I have just reread and reassessed the above passage. No doubt Mikkal and his sister, Fraina, had intended somehow to remove Ivar from their tineran Train. Fraina had warned Ivar that he would not be able to stay and had already taken all his money.
However, the circumstances of Ivar's expulsion were entirely his responsibility. He had been with Fraina. He saw Fraina willingly accompanying another man. He attacked the man - incidentally nearly sparking a riot. Wrong action. End of. Of course they had to expel him. Mikkal, throwing a knife, could have killed Ivar but did not.
If Ivar had understood and accepted tineran mores, then he would have been able to stay longer and to leave in different circumstances.
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I think you missed an additional factor: those telepathic parasitic animals. These creatures tended to encourage tinerans to be more irrational and violence than the probably would otherwise have been. I think they were affecting Ivar as well, stimulating similar reactions in him. After the weeks he had been with the tinerans, that would make sense!
Ad astra and Merry Christmas! Sean
Drat! I meant to write "...more irrational and violence PRONE..." above!
Sean
The Tinerans have probably evolved some resistance to them, with the most vulnerable in each generation dying younger and having fewer/no children.
In fact, taking away the parasites might have bad effects and would be unpleasant subjectively; I’ve known bipolar people who hate taking their meds during the ‘up’ part of their cycle because it makes everything feel ‘flat’ and boring - what the rest of us call normalacy.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I have to give a qualified disagreement. My reaction to your first sentence was to think the tinerans came to evolve a DEPENDENCY on the stimulation these parasites gave them.
And I cam see the tinerans being so dependent on these parasites that to suddenly take them away might cause them harm. So there would first need to be a scientific study of the tinerans addiction to these parasites before any attempt was made to remove them.
Ad astra and Merry Christmas! Sean
Sean: habituation would involve damping the effect, because those most vulnerable to it would reproduce less.
Populations which have been agricultural longer have higher resistance on average to alcohol addiction, for example -- Jews are an instance.
Ashkenazim have also been urbanized (or relatively urbanized in the "town and large village" level) because in most of Europe they were forbidden to engage in agriculture and limited to urban trades and occupations.
One result of that was that they're more resistant to water-born intestinal infections than populations who were more scattered and rural until lately, because gastrointestinal infections from contaminated water were very, very common in all densely inhabited areas until about a century to a century and a half ago.
Which is why nearly all preindustrial cities were "man-eaters", places where more people died than were born.
Funerals outnumbered baptisms in London by 5 or 6 to 1 in Shakespeare's time, for example.
Even Edo/Tokyo, the largest city in the world in the late 17th and 18th century (up until about 1800), which was the best organized in terms of sanitation, only had a 1 to 1 ratio of births and deaths.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
The "damping" effect you mentioned clarified what otherwise seemed a puzzling comment you made re those telepahtic parasitic animals preying on the tinerans.
Yes, post Roman cities in Europe were gruesome killers due to diseases spread by terrible hygiene and sanitation. Yes, I can see how funerals were more numerous than baptisms in cities like London, circa AD 1600. The survivors in such places would tend to have evolved a greater resistance to such diseases, like the Ashkenazim you mentioned.
Ad astra and Merry Christmas! Sean
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