Medieval 1 Percent

The king, his courtiers, and entourage ride on powerful horses through a village of serfs. The serfs assemble, can’t help themselves—such events are very rare. Barefoot and dressed in much mended dark clothing, they look up with uncombed heads at the passing splendor: the mounts are magnificent, the armor silver, the gowns purple and silk, the feathers tall, the shields like magic paintings. Above all, these people are so high, they look so well fed, the merest dagger carelessly doing its front-to-back-and-front-again movements on  the king’s hip would buy enough land for a serf-family to feed itself. The king, now and again, acknowledges the rude hurrah’s of the awed crowd with a mild wave of the hand.

Here we have the medieval 1 percent passing through a tiny sample of the 99 percent. But we see some striking differences. The armor might protect the lords from angrily thrown stones, but king, dukes, and lesser retainers can actually hear the voices, can see the misery in which the population lives. Furthermore the inequality between the two is acknowledged and unquestioned on both sides.

Oil-based technology, modern communications, and insanely huge accumulations of wealth, by contrast, erect quite inhuman barriers between serfs and lords in our day. Our institutions are walled off. Impenetrable barriers of cybernetics protect the high from any voices that are raised. Our tools enable the formation of vast institutions stretching over enormous distances well beyond human scale. The numbers are too big to permit a genuine democracy so that our own conceptualization, based on equality, is altogether hollow.

It was bad enough in medieval times. Since then we have achieved universal education (never mind its quality—it’s great compared to that of serfs). The quality of our lives has greatly improved; the TV set, the car (however scratched and bumped and ill-maintained) is present at the lowest levels. But the inequality we see a thousand years ago is actually vastly greater now than it was then. If we don’t actually feel it, that too has its explanation. The oil-wealth has lifted all. But oil is running out. Human labor will once more matter in the approaching times. The need for serfs will rise. The consolation is that in future, when kings and dukes will once more ride on horses, inequality will actually be less again. As for who is really in the saddle, for that we have a poet’s formulation: Horse, neat, purse, meat, chattel. Web to weave, and corn to grind, things are in the saddle, and ride mankind. (With apologies to Emerson.)

Approaching Limits

The philosopher Mortimer Adler, always desirous of showing that humanity is different in kind from other living creatures, not just in degree, argued that humanity is distinguished by having an almost unlimited potential which its members may or may not actually develop. We won’t find the same uniformity of behavior in people, Adler argued, that we find in other species.

By contrast the behaviorist, B.F. Skinner, argued quite the contrary. Skinner invented the Skinner box to demonstrated operant conditioning. It had an electrified floor (it could shock the test subject), a lever to cause food to be dispensed, and a communication port to signal when it was “all right” to press the lever—and when it was dangerous. Suppose now that some aliens make a Skinner box large enough to hold a person. They provide it with the same apparatus, but now it’s only the little bed, inside the box, that carries electric current. The subject can lie down on the bed only when the light is green—otherwise the bed will deliver a high-voltage jolt. The food-lever will produce a fast-food meal, but only when the light is yellow. They put a traditionalist into the box who will be damned if he’ll conform. He’ll show those aliens that he is human. The light is red but he lies down, writhing in agonies just to show them—but eventually the pain forces him off. He ignores the food lever when the light is yellow—but in a day or two he cannot help himself; he succumbs and wolfs down the fast food meal. Skinner’s great idea (discussed in his Walden Two) was to bring about millennium by engineering the environment so that it would produce the optimal behavior. Chicken and egg. How do you condition those who will engineer the optimal environment? Both Plato and Skinner needed an elite exempted from the drag of original sin.

FDR used to get speeches written by two speech writers, one on this, one on that side of an issue—and then hand these to a third to kind of, you know, blend the two. Thus must we do here. Humanity is a fusion of the all-too-easily conditioned and of the transcending. Human potentials are limited by nature—and nature is transformed, but only to a limit—by humanity.

These thoughts arose in wake of my post yesterday on changes in employment—services taking up the slack produced by enormously increased gains in agricultural productivity. That transformation points at a certain limit, it seems to me. The age-honored mode we follow is that a living, an income, must be earned by work. The work produces what people need to have—goods and services. But what if that which people need requires only a small portion of the labor available? Why in that case we must artificially augment those needs by creating human wants: and consumerism is born. Born—and then absolutely driven to grow, because people need to work to live. And so the products and services multiply. Suddenly Toys R Us—whereas, in my own growing up, a stick, a string, a ball wadded from old bits of cloth (it was World War II then) sufficed us for amusement. And we amused ourselves without uniforms or hordes of adult hoverers, played soccer in a corner of the church yard, and we weren’t members of a league, Little or Big.

Incredible Diversity

This happens roughly every other year—whenever I have an unusually long wait at an airport and, as a consequence, see unusually large numbers of people. I suppose you have to be at a major city’s airport. Detroit certainly works, and I’ve seen the same both east and west and in Chicago too. One sees every race, age, and every conceivable body type, male and female—and for each of those categories, in addition, I also see them in quite ordinary American dress and in traditional garb from all over the world. It’s amazing. I first had this feeling—namely that humanity is extraordinarily—and physically—diverse when perusing one of Jared Diamond’s books (I think it was Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed); there I saw photographs of all kind of people from around the globe thickly clustered, and the impression was striking. Now airports are enough to bring the feeling back. Hasn’t always been so. In the heydays of my travelling (1970-80), the fabulous diversity was beginning to appear. Now in a community like Detroit it is the norm, especially in summertime, when families visit from all corners of the world. Reminds me of a fascinating discussion of human nature Mortimer Adler presents in Ten Philosophical Mistakes. He invites us to consider animal species. Looking at each, he says, you would note differences. But…

The dominant likeness of all members of the species would lead you to dismiss as relatively insignificant the differences you found, most of which can be explained as the result of slightly different environmental conditions.

He then invites us to make random drop-in visits to look at human societies.

You would come away [from such a venture] with the very opposite impression from the one you took away from your investigation of the populations that belonged to one or another animal species. You were there impressed by the overwhelming similitude that reigned among its members. Here, however, you would find that the differences were dominant rather than the similarities.

Adler was, of course, not talking about physical differences—but they’re also present. As above, so below.