Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on September 5, 2022 | 52 Comments
Time to move on in this blog cycle about my book A Small Farm Future,with a post about the last chapter in Part III – Chapter 16, ‘From religion to science (and back)’. If, however, you’re bored of reading what I have to say about a small farm future, you can listen to what I have to say about it instead. A couple of interviews have recently landed here and here, although one of them was recorded quite some time ago. A change is as good as a rest, they say.
Anyway, back to Chapter 16 for those inclined to read on. The arguments in this chapter are quite intricate and I’m not going to summarize them here. But I’ll try to provide a few pointers.
I’ll begin with an observation I often make – it’s likely the future facing most of humanity will be a small farm future, whether we like it or not. This is because it’s hard to see climate, energy, water, soil and socioeconomic drivers ultimately pointing any other way. Certainly, not everything about such a future is appealing, especially for those of us accustomed to sitting high in the distribution of global wealth and other resources. So I willingly concede there are reasons not to like the idea of a small farm future. But there are also reasons to like it, and the inability of so many people nowadays to appreciate this speaks to the very problems in contemporary culture that are driving us haplessly to that outcome. The inability relates in part to ways of thinking about science, religion, ideology and status, and these are the subjects of Chapter 16.
Here’s a typical modern story we tell ourselves about these issues:
“In the past, people were subject to traditional forms of political and religious authority. They had little knowledge of science, and therefore little instrumental control of their environment, so they suffered. They subscribed to various superstitions and religious dogmas. But the secular revolution of modern thought swept away traditional authority, replacing it with modern popular democracy that at last put ordinary people in charge of politics. It also replaced religious and superstitious thinking with a scientific understanding of the natural world that gave humanity much more instrumental control over it and hence a better standard of living. The challenge now is to further develop scientific and technical knowledge to solve the problems of the present age, and to spread greater wellbeing to all humanity and, hopefully, to other organisms too.”
In my opinion, this narrative is wrong in almost every important detail. I’ve written at some length on this blog (and more summarily in Chapter 16 and elsewhere in my book) about why that is, and I won’t repeat that here. The main point I want to make for now is that the secular revolution of modern thought did not sweep away traditional political and religious frameworks. It merely transformed them, sometimes in ways that have proved less intellectually sophisticated and more socially pathological than the originals. It brings to mind William Davies’s comment that I mentioned in my previous post: “The claim that modern societies are constantly on the threshold of some great change that will liberate them from the past turns out itself to be a historical relic, forged in a particular time and place, that continues to constrain our sense of chronology.”
One aspect of this constraint is a tendency to think that our modern world of mass consumer goods is just a natural consequence of the inherent human desire for ease and comfort. Even so uncompromising a critic of modernist culture as Paul Kingsnorth embraces this view in his fine recent essay, ‘Life versus the machine’: “humans like ease, material comfort, entertainment, and conformity, and they do not like anyone who threatens to take these things away.”
That may hold true as a general nostrum, but I think it falls short as an explanation of how humanity has got into its present predicaments. Which is just as well, because otherwise we’d be even more lost in the darkness of an irredeemable human nature than I believe is the case. An alternative line of argument I pursue in Chapter 16 is that our present world of mass commodities has less to do with ease and comfort than with a fruitless pursuit of particular kinds of social status that, if they weren’t pathological at their inception, have long since become so. I fear that we’re trapped pretty deeply in this dysfunctional status game. But the good news is that it’s a cultural affliction, and human cultures can change.
So I disagree with widely-aired views of the sort that contemporary capitalist society is about the pursuit of comfort, ease or happiness, or that people aren’t prepared to ‘sacrifice’ for the sake of future generations or a livable planet. I’m not convinced the contemporary pursuit of happiness actually makes many people happy, and there are numerous ways in which people are manifestly prepared to sacrifice a lot, including their own lives, for their cultural goals. (Maybe it’s worth mentioning in this connection that the literal meaning of sacrifice is to ‘make sacred’). The real issue is how we construct those goals and cue our responses to them.
There are many dimensions to this. One of them relates to that point about happiness: the secular revolt of the modern rejected older ideas that one’s life should be moulded around collective virtues, replacing it often enough with strongly individualist notions of liberty or happiness, which paradoxically seem to have made people less happy, and perhaps less free. Another dimension relates to abundance. While the capitalist world of goods furnishes many things to a previously unimaginable degree, it also creates scarcities in things that were once more abundant, and threatens potentially catastrophic material scarcities in the longer term.
I explore these issues in Chapter 16 via a distinction between ascetic and libidinous forms of being or status. All societies, including modern capitalist ones, invoke these two forms. When people describe the (libidinous) ease and comfort of modern society, they too easily forget not only the misery of the many people toiling away to provide it for the fortunate minority, but also the extent to which most people even in that fortunate minority themselves are entrapped in an ascetic logic of labour discipline and productivity increase.
To wrest renewable livelihoods and a livable planet from this disorder, I think it’s necessary to come up with different ways of construing status. In Chapter 16, reprising a post I wrote about this a while ago, I suggest that most premodern agrarian societies invoked a small set of distinctive social personalities, who each have a different status or exchange strategy. In most basic outline, these are religious ascetics who receive almost nothing from others and give away what they have, warriors who both give to and take from others, independent householders who neither give nor take, dependents who take but don’t give and various categories of outlaw and monster beyond everyday society.
No doubt there’s a lot more that needs saying about this to make it come alive in respect of present global issues, but I don’t think I’m going to say it here – unless it emerges in the comments and discussion. Some of the necessary context is in my book chapter. And maybe I’ll say more in a future post. I certainly think status strategies and social personae are an important key to understanding present problems. In Chapter 16, I argue that the putative independent householder of modern mass consumerism is often implicitly represented heroically as a kind of warrior who gives and receives, but in truth is more of a dependent who receives but does not give. What’s needed to create renewable livelihoods long-term is many more in the way of genuine householders, in other words relatively autonomous self-provisioning farmers, who typically neither give nor take, but engage in more balanced everyday modalities of the ascetic and the libidinous, of fasting and feasting, of work and play, than we manage in contemporary consumer society.
Another aspect of this I examine in Chapter 16 is science, which I suggest is a modern iteration of an older ascetic value – a practice of self-critical humility and status abnegation in pursuit of transcendent knowledge. Unfortunately, this day-to-day practice of science has been turned into a modern ideology of scientism, which is more or less the opposite – a hubristic metaphysics of human progress that does little except offer empty celebration of our godlike mastery, and find new ways of enriching the few at long-term ecological expense.
No doubt this perversion of science into scientism has its premodern parallels in the perversion of spiritual enquiry into the worldly status rankings sometimes associated with churches, state religious cults and the like. I doubt the contemporary state religious cult of scientism will end well. Like most state cults, I suspect it will collapse alongside the contemporary political institutions enabling it. I just hope that science will survive the collapse of scientism.
