This is good writing, it must be acknowledged:
"[Fenn's] education to date included the chronicle of wretchedness which was history until five or six centuries ago - a bare half-dozen lifetimes. He hadn't learned only about famine, disease, poverty, toil, environmental destruction, the ills that piece by piece technology had lifted off mankind. He'd learned about the unnecessary horrors, slavery, private abuse, rampant crime, inherited hatreds, sexual distortion and oppression, superstitious dreads, and institutionalized atrocities of government, war, regimentation, extortion, torture.... Humankind today was liberated. Wasn't it?" (pp. 49-50)
No. Not if Fenn has to ask that question! The text continues:
"If it had pulled back into a warm, little Earth-womb, that was only because it was cowardly and stupid. No?" (p. 50)
No. A cowardly and stupid species would not have been able to create the technology that has ended famine, disease, poverty, toil etc. Not everyone but enough people would have been courageous and intelligent enough to resist any pressure to retreat into a metaphorical womb.
The news tells of unrest. Yes. And unrest can, not necessarily will, find an outlet: either remake society in the Solar System or go elsewhere and live otherwise as some have already done.
There is more good stuff to quote but we are going to have to take this in stages. Life beyond the computer calls.
Glory to the Emperor? Not in this timeline.
Until historically quite recently, slavery was a -universal- human institution.
ReplyDeleteHunter-gatherer bands had slaves (mostly abducted women), neolithic tribes and villages had slaves, ditto Bronze and Iron Age kingdoms, city-states and tribes.
In the 11th century, at the time of Domesday Book, for example, around 14% of the population of England were chattel slaves.
The first large area where slavery was extinct was western Europe in the high middle ages; then Japan abolished it in 1590.
After that there was a hiatus until the abolitionist movement developed in Britain (and its overseas offshoots) in the late 18th century.
(For example, the Crimean Tartars exported 10-15,000 people as slaves throughout the 17th century, until the Russians took over there. Mostly to the Ottoman Empire, and mostly as a product of slave-raiding in eastern Europe.)
The Brits abolished their slave trade (1807), and then slavery itself (1830's), and then went around the world grabbing people by the throat, sticking a gunboat up their noses, and forcing them to do likewise. There was no other way to do it.
Note that most of humanity thought slavery was 'natural' and resisted this as best they could. When the British tried to persuade the Sultan of Morocco to abolish the internal slave trade in the 19th century, he had a decree read out in every mosque exhorting people to pray that Allah would cure them of their madness.
China only abolished the 'right' of people to sell their children in the 1920's, for instance.
So the abolition of slavery was the product of an internal ideological change in western Europe, and one that was the product of a long line of unlikely coincidences.
And the Draka restore slavery in all but name. That is a very dystopian future.
ReplyDeleteYes, it is. From our perspective.
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