"I trust, he thought with a devil's inward laughter, that they don't know I know they know I'm actually supposed to install a password circuit for Kit.
"It was the sort of web he loved."
-Poul Anderson, "Hunters of the Sky Cave" IN Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 149-301 AT XIII, pp. 255-256.
It is the sort of web that I hate. I prefer life to be straightforward. How often can "...they don't know I know they know..." be prolonged before it becomes meaningless?
Fortunately, my experiences of cloak-and-dagger are limited. During the Great British Miners' Strike of 1984-'85, a National Union of Miners branch officer rang me and told me a pack of lies because we had reason to believe that the police were tapping my phone at the time. Before the Shah of Iran was overthrown, an Iranian student, funded by his government, asked me if I knew the names of any other Iranian students who might be involved in political campaigns... I referred him to the Students' Union. Mostly and thankfully, life does not involve such complications.
25 comments:
Humans probably evolved their present level of intelligence to deal with, essentially, political intrigue -- jockeying with each other for status, which was closely related to reproductive success.
We're far smarter than we need to be to deal with the surrounding environment in hunter-gatherer terms.
Mr Stirling,
We have these brains that keep remembering, regretting, imagining, anticipating, projecting etc when serene reflection or aesthetic appreciation might be more beneficial.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I'm surprised you did not comment on Flandry's FURTHER reflection after noting the pleasure he took in subtle intrigues: "It was the sort of web he loved. But he remembered, with a cold tautening, that a bullet was still the ultimate simplicity which clove all webs" (WE CLAIM THESE STARS, Chapter XIII).
Sean
Saen,
I am sometimes unsure when to stop quoting and start commenting! (And, when a passage is too long to quote, I summarize it.)
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I do understand that point. But I thought Flandry's reflection about the bullet cleaving all webs to bring out more succinctly your reservations about cloak and dagger work.
And as long human beings are human we are always going to see such things.
Sean
Sean,
Indeed. Relevant.
Paul.
Sean: depends what you mean by "beneficial".
In terms of promoting a trait, "beneficial" simply means "maximizing prevalence of Gene X". If something maximizes your reproductive success but makes you miserable at the same time, your misery will spread.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Your comments are always interesting, but this one puzzled. It does not seem relevant to either my comments or to Paul's blog piece. I think you had in mind the remarks I made in another combox about how lightly, and with minimal bureaucracy, the UK was governed between about 1890-1910?
Sean
Sean,
Mr Stirling was responding to my first comment in this combox.
His response is valid. What human beings regard as "beneficial" and what is beneficial in evolutionary terms can be very different.
Paul.
Evolution is a beautiful example of 'spontaneously emergent complexity' -- natural law imposes a filter, natural law limits the possibilities, time rolls downhill, and you get enormously complex things (human beings) for example, that "just happen".
Human consciousness can mimic evolution by deliberate design -- but our extreme consciousness of -intentionality- makes us get things bass-ackwards; we tend to assume that our mental trick of thinking things up is the underlying reality, whereas it's actually a way of copying and "playing" an unconscious natural process.
Mr Stirling,
Engels (I think) said that philosophy was standing on its head, i.e., philosophers thought that consciousness came first and that society was grounded in ideas, not in material economic relationships. For example, monarchies really existed because an economic surplus had accumulated that could support an elite, not because someone persuaded everyone else to accept the idea of "kings." It was necessary to stand philosophy on its feet.
Paul.
Gentlmen,
I believe evolution is real and has been proven to be so. But as a Catholic I don't believe evolution explains everything. Which means I also believe God acts THRU natural laws.
And I'm frankly skeptical of what Engels said. I think monarchies, or simply the state in general, evolved or developed from human organizations becoming more complex. E.g., the family, clan, tribe, early city states and kingdoms.
Sean
Paul: then environment sets limits, but within those variation is wide and chaotic.
Eg., you get monarchies, oligarchic republics, tribal quasi-democracies, and so forth, at the same levels of technology. And those are very broad generalizations. Both Japan and western Europe had more or less feudal systems, for instance, but there were innumerable differences.
