Human Civilizations In The Commonalty Period II

"Starfog."

In the civilization served by the Commonalty, pioneers build low whereas later generations with larger populations build higher, preserve wilderness, limit births and encourage emigration. Other civilizations live differently. 

Ten million planets have a significant number of Commonalty members. Unable to plan economies, they rely on the market which, according to Ranger Daven Laure, is as automatic, efficient, impersonal and ruthless as gravity:

"'...but we didn't make this universe. We only live in it.'" (p. 771)

Human beings did not make their natural environment but we do make our social environment of cooperation, competition, conventions, cultures, languages, laws etc. A storm or an earthquake is a natural event, or an "act of God," whereas a war or an economic crisis is a large number of human actions which, however, confront and overwhelm individuals with the apparent inevitability of natural phenomena. We know that there are different ways to manage or manipulate markets, perhaps none of them satisfactory, so I think that it is disingenuous to present the abstract "market" as if it were no different from a natural law like gravity.

The civilization is big, diverse and busy with its own affairs, including many other cases of need. To help the Kirkasanters, there is no tax mechanism and no way to contact enough people to ask them to make free-will donations. Again, the size and complexity of the civilization is merely stated. A library of novels would be necessary to make this real.

Human Civilizations In The Commonalty Period

"Starfog."

Human civilizations have spread through two or three spiral arms of the galaxy. The Commonalty is a service organization in one civilization.

Daven Laure, a Ranger of the Commonalty, says:

"'...we can't have a planned interstellar economy.'" (p. 771)

Agreed. Impossible and unnecessary. Each planet or at least each planetary system should be self-sufficient.

Laure continues:

"'Planning breaks down under the sheer mass of detail when it's attempted for a single continent. History is full of cases.'" (ibid.)

Laure's history is longer than, and different from, ours. With advanced, "intelligent," whether conscious or not, computers, nanotech and communications technology it should be possible to plan at least the production and distribution of physical necessities. No one should have to earn a wage in order to eat. Such physical security would provide the material basis for maximum human freedom. Nicholas van Rijn, transported into such a future, would find endless opportunities for pleasure, culture, social interaction, study, learning, travel and creativity but would not find a labour force needing to be employed by entrepreneurs like him in order to survive. 

Laure refers to quadrillionaires. No one can either need, or earn by his own individual labour, quadrillions. The term implies an economic pyramid with a base of low wage earners and unemployed. Thus, our familiar social structure is projected into what should be a qualitatively different future society.

Laure's career has to show what is described as "a profit" but:

"In this particular case, the profit would consist of detailed information about a unique environment. You could prorate that in such terms as: scientific knowledge, with its potentialities for technological progress; space-faring experience; public relations -" (p. 769)

I agree with this but the word, "profit," has gone far beyond van Rijn's trade pioneer crews finding new spices to sell in a money economy back on Earth.

Kirkasant

"Starfog."

Graydal from Kirkasant (= Holy Church?) enthuses about:

sudden sunsets in the Rainbow Desert;

star-crowded nights;

auroras dancing and whispering above stark hills;

great flying flocks with thundering wings and fluting voices rising from dawn mists above salt marshes;

banners above battlements;

new year folk dances -

- whereas, to Laure, the planet would be grim, dry and stormy.

Believing that each human body should be inviolable, the Kirkasanters have hindered the development of medicine but have also become dignified and self-reliant. Because they believe that each individual should have a private side, the mask has become an important symbol in their culture.

We learn this much from conversations between Laure and the Makt crew. None of the narrative is set on Kirkasant.

Space-Faring Civilizations

 

(Today, a boat trip on Lake Windermere, a meal in front of the fire in the Stag's Head Inn in Bowness on Windermere (see image) and a return home to the opening evening of the Light Up Lancaster Festival.)

A narrative that focuses entirely on interplanetary or interstellar explorers imparts only hints about the civilization(s) that produced such explorers. For example, in Poul Anderson's "The Saturn Game," one of the twenty-first century explorers of the Saturnian System was brought up in the Jerusalem Catholic Church but what else was happening on Earth at that time?

