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More on Making This Editor Happy

26 Tuesday Mar 2019

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After I had finished making selections for Ye Olde Magick Shoppe, I wrote a post discussing some of the recurring patterns in short stories that did not make the cut. And now that selections have been made on two more anthologies (official announcement coming soon!), it seems a good time to expand that list. (I am proud to say that this time, every author did get personalized feedback—which apparently is not common these days.)

Variations of the “And” Plot

In an “And” story, something happens, and something else happens, and something else happens… but each event seems meandering. There is no progression from one episode to the next; and no buildup to a theme’s culmination.

This time around, there were a few subspecies of the “And” plot that deserve special note:

  • Wish Fulfillment: Again, not all wish fulfillment is bad necessarily. Harry Potter begins with wish fulfillment: neglected boy is suddenly told he is special and goes off to wizard school. The danger with a wish-fulfillment plot is when the author gets caught up in all the nice things happening to the protagonist, and avoids providing a real plot or conflict. The author is in danger of shying away from true obstacles, which seemingly get in the way of all the nice things happening to the characters. Done well, wish fulfillment can launch a story and make it cool, or it could even be the culmination of a story—but in between, there had better be serious conflict, drama, opposition, struggle, and in a word, plot.
  • Revenge Fantasy: Strictly speaking, this is a kind of wish-fulfillment story, but with the focus on all the suffering meted out to the protagonist’s enemies. Again, this had better be the culmination of a well-constructed plot, or it will simply be boring and lurid.
  • Passive Characters: In this type of story, the protagonist is basically a bystander. Problems are resolved via Deus ex Machina, as the protagonist stands around impotently and drifts from scene to scene, the better to observe all the exciting things that other people are doing to other people. (This is distinct from a “Watson” viewpoint character, who is not actually the protagonist but serves as a narrative device to observe the real protagonist.)

Nihilism

Yet again, the grimdark emo plot makes an appearance. It seems like many authors believe that fiction ought to be depressing and to reiterate the meaninglessness of life. This often leads to flabby stories in which a series of bad things happen, with no real theme or point.

A useful contrast would be HP Lovecraft. His stories were unrelentingly grim, of course; but they were not truly nihilistic, to my mind. Rather, in the Lovecraft mythos, human experience was approximately trivial in comparison to the vast ancient powers who battled over the cosmos. On some level, meaning still existed; it’s just that humans rarely mattered!

And this does not mean that grim, depressing stories are verboten. But they need to have a point. The Grapes of Wrath, 1984, or Old Yeller were all grim; but the grimness was in service to the story, not its focus.

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So there you have it. The recurring theme of all of these entries is that stories, in my opinion, ought to have conflict over important stakes. The conflict need not be big and pyrotechnic; small vignettes can also be good. But it has to illustrate something that matters. At a time when we have literally millions of books to choose from, a good story needs a reason to demand the reader’s time. Tell a story worth reading.

Writing Exercises for Social Orders

07 Thursday Mar 2019

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This exercise is meant to apply the concepts from this post, which discusses the tensions between wealth and power and how they end up shaping the entire structure of society. If you like the exercises below and want to use them, read the linked post first and then come back.

  1. Spend five minutes and list all the forms of power—loosely defined, for our purposes, as both the ability to harm people and break things, and the ability to force other people to do what you want—in your setting. Fighting ability, magical power, or command over a band of robbers count; what else?
  2. Spend five minutes and list all desirable goods in your setting. Money or valuables count, but so would fame, social status, immortality, attractive romantic partners, et cetera.
  3. For our purposes, let’s define all of the above as “wealth.” For each relevant type of wealth, how might someone use different forms of power to get more wealth? List as many possibilities as you can.
  4. Likewise, for each type of power, how might someone translate different forms of wealth into more power?
  5. Now, imagine that centuries pass in which powerful people try to gain wealth, and wealthy people try to gain power. List at least five scenarios for how the society might end up looking. If a given group of people became stronger over time, who else would be threatened? How might they react? Who would win? Imagine as many possible social conflicts that you can, vary the outcomes, and list them all.
  6. Of all the ideas you’ve listed, which have the most resonance for the story you want to tell?

