. It recommends "Patri lineally", "patrilineal" and "matrilineally"! Feminist conspiracy?

Huh, I had actually iirc, specifically spell checked that word because autocorrect wouldn't fix it for me but I could have sworn I retyped it on my phone correctly and apparently it then happily destroyed it for me.

I mean to be fair, it was aristocrats who got Europe into World War One to begin with. The aristocrat class' sacrifices for their respective countries in the war perhaps should, I think, be viewed against that background.

And although quite a bit of scientific progress was done by independently wealthy gentleman scientists, I doubt that aristocrats have been the main drivers of the progress of science. For example, none of Newton, Euler, Gauss, Pasteur, Riemann, Maxwell, or Einstein were aristocrats. Of course one can easily also find examples of aristocrat-scientists. For example a quick search pulls up Lavoisier and de Broglie. But to me it seems that non-aristocrats have dominated the progress of science. So while aristocratic breeding might be nice and nice to be around, it might be only a minor factor in having made modern life so much better than the past had been. Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin and thus perhaps the man who contributed more than any other 20th century individual to improving humanity's lot, was the son of farmers. Jonas Salk, polio vaccine developer, was born in a from-what-I-can-tell unprosperous Eastern European Jewish immigrant family.

if the Duke had transferred his wealth merely a few years before he died, his children would have paid nothing anyway.

Well, yeah. If he wanted to benefit from the 7 year rule, he should have made the gifts earlier. He didn’t. Why should I want him to get the benefit anyway?

God forbid that they might actually have to mix with the unwashed masses.

Was this ever actually required? Like, how many noble people were walking through a peasant village and chatting with the locals like they were at a sports bar? You can have obligations that you fulfill without the emotional attachment to them.

You didn't just have to mix with them, you had to lead them into battle. With the rise of gunpowder and the demise of the knight in shining armour as a practical battlefield weapon, the role of nobles (and gentlemen below them) on the battlefield became as officers, and officering the army became the de facto function of the nobility. And the other ranks tended towards the worst kind of oik. As Wellington said:

I don't know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me.

If I look at my own family history (I am from a multi-generational upper-middle class family), all my (male) ancestors had a job early in their career where they had to give in-person orders to their social inferiors. My father's first graduate job was as a shift manager in a factory, and the previous three generations were military officers. The only people I have ever had to give orders to (apart from servants - one of the advantages of the UMC mindset vs. the PMC one is that you can save money by hiring servants directly rather than going through a corporate intermediary) are juniors in the office who are basically younger versions of myself. And that is typical of my generation - the only person in my undergraduate social circle who expected ever to be giving orders to social inferiors was the lady who spent her whole gap year working at McDonalds and got promoted to floor manager half way through. (Quite a few people from UMC backgrounds had worked on the line in shitty jobs like McDonalds as student summer jobs etc. - but that is temporarily slumming it with the proles, not leading them, and thus a very different experience).

What's UMC? I assume it isn't United Methodist church.

Upper-middle class.

May be a British thing.

Upper-Middle Class?

Ah yeah that's probably it. I was stuck on 'Something Managerial Class'.

I spent a long time making the opposite mistake - thinking that the American usage of PMC was "Professional Middle Class". It didn't help that there used to be a website at classmatters.org (incidentally, a good website focussed on explaining to lefty activists why they were putting working class supporters off with inessential weirdness) which did use it that way.

The lower nobility was very much exposed to the peasantry and seemed to be generally preferred to the bourgeoisie by that same peasantry.

Some of this is urban-rural. If you lived in the country, you couldn't avoid getting your hands dirty - admittedly the peasants got theirs dirty working while the gentry got theirs dirty playing. If you lived in the city, there was a decent chance that the factory manager went home with clean hands while the factory workers were reaching for the Swarfega. Some of it is that the landed gentry tended to be physically tougher than the bourgeoisie in a way that manual workers respected.

Like, how many noble people were walking through a peasant village and chatting with the locals like they were at a sports bar?

Depends on which level of noble, during which time period, and in which place. Of course, when nobility actually meant something it dictated a proper level of respect and/or courtesy between nobles and commons, so the whole "chatting like at a sports bar" thing was probably pretty rare. But you can definitely find examples of nobles having very good relations with local commons, and working for their benefit. Similarly, you can also find lots of examples of cultural traditions from the past where nobles ritually abased themselves or the social hierarchy was temporarily suspended or even upended. E.g., the "Feast of Fools," Saturnalia, the Christmas "Lord of Misrule," Carnival/Mardi Gras, etc.

