The other day, I made the case that a philosophy of empire would suggest that, since such a polity lacks an a priori geographical or ethnic character, its nature tends to be Historical with a capital 'H' - it imagines itself as the manifestation or driving force behind an arc of progress towards some idealised future state. I then suggested some examples from the real world to illustrate this.
But then somebody popped up in the comments to ask the interesting question: what about demihuman (or, for that matter, non-human) empires? What ideas and concepts would direct them and give their activities meaning across time?
Dwarf empires, for instance, might understand History as pointing towards an equilibrium in which all resources are deployed maximally efficiently (Pareto optimality all the time, everywhere), with the Empire conceived as the means by which this is achieved - through, of course, conquest and domination and then the minute micromanagement of its domain. Or they may imagine a kind of perfect interoperability between the living and the constructed, so as to eliminate friction and vastly expand productivity and power, with the Empire imagined as a mighty laboratory within which this interoperability can be realised (fuelled, perhaps, by a constant flow of slaves to power the experiments). Or they may simply imagine themselves to be engaged in the construction of a perfect artificial world for themselves to inhabit, or the pursuit of the perfection of a particular craft, such as architecture, masonry, glazing, pottery, etc., with endless resource acquisition the inevitable result.
Elf empires, on the other hand, might understand History as bending towards ever more perfect knowledge: their expansion is driven by the need to encompass more and more of the world (its physical qualities, the experiences of its inhabitants, its emotions, its ideas) within their framework of understanding. Or they might imagine History as the perfection of a particular art form or even the perfection of a particular emotional state or states; the Empire expands on the basis that more and more of the world must be wrung out in order to reveal yet more experiences, more ideas, more innovations. Then again, elves are very long-lived, if not immortal; more risk-averse than any other people (because they have so much more to lose), their empires are empires of safety, imbued with visions of utopia in which no harm is permitted ever to befall anybody, based on total regulation and control or total perfection of individual conduct.
Orc empires, dragon empires, kobold empires - we can all imagine the kinds of ideas that would drive them. The 'universal and homogenous' orc, with all the peoples of the world united in the chaos of 'might makes right'. The massing together in one place of all of the wealth and wisdom in the globe. The cur paradise, in which the weak and subservient rule the mighty. I could go on; is the most interesting question of all what a halfling empire would conceive as its telos? This would I think be the anti-empire, the empire of no empires, the empire of paradox, spreading its decentralisation and hairfoot-anarchism across regions, continents, the world...
This, though, leads us to Horkheimer's gap between the existent and the conceptual: how an empire manifests itself in reality may in fact undermine and contradict the very vision that it purports to realise. Hence the dwarves, in pursuit of the maximilisation of productivity or some perfectly crafted artifice, take a wrong turn and end up depleting their resources or rendering their realm a desert - like Easter Islanders, pauperising themselves through quixotic pursuit of some utopian dream. The elves, in pursuing knowledge, end up narrowly focusing on particular ways of knowing (for instance, statistical or symbolic), and as a consequence find their decision-making afflicted by a lack of awareness of the whole. Or, in pursuit of safety, the elf empire ends up breeding in its populace weakness and lack of responsibility, perversely making them less capable of long-term survival. Empires aim to achieve some end state, in other words, but may pursue this in such a way that they are driven in the opposite direction.
All that remains to be offered is the critique of the halfling anti-empire, precisely on these grounds. In pustulating itself as an anti-empire, the halfling empire would thereby be totally ill-equipped to resist expansion from genuinely more powerful neighbours, with the result that the anti-empire would quickly become subservient or even conglomerated into bigger polities - becoming annexed into empires precisely because it eschews the means by which its independence can be secured. The anti-empire, in other words, would pretty quickly end up being forced to be the anti-anti-empire, with its very telos being not only undermined but transformed into its opposite.
I'm glad that my comments inspired you so much.
ReplyDeleteSomething that I briefly touched on when we spoke on this before is that (I think) sentient beings tend to be aware of the their own flaws, at least to some extent, and tend to intentionally try to reform their societies to mitigate or even remove these flaws.
Easter Island is actually a good example of this: Austronesian (of which Polynesian is a subset) history is the story of a vast eastward migration across the Pacific and Indian (I remind you: Malagasy is an Austronesian language) Oceans. Easter Island, while a failure, must be contextualized within this glorious history.