It might become a blog project to extract whatever information can be gleaned from "Starfog" both about the colonized planet, Kirkasant, and about the Commonalty civilization.

Meanwhile, however, on Earth, there is some food to come out of the oven.

A Ferment Of Ideas

Reading, and reading about, the New Testament Epistles, I get the distinct impression of documents that refer to one God, the Father, and also to his one Son, the Messiah, who is sometimes described as pre-existent, therefore incarnated, but not yet as the second of three persons eternally coexisting within a single divine being or substance. Thus, we get a snapshot of religious ideas developing. Something happened in Jesus' consciousness. He interacted with many people. Different things happened in their consciousnesses. Whatever happened was expressed in terms of existing ideas.

I get the impression of a ferment of ideas in the Terran Empire period of Poul Anderson's Technic History. Human, Ythrian and Merseian monotheisms are incompatible but there can be partial syntheses like Djana's vision of a Merseian Christ. Magnusson combines his Neosufism with the Merseian idea of "the God." Axor combines his Jerusalem Catholicism and his quest for the Universal Incarnation with the occult-sounding idea that the Builders:

"'...abandoned their achievements, as we, growing up, put away childish things, and went on to a higher plane of existence.'"

-Poul Anderson, The Game Of Empire IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, June 2012), pp. 189-453 AT CHAPTER TWO, p. 210.

("...put away childish things..." is yet another partial Biblical quotation that I have not noted before.)

Axor's companion, Targovi, is a pagan if he is anything.

Small wonder then that, to be as inclusive as possible, the Magnusson Rebellion proclaims:

"'Stand by. The Divine, in whatever form It manifests Itself to you, the Divine is with us.'"

-CHAPTER FIVE, p. 261.

Scriptures

I am reading Fr. Raymond Brown's analysis of the New Testament Epistles and have just quoted Isa Upanishad in a greeting card to a Buddhist friend who reads Christian mystics.

Poul Anderson's "The Problem of Pain" tells us that the Ythrian New Faith has sacraments, theology, prophets, saints and believers. Does it also have prophetic writings, scriptures?  Prophetic and historical texts overlap in the Bible. Two candidates for scriptural status in Ythrian literature would be The Sky Book Of Stormgate and The Earth Book Of Stormgate, two volumes that recount the history of the exodus of a people to a new world. The Earth Book includes "The Problem of Pain," which compares Christian and New Faith attitudes to suffering and death and refers to the Book of Job.

Nicholas van Rijn is a rich man seeking the kingdom of God.

Cloud Universe And Ginnungagap

"Starfog."

When Jaccavrie enters the Cloud Universe, she tells Daven Laure:

"'You need to be drawn out of your fantasizing...Though you recognize your daydreams for what they are, you can't afford them. Not now.'" (p. 758)

This harks back to the very first Technic History instalment, "The Saturn Game," which is also about space exploration.

Laure had been remembering:

"...the old, old myth of the Yawning Gap, where fire and ice arose and out of them the Nine Worlds, which were doomed in the end to return to fire and ice..." (p. 756)

This also harks back:

"...blocks quarried from the cold side of Ginnungagap..."

-Poul Anderson, "The Saturn Game" IN Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (Riverdale, NY, December 2009), pp. 1-73 AT III, p. 39.

In James Blish's Cities In Flight, the cosmic collision is called the Ginnungagap because it generates new universes.

The Norse creation myth is the most scientific: opposite but interacting forces generate life and consciousness in a void. Norse mythology and hard sf go well together. Poul Anderson wrote both.

"Scientific" Dogmas

"Starfog."

"'Vandange was so dogmatically certain that what you reported having seen was impossible, that he didn't take a serious look at your report to see if it might have an orthodox explanation after all.'" (p. 749)

Once, having got into confused discussions with a guy, I asked him how he would respond if someone showed him what looked, on the face of it, like photographic evidence for the existence of a winged horse. His response was only that the scientific categories of biological life are such that an organism like that cannot exist! Scientific categories had become dogmas. It did not seem to occur to him either that he could examine the photographs for fakery or that he could ask to be shown the organism that had allegedly been photographed and could suspend judgment until further evidence was forthcoming. 

