Chapter IV introduces a sympathetic Terran character, Philippe Rochefort, who informs himself, and thus also us, by watching a training video about the enemy Ythrians. Because these beings are winged carnivores, their:
"Society remained divided into families or clans, which seldom fought wars but which, on the other hand, did not have much contact of any sort." (p. 45)
Ytrhians did not have any equivalent of the human need to cooperate in large numbers to dig pits for mammoths or to stand together against charging lions. When, eventually, herding generated a food surplus that did lead to leisure, culture and larger, more complicated social units, these were not based in anything corresponding to cities and that is all that we are told here. We expect to read something about "choths" but are disappointed.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
A small correction, things like humans developing settled cultures only became possible because of the rise of states capable of keeping some kind of peace and controlling the human inclination to be violent and aggressively competitive. That is what allowed things like "economic surpluses" to be possible.
The evidence archeology tells us is that life for early humans was all too Hobbesian: nasty, brutish, and short. Marked by permanent low intensity violence: casual murder and rape of all outside one's immediate family/neighbors. It took the rise of true states, after the invention of agriculture, to make some kind of wider peace possible.
It is also historically demonstrable that whenever a state collapses, no matter how bad it was, the old chaos and violence come back, with Haiti an all too apt example of that.
Ad astra! Sean
"humans developing settled cultures only became possible because of the rise of states capable of keeping some kind of peace"
I will at the very least quibble there. Settled cultures developed with agriculture. Yes, things were less than perfect because villages fought with each other, but they were settled cultures. The size of states gradually increased over millennia.
Kaor, Jim!
I was unclear, that's exactly what I meant. The first proto-embryonic states began as villages whose headmen/chiefs fought their way to becoming the village boss before expanding their territory fighting other villages. These early would-be kings found it useful to discourage/penalize random violence inside their realms. And, yes, these states grew larger as centuries passed.
Not perfect, but humans are kludgy people whose societies/states are going to be kludgy.
Ad astra! Sean
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