At the end of Poul Anderson's
The Night Face, inhabitants of the planet Gwydion are killing each other. At the beginning of the following instalment in Anderson's Technic History, "The Sharing of Flesh," Moru kills Donli Sairn. Is this series all about violence and killing? That would be a superficial impression. There are different reasons for the killings: psychological reasons on Gwydion; biological reasons on Lokon. Poul Anderson favoured action fiction but there was always more beneath the surface. People acted the way they did for reasons and problems could, usually, be addressed and solved. After these two instalments, the History takes us into a further future when:
"'The people of the Commonalty don't get into wars.'"
-Poul Anderson, "Starfog" IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, 709-794 AT p. 722.
24 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Except we are never told if the periodical insanity of the Gwydiona was ever successfully treated. The mere fact the Allied Planets interdicted anyone from off that planet from landing there makes me doubt it was.
My reaction to that line you quoted from "Starfog" was to scoff. Of course the people of the Commonalty had wars in their past. And I expect them to have wars in the future, esp. if they bump up against an aggressive civilized power. Or barbarian raiders.
Daven Laure could speak as he did because he lived during an interlude when the Commonalty was rich and was not challenged by hostile outsiders.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Where are we told that Gwydion was interdicted?
Paul.
It is at least possible that civilization will develop to the stage where there is nothing left to fight about. Then generations will grow up with no experience of violence and will find it hard to understand the historical accounts of wars, slaughters, massacres, genocide and individual violence.
Mere quarrelsomeness, if still exists, cannot generate armed conflict in a society where weapons are no longer produced.
Kaor, Paul!
I am almost sure the interdiction of Gwydion by the Allied Planets was mentioned in "The Sharing of Flesh." But I should not go too much trust in memory, so I will reread that story to find out for sure, either way.
No, it does not matter how rich a society might be, because humans will simply find other things to fight about. Mere generations of peace will not remove that innate inclination for being quarrelsome and violent. That was exactly the situation seen in that near Utopian society Anderson described in GENESIS, where violence nearly broke out--until the well meaning AI actually ruling the world suppressed it, with disastrous consequences for mankind.
I am sorry, but your last comment above was nonsense. If they really want to humans can make/improvise weapons out of anything. If necessary, bare hands and teeth!
I remain unconvinced Daven Laure is correct. And I think Anderson would agree!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I am sorry but we can realistically conceive of a society where priorities have changed and instruments of destruction are no longer manufactured, let alone mass-produced. I fail to see why mere quarrelsomeness, if indeed this persists, should lead not just to disagreement and argumentation but to physical fighting and violence even with hands and teeth! This is how people settle intellectual disagreements and differences of opinion?
All this is possible: an end to material want; more energy than anyone can possibly use; a changed set of public values and priorities; generations growing up in and taking for granted this completely different civilization and culture. And yet people will continue to behave as they are now doing in Ukraine and Palestine? That makes no sense.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
No, it is not realistic to "...conceive of a society where priorities have changed and instruments of destruction are no longer manufactured..." Nothing, nothing, nothing in human history has shown any such thing in reality. Nothing in how real people actually behave convinces me what you hope for will happen.
And, yes, intellectual disagreements can and has been settled by violence. I thought of how many of the victims of the purges in the USSR and Maoist China were shot or imprisoned because of either opposing or not being nimble enough to adjust to changing Party lines.
Heck, people can even fight over chess games! One of my chess books recounts cases in England of chess players being prosecuted for killing rival chess players.
So many people are quarrelsome and violent because that is simply what humans are. It makes no sense to persist in dreaming of them somehow "magically" changing. How would you change that? By genetic engineering? Such an attempt is more likely than not to backfire badly!
Last, after the very end of "Starfog" this is what Meisel wrote: "And now a new cycle turns on Fortune's cosmic wheel. Another brilliant era races to its apogee. What hidden flaws will send the Commonalty spinning downwards into darkness like the Empire and the League before it? Let its free and lively people prosper while they may, for as a proverb handed down from Old Earth puts it, 'Shines the sun ne'er so bright, / in the end must come the night.' "
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
But what has happened in history is an insufficient guide to what can happen in different conditions in the future.
There were material conflicts for physical power in the USSR and China, not just intellectual disagreements!
Killings over chess games will be very rare in a peaceful society. This is an absurd example.
