cralkhi wrote:AirTech wrote:(I was a little surprised Langhorne didn't go to Chinese ideograms or some version of Orwell's New Speak if he really wanted to freeze a culture, if you don't have words for a concept then explaining it is very hard).
Too easy just to invent new words, I think.
I do wonder why he picked a basically pseudo-Christian, monotheistic religion, though. It seems to me that using monotheism the way they did requires the concept of a divine plan, which is likely to bring in, or at least is a bit closer to the concept of a rational, comprehensible world than I think Langhorne would have been happy with.
A polytheism with gods often opposed to each other and a the-material-world-is-an-illusion (or a Gnostic style "matter is evil") doctrine would seem more useful at preventing the sorts of thought that lead to science from ever arising in the first place.
Wow! Did this topic ever swerve!
I, however, can swerve with the best of them. So . . . .
First, Langhorne's belief that technology could be permanently "turned off" at all represents a triumph of desperate hope over logic and historical experience. While one can find specific eras in human history which appear remarkably stable and remarkably anti-technology, there's seldom been a time in the last several thousand years when someone, somewhere on the planet hasn't been advancing human knowledge and understanding of the world about him.
Westerners are as culture bound is anyone else in their perception of how the world — and humanity — work. We make certain assumptions about how and why the scientific method emerged. We make certain assumptions about how other cultures, contemporary as well as historical, do or do not mirror our own experiences and expectations. Those assumptions can be very useful, but they can also blinker us, and one way that tends to work is to create an unconscious assumption that the way something worked in our own case, or in a known case, is the only way it could have happened.
Rationalism does not, in fact, depend on monotheism, in my opinion. Our experience in the West may be that our version of rationalism grew out of the Scholastic movement, but that is an observation made after the fact. While I am myself a monotheist, I believe that rationalism might also have grown out of atheism. If one does not believe in any God, gods, or spirits as the causative factors in the world about one, then one must obviously look for some other explanation for events and observed phenomena. I also think, however, that atheism is extremely unlikely to evolve in the wild, as it were. Atheism seems to me to result from a rejection of supernatural and divine forces because those forces are seen as having failed to accomplish what the proto-atheist views as their function, purpose, or responsibilities. Now, one may be taught to be an atheist just as one may be taught to be a theist, so I'm not saying that every single atheist in the world is the result of a personal experience of divine failure, but I believe that atheism itself is the result of a rational human mind's indictment of the divine for failure.
Note that I am not assigning any moral balance either way for the is him or atheism in the above paragraph. I'm simply observing that as a historian who's been reading history for better than 50 years now, it seems to me that religious belief is the default setting for early human societies. It follows from that observation that atheism results as those societies become more advanced (technologically, at any rate) and acquire the sophistication and broader base of education which increasingly technological societies make possible. Not all sophisticated, critical, questioning intellects will become atheists, but no one can become an atheist without becoming critical of divine explanations and questioning assumptions based upon them.
When Langhorne was visualizing his plan for Safehold, he had one overriding strategic goal — to ensure that advanced technology never emerged. In addition, however, he had several very important secondary goals, including the fact that he wanted human lives on Safehold to be rather better than "ugly, brutish, and short." In other words, he wanted the people who would populate Safehold to enjoy the best "standard of living" they could within the constraints of a society which would never, ever move beyond its own atmosphere. To accomplish those goals, he needed the inhabitants of Safehold to have some common reason to behave the way he wanted them to. He needed a unifying direction, a belief structure, and atheism wouldn't work to provide that. The rejection of the divine inevitably leads to the rejection of divine authority, and he needed that authority to hold up his entire structure.
As an aside, one of the points which I've made at least tangentially in some earlier threads is that Langhorne was never really concerned by the possibility of high-tech presence on Safehold attracting the Gbabas's attention once the initial Gbaba sweeps through the area had been completed. That is, he fully accepted that if Safehold "went dark" and stayed that way for three or four hundred years, it was extremely unlikely that a Gbaba scout would ever come close enough to the star system to spot the emissions of a technological society because those emissions would be pretty much completely lost in the background radiation of the system primary itself. There was a significant chance in the early days of the colony that a Gbaba scout might pass close enough to Safehold to pick up such emissions despite the primary's radiation, but once that threat had passed, Safehold could have built a technology with neutrinos and radio transmissions galore without much risk of its being detected by the Gbaba.
Now I'm not trying to suggest that Langhorne was entirely rational in what he believed/hope/feared. There was an element of "if we never radiate the spoor of high technology, we'll never be found" in his thinking, but his primary fear would be better stated as "if we ever go back into space, we will someday redevelop interstellar travel, and if we do that we will someday re-encounter the Gbaba and we will all be killed." What this means is that there is a subtly different focus to what he was after that I think some people have missed. His objective was to prevent technology from developing less because he feared the Gbaba might detect the technology, than that the technology would enable humanity to recontact the Gbaba. Because of that, he had nothing against technology which would improve the quality of human life so long as that technology never enabled spaceflight. Unfortunately, the only way to kill spaceflight and keep it dead was to destroy the entire edifice required to support spaceflight.
He also reasoned that without a unifying, focusing "plan of God" to keep the evolving Safeholdian societies focused in the direction(s) necessary to prevent the emergence of dangerous technologies, someone was eventually likely to jump the rails. That is, without something that specifically required the members of that society to follow a set of rules that precluded advanced technology, someone, somewhere, however gradually, would set in progress an evolution of thought that would lead to its development. Unfortunately, rules presuppose a plan, at least on someone's part. Without a plan, without a focus and an objective to be accomplished, rules make no sense, because they have no purpose.
