The Sanctified Status Quo

In medieval Europe, goods and services were often provided by members of a guild which were part of the economic and political fabric of society just as corporations are today. The guilds defined the education system, methods of payment, and cost of goods and services. They also served as mutual benefit societies, a forerunner of the insurance business, today.

The guild system seems very organic and logical to me. The people who could produce goods organized to protect their personal livelihood and way of life and to snuff out competition by force or threat. However, obviously, the guilds were eventually supplanted by the market system and, ultimately, by mass industry and the sort of businesses we're used to today.

At the turning of an age, the arguments for the new modes and orders are couched in the language of greater good versus corruption and the new men cast themselves as spokesmen of the divine, or at least of the good itself rather than beneficiaries of new systems. In the case of the guilds, the new modes of production were ostensibly more efficient than the traditional ways, e.g. manufacturing nails in a factory was more efficient than apprentices producing nails to learn basic blacksmith skills. The guild way of life was supplanted in favor of managers and accountants maximizing profits, i.e. money tokens, and making work as mindless and systematic as possible, what my high school history teacher used to call running the gloppita-gloppita machine.

In almost every case, the ex post facto explanation for historical change is that the winner was fundamentally superior and shows divine providence at work. The realization that the status quo is arbitrary rather than sanctified or divine is a tough one to internalize without becoming a complete nihilist.