Joyce has told van Rijn about t'Kela. He finishes eating the sandwich that she has made for him, broods silently for a long time, then, smiting the control board so that it rings:
"'By damn!' he bellowed. 'It fits together!'
"'What?' Joyce sat straight.
"'But I still can't see how to use it,' he said.
"'What do you mean?'
"'Shut up, Freelady.' He returned to his thoughts. The slow hours passed." (p. 35)
Van Rijn is driving while thinking. Regular readers are only too familiar with our heroes' moments of realization. In this case, we have been given one clue. Joyce theorizes that the t'Kelans do not fight wars because they cannot economically support armies. Van Rijn replies that human beings never allowed not being able to afford it to prevent them from waging a war. Why should the t'Kelans be different?
"'Maybe here is a key that goes tick-a-lock and solves our problem if we know how to stick it in?'" (pp. 33-34)
Since this is a van Rijn story, there is no "maybe" about it. But what is the answer?
9 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
One way of describing "Territory" is that it's a kind of science fictional mystery story.
Sean
Wars depend on a degree of altruism and collective solidarity T'Kelans just don't have the capacity for.
Humans can generalize the feeling they have for their immediate kin to much larger groups of people, or even to abstractions, though the bigger and more abstract the more unstable.
That lets us fight big wars -- and we've been doing it for a very long time (see link below).
War runs on love, things people love more than their lives. Other emotions factor in, particularly at the very immediate level, but without self-sacrificial altruistic love, wars couldn't happen on any scale.
T'kelans just don't have that emotional architecture. They're ferociously combatative on an individual level, but that's not the same thing at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tollense_valley_battlefield
Mr Stirling,
Indeed. You have crystallized what van Rijn realizes about the t'Kelans.
Paul.
A lot of it has to do with the size of the "primary" social group, the fundamental building block above the mated pair.
With t'Kelans, it's rather small.
Humans seem to have always had rather larger primary groups, from several dozen to a little over a hundred(*) -- that's the number of people the average person can recognize as individuals.
(Not at all coincidentally, a unit of about 50-150 is the basic building block of most armies, and in turn is composed of teams of four to twelve in most cases.)
So the primary group included people you wouldn't necessarily see every day or know intimately as an individual, but who you saw quite often and interacted/cooperated with quite often.
Groups above this size are made by adding the primary ones.
The larger size of the human primary group would select for a more flexible, and hence more extensible, definition of "us".
It's notable that political leaders often have extraordinary memories for names and faces.
(*) varying mainly by the density of population a territory can maintain. Hunter-gatherer groups which survived into the modern period were relict populations pushed into marginal habitat.
Before agriculture, hunter-gatherers usually occupied "prime" territory, which would allow much larger densities and hence social interaction spheres.
Experiments in game parks in Kenya showed that even untrained individuals with very elementary tools could get several pounds of meat a day with only a few hours of work, for example.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Your comments on how humans can fight wars more succinctly summarized what I said elsewhere. Because humans can have altruistic feelings for things larger than their immediate kin groups.
Sean
Sean: it's another example of evolution's unplanned, "kludgy" nature. In the context in which we evolved, nearly all the people in your social reference group -would- be close kin, and solidarity within the group was important to the survival of your offspring, your -siblings'- offspring, and your cousins and -their- offspring.
Willingness to sacrifice for your "us" made perfect sense from a selfish-gene point of view.
So it made evolutionary sense to develop a capacity towards altruism to those who gave off appropriate "one of us" signals, just as it made evolutionary sense to keep a capacity for xenophobic suspicion and hostility to those who -didn't-.
In one of those serendipity things, this capacity for extended cooperation then made things like agriculture possible... and that also conferred evolutionary advantage, because the groups that developed agriculture then spread explosively at the expense of those who didn't.
(For example, the spread of agriculture into Europe was largely a replacement of preexisting hunter-gatherers by immigrant farmers ultimately deriving from the northern Middle East, not an adoption of agriculture by the locals -- there was admixture, but in most places not much.)
Most of the paleolithic populations disappeared without leaving many descendants; only a select few became the ancestors of the bulk of the human race today.
The changeover to modern behavior traits seems to be assoicated with a steep drop in h. sapiens sapiens average level of male testosterone about 80,000 years ago (detectable by skeletal developments). This probably reduced in-group quarrelsomeness substantially, making larger social groups (and inter-group conflicts) possible.
It's analogous to what happens to wild animals when they become domesticated; we self-domesticated.
Oh, and because humans don't have very sensitive noses, the "one of us" signals were primarily cultural -- language, religion, custom, dress, etc. Though there's evidence we're instinctually primed to favor those who -look- like us, because primates are very visually oriented.
Thanks, Mr. Stirling.
Re: the ~150 person basic human group: "Dunbar's Number":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
-kh
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Many thanks for your fascinating comments. I have next to nothing to add in commentary, except my belief that we are MORE than advanced apes. That God is real and we do have a destiny after this life.
Sean
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