Why Lord Grantham is Such a Nice Guy
"After all, if this show were set in the early 1600’s, then yes, perhaps it would be a little strange for him to be such a great guy. But that’s probably because, in the early 17th century, the perks of being an aristocrat were things like raping the servants’ daughters and taxing your indebted tenants until they went broke and you could throw them off the land to starve. Having conquered the country by the sword – literally and metaphorically – the aristocracy kept their position because they had access to real political and economic power, and they used that power to keep their position.
That’s what real class antagonism is, the relatonship between the powerful who use their power to benefit themselves and the weak whose subjection to it makes them objects of exploitation. In industrial capitalism, this antagonism is the exploitation of labor; in agricultural economies, it’s based around rents and debt peonage. But the principle is similar enough, and in both cases, the antagonism flows out of real – and violent, when necessary – relations of power. It is because the aristocracy needs its victims that it violates them into submission and consent, producing – in the mind of the master – the Hegelian master-slave dynamic by which the master is actually, apparently paradoxically, dependent on the slave for his position. But it isn’t a paradox; the industrialist needs the laborer, and the lord needs the peasant, and because they need them, they use force to keep them.
Grantham is something very different than this. Rather than an aristocrat trying to cope with a modern world of industrial capitalism, he’s the author of a fantasy, using a wealth stream from America to recreate a “traditional” world that never really existed “Downton Abbey” – the house – is a museum and a show-piece, a theme-park for a single American tourist, and Downton Abbey – the show – is a behind-the-scenes narrative about its maintenance.
As a result, he has no reason to be anything but benevolent. Unlike a real landlord or capitalist – whose dependency on exploited labor necessitates violence or the threat of it – Grantham is dependent only on his wife’s money. And since he has that, he’s not dependent on much of anything at all; there is no Hegelian drama for him, here, no vexed relationship with the human beings he must dehumanize to maintain the hierarchy which positions him above them. He’s already got everything he needs; his only job is to enjoy it."
http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/zunguzungu/the-earnestness-of-being-grantham/
