Momentarily, Raven wants to tell Elfavy about his home planet, including:
"...bandits and burned villages and dead men gaping around a smashed cannon.
"But she would not understand. Would she?" (p. 570)
But why should she understand that? Surely Raven's part in the expedition to Gwydion is giving him the opportunity to question his whole way of life up to this point. He explains that fighting is his profession or calling. Elfavy's response is:
"'But killing men!' she cried." (p. 571)
Some people who experience war wind up responding to it like Elfavy. Which is the better response? Public opinion can shift significantly. Soldiers mutinied at the end of World War I. Jerry Pournelle trumpeted There Will Be War. There certainly will be if we do not stop it.
39 comments:
Then it turns out she kills men sometimes too...
Kaor, Paul!
And my view remains that of Anderson, as stated in his foreword to SEVEN CONQUESTS.
As Stirling reminds us, the Gwydiona can be violent!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Yes, we know that the Gwydiona can be violent. If we end the causes of war, then why will there be war?
Paul.
Paul: because the cause of war is, to be blunt, human beings.
We can -manage- this (sorta, kinda) but short of genetic engineering, we can not -end- it.
It's a condition, not a problem.
As I mentioned, the evidence indicates that violence -- war -- was the primary cause of death for human males, and probably the largest single cause of death for females, for the entire period before the invention of the State.
Which is to say, for the first 290,000 years of the 300,000-year span of h. sapiens sapiens.
This is fairly standard for social carnivores, which is what our species has been until the (relatively) recent invention of agriculture, and our pre-human ancestors for nearly 2,000,000 years. Since the emergence of H. Erectus.
So it is... how shall I put this... just "what we are".
Specific conflicts have specific causes -- competition for territory and/or power being the most common, with variations like religion.
But the basic overall cause is "human beings exist".
But I think that solar energy and advanced tech can produce so much that there is no longer any need for conflict about oil, territory or profits. Any other causes for disagreement can be addressed without physical violence. The obstacles to be overcome are vested interests and conservative/pro-status-quo ideas. The ideas serve the interests. We can have a bright future ahead provided that we can get through the current multiple crises and that is a tough prospect but, as long as some of us are alive, there is still hope.
Paul:
That's quite possible about -needs-.
But people will still fight over those things (and power) whether they -need- to or not.
The need to secure resources for descendants produced the instinct, but the instinct is now there in the DNA.
You see what I'm saying?
Even well-fed wolves will fight. Ditto human beings.
Yes. I am realizing how many obstacles there are to a better world. Because we are discussing not only the objective but also the intersubjective, we are both discussing what can happen and making our contributions to what will in fact happen which is unpredictable.
One argument that has come up and that I do not accept on any account is that a proposed change has never happened until now, therefore it can never happen in the future!
Had men split the atom before they split the atom? No. Is it impossible to split the atom? No.
However, I can see that some of the arguments put forward are weightier than that!
Changing material conditions makes a big difference. Understanding ourselves better makes another big difference. We now know that we are descended from animals (we have risen from apes, not "Fallen" from Eden) and that we have unconscious as well as conscious motivations. Will some genetic engineering become both possible and necessary? We are only just starting to find out.
Kaor, Paul!
Again, I cannot agree with you. You keep insisting that changing the merely material or technological circumstances in which humans live will somehow lead to humans becoming less warlike and aggressive. Why on Earth should that happen??? That has never been the case in real life and real history!
All you have been doing in trying to refute Stirling and I is offering mere hope and what I can only call unrealistic Utopianism. No, the best we can aspire to is muddling along not too terribly badly and keeping conflicts and wars within some bounds.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I have stated reasons. With abundance, there is no need to fight for resources. Other kinds of disagreements can be dealt with without violence.
Keeping wars within bounds? Like now? Current levels of destruction are far from acceptable.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Yes, bounds. E.g., no one has yet used nukes.
Wars, by definition, are destructive. And the blame for the destruction seen in the wars between Ukraine/Russia and Israel/Hamas fall entirely on Russia and the loathsome Hamas scum!