A peasant village? Never. But up until the mid-late twentieth century, the rich had very personal relationships with their servants. Your maid was your maid, not the girl that the maid service you contracted sent over today. Feudal contracts vary across places and periods, but frequently included personal obligations by peasants to work at the manor house. Either a set number of days mowing the lord's fields, or repair work on the buildings, or personal domestic service. The nobles would very much, by the nature of their lives, interact directly with the peasantry every single day. Not on an equal footing, never as equals, but every single day they would interact directly.

Today corporate structures exist to insulate the leisure classes from personal relationships of exploitation. Even if I take Uber multiple times a day every day, I never have the feeling that I am personally exploiting any individual Uber driver. I sit in the backseat and scroll through Atlantic articles about how horribly Uber treats its drivers, but I am not personally responsible to my driver in particular. Rather Uber as an entity, or the CEO of Uber, or Venture Capitalists more generally take the blame. I don't exploit my cook or my waiter even if I eat out every meal, a variety of restauranteurs insulate me from that. I can avoid any personal repeated relationship with any of the people whose labor is exploited for my benefit.

Corporations and small businesses and city slumlords are the sin eaters of the American Professional and Managerial Classes. The nice liberal lawyers and engineers and bankers I work with can grumble about how awful the exploitation of the working class is, because other men are taking on that rough work so that their houses are cleaned and their meals are made and the cooks and maids have somewhere to live in the city.

Old feudal lords had to house their serfs, and order them around. They saw how they lived because they were the ones choosing how they lived. They had to pay them directly, when they needed them to work more they watched what that meant in real time. I can just grumble about rush pricing and how long I had to wait for my uber to take me home from the airport.

This is relativistic nonsense. A master’s/noble’s relationship to his slave/serf, according to this view, is no less exploitative than that between a uber client and his driver, perhaps even more ‘authentic’ and ‘personal’. It equates with ‘exploitation’ two radically different relationships, and creates a parallel between the state of mind/contempt of the slave master and the uber customer, as if that mattered. Whatever one thinks about someone, they need to be treated as a person and not as a dog.

One had right of life and death over the other. It was really a boon to the brotherhood of man when nobles flogged serfs for a perceived insult or a failure to perform adequately. Much empathy was borne from those interclass interactions.

There are three basic types of human relationships: friendly, transactional and hierarchical. Don’t pretend they used to be friendly. The relationship evolved from the harshest kind of hierarchical to transactional, and that has been a great thing for humanity.

Nowhere in my comment do I use the word empathy or even imply that peasants were materially better treated. My argument is solely that the gentry of times past were aware that their lifestyle rested on exploitation of the lower classes in a way that today's PMC are often able to deny to themselves.

One could easily say, as you do, that it's worse to be aware of exploitation and live it anyway. But the nominal equality that the modern liberal upper classes grant the lower classes comes with precious few material benefits.

For what it's worth I also reject your trichotomy. Human relationships come in millions of forms, shades of transaction, friendship, duty, love, filial piety, hatred, self aggrandizement, manipulation, jealousy, and hierarchy come into each one.

Where are you going with this? I can see here the basis of an ultrareactionary ‘slavery was good, actually. Russian absolutism and lawlessness is the way to go’ take, or a communist ‘capitalistic exploitation is just as bad as the worst examples in history”, I wouldn’t mind reading either, but this is just soft equivocation. What you proably call nuance and complexity, I call a refusal to differentiate. When you condemn all, you condemn none.

But the nominal equality that the modern liberal upper classes grant the lower classes comes with precious few material benefits.

Compared to when they did not have ‘nominal’ equality, they’re richer, healthier, more educated, live longer, work less, are protected from arbitrary corporal punishments, incarceration, forced labour, rape. But aside from those, precious few.

I agree with your final point about the evolution of human relations. People do own their own labor and time to a degree never before possible.

However, @FiveHourMarathon has a point I don't think you can totally dismiss as "relativistic nonsense." Take an example that hasn't fundamentally changed in at least 100 - 150 ears; the Military.

A 2nd Lieutenant is typically between 22 and 25. A Platoon Sergeant (typically somewhere between E-5 to E-7 depending on factors and how fucked up the enlistment cycle has been) is within just a few years of age of that 2nd LT .... probably late 20s.

On paper, the 2nd LT is utterly superior in everyway to the Platoon Sergeant. Short of physical violence, the 2nd LT has dictatorial control. In real life, the platoon sergeant has about a decade of experience (and, for this generaiton, a lot of that in combat if its a combat arms MOS). They know then ins and outs of the organization, the duty station, the personalities up and down the command. If the 2nd LT does not strike a balance of experience deference to the Plt Sergeant while not looking weak in front of the men, he's going to have a bad time. A lot of self-conscious but very gung ho 2nd LTs will totally blow off the subtle suggestions of Plt Sergeants ... and learn some hard lessons about leadership the hard way.

