Let us yet again revisit those Hermetian social issues. Poul Anderson's texts present narratives that resemble real life to the extent that readers can adopt different positions. Thus, I would not back van Rijn if he bribed government officials, did not back Flandry when he led the Intelligence operation during the Imperial conquest of Brae and have big problems with the Time Patrol preserving the Holocaust etc. I will summarize and comment on a conversation between Benoni Strang and Emma Reinhart.
Reinhart: You couldn't vote and the aristocrats owned all the desirable land. That doesn't seem terrible.
My comment: What?!
Reinhart: Nobody prevented you from leaving Hermes and making your own career.
Strang: But those that I left behind are underlings with no say in public affairs. The Kindred resist progress and development and maintain feudal privileges.
My comments: I am for democracy, progress and development and against feudal privileges;
options open to a Traver (Strang's social class):
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I don't think life on Hermes was that bad, and certainly nowhere so bad to justify what Strang did in your option "(iv)." Which I'm glad to see you reject as unequivocally bad.
I think Dennitza is the planet in the Technic series where we see Anderson working out as carefully as possible a socio/political system he thought was optimally best and realistic.
Happy New Year! Sean
The problem with campaigning for social changes is the "law of unintended consequences".
The people who went to the Estates General meeting in France in 1789 didn't intend the Terror, Napoleon's tyranny (he made Louis XIV look like a pussycat much less the hapless Louis XVI), and thirty years of war that killed off every second adult male Frenchman and left devastation and death from Cadiz to Moscow.
But that's what they -got-.
Their -intentions- didn't matter a bucket of warm piss.
Hence the maxim: if it ain't broke, don't try to fix it.
We don't know how we work; we don't know how our societies work, or why they don't. We can't plan the future or plan our social arrangements. It's too unknowably complex.
"Planning" society is like trying to improve a clock by having a blind drunk hit it with a hammer.
Hence one should think three times before changing anything that's working at all, even if badly. It has to be very bad indeed to be worth the risks.
But the power of wishful thinking and optimistic self-delusion keeps people trying. As Kipling put it, "And the fool's bandaged finger/Goes wobbling back to the fire."
Whereas I am inclined to look at the other side of the coin, that the improvements which have been made, extension of the franchise, shorter working hours, better work conditions, pension schemes, abolition of slavery, equal rights, have resulted from people campaigning for them.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
Mr. Stirling: Absolutely! I don't care two pennies about the "good intentions" of the fools who brought on the French Revolution and the dictatorship of Napoleon. The horrors and the bloodshed they caused could not possibly justify "good intentions."
Paul: I disagree. All the things you listed could have been brought without needing the bloody horrors of the French or any other such revolution. The model to follow is that of Edmund Burke, who advocated prudent, cautious, incremental, conciliatory reform. And that was basically the route the UK took.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Yes but people campaigned in the UK and still have to. Poverty is increasing.
In Haiti, slavery ended not because anyone campaigned but because the slaves fought, defeating three imperialist armies.
Paul.
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