Ad astra! Sean
Paul: if a change in -human behavior-, behaviors that have been universal up to now, is proposed... it's almost certainly wrong.
Human beings can split the atom, yes, and that was entirely new.
But what was the first thing human beings -did- with the capacity to split the atom?
Right in one: they used it to kill their enemies.
What has stopped people from using it for that purpose since?
That's simple too: fear.
You see the distinction?
Technical changes are not changes in -humans-, they're just changes in what humans can do...
...to accomplish the same things they did with wooden clubs and rocks.
Note that the invention of the State did change an aspect of human behavior -- it cut down, in stages, the probability that you'd be killed by other human beings.
How did it do this?
By instilling -fear- of the consequences of such action.
In other words, it raised the -threshold- of provocation necessary to motivate people to kill.
By amplifying what had -always- been the primary deterrent: fear.
It didn't do this by convincing people to be unlike people.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I should have mentioned something like what you wrote above, which I agree is true. The peace, sort of, of the Mushroom Cloud!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
You keep saying that you disagree or cannot agree but you cannot think that I expect you to agree! The most that we can do is clarify different points of view. A lot of what has been said in this and previous comboxes is repetition. Some of it, more recently, is newer and more illuminating.
Paul.
Sean,
Don't just blame the other side. That is an endless refrain. Criticize the whole global set-up within which these events happen.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I agree we can try to clarify opposing points of view. But you stated many times your belief that if X happens then Y will be a result of X. That inevitably opens your views/beliefs to criticism.
No, it is right to point out there would have been no war in Europe if Russia had not attacked Ukraine, or in the Near East if Hamas had not perpetrated its atrocities on Israel. They are both guilty of what can only be called war crimes. Nor should you forget how Iran is malevolently stirring up chaos there, to further its own ambitions.
That "global setup" is not something external from human beings, it springs from them and our innate propensity for being violent, quarrelsome, prone to war and conflict.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Of course my views are open to criticism!
Hamas is guilty of war crimes and is not alone.
Why should I forgot Iran? I want all those regimes to be be replaced - by their own populations.
Of course the "global setup" is not external to us. That is why we have a responsibility to do something about it.
Cooperation and a desire for peace are innate. We can choose which innate propensities to encourage and develop. If we keep emphasising and (almost) defending violence and quarrelsomeness, then we will remain violent and quarrelsome. We have some responsibility for finding a way forward instead of holding ourselves back. This global setup which is us is destroying itself through environmental degradation and governments continue to degrade the environment further by very destructive warfare instead of agreeing to treat the environmental crisis as an international emergency - equivalent to an alien invasion. That is the reality which our leaders, both elected and unelected, remain blind to. Large numbers of people have to point this out to them. Some of this is happening.
Paul.
There have always been men - and presumably some women, as well, but the evidence is slim - who fight simply because they like to fight (are predatory, are sociopaths, etc.) ... gain (other than mental or emotional) is a minor consideration, if at all.
However, at the individual or small group level, that's essentially crime - or, possibly, "terrorism."
War, by definition, implies a societal level of organization, although that level has risen from clan to tribe to city state to nation etc.
And societies, by definition, come into existence and last with some sort of government; and governments, by definition, function by providing an desirable alternative to anarchy - and so must, simply to survive, weigh costs and benefits.
In a society where there is no economic or political power (which are tow sides of the same coin, after all) to be gained by engaging in war, it seems rather unlikely to expect anything approaching a rational actor to do so.
Which leads to the next point: in a "future" where anything resembling FTL travel is available, what is there to "gain" by fighting? If physics as we understand them are to be turned over by whatever "new" physics can be imagined to allow FTL travel, the very fiber of existence is, obviously, available to be worked in whatever way is desired to satisfy any human needs.
Hence, there is nothing to be gained by war.
Given that, and the reality that interstellar - much less interplanetary - distances are such to make conflict pointless, it makes it clear that - despite the reservoirs of ink spilled by various and sundry writers describing such conflicts - the reality of such coming to be is quite unlikely, to put it mildly.
