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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
Materialism is well-defined and means something in philosophy[1] - if you are using it in the sense of "greed" well, that's a different sort of thing entirely.
My own experiences and assumptions all point to 'diminishing marginal value' when it comes to all physical goods - I'll do a lot if it means that me and mine don't starve. I'll do a lot less to move up from a Toyota to a Lexus. (don't get me wrong, If I've gotta drive, I'll take the Lexus... but not if it means I have less reading time.)
Extrapolating backwards from that, my assumption is that everyone in the pre-modern era; everyone from a time where more people suffered from eating not enough than eating too much would be a lot more concerned with obtaining goods (well, food, shelter and the tools to obtain those things in the future) than I am now. So from that point of view, I'd have a distorted view of the dark ages (and, for that matter, Rome and the whole world before the 'green revolution' in the late '60s) simply because I've never experienced anything like real hunger or want. I mean, sure, I've wanted things, but every time you ask me to do something for money? My question is this: Would I rather do that thing you want me to do for the money you are offering? Or would I prefer to stay at home and read classic works from project gutenberg?
For me, a lot of how I've looked at work and the how much time to trade for it has been that view that I really don't have to save that much money to live a pretty comfortable life without working. (Now, I've made some massive mistakes in how to go about doing that, but that's a different discussion. the idea that money in the bank is years I don't have to work to be comfortable is a constant)
What I'm saying is that as modern people, I don't think we can comprehend the privation that pre-modern folks had. The amount of time and effort they needed to put in to gain even the most basic and essential of material goods.
Also, my guess is that when you are in such a tenuous situation, people are going to work a lot harder than your "New York" example. (I like your example because New York is a place I'm considering moving... in part as a way to de-stress my life. Remove transit issues. Live within walking distance of my life.)
For my purposes, which are not philosophically trained, anti-materialism would be when something so offends your soul (or your will in a more secular sense) that you would rather die than go along with it. I have known this feeling from when I didn't believe, so I know that it is real and possible.
From what I've read of ancient Rome, I suspect I would have preferred a short life struggling against nature than a long one tolerating Romans.
But again, value systems.
That, and I'm not entirely sold that acquiring the knowledge of how not to starve or be eaten by animals requires an imperium or a state.
>That, and I'm not entirely sold that acquiring the knowledge of how not to starve or be eaten by animals requires an imperium or a state.
Oh, you don't need the state to deal with animals, or food supply... I mean, the state can deal with those things, but that's not why you agree to live under the power of a state. the primary function of the state is to protect you from warlords or roving bands of warriors (which I personally think are proto-state like entities)
The model I have of peasant life is that okay, you are a farmer. there are good years and bad... you have to deal with crop failures and with wild animals and all that stuff. And as a pre-modern farmer, well, you had better be equipped to deal with those things; nobody else is gonna help you.
In a world where everyone was a farmer, this would be mostly fine. (I mean, one could argue that some sort of mutual system to deal with crop failures would be nice, but that's asking a lot of that time period.) You can mostly deal with it. Even with really primitive technology, if nobody is trying to steal from you, you can make a go at farming.
The problem is that there also exist warriors. Now, in a system with no government, where one band of warriors can expect another band of warriors to later visit the farm they have just looted, where that band of warriors can't reasonably expect to be first to that farm the next year, it is in the best interest of that band of warriors to take everything of value even if that kills the farmer
This, of course, is unpleasant all around. the farmer dies first, sure, but the warriors then end up starving, 'cause they've killed everyone who creates food.
Government is born when one band of warriors establishes themselves in an area, takes an amount of food from the local farmers that usually doesn't kill the farmers, and then mostly chases off any competing bands of warriors. This is better for both the warriors and the farmers than the other way, just because now the warriors have an incentive to keep the farmers alive.
My understanding of feudalism is that it's essentially a complex system designed to ritualize the warfare of the warriors in a way that usually doesn't starve everyone to death. If there's someone sufficiently powerful within your lands, there is a formal system for them to share in the power over the farmers.
The difference, I think, between me and an ideological anarchist is that the ideological anarchist argues that the warriors won't necessarily spring up in numbers that can't be dealt with by the farmers, that humans are basically good and would rather produce than steal.
I... can only assume that people who believe we can live without a state have had better childhoods than I have.
Not really advocating for any specific political platform here. If someone gave me absolute power, I would be more of a tweaker than a revolutionizer--this shit gets complicated!
I just think you're overfitting the age into a MMORPG-farmer/warrior/lord-duking-it-out-for-GP model.
>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. )
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".
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.
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?