-"The House of Sorrows," introduction, p. 70.
"A few of my stories take place in the Old Phoenix, that inn outside all universes whose guests come from every world of might-have-been and imagination."
-Poul Anderson, "Losers' Night," introduction, IN Anderson, All One Universe (New York, 1997), p. 106.
It is appropriate that these two stories are collected together. In his introduction to "Losers' Night," Anderson acknowledges that:
alternative universes have not been proved and might someday be disproved;
in any case, travel between them seems to be out of the question.
However, he also observes that there will probably be more revolutionary transformations in our understanding of reality. Although I expect more such transformations, I would also comment that, when events that have been imagined do happen, they do not happen in the way that they had been imagined. Thus, the Apollo Moon landings were very different from The First Men In The Moon.
The conclusion of "The House of Sorrows" has a dual significance. On the one hand, the rumbling, crashing Saxonian cannon are coming to the rescue of the protagonists. On the other hand, their rumbling and crashing signifies that there is no end in sight to the millennia-long wars between nations.
21 comments:
A character commented in a recent book of mine: "Everyone who makes wheels, makes them round. That's the way you get guys fired up to fight: 'Us Good, them Bad; us tough, them wimps: kill, kill, kill.' Certainly seemed to work, didn't it?"
Kaor, Paul!
There has been millennia long strife and wars between tribes and nations because HUMAN BEINGS, like it or not, are innately prone to being quarrelsome and strife torn. It's not the fault of the nations that we are like that.
But Stirling expressed the same idea more pithily!
Ad astra! Sean
And some people think otherwise. Merely (re-)stating this does not get us anywhere.
Man makes his own history but not in circumstances of his own choosing.
Kaor, Paul!
Wanting human beings not being so prone to being quarrelsome, strife torn, warlike, etc., is nowhere good enough. Stubbornly refusing to face, and accept that, is a huge reason why so many "reformers" fail so often and catastrophically, from the French Revolution to our times.
Robespierre began as a well meaning idealist who became a blood drenched monster. And there has been too many like him since the Reign of Terror!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Who just wants? The universe has changed from a quantum fluctuation to what we see now. Life has changed from a single self-replicating molecule to what we see now. The future, IF we survive, CAN be very different from everything that has gone before. No need to hoard or steal wealth when wealth is abundant. Most people most of the time tend to accept whatever social norm is presented to them and the norms can be very different. No need to scapegoat immigrants about economic shortages when there are no economic shortages. Think big. Think outside the box. Think like a science fiction writer who recognizes that technology and society change.
Paul.
Paul: you're right. Technology and society change.
However -- failing genetic engineering -- people -don't- change in their fundamental nature.
We are not blank slates that can be overwritten in any arbitrary pattern, as Locke falsely imagined and as 19th liberals -- including Marx, in his mutant way -- believed.
We're behaviorally flexible, more so than any other mammal, but not infinitely so.
Eg., hunter-gatherers worked only 3-4 hours a day, on average. Judging by their height (as tall as or taller than moderns) they ate better than human beings were to do until modern times.
And they didn't have much rivalry for material possessions, because they couldn't accumulate more than they (or the women, really) could carry around, being foot-nomads.
But they still fought each other, in groups and individually, and strove for power in their (small-scale, face-to-face) societies.
In our society people contend for money and possessions not because they're inherently valuable (beyond a sufficiency) but because they're markers, counters, chips in the game of power.
Poul's story where the ultimate-AI "Gaia" takes over humanity has a nice sequence where people in a society where there's plenty for everyone become obsessed with acting out games -- and a higher-up being unfair prompts a rebellion (which the AI-overlord short-circuits).
In that future people eventually stop fighting because the AI doesn't allow it... and become so utterly purposeless and bored that they stop reproducing and the species dies out, until resurrected artificially. I think that's highly realistic of Poul.
There can never be enough power for everyone because power is a positional good.
Human beings are capable of civilized behaviour that becomes habitual and that does not require continual enforcement by police, courts, prisons etc. I suggest that there are conditions (economic, social and cultural) that would encourage such behaviour, making a state apparatus increasingly unnecessary. Such conditions cannot be imposed on a population by a minority regime but might be built by a social movement responding to a crisis in the current socioeconomic system. On the other hand, such a movement might: (i) not get off the ground; (ii) not succeed; (iii) be defeated by those who, motivated by either self-interest or ideology, resist any fundamental change to the status quo. I think that that covers every option.
Kaor, Paul!
And I simply don't believe what you hope for is likely or possible. Because the kind of "conditions" you wish for is so vague and undefined. And there will never be a mass "social movement" of the kind you advocate, because that is not how real people think. Most of us will care only about our families, tribes, nations. The closest humans have come to any such mass movements came from religions teaching faiths whose believers could be found in many nations.
I also believe Anderson would share my skepticism, as this paragraph from his essay "Science Fiction and History" (from pages 158-59 of ALL ONE UNIVERSE, Tor 1996) shows: "Nor is it necessarily simple-minded to anticipate no new orderings of society, different in kind from any that have gone before. Though often proclaimed, this advent hasn't happened yet, in thousands of years. Instead, we have gotten changes rung on the same half-dozen or so themes. For example, in many Bronze Age societies and in Peru of the Incas, the economy was not based on exchange as we understand it. Everything that was produced, beyond the simple necessities of life for the commoners who produced it, went to the god-king. He then handed the goods out as he saw fit. Today a less extreme version of this is known as income redistribution in the United States, socialism abroad; and far from being a quantum leap of progress, true communism would amount to the same old thing itself."
