Privilege > Stewardship

privilege(n.)

mid-12c. "grant, commission" (recorded earlier in Old English, but as a Latin word), from Old French privilege "right, priority, privilege" (12c.) and directly from Latin privilegium "law applying to one person, bill of law in favor of or against an individual;" in the post-Augustine period "an ordinance in favor of an individual" (typically the exemption of one individual from the operation of a law), "privilege, prerogative," from privus "individual" (see private (adj.)) + lex (genitive legis) "law" (see legal (adj.)).

From c. 1200 as "power or prerogative associated with a certain social or religious position." Meaning "advantage granted, special right or favor granted to a person or group, a right, immunity, benefit, or advantage enjoyed by a person or body of persons beyond the common advantages of other individuals" is from mid-14c. in English. From late 14c. as "legal immunity or exemption."

Formerly of such things as an exemption or license granted by the Pope, or special immunity or advantage (as freedom of speech) granted to persons in authority or in office; in modern times, with general equality of all under the law, it is used of the basic rights common to all citizens (habeas corpus, voting, etc.).

Privilege is also more loosely used for any special advantage: as, the privilege of intimacy with people of noble character. Prerogative is a right of precedence, an exclusive privilege, an official right, a right indefeasible on account of one's character or position: as, the Stuart kings were continually asserting the royal prerogative, but parliament resisted any infringement upon its privileges. [Century Dictionary]

Middle English also had pravilege "an evil law or privilege" (late 14c.), from Medieval Latin pravilegium, a play on privilegium by substitution of pravus "wrong, bad." White privilege, "preferential treatment of caucasians" is from 1960, originally in South African contexts, although there is an isolated American use from 1928.

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In 1066 England was not conquered by the nation of France but by William, Duke of Normandy, a powerful French vassal who crossed the Channel with a mixed army of Normans, Bretons, and Flemings and, after victory at Hastings, replaced the native Anglo-Saxon aristocracy with his own followers, laying the groundwork for centuries of French-speaking legal and administrative influence on English law. So, we cannot tell the history of English without understanding the powers that governed England.

French law shaped English jurisprudence for four centuries after the Norman Conquest: royal courts conducted pleas in Law French, imported terms such as assize, tort, felony, lien, and statute, and adopted the continental idea that rights and exemptions were grants from the sovereign, embedding in English legal culture the notion that privilege is a discretionary concession.

Twelfth-century France was a patchwork of local customs, not a kingdom of uniform laws: each barony, town, or village enforced its own coutume, and privilege meant the exemptions, tolls, or judicial rights a lord or king chose to concede. From the late 1100s kings such as Louis VI and Louis VII began offering written charters that granted towns self-government or freed individuals from serfdom, turning privilege into a negotiable commodity that eroded feudal autonomy and slowly recast royal favor, rather than birth alone, as the gateway to legal advantage

Louis IX (1226-1270) treated privilege as a royal commodity. By expanding the right of parlement—a centralized appellate court in Paris—he welcomed subjects to appeal baronial verdicts directly to the crown, letting royal bailiffs quietly gnaw away at feudal jurisdiction and turning local custom into a grant revocable by the king. The result was a new hierarchy in which nobles kept their titles only so long as they did not contradict royal ordinances; privilege became less an ancestral right than a license the crown could issue, suspend, or redefine.

At the same time, Louis redefined moral privilege. His ordinances criminalized blasphemy with mutilation or death and ordered Jews to wear a yellow badge, branding entire groups as legally suspect while claiming to protect Christian public order. Thus, the same monarchy that promised universal justice reserved the right to decide whose freedoms were protected and whose were sacrificed, making privilege under Louis IX both the carrot of royal favor and the stick of discretionary exclusion.

Had it not been for the laws passed at in the 14th century, the peasants who survived the Black Death would have held the whip hand: labor was suddenly scarce, wages were rising, and tenants could play lords against one another for better terms. Yet between the Statute of Labourers (1351) and a flurry of later parliamentary enactments, the crown froze wages at pre-plague levels, branded mobile workers as fugitives, and fined any employer who offered “excess” pay, choking off the market forces that would otherwise have shifted bargaining power to the countryside.

Within this crisis, “privilege” hardened into a purchasable commodity: lords and their bailiffs received formal exemptions from the labor statutes, merchants bought letters of protection that suspended suits for debt, soldiers carried royal pardons that cancelled felonies, and the king’s Chancery issued writs of immunity to courtiers and favored towns. By turning legal immunity into a revenue stream, the crown redefined privilege as an exemption from the common law that could be granted—or revoked—at the sovereign’s will.

Fast forward to March 1960 when white South African police opened fire on thousands of black protesters who were peacefully refusing to carry the passbooks that restricted their movement; sixty-nine people died at Sharpeville, and within weeks the all-white Parliament declared illegal the main anti-apartheid groups—the African National Congress (a multiracial coalition that favored non-violent protest) and the smaller Pan Africanist Congress (a black-oriented movement that had organized the demonstration). Overnight, it became a crime to belong to either body, and the government gave itself the power to jail anyone without trial, outlaw public meetings, and censor the press, crushing any open opposition.

In 1961, South Africa left the British Commonwealth and styled itself a republic while tightening racial segregation. Activists who had once marched in the streets now formed underground units; the most prominent, Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), tried sabotaging power lines and government buildings until police raided its headquarters in 1963. The ensuing Rivonia Trial ended with Nelson Mandela and seven fellow defendants sentenced to life in prison, a moment that silenced above-ground protest and entrenched a system in which legal privilege—immunity from pass laws, detention, and daily harassment—belonged only to the white minority while every black South African risked arrest for ordinary political activity.

