At the ancestral Falkayn home, Hornbeck, there is brown soil, cool air and scrunching of boots on gravel: three senses.
"Far overhead a steelwing hovered, alert for prey."
-Mirkheim, XVI, p. 215.
See also The End Of A Stone In Heaven.
Falkayn says of Benoni Strang:
"'...he's taking his chance to get revenge. Or to right old wrongs, he'd say. Same thing.'" (p. 223)
Not the same thing, although an aristocrat might think so. If every righting of a wrong were mere reprehensible revenge-taking, then it would follow that no wrong should ever be righted. Falkayn did much to right several wrongs in that earlier, shorter Polesotechnic League culmination, "Lodestar." I remembered that while writing this.
15 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And I agree more with Falkayn than I do with you. The "wrongs' Benoni Strang complained about are too petty, objectively considered, to excuse the increasingly tyrannical means he used for "correcting" them. No, it still looks more like a seeking of revenge on Strang's part for personal disappointments or setbacks earlier in life.
Sean
Sean,
Of course Strang's tyrannical means are wrong. That at least is agreed. Contrast how Falkayn helped Supermetal members to help themselves. I regard the structural inequities of Hermetian society as very far from petty.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And I don't think those "structural inequities" to be worse than any number of very similar things you can find in the US.
Good, we agree the means and methods of Strang were wrong and bad.
Sean
Sean,
Well, obviously. I want to see social changes legitimized by mass action, not imposed by military force. What can be found in the US (or the UK) is not my criterion of what is acceptable, though!
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
However regrettable snobbery and corrupt means of advancing one's ambitions are, I don't believe they can ever be completely eliminated in any human society. The best that can be done is to limit them. And NO "mass action" will ever be able to do that.
Sean
Sean,
But unequal numbers of votes can be ended by legislation.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I don't think the idea of "weighted" votes is necessarily bad. For instance, the US has an Electoral College for electing the President. Every state's electors is the sum of its members in the US House of Representatives and the Senate. And since every state has the same number of senators, two, that gives more "weigh" to the votes of the smaller states over those of the more populous states. There has been bitter complaints by many Democrats over how that "disproportionately" empowers the smaller states. And I DISAGREE with those complaints. This weighing of the votes of the smaller states was designed to be a check on MAJORITARIAN abuses of power. To prevent the US from being completely dominated by a mere seven or so populous states.
If Hermes has similar arrangements, for checking and distributing power, I would regard them with sympathy!
Sean
Sean,
Maybe you can reread the relevant passages and see whether you think that their different numbers of individual votes, going down to none for Travers, is appropriate.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I do recall that while the Travers don't have the vote, they are also not taxed. In other words, there are trade offs and compensations.
Sean
Sean,
Yes but surely not acceptable ones!
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Arguments against? Yes. But also arguments FOR. I would point out that the kind of gov't which has mass voting also has MASSIVE taxes and lays massive burdens on its people. I think you are overlooking how LIMITED was the scope of action and powers of the Grand Duchy of Hermes. It was, in many ways, a very libertarian state, which to me counts for a lot.
Sean
Sean,
But members of one class had multiple votes whereas members of another had only one each. I am not going to look up the figures at this time of night but will tomorrow.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I don't object, in principle, to WEIGHTED votes. After all, the US has something like that with the Electoral College and every state having ONLY two senators. If done for checking, limiting, restraining, etc., the state I would call that a good thing. It also needs THREE FOURTHS of the states to amend the Constitution. Another check on power.
Sean
Our concept of justice is essentially a "socialization" of revenge; it substitutes impersonal punishment for violating an explicit code for simply retaliating for injuries, but it fulfills the same purposes (and others).
Experiments have shown that the desire for "payback" is cross-cultural: people everywhere will undergo substantial costs to see that someone who's injured them suffers for it, even if that puts additional costs on them that simply walking away wouldn't. Even when someone subscribes to an explicit ethical code that forbids or discourages retaliation, they had to make an exertion of the will to do so.
The evolutionary foundations of an instinct like that are obvious, I should think. If you don't retaliate for harms, people are going to get more and more likely to harm you. The same applies to retaliation for harm done your kin.
The "socialized" version has substantial advantages; it reduces friction, makes it less likely that things will get completely out of hand (as blood-feuds are prone to do) and so forth. If frees up energies that would otherwise have to be spent on continual vigilance.
But it has the disadvantage of being much less visceral, and if it becomes too severed from the desire for "payback", it risks losing legitimacy and collapsing, at which point the default state -- the 'lex talonis' takes over again.
In this it's like much of civilization. Like increasing the size of the social 'in-group', it enables greater cooperation, but it risks loosing its emotional and instinctual foundation, at which point smaller but more intensely bound groups can once more compete.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree with what you said about the "socialization of justice," of how it was desirable to make the punishment of crimes or wrongs done to you impersonal.
It's also a very real danger if the punishment of crimes/wrongs is seen as going too far in being less "visceral." That is, people might come to believe criminals are not getting enough of what they deserve. The end result, as you said, are blood feuds and out of control vendettas. And the Lex Talionis was an attempt by the ancient Jews to LESSEN that kind of thing.
I discussed similar issues in my essay "Crime and Punishment in the Terran Empire," based on letters I exchanged with Anderson.
Seam
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