One idea in my essay is that it’s easier to look at the structure, and see what type of relationship it’s compatible with, than to evaluate how exploitative the relationship is. Feudalism’s relationships were claimed to be mutually beneficial. You could spend a lot of time arguing whether that was the case; or you could just look at the structure, and say, “Hmm, evidence against.”
Evidence against what, exactly? My point is that compared to the typical conflicting relationships between living things studied by biologists, which can often be accurately described in terms of the standard patterns of predator/prey, parasite/host, etc., human relationships are usually too complex to make correct analogies with such simple patterns. To take a prominent example, simplistic biological analogies between human societies and non-human species have traditionally been a rich source of mind-killing political propaganda—just think of various occasions when some identifiable group was called “parasitic” by their political enemies.
Therefore, if you want to analyze feudalism or some other historical social order in terms of analogies with non-human species, you should explain why you believe that the analogies are applicable. I’m not dismissing your basic idea as fundamentally unsound—but I do believe that humans represent a very large evolutionary step over other species, enough to make many universal rules about non-human organisms inapplicable to humans, or applicable only under complex conditions and assumptions. In particular, it seems to me that while the notions of “exploitation” versus “mutual benefit” are fairly easy to define for (most?) non-human species, the way they should be generalized to human societies is not at all obvious.
Feudalism’s relationships were claimed to be mutually beneficial.
They did have benefits, and those benefits seem to fit in nicely with the model you presented. What the exploiter (lord, baron, earl, king, etc) gives to the subject is protection from other exploiters who may be worse or who at very least will be ‘more’. Even enforcing laws would just be modelled here as preventing exploitive relationships. If Y is exploited by X then X will benefit from killing potential exploiter Z. This is a ‘mutual benefit’ in the X-Y relationship but it does not suggest ‘mutualistic’, in the defined sense.
One idea in my essay is that it’s easier to look at the structure, and see what type of relationship it’s compatible with, than to evaluate how exploitative the relationship is. Feudalism’s relationships were claimed to be mutually beneficial. You could spend a lot of time arguing whether that was the case; or you could just look at the structure, and say, “Hmm, evidence against.”
Evidence against what, exactly? My point is that compared to the typical conflicting relationships between living things studied by biologists, which can often be accurately described in terms of the standard patterns of predator/prey, parasite/host, etc., human relationships are usually too complex to make correct analogies with such simple patterns. To take a prominent example, simplistic biological analogies between human societies and non-human species have traditionally been a rich source of mind-killing political propaganda—just think of various occasions when some identifiable group was called “parasitic” by their political enemies.
Therefore, if you want to analyze feudalism or some other historical social order in terms of analogies with non-human species, you should explain why you believe that the analogies are applicable. I’m not dismissing your basic idea as fundamentally unsound—but I do believe that humans represent a very large evolutionary step over other species, enough to make many universal rules about non-human organisms inapplicable to humans, or applicable only under complex conditions and assumptions. In particular, it seems to me that while the notions of “exploitation” versus “mutual benefit” are fairly easy to define for (most?) non-human species, the way they should be generalized to human societies is not at all obvious.
They did have benefits, and those benefits seem to fit in nicely with the model you presented. What the exploiter (lord, baron, earl, king, etc) gives to the subject is protection from other exploiters who may be worse or who at very least will be ‘more’. Even enforcing laws would just be modelled here as preventing exploitive relationships. If Y is exploited by X then X will benefit from killing potential exploiter Z. This is a ‘mutual benefit’ in the X-Y relationship but it does not suggest ‘mutualistic’, in the defined sense.