DS: no, no, you -don't- need a government to make war.
Take the Maasai in East Africa, for example.
They didn't have a government prior to the European colonization of the area. No state apparatus, no organized mechanism of coercion, no chiefs.
There were charismatic war-leaders, but their authority was purely based on voluntary recognition which could be withdrawn at any time, and there were 'laibon', prophets, also recognized only voluntarily -- they could lose prestige and be disregarded if their predictions screwed up a few times.
What they had was age-sets.
Every male was enrolled in an age-set when he was circumcised in late adolescence, and remained in it for the rest of his life; they had names, like "The Gluttons" or the "Bloody Spears".
To oversimplify a bit, young men were enrolled as "morani", warriors. They lived apart from regular settlements in camps of their own, and their occupations were dancing, hunting lions (big ceremonial thing), sex and war, with a little cattle-guarding thrown in.
They didn't eat anything but blood (from cattle), milk and (occasionally) meat.
Moran went raiding, in bands of various sizes, all the time, and fought off raiders from other tribes or other Maasai groups. They stole cattle and abducted women when they raided, but the warriors didn't get to keep them long -- they were turned over to clans and families.
Then at a certain age an age-group would be reclassified as elders; they could then marry and settle down.
The Maasai were highly effective warriors and had migrated into the East African highlands from further north in the 16th-17th centuries, displacing the previous inhabitants.
But they had no government as we understand the term.
PS: the whole 'rational actor' thing is nonsense.
Reason is just a tool, a means not a end. You use it to get what you want, but what you want is not determined by reason.
Hamas' actions, for a contemporary example, are perfectly rational... if you're operating from their world-view, which includes going instantly to heaven if you're a martyr for the faith.
We're not rationalizing beings, we're rationalizing animals.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Fascinating, how even societies without some kind of formalized State structure were amply violent and competitive.
And you beat me to saying something similar to Dave, that we don't need rational reasons for war and violence, merely the capability to rationalize what we want to do. And that is exactly why I think war over interplanetary or even interstellar (assuming FTL) distances will be possible.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: precisely.
The archaeological evidence supports this.
Studies of human remains, and those of pre-human hominids, from pre-State societies (both hunter-gatherer and Neolithic) show a consistent pattern; about a third of adult males and about half that of adult females show evidence of dying by violence.
Which is a severe underestimate because skeletons don't show soft-tissue damage.
Eg., Otzi the Iceman, whose flesh was preserved by the freak accident of his dying on a glacier in exactly the right circumstances and then being found.
And Otzi turned out to have an arrow in his back and 'defense cuts' on his forearms. We wouldn't have known how he died if we'd only had some of his bones, which is much more typical.
What the State does is employ collective violence ("war") more effectively than most pre-State societies can; that's a major reason most of the world is now governed by States.
There are exceptions -- what happened to Somalia, for example.
Violence at the tribal level is not war; it may be violent, but it is not war - as war is known to technical civilizations.
One may need to ask someone who has seen warfare, as opposed to pretending. ;)
As has been said, by a fairly well-regarded soldier, war is politics by other means; there is very little "politic" about random violence.
Given the the technological progress necessary to provide any sort of "inhabited" interplanetary or interstellar human civilization, the political "needs" that underly warfare can not exist - after all, in a post-scarcity human civilization where physical reality itself could be twisted to allow FTL, there's no point.
The concept is entertaining, and sells well, undoubtedly, but makes about as much sense as the Maori attacking the Inuit in 1400. There's no point, they're too far apart, and the technology doesn't exist to get from Point A to Point B.
And even a maniacal Maori would get tired.
Kaor, Dave!
Again, I disagree, because you are overlooking evidence contradicting your views. E.g., the Maasai had no state structures at all--but their warriors were organized into age cohorts who fought other Maasai in very organized ways. And I think it's reasonable to believe, long, long before the first true States of any kind arose about 7,000 years ago, humans were busy killing each other in ways similar to what the Maasai did.
