Now we summarize some of the future history of the Swedish timeline:
there was a world war;
in Boris Fedoroff's childhood, most of the war damage had been repaired;
population growth and civil disorder were now under control;
there were new projects on Earth and in space (this sounds like the early period of the Psychotechnic History);
there was a common spirit of dedication and hard work;
but, when Fedoroff returned after forty three years, that common spirit was gone;
his response was to work in space for five years to improve the Bussard ramjet and to gain his post on the Leonora Christine, never to return;
he hopes "'...for a fresh beginning on Beta Three.'" (p. 50)
Ingrid Lindgren tells him that, "'...mores change.'" (ibid.), echoing a Time Patrol member who says, "'Fashions come and go.'" (See here.) There have been, successively:
a libertinism before Fedoroff's time;
the puritanism of his childhood;
a rationalistic classicism;
the current neo-romanticism.
She concludes that the universe is too wide for the freezing of later generations into an earlier mold. Wise words since, as they speak, they are bound out into that wider universe.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
"Puritanism" would seem to be a natural reaction to the poverty and austerity caused by the world war of the TAU ZERO timeline. The focus on reconstruction and rebuilding would naturally lead many people to disapprove of ostentation or showiness.
Sean
Such cycles are endemic to civilization, but the way they're fast enough to be visible within a single human lifetime is a phenomenon of modernity.
For example, dress has always changed -- but it usually changed so slowly that people were only conscious that "youngsters today" were wearing exaggerated versions of their elders' clothes. Even that fades as you go further and further back in time. Romans and Greeks wore essentially the same clothing for over a thousand years.
It wasn't until the Renaissance, for example, that Europeans became conscious that people in antiquity didn't wear the clothes or use the tools they were familiar with. Medieval art depicted Romans as wearing the clothes of their own period, and medieval popular culture (the chansons du geste) showed Julius Caesar or Judah the Maccabee as 'knights' like King Arthur, Charlemagne, or their own contemporaries. There was a knowledge of history, but very little sense of historical "change".
You might say it was a dream of timelessness, or of change that was cyclical. Europeans gradually awoke from it during the Renaissance, and the consciousness has been spreading ever since.
An early 19th-century traveler in Central Asia noted that in Samarkand the 'coat of Tamerlane' (Timur-i-Leng, the Iron Limper, the great conqueror of the 14th century) was preserved... and that it was exactly same as the coats worn there in his day, 450 years later.
Kaor, Paul!
And this "awaking" from a dream of timelessness is yet another of the ways that made European/Western so DIFFERENT from all the rest of the world or of past civilizations. Other cultures had no choice but to somehow cope with this awaking from timelessness, even if many people did not want to do so.
Sean
I suspect that whether or not we go into a long decline as discussed by John Michael Greer in his blogs (http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/, https://www.ecosophia.net/)and books, our societies will not change as rapidly as they have over the past few centuries. I believe that this will not be because (as PA has occasionally mentioned) becaue we will have solved fundamental scientific problems, but rather because we WON'T be able to solve these problems- i.e., the "low hanging fruit" will have been plucked, and significant advances will require vastly more resources than we would be likely to have for many centuries, if ever...
- Keith "kh"
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