The Dangers of Economic Polarization: A Cautionary Tale

Burial chamber of the Sutton Hoo ship-burial 1, England. Reconstruction shown in the Sutton Hoo Exhibition Hall.

I feel another blog entry coming on.

I’m currently reading a fascinating book by Robin Fleming entitled Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise 400 to 1070. Fleming has a trajectory that is *not* in the direction of the typical book about this poorly documented period in British history, a trajectory that tells the story of elites, of kings and bishops and warring kingdoms. Instead she focuses mostly on the lives of everyday people and what their lives were like. There are very few written records of the lives of ordinary people but there is an archaeological record. In particular, burials give a good idea of the economic circumstances in which people lived. Not just burials either. You have to take your garden variety mound burial with a grain of salt. People were buried in their Sunday best, not the equivalent of the t-shirt and stained jeans that they wore to paint the garage. Burials often contain remnants of cloth, jewelry, and bones and teeth which will indicate the sort of diet the person had in various times in their lives.  House sites indicate the living conditions of different classes, if “class” is a word you can use in this unorganized period of British history.

Fleming’s thesis is that in the third and fourth centuries Britain became economically polarized. Increasing Romano Britons built elaborate villas and the island became almost a bit of a resort. Meanwhile, average people struggled to make ends meet. As the third century continued the economy began to include more and more goods, especially ceramics, made in Britain and sold to Britons. Small villages began to form while cities began to decline.

Eventually by the later fourth century the economic polarization and the weakening of Rome’s grip on the island through invasions from the north caused the economic and social structure to collapse in the matter of a few decades. Cities and villages disappeared and the island became a large landscape with farms. Cities such as London and York (to name two) lay uninhabited. The large villas in which wealthy elite entertained their high status friends fell into ruin and were gradually demolished by locals looking for ready made building materials.

It wasn’t until the sixth century, along with the re-introduction of Christianity and the gradual immigration of Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and other Germanic peoples, that cities began to come to life again. Villages and towns began to form, and the Church in Britain grew by leaps and bounds. The stratification of society began again, with local families who had talent gradually grew into higher status dynasties. Burials record this shift. If you could afford to bury your loved one with a valuable brooch, sword or other prestige item you had money. Some local families eventually raised up sons who became chieftains and later kings, and thus established the foundation of the British nobility that still exists today.

Although Fleming doesn’t use this term, this is essentially an apocalyptic scenario. It’s a cautionary tale, and an important one to remember. When societies reach the point that a small minority own the majority of wealth in a society they’re headed for trouble. This has been a political issue, rightly so, in the last several Presidential elections, and will certainly be a major issue in 2020. I’m not going to suggest that our society and economy is on the verge of collapsed, although for some it has already collapsed, such as the family that files for bankruptcy because they have depleted their life savings to pay for treatment for cancer, or the homeless person on the street in any major US city who needs but does not have basic mental health care and who dies on a park bench from exposure in a late fall cold snap, one that most people are aware of only because they bump the thermostat up a couple of degrees. Some scientists argue that we are already too late to retreat from catastrophic disaster

We could be heading for an apocalyptic scenario that might involve the collapse of the Internet, and various other elements of life that we take for granted. We must address the inequality in our society or it will turn around and bite us in a most uncomfortable way when we don’t expect it.

We've come to the point in the United States when the individual is supreme. What I want is more important than anything else. The immediate problem with this, however, is that each of of nearly 300 million people may want something different. There will be conflict. The conflict is between the self-interest of the 1% and the interest of those without adequate resources to meet their daily needs. This self-interest manifests itself in how elites carry themselves in society, from the way they drive to how they behave when told that they can't have what they want when they want it. We could easily go down the drain unless something changes.