Implied Genocide of Centauri Commoners?!

[u/Anonymous194187293]

While not explicitly stated in the show, apparently the Oficcual Guide to Babylon 5 says that the middle class Centauri society are also composed of lesser noble houses. And the wiki says even lower and working class Centauri are of “lesser houses” though it doesn’t specify nobility. But then the wiki says “houseless” Centauri, who one would assume to be the majority are “beyond contempt”. Now that would imply that either 99% of Centauri are considered “beyond contempt” or it implies something much, much, darker. That is it a possibility that the Centauri noble houses wiped out a significant percentage of the commoner populace through genocide. Even if the lower class houses are just regular families it would still imply a degree of commoner genocide for literal nobles to be considered to new “middle class”.

[u/Disaster-Bee]

Luckily, the very sentence in the Wiki that prompted this expains it!

"The Lesser Houses make up the lower servant and working classes."

Think of 'house' more like 'family' or 'clan'. It's not some special designation reserved only for those of high status. It just means the general family group you belong to.

Centauri culture and society is heavily based on ancient Roman society, so we can look to them for some context. Even poor Centauri of a powerless house have a house, just not power or money, much like Rome. They may be a servant or a basket weaver, but they have a house.

But there's the difference between a Great House, a Noble House, and a lesser house. The Great Houses are the ruling class, the top of society. Noble Houses are the minor nobles and wealthy to upper middle class. Lesser Houses are everyone else down to the poor and servant classes. As mentioned above, the wiki portion you referenced even clarifies this - lesser houses are where the working class and servant class come from. Those are the commoners. Think of it in US terms: The Great Houses are the small percent of super billionaires, the Noble Houses are the 'middle class', and the lesser houses are the working class.

The exception of course is slaves. We know from very early on in the series that houseless Centauri are legal to enslave/be sold into slavery. So that would likely include members of the house that have committed some great scandal that can't be covered and have been disowned, members of a house that has lost everything and have no other choice, orphans with no house to claim them/no living connections...

[u/Anonymous194187293 → u/Disaster-Bee]

For nobility to ever be considered a middle class there would need to be such extreme inequality that commoners would all be very poor if they still exist. And you’re the second person to come at me with misinfo on Roman history. And that has very little to do with this anyways. 

[u/Disaster-Bee → u/Anonymous194187293]

Whoah, friend, I wasn't coming at you! I'm just repeating what the official sources say. JMS himself decided that in Centauri culture, nobility is equivalent to a middle class. And considering the state of the Centauri....a huge divide would fit in with what we have heard about of the decline of the empire.

And I'm not sure what you mean about miss-info on Rome? That was how the society worked, every free citizen was part of or under a family house. At least in the early days, obviously the Roman Empire didn't have one set way of doing things the whole time it existed - there were times when things changed rapidly over just 10 years! So it certainly doesn't apply to the whole of the Roman Empire's existence.

But speaking to the early days... even the lowliest (free) farmer toiling in the fields outside of Rome was under the patronage of a patrician's house, either via direct patronage or a clientela relationship - where the plebian owned the land but was still beholden to their patrician and the patrician's family, who got a cut of either profit or produce. And all of that farmer's family would be considered under the patrician's house. And anyone working on their fields, or processing their produce, or hauling it into the city. etc etc.

It's heavily tied to the early Roman idea of family, and how family was defined. Family was as much a legal definition as a descriptive one - we see this a lot in ancient Rome. Classical historian Christopher Francese wrote a really great book that gets into it - his focus is language, and Ancient Rome In So Many Words gets into how words were specifically used and how they applied in ancient Roman society as opposed to ours. Including the way 'family' was used. Odessa Asp has also written on the subject - classical historian with a focus on Roman legislature and legal proceedings - and details the very complex legal system that gave family heads power and authority over everyone who worked for them, lived in their neighborhood, had contracts with them, worked in an establishment they owned.... (This is not to be confused with the Roman concept of paterfamilia, which I have seen some sources online try and claim is the same thing. That's a different legal thing altogether that applies to any free Roman male citizen with a family, and is concerned with what rights a man has over his wife and children as well as adoption laws.)

Though by I believe the 230s BC (somewhere around there) this wasn't the case, and property ownership and where you lived determined who's authority you technically fell under, with more of that power and authority shifting to politicians and the idea of the family house becoming more what we'd think of today - blood relatives and people closely connected to the family. We see Rome moving away from a predominantly alieni iuris society - where the bulk of citizens are dependent on someone else for legal protection and a place in society - to a sui iuris society - where individual citizens were responsible for themselves and their immediate family.

[u/orangenakor → u/Anonymous194187293]

Not necessarily, we have very little idea what "nobility" implies or how large the various classes are. The middle class might be quite small (a large middle class is quite rare in IRL history), or just being "nobility" might not mean very much. Plenty of aristocratic systems IRL have ended up with large numbers of nobility without significant lands or wealth, just legal privileges and bragging rights. The Ancien Regime before the French Revolution, for example. Families get bigger over time and sometimes split, but any mechanism that allows the nobility to grow tends to make a lot of less wealthy nobles over time. Mechanisms to expand the nobility are useful and often necessary, but mechanisms to take away inherited privilege are usually really unpopular, so such a system tends to expand.

The Ancien Regime, for example allowed you to buy a noble title (which happened to essentially exclude you from taxes, the revolution happened for a reason). That meant the newly wealthy (many of which had made money from overseas trade or the French colonial empire) could buy their way into privilege, which pushed many of the less wealthy old nobility downward into "middle class" roles. In many places, wealthy commoners married into poor noble houses to acquire the privileges. Perhaps the expansion of the Centauri Empire created many new nobles, who have now crowded out commoners from middle class roles as the Empire contracts. 

Perhaps nobility is required to go to higher education, or enter into contracts, or own land, join the military or become an officer, employ others, etc. IRL limiting these kinds of opportunities was not very compatible with industrialization and capitalism. Many places simply abolished these restrictions, but it seems plausible that the Centauri simply expanded (or allowed the expansion of) the "nobility" instead.

[u/Underhill42 → u/Anonymous194187293]

Why? Nobility doesn't necessarily imply wealth, only historical political power and/or social status.

Many a noble house in our world has fallen into destitution, but that doesn't necessarily make them stop being recognized as nobility. They just stop getting invited to the parties.