IPFS News Link • American History
'Production Versus Plunder' Part 19: Life in the New Empire by Paul Rosenberg
• Daily Bell - Paul RosenbergLIFE IN THE NEW EMPIRE
Daily life during the reign of the Church in Europe was stable. Life was not especially good – there were, for example, frequent famines and ever-changing political alliances – but the Church was clearly regarded as the moral center of the universe, and they were generally able to move the various secular rulers into paths that the Church chose, or at least into paths they could use with a back-up plan.
The Pope reigned as a king of kings, by maintaining a monopoly on legitimacy.
The Europeans of the Middle Ages were convinced that the order of their lives had been established by God and that to challenge that divine order would be a horrible offense. They saw a world made up of three types of people:
1. Latores - The kings and lesser nobles, who protected everyone else.
2. Oratores - The clergy, who interceded with God for everyone else.
3. Laboratores - The peasants, who fed everyone else.
There were always a few specialists on the fringes, such as itinerant traders and Jews, but they were not terribly many and always subject to violence if they attracted too much attention. So, they seldom made much trouble.
Obviously, this was a horrible structure for production. Humans, after all, vary greatly in their talents, and any system that makes good use of human ability must allow people to operate where their personal talents are most effective. But, if breaking out of your hereditary 'place' is a sin, your talents are a non-issue. It was God's will that you were born into a certain class, so that is where you had to stay. And, once again, this rigid structure was first prescribed by Plato. He writes:
You are brothers, yet God has framed you differently. Some of you he has made like gold, who have the power of command, and also they have the greatest honour; others he has made of silver, to be auxillaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has composed of brass and iron; and the species will generally be preserved in the children. ... God proclaims as a first principle to the rulers, and above all else, that there is nothing which should so anxiously guard, or of which they are to be such good guardians, as of the purity of the race. ... If the son of a golden or silver parent has an admixture of brass and iron, then nature orders a transposition of ranks, and the eye of the ruler must not be pitiful towards the child because he has to descend in the scale and become a husbandman or artisan ... When a man of brass or iron guards the State, it will be destroyed.