I do not propose any "magical" change. Please respond to what is actually said. Not genetic engineering. I have laid out social changes that are possible.
Everyone dies and this whole universe will end but it does not follow that every society will end in violence.
Paul.
The argument that something has never happened in the past, therefore can never happen even in completely changed conditions at any time in an indefinite future has been replied to (more than once) before. If that kind of argument were valid, then nothing would ever change. How did unconscious processes become conscious? Qualitative change not only is possible but happens.
Items that can be used as weapons will always be made. A knife made to cut up potatos for a meal can be used to kill a person. A rocket can be used to put a communications satellite in orbit or used to drop explosives on an 'enemy'. The explosives themselves can be used for constructive or destructive purposes.
I don't see that it is *totally* impossible that a peaceful society can develop.
A hopeful observation is that wars *between* democracies are vanishingly rare. Though there is no lack of wars in which a non-democracy is on at least one side. Whether a democracy will remain a democracy indefinitely is another matter.
Jim,
You are right about items that can be used as weapons. And a car can be used deliberately to kill a pedestrian. But at present there is a flourishing arms industry and a big trade in guns in the US! Al this does need to exist and there CAN be a future in which it is regarded with horror.
Paul.
Paul - Think it's fair to say the reasons for the killings on Gwydion included BOTH biology and psychology, and the pathologies Anderson relates in the story have a very clear biological foundation, isn't it?
Kaor, Paul and Jim!
Paul: No, we can change the merely material or technological conditions we live in. Those basically superficial changes will not change human nature. Recall how Stirling commented on how discovering how to split the atom was a new change--but the first thing it was used for was to kill the enemies of the inventors.
Again, no, there were lethal conflicts in the USSR/Maoist China over the correct interpretation of the "Vanguard Doctrine." Iow, violent conflicts over intellectual ideas. To say nothing of plain old struggles for power.
No, my analogy using chess games was not absurd. It's a very simple and clear example of how humans can quarrel and fight over anything. My copy of the US CHESS FEDERATION's manual for the laws and rules of chess has massively detailed legislation on how to play chess--attempting to limit and control that quarrelsomeness.
I truly don't understand, you have laid out nothing that makes sense to to me on how mere material changes in the conditions of life will "somehow" change human nature. Because wealth, comfort, peace will not somehow make men less quarrelsome, competitive, aggressive, etc.
All you have offered is mere hope that what is longed for will happen. That is simply not good enough.
You keep lamenting the US arms industry, which is an error. It's precisely because the US military forces are so powerful and deadly that we have any kind of peace. It's fear of the US which holds aggressive enemies like Russia, China, Iran, N Korea, etc., in some check.
Jim: I do not believe democracies cannot go to war with one another. E.g., down till the 1920's strategic thinkers in the US considered the UK/British Empire the chief rival and enemy of America. And that included the general staff drafting plans on how the US would fight the UK.
What keeps nations from going to war is not political systems. What brings on or prevents wars is a pragmatic evaluation, realistic or not, of the costs and benefits of fighting a war. None of the disputes between democracies like the US and UK were thought serious enough to justify a war. Albeit we did come close to that a couple of times!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
When I ask you to imagine a world with no material wants, no need for material competition or conflict, no weapons production, no division of the global population into armed nation-states and application of technology entirely for the purposes of individual and social development and then ask you to imagine the consequences of such changes in the lives of individuals for many generations, you apparently continue to imagine a world completely unchanged from the way it has been through history and still is now. We are simply talking about completely different things and there is no apparent attempt to overcome this gap of mutual incomprehension unless maybe I am starting to do it by what I am saying now.
If nothing changes, then nothing will change. I certainly agree with that.
The US is just one of the armed nation-states that are the problem, not the solution. The present world order is destroying itself.
Paul.
Dave,
Yes.
Paul.
Sean,
Intellectual disagreements in the USSR were expressions of the political power struggle. They were not an independent cause of violence. In a world where people are divided only by such disagreements, they will not be imprisoning or torturing each other on that account! Don't read our familiar evils into a completely different situation. Everything is connected. Change one aspect of society and other aspects will organically change with it.
Paul.
To anticipate a question and objection, I think that the scenario that I propose is entirely realistic, indeed the only alternative to continued and climactic chaos.
First, the current level of technology alone would enable the human race as a whole to begin moving in this direction.