Easter Island is perhaps the furthest east of any of the inhabitable islands of the pacific. That is of extreme significance.
Before they arrived at the Easter Island, the Polynesians had been a perpetually island-hopping culture. They would arrive at an island, and settle there. In rare cases where the island was big enough (such as Tahiti, New Zealand, Tonga, Hawaii, so on) this would be a perpetual settlement. In most cases, however, this would be a settlement that would last 50 to 150 years; at the end of this time, the soil of the island would be exhausted and unsuitable for the farming of their animals and plants.
They knew that this was how their world worked. They knew that a small island did not have the ecology neccessary for fast replentishment (specifically, faster than they were used up) of soils, or the space needed to let fields lay fallow. I want to emphasize this -- they knew that when they arrived somewhere and built their houses, a countdown had begun.
They actually had a number of social structures that seemed to be intentionally designed to incentivize people to take the MASSIVE individual risk (i.e., setting out in an unexplored direction with a double hulled single-sailed canoe with stone age technology and hoping that you hit an island that no one else lives on before you drown, starve, die of thirst, etc; none of them pleasant ways to go) required for collective success. Two such institutions that I remember from my history classes:
+ chieftanship of the new settlement was often granted automatically to whoever discovered the island -- you could leapfrog even vast social distances in a week's time if you simply found a new island
+ Polynesians did not practice the death penalty under ANY circumstances. The harshest punishment they had for ANY crime was exile, for which you would be given a number of days to prepare, at the end of which you were required to leave in your (fully supplied) boat. If you could find a new island, though, EVERYTHING was forgiven.
This might seem like an unsustainable and foolish system, but you must keep two things in mind:
+ they did this for thousands of years, and it kept working
+ if you abandon a used-up tiny island, the island's natural processes will eventually replenish it for the next group of Polynesians (possibly including your descendants!) to use it when it in a couple hundred years.
(Part 2)
ReplyDeleteNow, given all this context, you can see how Easter Island presented problems for this paradigm. It's so far east that there's nowhere uninhabited left to settle, other than perhaps the coast of South America; the science on whether or not they reached it is still unsettled, though there are tantalizing hints that they might have. The Island is 63 square miles; an area on the cusp between self-sustaining and not. Still, they managed to endure for 600 to 1000 years before European contact. Further, there are very much still Rapa Nui people in existence today -- about 9400 of them; they have endured well enough for Easter Island to gain special status within the administration of Chile. They are not an extinct people.
A practice that they adopted -- the one that led to them being a watchword for societal self-destruction -- revolved around Polynesian concepts of personal power and ancestor worship, which led to two feuding lineages on the island both making their own giant statues and toppling the other side's. This seems to have primarily happened due to the feud leading to warriors gaining more prestige than is healthy for a society.
Still, despite all this context, I would really like to note that the thing that led to the most visible (to Europeans) breakdown of their society was that about half of their population (of 3000, by that point) was kidnapped to serve on European sailing ships between 1862 and 1888, while most of the other half either died of smallpox (their island wasn't feeding them that well, all of their best laborers got kidnapped; starvation makes a fertile ground for plague) or immigrated to Tahiti, which was still technically independent (albiet a French protectorate) up until 1880. Something like 6% of their 1862 population was left in 1888, although -- again -- these people still have unassimilated modern descendents!
Also, by 1862, they weren't actually still building statues. They were toppling them in 1770, as well. So... that might have just been a weird period in their history?
(Part 3)
ReplyDeleteAnyways, my main point, other than "Polynesian history is cool" is people, even people with stone age technology, tend to notice when their society is moving in a direction that they don't want. They tend to develop internal critiques of their own society. They tend to try to deploy these. I have to assume that orcs, elves, dwarves, and halflings would do similar things, being sentient beings. Though, they're not human, and are fictional... we could, if we wanted, simply say that they don't.