Writing Exercises for Stories with Foraging Bands

01 Friday Mar 2019

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

This is meant to accompany this post about egalitarian bands and this post about class conflict. If you like the exercises below, read those posts before working through them.

Let’s say you have an idea for a story that involves a society of people who don’t have a fixed home. Perhaps they are wandering cattle-herders, or perhaps they forage for roots and berries in the jungle, or perhaps they are wandering space-gypsies who survive off of volatile gases harvested with ramscoops. In any case, these exercises should help you flesh out your idea consistently, and understand how it can drive conflict and story dynamism.

  1. Spend a few minutes and list five possible reasons why your band chooses not to have a fixed home. (You don’t have to use all five in the actual story. Brainstorm.)
  2. What forms of wealth might be different between people? Try to list at least three. Does a given form of wealth tend to be dissipated over time, via feasting or gifting or divisions between heirs or another means? Or does it build on itself?
  3. What special status might someone in the band (or some family) have that others do not? Try to list at least three, remembering that not all special statuses need be in the same family. (For example, one family might be chiefs, another might be shamans, another might have the hereditary right to guard the Sacred Hospitality Blanket, and so on.) How might such status be gained or lost?
  4. How does the band handle internal conflict? Are there mechanisms for doing this? Would conflict threaten to tear apart the band? What is at stake?
  5. Why might outsiders come into conflict with your band? List five possible reasons. (“We raid their settlements and take slaves and plunder” is an acceptable reason! So is “They want to wear our sparkly purple skin as trophies.” What else?)
  6. Why does having a wandering band fit in this story? What aspect of such a band fits the theme or the conflict?

Suggestions for more? Let me know in the comments!

Conflict in Politics and Fiction

18 Monday Feb 2019

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

What is politics? And why does it matter for fiction?

If you were to google “politics definition,” many of the dictionary entries focus on the mechanics of running a government or a society; these are not wrong exactly, but are not terribly useful. When we say “office politics,” for example, what we mean is often the exact opposite of a smooth-running office!

Early political scientists, when they were in a pedantic mood, might have used a definition like this: “The authoritative allocation of scarce goods.” This is not very good either, but it does focus our attention on a few points:

  • “Scarce goods” implies that some people will get less than they want, or do without entirely. By definition, some people will be unhappy with the “authoritative allocation,” and want it to change.
  • “Authoritative” highlights the importance of authority, the sense that some people or some commands ought to be followed. In other words, a key part of politics is about leadership and obedience, and how that comes about.

But this definition seems sterile. We are given an image of some central bureaucrat sitting in an office and punching numbers into a calculator, thusly to apportion out the chocolate ration. Yet politics is about more than material goods (or even status, which is also a “scarce good” of a sort; but see below). So the definition is often modified to include “The authoritative determination of values.” Here we get into more interesting ground:

  • Rather than focusing on what we want, “values” instruct us in what we should want.
  • Often, this gets to the core of our identities as people. The stakes are thus very high.
  • When two different people disagree on values—say, whether cocaine use is a personal matter or a harmful vice—often they are proceeding from very different principles, which prevent agreement altogether.
  • Without a way to authoritatively settle the question, such disagreements are thus likely to persist for a long time.

Still, this definition assumes that there is a way to authoritatively determine values, and have them stick. Sometimes it can happen, for example in a unified theocracy; but very often, people who disagree with the authority’s values will deny that the authority even has the right to impose them. Religious wars are but a single example; the conflict between Capitalism and Communism would be another.

Notice that both examples also involve “the allocation of scarce goods”; and in many cases, one’s choice of values is heavily influenced by whether you will benefit from them. Of course peasants will want redistribution of capital, and of course industrialists will want state protection of property—whether or not either side could defend its position on moral grounds (and perhaps they can). As they say, “Where you stand depends on where you sit.” Values direct behavior, but they also justify behavior.

