Oh you of little imagination. The more interesting question is this: would 1215 with iPods be better than 2020 with iPods? If not, why not? See, we aren't talking about technological advancement, we're talking about ideology and politics
Technological advancement inherently shapes (and is shaped by) ideology and politics, so this is incoherent. "The world of 1215, but with iPods" is a contradiction in terms. The world of 1215 could not support iPods or their technological requirements (electricity, the internet, plastics, silicon circuitry, etc.) without radical shifts in its ideology and politics, unless it were reliant on imports from outside. Which would make it dependent on those imports, and hence on a world which was not that of 1215.
Well, I have no doubt that whatever form of interstellar government may arise probably will be feudal or similarly decentralised in structure, owing to the difficulty of transport and communication across such vast distances. But on the shorter-run timeframe, what we are more likely to see if the "tech overlords" win is something similar to the rule of the Chinese Mandarins.
Also, why do you seem to view these developments favourably? If you think the "tech overlords", given governmental authority, would be favourably disposed towards traditionalist Catholicism - or conservative Christianity in general - I have a bridge in New York City and an acre of swampland in Florida to sell you. Unless it doesn't matter to you that the lords are Christian or even moral in a more basic, "virtuous pagan"-style sense, save that they are lords?
Yeah, I'm still not convinced you're right on this.
"My own intuitions on what
Soviet Russia feudal Japan must have been like according to my ideological beliefs trump actual historical reports from
Soviet Russia feudal Japan!"
And you avoided my question - would you bare your neck to the sword so that the nobleman's status in society over you might be affirmed? Are you willing to put your money where your mouth is, to live and die according to your conviction that "peasants shouldn't live like lords"?
Second, I doubt that the creation of gunpowder was THE factor. I think the rise of the modern state under centralizing monarchies is a much more salient factor. Noble power didn't decentralize during the rise of firearms, it centralized, and then was usurped by merchants.
Which is why even in countries which didn't go through a period of absolute monarchy like England and the Netherlands, the merchant classes still took the reins of political power? Feudalism rose in a context where the West Roman urban civilisation had collapsed, and heavy cavalry (which required a great deal of land to support) was becoming the major factor in warfare due to technical developments (the selective breeding of far stronger warhorses, and the stirrup).
When the context for these ended (that is, when bureaucratic structures and professional armies similar to those of Rome were redeveloped, along with new military innovations that weakened the dominant position of the heavy cavalryman), feudalism ended and political power returned from the castles back to the cities (where it had been in Classical times, and never really left in areas where the Roman Empire never underwent wholesale civilisational collapse), which had become the domain of the merchant class (and so they eventually ended up holding the reins).
One should note that it's not even the merchant class who took sole power in the early modern period, but a coalition of them, the urban aristocracy, and the lower-ranking rural aristocracy. And that in certain cases the line between the burghers and the aristocracy was blurred - one can think of the ruling class of
La Serenissima, or the House of Medici, who lived lavish lifestyles and possessed great political might but whose wealth and power came from trade and banking respectively (and it's ironic that you extoll the feudal aristocracy while also deploring rent as a source of income (to the point you said all accumulation of wealth not based directly on physical labour was immoral, including
an author wanting to earn money from a book he was trying to get published), given that the entire economic basis of the feudal ruling class was rent-as-labour provided by serf-tenants, which is where the modern term "land-
lord" comes from ).
Let it not be said that the feudal aristocracy was wholly a source of negativity for the countries where they held power - they were generally good leaders, provided the backbone of Europe's military might in an age where it faced continuous threat of invasion from the north, east and south, and produced a decent sampling of genuinely noble individuals. But they were far from the eidolons of pure and just rule subject to foul betrayal from scheming kings and burghers that you present them as.
And it's not as if the absolutising monarchs were wholly unjustified in taking power from the feudal aristocracy in the manner that you present them as being, given the constant trouble they caused for them and their realms.
The assumption that aristocrats inherently have noblesse oblige is ridiculously wrong as well - in Europe that only happened due to Christianity, and even then imperfectly. Meanwhile in feudal Japan they were literally slaughtering passing peasants just to test the sharpness of their shiny new katanas ...
It's worth noting that the idea that "self-made-men" inherently have no sense of noblesse oblige also isn't borne out by actual history. Namely the philanthropic endeavours of the "rags-to-riches" tycoons of the 19th century, or the behaviour of the "dollar-a-year men" of America's early 20th century wars.