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Conditions: use of labour and technology to produce what everyone needs and to protect the environment, instead of to accumulate vast profits for big corporations and state monopolies that destroy the environment. Whether this is possible will have to be determined in practice. I list it as a possibility. You go all out to brand it as an impossibility! I do not think that we can be so sure. But business as usual leading to a major catastrophe is a very major possibility.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
There is nothing wrong, per se, with economic competition and profits. THAT is how advances get made and innovations become practical. It's also the best way to solve problems if innovators are not hindered and prevented from inventing new solutions, goods, services, etc.
You persist in thinking a post-scarcity economy would mean everybody would be nice, gentle flower children. NOT so, people would compete and fight about other things.
I believe in facing reality, accepting what REAL human beings are like, not in futilely wishing they were not as they actually are: quarrelsome, strife prone, competitive, often short sighted, etc.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
A post-scarcity economy would remove poverty and many causes of crime. The flower power stuff will require a longer term change of culture. My remarks are based on some understanding of social processes - and setbacks.
"Quarrelsome" etc is only one side of the coin. Many people donate to charities and disaster appeals and do voluntary community work. When we visited my mother in a nursing home, we found a total stranger already sitting talking to her: a Catholic layman who had volunteered either through some society that he belonged to or through his parish church. When we arrived, he went off to talk to someone else. A family member of mine spoke to a homeless woman on the street, then went straight into a camping shop to buy a sleeping bag for her.
This issue will be resolved one way or another in practice, not by arguing about it here and now. The details of what will be done are certainly not knowable in advance.
Paul.
There is nothing wrong in principle with profits but we can envisage a society beyond them just as there was a society before them. Concentrating on massive profits at any social or environmental cost is certainly wrong.
BTW, if you just go all out to argue against what another person has said, then you say things that can easily be refuted. Thus, a radical transformation of the economic base of society would not generate an instant population of flower children - but it would not leave social behaviour completely unaffected, either.
BTW, if "quarrelsome" were the first and last word on human beings, then there would be no society. We must first communicate or converse before we can quarrel but communication is the most basic form of human cooperation. We must first cooperate by using a language before we can disagree or argue about anything.
The most basic, defining features of human beings are cooperation (leading to language) and manipulation (leading to tools, weapons, clothes, buildings, musical instruments, writing, machines etc). Not only are cooperation and conflict complementary but cooperation is primary. Groups fight other groups but, if every individual continually fought every other individual, then there would be no groups.
Paul: "Human beings are capable of civilized behaviour that becomes habitual and that does not require continual enforcement by police, courts, prisons etc."
-- no, -some- human beings don't require enforcement.
But -some- human beings always -do- require enforcement or its threat.
In the absence of enforcement, things devolve rather rapidly... and people who'd prefer to be peaceful can't be, out of self-protection.
Paul: cooperation is a precondition for successful "quarrels".
As Montinesquue pointed out, 'a rational army would run away'.
That is, an army of rational individualists would. That's why humans cannot be individualists of that order, not without doing violence to their psyches. Any human group who thought/emoted that way would be destroyed by its neighbors, because it would have no instinctive solidarity.
I think Poul reluctantly came to agree with that, in his later phases.
In WINTER OF THE WORLD, for example, the Rognaviki are 'instinctual libertarians', because they've followed a different evolutionary trajectory than standard humans.
"Even Hercules can't fight two," as the Graeco-Roman saying had it.
That's why human beings are -both- cooperative -and- quarrelsome: we evolved with -group- as well as individual competition, the two in continual interplay.
That's also why human beings are capable of very tight identification with a group/tribe/faction/nation/class/whatever, even to the point of sacrificing their lives for it.
This is -instinctive- behavior; it's common to -all- human beings, except for sociopaths.
Or to say it more compactly: the human capacity for group identification and solidarity is -itself- an essential part of the capacity to make war.'
Human groupings define themselves -against- each other.
First, thank you for all this discussion.
Some human beings always need coercion or its threat. That is certainly how things have been and still are. But imagine generations growing up in a completely different economy and culture. Even the nature of coercion can change. A body of armed men would no longer be necessary if violently inclined individuals became so few that they could easily be restrained by the community. That would mean a different prevailing psychology but that in turn can grow out of very different material conditions and social interactions. And that has to partly evolve and partly be built. It cannot be enforced by a clique trying to impose uniformity.
Kaor, Paul!
I did not forget your comments replying to mine, but I was not sure how to respond, despite not agreeing with you. Stirling's comments articulated what I was "feeling" much more clearly than I think I could have stated why I believe you to be wrong.
And I still disagree with your latest comments. I don't believe some magically "different economy and culture" will change humans the way you would like. Because ALL humans have at least the possibility within them of being quarrelsome and violent. And strife, disputes, violence, etc., can crop up anywhere, at any time, in anyone.
I know you will continue to disagree, so we will have to agree to disagree.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
But it's not magical! Removing poverty removes a lot of causes of crime. And so on.
The possibilities of being quarrelsome or of being amicable are realized in different circumstances.
Paul.
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