Welcome to the Hovel

hi sorry uh. incredible miscommunication on my part lmfao.

HELLO you are asking questions that literature and poetry THROUGHOUT the middle ages has asked, and it is from this questioning that we derive things like the Codes of Chivalry (which is not "how to treat a noble lady really nice" but is actually "how to be an ethical person when you're rich and you own a horse" and includes such things as "don't run people over with your horse")

In fact I daresay you already know instinctively just from cultural osmosis what a good boss -- a good liege lord -- is and does based on the tropes that have survived to the current day and the kinds of things that get Hugely Praised in things like legends of King Arthur.

A good boss (liege lord) is:

Merciful. He is not having his peasants killed for things like poaching rabbits during a famine. In fact, he is working to mitigate famine. During times of individual hardship, he might negotiate with a peasant for a payment plan on their annual rent.

Patient. He is not impulsive, he does not lose his temper.

Prudent. He makes choices that are thoughtful, considered, conservative (in the sense of not needlessly risky--he's not investing his entire fortune in having everyone plant an unproven crop). He is making sure local infrastructure like roads and public buildings are maintained and kept in good nick.

Gentle. He doesn't haul off and slap a servant or a tenant for breaking a dish or making a mistake. He doesn't abuse animals, his wife or children, or his employees. He doesn't rape the servants.

Generous (both in money and in spirit). He is not extorting the peasants for an amount of rent that is beyond their means, he is not raising taxes every year to cover his own lavish lifestyle. He is paying his servants a living wage (or, if wages are low, he's giving them room/board/clothing to make up the difference). If someone in a tenant's family dies, the lord is sending a gift of condolence, or helping to pay for the funeral, or possibly even ATTENDING the funeral and speaking a few kind words about the deceased, ESPECIALLY if they were a really upstanding and important member of the community. If one of his tenants is gravely sick, the lord is sending a basket of food or paying for a doctor. He is giving charitably (generally this will be, like, a bequest to the church so that they can run a hospital or an orphanage or a school for the local village children).

Pious. This classically means "goes to church, submits with humility to God" but to me this quality is subtextually standing in for "maintaining an ongoing sense of Perspective that HE'S not god, that there are higher powers he is Accountable to, that he too can be Judged, etc, so that he doesn't end up going on a weird fucked up power trip"

Humble. One of the most admiring things you hear about a lord doing in literature and epic poetry is, "He ate off of wooden plates while his followers ate off of gold and silver." Humility isn't about being meek, it's just about not thinking so much of yourself that you turn your nose up and sneer at what "lesser" people do. In other words: Don't be a fucking diva. If your carriage gets stuck in the mud, climb out and help everybody else push, you're not gonna die from getting mud on your shoes.

Condescending. This word has changed wildly in meaning/tone over the last couple centuries -- it's now a rude thing to do (because we've done away with legal social hierarchies, so someone acting like they're lowering themselves to your level IS insulting), but in older times, a high-ranking person "condescending" to a servant was worthy of praise and admiration: it means they were setting aside rank and privilege to speak to them with the easygoing, friendly respect and compassion they'd give a peer. This is things like... Treats those beneath him with courtesy and respect (ie: listens soberly and attentively when one of his servants or tenants comes to complain about a problem). Having a sense of humor and kindness about it when the lord and a servant both come around a corner at the same time and run into each other and the servant gets knocked to the ground and starts babbling apologies--the condescending (positive) lord helps them to their feet with his own hands and cracks a joke to show them that it's ok (as opposed to just walking off without a word or insulting/scolding them). This is also things like trusting a farmer, woodcutter, or artisan to speak with expertise about their own livelihood and taking their advice into consideration if they tell the lord that one of his ideas won't work.

Good boundaries. The ethical liege lord knows that it's normal for the staff to probably be softly bitching about him in private (even with a really good boss, we all grumble from time to time). He's not eavesdropping on them, he's not going into the staff areas where they should reasonably expect to have a degree of privacy, etc.

Righteous and protective of "the weak". The "weak" here doesn't necessarily mean physically weak, this is often used in the sense of someone politically or socially weak, aka The Marginalized -- the poor, the disabled, women, children, the elderly, etc. If a lord sees someone like this being mistreated or abused, he's supposed to step in and put a stop to that.

