Manse Everard:
"'The main difference is, nowadays they imagine it could be better.'" (p. 523)
Oh yeah? Like Jerry Pournelle's There Will Be War, "Things cannot get any better" could be a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially when backed up with all the resources of the Time Patrol. Unlike me, Everard knows that, in his timeline at least, wars will continue for many millennia. But we also know that the Time Patrol keeps things that way. In particular, it suppresses a matter transmuter that could instantly make all economic competition redundant.
I first read Guardians Of Time in the early 1960s and have had sixty years to reconsider my initial acceptance of its premises. I think that things can be better but not that they necessarily will be. Indeed, right now, they look like getting a lot worse.
32 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And I agree with the skepticism of Anderson and Pournelle, wars and conflicts will exist in the future as they do now and had in the past. Nothing about actual human beings makes me think otherwise.
it does not matter if a matter transmuter is ever achieved or not. REAL human beings will find plenty of other things to be competitive and aggressive about, not just the merely economic. Which is what Anderson believed and shows us how it might happen in both the HARVEST OF STARS books and GENESIS.
It has been my long held belief that, simply to widen our margins for survival, we have to get off this rock and start founding colonies on both other worlds and in O'Neill habitats. Which is why I hope Elon Musk founds his colony on Mars. I even purchased some shares in Tesla to assist in a tiny way in that!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Now some comments are appearing here but not on my behind-the-scenes part of the blog. I am in the hands of a technology that I do not understand.
Paul.
Sean,
But the human brain is plastic enough to be changed by culture. Indeed, that is how it came into existence, by using language to raise itself above mere animality.
Paul.
Paul: humans are more behaviorally plastic than other mammals.
That's our evolutionary specialty; it's the way we adapted to so many different environments without evolving into different species, and the way we out-competed previous hominids who were demonstrably less adaptable that way.
But that doesn't mean -infinite- adaptability.
All human societies show both internal competition for power, in one way or another, and intra-group competition. Both may or may not involve violence, but they all contain the -potential- for violence.
This is because violence is the -unilateral- form of communication, the only one that can be -imposed-.
You can refused to talk to someone; you can't refuse to fight if they want to. Even if you don't resist them, there's still a fight; and they've won.
I think that power can be distributed through society. The whole population can be physically comfortable, educated, informed, used to participating. Public office-holders can be elected and recallable, not able to accumulate more wealth then anyone else, not able to control the population through the mechanism of a centralized army or police force. This implies a whole different culture but we have the resources to build such a culture, resources that are currently being used destructively, but, if the human race survives the next century, there might be a shift to a different way of doing things. What seems impossible to one generation is sometimes taken for granted by a later one.
Kaor, Paul!
Paul: I still disagree. Both about how "plastic" human beings can be and your dreamed of political polity. For one thing, I don't in the least believe ALL humans will ever be as "..educated, informed, used to participating" as you hope for. They might be "comfortable", but they will not all be philosophers or give much of a cuss about public affairs. And having holders of public office be so easily removable merely gives fertile grounds for competition and de facto coups. Which in turn will inevitably mean a reaction against "recallablity." Nor do you need to be poor to have both internal and external violence. Which means the continued need for police forces and armies.
So I continue to agree with Stirling, and not with the hopes you outlined.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
You must try to imagine a very different culture: people who have come through hell almost literally (that is what we are heading for now) but who have held the world together and are determined to continue doing so, learning from and avoiding all past mistakes like the mistake of thinking that invading another country is any sort of solution to a problem.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I certainly hope Western civilization somehow manages to survive the all too probable chaos of the coming century. But I simply can't believe in the kinds of changes you hope for--because NOTHING in how actual human beings behave, in the past, the present, and the likely future, convinces me they will culturally "evolve" in the ways you desire.