You are overlooking another point: wars can be as large or as widespread as the technology then available to the belligerents will allow. We saw the first faint glimmerings of truly intercontinental wars during the war fought by Spain and England during the reigns of Philip II and Elizabeth I. English pirates/privateers attacked Spanish shipping and colonies in the Americas.
Pinpricks, really, but harbingers of what would come, which became plain in the 18th century. Spain, France, Great Britain fought each other in wars whose battles were all around the world. That was possible because advances in technology enabled them to do so, if they really, really wanted to fight.
So, yes, if they had the means of doing so, the Maori or Eskimos could fight each other if one or the other wanted to. And that will apply to wars off Earth as well, technology permitting.
Ad astra! Sean
Except Neolithic tribes, no matter when and where, are so far removed from the level of human civilization necessary to go into space - much less expand into cislunar, interplanetary, or interstellar space - it's data that has no bearing on the imaginary situation.
Whether Pict or Pathan, Maori or Mexica, such societies can not amass the wealth necessary to do so.
Hence the point; absent the "technology permitting" there's no such ability for such a society.
And if the technology exists, the same "super-physics" that would permit such expansion means any collection of matter can be transformed into whatever the same society desires; there's literally nothing to fight about.
Again, given the scale of the universe, it's akin to the Pacific in an era of kayaks and canoes - hence the unliklihood of the Great Inuit-Maori War of 1400 CE.
As far as the European powers in the 1700s, the global elements of the conflicts were essentially combat over economic resources that were seen as paying for the wars being fought in Europe; nothing more, really, and certainly not because "they really, really wanted to fight" - if any two combatants "really, really want to fight" they can do so close to home.
It's far easier to schedule. ;)
I agree: find specific causes for armed conflicts - territorial, economic, ideological. Ideology usually reflects and expresses material considerations rather than living a life of its own. But don't explain all conflict by a desire for conflict. An explanation that explains everything explains nothing. Everything that we do is a human action, therefore an expression of "human nature." So it is human nature to kill and also to help. More specific explanations needs to be found for specific actions.
Kaor, Dave and Paul!
Then we are not going to agree. First, humans don't need rational reasons for fighting or having wars if they really want to. Second, It remains my belief people will fight using the means made available to them at whatever level of technology they have. With the winners usually being being the ones able to make the most effective use of that tech.
Dave mentioned the Mexica (the Aztecs?). They fought plenty of wars against all their neighbors, both to obtain sacrificial victims to their gods and to expand their empire.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Then the Mexicans had two reasons for war, other than just "really wanting to."
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I agree, the Aztecs were rationalizing what they wanted to do.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
You mean that the Aztecs wanted to obtain victims and expand their empire or that they wanted to fight and rationalized their wanting to fight by pretending to themselves that they wanted to obtain victims and expand their empire?
Paul.
Paul - Understood; the point being made is that simple aggression at the individual or small group level for pathological reasons is crime, not war.
Ask anyone who has even been a) a war in the modern era, or b) seen the aftermath, up close and personal. The number of SF writers who can claim either are very limited, not surprisingly; they wouldn't be so fond of it as a setting, otherwise. Same for most of their readers. ;)
War is state-sponsored aggression; states are necessary to develop the organization and technology capable of sustaining warfare, generally, and most certainly are needed for spaceflight, much less interplanetary (or interstellar flight), much less FTL, much less colonization.
Any such technology, as a fairly-gifted writer of speculative fiction once put it, is "indistinguishable from magic,” after all ... so any society capable of developing FTL and everything else that would rise from such "miraculous" physics means a post-scarcity society, which sets the whole "two tough, smart species want the same real estate" trope on its head.
If a society can manage interstellar travel, they can create all the real estate, unobtanium, handwavium, etc. they'd ever want by dint of the same miracle physics, which sets aside any examples of "war as the human condition" based on which tribe of dirt poor vagabonds did in some other tribe of dirt poor vagabonds in 1000 BCE, doesn't it?
