Let's stay with Max Abrams for a while, a very able man who works hard to maintain civilization and would be a good guy to have around if civilization broke down but who will never be a reformer or innovator.
Interesting facts about Starkad, where Abrams is stationed in these opening chapters: sea-level air, poisonous to human beings, is too dense to move fast although, on Mount Narpa where the Terrans are based, storms can be more ferocious than on Earth.
Abrams debriefs Flandry and explains Imperial politics to him and also stands up to the conciliationist Lord Hauksberg. When Flandry elaborates on his adventures to Hauksberg's concubine, Persis d'Io, Abrams has a coughing fit. All this sounds innocuous but much will follow from these early interactions between these four characters - even including Flandry's and Persis' son in a later volume.
39 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I agree with your summation of Abrams' character except the about him never being a reformer or innovator. What exactly is a "reformer"? To me, a reformer is a leader on guard against abuses and being willing or able to correct them. Commander Abrams believed in the necessity of gov't being legitimate and not governing too terribly badly. And that has to include the correcting or preventing of abuses of power.
Conservatives too, like Abrams, can be reformers. In fact, my belief is that their skepticism about the workability or desirability of "extreme" reforms makes THEIR reforms more likely than not to simply WORK.
Ad astra! Sean
One of the final comments by Abrams influenced my political views quite significantly when I first read ENSIGN FLANDRY in my teens; namely that pacifism is not merely misguided benevolence, but outright evil in that it puts one owns moral purity above the lives and safety of those it is ones duty to protect.
That pacifism is evil was so against the grain of mainstream ideology in 1980s Sweden that it was almost heresy - delicious to a politically interested youth like myself! About the same time I gobbled up Heinlein's Starship Troopers and liked how he problematized Western Democracy - an even greater heresy in that time and place! Although my politics since youth have moved steadily away from libertarian ideals towards the european brand of conservative, and lately towards ideas I would have scoffed at as leftie back then, the ideals of those two books have stayed with me.
Johan,
Given that we can't avoid politics, we need a greater diversity of political views expressed here so thank you.
Paul.
When I read the bit about the evil of pacifism I was reminded of Gandhi’s advice to the Jews of Europe in the 1930’s — to demonstrate their “soul power” by embracing passive resistance regardless of consequences. Which was an illustration of the man’s preening vanity and selfishness; how far did he think that was going to go against real badasses like the kenpetai?
Pacifism is profoundly selfish - parasitic. The Gandhian variety, which relies on taking advantage of other people’s sense of restraint is all that and more; it’s a direct incitement to -abandon- all restraint. It’s a form of bullying, moral bullying - only manipulative and passive aggressive, hence even worse than the physical kind.
Mr Stirling,
I was persuaded of Gandhian pacifism in my youth. I wish now that I had not expressed any opinions until I was at least 50! But I do not say that to people who are younger than me now. I meet younger people who have a very good understanding of what is wrong in the world. My own daughter: during an election campaign, she met some British National Party leafleters and berated them about her own part-Irish ancestry. When I ran into them later, one of them said, "She's grand, that Irish lass!"
Paul.
To ALL:
And I agree with Anderson and Stirling's contemptuous analysis of the sheer evil and stupidity of pacifism. That "expletive deleted" Gandhi succeeded as far as he did ONLY because he took advantage of far better men sense of moral restraint.
Johan: I'm glad to see another comment from you here. But how would you characterize mainland European "conservatism"? I suspect it might not be quite how Anglo/Americans would define that word. And what are some of those ideas you would consider "lefty" over thirty years ago? Before I can criticize them I need to know what they are!
Ad astra! Sean
Well, let's just say I'm partial to old Otto von Bismarck. Surely not anyone's blue-eyed idealist, and yet he laid the groundwork of a welfare state in Imperial Germany current US conservatives would probably deride as communist. I think a limited form of the European welfare state is a proven idea which works, and was first implemented by conservative reformers. For me, a good society doesn't let it's citizens go hungry or freezing or uneducated (the most important thing of all), even if they are unable to provide for that themselves. I don't admire everything about Sweden, but I do admire the "free" education. I'm saying free in brackets, because TANSTAFL, taxpayers pay for it. But just like taxpayers pay for the military, the police, roads etc which make society safer and better, maximum opportunity to get educated regardless of socioeconomic background is the best investment a society can do.
