Saturday 2 November 2024

Violence And Predation

"Star Ship."

The Khazaki are:

"...naturally violent and predatory." (p. 284)

- and have built:

"...an early Iron Age civilization of city-states..." (ibid.)

If every individual was exclusively and permanently violent and predatory towards every other individual, then there would be no cooperation leading to language, let alone to civilization. Some minimum of cooperation within social units like families and tribes is necessary for rationality. However, we gather that, on a basis of minimal cooperation, much of it probably coerced, the Khazaki remain violent and predatory between groups and also between leaders or potential leaders of groups. This story describes a usurpation.

Khazak is a:

"...planet of warriors..." (p. 298)

Janazik, a Khazaki warrior, thinks that the age in which he lives has a:

"...gory magnificence..." (ibid.)

Gore yes, magnificence no, in my opinion.

Are the Khazaki doomed to remain at their primitive social level indefinitely or even to fall back below it? Janazik knows that he is helping the Terrestrials stranded on Khazak to rejoin Galactic civilization which will bring peace.

"...old Khazak..." (ibid.) will be no more.

2 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And that kind of predatory violence has been exactly what most of human existence has been like, before true States arose to impose peace over scales larger than the clan or tribe. And is at risk of always coming back, as times of chaos and anarchy shows when a State collapses.

Ad astra! Sean

Jim Baerg said...

It looks to me that Anderson took the name Khazak from the country that at the time the story was written was part of the Soviet Union. Within the story that name might have been given by the humans who found it because the Khazaki only called it something that would translate as 'world'.
The Khazaki are about as warlike as the steppe nomads who wandered across Kazakhstan for millennia, but their situation is otherwise not very similar