Committed to reciprocity. In a highly hierarchical system like feudalism, every person (from the lowest peasant all the way up to the crown prince) legally OWES their liege lord certain things (taxes, labor, service, loyalty, etc). A good liege remembers and takes very seriously the idea that this should be a balanced and reciprocal relationship -- in other words, he owes something BACK. Feudalism is modeled very strongly on the family system: If children owe their parents obedience and service, then parents owe their children care and protection. This still applies when the "child" is a farmer and the "parent" is a local baron. Or when the "child" is a duke and the "parent" is the king.

Basically, we get so caught up in the aesthetics of nobility that we forget that it literally is a managerial position that comes with responsibilities that were... very similar back in the day to the same ones we have now. Humans have not changed all that much. At the end of the day, a really good boss in the 1400s versus in one from the 2020s displays most of the same qualities of personality, even if the details of execution are different.

The next question is, of course, "well, but this theoretical liege lord is HIGHLY idealized -- how often did that actually HAPPEN? Wasn't it more likely that everyone was exploited all the time?" and to that I say: Well, maybe. But again, I don't think humans have changed all that much. Just like the bosses of today, there's a SPECTRUM: A really really good boss is rare and precious and one that you tell stories about for years after you've left that job, but a truly, genuinely, homicidally nightmarish boss is also pretty rare. Most bosses are sort of meh -- they have their good moments, they have their shitty moments, but they're tolerable and you can get along with them well enough to do your job, and then you roll your eyes at them behind their back. Generally, humans don't take outright exploitation lying down. Being a bad boss in the historical period is how you get peasant uprisings and revolts, and you know that to be true because your parents raised you with that knowledge, so unless you are very stupid or inbred or an egomaniac, there is literal personal incentive to at minimum be a Tolerable liege lord. And that means hitting at least SOME of the above bullet points.

TL;DR: In the words of Honore de Balzac, "Everything I have just told you can be summarized by an old word: noblesse oblige!"

Anyway I need to share with you all the most hilarious line that has ever been written, circa 1887:

“This book should be taken off of shelves for featuring–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Schools shouldn’t teach this book in class because–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Nobody actually likes or wants to read classics because they’re–” you are an anti-intellectual and an idiot

Literally right after I saw this post, I saw another post in a discord chat for BOOK EDITORS in which an outspokenly liberal editor talked about how Nabokov should have never been published because he wrote about p*dophiles and described women's bodies in ways that made her uncomfortable. She described his writing as "objectively terrible" and said she wanted to burn his books. And other editors were bringing up classics they didn't like and talking about how they wanted to throw them in the trash. This wasn't like a light "unpopular opinion!" conversation. This was actual book editors talking about how books should be destroyed and censored.

There is something so scary and toxic in global culture right now. The revival of fascism is influencing everyone's mindset and approach to art, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.

I see far more books being censored today than when I was a kid. Librarians handed me The Catcher in the Rye, The Sexual Politics of Meat, and Animal Farm when I was literally 8-11. My mom would never have taken a book away from me. I read everything from the Tao Te Ching to the Qur'an to atheist texts under my desk at school. Teachers thought nothing of it or encouraged it. Books seemed universally acknowledged as sacrosanct to me.

Now I can't find any adults who don't hesitate or want to make exceptions when it comes to censorship. Even the most liberal social activist librarians I know go, "well except for book X..."

Actually, I did reports on book banning three separate times with three separate teachers, with three separate sets of parameters so I was able to write about the same topic in different ways, but this is specifically about the report I did in university. The actual specs for the report included that we were supposed to complete some kind of study or poll (this was not a science class). I put the questions out on a couple of forums I belonged to at the time and asked a few IRL friends as well. A lot of the questions were standard for this sort of thing, I think - were you ever assigned to read a banned book, did you ever read banned books on your own, did you read/were you assigned them BECAUSE they were banned or did you find out about them being banned later, what's your opinion on banning books, etc.

But there was one question I asked that ended up reshaping the entire thrust of my presentation: "Are there any books that you think SHOULD be banned, and if so, why?"