The leftie part, well, with the advent of the AI revolution, I don't see how we can in the long or even medium run expect everybody to earn their own living. Most of us will be made redundant. Because of this, we'll have to move tax burden away from salaried work and instead tax capital much more heavily, because in the end there will be nothing more than capital to tax. And part of that tax will have to go for providing for ordinary people. The problem with joblessness is not that you lack job - it's that you lack an income!
It's a conclusion I've reached most reluctantly, I assure you, but I see no way around it.
I am very interested in Sweden because of its ethos and Stieg Larsson.
Johan,
I think that capital exists only by extracting surplus value from living labor. Thus, no labor would mean no capital. What are the possibilities?
(i) AI controlling us? What would that mean? Why should it control us? For what purpose?
(ii) A ruling minority controlling AI and exterminating everyone else as redundant and unnecessary?
(iii) The whole of society democratically controlling, cooperating with or merely coexisting with AI?
Leftists want (iii).
Paul.
Paul: that’s an illustration of why Marxism is Libertarianism’s great rival as a “dumb ideology for smart people” — it makes perfect sense if the labor theory of value were true, but the labor theory of value makes no sense at all when you look at it, as was discovered by the first ‘marginal utility’ economists in the late 19th century.
Marx claimed that his theories were materialist, and probably sincerely believed that himself, but if you examine them in detail you find them full of unexamined metaphysical operating assumptions — leaving aside the fact that he was trying to come up with a theory of history in a period in which they seriously thought that Ancient Greece was among the very earliest civilizations. In fact his whole -schema- is a paraphrase of Judaea-Christian eschatology, thinly disguised with secular trappings — it’s got Paradise, the Fall, Original Sin, Redemption and Paradise, just with the serial numbers filed off.
His view of value contains an assumption that value is inherent and absolute — an objective reality somehow fastened immovably to a thing. Which is mystical gibberish; as shown by his attempt to separate “use-value” from “exchange-value”; which, to paraphrase Bentham, is mystical gibberish on stilts.
The whole farrago is a testimony to the power of the human will to believe and a demonstration that intelligence and knowledge exist to make cases for what people want to believe anyway, not to discover “truth”.
Paul,
Like Mr Stirling I believe that most fundamental assumption of Marxist theory is wrong. I believe profit comes not from the exploitation of labour but from combining commodities and labour for which there is a lower demand into commmodities and services for which there is a higher demand. The inputs for the process were classically labour and capital, but what AI does is to increasingly substitute labour for capital. This decreases the demand and thus the price of labour. In the long run, AI will allow capital (i.e. machines) to completely replace labour at which point those who do not own capital will have no way of earning a living if nothing is done about it.
In the shorter run, this can be alleviated by shifting the the tax burden from labour, thus making it relatively more profitable to employ people. To my mind, all taxes are already paid by private (or public) enterprises which create added value, since they first have to pay employes any amount of money the employees later pay as taxes. So it would not (necessarily) be a question of increasing taxation of companies but to unpeg it from the numbers and wages of their employees. One possibility is to make sales taxes the main form of taxation.
As the process of replacement continues, AI will gradually become an Anne Oakley, doing anything we can do better than us. :) At that point, I belive some sort of citizens wage - in effect a wage subsidy - will have to be instituted to supplement wages gradually lowered by decreasing demand with a gradually increased subsidy. In the end, man will have been freed of the burden of work and left to find some other meaning to his existence.
So, to answer your options I), II) or III), I'd choose
IV)AI working for both public institutions for the common good and for privately owned enterprises.
Kaor, Johan!
When it comes to conservative PHILOSOPHERS, I would not turn to Otto von Bismarck for analyses of why things are as they are, good or bad. I would turn rather to men Edmund Burke (England), John Adams (US), or Alexis de Tocqueville (France). Bismarck was no philosopher or even a great statesman in the true sense. He was a politician, albeit a gifted one.