It’s tempting to call for a reformation of the worldly church of scientism, but no doubt the historical resonances are wrong. In terms of religious parallels, the Reformation of the Catholic Church did not put an end to worldly status rankings or state religious cults, and an interesting aspect of the Catholic Church is that although it was a state religious cult, it was never only that, and it has a more expansive aspect that could never be entirely captured by the state. Perhaps that’s true of most churches and religions. Of science too. The challenge is to unleash these spirits of enquiry and autonomy from the realm of blank collective control which, nowadays, is bound up in state-backed corporatism and narratives of human progress.
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Just a few notes to challenge/refine some of your categories:
1. I think it’s certainly true that Capitalism does not enslave us to mere ease and comfort, and that there is a deeper ideal of Progress (as a social status) which we are collectively enslaved to. However, there are multiple kinds of “comfort”: there is the virtuous comfort of enjoying the fruit of a hard day’s work or relaxing with one’s family, and there is the vicious comfort of wallowing in addictive pleasures (think of the drunkard, the glutton, or the social media addict). That distinction deserves further analysis to provide a moral assessment of different pleasures/comforts. The same is true of noble ascetic choices (ie not cheating on one’s spouse) and ignoble ascetic choices (toiling for money on a day when one’s community is enjoying a “Sabbth”/celebration).
2. Is the smallholder really one who neither gives nor takes? This may be somewhat true in terms of subsistence, but the medieval peasant or artisan (being laymen) would see themselves as dependent on (and so taking from) the sacramental gifts of the clergy, as well as obligated (and so giving) to the poor of their community, to whom their excess would be required, as well as paying tithes and taxes (back up the hierarchy) for the upkeep of clergy and nobility. I’m interested in how that fits into or complicates the archtypes you offer in that section of the book.
3. It is hard to find an example of a religion that did not arise in tandem with either tribal-ritual identity or state-cultic power, other than the Catholic Church (by which, to be clear, I am including early ante-nicene Christianity). Some other exceptions could possibly be found in Buddhism, Taoism, and Platonism—all of which have more academic origins in philosophers and ascetics. It’s easy to fall into the framing of “religion vs/and science,” but I think instead the relationship between the broadly “pagan” tribal-ritual/state-cultic religions, the “philosophical” academic religions, the “revelation/incarnation” Judeo-Christian religion (Islam being a offshoot of this), and the modern techno-ideological religions should be considered as the primary framing.
I also hope science survives in some form when scientism collapses, but… I think it will. I think this partly because religion does still exist despite modernity, but also because science itself is really a lot older than the Enlightenment and scientism.
I mean, we use Arabic numerals and the abacus is an absolutely ancient technology. Numeracy is not the whole of science, of course, but it sure comes in handy if you want to make any kind of quantitative evaluation of anything.
Meanwhile in terms of, say, science-informed public health in modern Western states, things frankly don’t look amazing. I think ideology, or maybe just disaster crapitalism, has already ousted science from some arenas where we very desperately need science to be taken seriously.
It’s going to be an interesting winter here in the UK.
Thanks Chris for another apt essay.
It happens that I have been recently chewing on the topic of “worldly status ranking” as you call it.
I am also interested that you mention the topic in the context of happiness and ease.
First, I’m increasingly convinced that while our species is interested in happiness and ease, the much stronger drive is toward that worldly status ranking.
The pursuit of which is an efficient recipe for the opposite of happiness.
Aren’t there many traditions which say that happiness can only be had if you are not seeking it directly?
Happiness as a by product of something else.
But the urge for status looks so primal in our species. What other possible explanation for anybody thinking it is a good idea to be a leader of a large organization or any other locus of power, not to mention a country.
In your listing of givers and takers, it occurs to me that this kind of categorization only works if we limit our view to the human world. In the larger non-human world, it’s not possible to give without taking – the energy has to come from somewhere. I guess the reverse is true too, but you could take, then give back something harmful.
So yes, “relatively autonomous self-provisioning farmers” are a good place to start, but being the social species that we are, I’d emphasize the ‘relatively’.
It seems to me that I’d rather live in a community where there was much consensual & equivalent give and take. Rather than attempting to be self sufficient. And in such a situation, if we have a little extra, it’s no problem occasionally giving someone more than they return.
Also, it sure looks to me that we have arrived at peak Scientism.
But I have been discovering that it really isn’t possible to under- or over- estimate many things, and those unsustainable trends just keep on going year after year.
Maybe it’s time for me to admit my ignorance and just mind my own business.
Just to clarify something in relation to Sean’s point 2. When I talk about the householder neither giving nor taking (and the parallel strategies of the other personae), I don’t mean to suggest that this accurately captures their actual behaviour in all or most respects. I mean that it’s a representation of one among several idealized personae in terms of exchange relationships that provide the basis for people to construct status claims.
Thanks for the comments so far – I’ll respond at greater length presently, but I just wanted to clarify my point.
Thanks for the clarification, Chris. I think that the same can be applied to the persona or role of “religious ascetic” — my understanding is that many clerics, at least, played as much an administrative role as an ascetic one. And this continues today in some fashion, with our church (and mostly our vicar, really) helping people to access other support by doing things like ordering copies of birth certificates (would you be able to put hands on yours if you were made homeless in a hurry? Me neither), sitting with people to help them fill out online forms using the parish computer, and generally aiding in the navigation of state bureaucracy.
I kinda get what you’re saying. But I’m not thoroughly convinced that this framework of “idealized personae” is culturally normative, ie, that it can be demonstrated to exist by an examination of human nature or world-history. Perhaps you could say more on this.
Maybe there are two sciences: a science of discovery and one of manipulation. The humity, etc that you describe would stem from the first. Suzanne Simard’s discovery of the “wood wide web” springs to mind. The second example of greed, hubris and other stuff would be someone like, to pick an example at random, the demons behind Neuralink whose experiments on macaques can be imagined.
Maybe the difference is like that between a conversation and an arguement.
https://www.theautomaticearth.com
Kinda says it all .
You are underplaying the accelerating drive for short term profits (used to be called greed) in creating a self centered consumer culture. Corporations know that they have to sell more and more to grow and be profitable. Advertising is meant to create dissatisfaction and desire. Moving the goal posts ensures that happiness will never be attained. However, well trained consumers will keep trying and buying. There is never Enough. Which leads directly to our current predicament.
The putative independent householder of modern mass consumerism is being played as a patsy, giving their lives over to soul killing work in exchange for needing to buy more worthless stuff to keep the economy growing.
The ’50s weren’t great but if resource consumption grew at the same rate as population since then, we would be using half as many resources today. Just think where we would be if efficiency and productivity improvements led to less consumption.
As I have said for a long time , there should be severe taxes on advertising !
There goes Monbiot ‘s goop / gruel
factories .
The BBC is reporting that the Campbell town wind turbine factory is closing down and basically the energy crisis is to blame , we ran into the energy buffers what now ?
