- Required Reading : Throne, Altar and Freehold over at Jim’s place.
- Jim’s claim is that in grasping for direct control of too many strands, the capacity for effective governance was diffused to the point of failure.
- Thus a King and His Ministers, in mannerbund, providing for the operation of the state as one must inherently limit itself to the task of managing the state as one, else their efforts become diffuse.
- The proposed resolution of this problem is that the notion of freehold — the absolute patriarchy of the father over his household — be accepted, including the externalities of any costs resulting from the failure of a father to be an effective patriarch.
- Yet my observation is that men in mannerbund will not allow for long one of their own to persist in such recalcitrant failure that significant, ongoing externalities that are to the detriment of the community accrue.
- Thus I see an arrangement of patriarchs in mannerbund, providing for the operation of a community as one, which notion I will label flowhold to provide for some distinction and future tie in.
- A King, whether he have ministers commanding different functions of states, or dukes commanding different regions of state, in commanding the state as one is primarily dealing with optimising the effects of externalities. This same function is deeply needed at the individual level for any family living in community.
- Yet Jim’s general point that there must exist a point where complexity is terminated remains utterly correct. And herein lies the tension. For few communities exist at a scale so small that all members of that community are of one mannerbund. Even a small town will organically develop a network of mannerbunds that combine to manage local interactions. At some point a cut must be made: all externalities beyond this point will be accounted for financially and will only be accounted financially.
- Logical points for this cut will vary from society to society. But the urban bound, and the catchment bound seem logical starting points.
- All above this is the domain of the King.
END
Seems like the start of a good thought. But there may be several different issues conflated here: (i) “entangling alliances”, in particular between global and local levels of the political system, (ii) mutual assured destruction as a strategy for subordinate units, and (iii) the use of customs to solve coordination problems.
The first is most directly related to the tension you identify between mannerbund and freehold; i.e., the fact that friends don’t let friends fail is fine so long as you move from allowing individual households to fail to allowing individuals households _or tightly-knit networks_ to fail. If the tightly-knit networks cut across levels, so that the duke can’t let his friends’ households fail and the chancellor can’t let his friends’ duchies fail, then you’re in trouble.
But this is an abstract “accounting” perspective on success and failure, right? I.e. the units are either profitable or suffering losses, “unprofitable” units are either subsidized or go bankrupt. But that assumes everyone is using their resources to maximize welfare; in reality they are also using their resource to maximize power, and in particular the power of some coalition. A duchy that is massively “in the red” (in terms of needing subsidies to be successful) can nonetheless be extremely powerful (in the sense that if he switched from one noble faction to another, or from his liege to a rebel, or from his kingdom to an invader, they’d be in trouble).
Leaders who subsidize failing subordinates nearly always say the subsidy is (a) humane, (b) actually a shrewd investment, but in reality they are mostly subsidizing people whose defection to a different faction would be a disaster. Because MAD has so many different equilibria, you end up using custom as a coordination point, but customs themselves can be thought of as “entities” that are either productive or expensive, and so the q. becomes how other players interpret it when you axe the coordination point.
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There is, as you point out, an incredible breadth of possibility space for ‘solving’ in a dynamic manner the interaction between high and low. For example, with the massive inter-connectivity online, we are seeing deeply ephemeral constructs that form ad-hoc around those providing ‘leadership services’, only to reform constantly as the field of political battle changes. I suspect if I had tried to survey that space I’d end up with a missive on the scale of Jim’s.
To address a more minor point, I’m not implying that mannerbund completely preserves the individual family in all circumstances. There remain cases where the individual will fail due to ongoing incompetence or be cast out due to ongoing deviance. But yes, tight co-ordination at that level will provide a robustness against individual failure that would not be present otherwise. And preserving the capacity to fail small and fast is critical at the larger scale.
I appreciate your point regarding cross hierarchical connections. One of the thoughts I had while pondering the post was whether you could arrange the State such that it’s basis was orthogonal to whatever basis the bottom-up hierarchy develops on. Thus a geographically aligned mannerbund system gets ruled by a ministry based state; alternatively a company-of-men mannerbund system gets ruled based on geographic bounds.
I wonder whether, in today’s interconnected society, you could intentionally establish (and maintain) both the top structure and the bottom structure, but simply allow the intervening institutions to form and reform ad-hoc, merely formalising them on a transitory basis.
Something to ponder.
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certainly you’re right – the pithiness of your posts is one of your great assets
Another thought to consider – obviously the mannerbund is interested in conserving its own symbolic capital/signalling value vis a vis outsiders. This problem largely evaporates for “exclusive” leagues that set a higher standard from which ability to support a family (e.g.) follows a fortiori.
>but simply allow the intervening institutions to form and reform ad-hoc, merely formalising them on a transitory basis.
What Martin and I call “fractal fascism” 🙂
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And some mannerbund will be like that; yet in any population, not all will. I suspect that if one allowed mannerbund to self-select, most would largely consist of people functioning at a similar level, with a couple of stragglers and a couple of leaders.
So you will find mannerbund which are marginal, supporting your marginal folk, as well as those that are exceptional.
I tend to think that the ‘coming of age’ rituals are more of the place to impose trials that serve to trim the lower bounds of a group.
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Interesting, thanks btw for this whole thought-provoking conversation
I take it you’re contrasting initiation rituals (tribes, unconditional membership to community) to mannerbunde (self-selecting, mutual projects)?
Some of the discussion hinges on how strictly we conceive of “mannerbund”. With a broad interpretation of what kinds of social units qualify (if the concept is meant to serve as a “workhorse”), then a variety of strong social networks would get folded into the concept. If we try to stay close to the original meaning, then we can be more strict about e.g. what it means for a mannerbund to “self-select” and what would result from that, but it requires stronger assumptions about why mannerbunde would be central to social organization.
In the original conception (iiuc) mannerbunde were young men, in a sense, withdrawing from the power structure of their community; in other words, it was not the case that old men lead the mannerbund and tap weak/low status young men as candidates for membership. But we were to accept that kind of clan/guild structure in an extended definition of mannerbund I’m not sure if it makes sense to exclude patron/client relationships (where the subordinate will never “group up” and mature into a higher status).
Either way, definition of terms doesn’t *eliminate* the reality of cross-cutting patron-client relationships; it just visualizes the importance of the mannerbund in two different ways. If “mannerbund” excludes patron/client networks, then it just mean the “league” is the social network among patrons and the followers a patron can summon to help his mannerbund are part of his personal worthiness to be a member of the ‘bund. (In other words, whether the question is sustaining members of the league or maintaining the power of members of the league, these groups can get bogged down in q about the non-performance of subordinate units.)
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Not so much contrasting but allocating different tasks to different societal institutions.
I had not particularly thought about the age distribution within a mannerbund. Under an established society I would have anticipated that mannerbund would have formed out of the groups of men who had successfully passed through the coming of age process. In the transition however, I would anticipate a much more informal process of men with vision / leadership agglomerating a group of men from their life-spheres.
But as you indicate, these processes make a substantive difference as to the nature of these groupings. Are mannerbund perpetual (if one can draw from following generations they will be), or are they cyclic (age restricted)?
Interestingly, I would expect that if you make them cyclic, mentoring (perpetuating!) relationships between mannerbund of different generations would organically form.
While the world is big enough to try both strategies, would you want both forms existing within a single society? I suspect if both are allowed, the perpetual form would come to dominate very quickly.
Interesting thoughts.
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