The Roman prisoner has been hanged and run through with a spear:
"A raven flapped around the dead man, perched on his shoulder, pecked and swallowed. Another came, and another, and another. Their cries rang hoarse through the wind that rocked him too and fro." (p. 520)
We remember the mythology:
this sacrifice has been offered to Woen, Tiw and Donar;
Odin, the Gallows God, was hanged;
his ravens tell him tales of what happens in the world;
Christ was pierced with a spear.
The ravens evoke all of this although none of it is made explicit because this particular narrative is historical sf, not fantasy. In fact, the current passage, Chapter 5, is historical fiction because the time travellers are absent. Chapter 6, beginning in the last line of p. 520, is a welcome return to modern Amsterdam where Janne Floris recovers from witnessing a massacre.
28 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Slaughter and massacre are perennial facts of human life and history, because we are all imperfect and flawed. Preventing such things is always going to be difficult.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Paul!
Janne Floris lived 15 years among barbarians she should not have been so shocked by slaughter and massacre.
Ad astra! Sean
We are not imperfect and flawed. We can certainly create conditions in which slaughter and massacre are relegated to the past with horror.
Kaor, Paul!
Disagree, and I don't believe in the realism of your "conditions."
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Of course you disagree! We merely keep saying this.
You don't seem to understand what I mean by "conditions." I just mean that there are many situations where there is no violence and we can reproduce those situations globally. It is unthinkable that:
people attending St Peter's Cathedral and Lancaster Priory Church will massacre each other on their way to church on Sunday morning;
Cardinals will interrupt a Papal election to massacre each other before returning to the election;
my daughter and I will, for no reason, try to strangle each other the next time we meet;
endless other examples.
Surely these "conditions" are perfectly plain and straightforward?
I ask not for agreement but for acknowledgement that I present an argument and a point of view that cannot be summarily dismissed.
Massacres will indeed continue in the kind of social conditions that the rich and powerful want to conserve. That is down to economic systems and power structures, not to something rotten inside each of us as an individual.
Paul.
People will always fight over power; power is a positional good -- if you have more, I have less. There's never enough!
I am not sure about this "positional good."
Ability to influence, yes. Ability to coerce, no.
Paul: power is the ability to secure obedience to your will. That can come in a number of different ways, but that doesn't matter much. Charisma has always been a source of power; so has violence or its threat.
OK. I make a sharp distinction between coercion and other kinds of getting your way.
Paul: I don't. For one thing, if you convince -some- people, they'll 'lean on' others. Human beings tend to take on the beliefs of their social environment in order to 'fit in'.
I agree with that but there is still an important difference between a society in which natural leaders give a lead to others and a society in which rulers coerce.
Paul: well, the State -is- coercion; it claims a monopoly of violence. As the old saying goes: "Government is not eloquence. It is not persuasion. It is power; it is force."
In practice, elements of both persuasion and coerciion operate in tandem in all relations of power.
Agreed that the state, any state, is an instrument of coercion. That is why there is the idea that, when the need for coercion ends, then so will the state.
Theft will no longer exist as a crime when wealth is abundant and shared. And so on. We can list reasons why coercion is necessary now, then conceive of changed material and social conditions when those reasons will no longer exist.
But, this does not mean that, while present conditions continue, the state will somehow gently whither away and disappear. Indeed, that would be a contradiction. The state IS a major part of present conditions.
But meanwhile we can certainly set about building something better than the present conflictive world order.
Kaor, Paul!
I do understand your arguments as regards "conditions," I simply don't believe them. You seem to think everybody will someday be like you--or even me! That is not going to happen because we are all different, in both bad and good ways. It's a fact that many, many people hold passionately held beliefs opposed by others with contradictory beliefs just as strongly held beliefs. That alone makes it possible for there to be mutual massacre and slaughter. I only need to remind you of the fairly frequent times when Hindus and Muslims massacre each other in India to demonstrate that.
Papal elections: there have been many occasions when conclaves dragged on for long periods of time because the cardinals were at loggerheads over whom to elect as Pope, sometimes acrimoniously. I was reminded of this bit from Morris West's novel THE SHOES OF THE FISHERMAN (Dell: 1970, p. 7), "...and there were harsh scenes and rough words over the election of the Saint, Pius X" (in 1903). Most cardinals are good men, many of them very good indeed--but they are still human and subject to the frailties of all the rest of mankind.
Unfortunately, intra-family crime, violence, abuse of all kinds, etc., is far too common. The happy situation of your family is not universal, and I see no reason to expect that to be so.
I acknowledge that you submitted arguments you believe in, that you believe are convincing. I simply don't believe them to be convincing.
People are always going to fight over power and status, it's simply what humans are like. Mere wealth simply makes it easier for those who crave power to do that. Stripping millionaires and billionaires naked will not abolish that craving.
