These four views include an Ythrian attempt to explain the concept, "nation." In Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History, here is how a Trader of the Stellar Union period regards historical nation-states:
"...the fantastic statist arrangements previously to the Second Dark Age, where everything was subordinated to the aggrandizement of the nation, which was somehow thought of as having a real and independent existence -"
-"Teucan," pp. 129-130.
Not only other intelligent species but also our own descendants might regard our "arrangements" as "fantastic." By imagining alien and future societies, sf writers comment on current society.
"Teucan" uniquely imparts the following information. Adventurers, later romanticized, include:
in the First Dark Age, vikings;
in the Second Dark Age, Martian war lords;
in the Stellar Union period, Traders.
We do not read about these "Martian war lords" anywhere else.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And I am skeptical that future generations will think our notions about the state and nation were "fantastic." Something like a "nation" will be needed if humans are to feel loyalty to anything larger than the extended family or clan.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Sean!
Something like a nation, perhaps, but humans don’t always see themselves as members of nations, or care much about nations as such. In the European Middle Ages, a king might reign over various vassals who did not speak the same language; they and the peasants on their lands would not necessarily have had much sense of nationhood. In the Middle East until recently, the concept of patriotism to a nation scarcely existed; a man might be loyal, beyond his own tribe, to a particular sultan or shah and his dynasty, or the Dar al-Islam, or to his particular sect, but it would scarcely have mattered whether a ruler’s mother tongue happened to be Arabic, Turkish, or Persian. In both ancient and medieval/Renaissance times, there were city-states which were the primary focus of their people’s loyalty and political identity. In the future, who knows?
Best Regards,
Nicholas
Kaor, Nicholas!
I agree, loyalty was not always, for most of history, to a "nation" as such. Rather, it was directed to, as you said, things like one's feudal lord, king, city state, or or faith, etc.
Regards! Sean
In his play about St. Joan, George Bernard Shaw says that she was a nationalist ahead of her time, expelling the English from France.
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