Here's the thing. Most of the forums I was posting on were fan spaces for a book series that, at the time, was one of the most banned/challenged books out there. It's a fandom that I have since entirely distanced myself from, that I one hundred percent do not recommend to anyone, that I will actively attempt to dissuade people from reading or talking about, and that I would like to not be popular anymore. I'm sure most of you reading this can guess which one I'm talking about (I won't name it or go into specifics because I don't want to trip any filters unnecessarily). But it was KNOWN that these books were banned in a lot of places. A lot of people wore the "I read banned books" badge with pride. I fully expected that the answer to that question would be a resounding "no" from the forums, and that I'd maybe get a few affirmative answers from one of the other spaces.

I was shocked. Not only did a lot of people come back with either "not exactly but I think we should keep [author] or [book] out of the hands of children" or "yes, [book]/anything by [author] should be banned because XYZPDQ", but not a single person who responded gave me the same answer. The only one I remember - keep in mind it's been almost twenty years - was that one person specifically said The Bone Collector, and for the "why do you think it should be banned" question, they only said, "No. I'm not explaining it. It's too horrible to even think about. Just believe me when I say nobody should ever be allowed to read this book."

I highlighted that last comment in my presentation, along with several other of my "favorite" official reasons for banning books - the Alabama school board that banned The Diary of Anne Frank in 1984 because it was "a real downer", the district that removed A Raisin in the Sun because it was "pornographic", the library that took Charlie and the Chocolate Factory out of circulation because it "might be hurtful to children without parents", and things of that nature - and pointed out that all of these were the same thing. This was somebody saying "I don't like this, therefore nobody should read it, and I shouldn't have to explain why." I also pointed out that if you can't give a good reason, the whole thing falls apart, and then I quoted "Smut" by Tom Lehrer:

All books can be indecent books, Though recent books are bolder, For filth, I'm glad to say, Is in the mind of the beholder. When correctly viewed, Everything is lewd. I can tell you things about Peter Pan And the Wizard of Oz - THERE'S a dirty old man...

Go back to that paragraph I mentioned earlier, about those books that I no longer recommend to anyone. Notice how I phrased that. I don't recommend them. I will tell you all the reasons why I don't think you should buy them. I will tell you all the problems with the author, with the franchise, with the writing. I wish they were out of print, I wish they were deeply unpopular, I wish nobody would ever read them again.

But I still won't advocate for banning them.

It's so easy to twist a justification. Look at what I quoted up there! A Raisin in the Sun was banned for being "pornographic". One of the websites I used as a source responded to that accusation with "Did they read the same play I did?" At the time, I thought the comment was funny. Now, twenty years later, I realize: It was a buzzword. It was a convenient label. At the time of the challenge, just saying "it's pornographic" was enough. Obviously you're not some kind of sicko who wants to hear about all the pornographic details, are you? Freak! That's pornography! And they're teaching it in schools! We should get rid of it!

A Raisin in the Sun, for anyone who didn't study it at any point or read it (or watch the movie, which was very good), is a play/movie about a black family in Chicago in the 1960s. The family matriarch has been in domestic service for years, but she's just received a very large insurance payment from her husband's death and is retiring. Wanting to give her family, especially her young grandson, a better life, she goes out and buys a house...in an otherwise exclusively white neighborhood. The head of the homeowner's association (essentially) comes to visit them and offers to pay them a substantial amount of money to not move into the neighborhood, because segregation isn't officially a thing and they can't legally stop them from moving in, but they don't want them there. There's a lot more that goes on in the play, and I highly recommend you go and read it, but the point is that there is nothing sexual or titillating in the entire thing. The closest we get is a scene where the daughter (Beneatha, a college student) is gifted a traditional African dress from her boyfriend, who's Nigerian, and he shows her how to put it on over the clothes she's already wearing, and maybe the scene where the daughter-in-law (Ruth, a laundress) accidentally reveals that, having found out she's pregnant, she's planning to have an abortion rather than bring another child into the world/have another mouth to feed.

It's not pornographic. But someone didn't want it taught in schools, so they called it that to get it banned.

It's so easy to twist labels. If you, a liberal, agree that books with X trait are okay to ban, the people who don't want books to exist will find a way to say they have X trait, and then what are you going to do, admit that you like that sort of thing? Sicko! Freak! Pervert!