The outbackers/woodsrunners oppose the agricultural development of Freehold. Uriason thinks that a fully cultivated Freehold might be able to support a population of ten or even twenty billion:
"'And not any huddled masses, either. Comfortable, well fed, productive, happy human beings. May a few million ignorant woodsrunners deny that many souls the right to be born?'" (p. 19)
No one has any right to be born. The overwhelming majority of potential human beings are never born - unless there is something to the idea of alternative realities? The living are that minority of potential human beings who happen to have been actualized by chance. Persons are valued when they are alive but cannot be known or valued in the same way while they are merely potential and might never be born. Could even a hypothetical omniscient deity know all the possibilities?
That a particular known person might never have existed can seem strange but how could it be otherwise?
2 comments:
As Richard Dawkins said:
"We are all going to die and that makes us the lucky ones. The vast majority of potential people will never be born." (as best as I remember it.)
Kaor, Paul!
I might pt it more clearly that what we see Mayor Uriason doing, quite unwittingly, is working out an ideology for the Nine Cities, for justifying and defending the kind of culture those Cities had and how it would affect and change the planet.
If the Outbackers had not developed their own, very different culture, one strong enough to challenge the Cities, there would have been no conflict of the kind seen in "Outpost of Empire."
Ad astra! Sean
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