In "The Game of Glory,"
I, Dominic Flandry has leave on Terra where he spends three months at the perpetual banquet of the Lyonid family and fights a duel with someone's husband but that does not exhaust the information on Terra in this story. In
II, we learn that the widow of the murdered Terran resident on Nyanza, Lady Varvara, was born an Ayres of Antarctica and that some of her bodily features also show the Chinese strain in the Ayres pedigree. She welcomes Flandry because he is straight from Terra and informs him that associating only with an inferior class has rubbed off on her and made her soul greasy. An interesting social throwback.
(An unfamiliar and inappropriate cover image. Commander Flandry is an alternative title of The Rebel Worlds. Flandry is a Captain in "The Game of Glory.")
25 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I think it's dated to use terms like "An interesting social throwback." I fully expect customs, mores, prejudices, bad and good ones, etc., to come and go as centuries pass. I also expect many of the dominant mores and ideas of our time will be regarded with disgust and contempt in the future. And DESERVE to be remembered with scorn!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I hope that future generations will not return to regarding the mass of the population as an inferior class.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Humans being what they are, I absolutely expect there will be absurd prejudices and petty snobberies thousands of years from now!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
And I will call those throwbacks.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And I would not. They would simply be human beings behaving as they have always behaved.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
There is no way that human beings have always behaved. There were no class distinctions in the earliest societies. That took time to develop and has changed enormously through history.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I disagree. It's a certainty that certain categories of people in hunter/gatherer societies had more success, wealth, and status/prestige/influence/power than others. Shamans, successful war chiefs, successful hunters, etc.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Yes but that took time to develop. I don't think there was very much "wealth" around for a while. People hunted together and ate, e.g., a slaughtered mammoth, together. Certainly some individuals gave a lead, gaining greater influence and prestige. But it would take a long time before a privileged minority began to regard the majority of society as an "inferior class." Don't read later ideas back into an earlier period.
Paul.
Paul: the primary sign of male status in hunter-gatherer societies is number of mates and offspring.
This is what establishes status competition as an -instinctual- strategy; being a leader (or a leader's henchman) makes successful reproduction more likely.
Note that slavery, in the form of abducted young women, is also a very common feature in hunter-gatherer cultures.
Maybe this theory is partly out of date but my understanding is that there was a time before men had mates. In the earliest societies, there was unrestricted sexuality within the tribe but incest taboos grew by stages for good reasons. Descent was matrilineal because no one knew who was a father. There was sexual division of labour. Women gathered because pregnant or breast-feeding women could not easily creep or run after animals. The earliest marriage was a free partnership revocable by either side. Patriarchal monogamy with wives subjected to men grew when former male hunters acquired inheritable property in the form of herds and slaves.
Whatever happened, it took time to happen but was then taken for granted as the way things had always been.
Kaor, Paul!
And I still disagree with you. Social stratification, status consciousness, "class," however you want to put it, existed in the earliest human societies. It was never the way you described. All the archeological and historical evidence I've read says human societies from the earliest times were organized the way Stirling described.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
That was still not anything like the sense of class superiority and inferiority expressed by Anderson's character.
Human societies were not organized in any way from the earliest times. That had to develop like everything else even including language.
Paul.
What I am saying is based on Engels who used the researches of a man called Morgan. Of course, they were in the 19th century.
Paul: no, pair-bonding is a universal human characteristic. The duration varies but the relationship is universal. Humans shed chimp-like sexual systems a long long long time ago -- probably at least two million years.
Kaor, Paul!
Stirling beat me again to expressing dissent better than I would have. Not only is pair bonding a very ancient and universal human characteristic--so is status consciousness, prestige, snobbery, whatever.
The theory you expounded is long exploded and discredited Victorian "science."
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Certain things must have taken time to develop:
the growth of incest taboos;
the change from matrilineal to patrilineal descent;
the change from a free pairing marriage to patriarchal monogamy based on accumulation of property with the wife need to produce legitimate male heirs who would inherit the property.
All of that cannot have been in place from the very first generation of human beings.
Many aspects of Victorian science are undoubtedly "exploded" and "discredited," if such language is appropriate. Others, like natural selection and the understanding that society as we know it has developed, are not.
Paul.
the wife needed
Some people both accept and update Engels' analysis of history. I received this text today:
"We don't stand by Morgan's anthropological studies of the Iroquois as these have been superseded by Gordon Childe's and Eleanor Leakey's work. I can't comment on when incest taboos developed, sorry."
