Poul Anderson, Harvest Of Stars, 22.
Guthrie:
"'Now, now, let's not get apocalyptic. I've seen crises come and go, everything from wars to elections for dog catcher, with all their excitement about how the outcome would either bring on a glorious new dawn of hope for the whole world or else topple it forever into a bottomless latrine. That never came about, the one way or the other. The human race slobbed on pretty much the same as always.'" (p. 205)
Now, hold on there, Guthrie. Not the same way as always. Science and technology have changed the world and raised us out of the cycle of rising and falling empires shown in the alpha and beta timelines of Anderson's The Shield Of Time. Secondly, that bottomless latrine did happen for all the people killed in World War I, the Holocaust, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Gulag and people starving now although the means to feed them exist. Thirdly, there are potential crises that could kill everyone and that only needs to happen once to prove the point except that there will be no one left to prove it to.
Long life can generate complacency. We see people panicking about things that we know from experience don't matter but some other things do.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
By and large, however, I'm inclined to agree more with Guthrie than you. While the bottomless latrine DID come to the people in the bad things you listed, such as the Gulags, I don't think Guthrie had such extreme contingencies in mind. I think what he was he was trying to say that in fairly ordinary times crises/hopes/fears do tend to be wildly exaggerated. But most times, as he said, we just "slobbed" on more or less intact.
And I am NOT at all sure science has ended the cycle of the rise and fall of civilizations. Rather a high tech civilization can rise very high indeed and then fall very far and hit bottom all mighty darn hard! Which is what happened to the Terran Empire, recall.
Sean
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