Which brings us to Lenin’s Trotsky’s cynical definition of politics: as “the question of who and whom.”

In other words, politics is about which actor or group of actors can enforce its will on another group. This needn’t even be about who gets more “scarce goods,” though that often plays a role. Rather, it’s about power—in the worst case (as Orwell so bleakly depicted in 1984), power for its own sake. Policy analysis, discussion of values, appeals to shared humanity or morality or whatever, all of these things are mere rationalizations for the will to power.

This also brings the role of conflict to the fore. Conflict was implied in the other two definitions, as we saw; but Lenin gives it center stage. Politics, for Lenin, is unending conflict.

A full definition of “politics” involves aspects of all three, but conflict remains at the heart. And that is why stories involving politics can be so powerful in fiction.

Authors are constantly admonished that stories must be about a conflict; the protagonist wants or needs something, and must struggle to get it. Political conflicts thus make for a compelling setting for stories, by definition. And each dimension of politics can add another delicious layer to the story. Conflict over possessions, or conflict over status, or right and wrong, or personal beliefs, or even about sheer will to power—as Milton’s rendition of Satan put it, it’s better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven—all of these things can interact and build off each other.

A clear understanding of politics can provide another tool to creating strong stories. And perhaps, with luck, truly insightful stories can improve our politics in real life as well.

Warlords and Frontiers

17 Sunday Feb 2019

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

We’ve previously discussed how a government’s control over territory is not a given; states have to spend great effort to project power and build institutions of rule. Frequently, a state’s rule is not absolute; far from the core of its power, state control diminishes even in areas that are nominally under its rule. In border areas, the reality of daily life might involve balancing off the claims of two states, neither of which can fully enforce its authority.

That does not necessarily mean that no one rules. Politics abhors a vacuum. Often, the true authority in a contested or peripheral area might be a criminal boss, or a local bandit, or warlord. Crime bosses and bandits are common fare in fiction, of course. Less frequently discussed, but potentially more interesting, is the warlord.

What do I mean by “warlord”? Let me answer with an example:

During the continuing civil wars in the Congo, the Kivu region of the country was wracked by violence and a severe breakdown in civil control. Instead, political power often devolved to the closest military force, whether government, rebel, or local militia. A typical brigade commander in FARDC, the Congolese military, had the benefit of military rank, which entitled him to a salary, logistical support from the capital Kinshasa, and formal legitimacy; but he would also have informal status in the local power relationships of his area, having de facto control over the local bureaucracy, extracting extra taxes from the hapless civilians, and using military force to control rich resources like bauxite mines or logging operations.

His loyalty would be very much for sale, notwithstanding being an officer for the government; he often collaborates with local criminal networks or directs them himself, using his troops and their logistical abilities to solve problems for the criminals. He will often play both sides in the civil wars, throwing in with one or another of the feuding insurgent groups, often with the full knowledge of Kinshasa. However, the central government puts up with the commander’s unreliability, because even when he is enriching himself and building his own independent power base, his troops still keep the local violence tamped down—and the government lacks the power to replace him or his men with someone more loyal. The status quo is bad, but it would be far worse if the commander were to openly break with Kinshasa and become a direct threat.

What distinguishes the warlord is a combination of three things. The first two are capacity for violence, and the claim to politically represent some constituency. A mafia boss uses coercion, but generally for economic goals; corrupt politicians may seek power and status, but generally within the existing formal framework of their state. But if we look at our Congolese example, we see a third element as well: nominal submission to a distant authority along with practical local autonomy. Warlords exploit gaps in official control to gain power and status, and then use that status strategically to cement their power.

I’m using the term “warlord” in a particular way here, following after Ahram/King 2012. They define a warlord as someone who stands at the intersection of legal and illegal, or of two state or cultural regimes. From this position, they can arbitrage between the advantages of each side, in a way that someone fully committed to one side cannot. 