"Hence the dwarves, in pursuit of the maximilisation of productivity or some perfectly crafted artifice, take a wrong turn and end up depleting their resources or rendering their realm a desert"
Dwarves might realize that this is a thing that they do, and very intentionally try (perhaps failing) to set up legal structures that in some way slow the progress towards or outright prevent that failure state. They might, say, give the ownership of those resources to some sort of governance council geased to consider long-term sustainability; they might outright treat natural objects as legal persons who own themselves; they might build vast aquaducts and vast greenhouses. Or, they might have internal factions that think that any or all of these should be pursued, but still not actually do them. Why should dwarves be so much smarter than us, after all?
"The elves, in pursuing knowledge, end up narrowly focusing on particular ways of knowing (for instance, statistical or symbolic), and as a consequence find their decision-making afflicted by a lack of awareness of the whole"
Perhaps they set aside some institution within their society that is supposed to be aware of the whole and travel the world, like a sort of reverse monastery? What if they gave that institution power? What if they ended up taking away that institution's power, because they hated them for being weirdos who wander everywhere and lecture everyone else about not being holistic enough?
"Or, in pursuit of safety, the elf empire ends up breeding in its populace weakness and lack of responsibility, perversely making them less capable of long-term survival"
What if a faction within elf society was trying to revitalize elf society by introducing some sort of extremely risky life-stage that elves were expected to go through if they wanted to reach full adulthood. And what if the rest of elf society hated those people as much as we would hate anyone who said "kids these days are too SOFT. We gotta force them to go live in the woods for a year. That'll teach 'em."
"All that remains to be offered is the critique of the halfling anti-empire, precisely on these grounds. In pustulating itself as an anti-empire, the halfling empire would thereby be totally ill-equipped to resist expansion from genuinely more powerful neighbours, with the result that the anti-empire would quickly become subservient or even conglomerated into bigger polities - becoming annexed into empires precisely because it eschews the means by which its independence can be secured. The anti-empire, in other words, would pretty quickly end up being forced to be the anti-anti-empire, with its very telos being not only undermined but transformed into its opposite"
No no, we have these in the real world. Well, had. You should read (or even just read a summary) of The Art of Not Being Governed. Interesting stuff.
I'm not entirely sure I'd agree 100% with all of this, but it's definitely food for thought. I find myself pondering the merits of a campaign based on the frontier of an expansionist authoritarian empire and an anarchic anti-empire of the halfling flavor. I might have some small trouble keeping my "peace, love, and second breakfast" bias in check, though.
ReplyDeleteI am sure there is a Jack Vance novel in this.
DeleteGreat stuff. I hope the exploration of empire ties in with the paladin material somehow - I guess the paladin as defender and exemplar of "civilization" is stuck in my head. Will posit that a trollslayer is essentially a dwarfish paladin, no matter how clockwork the culture has become or aims to become.
ReplyDeleteYes - that raises the question of demihuman paladins and how they would be different from human ones...
DeleteOne thing to mention is that demi-humans are mythical beings, aka they can work not just on Gygaxian naturalism, but on Gygaxian UN-naturalism as well. I always imagined that what the world would look like if the Drow conquered the surface world would be an utterly alien to us or the fantasy people.
ReplyDeleteQuestion: "Why do the things in the woods and under the earth hunger and lust for the human realms?"
Answer: "EHH? No idea. They just do."
I guess this throws in a Lovecraftian element to the characteristics of mythical empires, remember that there is magic in fantasy worlds. Perhaps empire building is an attempt to change some fundamental aspect of the world? Or perhaps it is to have another universe bleed into the conquered universe like Chaos from warhammer? Perhaps empire building is a showing of a deity's or deities' power, "Worship me, I am the strongest god. My culture has conquered all other cultures."
I like those ideas - they kind of remind me of Planescape actually, and the idea of land being annexed to one Plane or another based on convincing/converting enough people to switch alignment (or expelling the existing population and importing a new one).
Delete"like Easter Islanders, pauperising themselves through quixotic pursuit of some utopian dream"
ReplyDeleteMy understanding is that the Easter Islanders were doing at least half-way decently with various methods for increasing agricultural productivity such as using rock walls to prevent wind-blown invasion until they were fucked over horrifically by slavers. But then I'm not an expert, my main source on Easter Island is the Fall of Civilizations podcast.