And to add to The above
https://www.cleanenergywire.org
” Shut down of last German wind turbine rotor plant could put renewables expansion in danger”
I agree the arguments are intricate and I think you cover a lot of ground very deftly.
In contemplating a personal angle on this, I refer back to your text and see that really, you’ve already said it.
Perhaps more than status as such – though it is all interwoven in interesting ways – this chapter prompts me to hone in on how scientism/technology and its ‘goods’, which penetrate ever deeper into our lives (the Neuralink brain-machine interface being the latest example taking us even deeper into new territory) at the same time lures us away, from the natural to the virtual (plainly speaking: simply being outside and/or doing things in nature) furthering its erosive effect both on people’s relationship to nature, and on the natural world itself, being parasitic on it.
I sometimes picture scientism/tech as a Catherine wheel firework, forever approaching the point where it all comes apart. But as you say, this is just one challenging aspect among many.
I would concurr with Greg. I see the ease argument more like a reflection of the inherent drive in capitalism to produce more “stuff” and services and to enroll most of human energy in production for the system. Clearly both the masters and the slaves will have to develop a belief system that is coherent with the system wherein we live. We all seek meaning. Having said that I believe “status” or at least acknowledgement or respect is a very basic human need, which quite often trumps lower steps in the Maslow stair. I guess that like for most changes in human history the change of the “ideology” and the material foundation will/have to go hand in hand, beacuse they are part of a self-reinforcing system. This kind of acknowledgement, status or respect can taken many forms from being a brutish warrior to an skilled lace-maker or a wise sage or a caring friend.
The alternatives are – roughly: 1) we need to abolish capitalism but in order to do that we need to change peoples’ mindset or 2) capitalism will crash and therefore people will develop a new mindset or 3) we need to change peoples’ mindset but in order to do that we need to abolish capitalism or 1 and 3 together with the help of 2.
Capitalism has crashed multiple times in the past , the buy sell barter type of capitalism , even the peasantry in medieval England needed coin to pay their taxes or they paid in chickens that were sold for coin , in the Soviet union barter was rife amongst the lower class . People always went back to some form of capitalism to get the stuff they needed but could not make themselves , they always needed a excess of something they could sell it barter with, be it cabbages or axe heads .
As for scientism there has to be an excess of near everything to allow it to take hold and supply their needs , the Catholic church demanded its tithe , university have grants , today governments throw money around like drunken sailors , small farms will not have the excess to support the ” thinkers ” that it does now , I can’t see the thinkers getting away with demanding a tythe to keep them going . The Catholics did provide a kind of social security to the population little of use comes down from the likes of Monbiot they are too far away from the real world .
Not sure that you use the same definition of capitalism that I do. Capitalism is not defined merely by the existence of money or existence of markets. It is also based on wage labor, rents, private property and the accumulation of capital through appropriation of added value in production.
The news of the Queen’s passing landed here moments ago. A new woman as PM at #10… so the UK will go through some more political rearrangement in the coming days. Any sense that Charles’ ascent to the throne or the new government will impact an SFF in any significant manner?
Doubt it. He’s a king. Not known for their acts of decentralisation or egalitarianism.
Here you go Clem, here’s this morning’s heads up assessing the role of the new king in relation to the farming community (first five minutes of the programme).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001c6pf
Yes, Chas the 3rd is going to order the break-up of the great private estates of Britain (which currently hog vast amounts of the countryside – see Nick Hayes’ excellent ‘The Book of Trespass’ for details) and convert them into small organic farms.
Just kidding…. (alas).
Back to the main point – I think it would be helpful if folks could read Fred Hirsch’s book ‘The Social Limits to Growth’, which explains why and how industrial capitalism never can and never will deliver a good life for ‘humanity’. Because if there were room for everyone at the top – it wouldn’t be the top.
In my lifetime I have seen how academic standards have been lowered (many books on this now available) in order to try and overcome this fact of life. David Graeber’s ‘Bullshit Jobs’ is also a good source of information on how this plays out in the workplace.
We get the ‘human’ ‘nature’ that our human culture dictates. Religions in my experience don’t seem to make much difference. The mainstream ones all have pretty much the same ethical code about not being greedy and envious and dishonest and mean and violent, but being generous and kind, etc. instead – but the economic culture of the Market-State overrides this every time.
They made a film about it its called Idiocracy , dumbing everything down until everyone is equal .
Thanks for comments. Briefly:
The approach to status I’m taking here is influenced by the pioneering sociologist Max Weber. World-historical extrapolations would include Murray Milner’s ‘Status & Sacredness’, Georges Duby ‘The Three Orders’ & possibly David Priestland’s ‘Merchant, Soldier, Sage’.
Status is a non-expandable social resource (as Christine says, there isn’t room for everyone at the top). But, humans are complex creatures who both validate and subvert status rankings (as I argue in Ch16 of my book) and the people who aren’t at the top find ways to validate their status in contrast to those who are. Asceticism is a major resource for doing so. The renouncer scorns the trappings of worldly advancement and charts a different spiritual path to status.
Sometimes this manifests in religious schisms. Taoism, Buddhism, Protestantism… The church is seen as corrupted by its excessive trafficking with worldly political power and status, a path of renewal is sought. So yes, religious preceptors can perform various state functions – social worker, bureaucrat, police officer – or they can operate against or otherwise to the state as mystics, renouncers or political pretenders.
Sean, you know much more church history than me, but I’m interested in your view that the Catholic church didn’t arise in tandem with state-cultic power. Surely the Western Roman empire was the state complement to the Catholic church?
A whole interesting discussion between several of you about capitalism and the flow of goods. In non-modern societies the exchange of material things between people is often a fraught process, freighted with status implications. It still is even in conditions of capitalism mass consumerism, though it’s been hidden and normalized.
I don’t think I underplay the cynicism of capitalist mass consumerism, or the difficulty of overcoming it. But most of us here probably agree that it’s not sustainable long-term, so ultimately we face the options Gunnar enumerates. I also agree with Eric that it’s easy to underestimate how long a manifestly failing and unsustainable trend can persist. Rightly, there’s a clamour to change things right now in the face of urgent present crises. But ultimately there’s a need for deep cultural change that I don’t think can happen quickly. It will emerge slowly out of crisis. And there will be plenty of crises to choose from.
To Clem’s question regarding Liz Truss and ELizabeth Windsor … well, it feels a bit early to say. Boris Johnson has bequeathed Britain numerous problems, and I for one can’t see any solutions to them where the words ‘Liz Truss’ appear. Or ‘Keir Starmer’ for that matter. British politics is frozen at the moment inasmuch as everyone knows that Brexit is a gaping, self-inflicted economic wound, at least in the short-term, but nobody’s allowed to talk about it.
I don’t think Charles’s enthusiasm for organic farming or environmentalism will count for much. But maybe longer term with the link to Britain’s imperial past via the monarchy dwindling and with the mainstream political parties running out of road, there will be opportunities for a more realistic appraisal of the choices available. Although here I probably need to go back to Eric’s comment – this could take longer than you might think…
I’ll have to read more about the sociology work on status construction that you are referencing. I don’t see immediately how it aligns with the (normative) concept (more familiar to me) of “honor” in classical philosophy, so I’m in the dark there.