They cite as an example the Shan warlord Khun Sa, who began as a militia leader for the Kuomintang on the border between Burma and Thailand in the 1950s, but later broke free from them as his forces grew in power. He branched out into opium production, and secured semi-official status from the local government by fighting his fellow Shan rebels.

Khun Sa repeatedly switched sides over the next decades, sometimes calling himself a Shan nationalist, sometimes working with the Burmese government against local competitors; and he often sought Thai patronage as well (and gave hefty bribes to Thai politicians), as the political winds shifted and his opium operation grew. (At his height, Khun Sa controlled some 70% of the heroin production in Burma, with an army of over 20,000 armed men.) In addition, the Thai government tolerated Khun Sa because his forces controlled over a hundred miles of the volatile border region, and served as a buffer against revolutionary forces operating from Laos and Burma. In 1987, when the Burmese were taking American money for “anti-drug” efforts against Khun Sa, the warlord was actually cooperating with both Burma and Thailand to build a major highway through his territory. Later in life, he “surrendered” to the Burmese and disbanded his army, and in exchange was allowed to transform his wealth into legitimate businesses such as real estate and ruby mining.

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The concept of a warlord can be incredibly fruitful in fiction. A warlord character can play the role of ambiguous obstacle and sometime ally of your heroes; often such characters become fan favorites. More generally, the warlord is the natural consequence of settings where government control is tenuous; the presence of a warlord highlights the limits of official control. Questions to ask: What specific, local advantage does the warlord have over the government, and over rival warlords? What resources does the warlord control, and what relationships protect those resources? What would induce the warlord to change sides?

Creating Story Conflicts with Politics

31 Thursday Jan 2019

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

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

For a long time now, I’ve been slowly accumulating material in the “Politics for Worldbuilders” series, which will eventually become a book with the same title. I think I’ve managed to cover all the topics necessary, but now I need to revise each section and create writing exercises. In the meantime, here is a concrete example of how I used some of the concepts to write strong fiction.

Recently I edited and published Ye Olde Magick Shoppe, a collection of twelve fantasy short stories. One of the stories is mine, written under the pen name of “Jake Lithua.” It was directly inspired by my studies of politics, and in this post, I’ll be showing you how.

In the story’s world, the Eridari Empire has established colonies in a new land across the ocean, which it has modestly called New Erida. Its plantations there are worked by slaves, captured or bought from the indigenous peoples living in the hills around the colonial cities. Nevertheless, the reach of the colonial troops is limited, and they cannot simply take whatever they want. To access the richest treasures in this new land, colonists need to trade with the locals—a risky proposition, given that these are the same colonists who work the plantations with indigenous slaves!

The parallels with Africa and South America are fairly obvious. Beyond that, however, the setup borrows liberally from James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed. In particular, Scott notes that urbanized states often took slaves from stateless foraging peoples—but just as often, it was competing stateless groups who were raiding each other, and selling the losers to the city-dwellers.

Moreover, the foraging peoples often had much greater penetration into wild country than did urban powers, which meant that they could gather valuables such as spices, exotic animals, or gems and then sell them. In fact, for most of human history until the past two or three centuries, states and the surrounding stateless peoples lived in a kind of uneasy symbiosis, alternating between war (in both directions!) and trade.

What this meant for the short story was that the protagonist, a young trader venturing into the hills in search of rare magic, immediately finds himself facing justified hostility from the Men of the Hills, who have suffered greatly from the colonial power. But the Men of the Hills were also open to trade, in principle—if the terms were good enough. And the intermittent relations between the colonists and the indigenous people also sets up the main antagonist, who has secretly been doing some trading of his own.

Building the setting from specific political-historical patterns, rather than simply relying on the tired trope of the Noble Savage, helped create compelling conflict with high stakes and surprising twists. You can read the story yourself and decide if the end product was successful (and leave a review if you liked it!). But I think this illustrates how our fiction can be enriched by injecting a bit of political texture. I don’t demand realism for realism’s sake; but having more tools to work with can help us craft new, effective stories. And isn’t that the whole point?

