Emily’s Hypocrisy (Or Lack Thereof)

Emily’s Hypocrisy (Or Lack Thereof)

Half my family is ill, so I wound up doing this instead of continuing with The Family Secret.  Sigh.

There’s been some chatter in reviews of The Face of the Enemy and Child of Destiny that can be summarised as ‘Emily is a hypocrite because she is opposing someone who is trying to do the exact same thing she did in Cockatrice, just on a bigger scale.’  Obviously, as David Weber would put it, I disagree with that assessment.  And this is roughly why:

First, Emily is a child of our world.  She is not, by modern standards, any kind of paleoconservative.  Even if she was, and she went to a world that operates on very medieval principles, they would see her as the liberalist liberal who ever liberaled.  She has imbued attitudes towards other people, such as the radical idea that people aren’t property or the even more radical concept of might not making right, that are quite alien to her new world.

Seriously. You put a far-right guy somewhere 200 years into the past and he’ll be so far to the left Karl Marx will think he’s a cloudcookoolander.

Anyway, Emily does not believe she has the right to treat people as her personal slaves and/or to treat them as objects.  There’s a little nuance here – she believes one has to stand up for people who can’t stand up for themselves – but generally she’ll leave people alone as long as they leave others alone.

Second, Emily in Cockatrice is not Scarlet O’Hara in Tara.  She has no emotional connection to the barony, let alone any real belief that both the land and the people who work it are her property.  There’s no incentive, as far as she is concerned, to keep the barony because it is hers or to perpetrate a retrograde social system because she’s on top and/or because she believes it’s her duty to her family.  She also has the great advantage that most of the barony’s former elite have been attainted for treason or, if underage, King Randor’s de facto wards rather than being in any position to oppose her.

In short, when faced with the task of re-ordering the barony, Emily’s prime motivation was not her own wealth, power and glory.

Third, when she started, she basically handed out land like candy.  She did an assessment, between Lessons in Etiquette and Study in Slaughter, and generally gave out the land to the people who worked it (who were basically tied to land they didn’t own, de facto slaves, before Emily came along).  She didn’t want to keep the land, beyond the castle itself, and therefore did her best to make sure it went to the people who wanted it.  She also, given her prominence within the barony, took the time to reorder the laws, wipe out half-remembered agreements or documents written in ways the slaves couldn’t read, and generally make sure things were put on a more stable basis.

She also did a degree of tax reform.  Peasants had to give up one tenth, in cash or kind, and everything after that was theirs.

Remember, Emily spent most of her life studying history.  She knows that proper land and taxation reform can make the difference between successful states and failures.

Fourth, beyond this point, Emily let people do more or less as they pleased, relying on their self-interest to do the rest.  Farmers knew how to get more crops from their lands, they were just reluctant to do it – understandably – when their local landlords took pretty much everything beyond they little they needed to survive.  And it worked.  Crop production boomed, triggering off demands for similar reforms in other baronies or mass flight when the local landlords decided to be stubborn.  The sudden surplus brought in more money, which continued to fuel a growing economic boom.  It also made it harder, for the handful of young aristocrats as they came of age, to put the genie back in the bottle.  Emily wasn’t going to help them, they no longer had indentured servants to put to work or armsmen to beat up the unwilling and the king (and later the queen) wasn’t particularly interested in rocking the boat.

Obviously, you can make a case Emily stole their patrimony – and they certainly would.  But Emily wouldn’t be remotely sympathetic to their claim.  As far as she is concerned, there’s no moral difference between powerless serfs tied to their overlords and outright slaves.  They are not property and she wouldn’t go along with anything that would reduce them to servitude once again.

The point is, Emily did very little (relatively speaking).  She set up the basics, ensured a degree of fair play and equality before the law (another radical concept) and little else. 

This isn’t true of others.  Some of Emily’s opponents really do see their subordinates as property.  Others think they have a right to rule through blood or magic.  And still others, including her final enemy, think they know what’s best for everyone and therefore that they have a right to impose their own order, regardless of the opinion of the people being imposed upon.  They think they not only have the right to take control, but they actually can do it.

Emily knows this is not going to work.  The aristocrats, with their bloodlines, will decay rapidly.  The historical pattern suggests successful kings are followed by unsuccessful sons.  The fascistic concept that magic means power and the right to rule also means that the fascist will eventually, inevitably, be overthrown by a greater fascist or plunge their country/family into a war they cannot win.  And the belief someone knows better is almost always nothing more than wishful thinking.  It is impossible for someone at the top of the tree to know everything that is going on, let alone make adjustments for it.  Even with the best will in the world, you will be overwhelmed by the sheer mass of detail and eventually disaster will become inevitable.  The USSR could never compete with the US because central command and control was simply inefficient, as well as providing powerful perverse incentives for someone to cook the books.

In short, which is a bit of a joke after a thousand or so words , Emily does not see herself as imposing her ideals on everyone, but ensuring a degree of fair play, a clear understanding of the rules and other incentives to both reward hard work and penalise people who try to cheat the system.  It is not perfect, but – from her point of view as a history student – better than many other possible approaches. 

YMMV, of course.