So he created a religion in which God had created, through the agency of his Archangels, a mortal universe peopled with mortal human beings. The purpose of that universe, according to the Holy Writ, was for a loving God to bring life to his beloved children who would, by learning to know him and to obey the laws set down for them, advance in their understanding and spiritual grace to a point which would allow them at the time of their mortal deaths to rejoin him as mature spiritual beings able to fully comprehend him and interact with him exactly as the angels and Archangels did in the creation of Safehold. In effect, the Holy Writ is supposed to be a training manual for mortals who aspire to the role of immortals. You might say that Safeholdians are thinking in terms of Rudyard Kipling's "When Earth's Last Picture Is Painted"
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When Earth's last picture is painted
And the tubes are twisted and dried
When the oldest colors have faded
And the youngest critic has died
We shall rest, and faith, we shall need it
Lie down for an aeon or two
'Till the Master of all good workmen
Shall put us to work anew
And those that were good shall be happy
They'll sit in a golden chair
They'll splash at a ten league canvas
With brushes of comet's hair
They'll find real saints to draw from
Magdalene, Peter, and Paul
They'll work for an age at a sitting
And never be tired at all.
And only the Master shall praise us.
And only the Master shall blame.
And no one will work for the money.
No one will work for the fame.
But each for the joy of the working,
And each, in his separate star,
Will draw the thing as he sees it.
For the God of things as they are!
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I'm a bit surprised, actually, to realize that I've never really expressly explained that anywhere in the books, because I thought I had. Looking back, however, I don't think I ever did, probably because it was so firmly fixed in my own mind that it never occurred to me that I had to find a place to do the explaining.
Nonetheless, that is what everyone is talking about when they refer to "God's plan" for Safehold. It's not a matter of simply obeying the rules because God said to obey the rules, although there's obviously a huge dollop of that in the Church of God Awaiting. But by making that spiritual journey — that learning and maturation and eventual graduation to a greater and more glorious state of being and relationship with God — the ultimate focus and objective of every godly child of Mother Church, Langhorne helped to provide a bedrock foundation for a plan which would both justify/explain the existence of the rules set forth in the Holy Writ and provide a motivation for the members of Safehold's societies to treat one another well.
The God of the Church of God Awaiting is overwhelmingly (officially, at least) one of compassion and love. He wants his children to have good lives, to grow and develop spiritually, to provide for themselves and for their families, and to care for one another as they mature into beings capable of interacting directly with him. To enable them to do this, his archangels provided thousands upon thousands of "miracles" to help them in their lives. These are the teachings and explanations which are embodied in the Writ, including Bédard's teachings, and Pasquale's, and Sondheim's and Truscott's. Yet because every mortal living on Safehold is a "child" of God in every sense — including the sense of a hugely limited (by divine standards) ability to understand God and the greater task and life he has planned for his children after they "graduate" from mortality — there have to be limits. A loving parent trains a child in the skills, knowledge, and attitudes that child will need to someday become a fulfilled, loving adult, but when that child is very young, that parent frequently must simply decree "because that's the way it is," because the child in question lacks the life experience to understand an explanation of why that's the way it is.
Those are what the rules in the Writ are supposed to explain. The primary function of the Writ from Langhorne’s perspective is to preclude the emergence of that dangerous level of technology. The secondary function of the Writ is to provide the inhabitants of Safehold with the best lives, the best level of capabilities, possible (in Langhorne’s view) consistent with his primary objective. In effect, he was attempting to build a society in which the scientific method would never emerge, the members of that society would never realize there was actually a technology which had been denied to them, and which had an ongoing “God’s plan for Safehold” that would keep it focused on obeying the Writ.
Now, I don’t want to go into this next point to deeply, because of . . . well, for reasons of my own. However, I will remind you that the entire Book of Schueler was added to the Writ after Shan-wei’s “Fall.” That is, it was not a part of the “operator’s manual” until after Langhorne himself was dead, courtesy of Pei Kau-yung’s vest pocket nuke. Now, one might — might, I say — conclude from this that the surviving members of the command crew decided to make Pei Shan-wei’s fate and the destruction of the Alexandria Enclave a “teachable moment” for Safehold. In other words, all of the bloody penalties for violating Jwo-jeng’s proscriptions on advanced technology were added after Shan-wei’s “horrible example” of the consequences of violating them — that is, the destruction she had wreaked on God's plan — and were used to underscore the fact that “even an archangel” could be corrupted into disobeying God’s will. Shan-wei didn’t represent merely Lucifer’s rebellion against God in the names of pride and personal ambition; she also represented Adam and Eve’s rebellion in reaching for the approved of the Tree of Knowledge. She became, in effect, an essential element of the Church of God Awaiting’s theology, but she was not originally a part of that theology as visualized by Langhorne. It is entirely possible that the absence of a personification of evil and the temptation to disobey God’s rules would have constituted a much more immediate fatal flaw in Langhorne’s original plan, although obviously no one will ever know whether or not that was the case.
So those are the main reasons why Langhorne felt it was necessary to incorporate a “God’s plan” element into his original theology and an explanation of at least some of the ways that the destruction of Alexandria and the War Against the Fallen reshaped and modified that theology. I hope this isn’t too rambling and that it may help a bit with understanding Langhorne’s original purpose and at least some of the ways that his original purpose and plan were rather brutally modified after his own death.
