Nansen reflects that the Envoy crew were lucky to arrive on Harbor at a time of reindustrialization and dynamic individualism which he thinks cannot last. (But fortune favours the brave.) Harbor contrasts with Earth which either is stagnant or seems so to those who cannot see its subtler progress - although the text implies the former!
Paradoxical statements are made about Harbor but then dynamic economies and societies are paradoxical. On the one hand, the economy is ruthless with a hundred or a thousand going under for each one that succeeds. On the other hand, as we are told:
"...poverty is relative..." (p. 471)
- and "going under" might not be what it sounds like to us because:
"...technics feeds, clothes, houses, medicates everybody..." (ibid.)
Thus, something of the post-scarcity conditions on Earth is reproduced on Harbor. There are "...malcontents, misfits..." (ibid.) but they cannot be as desperate as their counterparts in earlier civilizations who had had difficulties with eating or keeping a roof over their heads. Will Harbor become more like the Earth of its present or of its past? Whatever happens, it will not stand still.
27 comments:
"post-scarcity conditions"
I just read "To Turn the Tide".
With all the innovations Artorius et al. introduce that increase labor productivity, would the Romans, especially the previously least prosperous, consider the aftermath to be 'post-scarcity'?
In the present, in industrial societies we are 'post-scarcity' as far as eg: drinkable water is concerned.
I would point out that starvation doesn't produce revolutions -- witness Ireland in 1847-48.
Mostly people who are starving just sit down and die. They get passive and listless.
What produces revolutions are rising expectations bumping up against limits.
Jim: yeah, privations are relative, mostly.
To us, cutting wheat with a horse-drawn reaper and then stooking it would be grinding labor.
If you're used to doing it with a sickle, it's a dream of deliverance from toil.
Resistance is caused not by starvation but by rising expectations meeting limits. Agreed.
Yup. And expectations are potentially infinite.
They're defined by what you have, and what you want... and wants are also potentially infinite.
A poor person in the UK or Canada today has things a rich person in 1700 couldn't even dream of -- painless dentistry, for example, and protection against plague and smallpox.
But expectations/wants grow with the feeding. There are no limits.
Kaor, Jim and Mr. Stirling!
Jim: Exactly, what you and Stirling said. Wealth and poverty are always relative, our perceptions of such things being dependent on what we ourselves know and experience.
Mr. Stirling: I agree, revolutions are not started by people like the starving Irish peasants of Potato Blight times. Horrors like the French and Russian revolutions were perpetrated by middle class types like the monstrous Robespierre and Lenin.
Also, the France of Louis XVI and the Russia of Nicholas II had monarchs who were well meaning, wanted to govern conscientiously, and were open to reform (the French king somewhat more consistently so). Their problem being that the more they tried to reform the more they bumped up against that revolution of rising expectations from middle/upper class types demanding yet more and more radical "reforms."
Even so, if it had not been for Sarajevo and WW I Russia just might have successfully passed thru this delicate transitional period. The Constitution of 1906 and the reforms of Peter Stolypin were so successful by 1914 that a few more years of peace would probably have made revolution almost inconceivable. I recall reading of how Lenin's realization that his hopes of seizing power were apparently passing reduced him to rage and frustration by 1914. WW I was a gift from Satan to him!
Reached Chapter 48 of STARFAERS, and I don't like Selahdorian Earth. Yes, when the 'Envoy' returned Earth was prosperous, placid, prosperous. It was also inward gazing, mostly indifferent to the rest of the galaxy, and showing hints of decline. That placidity would soon become stagnation--and after stagnation comes open discontent, decline, decadence, civil wars, collapse.
It's no surprise Captain Nansen and the other surviving crew of 'Envoy' soon departed to seek a better home.
Ad astra! Sean
"What produces revolutions are rising expectations bumping up against limits."
Don't roughly static expectations bumping up against declining limits sometimes do that?
Didn't some poor harvests in the late 1780s contribute to the French revolution?
Isn't part of what led to the Russian revolution the privations & the deaths of friends & relatives due to WWI?
How much turmoil can we expect from any declines in available petroleum?
Jim: the expectations have to go up before reality goes down.
The proximate cause of the French revolution wasn't bad harvests, though they didn't help, it was the enormous debt the French government had accumulated helping the American Revolution succeed. That was revenge for defeat in the 7 Years War, but it screwed the French monarchy good and solid.
