hanuman wrote:runsforcelery wrote:
This is not, of course, unique to the US experience, but one advantage of hereditary forms of government (I am sometimes tempted to say the only advantage) is that there is far less pressure for the "new broom" to "sweep clean." Policy discontinuities can still be wrenching (as an historic example the shifts following Henry VIII's death between Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth), but I think there's been a somewhat better chance historically of continuity. The huge differences in Manticore's case (as opposed to the US in Iraq) is that (a) the monarch has a greater degree of constitutionally protected control over government policies, both foreign and domestic; (b) the SKM's system is hereditary and the monarch cannot be simply voted out of office, (c) that both Elizabeth and Roger are prolong recipients, and (d) that the entire Masada situation emerged from a lengthy Cold War just as it started to turn hot.
Okay, I assume that 'runsforcelery' is Mr Weber's moniker on his website. If I'm wrong, then I apologize. But if I'm correct, I have a question for you that I hope you'll be willing to answer.
In Crown of Slaves, when Du Havel and Oversteegen are having their fascinating debate(?)/discussion at Cathy's party, Oversteegen said something about an aristocratic model of society and government having many advantages, however that aristocracy comes into being. Was it you or Mr Flint who wrote that part, and would you be willing to expand a bit on what advantages Oversteegen was talking about?
I don't really recall exactly which parts of that scene Eric wrote and which parts I wrote. The interesting thing is that whereas Eric has been nicknamed "Eric the Red" for his belief in Marxism and his activities as a dangerous socialist and union activist and I (despite having been raised as a pretty hard left — for the US — liberal) am much more conservative than he is, we agree on an enormous number of things. That's one of the reasons I fleshed out the character of John Simpson in the 1632 novels while Eric's primary viewpoint character is either Mike Starnes or Gretchen Richter (I've never been able to decide which, really). And one of the points that we made in The Baltic War was that the most reactionary 20th-century American had far more in common with the most liberal/socialistic/anarchist 20th-century American than either of them had with a 17th-century aristocrat. They come from the same society (whether they can stand to admit it or not) and they begin the same basic conceptual framework.
Du Havel and Oversteegen are both very . . . rich characters, and they are both in their own way iconoclasts who take a certain positive delight in "letting the chips fall where they may" and who enormously enjoy a vigorous intellectual debate on the issues. Mind you, they have strenuous standards were those vigorous debates are concerned. Neither of them has any patience with people who argue from ignorance or simply parrot arguments they've imbibed with their mother's milk, as it were, without benefit of any personal examination.
Oversteegen, in particular, is very well aware of the extent to which his aristocratic birth and family wealth have placed him in a situation of privilege within his society. He makes no apologies for those privileges, and the fact that he's amply demonstrated his courage, his tactical and strategic acumen, and his willingness to recognize and assume the obligations which come with the privilege simply confirm (as far as he's concerned) that the system is working the way it ought to, at least in his case. He's by no means blind to the ways in which the system can be "gamed," and he would be among the first to admit that the patronage system which afflicted the Royal Manticoran Navy's officer corps for so long was both personally and institutionally pernicious. He would point to Honor Harrington as an example of an outstanding officer whose career and advancement would have been enormously hampered by the patronage system (which was knocked on the head by a combination of King Roger's intentional reforms and the sheer rate at which the Navy expanded)the patronage system). By the same token, he would point to himself, Hamish Alexander, and perhaps even Michelle Henke as officers whom birth and privilege would simply have impelled even more rapidly to the levels their skills and devotion clearly merited, judged on the basis of their accomplishments.
What sets Oversteegen so strongly apart from his uncle High Ridge and the rest of the Conservative Association is that he rejects the notion that aristocrats are inherently superior in some fashion to the rest of the Star Kingdom's citizens, on the one hand, and that he believes equally strongly that the privileges he enjoys create moral obligations which it's his responsibility to meet. In other words, it's a quid pro quo. If his birth society is going to give him opportunities and privileges denied to others, then he owes his birth society more than those to whom those opportunities and privileges were not extended. This, by the way, is very much a part of the thinking of the House of Winton, which has always (sometimes with greater and sometimes with lesser degrees of success) emphasized the concept of service in the rearing and education of its children.
When Oversteegen says "No, the issue isn't the worth of the individuals in any given aristocracy. It's simply the social advantage which havin' any aristocracy gives a nation" the benefits for which he's arguing have a great deal to do with continuity, the power to evoke change, and the power to retard change. A conservative of Oversteegen's stripe is most emphatically not opposed to social change. He recognizes that change is the necessary and essential alternative to stagnation and that stagnation and closed, repressive systems inevitably lead to collapse. If the people at the top are fortunate, the system simply lapses into a spiral of decay which eventually collapses under its own weight. Much more often, the people at the top discover that by tying down the pressure valve of the aspirations of those not at the top, they get a boiler explosion in the end with often horrific consequences for society as a whole and always horrific consequences for those at the top . . . unless they have a way out to move with their wealth largely intact into another society where they haven't pinned great big targets to their own backs by their abuse of their social inferiors.