I disagree as well about "natural leaders" because you cannot have a large, complex, technologically advanced society without a formalized leadership structure, the State, commanding a monopoly of the means of violence.
One example: "natural leaders" and chance met amateurs cannot put out raging fires in large buildings. That requires trained professionals with complex equipment to handle. Professionals who first had to go to specialized schools to study. Then, of course, it took time and experience with actual fires to master. Next, fire brigades are organized as quasi-military units under a hierarchical command structure with the authority to use coercion, when necessary, such as the disciplining of firemen. Because that's the only way it can work.
I could go on and on listing many other functions only a State can reasonably be expected to handle. Your hopes are not realistic.
Ad astra! Sean
"Power and status" again! I have replied to all these points before. I really do think now that after all this time we should just drop it.
My hopes are realistic.
Kaor, Paul!
But you keep bringing up such notions in many of your blog pieces. Are readers supposed to keep quiet if they disagree with something that was said?
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I do not think that such ideas come up in many blog pieces. That seems like an exaggeration. No one is supposed to keep quiet but we don't need the same argument over and over again as if we had not had it before. I could give the same replies endlessly, in fact have done.
Paul.
Murder will always exist, though. And we live in unimaginable broadly-spread prosperity compared to, say, 1700... but theft is still common.
Kaor, Paul!
I'm puzzled, Stirling left a comment here I would like to respond to, but it keeps disappearing.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Paul!
Oops, I found Stirling's comment, it's higher up, not at the bottom.
Ad astra! Sean
Paul: there is no such thing as "abundance" in any absolute sense, since human -wants- (as opposed to needs) are infinite.
They grow with the feeding.
We live in a society so affluent that being overweight is identified with -poor- people, something inconceivable as recently as 1914, when upper-class people in England were 4 inches taller than the bottom quadrant(*) and weighed about a quarter more.
But property crimes are still common as dirt.
Human acquisitiveness is innate, it is genetic. It doesn't depend on having -needs- satisfied, it expands with -wants-. Plenty of people who are well-fed, adequately clothed, and comfortably housed, are inveterate thieves.
(*) they thought it was genetic, but it was largely nutritional, with a dash of a lower disease burden.
Not absolute. But advanced tech will still be able to produce so much that competition for resources, fuel, territory, profits, employment etc will become redundant. I think that we CAN have (what would now be regarded as) a "Utopian" civilization but first we will have to overcome all the current conflicts that hold us back. That is the main problem. Governments are still fighting over territory despite all the lessons of the twentieth century. Many people have learned those lessons but we collectively are still locked into power structures that pursue business as usual, including, needless to say, a lot of killing.
Kaor, Paul!
Not going to happen, for the reason given by Stirling, wants are infinite, while simple needs are finite. Your conception of the "ideal" society is too simplistic, not allowing for how, no matter how prosperous and advanced in tech we might get, there's always going to be some who are not satisfied, maybe even bored, or start craving power and status. And compete more and more aggressively for such things. Which is what we see in Chapter 6 of GENESIS.
The qualities that makes peoples and nations warlike and aggressive are innate in all humans, whether latently or actively. And are not going away just because you don't like it.
Again, I agree with Stirling (plus Anderson, for that matter), not you.
Ad astra! Sean
Paul: we -already- have so much that we'd be regarded as uniformly rich by our great-grandparents. It hasn't had much impact, has it? What reason is there to believe further increases in general productivity would so so?
I might add that envy -- the only one of the 7 Deadly Sins that doesn't even give you momentary pleasure when you indulge it -- is a universal human temptation.
Sean,
Possibly going to happen. I have replied about power, status and boredom before. I do not say that things will go away just because I do not like them. War and aggression are not innate. They happen because of conditions that can be eliminated. There are now many conditions without conflict.
"We," meaning the whole world population, are not uniformly rich. There are massive unnecessary deprivations and inequalities that cause conflicts. I am not imagining a society like GENESIS.
There is not always going to be someone dissatisfied enough to cause major problems when poverty and artificial divisions have been eliminated. I don't want to repeat too much of what has been said before.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I disagree, the drives and passions that leads to wars, aggressive competing for power and status, etc., are innate. I don't believe your arguments about "conditions." Nor do I believe universal prosperity will somehow abolish such drives.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I disagree. I do not agree that the drives and passions that lead to wars, aggressive competing for power and status etc are innate. There will be no wars when humanity is no longer divided into armed nation states, when there are no longer bodies of armed men obeying orders, when weapons are no longer manufactured, when companies are no longer able to profit from arms sales. There will be no power when there are no longer means of coercion. People who want status can compete for it all they want without harming anyone else. This is a summary but I have backed it up in more detail several times.
Universal prosperity will not "somehow" abolish drives but it will change how people behave. There will be no theft when abundance is held in common.
Surely we are no longer trying to agree and therefore do not need to re-state that we disagree?
Paul.
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