MY view remains that genuinely prudent statesmen will plan and act based on how real people behave, in both good and bad ways, and not as we would wish them to be. So, with respect, I still disagree.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
And we should not act on how we would wish people to be. But nor should we hold them back. People have changed the world already. More changes are urgently needed.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
It's a start that you concede the necessity of statesmen accepting humans as they are: flawed, imperfect, all too prone to be corruptible, etc. But the problem I have with the kinds of changes you advocate is that they would work only if human beings were all saints. I am convinced that is never going to happen. Short of the second coming of Christ!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
A different outlook and different institutions are both possible.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul! But not, I believe, of the kind you would desire. Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Paul! My reply disappeared. I wrote: "But not the kinds of changes you desire." About like that. Ad astra! Sean
(These disappearances are becoming a drag.)
I think they can.
Kaor, Paul! I think that on some matters we are simply not going to agree. Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Look at the difference in behaviour between a man in a peaceful, reasonably prosperous society and the same man if he was dumped into a situation where he was half starved and had to fight for every scrap of food he could find. We cannot generalize about "human nature" without taking into account the massive cultural differences that collective human action has created throughout history and is still creating.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Thanks for being so patient about dredging up my mysteriously disappeared comments!
And I personally know of people who are reasonably comfortable and having no need to desperately fight for bare survival--and who still have no interest in public affairs or participation in them. And I see no reason not to think such attitudes will exist in the future. We will have to agree to disagree.
Ad astra! Sean
Paul: sure they can... for a while, in a particular time and place. But the Old Adam is always waiting to come back!
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Exactly! I can imagine the kind of polity Paul advocates working for a time, a SHORT time, and then the old Adam comes racing back!
Ad astra! Sean
I think that there is a failure of imagination here. We do not fight over the air we breathe because there is more than enough of it but we might well fight if we were down to our last few oxygen cylinders. Society can be organized so that material wealth is abundant and also so that there is no longer power over others.
Paul: to begin with, "material" poverty is a relative term. In the 21st century in affluent countries, it's a sign of poverty to be fat and a sign of affluence to be think and/or muscular.
This would have been alien to the point of being utterly bizarre, to anyone before a quite recent era, because the basic sign of affluence was to have plenty of food whenever you wanted it.
Note that traditional caricatures of capitalists and other wealthy people showed them as "hefty". This was a hostile exaggeration, but not without some considerable foundation in fact.
When having plenty of food is routine and very few people -need- to exert constant physical effort, "affluence" shifts to the ability to be selective about diet and to use leisure to exercise.
In other words, poverty and affluence are moving targets.
Paul: and to continue, power is a 'positional good', like beauty. To have it necessarily means others don't.
And competition for power is coded into human nature, via our genes. It's present in -all- human social structures.
When something is universally present, you can assume it's human nature, and thus we cannot chose to change it no matter how much we try.
We are not the authors of our selves, which means that what we can chose to do with our selves is sharply limited.
We don't all want to be able to order other people around, though. Might this "positional good" (accepting that for the sake of argument) take different forms? -
always wanting to win an argument
wanting to be respected
wanting to win sporting and other competitions
wanting our books to outsell other authors'
etc
Actual and potential cultural differences remain enormous.
Poverty is relative but the kind of physical deprivation that causes desperation, violence etc can be avoided.
OK. I googled "positional good" instead of just going by a vague contextual idea of what it meant. If even a minority want not just prestige or praise but power meaning the ability to coerce, then they will seek it but they might not find it if they are surrounded by social institutions designed to prevent the acquisition of such power by individuals or small groups. Generations growing up in a fundamentally different culture will have very different ideas about what to expect and about what they can reasonably attempt to achieve.
I think that one thing is certain: society will have to be very different in future if it is to survive.
Paul: poverty is relative, so the emotions it arouses are -utterly independent- of the degree of physical deprivation.
It's notable that people who are actually starving don't usually rebel. They just die, or eat each other, or both.
It is precisely the -relative- deprivation that arouses emotions like resentment, hatred, envy and burning ambition.