By June 2020, as demonstrations over George Floyd’s death spread to every U.S. state, the phrase “white privilege” surged into everyday speech: protest placards, cable-news headlines, and corporate statements all pointed to the unearned protections—freedom from police scrutiny, presumption of innocence, access to safe public space—that whiteness still conferred while Black Americans were being killed on camera. The week’s marches made privilege visible by its temporary absence: curfews and National Guard patrols fell most heavily on Black neighborhoods, while many white protesters noted they could march past police lines unhassled, turning the abstract idea of privilege into a lived contrast experienced block by block.

Between 31 May and 6 June 2020, Google Trends recorded sharp spikes for the word “privilege” in six countries—Burkina Faso, Singapore, the Philippines, Qatar, Canada, and the UK—each attaching the term to its own fracture of class, race, and unaccountable power. In Ouagadougou the conversation was driven by jihadist curfews and November-election corruption scandals that made simple freedom of movement or media access a purchasable privilege, while Singaporean Twitter threads dissected “Chinese privilege” inside a majority-minority parliament and Philippine Facebook groups argued over who still qualified for balik-bayan visa-free entry and duty-free exemptions as borders stayed sealed. Qatar’s English-speaking timelines turned the airline’s frequent-flyer “Privilege Club” into a metaphor for Gulf labour hierarchies, and in Toronto and London the same hashtag that framed white immunity in Minneapolis was borrowed to question why cabinet ministers and corporate litigants could claim legal-professional privilege while pandemic contracts were redacted.

The shared grammar of 2020, stitched together by George Floyd protests and lockdown inequalities, let each country translate “privilege” into a local grievance—yet the search surge showed one simultaneous moment when the world rehearsed the same sentence: some people’s safety, voice, or exemption is bought at the expense of everyone else’s.

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The axis of privilege revolves around money. It’s no wonder so many seek it for themselves and their kin as a way of breaking out of these unjust control structures. However, the status quo doesn’t let you go so easily. You can’t quite buy your way to freedom. It’s the lie at the center of the Tootsie Roll Tootsie Pop. It’s the very definition of the Devil’s Bargain.

Fifteen years after Kid Cudi sang “I'm on the pursuit of happiness and I know everything that shine ain't always gonna be gold. Hey, I'll be fine once I get it, I'll be good,” he speaks openly in his new memoir about being shut in his house to avoid the crowds and developing a cocaine addiction to cope with the pressure. At the time of this writing, this video has 321MM views, a testament to how pervasive this meme is in the common frequency.

The move one makes to claim their birthright to sovereignty is available to everyone, or else it’s the case that we live in a fundamentally unjust universe. The point was never to suffer, the point is to learn. We are unrolling the scrolls of justice now. The generations most recently born attuned directly to the seismic faultline of this corruption and will stand for it no more.

The Devil’s Bargain genuinely paid out for the Boomers. They benefited greatly from the new invention of the mortgage loan. For Gen X, the bargain paid out less, but still sort of worked if you played by the rules. Millenials absolutely weren’t buying it since inflation of home prices, medical insurance, college, etc made it clear that the American Dream was a fantasy.

The Boomers will not be in power much longer. Trump versus Biden saw the oldest candidates ever for president. Soon, they will all be gone. They will be replaced by those of an entirely different sensibility towards race, gender, sexuality, money, law, and power.

Stewardship

stewardship(n.)

"position, function, or responsibilities of a steward," mid-15c., steuardship, from steward (n.) + -ship. Specific ecclesiastical sense of "responsible use of resources in the service of God" is from 1899.

steward(n.)

Middle English steuard, steward, "official in charge of the domestic affairs of a (large) household," from Old English stiward, stigweard "one who has charge of the affairs of the household or estate of another," from stig "hall, pen for cattle, part of a house" (see sty (n.1)) + weard "guard" (from Proto-Germanic *wardaz "guard," from PIE root *wer- (3) "perceive, watch out for"). But OED writes that there is "no grounds for" presuming an origin as "keeper of a (pig) sty."

It was used after the Conquest as the equivalent of Old French seneschal (q.v.) and applied to royal or imperial households and became the title of a class of high officers of the state in early England and Scotland.

The meaning "overseer of workmen" is attested from c. 1300; the general sense of "one who manages affairs of an estate on behalf of his employer" is by late 14c. The sense of "officer on a ship in charge of provisions and meals" is by mid-15c.; extended to trains by 1906. The meaning "person who supervises arrangements" at a meeting, dinner, etc., is from 1703.

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Luke 12:48 reads, “Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required”

The idea that those who receive more must answer for more is older than Luke; it appears in Greek notions of accountable office, where magistrates could be audited or exiled for misusing public resources, and in Near-Eastern palace cultures that required stewards to render detailed accounts of goods entrusted to them. By the classical period Plato and Aristotle were already arguing that rulers hold power as a stewardship for the common good, a theme later echoed in Jewish and Roman texts that treat authority as a temporary trust rather than possession]. Luke 12:48 crystallized this widespread ancient intuition into a single Christian maxim, but the underlying concept—that privilege and responsibility rise together—was already circulating in the Mediterranean world centuries before the gospel was written.

The Hermetic Principle of Correspondence—“as above, so below; as within, so without”—treats the universe as a single, self-similar organism in which every action at any scale reverberates through every other scale. If the same ratios govern atom, heart, ecosystem, and galaxy, then the boundary between “my” family and “your” tribe is an optical illusion; harm done to distant nodes eventually loops back to the point of origin.

Stewardship therefore cannot stop at kin or clan without violating the very symmetry the principle proclaims: to tend only one part is to destabilize the whole, and since the whole is mirrored in each part, genuine caretaking must extend outward until it includes the entire interconnected web—future generations, other species, and the planetary systems on which everyone, knowingly or not, depends.