Yeah, I mean the serf suffered a lot, because feudal lords became more repressive to keep them on their land - they also had to work a lot more. In fact serfdom spread even faster and the enclosure was being born. This led partly to the conditions that gave birth to the reformation and the great peasant war in germany, where nobles massacred thousands of poors.
It’s usually simplified pop-history mixed in with the “useless eater”/“crabs in bucket”/the rat experiment/soft-eugenics ideology that is spread by capitalism. As you mentioned.
I feel like at least with most other eras of history people are generally more willing to admit that their pop culture view isn’t accurate, but for some reason everyone thinks they know about the middle ages or go into ‘dark age’ tropes where they think that there isn’t much information so pop culture stuff about em (which originated in Victorian times where early capitalism had turned the average poor person into a dirty and diseased urchin in order to give the idea that things were improving. Living in a densely packed city where you just threw your shit in the river was way worse health wise than being a serf). It feels like the era where people feel most willing to make bold uninformed claims and make a map of human progress based on those claims
They couldn’t start any earlier because much like actual midevsl guys, they dickride ancient Rome.
Tbf I even more left leaning people use the europeans didnt know how to bathe!!! they rolled in smelly poopoo all day as a gotcha and a given (strange because I live near a former roman bath town with locally famous brine springs, also soap was produced since the middle ages here). I get why they do it, but its still a distorted picture.
I think it has to do with the enlightenment assumption which is constantly reinforced by modern culture and ideologies, that it was basically the nadir of human existence. To Liberalism that aspect especially poignant, since modernity and the achievements of liberalism are contrasted with that period, which is supposedly everything that liberalism was not and devoid of which liberalism gave “us”. Remember that all modern ideologies are forked from classical liberalism, since we dont live in a feudal economic structure.
Absolutely, although im gonna be pedantic cause it’s relevant and say ‘manoralism’ is what nerds call the dominant economic structure of the time and feudalism is a subgenre. It is a useful distinction and id like to popularize it. The average guy who thinks theyre smart will say the Muslim world was making massive advances at the time and then usually go on to say they stopped advancing socially at that point because they are racists. Which isn’t only racist but undermines advancements made in Europe at the time which were generally less amazing in scale but power was significantly less centralized at the time in Europe and theres a lot to be said for not living under an empire but some petty noble who doesn’t really give a fuck what you do as long as he gets the grain. Could be a lot of grain but within your own community you would have a much greater effect on politics than you could dream of now unless you were a woman most of the time, unless you were a woman does unfortunately apply to most signs of olde timey progressivism when ideas become law. And even then it could be argued that women had a greater amount of autonomy in a family of farmers and where domestic labor was fucking hard as hell. Serfs getting a lot of days off was real, but those are days off from tending your lord’s field so you can work on your own and handle the absurdly labor intensive versions of basic household shit that people with electricity can do either passively or in 10 minutes. Getting a decent understanding of the transitory period between ancient slave empires and modern capitalism makes historical and dialectal materialism pretty easy to grasp as well as the idea that societies shift from one economic mode to another through class struggle. When these enlightment era whitewashed versions of medieval and early modern periods are known for real it makes Marx way too obviously right to not be whitewashed.
Yeah, I mean the serf suffered a lot, because feudal lords became more repressive to keep them on their land - they also had to work a lot more. In fact serfdom spread even faster and the enclosure was being born. This led partly to the conditions that gave birth to the reformation and the great peasant war in germany, where nobles massacred thousands of poors.
It’s usually simplified pop-history mixed in with the “useless eater”/“crabs in bucket”/the rat experiment/soft-eugenics ideology that is spread by capitalism. As you mentioned.
I feel like at least with most other eras of history people are generally more willing to admit that their pop culture view isn’t accurate, but for some reason everyone thinks they know about the middle ages or go into ‘dark age’ tropes where they think that there isn’t much information so pop culture stuff about em (which originated in Victorian times where early capitalism had turned the average poor person into a dirty and diseased urchin in order to give the idea that things were improving. Living in a densely packed city where you just threw your shit in the river was way worse health wise than being a serf). It feels like the era where people feel most willing to make bold uninformed claims and make a map of human progress based on those claims They couldn’t start any earlier because much like actual midevsl guys, they dickride ancient Rome.
Tbf I even more left leaning people use the europeans didnt know how to bathe!!! they rolled in smelly poopoo all day as a gotcha and a given (strange because I live near a former roman bath town with locally famous brine springs, also soap was produced since the middle ages here). I get why they do it, but its still a distorted picture.
I think it has to do with the enlightenment assumption which is constantly reinforced by modern culture and ideologies, that it was basically the nadir of human existence. To Liberalism that aspect especially poignant, since modernity and the achievements of liberalism are contrasted with that period, which is supposedly everything that liberalism was not and devoid of which liberalism gave “us”. Remember that all modern ideologies are forked from classical liberalism, since we dont live in a feudal economic structure.
Absolutely, although im gonna be pedantic cause it’s relevant and say ‘manoralism’ is what nerds call the dominant economic structure of the time and feudalism is a subgenre. It is a useful distinction and id like to popularize it. The average guy who thinks theyre smart will say the Muslim world was making massive advances at the time and then usually go on to say they stopped advancing socially at that point because they are racists. Which isn’t only racist but undermines advancements made in Europe at the time which were generally less amazing in scale but power was significantly less centralized at the time in Europe and theres a lot to be said for not living under an empire but some petty noble who doesn’t really give a fuck what you do as long as he gets the grain. Could be a lot of grain but within your own community you would have a much greater effect on politics than you could dream of now unless you were a woman most of the time, unless you were a woman does unfortunately apply to most signs of olde timey progressivism when ideas become law. And even then it could be argued that women had a greater amount of autonomy in a family of farmers and where domestic labor was fucking hard as hell. Serfs getting a lot of days off was real, but those are days off from tending your lord’s field so you can work on your own and handle the absurdly labor intensive versions of basic household shit that people with electricity can do either passively or in 10 minutes. Getting a decent understanding of the transitory period between ancient slave empires and modern capitalism makes historical and dialectal materialism pretty easy to grasp as well as the idea that societies shift from one economic mode to another through class struggle. When these enlightment era whitewashed versions of medieval and early modern periods are known for real it makes Marx way too obviously right to not be whitewashed.