Control, Capital, and Political Bargains

05 Sunday Aug 2018

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

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

We’ve talked before about how states need to control their people, and so structure their very environments to make that easier (making them legible, for one thing). We’ve also talked about how states need to do the same thing with production and wealth, in order to collect taxes. When states are less able to extract taxes directly, they may have to rely on indirect means such as tax farming, which are less efficient and may cause other problems.

In a way, these are two examples of the same problem: states need to control resources, and different types of resources are easier or harder to control. Farmland is easy to tax: it can’t be hidden, and its production is fairly easy to monitor. An international merchant is much harder to tax: his goods may be anywhere in the world, or hidden in a bank vault somewhere, or converted into precious gems and sewn into his clothing. Factories are easy to tax, or even to confiscate entirely: they represent a massive upfront investment that is hard to move, and their production is easy to monitor. People can be easy or hard to tax (or conscript, or otherwise control), depending on how easily they can move from place to place, or hide from the local taxman.

To take a more fantastical example, magic might be easy or hard to control, depending on how magical power is accumulated and used. For example, some Polynesian societies believed that the brightly-colored feathers of certain birds conveyed magical power, or mana, and chiefs would have their subjects scour the islands to find such feathers. Individual feathers gave little power, and it was not worth the ire of your chief to withhold a handful of them; but the chiefs, sitting at the top of their societies, could accumulate thousands or tens of thousands of such feathers, which would be made into beautiful ceremonial mantles or coats.

If a state is lucky, it will control rich resources that are easy to tax, such as travel on a busy overland trade route, or oil wells or gold mines, or a large population of unarmed people in a confined area. With such a bounty, the state will have less need to worry about gaining the cooperation of its (other) people, and can be fairly hands-off. However, what if the available wealth is hard to tax? What if there are few people and lots of land for them to escape to, as in the African plains or the Russian steppes? What if your economy is built on ship-based trade and banking, as with the Dutch?

Generally, the state (or anyone, really) can respond in two ways: with overwhelming coercion, or with some kind of political bargain—sharing power or granting civil rights in exchange for cooperation. Russia imposed serfdom on most of its populace, tying them to specific wealthy landowners; in much of Africa, likewise, rulers used sophisticated strategies of control and coercion, including slavery, to keep their subject peoples under control. Colonial powers often imposed a head-tax on native peoples, extracting taxes without needing to worry if the poor individuals could actually afford them.

The Dutch, on the other hand, incorporated their merchant class into the government; Italian city-states often structured their taxes as a kind of forced loan, paying interest on their “debts” and turning taxpayers into investors. Famously, the American colonists declared “No taxation without representation!” And the link between these two things is quite strong: the earliest parliaments had power against their monarchs because (and only because) they had direct control over taxation.

Athens and Sparta combined both approaches: a large population of slaves or helots, over which was a broad ruling class with a say in government, whether through actual democratic voting or other means. The difference was that citizens were armed; they were both necessary for civil defense (or conquest), and very hard to tyrannize.

Rulers faced with difficult problems of resource control can either choose to use coercion in response, or to strike a bargain and share power or create political rights. Though some social scientists claim that granting rights is more likely, the truth is that it is merely more effective; short-sighted rulers often use coercion even when it fails, as we see today in places like Venezuela.

This is good news for authors, as we can present political problems to our invented societies and have them respond in the most convenient manner for the plot. Other useful questions: what resources are most difficult for the rulers to control? Are they dangerous in the wrong hands? Could a new kind of power or wealth or magic, or a new population of people, upset the existing calculus of control? What are the costs to the rulers for relying on indirect strategies like tax farming or delegating power to local lords? Might a farsighted politico realize that a different form of control, or a new political bargain, would yield better results?

Rebellion, Part Two

29 Sunday Jul 2018

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

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

In our earlier discussion of different kinds of rebellions (and why worldbuilders may benefit from expanding their mental models of rebellions beyond Robin Hood and Parisian riots), we arbitrarily defined four types: violent contention, secession, coups, and revolutions. We then briefly discussed the first two. Now, let’s finish our list by talking about coups and revolutions.

