Concerning the Cainites:
"'...the problem of origins hadn't occurred. Life was what you had, here and now. The world was a set of phenomena, to live with or master or be defeated by as the case might be.'" (pp. 128-129)
A Cainite thinks that this proposition is too self-evident to ask any questions about it.
A guy I knew was "past thinking about life" - "It's just there!" - but the Cainites have never started thinking about life in this sense, only about immediate practical problems which they would either master or be defeated by.
I cannot imagine either not thinking about life or not enquiring about origins. I was surprised when I read that Sherlock Holmes did not care whether the Earth went round the Sun or vice versa. Of course that mattered! But I know that there are people who do not think about "life, the universe and everything."
A Royal Navy Commander who was also an amateur astronomer told me that the only questions that mattered were the ones that could be answered, like the orbit of a particular planet, not the cosmological puzzles where the answers offered where full of unwarranted assumptions and were purely speculative. But scientists have to formulate theories if only to know what questions to ask next.
The Cainites sound a bit like the Lithians in James Blish's A Case Of Conscience.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
The Yildivans of Cain were pretty narrow and unimaginative.
Ad astra! Sean
It's also a matter of what your daily life is like. If survival is an all-consuming battle, you don't have much attention to spare.
Too right. If a man has to define himself indefinitely against mad dogs, he will become a mad dog.
defend
Kaor, to Both!
Both: another thought I've had more than once is wondering more than once if the Yildivans dependence on the Lugals as preservers/transmitters of knowledge and culture contributed to the puzzling narrowness and lack of imagination in their masters. Because the Yildivans did not have to use their brains as they otherwise would have if the Lugals did not exist.
Paul: And that is why the State eventually arose among mankind, putting a stop to the war of all against all. The State's monopolizing of violence meant most people did not have to be armed to the teeth leaving their homes.
Most times, anyway! The horrible current example of the chaos in Haiti shows what happens when even a bad State fails to preserve some kind of order.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
States emerged when relations of production generated two economic classes, one controlling and exploiting the other. Bodies of armed men were necessary to prevent conflict between these classes from disrupting production. Increased production will make the division of society into economic classes no longer necessary and will also end all pre-state causes of physical conflict between individuals.
Paul.
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