There’s something important to learn from shows like Downton Abbey. Period dramas from what seems a very…

There’s something important to learn from shows like Downton Abbey. Period dramas from what seems a very different time, when many ordinary people were ‘in service’ to aristocracies. We assume we’ve progressed since those times. But the basic rules of social life never change. /1 https://t.co/KhEQ7vpGw5

Something about the series which isn’t much commented on is that it shows the entire social status hierarchy. Some of the complex interconnections between the different layers of society of that time. And all under one roof. And that’s an important thing. /2 https://t.co/jXiQseSqWn

Because it shows that in earlier times the fundamental interdependence of these ‘layers’ of society was much more fundamentally understood, the criticality of each role. It’s SO easy to approach a show like this with modern sensibilities, and simplistic ideas of progress. /3 https://t.co/z1x1ew7DzZ

Where we might say that we no longer have these status hierarchies, and working people are no longer servants to our more privileged people. But status hierarchies are and always will be societies. We need to look harder. We often hear about ‘service industries’. /4

And how they’re dominant in modern economies. The language hasn’t even changed, most of us are still ‘in service’. The name hasn’t even changed. What *has* changed is the close social ties between service workers, and their employers. /5 https://t.co/oNTwqFXELS

The employers no longer have skin in the game. No meaningful responsibility for the social well-being of their staff outside a strict labour hire relationship. Look at this photo, both ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’ sharing the same social space. /6 https://t.co/VlBE5r2GYz

Like the older show on a similar theme, with that name. Upstairs and downstairs are brilliant shorthand for social distinctions. Again, with our smug modern eye we can watch these shows and congratulate ourselves that life has ‘moved on’. /7 https://t.co/HTa2jP0qHQ

But our service industries show that the same social distinctions remain, and always will. What changes is our attention to them, and their interdependencies. Modern labour hire is much closer to slavery in its social model, than to an upstairs/downstairs social model. /8

Social relationships stripped of mutual obligation, only the work remains. Nothing in our modern lives functions without an enormous amount of interdependency between all peoples, as ‘lockdowns’ showed so graphically. But we’re not seeing that *socially*. /9

It’s like now we have upstairs people who never see, speak to or even think about the downstairs people, living in the same house. They can brutalise them, and if they don’t like it, they import new ones, often from overseas at much cheaper rates. Slavery, not service. /10

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with working to provide a service, it’s the most noble thing. But to no longer recognise that socially as a fundamental interdependency, where the fate of upstairs and downstairs are profoundly linked, is new. /11

Like ‘the vulnerable’, under Covid. Lots of hot air about protecting them, protection which never eventuates. Delusional assumptions that the upstairs of society can somehow live free of the interdependencies. Covid brought in downstairs will eventually reach upstairs. /12

And vice versa. And I think it’s a mistake to think upstairs is just that hyper-rich elite we hear so much about, the top 1% or 0.1%. You won’t find many people who know much about how many of our essential services are provided. /13

Egged on by the new decoupled upstairs, those services are some of the most popular targets of social ridicule and complaint. The council workers all standing around while one of them does all the shovelling, etc. Or to go back to Covid, such a revelation in so many ways. /14

The main reason so many believe the pandemic is over is because the ‘upstairs’ told them it is. They don’t so much disrespect the public health work the ‘downstairs’ public health people have always done, as not even know it exists. /15

Decades of services decoupled from mutual social obligations created the impression that things like the good health of populations just happened by itself. Similarly, in lockdowns many of us suddenly realised that the people who did essential things like harvest our food? /16

They’re not even downstairs people. They don’t live in the same country, they’re imported cheap labour hire. Again, more a slavery model. Not only no obligation to them, in that upstairs/downstairs way, but complete invisibility of the work they do. /17

The tension of social relationship of these shows is so instructive to revisit. That sense of everybody being in it together, everybody having skin in the game. These old households were a model of wider society. A model now in tatters. /18 https://t.co/j5aeN4cdZL

And importantly, both the series I’ve used as examples here showed this model in decline. The destruction of those old status hierarchies, mostly via the two world wars. Our fatal error was to assume that destruction alone was the social progress we needed. /19

What we forget is that we needed to invent new status hierarchies, for newer conditions, and critically hierarchies with mutual interdependencies recognised and cultivated. Instead we invented ‘market economies’ stripped of any recognition of interdependency at all. /20

Just 8 billion separate consumers, operating in supposedly free markets. A fantasy, that is destroying all societies. /end