Let's have another crack at Avery although he becomes tiresome. He wants "'...stability...'" (p. 123) whereas Dalgetty recognizes that freedom is "metastable," therefore more difficult to sustain than dictatorship. Dalgetty also recognizes that psychotechnics could be misused to serve dictatorship which raises the question whether that is what Avery is doing.
Avery's problem with interstellar travel is that:
"'The rush of emigration will produce a turmoil which we couldn't possibly control...'" (ibid.)
Why should you control anything? If malcontents, as he calls them, want to and are able to emigrate, then that is their right. The Terrestrial government needs to help the malcontents to control their new environments, not keep them on Earth in order to control them!
"'A million eccentric little civilizations will spring up and go their own ways.'" (ibid.)
This would ensure four good things:
racial survival;
cultural diversity;
social experimentation;
the possibility of new, unpredictable and beneficial forms of social organization.
But that is enough of Avery, a very sad man.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Just for once, I agree with almost everything you wrote in this blog piece! I have only a couple of minor quibbles: (i) I don't think the Terrestrial gov't will help everybody who wants to leave, both because of the sheer cost and from being hostile to some emigrants. And, (ii), I'm a bit uneasy with the idea of "social experimentation." I would rather let the new colonies and societies go their own ways, more or less randomly.
Sean
Sean,
Of course they would go their own ways. Some would be utopians and some would experiment.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And even "Utopians" would have to adapt their "experiments" to the actual conditions of the planets they eventually settle. A simple example: a cold planet like Altai would not encourage nudity, and so on.
Sean
To be fair, he's anxious about uncontrolled development because his intellectual tradition arose in reaction to a series of global conflicts that nearly smashed civilization completely, and might have wiped out the human race.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I agree. But people like Avery eventually concluded the solution was to basically imprison the human race within the Solar System, a policy I would absolutely oppose! They should have realized that a "million eccentric little civilizations" on other planets at least meant that it would be impossible for the human race to be wiped out by a single conflict.
Sean
Post a Comment