Hard to sell escapism set in a universe where all needs and wants are met, of course, which is why Bellamy is barely remembered and Wells was a trope-creator.;)
DS: "Violence at the tribal level is not war; it may be violent, but it is not war - as war is known to technical civilizations."
-- in the immortal line of dialogue from "Eric the Viking": "Well, that's a circular argument, isn't it, then?"
In the Maasai example I quoted, the Maasai mobilized forces of up to several thousand for specific campaigns, virtually every physically fit male in the groups concerned.
They fought over and took territory, they fought other groups (different languages and cultures) and there were large set-piece engagements involving up to several thousand participants.
So you had different -groups- fighting on a -large scale- over (among other things) who got to control/inhabit broad stretches of territory.
If that's not war, then what the ***k is it?
War is -inter-group- aggression.
It may be organized by States, but as I have just demonstrated, it is not limited to them.
Unless you torture the definition beyond recognition.
Kaor, Paul!
Both, humans are amply capable of having multiple motives or reasons for doing what they want to do.
Ad astra! Sean
SMT - Remind me when the Maasai managed spaceflight. Or flight. Or transoceanic shipping. Or shipping, period. Or the wheel. Or domesticated riding animals. I'll wait. ;)
The entire conversation is about the SF trope of imagined interplanetary/interstellar conflict - which, even in the most fantastic fantasies presented under the "MilSF" banner, depends on technology.
Of which the various examples of pre-technical societies that are thrown out of examples of why "THERE WILL BE WAR" writing - despite the best efforts of everyone from Smith to Pournelle and company - is such hackery.
In an imagined future where anything resembling FTL travel is available, that means physics as we understand them have been turned over by whatever "new" physics can be imagined to allow FTL travel, the very fiber of existence is, obviously, available to be worked in whatever way is desired to satisfy any human needs. Hence, there is nothing to be gained by war.
Given that, and the reality that interstellar - much less interplanetary - distances are such to make conflict pointless, it makes it clear that the reality of such conflict coming to be is fantasy - to put it mildly.
Kaor, Dave!
No, IMO, you persist in missing several important points. First, humans are quarrelsome, aggressive, and competitive. And I've seen no reason to think that's ever going to change.
Second, can we at least agree that war is organized inter-group competition/aggression? And that it can be carried out by both States and societies, like that of the Maasai, with no formal State structures?
Third, the means and methods by which wars are fought can change as technology advances. That is a fact which cannot be denied. That is why I do not think it's going to be impossible for humans and non-humans to fight wars in space.
Limiting ourselves to the Solar System for simplicity's sake, with current tech it would take about six to nine months to get to Mars from Earth (depending on the timing of launches). But if, as I hope happens, mankind gets decisively off this rock, I do not think it will be impossible to make interplanetary travel far quicker. Humans being what they are, I am convinced there will be times when conflicts occurs between Earth and any colonies off Earth. That alone virtually guarantees there will be wars in space.
Your conviction there will be no wars in space strikes me as unduly optimistic.
Ad astra! Sean
DS: nice artful dodge there. Fancy footwork.
That specific thread was about whether pre-State societies could fight wars; you denied it, I provided an example that showed they -could-, you ducked and wove. Glyph of slow clapping.
As for predicting the future -- that is inherently impossible.
SF writers can imagine -possible- futures, and that's all they can do because it's all -anybody- can do.
All attempts to actually predict the future go spectacularly wrong.
Partly because history is chaotic and contingent, partly because confirmation bias and motivated reasoning swing -spectacularly- into action when people try prediction, because it activates their emotions.
Attempts at "futurism" by people convinced they're 'deep thinkers' do no better than science fiction writers.
The most you can -legitimately- say is that you, personally, don't find a particular prediction convincing.
This is why Molkte the Elder said "planning is everything, but the plan is nothing".
PS: if you can predict the future, why aren't you rich?
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Ha! That PS pf yours made me laugh a little. It reminded me of the Kievan Russian in THE DANCER FROM ATLANTIS who wryly suggested to his fellow time castaways that they should set themselves up as prophets.
Ad astra! Sean
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