Regarding the Catholic Church, its hierarchical structures originate with its Bishops, the immediate successors to the Apostles, who spend a long 2.5 centuries of building alternative power structures initially under persecution by the Pharisees of Second Temple Judaism and more consistently by the Roman Empire. This makes Christianity rather unique among world religions because it began and spread neither from an elite academic school nor from tribal-ritual/state-cultic power, but amid severe persecution by both these religious forms due to its revolutionary philosophic and political claims.
The question of how and whether Christianity changed upon its legalization and elevation is complex. The “Western Empire” was collapsing not expanding, so a more accurate “state-cultic” center of Christendom would be Constantinople. But the spiritual center of Christianity still remained Rome (the West-East Schism would not occur until the 11th century) and, unlike in previous state-cultic systems, we find that emperors and kings have been stripped of their unchallengeable divine authority. (For example, after the Massacre of Thessalonica, Emperor Theodosius accepted the penance demanded of him by the Bishop Ambrose.) Regardless, Christianity as a religion has a novel relationship (in terms of world-history) to any worldly power, because it derives its creation and maintenance from the eschatological “Kingdom of God” which Jesus Christ preached, which is neither an ivory-tower gnosis nor founded by any man-made power. This is best encapsulated in the scene where the already-scourged Jesus stands before Pilate (John 18:28-38), who, being a good Roman pagan, is utterly baffled by Jesus’s claim to kingship without any military force to back it up.
To be clear, I think there is certainly a lot of cynical Christianity after the 3rd century, in which Christianity is used as a commensurable replacement for a previous pagan religion. But even among the kings of Europe there are still some startling occurrences, such as King Louis IX washing the feet of beggars every year and not only funding, but personally serving food, in the equivalent of “soup kitchens.” That does not regularly happen, to my knowledge, in the state-cults of old, precisely because the king’s divinity had to be socio-ritually reinforced. The “divine right of kings” is steadily abolished wherever Christianity spreads—because God alone is the Divine King, and all earthly powers from priests to princes to patriarchs are simply relative analogous participants—until it returns with a vengeance via Reformation theology and Proto-Westphalian Nation-Statecraft (esp. in the person of King Henry VIII).
But to return to the main point, I think the uniqueness of Christianity requires discussion for any satisfactory analysis of world religions. The modern attempts to plagiarize Christianity with a secular ideological rip-off (the Enlightenment approach), to dismiss Christianity by subordinating it to “axial age” developments (the postmodern/critical theory approach), or to relativize Christianity by equating it with other “perennial” mysticisms (the New Age approach) are all well developed arguments, and clever enough, but none stand up well in the face of the historical evidence or a critical analysis of their own biases.
Ah, whoops, replied to the wrong comment. This is a response to your reply, Chris.
Interesting comment, Sean – thanks.
Status vs honour is, I suspect, another iteration in our larger conversation about modern and premodern thought, and associated dualities – status/honour, Nietzsche/Aristotle, instrumental/normative. I’m sympathetic to a normative concept of honour. But I also think an account of how people use status instrumentally, even in relation to non-material things like sacred knowledge, is important. How to mediate or reconcile these approaches is a big question that I hope to come onto soon.
Regarding church history, I see your point, which is an interesting one. I’m not yet completely convinced of Christianity’s uniqueness in this respect. One of many things I’d like to explore further.
Your point about the Kingdom of God and its autonomy from secular notions of sovereignty is also fascinating. Of course you’re right that this gave churchmen power over secular rulers, but I’d argue it also gave secular rulers a living model of divine kingship that they could use to their advantage – and this manifested in the relative stability of medieval European kingship compared to, say, Hindu kingship, which has been quite historically consequential.
I get the feeling that we are speaking a different languages sometimes.
In the modern world status is conferred by money, conspicuous consumption, buying expensive things of little use. What you own defines you as a person.
There is a branch of this that uses possessions to overcompensate for their lack of power or control in their lives. Or maybe they are just jerks.
Religion is tricky. There are some spiritual paths that do lead to good outcomes. There are things like megachurches and evangelicals who seem to have only a nodding acquaintance with Christianity. Nonbelievers have no status, but the feeling is mutual.
How either of those translate into a SFF is unclear.
When national governments fall apart the money becomes worthless. Much wealth is currently held as some sort of paper. Many owners of paper or expensive toys will lose their status unless they have other resources or skills.
The magic went out of religion a long time ago but they are organized as some sort of community. Unless they are feeding the hungry, healing the sick, clothing the naked, and welcoming strangers, they may not be a power for good.
Will status come from the barrel of a gun or a bag of wheat in a society in collapse ?
I think status can arise from more than material accumulation. Skill(s) in sport, creative arts, and behaviors as simple as warm neighborliness come to mind. Sure – many of the most successful athletes and entertainers can monetize their skill set, but this bankrolling isn’t a requirement. Amateur success also brings some status. I’d suppose most local communities know who among them are the most neighborly, the most helpful, and value these same.
So intent, that private and mostly hidden aspect of one’s motivations, makes some difference. If my hard work developing some particular skill is driven by what I can eventually cash it in for… or if I am motivated to care for kith and kin, environment, and more – – – therein lies a difference worth pondering.
Those who have cashed their ticket and amassed more than necessary can still find solace by giving back.
Barrel of a gun, or a bag of wheat… OR perhaps loving one’s neighbor as oneself.
The Bible has quite a lot to say about ” status ” and “wealth” , from the man that filled his barns and bragged he was a rich man and died that night , to ” it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven ” .
Ego drives status look at any politician anywhere on the planet , those that vote for them or are under their tyrany feed their ego .
Science and religion both try to influence humanity , Christianity set down rules that mostly led to western civilization as we know it , atheists hate religion but live in a world based on the ten commandments .
Science is a ever changing system , we have heard regularly for a couple of years ” follow the science ” which is now being quietly debunked . There are at least two sides to any scientific subject , fixed science is regularly debunked by later revelations yet I believe that all of us agree that ” thou shall not murder ” is set in stone .
An interesting discussion… but I am wondering whether all ideas of status and honour need updating in the 21st century when every truth-bending narcissist with the means has access to socially-mediated self-representations – and some of them are successful at monetising their ‘influencer’ skills accordingly.
