Author Archives: Oren Litwin

How to Make This Editor Happy

24 Sunday Jun 2018

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During the submissions period for Ye Olde Magick Shoppe, my current anthology project, I received around a hundred submissions. Some were of beginner quality, which is not a bad thing per se, since it means that the authors can improve their work through feedback. Other works were of higher quality, but didn’t mesh well with my own particular aesthetic preferences; other editors may well accept such work, even if I didn’t. Unfortunately, between the sheer number of submissions and my own time constraints, I did not give individualized feedback to the submitters—which is not fair of me, since they did put in the work.

I think it’s worthwhile, therefore, to write up a post discussing some of the common patterns among work that was not accepted for the anthology. That way, authors considering submitting their work to me in the future will know more about my preferences, and whether their story fits with them.

(I should emphasize that not all stories that were turned down fall under one of these categories. If you submitted work, do check if anything in this discussion resonates with your experience; but there’s no need to jam your story into a category just because it’s here.)

With that, in no particular order:

Unpracticed Writing

Mark Twain once said words to the effect of, “The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” Some of the submitted stories had prose which lacked fluency and smoothness, or had frequent errors of meaning or grammar. This does not necessarily disqualify a story—in my previous anthology I accepted more than one story that needed extensive editing, because the plot and characters were strong enough to justify the work needed to fix them. But it took a lot of work on my part to fix these stories, and I’ll only accept a rough story if it has great merit otherwise. Often, inexperienced prose was accompanied with some of the plotting flaws discussed below, which is not surprising.

The solution here is simply to write, and write, and write, and study what good writing looks like so that you can improve your prose over time. As you develop your technical ability and prose style and it becomes instinctive, you will be able to transcend the need to labor on your prose as much—so you can spend more effort on plot, characterization, and so on.

Infodumps

Common in stories that were trying to introduce an entire elaborate setting or magical system, an infodump (also called “expository lump”) is an explanation or exposition that is not smoothly integrated into the scene action, “as if a page from an encyclopedia accidentally got shuffled in.” For example, a story might spend several paragraphs on the precise details of how to enchant magical rings, most details of which do not actually affect the present story.

Figuring out how to provide vivid detail or to introduce the rules of your setting to the reader without bringing the plot to a screeching halt is a difficult element of the craft; a good rule of thumb is to give background information one or two sentences at a time, interspersed with plot action or dialogue. This is not a hard and fast rule, of course. Another rough guideline is to introduce setting details only if they actually affect the plot (though some authors create powerful literary effects through their intricate ornamental details). In any event, the more sensitive you get to the flow and pacing of your scenes, the better you will become at this.

The “And” Plot

In this story, something happens, and something else happens, and something else happens… but each event seems disconnected. There is no progression from one episode to the next. A character might face several challenges, but they lack a connecting thread or any lasting consequences. (In D&D terms, it’s a series of wandering-monster encounters, rather than a coherent adventure.) Common examples were stories in which the proprietor interacted with several customers one after another, but without learning anything from each or being otherwise affected by them, and without each customer contributing to the plot progression. If you could shuffle the customers and rewrite in a different order without the story changing much, it’s an indication that you have an “And” plot.

Especially in a short story where you have very little space to work with, every word must build toward the conclusion. Every element of the story should build dramatic tension, should contribute to the theme, should drive us toward the climax. There are a few different techniques for how to do this; you might compare Deborah Chester’s “elemental story design” with the method of Holly Lisle to see which fits your style better.

No Conflict

The story has characters, and description, and a narrative—but there’s no drama. People have no goals, or else they accomplish their goals without real opposition. This showed up several times in stories that tried to introduce a larger setting; so much effort was spent discussing the setting that there was little actual plot drama.

One symptom of not having a real conflict is characters being nasty to each other for no reason, and with no consequences or story importance. This is a strong tell that the author realizes that the story isn’t dynamic enough and so tries to inject “conflict” without understanding the role that conflict is supposed to play in the story. Conflict is more than characters snapping at each other for no reason. It is about characters with fundamentally opposing goals, or interests, or desires. It is about one character striving to achieve something and another character trying to block him, or kill her, or get there first.

Conflict is what makes the story interesting, and not only because it creates story tension. Characters need conflict, need obstacles and opposition, in order to reveal what they are really made of—to give us someone to admire.

No Conclusion

After a great deal of plot, the story ends with a thud. It might be someone ruminating on life and fate and belly buttons; it might be two people talking; it might be an exciting battle of some kind. But the ending does not actually resolve the conflict established earlier in the story.

A story begins by asking a sort of question. In its simplest form, the question could be: will the protagonists achieve their goals? In more ambitious works, the question could be: do the protagonists understand themselves better, and understand why they chose that goal to begin with? Other questions exist, of course. Whatever it is, the question is elaborated and complicated over the course of the story, and finally answered by the end. If the ending is not connected to the fundamental question of the story, it means that the author does not yet know what question the story is raising.

*****

So far, so good. But most editors want capable prose and well-structured stories. What about my own idiosyncratic dislikes?

Undeserved Endings

A protagonist ends the story in total defeat, despite doing everything right. Or she has victory handed to her on a silver platter, via deus ex machina or a sudden change of heart by the antagonist or intervention by a bystander. In short, the resolution of the story had nothing to do with the efforts of the protagonist (and therefore was not the culmination of the story’s theme, but that’s a more advanced point).

I like stories in which the protagonist succeeds because of her efforts, or fails because of her mistakes. Meaningless suffering leaves me annoyed, unless it is handled very skillfully indeed.

(Note that intervention by a third party can be justified if the intervention is inspired by the protagonist’s utmost attempts. For example, suppose Sir Haldric the Hapless attempts to vindicate an innocent man through trial by combat, and he suffers horribly at the hands of Sir Robard the Ruthless in the arena. Yet every time he takes a wound, he gets back up; his honor and commitment to the accused man require no less. Finally, when Haldric’s death is at hand, the magistrate suddenly rises from his seat and stops the combat. Though Haldric was the lesser fighter, he says, he is surely the greater knight. The innocent man is freed.

I would not consider this ending to be undeserved; Haldric earned his ending by his self-sacrifice and courage. Admittedly, the ending would have to be carefully set up or it would be implausible; but that’s a different issue.)

Unsympathetic Protagonists

We need a reason to want the protagonist to win. Evil protagonists are not always unsympathetic (though that depends strongly on who the alternative is, in my view), but merely being the viewpoint character isn’t enough to justify them.

When I read William Gibson’s Neuromancer, despite all of the deft prose and imaginative prefigurings of the Internet, I was left cold by the protagonist. We are told early on that at his lowest point, he murdered innocent people for their pocket change; to me, that takes a hell of a lot of redemption for me to care about what you are doing—unless the stakes are high enough, like end-of-the-world high. In Neuromancer, they were not. So to me the whole book fell flat.

Nihilism

Good stories mean something, and they mean something worth the effort. To me, the world and its suffering has meaning. We can disagree on what that meaning is; but I dislike stories that assert the futility of struggle, of growth, of virtue. Other publishers like them better, and if such stories are your metier then submit to those other publishers.

*****

So there you have it. This doesn’t cover everything—for one thing, I have my own unconscious biases, as does everyone—but if you want to submit a story to one of my future efforts, this list is a good place to start in deciding whether your piece will attract my attention.

Who Rules? Part Two—The Nobility

17 Sunday Jun 2018

Posted by in Better Fantasy, Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, Uncategorized, Writing

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series.)

Some time ago, we mentioned the four potential ruling groups laid out by Samuel Finer, and discussed the first “polity” (or regime type), the Palace Polity. Now, let us discuss the second “pure” polity—the Nobility—as well as our first hybrid polity, the Palace/Nobility.

What makes the Nobility unique is not that they are powerful or influential. In any polity there will be influential figures, even in the Palace. But for a group of powerful people to be considered a Nobility in the sense Finer means, they must first have autonomy from the central government, and from each other. Aristocrats attached to the Palace, and deriving their power from it, may be noble in the class system of their society; but Finer would not consider them “Nobility,” merely courtiers (typically the rivals of the autonomous Nobility). Nobility are able to resist the central government, because they control their own power resources—land most frequently, but also the people on that land.

(One might consider a vast fortune to count as a power resource as well, though historical nobles usually had land as the source of their power; but money by itself does not yield power if the rich are vulnerable to state coercion. Furthermore, a state with enough money to make large fortunes possible is unlikely to have autonomous nobles; the central government is usually strong enough to force some sort of dependent relationship, often in the form of a corporatist system. Bill Gates cannot simply decide to stop paying his taxes. It was the historical lack of coin, and thus the need to pay retainers in land grants, that typically led to the emergence of nobility in the first place. Still, one can imagine other potential sources of autonomous power.)

Second, a Noble is distinguished by his absolute control over those in his domain. No higher authority, no central government, may interfere with a Noble’s lands or vassals. Not even other Nobles, which is helps to explain why nobles were constantly occupied with feuds and intrigues against each other. On the other hand, Nobility could often arrange themselves hierarchically or even fractally, so that many petty lords could be vassals of a more powerful lord, who in turn would be one of the several vassals of an even more powerful lord, all the way until you reach a handful of great nobles who dominate their politics. Finer gives the example of Bakufu-era Japan, with its samurai class aligned under the daimyos, in ever-shifting coalitions and factions.

A pure Nobility polity is extremely rare and not very stable. To qualify, it would have to lack a strong central government entirely. But the nobles would still have to be bound together in some form, or else it would not be a single polity but a patchwork of smaller principalities. The only example that Finer locates is that of 16th-17th century Poland, where the great nobles sat in a council together, under the nominal rulership of a king who nevertheless was nearly always controlled by the noble council. Such polities would tend to either coalesce into a stronger central regime over time, or else fragment entirely.

More commonly, strong nobles coexisted uneasily with a central Palace regime, leading to the Palace/Nobility polity (naturally). This was the situation during the Feudal era of Europe, in which a nascent centralized government had to deal with lesser nobles who could stand apart from the Crown, and on occasion present a real threat to its power.

If the independent nobility is relatively weak and more easily controlled by the Palace, then while Nobles have their ancient privileges, those privileges might be closely circumscribed. Palace administrative structures may be imperfect, so local control depends on the cooperation of the nobles, but the nobles themselves would have small armed forces if any; they pose little threat to the Palace in the long run. And unless there is a dramatic change in the balance of power, the Nobles’ position will erode over time. Perhaps the independent nobles are being challenged by other “court nobles,” whose prestige depends on the largesse of the Palace alone.

If the central monarch faces a powerful set of nobles with strong militaries of their own, he or she must scramble to keep on top of them via careful alliances and shrewd politicking or risk losing power, or being made nearly irrelevant. Think of the early French kings, or of King John of England (who was forced to sign the Magna Carta by an alliance of barons). The king remains powerful in his own right; otherwise, if the king were a mere figurehead or first among equals, we would be left with a pure Nobility polity as in the case of Poland. But the nobles are strong enough collectively to restrain the king’s power or even to bring him down, if they ever manage to put aside their own rivalries and oppose him as one.

This circumstance can have several long-term outcomes. In the case of England, the rights that the nobility extracted from the king (the Magna Carta) laid the groundwork for the later English experiment in broad political rights, the forerunner of the more explicit American political rights that created the modern liberal-democratic society. That did not happen in France, where the nobles focused not on rights but on privileges—chiefly, the privilege of taxing the populace. As a result, even when the French monarchy grew in strength, it still had to depend on tax-farming for revenue; the resulting abuses of the people were a key factor leading to the French Revolution.

For a weak ruler to strengthen his position is a long, perhaps generational, project. It took the Capetian kings of France hundreds of years to slowly, patiently, methodically chip away at the power of the nobility, and they were never assured of ultimate success. The same could be said of the English kings, who suffered periodic overthrow and wars of succession. A strong nobility can defend its own position quite effectively; still, the king has the advantages of a central political position and the ability to divide and conquer, given the opportunity.

A final possibility is that a weak Palace can strengthen to the point that the polity becomes evenly balanced. Or, a previously powerful Palace can have its position diminished so that the nobles reach parity. In either event, such a Palace/Nobility polity features an unstable, delicate balance between each side, so that the future trajectory of the system could go in either direction.

For authors, opportunities for conflict abound. Independent nobles can scheme against each other or even make open war, the king can intrigue with one faction against another, or they could intrigue against the king or rebel; country aristocracy could come into conflict with dependent courtiers, each side resenting the privileges of the other. Feuds between nobles and a weakened king could risk fracturing the polity altogether, leaving it open to outside invasion; or the threat of such invasion could be exploited by the Palace to augment its own power and force the nobles in line. If court politics is your thing, then the possibilities should make you downright giddy!

Last Day to Submit to Ye Olde Magick Shoppe!

01 Friday Jun 2018

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Today is the published deadline for submissions to Ye Olde Magick Shoppe, my second anthology. If you have already submitted and haven’t heard back, it’s because I’m being blizzarded by submissions, thankfully!

Don’t let that dissuade you, though; my goal is to see all quality stories published, either in this anthology or in some other venue. Good luck, and I look forward to your submissions!

How Not to be Overthrown by Your Army

30 Wednesday May 2018

Posted by in Military, Politics for Worldbuilders, Writing

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series.)

Being a ruler can be hazardous to your health. The safety of your country depends on you having a strong enough army to repel invaders, and the safety of your regime depends on that same army being able to deter rebellion. But an army strong enough to do that is also strong enough to overthrow you by itself; history is full of ambitious generals who did just that. So what is a ruler to do?

There are many strategies that can be employed, such as keeping your soldiers fat and happy with tax revenue, or using ideological indoctrination to secure their loyalty. Here, I want to focus on army composition, and how it can be used to secure the regime.

By “army composition,” I don’t mean how much infantry you have versus cavalry, or battle mages versus dragons, or whatever—though that is clearly important. And if you do want to think about that kind of thing, questions of unit type can easily fit into the model we are about to discuss. But as Samuel Finer discusses, a ruler fundamentally must build his military from among three kinds of armies: popular militias, a professional national army, and foreign mercenaries.

The popular militia is the cheapest and easiest option, if your objective is to defend against invasion (or, sometimes, to do a spot of invading yourself). Responsible for their own training and equipment, the populace does not represent a drain on the treasury as other types of soldiers do, and they can be raised quickly when needed. However, they tend to be relatively poorly trained and armed, and are therefore less effective in battle than a standing army. More importantly, to the ruler, is that the popular militia is loyal to their families foremost, their nation second, and the regime a distant third—if at all! Especially if you plan on being a squeeze-the-peasants sort of ruler, allowing the people to organize into armed units would be the last thing on your mind.

A standing army remedies many of the defects of the militia. Soldiers are better equipped and better trained, dependent on the regime for their pay, and also more easily indoctrinated politically (if that kind of thing is a feature of your regime). However, professionalized armies take a long time to train up, and are fantastically expensive; Finer estimates that the vast majority of state spending throughout history was on maintaining armies. Moreover, while soldiers in a standing army may be more loyal to the regime than your average peasant is, they will still care more about the nation as a whole—and might decide that the ruler needs to go for the public good. Alternatively, one of your commanders may decide that he wants your job, and convince his men to back him. A standing army thus represents a permanent threat to the regime, more urgently than the populace as a whole does.

Finally, we have mercenaries—they come pre-trained, only care about getting their pay, and have no sentimental attachments to the populace. Indeed, the populace may view them with resentment or hatred, deepening the mercenaries’ dependence on the ruler who signs their paychecks. On the other hand, mercenaries are notorious for their lack of fight-to-the-death commitment, are prone to switching sides, and even are known to overthrow the regime and take over—as Machiavelli notes in great detail when discussing the Italian Condottieri.

One classic way that tyrants would mitigate these risks is for the ruler to have a small number of mercenaries as his personal guards. They would not be strong enough to credibly challenge his rule, and would be at risk of massacre by the locals if the ruler ever died; but they can still keep him safe from the standing army, and indeed their own welfare depended on it.

Likewise, most regimes would maintain a relatively small standing army as the core of the military, along with a much larger popular militia to be called up during wartime. The standing army would serve as shock troops in battle, improving the effectiveness of the military as a whole, and would also defend the capital city from any restiveness in the outer provinces—all for a relatively low cost, compared to an entirely professionalized force.

Of course, a wealthy enough regime that was not loathed by its people could have the luxury of a powerful full-time army; the United States is one example today. But even the U.S. still maintains a distinction between the Army and the National Guard, which could be seen as a rough parallel to the “popular militias” discussed above. A better example would be the Iraqi army under Saddam Hussein; the bulk of the military was poorly equipped and paid, while the smaller Republican Guard—recruited exclusively from Hussein’s own clan—was a relatively elite force whose performance, and loyalty, were more assured. Meanwhile, several small African or Pacific Islander states relied in recent years on mercenary groups such as Executive Outcomes or Sandline, because they were viewed as more reliable than the regime’s own military. With good reason; these regimes tended to have a long history of military coups.

So the militia/standing army/mercenaries model is broadly applicable. In your worldbuilding, consider the strategic problems that a regime faces from its own military. They are sure to generate some gripping stories, if you want to write them. Key points to consider: the cost of an army, its loyalty, the loyalty of its commanders, the need for more loyal units to deter mutiny by the more marginal ones… and trading off all of the above against military effectiveness. Remember too that some rulers can more easily survive defeat in war than they can a military coup—and will therefore treat their own military as their greatest threat.

******

(And don’t forget, I’m accepting submissions to a fantasy anthology, Ye Olde Magick Shoppe. There are only two days left! Check out the announcement and start writing!

Plus, the associated Kickstarter project is now live! We’ve got a fancy video and everything…)

Who Rules? Part One—The Palace

14 Monday May 2018

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, Uncategorized, Writing

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series.)

Up to now, we have spent a lot of time discussing the constraints that any political regime has to deal with—the problem of legitimacy, taxation and legibility, power projection, and so forth. There are still more areas to discuss, such as the strategic problem of having a standing army (which can pose a threat to its own political leadership, and often does); but for now, let’s switch gears and discuss the differences between regimes, starting with a fundamental question: which elites rule?

Rather than exhaustively catalogue the relatively minor differences between presidential democracies and parliamentary democracies, or sultanist dictatorships and technocratic dictatorships, here we will follow the work of the eminent political scientist Samuel Finer. In his model, there are four possible groups of political elites who could claim the right to rule a regime (or polity, as he terms it): the Palace, the Nobility, the Church, and the Forum. Pure types exist, or you can have hybrids such as Palace/Nobility or Palace/Church; but per Finer, these four contenders for power are it. (This is convenient for worldbuilders, because we can figure out the broad type of our regime without being excessively constrained in the details that we love to invent and tinker with.)

Before examining each, we have to ask: what about the military, or the bureaucracy? Both of these group can hold tremendous power in a regime, and indeed become the de facto rulers. Yet to Finer, neither of these groups is capable of ruling legitimately, because the justification for their power derives from one of the four groups: a military junta may claim to rule on behalf of the people, or a labyrinthine bureaucracy can claim to represent the Emperor. The military and bureaucracy in themselves lack a legitimating ideology, which is what the four main elite groups sometimes possess. Additionally, as Peter Feaver notes, if a general overthrows the dictator, he ceases to be a mere general because he is now responsible for the entire regime, not just the interests of the military, and the problem of civil-military relations begins anew (even if his fellow officers may trust him more, initially). In effect, he himself becomes a Palace autarch.

(I wonder, however, if we are not in our lifetime seeing the rise of an ideology justifying the rule of expert bureaucrats, on the grounds that the people are too stupid to rule. At the moment, though, this ideology has little purchase in the broad society—which is why the rulers of the European Union, for example, pay lip service to democratic ideals even as they cheerfully ignore the will of the people as a matter of course.)

With that, let us begin by looking at our first pure type, the Palace polity:

In the Palace there is only a single controlling will—that of the ruler, the center of the Palace, the nexus from which all decisions flow. The ruler could be called king, emperor, dictator, president, or any number of possible titles. He may preside over a nobility or other sorts of important people, but what distinguishes the pure Palace polity from the Nobility polity (to be discussed soon) is that nobles are totally dependent on the ruler—they do not have autonomous power, and their privileges depend entirely on carrying out his will. Within the state, the ruler has ultimate, arbitrary power, without procedural constraints of the sort we expect in a liberal democracy. The power of all others depends entirely on their proximity to, privileges from, and influence over the ruler.

In the Palace polity, Finer notes, legitimacy always derives from some form of charisma or tradition. Charisma could be “routinized” and shade into tradition, as when the hereditary ruler claims to be a god or otherwise supernatural. Rulers could also claim the divine right of kings, or the Mandate of Heaven, or some other transcendent blessing justifying his rule. But whatever the exact form of legitimacy, the ruler is ultimately responsible only to the power or beliefs grounding his rule: the gods, or God, or the harmony of the universe. This might require that the ruler spend much of his time in rituals and ceremonies befitting his cosmic role, especially if he is seen as the intermediary between Earth and Heaven. (The Chinese emperors were so perceived, for example, as were many rulers of the Ancient Near East.)

But the ruler is not required to justify himself to anyone else—especially not the people. Finer states that all of the types of legitimacy claimed by a [pure] Palace polity are, “without exception, authoritarian. There is no question of popular sovereignty. The monarch’s authority descends on him from a Higher Power and sets him above the people.” This is definitionally true; if the ruler does claim to represent the people, or actually is elected by them, he would no longer rule a pure Palace polity. Instead, this would be a Palace/Forum polity, a tremendously important type which we will discuss later.

Again, within the broad category of “Palace” the details of two different regimes could vary considerably; the Han Empire’s regime is quite different from ancient Persia, for example. But as you craft your setting, Finer’s typology can keep you grounded in the essential features of your regime.

******

(And don’t forget, I’m accepting submissions to a fantasy anthology, Ye Olde Magick Shoppe. Check out the announcement and start writing!

Plus, the associated Kickstarter project is now live! We’ve got a fancy video and everything…)

Power and Legitimacy

08 Tuesday May 2018

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, Writing

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series.)

Why do people follow kings? Or presidents, or dictators?

The ruler of a state is a single man (or occasionally, a single woman). He is surrounded by people with guns, any one of whom could easily shoot him. But instead, they follow his orders and shoot other people, or sometimes don’t need to shoot anyone at all—because everyone else is following the ruler’s orders too. But why?

Remember from our discussion of selectorate theory that the ruler needs to have a support coalition on which to anchor his rule. The simplest way to maintain your coalition is by providing benefits to its members—either explicit payments, or privileges, or public goods such as peace and commerce. Perhaps, then, your coalition will follow you instead of another ruler because they believe that you are better at providing benefits than others would be, or that the disruption involved in overthrowing you is not worth the potential gain.

This can be enough, if you have particular administrative or political skill. But it is a relatively fragile basis for your rule; at any time, a competitor might arise who promises to rule more effectively. More seriously, each official has opportunities to ignore your commands if it would benefit him—by receiving bribes, for example. If his only reason for following you is the benefits you provide, he will be much more likely to take bribes or exploit his position in other ways when the opportunity arises. Over time, this kind of venality can totally undermine your rule.

Another common method is to rule by fear—provide benefits to your military enforcers, and use them to cow the rest. This reduces the likelihood of venality, because the official must weigh the potential benefit against the danger of being caught. And realistically, most regimes use a combination of benefits and fear, as they are more effective in combination. (Even in “nice” societies, we rely on the police to deter official corruption—which raises a problem when it is the police who are corrupt. But I digress…) Still, relying on fear is also a fragile strategy—if you ever grow weaker and lose your ability to punish defectors, your entire regime may crumble overnight.

Both providing benefits and threatening punishment lead to a mindset of constant calculation of one’s odds. Better for the regime if it could appeal to a reason why obeying it is the right thing to do, even aside from personal benefit. Such a sense that you ought to obey and that the ruler is entitled to rule is called legitimacy.

Max Weber, that towering genius of sociology, identified three kinds of legitimacy (there are more, but he was focused on the contrast between ancient religious societies and the modern state, his personal enthusiasm): charismatic legitimacy, traditional legitimacy, and rational-legal legitimacy. All three can coexist, and often do, but as pure types they look like this:

Traditional legitimacy is where we follow a given regime because that is what we have always done. The prince succeeds the dying king because no one imagines doing anything different; the peasants pay the tax-collectors (as little as possible) because that’s what their fathers did, and their grandfathers, and everyone they can remember. This does not necessarily imply unthinking obedience; routine behavior can often become its own justification, because changing behaviors can introduce disruption, uncertainty, even chaos and suffering. But traditional legitimacy appeals to history, and one’s obedience to historical norms, as the main justification for continued cooperation with the regime.

All this is thrown into upheaval by the charismatic leader, who appeals not to history, but to his or her own remarkable personal qualities. Often, the charismatic leader claims to be a prophet, either of a god or gods, or of inevitable historical forces, or of a radical new ideology. The charismatic leader challenges the way things have always been done, and gathers followers by force of personality and the momentum of his achievements. Examples would include Martin Luther King, Joan of Arc, George Washington, Julius Caesar, Benito Mussolini, or Adolph Hitler. Clearly, charisma can be used for good or ill.

Ironically, however, a successful charismatic leader cannot sustain a regime by charisma alone. Taxes need to be collected, laws enforced, and supporters rewarded; charisma is a poor means of doing that over long periods, and even if it were, what happens when the charismatic leader dies? The wise charismatic leader will take steps to institutionalize his rule, by building a bureaucracy or a durable support coalition. And certainly once the original leader dies, his successors will tend to justify their rule by appealing to his memory. Thus, Weber notes, the initial charismatic revolution becomes transformed into a traditional regime of its own—or, in more modern times, a rational-legal one.

Weber’s description of rational-legal legitimacy was highly colored by the Germany of his day (the early 1900s), in which the ideal of a disinterested bureaucratic technocracy was supplanting the rule of the old German aristocrats. Thus, he describes a rational-legal regime as based on a bureaucratic class that operated according to laws and regulations, without a hint of self-interest, justifying their activity with the sacred power of the law. The law becomes self-justifying, as an expression of the will of the state. The self-interested rule of traditional aristocrats and the disruptive power of charisma become replaced by the impersonal wisdom of statecraft, executed by a professionalized bureaucracy.

In truth, as I mentioned, most regimes have elements of all three forms of legitimacy (and really, I am tempted to include ideology as a fourth type, since it has its own unique characteristics and doesn’t fit neatly into Weber’s schema). Any dictator worth his salt will try to create a cult of personality; hence, Kim Jong Il claiming to be a champion archer and athlete. Similarly, in the United States, much of the populace reveres the Founders as a sort of secular pantheon. And bureaucracy was known as far back as ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, though it was not professionalized as Weber would like.

More importantly, any form of legitimacy imposes constraints. The ruler must act, at least in public and at least most of the time, in ways that are consistent with the claimed basis of the regime’s legitimacy. Otherwise, the manifest hypocrisy will erode the feeling of obligation among the citizens that legitimacy is meant to create. The fall of the Soviet Union is perhaps the most spectacular example of recent times, coming as it did after the people had grown cynical of a ruling class that mouthed the platitudes of Communism without providing social equality or development.

Speaking of which, even well-entrenched legitimacy will only take you so far. If a legitimate king puts his support coalition at risk with reckless policies or defeat in war, they will only stick with him for so long before inventing a pretext to replace him, crown or no crown. Similarly, if the laws are not being enforced and no one fears the regime, it will be only a matter of time before petty opportunism snowballs into something more serious.

Still, legitimacy is supremely important. It is the glue that holds societies together. It allows regimes to rule effectively without imposing a costly police state, as most of the people will respond with quasi-voluntary compliance, in the phrase of Margaret Levi.

For writers, legitimacy can be a powerful theme. Does the regime have the support of the people? On what basis does it claim the right to rule? Do your protagonists live under a legitimate but feckless ruler, such that they must choose between respecting their traditions and physical survival? How might a regime seek to generate more legitimacy? Does a ruler behave as he should in public, but violate his claimed principles in private? How might an external enemy, or a rebel group, or a treacherous nobleman, attack a regime’s legitimacy?

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(And don’t forget, I’m accepting submissions to a fantasy anthology, Ye Olde Magick Shoppe. Check out the announcement and start writing!

Plus, the associated Kickstarter project is now live! We’ve got a fancy video and everything…)

Ye Olde Magick Shoppe is Live on Kickstarter!

04 Friday May 2018

Posted by in Self-Actualization, Writing

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You may have noticed that I’m accepting submissions for a new fantasy anthology, Ye Olde Magick Shoppe. Well, I’m pleased to announce that the associated Kickstarter project is now live!

The more backing we receive, the more short stories I can accept and the more that authors will be paid. So if you like reading fantasy stories about when magic is for sale, definitely check us out; and if you like writing such stories, do check out the submission rules and submit your work before the deadline.

Onward!

Identity, Boundaries, and Conflict

03 Thursday May 2018

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, War, Writing

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series.)

Identity is a thorny topic, especially as it relates to political behavior. One’s identity can have many parts: I am at once a son, a husband, a father, a writer, a blogger, a gamer, a political scientist, and a whole host of other things. Some of these identities take precedence at some times, only to be pushed into the background at other times.

Then there is ethnic or national identity, a common source of political conflict. But even then, one’s identity has many layers to it, each of which can be more relevant at some times than others. For example, one can call himself American, Latino-American, Guatemalan-American at different times; and sometimes the identity of “Guatemalan” will be more important than the larger category of “Latino”—usually when you are in conflict with other Latinos.

Political theorists are split on the topic of identity. The “primordialist” view is that some identities, like ethnic identity or national identity, are basically set in stone: they derive from “real” sources like genetic heritage and group history. An ethnic Berber, for example, will be sharply distinguished from neighboring black-skinned Africans, first of all by physical appearance, but then by fundamental attitudes deriving from Berber history and culture. No matter how much our Berber immerses himself in another people’s culture and adopts their customs, he will never stop being Berber.

The opposing view is “social-constructivism”; this view holds that all identities are socially constructed, built on the cumulative decisions and interpretations of individuals as such, and as interacting participants in a shared social setting. The social-constructivist view of identity focuses on the ways in which identities are malleable; the American category “white,” for example, used to exclude Mediterranean peoples such as Italians and Greeks, whereas today it encompasses them. The constructivist view of identity will emphasize both the changing content of a given identity, and the shifting boundaries between in-group and out-group. In particular, many cultural practices have the explicit purpose of dividing “us” from “them,” and these practices take on more importance in times of danger—when knowing who is a “fellow” becomes crucial.

Practically speaking, both views have merit. In a trivial sense, all identities are socially constructed, in that they depend on the beliefs of the individual and the other members of the family or society. As far as I know, no society or person attaches a lot of importance to whether a person’s earlobes hang free or are attached, for example; so not all differences between people become vested with importance. On the other hand, there are some identities whose basis is effectively primordial. For example, being black in America is likely to remain salient for a long time to come, even for new immigrants from African countries who are not used to thinking of themselves that way; the people around them impose that identity, even if they themselves resist it. In that sense, even though the identity of “blackness” is indeed socially constructed from the point of view of the surrounding society, for the African immigrant it becomes effectively primordial—since it cannot be opted out of.

Still, what the identity of “blackness” means will vary, depending on how people think of it, and also how they draw the boundaries between “black” and “not-black.” Additionally, the priority one places on blackness, compared to other identities such as “parent” or “American” or “Methodist,” will vary as well. These areas of variability are where politics enters into the equation.

We mentioned that people carry many different identities, and which one is most important will vary. But why, and when? Generally speaking, an identity will come to the fore when it is being threatened, or when there is a social or political benefit to emphasizing it. As an old Bedouin saying puts it, “I against my brother, I and my brother against a cousin, I and my cousin against the stranger.” At each stage, different facets of one’s kinship identity are emphasized, depending on degrees of closeness and trust.

However, identities can also be manipulated politically. A tragic example is what happened in post-invasion Iraq, circa 2004 or 2005. The small community of Iraqi expatriate leaders, who had agitated for the war from their perch in the United States, now returned triumphantly to Iraq in order to claim the political positions in the new democracy to which they felt entitled. But they found that in their years abroad, they had lost all their connections to local communities; they thus had no base of electoral support. The less scrupulous among them responded by whipping up sectarian tensions; “Vote for me, because I am a proud Shia and I will defend my fellow Shia against the Sunni threat, and help us Shia get our revenge against those Sunni in the process.”

This process—convincing people that a certain identity needs to take precedence over other concurrent identities—is called boundary activation (the boundary between “us” and “them”), and it is one of the most powerful and often most dangerous forces in politics. In the case of Iraq, the expatriate politicians were often able to gin up electoral support based on ethnic or sectarian chauvinism, but they also set the groundwork for years of bloody inter-communal violence that strengthened the Iraqi insurgency, contributed to ISIS’s rise, and has caused an endless spiral of death squads and massacres.

More benign examples are convincing Americans that their identity of “worker” takes precedence over “consumer” (in support of protective tariffs) or the reverse, or that one’s identity as “American” takes precedence over “white” or “black” or “Latino”, or the reverse.

But there are always political figures who calculate that they can gain power by emphasizing a different set of identities, usually ethnic identities; and for them, it may be better if violence results, since that makes it harder to go back to the way things were—once different ethic groups are at war, it becomes actually dangerous to deemphasize your ethnic identity. That, in a nutshell, is what happened in the former Yugoslavia: Serb politicians were the first to deliberately incite ethnic war for their own gain, but politicians on all sides soon followed. (This is why appeals to ethnic identity-politics are so incredibly dangerous, whether at a Klan rally or in a social-justice seminar.)

The same happens in reverse as well. Many new states will violently impose a common nationalist identity over the separate ethnic identities of their many internal communities. From their perspective it is necessary to ensure the unity of the new nation, but for the persecuted minorities, this typically means the violent suppression of their culture and heritage, the forced indoctrination of their young, and the loss of their language and history. Latin American states’ treatment of their indigenous peoples are a good example.

For authors, political conflicts over identity are a gold mine of story drama. They hit both the external aspect of plot jeopardy, and internal character conflict of how your characters think of themselves: who they are, who they might be, and who they stand with. Many of our most powerful stories are built around identity conflict, and if you can layer the political aspect on top of that, so much the better. The key concepts to keep in mind are boundary activation (especially by unscrupulous politicians seeking to gain or keep power), identities that are imposed by the surrounding society (as in the case of African immigrants), and how violence can actually make it harder to reverse identity politics.

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(And don’t forget, I’m accepting submissions to a fantasy anthology, Ye Olde Magick Shoppe. Check out the announcement and start writing!)

Wealth, Power, and Social Orders

26 Thursday Apr 2018

Posted by in Economics, History, Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, Uncategorized, Writing

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series.)

Suppose there were two people on a desert island. One owns a crate of food; the other owns a gun. What is going to happen?

Very shortly, the person with the gun is going to also “own” the food; the other person might be dead, or might be reduced to the level of a slave. (In the immortal words of Clint Eastwood, “There are two kinds of people in this world…”)

This illustrates the fundamental problem of property’s relationship to power: if an actor has a lot of power but little wealth, it will often try to gain more wealth through violence. If an actor has much wealth but little power, it will often try to use its wealth to gain power—if only for self-defense! And this dynamic has played out throughout history, leading to endless cycles of bloodshed and misery.

To survive, as North, Wallis, and Weingast (NWW) argue, groups of people need to come up with some solution to this danger—a way to align the interests of those who have wealth and those who have power. This is called a social order.

NWW identify three kinds of social orders: the foraging social order, the limited-access or “natural” social order, and the open-access social order. Foraging bands deal with the problem of wealth and power very simply: group members have roughly equal wealth, physical strength, and social status. There is relatively little incentive to take more with violence, as the other group members will unite to destroy you.

As we will discuss fully at another time, egalitarian bands use several techniques to enforce social equality: malicious gossip, mandatory gift-giving, and the threat of splitting the group if one faction becomes too powerful, to mention a few. However, these methods do not guarantee success; it often happens that a respected chief is able to accumulate enough personal loyalty, wealth, and prestige that he can gain lasting control over the group, which is passed on to his descendants.

That brings us to the limited-access order, which has been the predominant mode of social organization throughout the history of states. In a nutshell, those with power are also given control over wealth as a consequence, in a tacit agreement between elites in order to minimize conflict between them. In the words of NWW, “By manipulating privilege, interests are created that limit violence.” The most obvious example was European feudalism, in which brigands with large armies “went legit” and set themselves up as landed aristocrats, along with supporting networks of bureaucrats and clergy to help them run things. As NWW put it, “In all natural states, economics is politics by other means: economic and political systems are closely enmeshed, along with religious, military, and educational systems.” One could also look at Soviet-style communism, in which wealth flowed to the regime leaders by virtue of their control over the military and police apparatus.

A key aspect of the natural order was that impersonal law and procedural equality did not exist. The regime was not a neutral arbiter of people’s social and commercial disputes; it existed to defend the privileges of the ruling coalition as a class, and thus your treatment by the regime depended on your personal relationship with the ruler or other elites. As NWW put it, “Personal relationships, who one is and who one knows, form the basis for social organization and constitute the arena for individual interaction, particularly personal relationships among powerful individuals.” This limited the ability for people to form complex organizations, in business or society more generally: if they could not settle disputes internally, the state would not do the job for them and the organization would collapse.

Partly, this was by design. Elites protected the value of their “rents” by deliberately restricting the ability of those outside the regime to organize groups of people. It may seem strange to us, in our society of mass organizations, but in the feudal era it was tantamount to treason to organize an independent guild of craftsman outside of the regime-sanctioned guild, or to have a town of people who swore loyalty oaths to each other. That was why English entrepreneurs needed to petition the Crown for the right to form a joint-stock corporation, for example. And in Communist or Fascist regimes, even such mundane organizations as chess clubs needed to be approved by the regime. In this way, a limited-access regime is able to retain control over economic activity and take its cut, and to prevent possible competitors from arising via new organized groups in the populace.

Again, the natural order is the most prevalent throughout history. It is almost inevitable for those with power to demand wealth, for those with wealth to seek access to power, for the two classes of people to become incestuously intertwined and then to use their power to suppress competition. Think of the relationships in many Latin American countries between oligarchs and generals. Think of the paramount business associations and unions found in much of Western Europe, organized and maintained by the state, which have the effect of protecting incumbents and squelching entrepreneurialism.

The biggest problem with the natural order, however, is that it is fundamentally unstable. If someone becomes too powerful or too wealthy too quickly, suddenly there is a mismatch between what he has and what he (or others) might want. This generally leads to a breakdown of the delicate balance of power in the regime, culminating in violence or even civil war. This is why, argue NWW, autocratic regimes tend to underperform democracies in economic growth over time: because their relatively better performance during good times is outweighed by frequent destructive episodes of civil war and social breakdown.

(This is a crucial reason why dictators need to gain control over their countries’ wealth: not merely out of greed, but to protect themselves from rich competitors. Regime outsiders who strike it rich represent a deadly threat to the regime.)

The third form of social order, the open-access order, is a historical anomaly: it first emerged only a few centuries ago in Britain, as elites gradually transformed their particular privileges into general rights (through a long and subtle process that NWW discuss in detail). This does not merely mean democracy, though Britain and the United States are the chief examples. In the open-access order, elites have no special privileges in law, and military power is removed from partisan politics or the extortion of wealth, becoming a neutral enforcer of the political system; it stays neutral because no single political or business leader has the opportunity to bring it under his or her control.

What distinguishes the open-access order, and what makes it work, is that anyone is allowed to enter politics or business, and to organize companies or political parties or activist groups without the permission of the regime. And you need both parts: political freedom is protected by economic dynamism, as new companies challenge the old leaders and displace them before they get too cozy with the government. Economic freedom is protected by electoral competition and turnover in political leadership, which makes policies that benefit the mass populace relatively more attractive to ambitious politicians compared to policies that benefit a handful of powerful companies. (See the post on selectorate theory.) NWW call this the “double balance.”

It should be noted, however, that for all its achievements the open-access order is profoundly fragile and in danger of backsliding into a natural regime. This can happen in either of two ways (or both simultaneously). First is for the government to become too powerful relative to the economy, in which case it can throttle free competition. Second is for individual businesses to become too wealthy and influential compared to their competitors or the government, which leads businesses and governments to build corrupt relationships with each other, with businesses gaining special privileges and returning the favor by keeping favored politicians in power. To a degree, such backsliding is always present (the military-industrial complex comes to mind, as does the growing political power of Google, Amazon, and Facebook). And the natural tendency is for such collusion to accumulate like layers of sediment over time.

