- 27 May 2017 11:31
#14808818
The solution to 1984 is 1973!
@ingliz
Of course it is reasonable to assume that the Church is not pushing the narrative that slavery is an evil entirely out of humanitarian sentiment. That at least initially the Church is forbidding only the enslavement of Christians with both heathens and muslims being fair game looks like a way to incentivise heathens and perhaps also muslims to convert.
What you are missing is that to the extent that in England / France that policy is successful in encouraging heathens to convert you will eventually run out of people who can be legally enslaved, so you then have a shortage of slaves to go with your shortage of coin, and it is this that results in the practice of both using land titles as means of payment for military service and serfdom as a means of extracting labour and / or rents which are the practices that modern people call feudalism.
With regard to the Church's policy of using exemption from slavery as a means to encourage conversion, with the side effect of causing a shortage of slaves, a similar thing happened in Muslim world too because the muslim rulers also had comparable policy where one could become tax exempt by converting to Islam. This policy creates a persistent financial incentive to become a muslim but which eventually leads to a shortage of tax revenues as the majorities of peoples under this policy eventually come to take advantage of it.
The Knights of Malta are in a different situation to those peoples in England / France as they are right on the frontlines with Islam, constantly engaged in military conflicts through which they have the opportunity to acquire slaves of a sort (muslims) which does not offend the church. Moreover those muslim slaves are very much less likely than heathens to try to legally escape slavery by converting to Christianity because Islam unlike heathen beliefs places great perils on apostasy.
I wonder how you think the Knights of Malta damages my thesis more than it does yours given they at least appear to be, depending on who they are dealing with at the time, feudalists, slavers and capitalists all at the same time. Apparently the Knights of Malta had not fallen under the spell of magical dialectics so that they by these metaphysical imperatives are slavers first then become feudalists and then to become capitalists..
See feudalism isn't a spiritual philosophy and for that matter neither is slavery, serfdom, tithing, tax, rents, monetary exchange using gold, monetary exchange using promissory notes, barter, wages and salaries, credit and debt, usury, arbitrage or whatever else. They are all just practical techniques to solve material economic interests. Which ones dominate in a particular time and place depends not on some mystical progression but only on the particular material contexts of that time and place ie: gold money will tend not to predominate for exchange where gold is vanishingly scarce - 11th century England. Waged labour will not tend to predominate where slavery is legally tolerated and slaves are plentiful due to a polity's streak of successful warring - Imperial Rome.
Of course it is reasonable to assume that the Church is not pushing the narrative that slavery is an evil entirely out of humanitarian sentiment. That at least initially the Church is forbidding only the enslavement of Christians with both heathens and muslims being fair game looks like a way to incentivise heathens and perhaps also muslims to convert.
What you are missing is that to the extent that in England / France that policy is successful in encouraging heathens to convert you will eventually run out of people who can be legally enslaved, so you then have a shortage of slaves to go with your shortage of coin, and it is this that results in the practice of both using land titles as means of payment for military service and serfdom as a means of extracting labour and / or rents which are the practices that modern people call feudalism.
With regard to the Church's policy of using exemption from slavery as a means to encourage conversion, with the side effect of causing a shortage of slaves, a similar thing happened in Muslim world too because the muslim rulers also had comparable policy where one could become tax exempt by converting to Islam. This policy creates a persistent financial incentive to become a muslim but which eventually leads to a shortage of tax revenues as the majorities of peoples under this policy eventually come to take advantage of it.
The Knights of Malta are in a different situation to those peoples in England / France as they are right on the frontlines with Islam, constantly engaged in military conflicts through which they have the opportunity to acquire slaves of a sort (muslims) which does not offend the church. Moreover those muslim slaves are very much less likely than heathens to try to legally escape slavery by converting to Christianity because Islam unlike heathen beliefs places great perils on apostasy.
I wonder how you think the Knights of Malta damages my thesis more than it does yours given they at least appear to be, depending on who they are dealing with at the time, feudalists, slavers and capitalists all at the same time. Apparently the Knights of Malta had not fallen under the spell of magical dialectics so that they by these metaphysical imperatives are slavers first then become feudalists and then to become capitalists..
See feudalism isn't a spiritual philosophy and for that matter neither is slavery, serfdom, tithing, tax, rents, monetary exchange using gold, monetary exchange using promissory notes, barter, wages and salaries, credit and debt, usury, arbitrage or whatever else. They are all just practical techniques to solve material economic interests. Which ones dominate in a particular time and place depends not on some mystical progression but only on the particular material contexts of that time and place ie: gold money will tend not to predominate for exchange where gold is vanishingly scarce - 11th century England. Waged labour will not tend to predominate where slavery is legally tolerated and slaves are plentiful due to a polity's streak of successful warring - Imperial Rome.
The solution to 1984 is 1973!
- By Dr House
- By JohnRawls