Friday 16 October 2020

Gadarene Swine

There Will Be Time.

Jack Havig spends time in the 1960s:

"'...among all those Gadarene swine happily squealing their slogans.'" (IV, p. 34)

(Another Biblical reference.)

He elaborates:

"'I'm sure Uncle Jack wanted me to have an inside knowledge, how it feels to be somebody who's foresworn the civilization that bred him.'" (p. 41)

In any case, Uncle Jack could not have prevented young Jack from experiencing anything that he had experienced.

Some people foreswear the civilization that bred them whereas others defend it to the hilt but there is a range of intermediate options. Anyone who hopes, for example, to organize a radical restructuring of a socioeconomic system needs to preserve a very great deal:

literature;
scientific knowledge;
technology;
technical knowledge and expertise;
knowledge of history (very important);
ways of organizing;
means of communication;
precedents, if any, from previous historical turning points;
as much goodwill as possible in spite of and because of inevitable conflicts.
 
Some of Havig's "Gadarene swine" would have done more than squeal slogans but he, as a time traveler, learns that there is catastrophe ahead. However, whether:
 
"'...everything follows straight from that witches' sabbath I saw part of in Berkeley...'" (p. 42)
 
- is surely a matter of interpretation. It seems unlikely. 

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Several thoughts comes to mind. I don't believe anyone agitating for "...a radical restructuring of a socioeconomic system" is at ALL likely to get anything good or even better as a result. All we have seen from such attempts during the French, Russian, Maoist, or any other such revolutions has been bloody and brutal tyrannies (and decades of war because of the French Revolution).

And I would have included in your list of "carry overs" plain old criminal law punishing crimes like theft, fraud, rape, murder, etc. EVERY single human society has needed means of controlling crimes of all kinds.

In many of his stories Poul Anderson has speculatively examined alternative ways of organizing a society. Two examples I've thought of being the Constitutionalists who settled the planet Rustum and the truly unusual set up we see in "Inside Straight."

Ad astra! Sean