Neither violent contention nor secession intends to totally overthrow the existing government (necessarily); the rebels want to better their own condition or to break away, but to leave the rest of the society more or less as it was. In coups and revolutions, on the other hand, the point is indeed to overthrow the ruler. The difference between them lies in who is doing the overthrowing, and whether they mean simply to take control of the regime or to demolish it and put some other regime in its place.

We’ve discussed before the selectorate model of regimes, in which a subset of the populace is the selectorate, meaning that they could possibly be part of the ruling coalition. In a coup, members of the selectorate decide to replace the current ruler with another one better to their liking, usually so that they themselves have more power within the new ruling coalition. However, they typically do not want to destroy the structures of the government in their coup; rather, coups typically happen swiftly, aiming to paralyze the ruler’s supporters long enough for the plotters to seize the ruler’s person, and then declare their victory a fait accompli. (This is why in most modern coups, the coup plotters will try to capture the country’s media stations—both to present the impression of overwhelming control, and to prevent regime loyalists from coordinating a response.) Then, after a bit of reshuffling and the odd loyalty purge, the bureaucracy and the army are meant to fall in line, and life will go on.

For a coup to work, the ruler and perhaps large parts of his ruling coalition would have to have weak legitimacy and little loyalty among the military; that way, few will object too much if they are replaced. However, the selectorate itself should either still have prestige in society or at the very least enough raw power to stay on top. So for example, if King Gunther the Mad were quietly removed to an asylum by a cabal of noblemen, and replaced by his infant son Rudolph the Tiny (with Chancellor Grise acting as regent, of course!), the plotters might settle scores with a few of Gunther’s supporters; but fundamentally, they do not challenge the idea that noblemen should rule society. Why would they? They are noblemen themselves!

In a coup, the government might change, but the regime persists—the system of elites and state institutions that sustains the power of the government. This is not the case in a revolution. Here, the regime itself has decayed so badly that a broad popular uprising is able to sweep it away entirely. Old elites are dispossessed or killed, old justifications for state power become obsolete; a new group of elites arises at the head of the revolutionary mass, claiming power. 

In a revolution, the old selectorate is replaced by a new selectorate, justified by a new principle of legitimacy (the new selectorate might nevertheless include some of the same people as the old one, but not always). All the old relations between classes and social groups are upended, and new relations form. This is the distinguishing mark of a revolution in the comparative-politics sense. (Which is part of why I prefer to think of the American Revolution as more of a secession; yes, the idea of breaking free of the king was fairly novel, but within American society it was the existing elites who took over.)

For a revolution to succeed, the entire elite stratum has to be losing its grip. In pre-revolutionary France, for example, the French monarchy was deeply in debt and had ceded much of its authority to tax farmers, who harshly oppressed the populace. Worse, the nobility had largely retreated into decadence instead of paying attention to the society around them, where dangerous new ideas about democracy and enlightenment (not to mention the execrable Rousseau, whose philosophy set the stage for modern totalitarianism) were taking hold among the growing middle class, inspired by the example of the United States. A few nobles even became important revolutionaries, such as the lamented “Philippe Égalité,” otherwise known as Louis Philippe II, Due d’Orleans. (This is a common pattern in revolutions: their leaders are often part of the old elite, usually embittered with the old regime and upholding new ideals, or marginalized and seeking more power or personal meaning as part of a revolutionary vanguard.)

Importantly, because the regime is falling apart, several different types of revolutionaries usually spring up to fill the void—and they may not like each other much. In the 1979 Iranian Revolution, not only Khomeinist Islamists rose up but also communists, trade unions, liberals, and business groups. Indeed, Khomeini’s faction seemed to be among the weaker ones, and few expected that they would end up taking power. However, if all of the state’s institutions crumble, power ends up in the hands of whoever is most ruthless. The initial hopes of a new age of Persian freedom were dashed by the rise of Khomeini, who quickly massacred the non-Islamist revolutionaries and imposed a brutal theocracy.

