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It was a long time ago, but I recall them using the word "state" in the same context we currently use it, which is typically a layer of government above the low

It was a long time ago, but I recall them using the word "state" in the same context we currently use it, which is typically a layer of government above the lowest level of organization. Being sans-state is not the same thing as anarchy. Of course there was violence, but since this was not a time known for having the best records, it is anyone's guess as to whether there was more or less of it. In the last 20 years, our imperium has destroyed several sovereign states and killed hundreds of thousands or millions (depending on who you ask) for absolutely no damn reason. Centralization is typically better at directed goals (such as violence) than decentralization, so your assertion that "the economy was way more directly violence-based" is on shaky ground. Our economy is very violence based, it's just that most of it has been abstracted away from direct contact (see Smedley Butler). Just shrink the concept down to personal computers. Did you prefer the wild-west of the 70s/80s that gave us Apple IIs, Amigas, Commodores, Ataris, PC-88s, and numerous others, or did you prefer the late 90s when Microsoft seemed to have the whole thing on lock-down?

lsc 9y ago
You are missing what i mean by being a violence based economy. Of course, you can't have property without violence. I'm not even saying that the dark ages were more violent than other ages. (I think they might have been, but it's largely irrelevant to the point I'm making about a 'violence based economy') My point is just that in the dark ages, you accumulated wealth through you yourself or through people who directly worked for you committing acts of violence. Not by simply operating within the rules of society (which are, of course, enforced with violence) as you would do today. Today? Directly being a, uh, violence technician as it were, or even being higher up in the chain of command in the organizations that handle violence in our society just isn't that remunerative. You've gotta be way up the officer ladder before you make as much money as I did out of high school as a UNIX technician. I mean, I know I messed up some connotations there; I certainly have nothing against the 'violence technicians' as I put it; I recognize that they are important. I just prefer to live in a world where Truman fires MacArther and not the other way around, if you know what I mean.
- jstewartmobile 9y ago
  I think your take on the early middle ages has been abstracted through the lenses of modernity, drama, and materialism. There were so many different arrangements, cultures, and value systems in play at that time, and obviously some of those elements came into conflict with each other, but to extrapolate that into a summary of the entire age is a mistake.
  - lsc 9y ago
    I suppose it would be... difficult for me to see anything except through the lens of materialism. But I think that's true of most people; the number of people who don't see the world in a fundamentally physicalist way is... shrinking. (This is controversial; the religious in my country have been flexing their muscles, and there is open debate as to if this indicates a resurgence of belief, or just the religious seeing the majority slip from their hands thrashing to turn back the clock while they still have the strength. I personally believe the latter, but I don't have evidence that is any more solid than anyone else.) I do think I would be a better person if I was better able to understand how the religious people saw the world... but it's just not something I've been able to do. It's very difficult, really, for someone who doesn't believe faith is good in and of itself to understand people who do. I read on the subject; the most sympathetic and relatable portrayal I've found so far is Jeung's "Answer to Job" But... while it's fair to criticize me for not really understanding spirituality, If you are arguing that the dark ages were not dark for, uh, metaphysical reasons, I think our values are so different that we can't really have a meaningful debate.
    - jstewartmobile 9y ago
      There is some ambiguity to what the complement of materialism actually is, but I'm fairly sure religion isn't it. I think we can all come up with examples of people who accepted reduced material circumstances in service of a higher goal, and many of those people were not believers in anything other than their own personal value systems. The hazy impression I get of that era is a breakdown of the Roman imperium's refined monoculture into a multitude of unrefined variations. On many levels, I like that. By ceaselessly optimizing, refining, and centralizing without regard to intrinsic human needs, we're really just charging head first into entropy. Think the Italian "slow life" vs NYC...
lsc 9y ago
>Being sans-state is not the same thing as anarchy. This, I do not understand at all. I mean, sure, it might not be an ideological anarchy, but when you don't have a state, you have anarchy. I guess you could also call it "a hobbesian state of nature" - but to me, and to most people who don't think that humans work the way the ideological anarchists think they do, the two are the same thing. (That said, I do believe that there were states during the dark ages. They were less stable and well defined than what came before and after, but I don't know of anyone who argues that there was not a layer of government over the lowest level of organization, as you put it. )
- jstewartmobile 9y ago
  Think of tribes, or kinship groups. Even without the state formalities of written law, police function, civic bldgs, etc, people arrange themselves with unspoken customs and traditional dominance hierarchies. The threat to such a tribe isn't anarchy. It is the better-organized foreigner that grinds his subjects into cogs for a well-oiled killing machine. Think Romans on Jews, or Germans on Eastern Europe... As for states, they certainly existed in various forms at the time. My original point, that I received from Quigley, is that certain stateless groups in the "dark ages" provided a counterexample to those who believe that you can't have civilization without a state. In modern terms, I guess this would be a sort of "localism".
  - lsc 9y ago
    The threat to such a tribe is any other group that feels they can take what that tribe has at a reasonable cost. The problem is that figuring out who can take what from whom directly using force ends up with a lot of dead, and it ends up killing a lot of the farmers and artisans that ultimately are producing what you are fighting over. The argument for federation or centralization is that you formalize the systems of stealing based on measures of force that involve less death and destruction than just having a battle every time your clan thinks it's stronger than the clan down the way.

