"'Charity is outside their instincts, but profit is not, and they will feel good at how they swindle us on the price of wine. No more standoffishness and suspicion about humans - not when humans is plainly come here on a money hunt. You see?'"
-Poul Anderson, "Territory" IN Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-76 AT p. 74.
Joyce Davisson's response:
"They weren't going to like this on Esperance; the Commonalty looked down from a lofty moral position on the Polesotechnic League; but they weren't fanatical about it, and if this was the only way the job could be done -" (ibid.)
"...they weren't fanatical about it..." We can manage necessary social change if we are not fanatical about it - or at least manage it with less overt conflict. If the Puritans had been less fanatical, would the monarchy have been restored?
In the periods of the Solar Commonwealth and the Terran Empire, a group that wants to conduct a utopian experiment can colonize a planet instead of engaging in ideological conflict on their planet of origin and, if they succeed, might influence other populations by example. The Esperancians should have studied the psychology of the t'Kelans before the planetography of t'Kela. The Esperancian social experiment might have been more successful than it was.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
As you know, I'm skeptical of Utopian social experiments and aspirations. I can't help but think that a "social experiment" which was non-fanatical, would be modified (or "tamed"?) by the mere existence of other arrangements, both human and non-human, in the eras of the Polesotechnic League and the Terran Empire. But how much INFLUENCE, really, can a "Utopian" setup on one planet have if there are thousands of other worlds, both human and non-human, with their own ideas, arrangements, aspirations, etc.? They would merely be one more ethnic group in an Empire containing thousands of them.
And, of course, it was Zacharian resentment of themselves being only one of thousands of such ethnicities which led them to plotting with Merseia in the first place. So I would stress the need for some caution when it comes to Utopianism.
Sean
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