Similarly, the initial group of humanists and liberals who led the French Revolution were quickly displaced by vicious absolutists like Robespierre, driven by fantastic visions of a perfect society and willing to spill rivers of blood to get there. Before long, the overthrow of the monarchy, the nobility, and the Church (the old elites) became only the first stage of a ruthless war by the new French state against its own citizens, where today’s ruling clique became tomorrow’s victims of the guillotine. (You can read a fascinating account of one dimension of the revolutionary madness in the free book Fiat Money Inflation in France—which is also interesting in its own right because of when it was written, when it was republished, by whom, and in what context. But I digress.)

Revolutions usually end badly, because the idealists who begin them are usually replaced by ruthless murderers who smell the chance for power and take it. A similar process, although slower, can happen in the course of some longer revolts such as secessions or violent contention; the history of the Autodefensa movement in Mexico is a good example. (In the famous phrase of Eric Hoffer, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”) To me, it seems that the only way to reliably defend against the ascension of the vicious is for the rebels to build strong institutions of governance early, and to sustain them over the course of the revolt. This, I think, is the main reason that the American Revolution was so successful in the long run: because the colonial legislatures had a long heritage and political tradition that could resist the rise of extremism. Gestures toward a true revolution such as Shays’ Rebellion never got past the stage of violent contention, and were quickly put down.

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Authors can consider questions such as: What is the goal of the rebels? Is the regime stable enough to defend itself? Are things likely to snowball out of control and become much larger? Who among the rebels is most ruthless, and would they impose themselves on the others? Is this revolt a contest between different groups of elites, or between the elites and groups out of power? Do any of the elites join the rebels anyway? Do the rebels have a competing political principle to justify their rule instead of the existing regime, or several conflicting principles?

Before the State: Egalitarian Bands

18 Wednesday Jul 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.)

The very earliest groups of people in prehistory, as far as we can surmise, were small bands of nomadic foragers. Such bands have continued to exist down to the present day, though they are becoming increasingly hemmed in by powerful states who prefer people to be stationary, formally employed, and taxable. Still, many of our social intuitions were formed in an ancestral environment of such nomadic bands, so we should discuss them first and foremost.

Assuming that a band does not possess livestock, its members can only own what they can carry. As a result, the social structure is relatively flat; there are no wide class distinctions as are typical in “civilization.” (Civilization does have its advantages, of course, but that is not our present topic.) That is not to say that people are equal; all primates are acutely sensitive to status distinctions, humans included, and any social group will have its pecking order. More successful hunters or warriors will accumulate trophies, jewelry, or marks of prestige, and probably higher-status mates as well. Still, compared to more complex societies, we can still describe such bands as broadly egalitarian.

That doesn’t guarantee that they will stay that way. Commonly, such bands will have a leader or big man (as the anthropologists would call him—and barring magic or some other equalizer of the sexes, he will almost certainly be a man), who has the respect of the others even without having formal authority or privileges. Over time, a canny big man can formalize his position and even pass it on to his sons, becoming a true chief. Initially, the chief or big man would be expected to use his power to redistribute possessions among the band, rather than enriching himself; but with enough political skill, a chief can build a cadre of supporters who will back him as he does in fact become more wealthy (as will they!). Thus does an egalitarian band develop political structures and social classes.

Those bands that remain egalitarian usually manage the feat because of an explicit aversion to hierarchy. To prevent hierarchies from emerging, or to constrain nascent hierarchies as they form, egalitarian bands often discourage inequality with several strategies. The first is an overwhelming social environment of envy. Anyone becoming conspicuous by gaining social power or wealth could expect to be the subject of malicious gossip, petty acts of uncooperation (in James C. Scott’s term, “weapons of the weak”), and later, public disapproval, political opposition, and even magical curses or physical violence. Attempting to dominate an egalitarian band is a risky business.