This being today’s reality, I am also wondering who – if anyone these days – is gaining status or honour by being an ascetic or renunciate? The last one I can recall having any international status as such was Mother Teresa, and she died in 1997. I have a friend who was a monk in NZ’s only Trappist monastery between 2003 and 2017. He left after failing to persuade his fellow monks that his lifestyle (vegetarian, growing veges, meditating twice daily as well as the round of prayers) was more appropriate for monks than the ‘standard Kiwi’ ones they were leading. Perhaps more significantly – after the failure of his attempts to convince them that it was not religiously or ethically appropriate for the monastery’s dairy farm to be supplying the global dairy company Fonterra. (This was and is the monastery’s main source of income.) My friend is now growing veges in the garden of the presbytery in the small town where he is the sole priest, where some of the long-time parishioners object to his use of Maori in the services, and he finds he often has more in common spiritually and personally with immigrants of Buddhist or Hindu persuasion – most of whom have the skills needed to keep the local dairy farms going!
So it’s complicated… and just how complicated it is was reinforced by reading in the excerpt from Douglas Rushkoff’s latest book, Survival of the Richest (at (https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff) about someone who is seeking investors in his perversion of a ‘small farm future’ model – for billionaire preppers! Apparently he hasn’t found any yet – funny that. The interview link on his website goes to the site of a conspiracy disinformationist, which seems to me to be just the ‘less respectable’ side of the sociopathic disinformation of the billionaires, who are given mainstream coverage for their ‘life on Mars’ fantasies. (Eating gloop, of course.)
But perhaps the worst perversion associated with the prepper version of a ‘small farm future’ is that it is something one BUYS because one HAS to, rather than chooses to work at because it is a lovely way of life. We are up against 50+ years of relentless propaganda for large scale monoculture industrial agriculture and associated global agricultural product supply chains and consumer outlets and against small scale, local, nutritious, earth and people friendly ways of producing and distributing food. How to redress this gross imbalance in perception and reality is perhaps the biggest challenge facing those of us thinking and doing otherwise.
After reading a little into ‘ the moral economy of the middle ages’ , a great little book recommended by Chris, I can see the need to understand status as the foundations of human organisation. The main point being that hierarchy is inevitable but not necessarily or structurally oppressive or exploitative. The values of responsibility and reciprocity underpins the moral economy creating a network of relations, each holding a place. Each then has a dignity and protection by law from the so called lowest to highest. This hierarchy as we know is both real and made up, like Clem says when it all comes down, the billionaire is nobody. This still holds true before collapse as we can draw our sense of being from outside of the purely economic. This can also be found in another great historically rigourous book, the commoners, by JM Neeson, where she traces the devastating effects of the parliamentary enclosures. A contemporary of the times describes the commoners as little lords of their own manor, who had no inclination to wage labour (one of the problems as the parliamentarians saw it), but would help the lord get his harvest in at a fair price.
I can envisage a connection with some of these themes with a SFF and ruralisation at the local level. In such a societal future I foresee face-to-face social networks becoming denser and a need for social interactions to become more co-operative and facilitative and, dare I say, caring. New Testament Christian values (I am not saying exclusively) provide a strong impetus for such an approach. Gradations of status will inevitably be still apparent but perhaps revolving less around ostentatious materialism but more around the articulate or, alas, the noisy. Well thought out participatory practices at a community level and skills in non-violent communication at an individual level might help to ameliorate the negative aspects that can arise from the micro-politics of social interactions. This will be especially important during a protracted transition to a SFF.
(Since the Catholic Church has arisen in the comments, its perhaps worth noting the Synodal Process initiated by Pope Francis, who has taken a critical stance towards Church hierarchies, which has been underway to capture lay perspectives down to parish level, world-wide).
I’m coming late to this discussion and it’s difficult to know where to start – in this case not helped by the fact that I remember taking part in the discussion under the earlier post about the Varna categories as well!
I agree with Sean where he states that he is not ‘convinced that this framework of “idealized personae” is culturally normative, ie, that it can be demonstrated to exist by an examination of human nature or world-history’. My earlier objections focused on the extent to which it naturalised elements of a society that it purported to explain – that is, that using the framework of personae was part of active attempts to make society conform to it, rather than trying to describe it. The medieval ‘three orders’ scheme certainly needs to be seen in this light – primarily as an attempt to control the behaviour of violent laymen and channel it in directions conducive to achieving religiously defined ends.
An important issue here is how we use the idea of ‘status’. By itself it can mean many things depending on how it is measured, but Chris is, I think, more concerned with status strategies or status competition – so the important bit is not the end state (the desired persona or whatever) but the act of trying to get there. Status-seeking is the issue here, and to me that basically means power. A libidinous relation to status-seeking is one that embraces the exultation of wielding power of some kind, while an ascetic one rejects it. I’m not sure this quite maps onto Chris’s usage here though.
Regarding religions, I’m not really comfortable (or knowledgeable enough!) mapping them onto anthropological categorisations of the different societies in which they emerged – I’m not clear on what that kind of analysis would demonstrate or prove. From an historical point of view, the problem with developing a clear view of early Christianity is the lack of comprehensive source material – people trying to keep out of the way of persecuting authorities don’t tend to leave a great deal behind, but I take Sean’s point that persecution itself was an important formative context.
I would see the Roman Empire as foundational to the development of the structures of the Christian church – what it became after the fourth century was very different to what it had been beforehand precisely because it became thoroughly entangled with the structures of Roman societies as these developed at both eastern and western ends of the empire.
There is a paradox, of course, in the notion that Christian asceticism represented a rejection of status-seeking, because it was often understood to confer a spiritual potency that was itself a power often wielded. The most ‘successful’ ascetics would never have advertised the fact, while those that wrote their hagiographies were perhaps more concerned with status-seeking, perhaps with an eye to the success of a nascent relic cult. Meanwhile, in the cities of the old empire, bishops were often drawn from the local elite families, who tended to monopolise the seeking of this most honoured status. This is not to decry their spiritual motivations, about which we might often give them the benefit of the doubt, but to emphasise that spiritual potency could itself provide an arena for status-seeking (indeed it had to, if religious authority or leadership was to be asserted in some way) and therefore always possessed an uncomfortable relationship with ‘true’ asceticism.
It would be ideal if status was accrued according to value to the community. It does not appear to work that way.
The Cambridge dictionary defines status as “the amount of respect, admiration, or importance given to a person, organization, or object,” and I think the key concept here is that status is *given* (by people, communities, society).
Max Weber bases social status on property (or wealth), prestige, and power; all of which arguably result from people collectively allowing (or giving their consent to) such differences.
In the events leading to a small farm future, it seem obvious that there would be a shake-up in how status is conferred upon individuals. Status symbols will undoubtedly change, too. In a society that’s largely composed of lean and tanned farmers, would the status symbols include being overweight and pale?
The dictionary definition makes clear that status is about ‘amounts’, so quantifying people on scales of different kinds of value, creating hierarchies. I agree the idea that a certain status is ‘given’ by others is important – status manifests when we agree that certain people are better or worse in some way.
But that also means that status is about ‘freezing’ people – making a judgement about how people are arranged with respect to each other and validating it, making it count, turning some kind of superiority or inferiority into a quality. Status-seeking is as much about reproducing the grounds on which those judgements are made, maintaining certain scales of value as primary, as it is about trying to achieve particular levels on the scale.
