Yes Sir, Feudalism Might Be Practical 📙
Selections | Joel Kotkin’s “The Coming of Neo-Feudalism”
Welcome to Selections. Where we slide a book off the shelf or a record from the stack, and talk about it. I’ve got something just for you.
I think a good historical exercise to counteract the distortions and misconceptions of the present day is to attempt to write a Star Wars opening crawl for your own decade; or lifetime or century if you’re ambitious. The reason this makes for a good exercise is it forces us to refocus our lens away from the immediate microissues and reminds us of the macro forces and themes that will end up being remembered. As I've discussed before, we aren't the best at identifying these within our lifetime. But at least we can try. You'll see why this is important momentarily.
Joel Kotkin's book The Coming of Neo-Feudalism does a good job of recognizing a metatrend in current events that may one day be written down as a sweeping historical development. Like most actually significant historical events, his analysis goes deeper than the talking points that will be forgotten almost as soon as they stop echoing in the newsrooms and Twitter threads of our present moment. Kotkin makes and defends the case that power in the modern world is increasingly becoming centralized into hierarchical structures not dissimilar to the feudal classes of the Middle Ages, and then identifies a few potential new feudal lords, many of whom are counterintuitive to those steeped in today's common sea of social media distraction.
It is this central thesis that anchors my recommendation of this work to you. Something about it agrees with a long unspoken sense that I've struggled to articulate, that the centers of power in our modern world are rapidly spinning out of the grasp of the Modern Democratic State and reverting to a constellation of localized structures. The fact that Kotkin identifies this pattern and traces it persuasively is enough to make this important reading. But I must warn you that this book also made me incredibly angry, angry in the thoroughgoing way that I've learned foretells an essay like an optic aura coming before a migraine.
Kotkin correctly identifies the coming of a newly balkanized, dynamically changing and hierarchical way of being, yes. However, he then declares unequivocally and ahistorically that somehow feudalism is causing the looming catastrophe as it is nearing its own rebirth onto the scene. He chronicles with monotonous pessimism a litany of societal ills, the breakdown of the family unit, failure of postmodern states to provide sustainable livelihoods and spiritual fulfilment for their citizens, the rise of fanatically policed media narratives and monocultural, quasi-religious intellectual hegemony. He then consults what seems to be a comically simplistic and outdated mental model of Medieval history and begins drawing big lines on an imaginary whiteboard. Well look, they had social problems too! And also the Church controlled the universities and set the doctrine, so that makes liberal social elites the new Church! And now it looks like people might be getting poorer and more dependent on the state, so that's probably feudal because we know feudal people were poor. You can almost imagine the whiteboard now filled with lateral lines connecting the Medieval and Information Ages as Kotkin steps back and preps his book proposal. There's just one problem with this analysis, however. No that's not true, there's several actually.
Answers to leading questions under torture naturally tell us nothing about the beliefs of the accused; but they are good evidence for the beliefs of the accusers.
~ C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature
First, the picture of the Middle Ages that is used for comparison is deeply historically flawed. Kotkin seems familiar with the mythic and culturally blinkered modern interpretation of the Medieval period, a barbarous time in which superstitious, stoop-backed and bizarre human cousins crawled the dark forests of Europe and, according to a well-known British comedy/historical documentary, could easily identify royalty because everyone else's clothes were caked in dung. But he totally fails to see any of the colorful, explosive and intellectually seeking reality of the Middle Ages. He has bought into the (debunked for a very long time) Dark Age repressive narrative and does not see that feudalism can (and did) provide structure for human flourishing, potentially more so than chaotic modernity. I'm of course not denying the brutal realities of Medieval history (those that actually existed and aren't inventions of Hollywood), but I am insisting that good historiography must deal with the past as it was, on the past's own terms. I am not an (entirely) antimodern thinker, I simply demand historical accuracy and have a desire to learn from the real past. And for all of the ignorance, suffering, superstition and religious bloodshed of the Middle Ages, we cannot overlook the flourishing intellectual life, breathtaking works of architecture, and fertile foundation for everything we praise as Modern today. Kotkin falls prey to the fairy tale that Giles Fraser carefully dissects: "Forget about the founding of the great cathedrals and universities, forget about the Islamic development of mathematics, forget about Leonardo da Vinci and all of that: in secular salvation myth we are sold the simple story that we have been saved from the dark ages of barbarism and stupidity by the clear moral vision of science, rationality and Apple computers."
