Expecto Patronus

Lately I've been thinking about the Patronage of the early Romans, and how it fits into our current world. I forget whether I had it in mind before, but I started thinking more about it after seeing this Simon Sinek video on leadership and brain chemistry. Here he's saying that not only did we grow to be a species that relies on the group, but on one that is naturally hierarchical, which isn't something I personally like to hear, being deeply suspicious of hierarchies. But I'm not so stubborn so as to ignore it. Aha, but its not just hierarchical, its also reciprocal! Well of course it is, and we all know that, but something was clicking in my mind, and I started thinking about clientelism and where we are today.

Its not really like there was a codified law about patron-client relationships in ancient Rome so much as the relationship had grown organically and was then supported by law. Its hard to even think of a modern analogue, because, by its nature, its assumed. Maybe it is like how America is a capitalism: some people like to say the founders "chose" capitalism, but this isn't really true. There weren't other candidates; a market was just assumed. Its how things worked. Likewise Roman Clientelism was a background ideology; it was assumed. Toward the end of Republican Rome, some of the older, more conservative senators pointed to the diminishing of the patron-client relationship as a source of the growing political turmoil, which ultimately ended in Julius Caesar's populist driven coup and the rise of the Roman Empire. Whereas Rome had always had its hierarchies, its patricians and plebes, its various levels of slavery, its citizens and non-citizens, cities which were Roman and cities which were Italian client states, as people like Cato the younger saw it, there was always a kind of reciprocity: the clients worked for their patrons, but the patrons also had responsibilities to their clients. Toward the end of the Republican era, Rome had grown much stronger, the upper class citizens were taking less direct part in military matters and accruing more wealth toward themselves. Meanwhile the lower classes were seeing economic stagnation. In other words, Rome had reached a decadent phase after its successful military expansion, and now it was just sitting on its laurel leaves (I thought I was being funny here and quickly realized that, no, this is in fact the origin of the phrase "sitting on one's laurels").

During the latest NFL kneeling kerfluffle, the President of the United States dropped this line in an interview: speaking of the lack of action by the owners to punish those players kneeling, he says, "...I think they're afraid of their players, if you want to know the truth, and I think it's disgraceful." Many people jumped at this as "racial dog whistling", saying that its disgraceful for "white" owners to be afraid of their "black" players. Its not where I went. I don't want to put words in the President's mouth, and I don't want to say, "this is definitely what he meant!" But when I heard him say that, what I could not help but think of was this patron-client relationship. Because whether explicitly or implicitly, he's saying there's something "disgraceful" about an owner's actions being dependent upon considerations of his players, that authority is a one way street. There's no notion of reciprocity here, not even the consideration that owners 'should' be "afraid" of players, even though the whole enterprise relies on the players. Now ideally you don't want the leaders or the led to be afraid of one another; you want them to trust in one another. But this is in the context of the owners being called upon to discipline and even fire the players. So the owner's authority, his inspiring of fear, is actually considered a good thing here, but the reverse, the owner's fear of his players, upon whom he relies, is "disgraceful".

Our economic language betrays this understanding of reciprocity, or lack thereof, too. That a business's only business is making money, you'll see, is it's making money for "the patron", while "the client", the worker, is only there to make the money. The worker making money himself is just a happy accident. The idea of trickle down actually makes this explicit. That people on the bottom even make money is just the incidental byproduct of the wealthy getting wealthier. Heap upon this the Reaganian proclamation of "the business of America is business," and the ideology of non-reciprocity is spread and enshrined in all areas of life, public and private.
 
I think whatever we call this reciprocal relationship, forgetting that it exists is dangerous. The French Revolution, with its bloody terror, wasn't just an ideologically driven, Democratic endeavor. It happened because French people were starving, because the aristocracy could make more money selling grain overseas than to their own populace. The Bolshevik Revolution wouldn't have happened if the Csar was seeing to it that the starving Russian masses were fed; Csar Nicolas was the richest man in the world, and if he'd spent that wealth on feeding his populace, that poor country would not have borne witness to what was probably the most destructively psychotic regime the world has ever known. In American history you can see it happening over and over, the Gilded Age, the Roaring 20's followed by the Great Depression, etc. The pattern is something like Rise, Hubris, Fall, and we seem to be preoccupied with extending the hubris phase as long as possible, which is natural, because that's the phase when we can sit contentedly in our solipsistic time capsule and feel good about sitting on our laurels, because we earned it.