You can call Oversteegen's view selfishness, or enlightened self-interest, or simply pragmatism yYou can also, however, call it moral. He doesn't think that exploding societies are good things for anyone, since there's always so much collateral damage even (or perhaps especially) among the groups who are finally driven into lighting the fuse. As such, he sees it as the moral responsibility of the aristocracy to create a situation in which no one needs to be lighting any fuses. This means that he opposes ideologues of any persuasion, that he distrusts radical solutions to problems, that he rejects arguments against change simply because it is change, and that he believes politicians and individuals should be held accountable for (and either reelected or turned out of office on the basis of) the actual consequences of their policies rather than being permitted to excuse themselves in the case of disaster because of the high nobility of their intended outcomes.
In Oversteegen's view, an aristocracy creates a protective buffer zone, you might say, around the essential concepts and organization of the political and economic system. You might think of it as a "balance of power" argument in which the aristocracy fulfills the function of making change difficult. It's been argued that the intention of the Framers of the United States Constitution was really to put as much "grit" as possible into the governing process. They wanted to make it hard for the central government to enact legislation which would affect every US citizen on the theory tha making the process difficult would prevent casual abuse of the citizenry and force compromise solutions to the intractable problems facing the country. One can argue (obviously
) about how well that's working out at the moment, but that was the theory, and Oversteegen would argue that what holds true for a government holds true for a society. At the same time, though, note his comments about Catherine Montaigne, about the value of martyrs, and about the moral integrity and courage required to break the "rules" of which he regards the aristocracy as the natural guardian. Oversteegen would agree wholeheartedly with Thomas Paine: "What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value." He wouldn't argue that change should be achievable only through the shedding of the blood of patriots, but he would argue that change which is too easily achieved is seldom thought through, rarely fully tested in the laboratory of contending ideals and aspirations, and generally undervalued and so easily lost once again. And he would argue — did argue — that exacting the penalty when the "rules" are broken is what gives meaning to the decision to break them because the principle or the cause is important enough for someone to be willing to pay the price set upon defending or accomplishing it.The value of the House of Lords to the Star Kingdom of Manticore — and it has indeed been of value many times in the Star Kingdom's history — is that it conserves, on the one hand, and also provides an unassailable vantage point for those who believe change is necessary. Just as people who dig in and use their positions of power solely to protect those positions of power (like Michael Janvier and the Conservative Association), there are also those who use their positions of power to contend and work for necessary change (Catherine Montaigne and even Countess New Kiev. And, yes, I know that Cathy renounced her title, but does anyone reading these books think she really stopped being a member of the aristocracy, be it ever so distressing to the High Ridges of the conservative association, just because she's no longer Countess of the Tor? Really, people!) The Lords have acted as the . . . balance wheel, if you will, of the Star Kingdom. While the House of Commons has been the voice of popular change (frequently with the Crown's support), the Lords have protected (even when it's only a consequence of protecting the individual peers' personally privileged positions) the essential structure of the Star Kingdom from poorly thought out and overly sweeping changes, all conducted withinam in which (with a few exceptions) the rule of law and the power of the ballot box are respected by both sides.
It's quite late, and I'm pretty tired at the moment, so I don't know that I'm expressing this clearly. In many ways, however, Oversteegen's thinking reflects on a societal basis Churchill's comment on a personal basis: "If you are not a liberal at 20, you have no heart; if you are not a conservative at 40, you have no brain." The original source of Churchill's observation was probably François Guizot, a French monarchist born near the end of the eighteenth centur, who said "Not to be a Republican at 20 is proof of want of heart; to be one at 30 is proof of want of head," and George Clemenceau paraphrased that in turn as "Not to be a socialist at 20 is proof of want of heart; to be one it 30 is proof of want of head." Whoever said it first, however, there's a certain point to it, and not simply the retreat into reactionism some people would call it. "Liberal" and "conservative," are, of course, always loaded terms, and every person I know would define his or her personal position on the spectrum between them differently from almost anyone else. If we take a blind reactionary, opposed to any change for any reaso, and put him at one end of the spectrum and we take a burning social revolutionary who refuses to acknowledge any limitation on what he can/should be able to change, on the other, we have a set of extremes, neither of which, I expect, very many people would find acceptable. Yet societies are always changing. Sometimes the change may seem glacially slow, other times it races ahead with breakneck speed, but change is a constant. We forget sometimes that our own life experience – especially our own current life experience — is a single frame from a moving picture. We imbue it wit a sort of permanence because it's who we are, where we are, and what we are (or think we are) at the given moment when we pull our analysis of it out where we can see it. And I think that most people, as they grow older, recognize that the burning ardor of youth is frequently tempered by experience into something which may not be more conservative (depending on how one chooses to define that term) but is almost certainly more . . . pragmatic. More informed, perhaps, by our greater life experience and the process which forces us to actually think about what we are trying to accomplish because we need to understand how to bring that accomplishment about in the face of the obstacles in our path.
It is in the interplay between contending viewpoints — between the thesis and the antithesis — that the achievable is discovered, and Oversteegen would argue that an explicit aristocracy creates one of those contending viewpoints. Of course, he would also argue that the aristocracy's privileged position is the basis for the individual aristocrat's obligation not simply to his own class but to the entire society of which is class is a part and without which it could not exist.
All right. It's roughly 3 o'clock in the morning, and I've been up and writing since yesterday morning, so I'm going to stop here. I'm not sure I answered your question, and I'm not sure that your question really has a clear-cut answer. It's integral to how Michael Oversteegen, the character, sees his own and his social class' function, position, and responsibility within the larger context of a healthy society. It may be that his vision is entirely wrong, but it's what guides him and that's really the point he was making to Du Havel, I think.
if a bit more honest.