lsc 9y ago

You are missing what i mean by being a violence based economy. Of course, you can't have property without violence. I'm not even saying that the dark ages were more violent than other ages. (I think they might have been, but it's largely irrelevant to the point I'm making about a 'violence based economy') My point is just that in the dark ages, you accumulated wealth through you yourself or through people who directly worked for you committing acts of violence. Not by simply operating within the rules of society (which are, of course, enforced with violence) as you would do today. Today? Directly being a, uh, violence technician as it were, or even being higher up in the chain of command in the organizations that handle violence in our society just isn't that remunerative. You've gotta be way up the officer ladder before you make as much money as I did out of high school as a UNIX technician. I mean, I know I messed up some connotations there; I certainly have nothing against the 'violence technicians' as I put it; I recognize that they are important. I just prefer to live in a world where Truman fires MacArther and not the other way around, if you know what I mean.

jstewartmobile 9y ago
I think your take on the early middle ages has been abstracted through the lenses of modernity, drama, and materialism. There were so many different arrangements, cultures, and value systems in play at that time, and obviously some of those elements came into conflict with each other, but to extrapolate that into a summary of the entire age is a mistake.
- lsc 9y ago
  I suppose it would be... difficult for me to see anything except through the lens of materialism. But I think that's true of most people; the number of people who don't see the world in a fundamentally physicalist way is... shrinking. (This is controversial; the religious in my country have been flexing their muscles, and there is open debate as to if this indicates a resurgence of belief, or just the religious seeing the majority slip from their hands thrashing to turn back the clock while they still have the strength. I personally believe the latter, but I don't have evidence that is any more solid than anyone else.) I do think I would be a better person if I was better able to understand how the religious people saw the world... but it's just not something I've been able to do. It's very difficult, really, for someone who doesn't believe faith is good in and of itself to understand people who do. I read on the subject; the most sympathetic and relatable portrayal I've found so far is Jeung's "Answer to Job" But... while it's fair to criticize me for not really understanding spirituality, If you are arguing that the dark ages were not dark for, uh, metaphysical reasons, I think our values are so different that we can't really have a meaningful debate.
  - jstewartmobile 9y ago
    There is some ambiguity to what the complement of materialism actually is, but I'm fairly sure religion isn't it. I think we can all come up with examples of people who accepted reduced material circumstances in service of a higher goal, and many of those people were not believers in anything other than their own personal value systems. The hazy impression I get of that era is a breakdown of the Roman imperium's refined monoculture into a multitude of unrefined variations. On many levels, I like that. By ceaselessly optimizing, refining, and centralizing without regard to intrinsic human needs, we're really just charging head first into entropy. Think the Italian "slow life" vs NYC...

lsc 9y ago

>Being sans-state is not the same thing as anarchy. This, I do not understand at all. I mean, sure, it might not be an ideological anarchy, but when you don't have a state, you have anarchy. I guess you could also call it "a hobbesian state of nature" - but to me, and to most people who don't think that humans work the way the ideological anarchists think they do, the two are the same thing. (That said, I do believe that there were states during the dark ages. They were less stable and well defined than what came before and after, but I don't know of anyone who argues that there was not a layer of government over the lowest level of organization, as you put it. )

jstewartmobile 9y ago
Think of tribes, or kinship groups. Even without the state formalities of written law, police function, civic bldgs, etc, people arrange themselves with unspoken customs and traditional dominance hierarchies. The threat to such a tribe isn't anarchy. It is the better-organized foreigner that grinds his subjects into cogs for a well-oiled killing machine. Think Romans on Jews, or Germans on Eastern Europe... As for states, they certainly existed in various forms at the time. My original point, that I received from Quigley, is that certain stateless groups in the "dark ages" provided a counterexample to those who believe that you can't have civilization without a state. In modern terms, I guess this would be a sort of "localism".
- lsc 9y ago
  The threat to such a tribe is any other group that feels they can take what that tribe has at a reasonable cost. The problem is that figuring out who can take what from whom directly using force ends up with a lot of dead, and it ends up killing a lot of the farmers and artisans that ultimately are producing what you are fighting over. The argument for federation or centralization is that you formalize the systems of stealing based on measures of force that involve less death and destruction than just having a battle every time your clan thinks it's stronger than the clan down the way.