The point is, even in a situation where, yes, you have close to absolute superiority in every way over a "subordiante" (fun fact the etymological root of Sergeant is Servant) if you're going to have a long term or just a non-transactional relationship with that person, you have to invest in the relationship somehow.

That relationship is still hierarchical, but it has almost nothing to do with the absolute superiority of the past, of servants and slaves. In pre-19th century armies (later for less enlightened societies, like russians or arabs) , the lieutenant could have the sergeant and his men flogged at will. This has proven to be a cruel and inefficient way of handling human relationships. This is the supposedly authentic and empathic model fivehour and the others are defending.

In pre-19th century armies (later for less enlightened societies, like russians or arabs) , the lieutenant could have the sergeant and his men flogged at wil

Yes, but he still needed them to be loyal and effective soldiers. There was even then a balance that had to be struck, and it was the accepted duty of the commander to command effectively as much as - if not moreseo - it was the duty of the soldiers to obey commands. Was it cruel? Surely that depended on the effectiveness of the commander - is it cruel to win? Was it inefficient? Consider a different world, where materials and manufactured goods are rare but illiterate, unskilled manpower is not.

But that is my point, they did not win, you don't get loyal and effective soldiers this way. You don't get a productive underclass either, the cruelty is not just gratuitous and prejudicial to them, it also harms the elite, their institutions and goals. Feudal peasants/slaves are unproductive, and feudal peasant armies are dogshit. Armies and societies which treat and treated their underclass with great brutality end up poor and lose wars.

e.g. , old monarchical armies versus more enlightened french and english, southerners versus northerners in the ACW, WWI losers (who had the harshest discipline and the highest number of soldier executions? Of course the garbage tier of WWI: Austria, Italy, Russia) , arabs in the latter half of the 20th century (earlier too, but now it's getting real embarassing).

You’d have to admit that thinking of someone as a person is much more likely f you see them and talk to them daily. If you see your personal maid sobbing because she can’t afford to take her sick child to the doctor, you cannot help but see a human there. When you have a new maid every week who’s assigned by another person, paid by that person and fired by another person, it’s a lot harder to see that person as a person and to care about that person as a person.

And most business and client interactions are set up this way. The CEO can freely cut health insurance, or lay people off, or increase workloads because he only sees the spreadsheet, not the people. The people in the business world are on the same spreadsheet as other business supplies and equipment. The baker is just another expense right next to the oven and the icing tubs.

And for consumers whether of goods or services, the workers are often hidden behind similar layers of abstraction. The American buyer of chocolate has never seen the fields where cocoa is grown. The online shoppers don’t see the piss bottles in the warehouse. So while they might read and essentially gawk at stories of exploitation in these hidden worlds, they don’t care in the same way they might if they knew someone who grew cacao or worked for an Amazon warehouse.

To be clear, your position is that living with slaves leads the master to see the downtrodden as fully realized persons, in a way the modern uber/amazon client or ceo can't fathom?

I think the usual reaction to seeing your personal maid cry would be to politely remind her that you don't feed her to cry, and she could still turn to prostitution and starvation if the performance of her duties to your house proved too much of a challenge.

  1. most people are not psychopaths

  2. historically it seems like it was generally perceived that domestic-servant slaves were much better treated than other slaves(eg fieldworkers, mineworkers), and the use of the term ‘house nigger’ today indicates that this perception was shared by the slaves themselves.

The contention that domestic servants directly attached to an aristocratic household were typically treated better than other members of their same social class seems well supported by available evidence.

The point is that all these tender moments rarely lead to a dissolution of the incredibly opressive relationship between master and slave. In a way the moral fault is even greater if the masters actually thought of their slaves as human beings. So if you say they were warm to their slaves and servants in their day-to-day life, that only displaces and exacerbates the cruelty to another part of the relationship. "Hey pal, can you put an end to the contract that says you can kill me with impunity, beat me and sell my children into slavery? Sorry dear, you know I can't do that". It's already ridiculous and slimy when your boss pretends to be your friend, I can only imagine what a slave would think of it.

It would depend how high up on the chain you were, so to speak. "Feudalism" was a series of interwoven, reciprocal, personal arrangements between lords and vassals; if you were a King or Duke your vassals would be other nobles, but if you were a minor lord or knight or clergyman or landholder the people that were bound to you (and you to them) would be peasants. You would make your oaths to each other, you would feast them at least once per year (and likely more commonly than that), you would know their personal problems as it would be you who had to intercede in quarrels and disputes, and also succor (and exploitation) if a harvest failed or there was a fire, etc.

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