That was what led to the calling of the Estates-General; the French government was theoretically an absolute monarchy, but the King and his ministers knew that if they tried to raise taxes as much as necessary without some sort of agreement by the people who'd be paying them, they'd all get their throats cut.
This was a weakness of the French government when fighting the British; the classes who made up Parliament in Great Britain also paid most of the taxes for Britain's wars, and they agreed to the taxes necessary, via the Bank of England and other institutions.
British middle and upper-class people paid much, much heavier taxes than their equivalents in France -- but they were willing to, because they controlled the institution which levied them.
And it wasn't the -losses- of WW1 that caused the Russian Revolution, it was the -incompetence- of the Russian government.
Eg., hunger in the cities was totally unnecessary; Russia had been a major grain exporter, and those exports were blocked by the Turks.
So even with the absence of a lot of peasant men there was enough food. The Russian government was just awful at getting it where it was needed, and the workers (numbers vastly swollen by refugees and war-workers) went hungry because the government was run by idiots. And they knew it.
(One sign of the idiocy was the policy of forcing millions to retreat -with- the Russian armies, landing them in the interior cities.)
And in 1915-16, the Russians suffered an enormous defeat and mass retreat from the Battle of Gorlice-Tarnow on, losing all they'd gained against Austria-Hungary and all of Poland and most of the Baltic to the Germans.
(The Russians could defeat the Austro-Hungarians and the Ottomans; they got beaten like a drum when they tried to fight the Germans.)
Also, the 1906 Constitution had aroused middle-class Russian hopes of a constitutional monarchy, which subsequent backtracking by the Tsar disappointed.
Put them together and they were a disappointment to expectations.
(Also, the Germans let Lenin back into Russia. If they hadn't done that, Kerensky's government would probably have survived.)
Thank you very much.
Michael Moorcock has an alternative history novel in which Ulyanov (not called Lenin) did not get in the train and knows that he missed an opportunity somewhere.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Thanks for this mini essay. I've thought more than once that it was a long term disaster for France that the Estates General fell into disuse after 1614. It would have been far better if the kings and their ministers had to argue/cajole with 700 or so politicians about getting support for their policies. Including getting consent on the always sensitive matter of increasing taxes.
I do have one caveat about your comments re Russia. I agree the last Tsarist Prime Minister, Prince Nikolai Dmitrivich Golitsyn and most of his cabinet, were weak and ineffectual. But not all of the ministers were idiots, such as Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Rittikh, the Minister of Agriculture. Chapter 3 of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's MARCH 1917 is a fascinating examination, using real history, of Rittikh's efforts to untangle the confusion in the purchase and shipping of grain/flour from the country to the cities. And by March of 1917 he seems to have made solid progress doing that. The Chapter also includes an examination of how Rittikh tried to explain all this to the State Duma.
I agree, a few able men alone couldn't save the Tsarist gov't if there were too many bunglers in both the civil and military services.
Also, even if Lenin had not been injected like a plague bacillus into Russia by the Germans, I wonder how long Kerensky could have survived as PM. He too was not very competent.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yeah, but Lenin -was- competent. And utterly malignant, if you read his correspondence. He actively enjoyed killing people and terrifying them; a man driven by hatred.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Absolutely! It was tragic for Russia, and the world, that the monstrous Lenin was competent where it came to seizing and holding power. Like Lenin, Stalin also enjoyed killing people and gloating over their agonies.
And their are still idiots who cling to the myth of the "noble" Lenin! Bah!!!
Ad astra! Sean
Also, note that Parliament in England promoted national unity and nationalistic sentiment.
The ruling classes -- both the upper nobility (House of Lords) and the 'working' upper classes (Parliament) met regularly and talked to each other, with persons from all over the kingdom.
Then they went home and talked to other people there, including their fellow-squires and merchants who'd sent them to London in the first place.
The London "season" helped, but that was an outgrowth of Parliament.
It didn't hurt that England was more compact than France, of course.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Makes sense to me, and very good, how Parliament was able to work and function in Great Britain. The MPs and Lords would put up with high taxes if they consented to them and believed it was necessary for the good of the kingdom. A pity something similar didn't evolve in France.
Ad astra! Sean
Stirling:
Thanks again for your informative long comments/short essays.
BTW your mention of exports of grain being cut off by the Turks led me to look up when Murmansk was founded and the railway to it built. In 1915 to allow import of military supplies from Russia's allies.