As Mancur Olson warns in his The Rise and Decline of Nations, it is always easier to organize a small group of powerful actors to lobby government for some subsidy, than it is for the mass of the citizens to organize against them. This is because the average person is barely affected by the average subsidy and won’t bother to get involved, whereas the beneficiaries have a great deal to gain. Over time, this tendency results in a steady calcification of the economy and the government, as interest groups accumulate to feast on the populace’s wealth through direct or indirect means. The only way to prevent such decline, Olson suggests mordantly, is for an invading army to sweep away the existing corrupt relationships.

Fortunately, this invasion can be metaphorical. David P. Goldman (AKA “Spengler”) argues that American corruption declined in the 1980s, as the new tech industry displaced the existing corporate titans despite their close relations with government. The same can happen in the political sphere, if a determined political faction dismantles corrupt bargains and is rewarded electorally for it. That is the strength of the open-access system.

But it remains fragile. In the United States, we ought to be alarmed by the unprecedented decline in new business formation in the past decade, and the manner in today’s tech oligarchy is actively stifling competition—even as they exert themselves in the political sphere.

As authors, how can we use these concepts? Here are some points of conflict: growing power brings the temptation to take the wealth of others. Growing wealth attracts violent vultures, or inspires the wealthy to gain power as well. Sudden shifts in power and wealth will threaten to destabilize the balance of power in a society, with war as a likely result. (A brief glance at the history of the Congo will provide many depressing examples.) These tendencies are rich ore for story conflict, and the thoughtful author can build powerful plots from them.

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(And don’t forget, I’m accepting submissions to a fantasy anthology, Ye Olde Magick Shoppe. Check out the announcement and start writing!)

Legibility and Power

22 Sunday Apr 2018

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, Uncategorized, Writing

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series.)

Suppose you wake up one day to find that you are the new king of your very own state. After a moment of shock, you start to think about all the cool things you can do now—the laws you can pass, the taxes you can collect, the armies you can raise. But then you realize that even if you pass a law, you don’t know if people will follow it; even if you impose taxes, you don’t know if people will pay them; even if you raise an army, you don’t know whether it will remain loyal. In short, sitting in your palace at the center of your new domain, your first problem—maybe your most severe problem—is being able to perceive what people are doing.

There are several strategies you could use in response. You could appoint trusted subordinates to carry out your will and enforce your laws (see my post on English aristocrats), if you have such trusted subordinates! You could impose head taxes or customs duties at the city gates or other travel bottlenecks, so people passing through will be unable to avoid them. But each of these approaches has limits. A more ambitious strategy, used by practically all states throughout history, is to deliberately increase the populace’s legibility: the degree to which its activity can be monitored.

The classic discussion of legibility is by James C. Scott, across several of his books—most directly, Seeing Like a State and The Art of Not Being Governed. In a nutshell, states force changes in their subjects’ behavior in order to more easily monitor and control them. One example is having people carry an identity card; in our modern society, this is convenient for businesses as well as governments, but back in the days when most people lived in the same village all their lives, and knew each other intimately, the only purpose of identity papers was for the traveling government official to know whether you had paid your taxes this year.

More drastic examples include German “scientific forestry,” in which a complex forest ecosystem was demolished and replaced with a monocrop of elm trees, grown in carefully measured rows and columns, so that the lumber yield from the forest would be predictable (in theory); the frequent practice in Southeast Asia of forcing your peasants to live in your capital city, so that their behavior can be easily observed; demanding that they all plant wheat, which can be easily assessed and taxed just before harvest, and making it a crime to grow potatoes (which grow underground and can easily be concealed from the tax-man); and forcing people to take on last names, to make censuses easier and to better distinguish “William of Hole-in-the-Wall” and “William of Top-of-the-Hill” in the official records. (See e.g. here.)

Writing in 1951, Hanna Arendt imagined with horror what Soviet intelligence would be able to do if they possessed a social-network graph of their captive populace, the better to monitor dissidents and punish them, their families, and everyone they ever knew. (Of course, we today have obligingly entered ourselves into such a social-network graph, providing it with intimate data about our lives that any intelligence service would drool over—to our growing sorrow. We also carry tracking devices in our cars and on our persons! Truly, we are the most legible generation in all of history.)

On the flip side, people strive to make themselves less legible to the state, to evade its control. This is one reason why merchants, nomadic communities, and “barbarians” are typically viewed with suspicion by “official” society, since their capital is easily moved and they are hard to tax or control.

In general, however, the basic rule is more legibility = more control.

This is not just true with states. One of the enduring problems of business organization is how to make sure that one’s employees are doing what they are being paid to do. Production quotas were an early (and crude) mechanism to monitor employees; nowadays, employers often use video cameras, monitoring software on work computers, and the like. You can even see this concept on the personal level: think of the controlling husband who demands that his wife use only a credit card that he has the password for, the better to control her spending. (Or a controlling wife, or that matter.)

The theme of legibility is a rich vein of conflict for fiction. An especially important spur to conflict is when a new technology, or form of magic, or a new type of organization such as a police force or intelligence service, disrupts the status quo of legibility and makes people easier or harder to monitor. This can be something as mundane (to our eyes) as the first census in a country, in which the populace suddenly is categorized and sorted by the regime to enable better control. As an example, the Biblical figure of King David carries out a census and is said to have sinned grievously by doing so—so much so that the realm is punished with a divine death plague. The political scientist in me wonders whether this “death plague” is a coded reference to violent popular resistance to the census; in Southeast Asia, as Scott notes, the very first objective of rioting peasants often was not to lynch the local landlord (that came second), but to burn down the government’s records office.

Conversely, think of the heartburn that some governments are feeling over the growth of cryptocurrencies, which aspire to be completely untraceable and thus beyond the reach of taxation authorities.

In your fiction, the interplay between legibility and obscurity can drive compelling conflicts with the state, or with an employer, or a local mafia boss, or even within families. For states, the topic has implications for taxation, how armies are raised and led, and a host of other details. Again, a single fundamental constraint gives rise to many rich problems, all of which can be of service in your writing.

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(And don’t forget, I’m accepting submissions to a fantasy anthology, Ye Olde Magick Shoppe. Check out the announcement and start writing!)