What you are, not what you want
Tuesday, December 03, 2013
I learned during my long-ago university days of the key historical change from 'status' to 'contract'. In a sense, modern civilisation began when, not only were rulers subject to the law, but your legal obligations depended not on who you were but what you had agreed.
No more jus primae noctis or knight service. Your obligations depended upon the contracts you entered into. Moderns might think themselves 'wage slaves' because of a real or perceived lack of job opportunities, but their employer had no claims over them qua employer, only by reference to their contract of employment. Their serfdom was therefore metaphorical at most.
As recently as the 1970s then, this was seen as progress in itself and as a key enabler of progress. It was a thoroughly civilised way of organising human relations. Modern society was not possible without it. Indeed my legal history lecturer (leftist though he was) presented it as a key enabling factor of the industrial revolution and therefore of all modern prosperity.
Yet the drift back to status was already well underway. English law, for example, limited an employer's response to the breach of contract involved in refusing to work if it was in the context of a protected strike lawfully organised by a trade union. The status of being under the protection of a trade union (a modern descendant of a medieval guild) alters your employer's legal rights and - in a certain sense - justifies your breach of contract.
For a long time the police operated with the same power of arrest as any other citizen. If someone commited a felony (now an 'arrestable offence') you or I could arrest them and so could a copper. The only difference was that he was paid, trained and expected to do it. I always thought that was a wonderful check and balance on police power. It's a dangerous thing to have a professional police force because, among the honest decent people attracted to such work, there is bound to be a higher-than-average proportion of thugs and bullies. Bossing people around attracts bossy people.
Now the status of being a police officer or enjoying one of a large number of other state-granted statuses, confers special powers of arrest, search, seizure and forced entry. Even, as we have seen in recent days, forced entry to a mother's womb.
Landlord and tenant law tends to assume (ridiculously in the modern era when he might be Google or Microsoft and his landlord might be your mother's pension fund) that a tenant is a weaker party entitled to special protection by virtue of his status.
Similarly consumer legislation operates on the basis of a cartoon caricature of a buyer like Wile E Coyote; endlessly supplied with disappointingly non-lethal-to-road-runners goods by ACME.
The Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 specifically prevents people from entering into, or at least from being bound by, contractual obligations, based on their status as 'a person dealing as a consumer.'
The notion of 'positive discrimination' confers for the first time in law an actual right to be racist (if you ignore, as I do with utter contempt, the socialist claptrap about racism being by definition a problem exclusive to white people).
The concept of 'hate crime' makes it more serious to insult, hurt or kill people enjoying a specially protected status. Current law thinks some deaths diminish me more than others. I disrespectfully disagree.
Your status as a citizen imposes all kinds of obligations on you. For example you must surrender a percentage of your earnings to the state, pay your local council for the privilege of living in your own home and hand over 45% of your parents' wealth above a certain value on inheritance.
It would be amusing if it were not so sad that modern 'progressives' have for decades been busily restoring a key concept of feudalism and systematically undermining a key legal foundation of post-feudal prosperity. Their labels may not openly be 'lord' and 'vassal' but their world view is founded just as much on different rights and duties for different classes of human.
Not everyone, Tom, not everyone.
Posted by: Tcheuchter | Friday, December 06, 2013 at 09:44 AM
The French Revolution was caused (inter alia) by a legal obligation on peasants to do unpaid work for the state. When you consider that welfare state citizens are working to pay taxes for half or more of each year, they are - in a sense - time share serfs. It's hard to avoid the left/right distinction in politics because it's so commonly used, but it's a bit of a nonsense most of the time. Some days I feel like everyone in Britain but me is on "the Left"
Posted by: Tom | Thursday, December 05, 2013 at 04:09 PM
People oftentimes refer to medieval peasants and serfs with disdain, in the mistaken belief that today they are better off and more free, whilst the serfs submitted too readily to a lifetime of bondage.
In reality serfs were financially less obligated to their "lord" than we are today to our multiple government overlords. Despite an over-reliance on expensive police forces today, serious crime is infinitely worse. Commercial transactions were once conducted with a handshake, no more.
Though it is impossible to do any kind of quantitative comparison between the ages (mainly due to technological and medicinal advances), I cannot see that the new serfdom you have described is any improvement at all, the politicians and their multiple ministries "lording" it over us and the multiple layers of "security" policing our every physical move and electronic thought is stifling. We are taxed more, are less secure, and have less personal freedom and freedom of thought than the medieval serfs.
Though I would tend to blame progressives for the worst examples of our bondage to the government, the so-called right have enthusiastically embraced all that has been done to restrict freedoms.
Posted by: Cascadian | Thursday, December 05, 2013 at 05:56 AM