Falkayn, captured, becomes a house guest in Schloss Graustein, gaunt, dreary, on a high ridge, surrounded by forests with excellent hunting, with heavy but edible food, long conversations and occasional planetary guided tours in the company of his host, Landholder Graustein. Time hangs but Falkayn knows that, unbeknownst to his captors, the League is working on the problem and that he will be rescued.
He must persuade one of his captors that adjustment to League mercantilism will not be bad:
"'...even a knight must eat...'" (p. 314)
That is the entire basis of materialist philosophy. Mankind must eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, art, science or religion. Therefore, material production and economic development underlie and explain states, laws, art and religion, not vice versa. A Yellow Emperor did not initiate agriculture. Instead, agriculture generated the material surplus that eventually supported Emperors.
Falkayn continues:
"'...and our bread doesn't come from slaves or serfs or anyone who had to be killed.'" (ibid.)
Social progress occurs and can continue.
Finally, because the captor whom he is addressing is female, Falkayn invokes the romance of mercantilism:
"'Thy merchants chase the morning down the sea...'" (ibid.)
11 comments:
Not quite. Agriculture led to a severe drop in the standard of living.
Early agriculturalists were runty, underfed, diseased and miserable compared to hunter-gatherers. There's a 4-6 inch drop in average height after subsistence strategies shift to agriculture, for example.
What agriculture did was enable much -denser- (albeit poorer) populations, and it encouraged higher birth-rates.
It didn't have the homeostatic feedback mechanisms which (uusally) tended to keep hunter-gatherer populations in rough equilibrium.
Furthermore, technological progress is not an autonomous process. It depends on suitable social and cultural arrangements; and most post-neolithic human societies were effectively hostile to fundamental change.
Kaor, Paul!
Mr. Stirling beat me to making somewhat similar remarks, that hunting/gathering preceded the invention of agriculture by many thousands of years. Albeit, I would not have mentioned how hostile post neolithic societies were to really fundamental changes.
Ad astra! Sean
The scientific and industrial revolutions were, IMHO, low-probability accidents.
The maximum probability -- what would happen 99.9% of the time if you could rewind history to say 1000 CE and let it go again -- would be a long postmedieval stasis in which people would still be talking about the Four Humors and fiddling with flintlocks.
There would never be a scientific worldview or an industrial economy; the world would just go on and on at about the same level, until an asteroid hit us or something of that order.
And of course there would be a gradual ecological impoverishment as peasants, goats and slow population growth on the margins ground down the earth's capacities.
Sort of like Poul's story DELENDA EST.
Or like the last part of THE SHIELD OF TIME?
This makes scientific civilizations elsewhere seem even less likely.
Paul: Very much like THE SHIELD OF TIME.
So scientific civilizations -are- unlikely, and that's my personal solution to the Fermi Paradox -- that it takes a cascade of improbabilities to get a scientific civilization and then another for it to survive long enough to do serious space travel.
I'd be surprised if Earth was the only life-bearing planet in the universe, but not very surprised if we were the only technological culture in this spiral arm.
And, of course, a sentient tool-using species has happened only once on Earth, and land vertebrates are at least 300 million years old.
And -that- took some improbabilities, too. An asteroid big enough to wipe out the dinosaurs (except birds) but not big enough to sterilize the planet or kill all land animals. That took a very precise set of parameters.
It's a chancy universe... 8-).
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
Both: Mr. Stirling's comments are so interesting and detailed that I don't really have much to say, aside from expressing general agreement. About all I can add is to point out Anderson's argument in both "Delenda Est" and IS THERE LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS? that a series of accidents occurring at the right times in society, philosophy, religion, politics, etc., somehow enabled a true science to arise on Earth. Anderson seemed to date the beginning of that process from the invention of mechanical clocks by Christian monks, circa AD 1200
And I like Stirling's suggested answer for the Fermi Paradox: the sheer FEWNESS of civilizations with a true science and high technology.
I agree the universe is dangerous! Just read Pournelle/Niven's LUCIFER'S HAMMER!
Ad astra! Sean
There is one nearby star with large asymmetrical objects orbiting it.
or that story of Poul's where the Assyrians wiped out the Jews, and a guy from Vinland is in what's Jerusalem in our history.
(SM Stirling published this comment but it disappeared so I have restored it. The story is "The House of Sorrows.")
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: Thanks for restoring the vanished comment!
Both: I remember "The House of Sorrows." Yes, the stamping out of the Jews by the Assyrians aborted the process which led in our timeline to the rise of a true science, and many other things.
And that "nearby" star with large, asymmetrical objects orbiting it intrigues me. I hope the James Webb Telescope will reveal what they are, either natural or artificial. Possible evidence of extraterrestrial non-human intelligences?
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment