What Abrams Says To Flandry

Scouring the early chapters of Ensign Flandry for any references to John Ridenour, I reread this interesting speech by Commander Max Abrams to Ensign Dominic Flandry:

"'They rammed you through your education. You were supposed to learn what civilization is about, but there wasn't really time, they get so damned few cadets with promise these days. So here you are, nineteen years old, loaded to the hatches with technical information and condemned to make for yourself every philosophical mistake recorded in history. I'd like you to read some books I pack around in micro. Ancient stuff mostly, a smidgin of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Jefferson, Clausewitz, Jouvenal, Michaelis. But that'll take awhile. You just go back to your quarters today. Sit. Think over what I said.'"

-Poul Anderson, Ensign Flandry (London, 1976), CHAPTER FIVE, p. 57.

What had Abrams said? We can return to that but, first, reflect on how much each individual is required to learn, most of it experientially, in their first two decades:

a spoken language, e.g., English with a regional accent;

ways to interact socially;

basic literacy and numeracy;

other school subjects (mostly forgotten);

some kind of preparation or training for work.

Possible extras:

more academic subjects in higher education;

religious indoctrination arbitrarily imposed by parents.

It is not surprising that this complicated process does not always run smoothly. Some individuals wind up badly out of joint with society. Personally, I was blind and deaf to much of the social training, resented and resisted much that I regarded as arbitrarily imposed, rationalized but then questioned received indoctrination and was very slow to formulate any kind of career aim. But I was not capable of doing anything else. My contemporaries responded in very different ways to very similar inputs.

Do I agree that Dominic Flandry should read some social philosophers? Certainly. Do I agree that he should focus on "a smidgin" of authors selected by Max Abrams? Certainly not.