"To explain the concept 'nation' is stiffly upwind."
-Poul Anderson, "The Problem of Pain" IN Anderson, The Earth Book Of Stormgate (New York, 1979), pp. 23-48 AT p. 23.
What is odd to an Ythrian is that, within a Terrestrial nation-state, law and obligation are maintained less by usage and pride than by force:
"It is as if a single group could permanently cry Oherran against the rest of society..." (op. cit., p.24)
Each nation claims:
"...powers which are limited not by justice, decency, or prudence, but only by its own strength." (ibid.)
These strange claims are explained by human history just as the Ythrians' arrangements are explained by their distinctive biology and psychology.
A Jovian does not understand how a government can first rule, then be overthrown, because he does not understand how a leadership that did not benefit the people could have maintained itself in the first place. In Jovian environmental conditions, a Reeve who was not an efficient and successful master engineer would never have been a Reeve and his people would have remained barbarians. When Fraser explains that some human beings did think that this government benefited the people whereas others valued freedom more than security, Theor does not quite grasp this. Jovians primarily value survival.
18 comments:
Poul, I think, tended to over-romanticize settings like the Icelandic Republic where there's no real State structure. He gets the negative consequences of the State more or less right, but gets the context wrong, the context which makes the nearly universal adoption of the State explicable.
The primary selective force on human social organizations is how well they compete with their neighbors -- that is, how well they act as force-concentration mechanisms (using "force" in an engineering sense, rather than as merely violence).
The State is not "natural", in that it's an institutional invention probably made early in the Bronze Age -- though it's natural enough that it's been independently invented in many times and places (rather like written language).
It's spread to encompass the whole human species, more or less, over the past 5000 years or so because it outcompetes rival ways of organizing large-scale societies.
The most fundamental way it does this is by managing the violence function. In a "state of nature", the natural way for human beings (particularly males) to die is to be killed by other human beings (particularly males). There's a constant state of endemic low-level fighting, flaring up into massacre occasionally. The archaeological evidence on this is voluminous.
The invention of the State, an institution which claims and attempts to exercise a monopoly of violence within its borders, leads to a very sharp reduction in the amount of free-floating violence within those boundaries.(*)
This frees up huge amounts of energy for doing other things; you don't have to take a spear along to the outhouse, and you can plan for the future without having to be constantly concerned that a feuding neighbor is going to burn down whatever you make.
State-level societies have bigger wars, but on balance fewer of them. They also tend to expand at the expense of pre-State societies on their borders; by now, that's a rare situation since those tribal societies have more or less vanished.
(*) an initial drop in almost all forms of State-level organization, and then another very substantial one in the past few centuries, as innovations in institutions and technology made that monopoly much more enforceable.
The Jovians in that story have something that is roughly like what Marx expected of a fully Communist society -- that is, government is primarily a matter of governing things, rather than people. Being aliens, this is credible.
Mr Stirling,
Thank you very much. I was going to mention Marx but you did anyway. Your account has made me question the Marxist idea that the state is primarily necessary to maintain order in class-divided societies. Males killing each other all the time in pre-state societies counts against that idea.
Paul.
Still, classes and the state are related because both require an economic surplus.
Dear Mr. Stirling and Paul,
Mr. Stirling: very fascinating comments by you! I had some vague inklings along those lines, but you put it much more clearly than I would have. These comments of yours deserves to become a blog article, perhaps some what expanded.
Paul: and I simply don't agree with the Marxist emphasis on "class," because I think it is too simplistic and makes no allowance for how complex REAL human societies are. It makes no allowance for nuances, permutations, gradations, people rising or falling or simply being content with what they have, etc. Also, my view is that "upper" classes are that way partly because they tend to supply most of a society's leaders. And if the "lower" classes are satisfied with that, and believe these leaders to have power legitimately, that also makes Marxism less than convincing. Lastly, if it's possible for ambitious "underling" to become "upperlings," again that seems to undermine Marxism.