We see this in the way that media discourse reproduces certain ideas about what makes a good politician, and how discombobulating it is for those in the media when some politicians make clear that politics is better understood or valued differently. Maintaining certain kinds of status involves maintaining the webs of values that define them – witness the effort currently being made but the UK media establishment to frame QE2 as a successful monarch, rather than, for example, the regressive face of a persisting colonial attitude to the world, white supremacy, etc.
The ascetic move would then be as much about rejecting the grounds of dominant status valuations as it is about rejecting status or power per se. In terms of Chris’s cyclical status games, feasting and fasting, I suppose he’s implying an attitude to the world that insists on the value of valuing particular qualities in people and allowing them to act as desirable targets for status-seeking, but also regularly subverts them and reminds people not to take them too seriously, to question them instead. In an ideal SFF status-seeking and ascetic withdrawal would constitute more playful aspects of life, not the driving forces behind it.
Yes agreed, nice points. Sorry I didn’t see this comment before posting below.
Maybe worth just adding that the word ‘hierarchy’ is often used rather misleadingly to mean rank order, like a football league table, rather than to mean a structure of organisation with different levels, of parts and wholes, and reversals at different levels.
I’ll come onto this in another post shortly. It has some relevance to Sean’s point about King Louis’s activities. The king who is lowlier than a beggar. Again, there can be an element of cynicism about this in buttressing power, although it can backfire. But I think it’s also saying something deeper about status and power – which is also relevant to the subversion of status strategies by the agrarian householder you mention.
I will add my thoughts that in a society which is a diverse conglomeration (instead of fairly uniform in its values), the differing ‘webs of values’ can result in subgroups or factions (having their own gradations of status within) which may jostle and compete for primacy (a form of status-seeking), while members of the subgroups which are not in power might be considered ‘ascetic’ by remaining true to their non-dominant values and ways.
I’m guessing that a resource-constrained SFF will not be able to locally support such a diverse conglomeration of competing subgroups, largely due to efficiency considerations (among others).
To answer Steve on the skin colour and size question – just peruse an illustrated history of twentieth century fashions and see the favoured body look among the upper classes and their middle class copyists go from plump and pale to lean and tanned. So when and if the white-skinned lower classes (currently plump and pale) revert to being lean and tanned, you can expect to see this reverse. But wouldn’t be great if classes were abolished first?! And everyone could be a healthy weight and whatever colour they preferred, and bodies would not be used to signal status in unhealthy ways. Dream on…
In terms of where a discussion of status gets us when considering the likely uptake of small farm futures, I wonder if it is even an issue when every week I read of people currently excluded from farming who are eager to get into it (e.g. the Land In Our Names collective of black would-be farmers in the UK, and similar organisations in the US). What is stopping them? Affordable access to land, of course. This is due to the land grabs of the past (50% of Britain is owned by 1% of the population, and a lot of them came by their land via the profits from slave labour in the colonies). Also the land-grabbing of the present. In which category one can now count the re-wilding business – and it is indeed a lucrative business which billionaires are investing in, as one can read in the article ‘Renewing the Land Question: Against Greengrabbing and Green Colonialism’ by Kai Heron and Alex Heffron at
https://newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/renewing-land-question-against-greengrabbing-and-green-colonialism/
The leading re-wilders in the UK are persons of pre-existing status and wealth, and what they are allegedly doing ‘for nature’ is as much ‘for money and status’ and ‘against people and nature’ as the enclosures ever were.
Thanks for a lot interesting comments! I’d like to respond in a greater level of detail that their thoughtfulness deserves, but alas I think I will have to confine myself to a few bald statements and questions as follows:
– I’d argue that *power*, not status, emerges from the barrel of a gun
– money can confer status, but (per Clem) it’s more complicated than that, and other things confer status too. As per my arguments in Ch.16, imagine a man (it could be a woman, but it’s more likely a man) who goes into a bar, buys everyone a drink, tells big stories about himself, subtly or not so subtly puts other people down and tries to win everyone’s admiration. Does he accrue high status? Maybe. Or maybe, as per Greg’s comment, people just think he’s a jerk.
– maybe it’s useful to frame this in terms of self-respect rather than status. What gives you self-respect? Would you have more self-respect if you had a lot more money than you do? Some people certainly do equate more money with greater status or respectability. What do you think of such people?
– I agree with Christine that small-scale farming can be a lovely way of life, but not if you want to be rich or famous. I also agree that it’s been relentlessly propagandized against in modern life, and that ascetic/renouncer strategies are not abundant nowadays. Various sporting or adventurous activities are the main exception – I discuss why this works as an exception in Ch.1 of my book. But there is an element of asceticism, of making do and mending, about the life of the small -scale farmer.
– Historically, some people thought it was a lovely way of life (or at least a preferable one) to raid small-scale farmers, steal their chattels and enslave them or otherwise turn them into dependents. Sometimes the farmers fought back, and won. But they suffered some disadvantages in the fight. It’s interesting to ponder the status and/or the self-respect that these protagonists might have accorded themselves and others.
– I agree with Andrew that stylized descriptions of status strategies can be used to naturalize aspects of societies, for example relative inequalities. Nevertheless, I think it’s useful to see how status personae unleash real social forces. The propagandizing that Christine mentions, the ‘no one wants to farm any more’ rhetoric, involves a status-based negation of household autonomy in favour of something more akin to a royal/warrior model of the modern consumer as a beneficient taker of tribute. But for numerous reasons it’s a dead end. That’s why I think it’s important to articulate other kinds of status/exchange strategies.
– I guess my arguments in respect of most of this are kind of about long-term cultures of agrarian localism, and not so much the pressing issues facing people right now, especially people who want to farm but have little access to land or money. I agree with Christine about the short-term need for land reform in this respect. But maybe that in turn can be expressed via the status/exchange strategies I discuss here.
– contra Andrew, I’d argue that these status personae I’ve sketched indeed are culturally normative and work across many societies, as a good deal of sociology & anthropology attests. For me, a lot of things click into place with this framework. But if it doesn’t resonate with you, fine. I’m probably not going to bang out about it much more in my future writing, unless some new aspect of it excites my interest.
– Re the discussion about the early church, Sean I’m open to your analysis about this and would be interested to hear more of your thoughts about it at some point. But before that I need to broach another debate between you and me, which is coming up in the next couple of blog posts.
Thanks to everyone who’s commented, and sorry for not engaging more fully with everyone’s thoughts – all of which I found informative.
And thanks for the references, Christine. Kai Heron and Alex Heffron, huh? Those names sound curiously familiar… 🙂 More on that soon too!
Thanks for your replies Chris, certainly more than bald statements! Although I’d take issue with the shortest…
I don’t think power and status can be sufficiently separated to allow that one can be found in the barrel of a gun but not the other. Status-seeking is all about trying to occupy particular statuses because they are valued, for whatever reason, and therefore occupying them cannot but involve wielding power in some way.
