Chaim and Yael Zorach's children will join the Time Patrol. Manse Everard reflects:
"If not...could you stand it, watching them grow old, suffer the horrors that will come, finally die, while you are still young of body." (p. 247)
The phrase that attracts my attention here is "...the horrors that will come..." Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series was published from 1955 to 1995, this instalment in 1983. Anderson avoided describing any near future events and this paid off. The series has not become dated by specifying any "horrors" that have not come to pass, e.g., in the 1990's or in the early twenty-first century - but it was a safe bet that there would be horrors. In 2025, we have experienced and are still experiencing them. Anderson was able to leave it vague and yet get it right. The Time Patrol could still be part of our timeline - and yet no, it could not, because, in the Patrol's timeline, Sherlock Holmes was a real person! Also maybe Cyrus the Great was not really a Zoroastrian? Changes in historical understanding can date time travel fiction.
In any case, the "...horrors that will come..." is accurate.
29 comments:
Well, I wouldn't call anything that's happened since 1995 "horrors", except possibly stuff in the Sudan. Just normal history -- wars and rumors of wars and so forth.
Thank you for a different perspective!
Now, 1914-45, -that- period had horrors. And the 1950's through the 1970's in China. Mao killed somewhere between 30 and 60 million in the Great Leap; I've talked with Chinese who knew people who'd eaten their children, or traded them with other people so they could eat someone -else's- children.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, what we have been mostly seeing since 1995, in both minor and major ways, is simply how have been behaving since the Fall.
Mao! What a vile creature he was, managing to be both the Lenin and Stalin of China in one disgusting package.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: Yeah, Mao was notably bad.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
My view is this: No more Marxism, Leninist, Stalinist, Trotskyist, Maoist, Castroite, etc., etc., nauseatingly al!
Ad astra! Sean
My view differs, of course, but we have been through it all before.
Well, Lenin killed millions, Stalin tens of millions, Mao nearly a hundred million and forced people to eat their children to stay alive...
Sure. My position is a third one, neither defence of all those deaths nor opposition to attempts to change society.
Kaor, Paul!
I oppose and reject Marxist inspired attempts at "changing" society. I oppose efforts at "changing" society which flies in the face of what human beings are really like and the hard facts of real life and history. No more impossible Utopianism!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
What human beings are like is that they have cooperatively changed their environment with hands and brains and have changed themselves into rational, linguistic beings in the process. Thus, active change is our essence. We have added urban and social environments to the natural environment. The hard facts of real life and history are that we have progressed from hunting and gathering to a high tech global economy and might destroy ourselves (indeed, seem Hell-bent on it) but, otherwise, with unlimited time ahead of us, we will not, whatever else we do, stand still. Society will in any case "change." Advanced technology can certainly produce enough wealth to enrich everyone many times over and that is bound to transform social relationships and individual psychologies, especially in future generations growing up in entirely altered circumstances. No more unrealistic dystopianism.
It has become clear what you oppose and reject. Does it need to be re-stated?
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
The hard facts of what humans are like includes things such as how we are all imperfect and flawed. Nor do I believe one bit that a mere increase in prosperity or technological advances will somehow "change" men/women from what they actually are, as we see them/each other in the real world.
I put far more stock in humbler things like the efficient collecting and disposing of trash and keeping rats and mice under control. Not in grandiose impossibilities!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
We are not all imperfect and flawed. Vast increases in prosperity and technology are not "mere." They will not "somehow" change people. Relationships will change when there is no longer any need for one person to employ others, no longer any opportunity for any one person to exploit, oppress or deprive others. That will change everyone's experiences, perceptions, expectations, attitudes and motivations. People will become different from what they are in the PRESENT real world. The future real world will be different as the past was. Things change. Life is change.
This is not grandiose and not impossible. We consistently talk past each other.
Paul.
People exist along a moral spectrum from very bad to very good. The best are indeed very good. To say that we are all imperfect and flawed does not do justice to this variety. And many people can do better. We are not insulated from good and bad influences and there are of course many bad influences but that also can be changed over time.
Paul: if it was necessary to kill and starve and torture all those people, would any changes have been sufficient justification?
Just back from the Gregson Institute.
I think that we are agreed that no good can come from mass murder!
