"'The Alori are a unified culture. They evolved as one, whereas your kind did not. That is again a reflection of the gulf between us." (p. 143)
Yes! I am all for the Alori. However, on a few planets:
"'We exterminated the natives. It was gently done. They hardly knew it was happening, but it was carried through. We needed the worlds and the natives could not be made to cooperate.'" (p. 145)
No! United with each other, they lack empathy for others:
"Trevelyan's will surged out to clamp on his feelings. Man's history had been violent. If he respected intelligent life today, it was because he had learned by fire and sword and tyrant's gibbet that he must." (ibid.)
We are learning the hard way. But we are learning. I think.
6 comments:
I doubt the Ukrainians or the Uyghurs would think so... or the people freezing and starving in the earthquake rubble in rebel-held areas of northern Syria.
Without a 'them' there is no 'us'.
Yes. The world seems not to be learning - big time - right now.
Kaor, Paul!
IOW, the Alori were just as ruthless as humans can be, just in somewhat different ways.
And I don't believe the human race is "learning" better. Our species remains as quarrelsome and strife torn as it was 300,000 years ago.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: well, possibly not 300,000 years.
There was a major behavioral change -- 'behavioral modernity' -- about 80,000 years ago.
This was accompanied by a physical change; a steep drop in adult male testosterone levels.
This probably made men -in the same group- less likely to quarrel with each other. Not unlikely, but -less- likely.
Which in turn made them more effective at cooperating for intergroup conflict, and other (closely related) things like large-scale hunting.
This was when modern humans began to expand rapidly outside Africa and replace other hominids -- Neanderthals, Denisovans, remnant H. Erectus.
It's also when human cultures began to change their material tool-kits faster, and to much more closely adapt to regional ecologies and exploit their resources better, which is related to the above because it let them have 'dense' populations compared to the generalized hunting-foraging strategies and much slower toolkit changes of other hominid subspecies.
NB: you can tell the testosterone drop by the effects on bone structure.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I sit corrected! But 80,000 years is still a long, long, LONG time!
Ad astra! Sean
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