I suppose we could quibble about what power means, but essentially status gives one the ability to do things they might not otherwise be able to, and likewise power is the ability to do things. Are you perhaps trying to raise a conceptual barrier between ‘soft’ power (status) and ‘hard’ power (force)?
Perhaps I just see power everywhere! But I do see status-seeking as essentially power-play, in which status personae like those you describe fill the role of sets of values with which the seeker wants to be associated in the eyes of others, so that they are better able to affect their society in some way. Whether these effects are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ depends on context.
Your pub example got me thinking. What you describe there is a context in which different webs of value are manifested and intersect. The loud guy basically proclaims that earning big money confers high status on himself, and he wields that power by spending it without apparently batting an eyelid. Some of those in the bar who accept a free drink might agree between themselves that the guy’s a self-obsessed jerk, and on talking about it would establish other webs of value that they considered more important. But still, none of them could deny that they all got an extra drink because the man was ‘powerful’ enough to get one for each of them, and that by accepting it they each validated his power, his status, in that moment. The guy didn’t threaten them at gun point to have a drink, but the nature of the power he wielded meant that he didn’t have to but still got the same result.
Thanks Andrew. Agree that power is everywhere, and status involves power plays – but what’s most interesting me here is the material that’s being used to make the power plays. In relation to guns, power and status, maybe I could frame it by asking what’s the difference between a king and a bandit, or a crime boss running a protection racket (articulations of Indic kingship made a point of this, or maybe we could think in terms of popular representations of King Richard vs King John)?
In the pub example, suppose everyone else could have afforded to buy a big round but they didn’t bother because … why would they? They’re happy to get a free drink and allow the guy to think he’s impressing them. But they still think he’s a jerk. Nothing really gained by the drinks buyer – though I’d concede that a gift almost always imposes a sense of future obligation of some kind. But somebody else might buy them a round, act generously and genuinely gain more standing. What’s the difference? What’s the stuff on which the status is built?
“But somebody else might buy them a round, act generously and genuinely gain more standing. What’s the difference?”
The difference could be the recognition of sincere generosity. A bribe, for example, isn’t considered generous. And the cost of a round is a pittance to a rich man.
A gift would seem more meaningful (and generous) when the cost involves hours of one’s labour (or perhaps a month’s wages comprising all the money that the giver possesses). As Cyrano said, “quelle geste.”
What’s the stuff on which status is built?
My grasp of this would lie in words like intention, integrity, manifest goodness (bear in mind I live in a small community where – horror of horrors! – everyone is well-known to everyone else, and so ‘the really good people’ who have steadily earned status in others’ eyes are generally widely agreed upon… I mean, there’s just nowhere to hide:)
There’s a certain probably unavoidable largesse in the example given – buying everyone in a bar a drink. How to do it well? Well, a friend of mine once visited me over here, spent an afternoon in the village bar, couldn’t speak a word of the language, and after a few drinks bought everyone in the place a drink before bidding his non-verbal farewell. He told me later that it would probably be the only time in his life he’d be able to do that – beer is sometimes cheaper than bottled water over here, while UK pubs are not cheap places to drink – and his afternoon interlude had moved him enough to want to do it as nothing more than a nice gesture to other drinkers he’d passed a few hours with. I don’t think we ever went back to that bar, which is probably just as well.
I think status that can be ‘looked up to’, if you like, comes from an accretion of good thoughts and deeds throughout one’s life, and comes from a genuine place, frequently visited, that’s not self-seeking, or at least puts ‘the self’ to one side for a moment. Its well-spring might be contemplation, a familiarity with pondering in the heart. Genetics too could play a part (good parenting?). My friend works in mental health, “with what used to be called ‘the criminally insane'”, he tells me. In my eyes he’s a good man of fine standing. I admire the way he lives and handles life, from the seismic body blows to the subtlest of gestures. I believe this is the kind of status it’s good to fecundate the world with.
Much of what we put out into the world around us is non-verbal – 70 to 93 per cent according to experts (via Google) – which leads me to conclude that, whether someone is being a genuine jerk or simply genuine (I assume the latter would be awarded more status in their community in the long run), the clue must lie largely in body language, expression, and other signifiers, and others pick up on it accordingly. Another kind of status might turn up in a Ferrari. I guess I’m thinking of the kind of status that is ensouled by the jerk at that bar, or that other nice fellow that’s just bought us all a drink. Cheers!
I also wonder how moves like this will affect other companies’ status in consumers’ eyes:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/14/patagonias-billionaire-owner-gives-away-company-to-fight-climate-crisis-yvon-chouinard
Thanks Chris. In one (dense!) sentence, I’d argue that status is built on the collective creation and maintenance of normative webs of values that are intended to confer particular qualities on people through which they are compared qualitatively with others. Drilling down to the details requires an appreciation of context and the ways in which different attitudes to value intersect.
I take your point that the movement of things between people is often an important part of status-seeking – often crucial to the ways in which certain values become normative and are thereafter maintained. David Graeberargued that tributary ‘gifts’ were crucial to the creation and maintenance of hierarchies because they created a sense that one kind of person owed something to another kind of person simply by virtue of what kinds of people they were, rather than through any sense of equal exchange.
I take it that you’re referring to the issue of context when thinking about kings, bandits, gangsters and the like. There is a commonality at a very general level – they are all taking/receving things from other people because of the ‘kinds’ of people they are – importantly, it’s not just that they claim to be these things, but that they have successfully established themselves within specific collectivities as the particular people who are owed tax/tribute/protection money. But the details are important – kings establish themselves within a ‘national’ community, gangsters within certain classes within a city or neighbourhood. And their own statuses intersect with others in different ways – the forces of law and order are likley to act generally in support of a monarch, whereas their relationship to a gangster is more ambivalent (hostile, unless paid off!).
To return to the pub examples, you say the other patrons are ‘happy to get a free drink and allow the guy to think he’s impressing them’ – but what the guy thinks is informed by what is happening there. He is offering to splash his cash, and people are taking him up on it – they are playing his game at his instigation, reaffirming the status that he’s seeking, and what they think about all that in their own minds is beside the point really. So the drinks buyer gains validation in that moment, even if he hasn’t made any life-long friends – that was probably not his intention anyway! And he doesn’t really need the other drinkers to maintain his status long-term – the next day he’ll go into work, lord it over his functionaries, make sure any mistakes are blamed on someone more junior than himself event though the buck apparently stops with him, and take home the salary awarded him for shouldering such profound ‘responsibility’ – because he’s played that particular status game and come out on top.
What would it mean to have more ‘genuine’ standing in the pub? It would probably mean more than one visit for a start. It would mean being known in the community, and having sought various different kinds of status in ways attuned to the various value-systems at play there, so that buying everyone a drink in the pub is an affirmation of qualities already commonly understood to inhere in this person. I’m not sure anyone would ever acquire any kind of more long-lasting status after only one round of drinks, as with Simon H’s tale.
I agree with you there, Andrew – after buying one round of drinks for a roomful of strangers any ‘status’ would of course be transitory and shallow at best. I like your dense sentence!
Thanks for the responses here.
Andrew, I agree with your point about “creation and maintenance of normative webs of values that are intended to confer particular qualities on people through which they are compared qualitatively with others”. The point of the different status personae I discussed is to home in a bit more on what some of those webs of values are. A major one in contemporary capitalist society is to get a well paid job and a high-ranking position and to thereby amplify one’s circuits of capital and social networks. When I quit my trajectory towards a more senior and better paid academic position and switched to being a market gardener, many of my friends and relatives were bemused. I’m arguing that we need to create a status order where they wouldn’t be bemused – so that being a low input, self-reliant farmer (neither giving nor taking) is regarded as a respectable and self-respecting option. The Earth can’t provide enough resources for everyone to play the other game.
Regarding kings v bandits, I don’t think it’s about geographic reach or the scale of operation. Indic kingship is relevant because India was full of ‘little kings’ in a way that hasn’t really been the case in Europe – European kings had to operate on a large scale, because the nation was the proper symbolic object of royal legitimacy. A king without a country isn’t a king. In India historically the king/bandit couplet was more apparent to people, because kings have a harder job securing legitimacy. Ultimately kings are basically running a protection racket – taking tribute from people in return for offering military protection from other bandits or would be kings. But if they can cloak this in some kind of spiritual legitimacy – defender of the nation, defender of the faith, embodiment of the godhead or something, it makes the job easier. That’s why I raised the myths of Good King Richard and Bad King John. Crusader and bandit.
So these spiritual claims invoke the normative webs of values you mention. My take above is quite cynical – a king is just a bandit in spiritual garb – but I’m not *completely* cynical about these spiritual claims, and this is a point I’ll address in relation to Sean’s post. However, I still want to de-emphasize these royal forms of status in favour of the more humdrum one of the agrarian householder.
That brings us to Simon’s comments and also Andrew’s and Steve’s about the guy in the bar. Status and respect are earned within a close agrarian community of people of like economic standing, on the basis of generosity, authenticity etc. – I agree with that.
But there’s also the more ineffable factor of charisma that Weber discussed. Some people are better are drawing others to them. They build retainers, dependents, disciples or admirers and can use this to various ends. The jerk in the bar is a would be king who failed. But somebody else might play a similar game and succeed. One part of human nature is to attach ourselves as sidekicks to people of perceived higher charisma. Another part is to reject that and emphasize our relative autonomy. I’m arguing to amplify a status order that emphasizes the latter.
It’s been interesting watching Britain’s new king fluff his lines in recent days by getting angry about a malfunctioning pen and gesturing impatiently at his staff. A convincing king projects an air of regal calm. Otherwise he looks too much like…a jerk in a bar.
I’m interested in what the equivalent challenge is for a small-scale farmer.
Interesting indeed. Both you and Andrew probably allude to it, but some elements of Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis might be usefully revealing here.
Thanks Chris, that’s interesting and clarifying. I’m not really convinced by the notion of the bandit in spiritual garb – you note that it’s a cynical interpretation, fair enough, but it’s too reductive for me. It seems to assume that the primary motivation is material acquisition and everything else is secondary.
If the Indic kings were smaller in scale than European kings, then perhaps a better comparison would be with the counts and castellans of medieval France. Certainly they were seen as rapacious, but even then the complaint was often that they were taking more than they were entitled to, and that often violently – the notion that they were entitled to take something – customary ‘gifts’ – was not really challenged. Bandits, on the other hand, were fundamenally oustide the normative (aristocratic) sense of right.
Many such lords went on crusade, but this wasn’t a cycnical garb to butress their status. Many expected to benefit materially, but it was a huge risk with no guarantees, and only spiritual motivation can explain the massive enthusiasm of the first crusade. Spiritual status-seeking needs to be seen as an important field of action in its own right, not simply appurtenant to more secular ideas about lordly status. Indeed, I’d argue that kingship itself was a kind of spiritual status in important respects in medieval western Europe, certainly from our earliest evidence for consecration in the eighth century.
But perhaps this will come out in your response to Sean, and as you say above, we should probably stop going on about kings and focus on the more interesting people instead! You characterise the ‘low input, self-reliant farmer’ as one who neither takes not gives. I realise this plays into the emphasis you place on material transactions to ground the status categories you discuss. However, in light of this conversation, I wonder whether a useful alternative to this might be to characterise such people as neither exalting nor dimishing themselves
The point here is that, rather than seeking to acquire some particular kind of status, they do not really want to become that invested in status games at all. By highlighting this aspect, we move the focus away from notions of taking and giving. To my mind, material transactions can mediate all sorts of relationships that might be cultuvated by farmers who were nevertheless materially self-reliant to a large extent – not least buying a round in the pub among friends now and then – and the language of avoiding taking and giving grates against that to some degree.
Finally, your points on charisma and the ineffable are interesting. It’s always frustrating to have to admit, as a historian or any kind of social analyst really, when your models and theories run out of explanatory power and you have to accept personal ability as a key element! I suppose the job of those neither exalting nor diminishing themselves will be to pop the bubbles around as many charismatic status-builders as possible!
When I read the Heron and Heffron article, Chris (it was in Uneven Earth’s August compendium of readings, in the Food Politics section – which included your blog post on rescue ecomodernism) I thought it rang an uneasy bell. Kai Heron is a memorable name – perhaps especially to a Kiwi interested in food and farming issues – ‘kai’ means ‘food’ in Maori. So I just looked up what was niggling at me, and found your response to their review of your book. It was nearly two years ago now, so the details had gone from my memory.
The article I provided the link to is largely descriptive. I don’t think they distorted anyone’s point-of-view, but you will be a better judge of that than me.
I found out the hard way 40+ years ago, when writing for a feminist magazine, that some people don’t read what you say – they read what they want to think you said – and then they come and hassle you by taking exception to what they thought it was. (Or embarrass you by misrepresenting it – but in a positive way.) Also, when I wrote what I thought were a-political gardening and cook books (‘Cottage Gardening in NZ’ and ‘A Cottage Garden Cookbook’) they turned out to be not what some reviewers thought I should have written. Especially if they were male professional gardeners or cooks and/or writers on these topics, although ‘woke’ feminists and posh suburban lady gardeners were also disapproving. The majority of ordinary readers, however, who just wanted useful gardening information and some good, easy recipes, were well-pleased. As I was writing for them in the first place, I had to be happy with that and try not to let the critics get under my skin.
Methinks that H&H – and Monbiot – do protest too much…
Yes, it’s very easy to write reviews of the ‘what I’d have written if it were me’, or ‘this is what I want to think they said’ or ‘this is what they didn’t say but should have’ variety. I dare say I’ve erred along some of those lines in reviews I’ve written. Adopting as constructive a tone as possible helps – or not reviewing at all. Hard lessons.