The trouble with welfare is that it never seems to STAY modest, reasonable, limited. Rather it grows and grows and grows till even the wealthiest nations are ruined by it. We in the US are dangerously far down that path.
As for true AI, that I remain skeptical about. We have not reached, yet at least, the situation seen in Anderson's "Quixote And The Windmill." I would far rather we looked beyond Earth for new worlds, frontiers, and hopes. Which is why I hope Elon Musk succeeds in founding his Mars colony.
And I have tried to explain to Paul why the Marxist labor theory of value makes no sense, while the marginal utility theory of value DOES.a
Ad astra! Seam
Wow!
Mr Stirling, I would be interested in more about the "unexamined metaphysical operating assumptions." Value as an absolute would be part of this? I think that the difference between growing enough potatoes to eat and a lot of potatoes to sell makes sense?
Johan, AI is indeed capital in the sense of a product of past labor but it would cease to be capital in the sense of needing to compete to accumulate more of itself.
Sean, Is the US really being ruined by welfare? I think that the problems of the competitive economy come more from the declining rate of profit.
Paul.
Sean,
Oh, I didn't consider Bismarck a philosopher, rather an example of clearly very conservative politician and reformer who nonetheless instituted welfare programs. It was in answer to your question how Euro conservative differs from the American brand.
You're never going to agree with this, but I think the opposite - to my mind, the more advanced western european nations are more prosperous than the US (and UK), perhaps not in GDP per capita but in average, or perhaps median living standards precisely because we have more, not less welfare than the US. In recent decades, the Euro welfare states have contracted, not expanded. This, I belive is basically healthy, but some staples of Euro welfare really are important, like tax funded education, health care, child care, unemployment subsidies etc.
There is much noise about the increased levels of violence we have in Sweden, and indeed, it is an ongoing catastrophe of our own making. But still, Sweden at it's nadir, while we percieve our system to be on the verge of breakdown, is much safer and less violent than large parts of the US seem to be. And even our poorest, most marginalised areas are not nearly as poor and run down as the worst bastions of entrenched unemployment, substance abuse and crime in the US and UK. Despite its many and undeniable faults, I still credit our welfare state for this.
But everyting is certainly not hunky dory here. One of the great faults of a western-european style welfare state is that it incomparably worse at absorbing and integrating immigrants than a system like the US. Immigration has put a tremendous strain on the european welfare states, which is a big reason why there is such a surge of conservative support among its working classes who previously voted left. Welfare and open borders do not mix. But these are conservatives who want to preserve our welfare systems by reducing immigration, not slaughter them.
As for the future of AI, it might well be that I'm overly optimistic about it's potential. Maybe it will happen as in earlier technological revolutions that new types of jobs will appear to replace those lost. But in any case, decoupling taxes from wages would be a good thing as it would make labour more relatively more profitable, leading to less unemployment and higher wages and less economic inequality. No matter how AI develops, that would be a good thing.
Paul,
I would assume AI would compete against AI. I don't expect a single monolithic big brain to rule us all, rather many, many AIs of many different types, from simple apps to big corporate and government superbrains.
Johan,
But I question whether AIs would have any reason to compete.
Also, although I think that AI is at least logically possible, there is still an empirical question as to whether it is remotely imminent.
Paul.
I still think that this makes sense: a worker reproduces the value of his labor power in part of a day's work and, for the rest of day, produces surplus value. Hence, the profits of his employer(s). Value is a relationship, not an absolute.
Paul,
Regarding AI, I think we're using the same word for different things. I'm not expecting a free-thinking simile of C3PO anytime soon either. What is not imminent but already here is applied machine learning. There are already AI applications that outperform humans in fields as diverse as medicine and law. Just recently, an AI application proved better at identifying cancer tumors in x-ray pictures than human doctors. Read a few years back about a program that appealed parking tickets with a greater win rate than human lawyers. And so on. These are still small, specialised tasks within broad fields of knowledge but of course, every minute saved in a routine task adds up to a few less doctors or lawyers needed. And my are these machines learning quickly!
AI might well never grow into artificial person that we'd consider "alive", with its own reasons and objectives. But that doesn't mean it will not eventually outperform us in virtually every field of human activity. And that is not imminent. That is already begining.
Paul,
My sincere apologies for driving this comments thread so wildly off topic. It began with reminesences about reading ENSIGN FLANDRY and ended up with a techno-economic- political debate.
I will shut up now! :)
Johan,
You didn't drive it off-topic! We go wherever the argument and the discussion take us.
Paul.
OK. We were talking about different meanings of AI.
Kaor, Paul and Johan!
Paul: Yes, there is anger and alarm among many in the US over how MUCH of the budget of the US Gov't is consumed by welfare. Far more so than for the much maligned military budget. And our 23 trillion dollars national debt and the need to pay the interest on the US bonds comprising that debt also alarms many. I simply don't believe either can indefinitely grow without something eventually breaking. Most likely, the US will be forced to repudiate its debts, to stop paying interest on those gov't bonds, THEN another, and far worse Great Depression comes as the economy crashes.
I've tried to explain before why the marginal utility theory of value makes far more sense than the Marxist labor theory of value. And I used the analogy of a potter for that. The value of a pot does not depend on how much labor it took the potter to make it--rather, it's value depends on whether potential customers will buy it. If Potter's A wares are not being sold because people are buying Potter B's stuff next door, it's because customers marginally value B's wares over those of A. And so on for many other goods and services!
Johan: But your own comment about how, in some ways, welfare has been CONTRACTING in countries like Sweden seems to support my argument. That is, people are accepting that limits has to be placed on welfare. And that is not the case with many welfare advocates in the US or in states of the US, such as CA.
As for the danger to be found in some parts of the US, I put that down largely to many on the left being unwilling to accept the means needed for ordinary policy and maintaining of order. Here I have in mind the policies followed by Guiliani and Bloomsberg when they were mayors of New York city. There are other factors, of course, such as the counterproductive policies of the left which are destroying cities like Detroit, San Francisco, Los Angeles, etc.
American conservatives, despite their distrust of the overweening state, have mostly made their peace with SOME degree of welfare. But welfare in the US is far too open ended, bureaucratic, misapplied, perversely applied, etc.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I can't see that the pottery argument changes the fact that an employers has profited from his employees' labor.
And I can't believe this blaming of all social ills on "the left" and not on the workings of the profit-based economy! This "left" must be a very diverse and insidious bunch of people.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
What you said misses the point. REAL people still marginally value many goods and services in different ways. That is why prices for many goods can vary.
And I don't agree with what you said about "employers." They too work, in the sense of discovering a need and satisfying it, and raising the capital, funding the building of needed structures, supplying equipment, hiring people, etc. Their "profit" comes from what is left after all costs, overhead, taxes, etc., are accounted for.
Marxist economics, bluntly, does not work!
I'm sorry, but I still put a lot of the blame for our problems in the US to disastrous ideas and policies advocated by the left. But not because I believe in silly conspiracy theories. Just people who managed to implement ideas I believe are bad.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
And that profit is created by labor.
Paul.
Paul: no, there’s no distinction between growing potatoes to eat and to sell. They’re both for -use-. You use some to fill your stomach, and others to get shoes or rifle cartridges — all -same-same.
Value is the result of -consumption-, not -production-. Nothing has any value in and of itself: it acquires value only from consumption, and the value can only be quantified by measuring what someone else is willing to give up to get it.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder; nothing is inherently beautiful. Value is in the mind of the consumer; nothing has inherent value.
So, no, profit is not created by labor; value is created by -sale-.
As witness the fact that people will give you potatoes or chickens for telling jokes, for example, or because they believe you can talk to ghosts.
As for those metaphysical assumptions: that history has a teleology, which is in turn based on -a priori- assumptions about things with no evidence at all.
‘Primitive communism’ for example, is entirely mythical: hunter-gatherers don’t practice collective ownership.(*)
People own ‘stuff’ — weapons/tools, clothes, containers, food — as individuals and households. They make and exchange goods and services... and fight savagely over them at times.
They don’t “own” land collectively either. They exercise -political sovereignty- over -territory- as a group; but then, so do we. And they fight over territory, just as we do — they’re highly territorial. While highly varied, they also practice retaliatory feuding and various ways of addressing injury by compensation as alternatives to it.
Political sovereignty enables a group to exclude outsiders from access to the territory’s resources, just as it does now.
Game on a hunter-gatherer’s range isn’t collectively owned, nor are plants and so forth: they’re not owned at all. People convert them into property by killing and collecting and processing them. Families or groups may “own” — possess recognized rights to — things like fishing sites or deposits of ochre or whatnot.
Nor are hunter-gatherers particularly socially egalitarian. Men always dominate, to a greater or lesser degree, and do most of the hunting and fighting; women do childcare and most of the routine drudge work; forced abduction of young women is pretty ubiquitous, amounting to slavery more or less. High-status men get more mates and more reproductive opportunities, as do magical specialists.
(*) Marx probably -thought- hunter-gatherers practiced Primitive Communism — it was an idea floating around in the zeitgeist at the time. It was just flat wrong. Anthropology and archaeology were in their infancy at the time and what there was was chock full of errors, folk-tales, etc.
Marx was operating in a time in which “science” had high status, but actual scientific habits of thought were still scarce, and history was still regarded as a branch of literature and/or moral philosophy. Magical thinking was even more rife than it is now.
I could go on and on.
Mr Stirling,
Just on "teleology." Historical class struggles are said to have led either to reconstitution of society or to the common ruin of the contending classes - so there was no necessity or inevitability about social progress - and certainly not now!
That is interesting about hunter-gatherer societies. People who accept a class struggle analysis of history and of contemporary society have to accept new findings about prehistory. One kind of "Marxist" insists that the founder was right about everything but that is a kind of dogmatism that rears its head within every world-view.
Paul.
Going back to an earlier point, the worker has sold his labor power, then has produced goods or services which are sold. His labor power is bought at what is seen as its value. The goods and services are bought at what are seen as their values. He has produced more value than he has received. I know that that is how the present system has to work. But I still think that it has to be described in terms of the worker producing surplus value.
Kaor, Paul!
No, as Mr. Stirling explained, profit or wealth is not created by labor, it's created by OTHER persons valuing what A has made or offer OVER what B offers. If no one buys what B offers, he has no wealth, no matter how much labor he expended on his failed work.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
But the commodities that are sold are produced by labor and the higher the skill of the laborer, the more valuable the product.
Paul.
The main thing about prehistory was that there was not yet a large enough economic surplus to enable one economic class systematically to exploit another. (I think.)
On 2 occasions I have quoted (different) passages from Engels to Marxists only to be told, "That is an out-of-date 19th century argument!" Thus, not everyone who sees sense in Marxist ideas is doctrinaire about it. The main necessity is to keep learning.
I should have said the very earliest prehistory, of course.
Kaor, Paul!
But the commodities manufactured by a factory or craftsman means nothing, has no value, no matter how well made they might be, if no one buys them. The fact that some craftsmen and manufactories have failed supports my argument about the marginal utility theory of value, not the Marxist labor theory of value. Greater quality and higher skill merely makes it more likely than not for such people and factories to succeed. But it always depends on what OTHER people think or value.
And, again, even in the very earliest pre-history, there was at least a crude use of marginal utility. A half ape could do or gain more from using a stick or rock to grub up food or hunt small animals. His fellows would notice that and eventually prefer to take what he could offer them instead of what another half ape could do with just his teeth and hands.
Again, we see marginal utility, not "labor power."
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
However we describe it, the economic system involves a lot of people working very hard to earn a living or to make ends meet and a small minority accumulating great wealth.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And one huge reason why that happens is because people are DIFFERENT from each other, in abilities, talents, inclinations, or mere accidental circumstances of life. And I would oppose any attempts at trying to flattening out any society, to arbitrarily and coercively reducing everyone to same level. That means brutal tyranny and could end in what happened to the Zolotoyans in Anderson's story "The High Ones."
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I oppose any attempts to arbitrarily and coercively reduce everyone to the same level. There are different ideas about how to improve society. Differences in abilities are not the only reason for the phenomena discussed here.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Good, here we mostly agree. And "accidental circumstances of life" fits in with your last sentence. And another warning story by Anderson about what might happen from making bad choices is "Murphy's Hall."
Ad astra! Sean
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