Sean
Sean,
I think we can see the importance of "class" as different relations to the means of production while acknowledging complexities, nuances etc. Of course people rise or fall and some are content etc.
Two men, A and B, sit at a table. A has a loaf, a knife and a coin. B has nothing. A lets B cut three slices and gives him the coin. B exchanges the coin for one slice. Each eats one slice and A stockpiles one. They repeat this exercise until A has stockpiled a tall pile. Then he lays B off. B holds out his cloth cap for a handout. A puts the coin in the cap, B exchanges the coin for one slice and they are back where they started.
A arms a third man, C, with the knife to prevent B from appropriating any bread, including the slices that he himself has cut.
Alternatively: all three men cut bread and the coin is not needed.
Paul.
Many of Mr Stirling's contributions deserve to be articles rather than combox comments.
Kaor, Paul!
I read your argument about A, B, and C, and I think I understand it. But, the problem is I don't believe it because it's simply not what happens in real life. A baker, for example, does not behave like this. He sells bread to anyone willing and able to buy it. And he can't charge prices much higher than production and labor costs because his customers would go to bakers (or stores) selling the same kind of bread at lower prices. That, along with its brutal politics, and many other reasons, is why I don't accept Marxism.
And I certainly agree with what you said about Mr. Stirling!
Sean
Sean,
The ABC argument is meant to describe the relationship between the owner of a bakery and his wage- or salary-earning employees.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Apologies for a partial misunderstanding of your argument. But, even so, I still don't believe it, because it's not what happens in real life. I personally go to a bakery once a week on average, and I have observed over the years many employees coming and going. And I don't believe their relations with the family who owns the bakery were like that. Some certainly must have been dismissed for one reason or another, but most must have left at their own choices for their own reasons. Not because "A" armed "C" to terrorize "B."
Sean
Sean,
No, of course not! I got the AB part of the argument from a book called THE RAGGED-TROUSERED PHILANTHROPISTS by Robert Tressell. I added the C part as a comment on the state, i.e., a man who has become unemployed because of overproduction will be prevented from stealing any of the goods that he needs, and might even have produced, by the forces of the state.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
But "overproduction" should lead to a lowering, in this context, of the price of bread and LESS need for any kind of "C" (which I would understand as a police force trying to keep robbery and theft under control). And less need or temptation on "B's" part to steal.
Also, "overproduction" in a real, more or less free enterprise economy tends to be be corrected by making LESS of the goods being overproduced. There's no profit in making more than what a market can absorb. So production will be cut back till prices rise again to levels customers will tolerate.
Sean
Sean,
OK. I have tried to summarize a particular analysis of the role of wages. The worker is consistently paid less than the value of what he produces. I find that this argument is also summarized in the Wiki article on Tressell's book.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
But I don't believe what Marxism says about wages. Because it does not fit what we actually see in the real world. Wages, in this context, is determined by how much customers are willing to pay for the goods being produced. See Bohm-Bawerke and Ludwig von Mises criticisms of Marxism.
Sean
Sean,
In the AB argument above, the loaf represents natural resources, the knife represents tools/machinery/means of production and the coin represents money so the focus was not meant to be on bakeries as such!
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Understood, I hope. I was perhaps focusing too literally on BAKERIES. (Smiles)
Sean
All human societies have sharp inequalities; they just don't manifest in the same way in more primitive ones.
(Historically attested hunter-gatherer societies aren't good models, because by the time literate observers were around they'd been pushed into marginal environments.)
For example, almost all primitives have a large class of "captives" (more or less slaves), mostly women and children taken in raids, who do a lot of the less pleasant work and serve to increase the followings and social prestige of "big men" and dominant warriors.
Catherine Cameron has a broad survey article on this in the latest "Scientific American".
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Considering how rotten we humans can be, I find all too easy to believe. And Poul Anderson, in the "Beringia" section of THE SHIELD OF TIME, has the invading paleo-Indians treating the primitive archaic Caucasians like that.
And I don't expect any human societies, both those which exist now and to come, to be wholly free of those "sharp inequalities."
Sean
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