"but they might not find it if they are surrounded by social institutions designed to prevent the acquisition of such power by individuals or small groups."
-- Paul: except that "quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"
Who will watch the watchmen?
Institutions don't exist in a vacuum, nor do they operate automatically.
They're made up of -human beings-.
And institutions which regulate power will inevitably attract those most strongly motivated by the desire for power. Others can't be bothered, not in the long term.
Even if the people who -design- a "social institution" such as you mention want precisely what you describe, what about their successors? And the successors of their successors?
Lust for power is not something people can -decide- to have nor not have; it's just there, like the libido, which is also highly variable between individuals but can be assumed when dealing with human beings -en masse-.
Hence power and the desire for power is not a "problem" which can be "solved" once and for all, it's a -condition of human life- which can only be -managed-.
And remember that our nature is not the product of -design-, it's a -random- result of selection operating on mutation.
It's not _designed_ to make us happy, or to make things operate smoothly; it's just the statistical outcome of genetic competition over a very long period of time.
And in most times and places (not all, but most, which is what matters in things like the frequency of genes) power is directly correlated with successful accumulation of social/political power.
Hence what I like to call the "Moulay Ismail factor", after the Moroccan sultan of the early 18th century who had in excess of 3,000 offspring.
Or you might call it the "Genghis Khan factor" -- over 10% of the population of Asia are descended from him and his sons and grandsons.
Now that we can directly investigate DNA through ancient times, it turns out that "genetic bottlenecks" due to that sort of differential reproductive success are common as dirt and a major factor in human evolution particularly on the male Y-chromosome side.
See Robert Reich's work on human DNA history for the basic story, but it's been reinforced mightily with each passing year.
Well, I have tried to suggest some institutions: a society in which the technology necessary for the production of all physical and many cultural necessities is collectively controlled, all public officials are elected and recallable, no one any longer controls an armed force that could be used to coerce or control the population, every individual is educated and encouraged to identify and develop their own abilities and potentialities, power conflicts are studied as part of history but are no longer the current way of doing things. Communications technology can be used neither to advertise nor to propagandise but to facilitate public discussion and decision-making. A genuinely new society. We have progressed a long way and can go further - or, of course, regress.
Note also that economics is a matter of power too, beyond the subsistence level. People like Elon Musk or Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos don't accumulate huge fortunes to buy themselves food, nor do they do it for physical luxuries, pretty girls and so forth. If they did, they'd stop far short of the level they've achieved, because once you're over (to be arbitrary) $100 million there's nothing in terms of physical gratification that you can't already get... and building and maintaining a greater fortune is highly competitive and very, very hard work. At that level, money isn't equivalent to the stuff you have in your pocket; it's a form of -power-. Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars, for example. A vast fortune gives him the ability to do that. Andrew Carnegie spent the first half of his adult life accumulating a vast fortune with total ruthlessness and diamond-point concentration; then he spent the second half of his adult life giving most of it away. Both were exercises in the accumulation and use of power. Every library funded with "Carnegie" over the entrance was another demonstration of the power of the donor.
(The comment immediately above this one was contributed by SM Stirling, not by me. I get behind-the-scenes notification of comments and, when they either disappear from or fail to appear here in the combox, I copy and paste them.) (A nuisance, when it happens, but I try to keep track.)
I agree that money in large enough amounts is power over the labour of others.
Kaor, Paul!
I cannot better Stirling's comments above. Except to say I agree with him and not you. I simply cannot agree with what you wrote at 21.54 (for May 24), for the simple reason that human beings, in the mass, are simply NOT going to be the kinds of people that would enable the type of polity you desire to WORK.
For far too many weary times Utopians have tried to get their impossible schemes to work, and they have always failed, either violently and brutally, or simply because their schemes don't work because most people will not do what the Utopians desires them to do.
Enough! It's better to settle for small, modest possibilities which has been shown to work--and to dismiss grandiose impossibilities.
Ad astra! Sean
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