"...her brief meeting with him had given her the idea that this was a decent man. If his task put him at odds with her, that wasn't his fault..." (p. 65)
Years ago at Lancaster University, a politically conservative student had some sort of disciplinary or monitoring role within the student body and therefore admonished a fellow student for rowdy behavior. The rowdy item complained to a left-wing Student Union officer who therefore had to contact the first guy to investigate the complaint: a perfect recipe for a first class ideological confrontation. Yet both the monitoring guy and the Student Union officer were merely doing their duties, the first by responding to rowdiness on the part of a student and the second by investigating a complaint by a Student Union member. Hopefully, the matter was resolved without further difficulties.
During military action, two antagonists do their best to kill each other, then one might take the other prisoner and treat him decently as if they had just been playing football, a bizarre combination of barbarism with civilization.
We sometimes frequent a cafe run by an armed services charity and are asked whether we have done any military service because this would entitle us to a discount. I usually reply, "We are noncombatants." Once, the guy behind me laughed and said, "In society nowadays, we are all combatants!" I afterwards thought that maybe he was right but that he and I would be on opposite sides.
Some disagreements can threaten friendships almost as if we were in a civil war. There are those who deny that there is an epidemic and who refuse to take precautions against it...
What we do now affects the immediate future and thus also the further future. I can no longer separate reading Poul Anderson's future histories or Time Patrol series from thinking about what to do next.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
A useful text where Poul Anderson discussed conflicts and wars is the Foreword he wrote for SEVEN CONQUESTS (Macmillan: 1969). As he wrote on pages 9 and 10: "Our subject is human conflict leading to institutionalized violence. The key word is "institutionalized." Societies have generally found ways to keep murder, battery, rape, and riot within some bounds. When they fail to do so, throughout history it has been a symptom of their breakdown; they are soon replaced by new systems or whole new cultures virile enough to guarantee the ordinary peaceful person a measure of security in his daily life. But not government thus far has established a similar protection against war: for this is a proceeding of society itself." And, again: "The violence of the state remains legitimized, and often glorified, because it serves the ends of the state. And these ends are not always evil; ask anyone whom Allied forces liberated from Nazi concentration camps. Such considerations demonstrate the fallacy of pacifism."
So, no matter how advanced a society might be, I fully expect conflicts of many different kinds to exist. And some of these conflicts are likely to escalate to the institutionalized violence called war.
Ad astra! Sean
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