Secondly, it is in the material interests of the vast majority of the world's population to construct such a system.
Thirdly, they have the power to do so.
This means that some such social transformation can, not necessarily will, happen.
Paul & Sean:
The hope that material abundance will bring peace is just that, a hope, or maybe it can be considered a hypothesis. To find evidence for or against that hypothesis, try to find data for the amount of violence in a society & the prosperity of the society. Is there a negative correlation? If so can we find reasons to think causation works in the direction of prosperity->peacefulness or peacefulness->prosperity, or (some 3rd factor)->(both peacefulness & prosperity).
Sean:
Proving that democracies *will never* go to war against each other is impossible. We can look at the data & conclude that democracies are *far less likely* to go to war against each other than for wars between non-democracies or wars in which a non-democracy fights a democracy.
BTW one hypothesis for *why* democracies are less likely to fight each other is that democratic systems are better at evaluating the likely costs & benefits of any particular fight. The leader of a democracy can't just censor the people saying 'this is bad idea'. The leader who thinks war is necessary in a particular case has to persuade the majority of the population.
Jim,
A bit more than a hope surely. My point is: identify what people fight for, then make it unnecessary for anyone to fight for those things. Thus, we do not (and do not have to) fight for the air that we breathe but at least some of us would definitely fight to the death for the last oxygen bottle if we were in a space station with a diminishing air supply. If I want to read a newspaper, then it is far simpler for me to buy one or to read a copy in a public library than to mug a stranger for his copy. If there is enough room for everyone to stroll on the beach or in a park, then I do not insist that I want to stand on just the few square inches that someone else's feet are occupying! And, if I did insist on that, then everyone else in a sane society would gently assist me to the psychiatric ward of a hospital. This example might sound stupid but I did have someone suggest precisely that - "What if I want to stand just where you're standing?" - in an argument because people can come up with all sorts of daft ideas in arguments that become totally divorced from reality.
Thus, if everyone has everything that they need and does not need to fight anyone else for it, then they will not think of fighting for those things but instead will think of something more positive to do with their time. Of course if, even in such a materially beneficent environment, there were nevertheless unprovoked murders, riots, wars, pogroms and ethnic cleansing, then I would be proved wrong and "human nature" would indeed be as irredeemable as many people insist that it is.
Paul.
Kaor, Jim and Paul!
Jim: I remain skeptical, because I don't believe there is something so special about democracies that they are less likely to go to war than autocracies. Here I have in mind the War of Jenkins' Ear, where popular passions and pressures in and out of Parliament forced a reluctant PM, Walpole, to agree to war with Spain. A war which was largely a disaster for the UK, marked with severe defeats and losses (such as the Veracruz fiasco and Spain wresting back the Balearic Islands).
I do agree that in political systems where power is dispersed, not concentrated in a single person, the head of state or gov't has to persuade many people before a war can be started. And I agree that is the better way of doing it. But, popular passions in the US nearly did lead to war with the UK two or three times.
Paul: I cannot agree, because I don't believe one bit that the advent of a post-scarcity economy somehow means human beings will no longer be quarrelsome, aggressive, competitive, etc. People will simply fight or compete about other things, esp. for status, prestige, power. Including, yes, fighting over chess games (killing, cheating, bribing)!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
But there will be no "power" in the society that I envisage, no instruments of coercion. Some might compete for status or prestige. Many, I think, will regard such competition as infantile and, in any case, it will not lead to violence or killing. So one person wants the prestige of winning a race or formulating the Unified Field Theory but somebody else does it! Society applauds everyone who tries and gives everyone plenty of opportunities to express themselves or to lead a quiet life if that is what they prefer. Human potentialities are still virtually untapped. We can unleash them.
Paul.
Paul:
Something to confuse our two hypotheses: democratic societies tend to be more prosperous. So is peacefulness due to democratic institutions or to the prosperity. Which of these three characteristics causes the other two?
Kaor, Paul!
Then we are not going to be able to agree. Because I believe, even in a post-scarcity economy, people are going to remain competitive and aggressive. And that includes competition in politics, peacefully or not.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I try to show that there can be circumstances in which there is nothing left to squabble about but you still insist that people will squabble in any circumstances. They do not squabble in every circumstance and those circumstances in which they do not squabble can be multiplied.
Paul.
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