I suppose that would have allowed some export of grain to pay for imports, though that would be far less convenient than shipping through the Black Sea. With a competent government that wouldn't have been enough to cause food shortages within Russia.
Kaor, Jim!
It also helps make understandable Russia's centuries long obsession with getting its hands on Constantinople and firm access to the Mediterranean. I'm sure that's somewhere in the murky depths of Putin's mind!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yeah, controlling the Straits is a perennial Russian expansionist's dream. Conversely, it's a nightmare to those hostile to Russia and that's prevented it. In WW1, the British and French agreed to Russia getting Constantinople, but the Russian government collapsed before the final victory.
Mind you, nobody "in the know" in January of 1918 thought the war would end that year with an allied victory. If you read the secret correspondence of British cabinet ministers like Milner, they were starkly pessimistic at that time, and even more so during the great German offensive in the spring and early summer.
Mind you, if Ludendorff had aimed it at Amiens (which they could have taken) they -would- have won. The British leadership (both political and military) were planning to break contact with the French and retreat to Dunkirk and Calais if that happened.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Trying again, trouble uploading comments.
There was one time when Russia came close to getting Constantinople, during the Russo-Turkish War of 1876-78. Russia seized the occasion of the Turks savagely crushing the Bulgars to go to war with Turkey, and after hard fighting drove the Turks out of Bulgaria, advancing to the very walls of New Rome. All the Russian generals needed was Alexander II's order and they would seize the City--but that order never came.
That order never came because the Tsar knew a Russian occupation of Constantinople would be intolerable to the rest of Europe. All the great powers: Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Great Britain, would forget their disputes with each other and unite to oppose Russia keeping the Straits. Alexander II knew Russia could not defeat so powerful a coalition, and settled for gains short of getting Constantinople at the Congress of Berlin.
Only desperation could have gotten France and the UK agree to Russia finally getting Constantinople in WW I. Fascinating, how a slight change in the thrust of the German offensive in 1918 might have enabled the Central Powers to win the war at Amiens. It's reminiscent of your Black Chamber books; with Germany being able to keep the gains Lenin coughed up to them in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: well, France and Britain were desperate to get and keep Russia in the war against Germany; without that, they'd have lost and they knew it.
Time out for laughter and applause: the declaration of unlimited submarine warfare in 1917 was crucial in bringing the US into the war.
But the US government had just advised private lenders against lending any more money to the Entente powers when Germany did that.
In other words, the Entente would have gone bust if Germany hadn't provoked the US into the war...
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, it took desperation by France and the UK to agree to Russia getting Constantinople during WW I.
Ah, the irony! Germany's desperation led her to needlessly provoking the US with that declaration of unlimited submarine warfare. Berlin should have done almost anything to keep the US out of the war. Just waiting a few more weeks, during which that command not to lend any more money to the Entente Powers would become public knowledge would have saved the Central Powers.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: well, it was a strong recommendation rather than a command, but that's a thin distinction. For what it's worth, the warning was accurate - most of the money the Americans leant was never repaid.
Of course, the US would have gotten absolutely nothing if the Germans had won, and would have been in a very sticky strategic situation.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
It makes me wonder, what kind of world would our timeline had been like if the US had stayed out of WW I? I do get your point about the "sticky strategic situation" DC would have vis a vis a victorious Germany breaking France and seriously weakening the British Empire. But a world where Lenin was reduced to impotence (and soon, hopefully, overthrown) and Hitler never rose to power sounds a lot better than what we got!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: if you read the Treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest, which Germany imposed on a defeated Russia and Romania, you get a sense that Germany in 1918 was about halfway to Hitler already. They were already shoving Poles out of areas they intended to settle Germans in, for example.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I did read up a bit about those treaties--and the terms imposed on Romania and Russia were indeed harsh. And the Poles, as so often, were also harshly treated. I would only suggest the Germans of our WW I were not the Germans of your Black Chamber books, with their Annihilation Gas, or the Nazis of our world, with their fanatical racism. So I hope they would not have as bad as these extremes shows them.
Still having trouble sometimes uploading comments.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: no, they weren't Nazis -- though Ludendorff became one. But they were savagely ruthless.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, wars are like that, if one side or another is going to win. Sherman's ruthless march thru Georgia and South Carolina, ripping out the guts of the Confederacy during the US Civil War, was also savage. And necessary, to break the Confederacy.
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment