Poul Anderson recognizes that all things, including human beings, change:
"...the change in technology had brought a change in human nature itself..."
-"Un-Man," VI, p. 48.
The profoundest human change occurs in Anderson's Brain Wave where a global increase in intelligence is followed by an even greater inner transformation as intellect and will gain conscious control of instinct and emotion. See Changing Motivations.
Earlier qualitative transformations were the emergence of consciousness from unconsciousness and of rationality from animality. With those changes already behind us, we should be able to accomplish much more, not just to traverse space.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
But my belief is that Poul Anderson eventually ABANDONED the Psychotechnic series because he became SKEPTICAL of such things as "...the change in technology had brought a change in human nature itself..." He came to believe that, wherever it sprang from, human beings and their socio political systems would continue to remain flawed and imperfect.
The Psychotechnic stories should not be misunderstood as containing Anderson's final conclusions in such matters.
Ad astra! Sean
Human nature is the genetic element in our makeup.
That does change, but slowly. In practical terms, it's eternal; certainly it hasn't changed much since the emergence of behaviorally modern humans about 80,000 years ago -- which incidentally seems to have been associated with a drop in male testosterone levels (the hormone leaves a distinct skeletal trace).
How our common nature is -expressed- is quite flexible, depending on time and local circumstance.
Eg,., humans are territorial but the "territory" can be a number of different things.
Likewise, the number of people you can know well and feel a personal, one-to-one link with is sharply limited -- about 200 maximum. But -which people- is quite variable. In our original environment, it would be a clan of several groups of families. In a modern environment it can be a neighborhood, and in an ultra-modern one an on-line neighborhood; or it can be a military company, or a number of other things.
The tendency to have a group of about that size as the fallback social referent is stable; that's human nature. What the group is, is variable -- that's culture.
Culture is sharply variable and can change fairly quickly, though not instantaneously.
But it operates within fixed limits set by genetics, in turn determined by our evolution.
Poul and I shared this analysis -- I know that from conversations with him.
I think his view of the share of "nature" vs. "nurture" swung in favor of "nature" as his life went on, but that's part of a common development in Western culture over the past several generations, as "blank-slate" theories became increasingly discredited.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
While, as a Catholic, I don't entirely agree with what you wrote, I do mostly agree with what you wrote about how humans live, think, and act. Yes, from his own letters to me, Anderson favored the "nature" not "nurture" POV. Which explains why he was so skeptical of dreams of somehow setting up an ideal society thru "education."
Ad astra! Sean
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