Vandange was convinced that the Kirkasanters were lying about their "'...Cloud Universe...'" (p. 749)

That someone is lying is always a possibility. Other possibilities are that they are mistaken or that our reasons for disbelieving them are invalid. Of course, in the case of a winged horse, we have good reasons for believing that we never will see such a thing - but any report has to be investigated if only to discover why anyone is making such a report.

Vandange does not believe that there can be two universes, one visible from the other, and in fact there are not, but there is a reason why the Kirkasanters report this and it is not necessarily that they are dishonest. Indeed, if their intentions were hostile, then they would surely concoct a more plausible account of their origins.

Verbal Communication

"Starfog."

"Laure, who had heard the details before, had spent the time admiring her and weighing his reply." (p. 741)

If someone speaks at length, then their auditor has more time to consider a response. Verbal communication can be anything but straightforward.

A woman asked me a question and continued to speak. I waited for her to finish speaking before I replied. She looked puzzled because I was not replying. I realized that she expected us to speak simultaneously!

A colleague asked me half a dozen questions without pausing for breath. Remembering the order of the questions, I replied, "Yes, yes, no, maybe, don't know, yes." She asked, "What does that mean?" She had forgotten the order and possibly also the content of the questions.

Someone rang my work to complain about a colleague. She stated her complaint, then, not knowing what to say next, repeated the complaint, then, again not knowing what to say next, said, "That's my complaint," and hung up, having given me no time to respond.

At a conference, I was in a sub-group that gave me the job of preparing a summary of our discussion to report back to the plenary. While I was writing, a colleague said, "All you need to say, Paul, is..." Then a woman in the group, thinking of something that amused her, addressed the group, interrupting my colleague who stopped speaking because she had started. When she had finished, I asked him what I should say. He regarded me with complete incomprehension. He had forgotten not only what he was going to say but that he had been saying anything.

A teacher I trained with would speak at length, then say, "Having said that...," then speak at further length, then look to his auditor for a response. All that you had to do was to begin to quote one of the things that he had said either before or after the "Having said that..." He would then take this as his cue to interrupt you and expound further on that single point.

A colleague always asked, "What's this, Paul?" or "Are you going to this thing, Paul?" I always had to ask a question before I could answer a question.

A Polish friend mischievously told two fellow Poles, "Of course, Paul's a Communist." I was immediately, aggressively asked whether I had read Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. I tried to reply, "No, but I have read Trotsky's Revolution Betrayed and Cliff's State Capitalism In Russia." I was interrupted after the "No..." and berated on the assumption that I supported the then Soviet Union. I should have said, "Yes," which at that time was untrue but was all that mattered. (This couple also "knew" that all black people were bad and were so convinced of this that they would not discuss the matter.)

Interrupting a school lesson to call one pupil out for a careers interview, I was immediately bombarded with questions like "What are they?" "When's mine?" "Can I have one?" "Why haven't I had one yet?" "What are they?" Of course, I did not answer any of this and felt bad about causing such an interruption to the lesson although really I was hardly responsible.

Blog readers might gather that I can be frustrated by verbal communication and sometimes prefer to write.

In The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressel presents an authentic description of the confused nature of lunch time conversation among a group of building workers.

Wings

Time today has been taken up both with a (fourth) covid vaccination and with a visit to Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop.

Andrea and I recently watched a feature film starring, among several other comic book characters, a superhero who flies not by his own power but by flapping artificial wings while wearing a belt of anti-gravity metal. The belt answers the question: how would an organism with a brain and a central nervous system heavy enough to carry intelligence be able to lift itself and to fly under terrestroid conditions? Such a character would be a worthy candidate for admittance into an Ythrian choth.

In a comic book, we do not see the wings move whereas on screen we do and it looks good, my point of course being that it will now be an easy matter to put Poul Anderson's Ythrians and Diomedeans onto a cinema or TV screen so let's see it.

High is heaven and holy. Fair winds forever.