Simple secularists still talk as if the Church had introduced a sort of schism between reason and religion. The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and religion.
~ G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
Of course the problem here is that the real story is almost completely opposite to the modern myth. To decry the failures and coming catastrophe of modernity and then turn to the camera and say “why would feudalism do this” seems to be a failure of historical perspective comical in the extreme. The historical viewpoint tells us that the vast majority of human souls who have ever walked this earth have owed fealty to a monarch of some stripe. There is a mixed and complicated story to tell about what life for the average person under feudalism was like, and it turns out to be more secure and humane in some areas than that of a modern Uber driver, and significantly worse in others. The myth of historical progression is a pervasive one. If anything, the supposed degeneration of the modern and postmodern project into semi-feudal structures should tell Kotkin that liberal democracy is at best a tenuous hothouse flower, nurtured only by obsessive care and possessing a spectacularly short half-life. Democracy seems in fact to be a mutating aberration of the structures that have maintained human survival since Cain raised the walls of the first city. The answer to modern troubles just might not be "Democracy, more and harder."
To go further, it is the collapse and degeneration of the Medieval feudal world (flawed at its best, decadent, violent and ossified at its most decrepit) that enabled the democratic aberration that will sit on the throne of Neo-Feudalism. The beauteous things Kotkin seeks in the infancy of pluralistic cosmopolitanism are the rightful inheritance bought for it by the sweat and blood of its feudal ancestry. If you are a lover of the arts, then historically you owe something to the efforts of the medieval societies that didn't simply generate an artistic foundation for future ages, but also raised monuments that we have not since been able to duplicate. If you love the written word and scientific, rational thought, then you ought to be deeply interested in the monks and religious scholars who literally invented the intellectual world you live in. If you are a pacifist and a seeker of structures to build human flourishing, realize with humility that the World Wars occurred on the watch of modern, rationalistic societies.
“It was the anti-clerical and agnostic world that was always prophesying the advent of universal peace; it is that world that was, or should have been, abashed and confounded by the advent of universal war.”
~ G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
I'm of course not happily welcoming the return of the pain and suffering that a more medieval existence might bring to our world. But I would propose that feudalism is a system that can be lived with, if that is our destiny. The question becomes to which feudal lords will we offer our fealty, and I am just optimistic enough to believe that one of the benefits of the modern technological age is we just might have some choice in the matter. If web3 can really pay off on its' promise of decentralization and geographic reshuffling, then some of the people reading this may even become feudal lords, able to steward an increasingly large demesne that brings stability and livelihood to many. If the broadly centralized political powers are actually becoming weaker, which Kotkin seems to argue persuasively, then the vacuum must be filled. While the immediate fear of Silicon Valley and extreme Progressive clerics is very current events, I am increasingly convince that this obsession may be skating to where the puck is right now, not where it is going. As we become disenchanted with these feudal powers, and this is happening as we speak, others may rise to provide the stability and hierarchy that all humans intrinsically require. More local and ancient powers, tying us back to our neighbors and town and soil, are beginning to stir from their historically brief nap of five centuries.
At the close of the Middle Ages, scientific innovation allowed people to see both into the heavens with the telescope and into the cellular world with the microscope in a way that destabilized the prevailing understanding, redrew the scientific map and suddenly made a lot of people feel a chaotic change in their worldview. We are experiencing the same process today as scientific innovations in quantum physics break our ordered picture of spacetime and exponential technological mutation challenges our settled pictures of society and human life. We’re about to experience another shift in the relationship between science, technology, and religion, one which is allowing many people to grasp the disturbing implication that perhaps the scientific method was not a sufficient metaphysical philosophy after all. Welcome to the New Feudalism. We already have a map.
It is a time of turmoil. old powers are falling, and new technologies promise freedom and power to many. There is much uncertainty. While the rulers dodder, sprawling networks of rebels spring up. Chaos and hilarity abound. The CENTRAL POWERS do their best to maintain control, but the future is no longer theirs. Banding together into new networks, the rebels build and dream. They know that no great moment will mark the beginning of the new age, and must do all they can to craft a new world, now. So many depend on them...