For this kind of brainstorming I'm reminded of my own ideas for elf kingdoms (in which elves would be a tiny ruling class) based loosely on ancien regime Europe for a French Revolution-inspired campaign. But those are more self-contained kingdoms rather than boundless empires with there being plenty of squabbling between High Elf-ruled not-France, Wood Elf-ruled not-Spain, etc. etc.
My idea was that elf tropes could do a good job of capturing some of the grandeur and horror of ancien regime Europe, for example:
-Lovely fair tale palaces and elf ladies that travel from one to another by hot air balloon (with a cable connected to an ox cart on the ground to pull it in the right direction) so that their feet never touch the ground and where children are taken to as servants, never to be seen again by their parents.
-Vast wild places kept off-limits to grubby humans.
-Awe-astounding works of art produced at incredible expense while human peasants barely have enough to eat.
-A vast cadre of half-elves and quarter-elves, and eighth-elves who do most of the day to day bureaucratic work who are only put in place because of who their father is while even the officially meritocratic positions generally require a resume a century long.
-A legal code that is a vast morass of exceptions and precedents going back centuries that only elves can keep track of without incredible effort.
-Good old fey capriciousness and a government based on adhering to the letter of the law while taking great joy in fucking people over within that letter, but the actual letter of any promise from an elf lord is ironclad.
-Just enough noblesse oblige and benevolent use of magic by ancient elven mages to keep things working.
If demi-humans are played with more human-like characteristics, I think halflings can have a range of motivations. An example halfling empire might be one focused on trade and commerce. The motivations of that power might be prosperity, comfort, peace, or change. Germany of the past 40 years and the mantra of "change through trade" would be a real-world parallel to something like this. It was an example of a non-militaristic society exerting influence and power, often alongside other countries and cultures that were more hostile and, at times, strikingly different. It may include reluctance about being powerful or using their power. It may become indifference and ambivalence about their role to change the world. It may rely on means of protecting themselves that become less visible and less relevant to the population.
ReplyDelete"is the most interesting question of all what a halfling empire would conceive as its telos"
ReplyDeleteOf course not. Halfling were constructed as English rural folk, and we already know which kind of empire such a folk build. ;)
A general definition IS interesting, though I'm not sure it holds much water from a historical point of view. After all, a Roman empire was built just from a necessity to somehow regulate manifold conquests of their previous republic. Chinese empire was generally defined by ethnic borders and did not form as ideology till later (though there were some precursory currents from Zhou times). And Britain formulated its "burden of White" only at the period when the empire itself was steadily declining. While its acquisition of Indian Raj (which was what gave them the Imperial title) happened almost accidentally through the actions of very unenlightened self-interest of East Indian Company... The 3rd Reich is probably one of the few exceptions... but it didn't last long, and the main feeling that went into its creation was the resentment over losing war and suffering the consequences thereof.
So, I personally don't think that Empire = Ideocracy, and the latter term is already widely used...
Still, an interesting area for speculations. ;)
Mike
One interesting idea that I find is not explored enough in 'pseudo-D&D-and-derived' fantasy settings is the idea of a reversal of a racial empire being built upon racial purity. Normally we tend to assume that a race-based empire (race here as fantasy race, im not going to waste time trying to find a better term despite how it piss people off) is generally built around purity, with the dominant race on top and halfbreed below them. However, if we look at violent and conquering races that can crossbreed and are known for producing offsprings rapidly this brings up an interesting and novel concept:
ReplyDelete"What if an orc (or whatever similar creature) empire encouraged breeding with other races?" Under this concept, orcish (or again, any similar race) actively acquire concubines and produce half breed offsprings. A sort of bizarre conquest, where the womb and seed of other races are consumed by the so-called superior race. After all, look at how their hybrid offsprings grow quickly, how strong and tall they are! If a fantasy race is known for its particularly rapid and widespread breeding habits perhaps they might develop the idea of some manifest destiny to bring all compatible races into their great race so their descendants may share in the glory and power.
I think it would definitely be one of the more interesting twists. Hell, you could argue it work best with HUMANS because there is a tendency to have half human/half something hybrids, but not half elf/half dwarf. Would it be a stretch for fantasy humans to think they have a manifest destiny to pork all the fantasy races and bring them all together under humanity's banner? If the internet has taught me anything its that human libido is more powerful than anything else.