Category Archives: Politics

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!)

Keeping Power

20 Friday Apr 2018

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders

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

Fiction writers often create elaborate imaginary kingdoms or galactic empires, ruled by iron-fisted dictators or feckless legislatures or councils of wise elders. Often, however, the politics of such regimes often falls flat. Powerful figures line up for or against the protagonists seemingly at random, or “because the author says so.” While this can be fine, depending on the main emphasis of your story, it would be better to understand the dynamics of political conflict in your imaginary regime, so that you can use it as a basis for creating a compelling story.

But there are many different kinds of regimes: democracies, dictatorships, aristocracies, each of which has innumerable flavors and nuances in their structures. Does an author need to become an expert in all of them to write good political conflict?

Not necessarily. A good starting point would be a general theory of how regime leaders stay in power or get overthrown—simple enough to be easily applied to your story, flexible enough to be relevant to ancient kingdoms, modern democracies, and everything in between. Fortunately, there is such a theory, developed by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and his collaborators, and known in comparative politics as selectorate theory. It goes like this:

Imagine a Kingdom of Crelia. Its king, Rothgar the VIII, rules over a strong aristocracy headed by nine barons, not all of whom like him very much, and a much larger pool of powerless peasants who pretty much have to suffer whatever comes. Rothgar doesn’t have to worry much about what the peasants think; but he must pay attention to the barons, because if enough of them turned against him, Rothgar could be overthrown and beheaded. Fortunately, he doesn’t have to keep all of them happy all the time—just a fraction of them, let’s say four. Their strength, plus his own, are enough to keep the other five barons in check.

To keep his supporters happy, therefore, King Rothgar keeps their taxes somewhat lower than the other five barons, gives them more privileges at court, and sets royal policy to favor their interests over those of the five other barons, to some degree. (The peasants, needless to say, get milked for all that Rothgar and the barons can get.)

In terms of selectorate theory, the peasants (Residents) have no role in choosing the king. The nine barons, on the other hand, make up the Selectorate—the group of people with the right, or the power, to influence the selection of king. The selectorate is the outer circle; the inner circle, on the other hand, is the Winning Coalition, the four barons who make up Rothgar’s chief supporters.

Rothgar’s survival depends on maintaining his winning coalition. But he need not keep it as the same four barons; indeed, his main leverage over them is the threat of replacing a pushy baron with one of the other five barons in the selectorate. That threat allows him to keep the expense of maintaining his allies down to a reasonable level, so he can keep more taxes to himself.

His threat would be even more effective if he could expand the size of the selectorate, by appointing five or six peasants to the nobility. Now, there are fifteen barons total, and the king still needs only four of them as his supporters. With so many more options to choose from, Rothgar need pay a much lower price to secure his base of support. Any baron that tries to hold out will quickly be replaced by a more cooperative rival.

However, suppose that there are not nine total barons but only six. Then, each of the four supporter barons is in a powerful position; the king will have a much harder time replacing them individually, and has no way to replace them all. They can then extort a heavy price for their support, perhaps so heavy that the king’s own revenue is squeezed and he loses power over time. The same would be true if the king suddenly needed seven barons out of nine, instead of just four. (The country, needless to say, will suffer as spending on public goods drops off a cliff.)

As a rule, if the winning coalition is large relative to the size of the selectorate, it can extort a high price. If it is small relative to the selectorate, the ruler can keep more revenue for himself. At the limit, if you make the entire populace part of the selectorate while only requiring a tiny winning coalition (for example, with a strict meritocracy or an authoritarian party-based regime), then your supporters will have to make do with meager benefits indeed.

In general, therefore, the ruler has an interest in expanding the selectorate to cover a larger part of the population, and the selectorate members have an interest in restricting its size. Likewise, the ruler has an interest in reducing the necessary size of the winning coalition, and the selectorate would want to increase the size of the winning coalition.

You can see these dynamics play out in the political struggles over extending the right to vote. In the United States, for example, it was originally the case that only property-owning freemen could vote, about 6% of the population. Government policy thus tended to favor the landowning class. Over time, the right to vote was slowly extended to most white men, then most men, then most adults. At each step, some who already had the vote feared that their interests would be harmed by the new voters, and fought bitterly against their inclusion. And at each step, the size of the winning coalition grew along with that of the selectorate, and government policy thus changed to benefit larger portions of the total populace.

This brings up an important point. When the winning coalition is small, it can be bought off with policies that benefit itself, even if those policies harm the populace at large (as they often do; it is easy to tax the populace and enrich a handful of supporters). But as the winning coalition grows, relative to the populace as a whole, it becomes more likely that policies benefiting the winning coalition will also benefit the populace in general.

This, argues selectorate theory, is the main reason that democracies tend to be better run (on average) than dictatorships—the ruler must set policies that benefit 50% of active voters at a minimum, instead of a small handful of powerful nobles, generals, or businessmen.

The model can fit any regime you imagine. Communism? The Communist Party membership was quite large, compared to the size of the Politburo; regime figures could be replaced easily, and often were. Banana republic? The key figures are the generals and the main business leaders, who are hard to replace and thus demand a high price for their support. (For more, read The Dictator’s Handbook.)

How can you use this in your fiction? Selectorate theory gives you several points of conflict to focus on: expanding or shrinking the winning coalition, or the selectorate; exactly who gets to be in the winning coalition; policies that benefit the winning coalition and harm the rest of the country, or an effort to change such policies as winning coalitions shift; a ruler who allows his winning coalition to fall apart, so a challenger can assemble such a coalition of her own. You can tune the details to fit your particular setting; but selectorate theory gives you a strong foundation on which to build the political conflict in your story.

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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!)

Class Conflict, Part One

09 Monday Apr 2018

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

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

Imagine a small nomadic band of hunter-gatherers, living a carefree existence in the wild hill country—let’s call them the Pandu. They own little property aside from the weapons and tools they carry and the clothing they wear. Let’s even suppose that they practice free love, and that children are raised communally. Finally, imagine that everyone performs the same jobs: hunting, foraging, making clothing and tools, raising children, and making decorative jewelry that looks pretty (we can call these “prestige goods”).

One might think that the Pandu ought to be the perfect egalitarian society, without conflict over possessions or political power. And actual foraging societies do tend to be nearly egalitarian (for reasons discussed in Michael Taylor’s Community, Anarchy, Liberty, among other authors). Still, they are not perfectly egalitarian, even if there are no hard class divisions. Let’s see why.

Let’s say that some Pandu are somewhat better at hunting or foraging than others. Such “Good Hunters” manage to gather enough food in a shorter time, so they can spend more time creating prestige goods—or else they can gather extra food and trade it with others for their prestige goods. Over time, they will have more jewelry than less skilled hunters. At this point, jewelry starts to be not just pretty shiny things, but a sign of hunting skill.

Good Hunters will start to attract more intimate partners because of their greater prestige, or simply with gifts of food or jewelry; lesser hunters will lose out, in relative terms. If the story ends here, we would have a single-class society shot through with simmering tensions and periodic fits of jealousy-driven violence.

Now imagine that successful hunters had the right to eat their prey’s hearts, which grant magical powers and even greater hunting skill. Suddenly, we have a “rich-get-richer” scenario: Good Hunters would soon outstrip their less-skilled rivals, becoming a class in themselves that eventually possesses far more food, prestige, and social attractiveness than the “lower” class. The lower class could still feed itself, but would lack prestige and social standing, and likely intimate partners as a result—and would have no way to catch up, at least not through hunting skill.

Still, both of these classes would have broadly similar interests: they hunt the same game, gather the same foods, value the same goods. So long as interclass jealousy is kept under control, perhaps by social rituals that periodically erase class distinctions, the Pandu band will remain unified.

But suppose that the less successful hunters, recognizing that they cannot compete at hunting, decide to begin farming instead so that they can win prestige and intimate partners of their own. Suppose they are successful, and produce as much food on average as the Hunters do, achieving a broadly comparable social status. How does this change the picture?

For one thing, while the Hunters would continue their nomadic lifestyle, following the game as the seasons shift, Farmers suddenly are tied to a fixed plot of land. Even if they can travel during fallow seasons or even between the planting and harvest time, they would have to return to their plots of land to harvest their crop. Even if they plant multiple crops in multiple locations and circulate between them, they are now less mobile than before.

What’s more, Farmers have to feed themselves somehow while their crop is growing. They might borrow food from fellow Pandu, promising to repay them at the harvest. Likely, they would borrow from the Hunters. But perhaps the Hunters would take advantage of the new situation to demand back more food than they lent.

Suddenly, Hunters and Farmers have opposing interests. Hunters want to be mobile; Farmers less so. Hunters want their rights as lenders upheld, and perhaps to gain additional privileges in the process; Farmers would want to defend themselves against such privileges, or even to deprive Hunters of their repayment.

So what policy will the Pandu band follow? It will depend on the relative strength of each class, the ideological beliefs of the Pandu, and the skill of the band’s mediators or leaders. At all times, clashing interests will pull the band in different directions, and perhaps pull it apart entirely.

Class can go beyond simplistic notions of upper, middle, lower—it can also be derived from different and conflicting interests. And conflict, needless to say, is at the heart of good stories. You can generate powerful conflicts by depicting societies with opposing class interests, and those conflicts will be all the more compelling if your social classes are more than caricatures.

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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!)

Geography, Travel, and Power Projection

07 Wednesday Mar 2018

Posted by in Better Fantasy, Politics, State Formation

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Years ago, I wrote a post about long journeys in fantasy fiction. It discussed how incredibly difficult long-range travel was, and the profound economic and social effects caused by that difficulty. But I didn’t discuss very much the close relationship between ease of travel and political power.

Remember that in the premodern world, travel on land was extremely difficult compared to travel by sea. It was about as hard to transport a load of grain 100 km over land as it was to ship it from one side of the Mediterranean to the other. Traveling off-road was slow, difficult, and dangerous; there was no guarantee of food, and it was easy to be injured by terrain or wild animals. Even when roads existed, travelers could easily be hampered by bad weather, bandits, or disease.

Why does this matter for politics? We who live in consolidated states sometimes forget that the government’s power is not a given. People generally comply with the government only when they are made to, through enforcement by armed men and the bureaucrats who keep them paid. Where there are no police, and communication with the government is difficult, inhabitants can ignore the law when it suits them. (Even in modern America, there are parts of Appalachia and other rural areas that are renowned for moonshine, drug cultivation, and general lawlessness.)

As James C. Scott lays out in great detail, the first requirement for the consolidation of political power is the ability to control people. That means that a state will generally only extend its rule into areas in which its soldiers can easily travel, in order to extract taxes and plunder and slaves. In Southeast Asia, the focus of his study, large cities were controlled by powerful rulers, but their ability to project their rule into the countryside was limited. During harvest season, the regime’s armies would sweep through the countryside in order to extract grain from the hapless farmers, and in some cases to take slaves. But in the monsoon season, when the roads became muddy lakes and were impassable, a regime’s effective zone of control often shrank to the borders of its capital city alone; the countryside would be beyond its reach.

Similarly, state control often did not extend up into hill country, mountains, marshlands, or other rugged terrain. State rule and so-called “civilized society” would be a feature of the lowlands, while the highlands would be seen as stateless zones of barbarism.

States that wanted to increase their power thus had a strong incentive to move population into arm’s-reach, and to keep them there. Cities were the most prominent example; walls were built not only to keep invaders out, but to keep subject populations in. Peasants were often forbidden to move away from their designated cities, and had to farm plots that were in easy traveling distance. (This was also meant to aid in creating legibility for the state.) Plus, serfs or slaves would be imported and kept under control by force.

On the flip side, Scott writes, people who wanted to escape the coercive state would often flee to inaccessible areas such as badlands, hill country, or marshes. There, they would set up “maroon communities,” or else join with the existing bands of stateless peoples who lived as nomads or foragers. Not that they would disconnect from the state entirely. Until quite recently in human history, a majority of the world’s population was outside of state control, and states depended on trade with stateless peoples to provide them with many of their luxuries (as well as slaves).

From the viewpoint of accessibility and power projection, you can see the tremendous importance that good roads played for imperial powers such as Rome and Persia; or the role that the Dutch and British fleets played in imposing their colonial rule across the seas. Nor was this only an issue in earlier ages; NATO forces in Afghanistan have suffered severe problems suppressing the Taliban specifically because of the difficulty in traveling through the mountainous terrain.

Summing up: power depends (in part) on a regime’s physical access to people. Regimes with better logistics, better traveling technology, and the ability to move their subjects into concentrated zones of control thus could intensify their own power.

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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!)

So, About That How-To Book on Politics…

06 Tuesday Mar 2018

Posted by in Better Fantasy, Politics, Writing

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[UPDATE: The first volume is published! Check it out.]

Some years ago, I blogged about my plan to write a book about politics for writers, filling a gap in the existing materials on worldbuilding. Most writing teachers focus on details such as the structure of the nobility, or the form of government, or other political features that are actually secondary to the fundamental questions of power, rule, and conflict. I hoped that, using my scholarly background in political science, I could create a guide that succinctly gave authors a powerful tool to generate stories from political conflict.

So what happened?

In short, I’m very badly stuck on how to structure the book.

Basically, there are a series of key concepts that underpin politics: geography, technology (especially weapons technology), the related issue of legibility (how easily a ruler can monitor and tax the peasants), power projection, legitimacy and ideology, and the social order (how wealth and power coexist with each other), to name just a few. Starting with those, you can very quickly drill down to the fundamental type of story you want to tell, and design your world to facilitate that. The problem is that all of these concepts tend to interpenetrate, in a big gnarly ball of connections shooting every which way.

So in trying to essentially give a crash course on graduate-level PoliSci, where does one start?

And if someone wants a checklist for use in worldbuilding, what order would you follow?

I honestly don’t know. But if I keep dithering, the book will never get written, and all you aspiring worldbuilders will be left adrift in a sea of bad fantasy-kingdom pastiches. (Horrors!) My current plan, therefore, is to write blog posts about the various fundamental concepts piecemeal, without worrying overmuch about their order or relationship to each other. I will be collecting these posts, and past posts on related topics, in a new page called Politics for Worldbuilders, which you can see in the top of the blog.

Enjoy!

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

Excerpt from My Current Project

21 Monday Dec 2015

Posted by in Better Fantasy, Politics, State Formation, Writing

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[I’ve previously written that I want to write a handbook for writers on how to handle politics and political conflict in our stories. Right now I’m working on a precursor to that handbook—a brief study of different types of political regimes, summarizing and commenting on the work of political scientist Samuel Finer. Here’s a short excerpt from my current draft, a fictional vignette illustrating what one example of the Palace polity would feel like:]

Amanukemba XVII yawned as he completed the last of the sacred rites for the day. The god-emperor had to placate the Ancestors, of course, but now that all of that was done he could pay a quick visit to the harem before finally meeting with his high council. They were a tedious pack of bores mostly, but it wouldn’t do to antagonize them too much or the bureaucracy would just make trouble. He would smile and nod, and then meet with his true advisors in secret later that evening. They were men more to Amanukemba’s liking, ambitious and driven, yet without high station and title—too weak to pose a threat, and totally dependent on his patronage. And unlike the paper-pushers, they got things done.

Which was good, for much remained to be done before the fall. The granaries needed filling, and that meant that the peasants needed squeezing. Yet somehow he had to free up enough men from his conscript armies to ensure a good harvest, without exposing his frontier to barbarian raids. Choices, choices.

The emperor hummed a happy tune as he passed between the eunuch harem guards, who bowed at his appearance. He would ask for Messarina today. She would almost certainly try to flatter him and distract him, and then at a crucial moment she would ask about affairs of state, about which she had no business asking. If Amanukemba were lucky, she would then whisper a suggestion for what he should do, and then he might discover which official had been bribing his eunuchs to gain access to the harem. Not to take liberties with the concubines, of course—it would be madness to risk death by slow torture—but to plot and scheme and do all those things court functionaries seemed to do with their time.

The whole thing was silly, of course. If they were smart, they would all realize that the surest way to wealth and power would be to please the god-emperor, Son of the Ancients. He was too wise and cunning to be taken in by such petty manipulations. Perhaps his grandfather had been, but not his father, and not he…

The Power of Guiding Metaphors

19 Saturday Dec 2015

Posted by in Better Fantasy, Economics, History, Military, Politics, State Formation, War, Writing

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I’ve lately been reading The Axis Grand Strategy, a book published in America during World War Two. With only light editorial comments, it presents translated writings from German military theorists and officers about different aspects of warfighting. (The editors are presenting this material, in part, as a demonstration of Nazi perfidy; they highlight passages in which the Germans offhandedly note various breaches of international law—for example, that the invasion of neutral Belgium during WWI was conceived of a decade in advance.) The book is incredibly interesting from many points of view, and even as a historical artifact itself; I did not know, for example, that the Allied powers were calling themselves “The United Nations” even during the war.

One point that the book is reminding me of is the importance of metaphors in structuring thought. Over and over again, the German authors refer to the ideal military enterprise as a well-oiled machine, operating with incredible precision down to the smallest detail. To make such a machine possible took a stupendous level of planning and organization, which had to be carried out years in advance (and which the authors describe in great detail). This was one factor that pushed German doctrine to the conclusion that to have any hope for victory, they needed to decide upon war several years before actually carrying it out, and then to direct all of their government policy and grand strategy to support that decision. That is, once the German decision for war was made, it became largely inevitable that war would result even three or five years later—because German leadership believed that such decisions needed that much lead time for the planning process to be adequate, and victory to be possible.

To be sure, the “well-oiled machine” metaphor was not the only reason that German doctrine came to that conclusion, or even the most important one. But it surely played a role, because it presented an ideal towards which to aspire.

Lewis Mumford, in his Technics and Civilization, presents a similar argument about the development of vast hierarchical bureaucracies. He writes that the age of coal had dramatic impacts not only on our economy, but on the mindset of society’s leaders. Where previously, water-powered manufacture had been relatively decentralized, coal-fired steam power created tremendous economies of scale. The most efficient method would be to tie all of your machines into a massive central boiler; this also meant that they had to be standardized, coordinated, and operated without any sort of individual discretion or initiative.

According to Mumford, the success of centralized manufacture led thinkers to imagine that other centralized projects were ideal as well—massive bureaucracies, mass armies, central planning of the economy, and so on. These people had been conditioned by the guiding metaphor of coal-fired steam boilers, and the resulting hierarchical organization of mass factories. Many would even make the parallel explicit. Individual initiative simply made a mess; better to control everything from the head. The result was the age of totalitarianism.

Economist Richard Bronk, in his The Romantic Economist, makes a similar argument about the development of the idea of equilibrium markets in economics. He says that the guiding metaphor there came from thermodynamics; in an attempt to make economics into a mathematical science akin to physics, champions of quantitative economics proposed simplifying assumptions such as “utility” or “self-interest” that could transform economic behavior into something predictable, something that could be captured in quasi-thermodynamic equations. Bronk argues that such metaphors have been played out, and the further progress in economic thought needs to borrow metaphors from the Romantics—biological processes, or ecosystems, or webs of interdependence.

Today, we netizens are conditioned to think about networks, or crowdfunding, or robots. These new guiding metaphors have in turn produced new ideas of how governments should work, or how organizations should be structured. Some of these new ideas are even useful. But in any event, they are very different from the sorts of ideas that would come from a person accustomed to steam-powered factories.

The concept of a guiding metaphor is important if you are any sort of creative thinker, whether in business or government or the arts. If you write fiction, think about what metaphors influence your characters or even whole societies. If you have a business, think about how new metaphors can suggest new products or services. If you are in government, stop trying to bludgeon your society with models of coercive government that date from nineteenth-century proto-fascism.

If you want to create something new, try applying a different metaphor.

The Defense of a Free State

10 Thursday Dec 2015

Posted by in Politics, Self-Promotion, Weapons, Writing

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[Note: This is one of the short stories that can be found in my Kindle collection, The Best Congress Money Can Buy: Stories of Political Possibility. Given  recent events and the political debates that have accompanied them, I figured it would be appropriate to revisit this story. Let me know what you think!]

Beth had scarcely come home from the massage clinic where she worked when her smart phone beeped at her, with the news that Handgun Defense, Inc., was lobbying for more changes to gun-ownership laws. This time, they wanted to weaken the exemptions for pepper-spray.

“Ridiculous,” Beth snapped to her friend Donna, who had come by with a satchel of tomatoes from her garden. “Why should they force me to carry a gun if I don’t want to? What’s wrong with pepper spray?”

“It says here that they don’t think it does a good enough job against criminals,” Donna said with a sniff, reading from her own phone. “I think they just want to end up with everyone owning a gun, whether we want it or not.”

Continue reading →

Politics for Writers?

10 Sunday Nov 2013

Posted by in Better Fantasy, Politics, Self-Promotion, Writing

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This being November, I am once again participating in National Novel Writing Month, otherwise known as NaNoWriMo. Which of course has me thinking about one of my favorite topics, politics and fiction.

There’s a lot of “how-to” material for writers out there—how to write a compelling scene, create believable characters, and so on. But as far as I can tell with some random Googling, there seem to be few resources to help writers (especially fantasy and science-fiction writers) think about politics. As I’ve written about on this blog before, most writers have only a few mental models of how politics could work (fantasy medieval kingdom, evil galactic overlord, idealized democracy, and maybe one or two others); while there’s nothing wrong with any of these when handled well, the shortage of raw materials affects the kind of stories a writer can tell. As a political-science junkie, I find myself wishing for more variety.

What resources there are seem to view politics from the perspective of world-building, as an afterthought of things like culture and language. For example, Holly Lisle’s Create a Culture Clinic (which is otherwise a fantastic aid to fleshing out the richness of invented societies, and I highly recommend it) devotes less than ten pages to politics—and those are mostly asking checklist questions like “Who is in charge? How do they punish criminals? What rights are there?”

Missing is any discussion about what an author’s choices would mean for the story. Or, even more useful, what kinds of stories you could best tell in a given political system. Or, best of all, how the tensions within a given political system could give rise to powerful new stories. If I were a beginning author, I would want to start there—and once the plot is in place, then I would decide on the details that all the world-building resources deal with.

So it seems to me that there is a great need for a writer’s guide to politics in invented societies, and how to choose among political systems to help generate the strongest plots. But to write a guide like that, you would need to be an expert in politics who can cut through all the details and isolate the fundamental building blocks—the handful of key questions that are the key to rapid understanding. (As you can probably tell, I’ve been reading a lot of Timothy Ferris lately…)

As it happens, I am an expert in politics. And better, I’m an expert in Comparative Politics, which is the most interesting subfield within political science, if I may say so myself. And I’ve been thinking about doing something like this for a long time.

What I’m envisioning is a relatively short e-book that would describe each archetypical political system before distilling it down to a single chart of features, showing the most important actors in the system, the key points of stress, and the story themes that this system is perfect for dealing with. For example, a communist dictatorship would be a good setting to address themes of the individual versus the state, or property and communal need, or privacy in the face of constant surveillance. A monarchy would be good for looking at questions of loyalty, honor, the role of divine right, and so on.

There’s a lot more, of course, but the key here is that in a very few pages, you could learn how to build exactly the political system you need to form the backdrop to the story you want to tell—or you could discover new kinds of stories that never would have occurred to you otherwise.

If this is something that you’d want to see, be sure to fave this post, and I’ll get right to work.

When Do Societies Face Unrest?

02 Thursday May 2013

Posted by in Better Fantasy, Economics, History, Politics, Revolution, Self-Promotion, War, Writing

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I have just read a recent journal article by the brilliant scholar Peter Turchin, in which he elaborates on his theory of the dynamics of social instability over time and tests it on the United States from 1780 to 2010. Put briefly, his theory holds that one can expect a society to suffer greater social violence (such as riots or lynchings, as opposed to routine crime) in a relatively predictable cycle. The larger “secular” cycle occurs every 150 years; a smaller cycle of violence occurs roughly every 50 years, superimposed on the secular cycle. Thus in the United States, we had peaks of societal violence near the years 1870, 1920, and 1970, with the Civil War being the peak of the secular cycle. Turchin forecasts that the next secular peak should hit sometime around the year 2020. Turchin’s previous work has detected the same sorts of cycles in societies from ancient China to revolutionary France.

Of course, detecting a pattern does not tell you what has caused it. Turchin’s theory for when violence intensifies depends on two major factors. Both of these factors might derive from excessive population growth; in the early version of Turchin’s work, he was focusing on agrarian societies in which population growth leads directly to food shortages. But now that he is considering Industrial societies, Turchin is focusing more on the immediate causes laid out below.

First, whether from excessive population growth or technological disruption or whatever, there emerges a labor glut. The average wage drops in response, leading to diminished standards of living. Thus you see larger segments of the populace who are in a precarious situation, with the potential for violent outbreaks such as labor struggles, or ethnic competition with minorities, or political upheaval.

Second, there emerges “an oversupply of elites.” This can happen for a few reasons, and Turchin focuses on the economic one. The low cost of labor means that it is easier for those on the top to become far wealthier than they might have done in a more normal setting, leading to the accumulation of vast fortunes and a polarization of society. A consequence of this is that there is much more competition for the leadership positions in society, such as control of government offices. Politics becomes more nasty and partisan, leading in extreme cases to violent rivalries between elite factions struggling to secure their hold on power. Such violence is made easier by the larger number of poor, desperate people in society who can serve as a demagogue’s muscle.

In Turchin’s research, he finds that oversupply of elites has the strongest association with societal violence. This is easy to understand when one looks at places like the Philippines, in which politicians routinely employ armed militias to attack competitors (a horrifying example was the Maguindanao Massacre of 2009), or the Congo, which has been wracked with coup after coup. But even in the United States, a surplus of would-be leaders will tend to produce extreme ideologies, such as militant unionism in the 1920s, or the present upsurge in eco-terrorism.

I think many people, writers among them, mistake the relationship between cheap labor and exploitative rich. Often, a super-wealthy class emerges as a result of lots of poor people, who make it easier to be rich—that is, to benefit from the production of lots of other people. This is not to say that an exploitative class won’t try to keep everyone else poor, once it emerges. But the dynamics are complex here, and societal violence is one of the things keeping them in check.

(How might such violence be averted? Full discussion will have to wait for another post, but I find it rather interesting that the Biblical institution of Jubilee, in which land was returned to its ancestral owners and debts forgiven, follows a 50-year cycle.)

(Have I mentioned lately that my new book is available on Amazon Kindle? It’s called The Best Congress Money Can Buy: Stories of Political Possibility. You can read the first story for free here, and then buy it if you like. Enjoy!)