China, adjacent to Japan, had an entirely different historical trajectory; the early Japanese emperors tried to impose a bureaucratic centralism akin to China's, but it never "took".
Likewise, in periods of imperial breakdown Chinese society occasionally showed signs of tending towards the decentralized timocratic system we call feudal, but there -that- never "took" and once a unified empire under central control was established in the Chin period it always reasserted itself.
Or to take another example, slavery was a ubiquitous institution in the pre-modern world, but it was unusual for it to become a central organizing principle for a whole social order -- that happened a couple of times in the Mediterranean and Islamic worlds, but it never did in the Far East, where chattel slavery was always a peripheral institution.
All these differences represent different ways to solve similar problems in similar environments. All human societies are "imagined communities" -- they have to live in the real world, but the real world contains human heads, and the software inside them is itself a real and powerful thing.
Mr Stirling,
Thank you. This kind of close historical analysis seems to negate the generalizations but what it really does is to fill in the details. In a passage from "Margin of Profit," which Poul Anderson used to introduce "Territory," he wrote:
"It is a truism that the structure of a society is basically determined by its technology. Not in an absolute sense - there may be totally different cultures using identical tools - but the tools settle the possibilities: you can't have interstellar trade without spaceships..."
Paul.
Paul: true, but you can have spaceships and -not- have interstellar trade.
The technology may open up possibilities, but what people do with them is a matter of human agency.
Eg., in 1500 Europe and China were roughly at the same technological level -- the Chinese were ahead in some areas, Europeans ahead in others(*), but the Chinese could build ships just as well as Europeans could.
Yet Europeans conquered the Americas and came to dominate the world's long-distance ocean trades over the next century, with incalculable and irreversible historical consequences -- I'm sitting in Santa Fe, New Mexico, right now, in a city founded by Spaniards in 1602.
While the Chinese simply decided not to do anything similar.
Likewise, in 1600 the Japanese had copied European military technology, and independently reinvented most of the organization and tactics that went with it -- the Japanese armies of the late Sengoku period are startlingly similar to European Renaissance ones, complete with blocks of pikemen and musketeers firing in volleys.
And they were familiar with European ships and could easily duplicate them -- Japanese 'wako', pirates, were active all the way to Burma, and Japanese adventurers and mercenaries came to dominate several Southeast Asian kingdoms in that period.
Once they were unified by the Tokugawa Shoguns, the Japanese -could- have swept down the Asian coasts, taking the islands, and kicking out the Spanish and Dutch out of the Philippines and Indonesia, who couldn't possibly have competed with a power of equal skill much closer to its home base.
Again, they simply chose (for their own internal reasons) not to do something well within their capacities.
So Indonesia, for example, came to be dominated by a trading company based in a small merchant republic on the other side of the world that was at least six months to a year sailing distance away, a wildly unlikely outcome.
(*) China had better metallurgy, deep well-drilling techniques, and superior civil engineering. Europeans were ahead in mathematics and anything that required gears.
Mr Stirling,
Poul Anderson imagined different nations coming to dominate the world in future. Anderson knew that history was full of the unexpected.
Paul.
Gentlemen,
I almost wholly agree with what Paul and Mr. Stirling said. Only a few minor quibbles. China did have a kind of feudal age, during the early and middle Chou periods, when the Chou kingdom was divided into many small states under the king's suzerainty. This eroded away during the Warring States era, when the Chou king had become powerless and powerful vassals more and more fought among themselves for hegemony. After which, as Stirling said, the Chin Imperial model became deeply rooted and came back after every period of dynastic breakdown.
In "The Only Game in Town," Poul Anderson gives us speculations about what happened if China, during the Yuan Dynasty, had explored and colonized the west coats of the Americas.
All this makes me wonder why the Tokugawa Shoguns decided to withdraw into isolationism, to cut off contacts with the outside world. Because to engage with the world would inevitably, sooner or later, undermine Tokugawa rule?
Sean
Kaor, Sean!