Kaor, Paul!
Marxism has been a grotesquely bloody failure every time it's been tried. You should be asking yourself why that is so, what it is in Marxism that makes it such a failure.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Disagree. What you call applications of Marxism, I call state capitalism.
Paul.
Sean,
If we want to keep communicating about this, then we should discuss and clarify what each of us means by the key terms used instead of just using those terms in absolutist statements - as if such loaded terms had clear, unambiguous and undisputed meanings.
Paul.
Paul: that was Trotsky's later justification for the USSR. But when he was in power, he was just as bloody-handed a mass murderer as any of the others -- read his justification of forced labor, sometime.
The real legacy of Leninism was that human beings formed before "true communism" arrived were just worthless scum, and that killing any number of them was fully justifed.
Trotsky, unfortunately, continued to regard the USSR as a workers' state, albeit degenerated, even when it had become (a) a brutal, bureaucratic dictatorship and (b) what Tony Cliff and his followers analyzed as "state capitalist" (destroying any remnants of democracy and exploiting workers in order to compete militarily against Western powers). Orthodox Trotskyists to this day cling to the letter of what he wrote.
I have read major works by and about Lenin and Trotsky and have come to a different understanding of their purposes. But, even if I were shown to be wrong about them in particular, I would still maintain that most Bolsheviks aimed for a general social emancipation and liberalization, that this began to be implemented immediately after October - but was unfortunately reversed - and that people now calling themselves "Trotskyist" (preferably "unorthodox") aim to encourage a collective self-emancipation that is the diametric opposite of what the USSR became: popular control; social needs addressed; everyone involved in discussing and planning the way forward etc. Something like that is the way to a better future beyond the current war-mongering and environmental destruction. There are current preparations to present a genuine alternative in Britain.
I would not have gone into all this here but it is what has come up in discussion!
Ultimately, it goes back to Poul Anderson raising the basic questions about how to live and how to organize society. This means that every answer has to be considered. Human Avalonians eventually go beyond government albeit with Ythrian help.
Kaor, Paul!
No, what Trotsky miscalled "state capitalism" was and is what Marxism always becomes once in power. All I'm getting from you is a desperate clinging to hope, no matter how many times Marxism bloodily fails.
And I don't believe in that Ythrian scenario, which was based only on Anderson's libertarian wishes--and which was something he moved away from, as he wrote to me in some of his letters.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
No. Cliff (not Trotsky) correctly named state capitalism. Capitalism is exploitation and competition. Russian state bureaucrats exploited workers in order to compete militarily, therefore they reproduced these two features of capitalism.
You cannot talk about what happens when Marxism "always" comes to power because, so far, October 1917 has been the only proletarian revolution led by Marxists. Do not make the logical error of generalizing from a single instance. Maoism was Chinese Third World nationalism using Marxist terminology for its official ideology. The Chinese working class did not seize control of the means of production. Instead, it was instructed to carry on working as normal while, way above the heads of the workers, Maoists seized control of the state apparatus. I said that we need to clarify our terms if we are to proceed.
Marxism has not bloodily failed many times. It was defeated once in Russia because of backwardness, isolation and civil war. I am not desperate. All I'm getting from you is prejudice and a desperate clinging to catastrophic capitalist crisis with a blanket misuse (instead of any discussion or clarification) of loaded terms like "Marxism." We can go on like this forever.
Paul.
(I would prefer simple discussion but I respond in combative style.)
Kaor, Paul!
You are simply clinging to a failed ideology. On this matter we are never going to agree.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
We are not trying to agree. You are clinging to a capitalism with a long term decline in profit rates which is causing austerity, poverty, deprivation, scapegoating and wars.
I have explained that there has been only one workers' revolution led by Marxists and that that revolution was defeated by backwardness, isolation and civil war. That does not make Marxism a "failed ideology." It was formulated in the nineteenth century and we have (hopefully) an indefinite future ahead of us.
Paul.
Short of agreement, I would settle for recognition that there are two points of view here and that neither point of view can be summarily dismissed in derogatory terms. If we get to that stage, then that will modify the tone of some of my responses.
Interesting discussion of post-Mao China here. What they got right & wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjsFfYohXDQ
About halfway through the one-child policy is discussed.
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