Some intelligent, informed people apply alternative analyses. Descriptions like "exploded" and "discredited" are inappropriate. In this, as in many other fields, there are major disagreements.
Kaor, Paul!
I still disagree. If human pair bonding goes back as long as two million years ago, that to me means the father's role in reproduction was understood a very, very, VERY long time ago. So I don't believe "free pairing" marriage was ever usual. Meaning patrilineal descent was accepted so long ago that it very early became the norm.
Terms like "exploded" and "discredited" can legitimately be used. E.g., at one time blood letting* and phrenology were considered worthy of respect. And if modern archaeology and historical studies has made Morgan's work obsolete, they can apply to his work.
Ad astra! Sean
*Many sick people in past times would have survived if they had not literally been bled to death!
Sean,
I don't see what blood letting has got to do with it. Work that has been superseded is not obsolete. It is part of the process that has led us to where we are. Morgan has been superseded by some other people you also disagree with. BTW, we don't need to keep saying that we still disagree. That remains inevitable with completely different world views and starting points.
Although I quoted a particular account of prehistory with which I am familiar, I do not know (as of now) which parts of that account should be regarded as invalid. You want to just sweep the whole thing away. There is a difference between patrilineal and patriarchal. Men started ruling over slaves and women at a particular point. That set of relationships certainly was not there from Generation One.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I apologize for being so sharp, even angry. And for using excessively harsh terms like "exploded" and "discredited." I can only plead the following extenuations: speculations by Morgan about "free pairing," and reckoning descent matrilineally rather than patrilineally struck me as simply wrong, because not borne out by the work of recent scholars. Both Stirling's mini essays and my reading of works like FOSSIL MEN contradicts Morgan's theories.
I don't understand your point about "supersede." The second definition of that word given by THE RANDOM HOUSE DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE says: "To set aside or cause to be set aide as void, useless, or obsolete, usually in favor of something mentioned:..." And the authors of the communication you quoted seem to think exactly like that about Morgan.
Additionally, and irrationally, mention of Morgan's work reminded me of some of the follies and insanities of our decadent age: the hysterical screaming of the woke left shrieking their hatred of "dead white patriarchal males." These destroyers of their own civilization are trying to erase or bowdlerize the great works of the past, esp. the great works of Western civilization. Moses, the Prophets, Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Virgil, Boethius, BEOWULF, THE SONG OF ROLAND, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Newton, et al, all must be swept away say these awful persons, because they are males!
My comments in the above paragraph do not apply to you, of course!
But the attacks I've seen on "patriarchy" angered me because they also felt like attacks on MY father. There is nothing wrong, per se, in being patriarchal.
Again, my apologies for being too harsh!
Sean
Although many specific aspects of Morgan's evolutionary position have been rejected by later anthropologists, his real achievements remain impressive. He founded the sub-discipline of kinship studies. Anthropologists remain interested in the connections which Morgan outlined between material culture and social structure. His impact has been felt far beyond the Ivory Tower.
-from the Wikipedia article on Morgan.
Kaor, Paul!
I can agree some parts of the work of a scholar regarded as obsolete may still be regarded as useful by later scientists. The example I thought of being the medical works of Galen, whom we see in Stirling's TO TURN THE TIDE.
Ad astra! Sean
Hello:
Back to commenting after a few days of being ill in a way that made me too tired to do much of anything.
Re: 'inferior class'
The relatively pale skinned residents of the one Large island on Nyanza were 2nd class citizens on the planet. That status would tend to affect the psychology & behaviour of them.
I am reminded of of a comment somewhere in Toynbee's 'Study of History' in which he notes that pre 1800 Eruopean visitors to Muslim ruled lands, noted that Christians who had grown up there behaved in 'Jewish' ways.
What those visitors were seeing was not 'Jewish' behaviour, but the behaviour of a despised & disliked religious minority.
Something similar led to Lady Varvara's feeling of a 'greasy soul'.
Kaor, Jim!
Of course! But I don't think the "pinkies" of Nyanza were treated quite as badly as Jews used to be in Western countries and still are (along with Christians) in Muslim countries. Except there are not many Jews left in the dar al-Islaam.
Flandry did say in "The Game of Glory" did say the Empire did crack down on the grosser things to be found in some of the colonies.
Ad astra! Sean
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