Chiming in late, here; I've been busy. I'm not certain about the exact motives of Tokugawa Ieyasu and his successors, but
I think your guess makes sense; after all, once Japan was forced to engage with the rest of the world, that did undermine Tokugawa rule. Also, there was the matter of firearms; to dominate East Asia and drive the Europeans out of the Philippines and Indonesia, the Japanese would have needed guns, which they had. But then the Tokugawa bakufu suppressed Japan's firearms industry, and severely limited the use or possession of guns, as a threat to the social order. A peasant with a few weeks of training could use his arquebus to kill a high-born bushi who had practiced the use of sword and spear since childhood, which was not what the aristocracy wanted.
Best Regards,
Nicholas
Kaor, Nicholas!
Exactly, Tokugawa rule was indeed undermined once Japan was forced to open up to the outside world. Which means Tokugawa Ieyasu was a very unusual dictator, if he was content with the rule of Japan and did not try to create an outside empire.
Ditto with what you said about bushi spending years mastering swordsmanship while peasants only needed a few weeks training and practice to master guns. Quantity trumped quality, you might say!
Regards! Sean
The Japanese did try to conquer Korea in the late 1500's, under Shogun Hideyoshi.
Long complex war; short form, the Japanese beat the Koreans like a drum on land, the honors were more even at sea, and the intervention of Ming Chinese forces tipped the balance against the Japanese, though it weakened the Ming critically and opened them up to conquest by the Manchu a little later.
This may have put them Japanese off foreign adventures, but it would have been a different story if they'd stuck to the offshore islands and SE Asia, rather than trying to butt heads with the Chinese on the Asian mainland. The Japanese were superior in military technique but not -that- superior.
An isolationist policy was one way to stabilize the Shogunate, but successful conquest and colonization abroad would also have worked -- someplace to employ all those samurai and restless nobles, and fiefs to hand out and land to settle for the surplus peasantry who'd grown accustomed to fighting in the civil wars as ashigaru.
Japan's population and economy were growing very rapidly at the time and there was under-utilized real estate to be had; Taiwan was mostly empty or thinly inhabited by aboriginal tribes then, for example -- the major Han colonization was just getting under way in the early 17th century. The northern Philippines were almost as thinly populated, and the Spanish position there was weak, held only because there weren't any strong challengers.
As it was, in about 1700 Japan ran head-on into a resource crisis -- overworked farmland, deforestation, and so forth. They responded with remarkable ingenuity, by limiting their birth-rate and by conserving resources with extreme care and skill. Europe avoided that Malthusian trap by using the "ghost acres" produced by trade and conquest abroad.
All,
I am glad to have initiated this historical discussion but I am certainly not informed enough to contribute to it.
Paul.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I agree, the failed attempt at conquering Korea was what probably made Tokugawa Ieyasu fore swear foreign adventures. But, as you said, Japan could have avoided head butting with the Chinese and easily expand elsewhere. At a time when Japan would have faced little real competition from other powers. By the time Japan began trying to do so, rather late in Emperor Meiji's reign, it was much harder. Asia had been staked out or divvied up by other expansionist powers, like France, the UK, the US, and Germany. Japan lost ALL her gains when she rashly attacked the US.
Sean
Kaor, Paul!
I too am glad of of this historical discussion. I went thru a "Chinese phase" at one time, reading many books about Chinese history. And rather less about Japan. With me favoring translations of Chinese historical sources, such as extracts from Ssu-ma Chien's RECORDS OF THE HISTORIAN or Pan Ku's HISTORY OF THE FORMER HAN (both by Burton Watson). And most recently a biography of the Empress Dowager Tzu-hsi.
Sean
"It was the sort of web he loved."
It seems Flandry or Aycharaych would agree with this.
Oh what a tanged web we weave
When first we practice to deceive
But once we've practiced quite a while
How vastly we improve our style
Kaor, Jim!
I was glad to reread the comments here because I've been wanting to recall where we see Flandry reflecting on the pleasure he took in subtle intrigues--and how lethally easily they could be torn apart! I'm going to take special note of Chapter XIII of HUNTERS OF THE SKY CAVE.
Ad astra! Sean
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