Second is expecting those with many possessions to be generous with them. This could be through public feasting, or socially required gifts to others, or sacrifices to the gods. (The anthropologist David Graeber has a long and amusing discussion of such mandatory gift-giving.)

This expectation persists even in a hierarchical setting. In most societies, the wealthy and powerful are expected to foster patron-client relationships, in which the powerful patron is served by the weaker clients, and in return the client can expect the patron’s support and protection. You can think of feudalism as a formalized patron-client relationship; the vassals owe taxes and service to their lords, but the lords are expected to defend the rights of the vassals in return. Another example would be large landowners in places like precolonial Southeast Asia; the landowners often took very high percentages of the crop from their sharecropper farmers, but if times were bad, the farmers would expect the landowners to give them food from their storehouses (or risk getting lynched!).

Third, if conditions within a band became intolerable for some of its members, they would simply leave. The band could split, with the dissidents moving somewhere else and leaving any would-be strongman with a vastly diminished pool of manpower. (In the literature, this is called fission.) Obviously, this would be traumatic to the people involved, and would only be a last resort; but the threat of fission does much to keep ambitious leaders in check.

It is no accident that developed states often arose in cramped geographic areas that made it hard to escape, or else at a time when the society was facing outside invasion, which would likewise make it difficult (practically as well as morally) to simply leave. Mobility gives choices; choices constrain political domination. The lack of choice means that band members have little recourse when their chief decides to cement his power. (This concept is applicable even within developed states; the American West played the role of an escape valve for the urban centers of the Northeast, threatening a population drain in response to the more obnoxious schemes of politicians. See James C. Scott for more examples, in Southeast Asia and elsewhere.)

The concepts here offer much to authors. Here are a few thought-provoking questions, in building your setting: What social expectations does your society place on the wealthy? How far are they tolerated, before risking violence from those with less? If the society is egalitarian, how does it stay that way? What role do gossip, threats of violence, or malicious charms and curses play in keeping powerful figures in check? Do political leaders risk driving off their populace if their policies are too harsh, or foolish? Did your protagonists come from somewhere else, and if so, why did they leave? What attitudes or personality traits does that convey, or were taught to them by their experience?

Who Rules? Part Four—The Clergy

10 Tuesday Jul 2018

Posted by in Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, Writing

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

So far, we have discussed three of the four potential ruling groups in a Polity (regime), according to the model of Samuel Finer: the Palace, the Nobility, and the Forum—as well as a few of the possible hybrid Polities such as Palace/Nobility. Now, let’s discuss the fourth potential ruling group: the Clergy (or as Finer designates it, the Church).

A pure Clergy polity is vanishingly rare—Finer identifies only the Vatican and the historical Tibetan theocracy as pure Clergy polities. Far more often, a Clergy is joined with another ruler type and gives it legitimacy; the most common of these is Palace/Clergy. This is perhaps because the Clergy’s own legitimacy depends solely on religious justifications, and usually excludes a justification based on political or military power. (Indeed, a Clergy that actually justifies itself based on its coercive power is probably in the middle of a collapse of its authority.) Instead, endorsement by the Clergy turns obedience to the Palace into a religious virtue.

That said, the potential power of a Clergy should not be underestimated. There were times in Medieval Europe when the Pope was able to raise up kings and cast them down, and when the Catholic Church had the most powerful bureaucracy and intelligence systems around. (Largely because few Christians outside of the Church could read.) But while at times the Church could call on military forces of its own, typically its power depended on its moral authority—the widespread belief that the Church’s dictates ought to be followed, even among the nobility or monarchs. Maintaining that moral authority usually requires that the Clergy act and make sacrifices in accordance with its religious teachings, and demand such sacrifices from the populace and other rulers—at least in public!

A Nobility/Clergy polity would be unusual, since a fragmented nobility would coexist uneasily with a centralized Clergy; but Finer does note one example, the Teutonic Order during its bloody rule of East Prussia and the Baltic, starting in the 1200s: ”The Order consisted of three classes of brethren: the priests, the serjeants, and the knights. These knights had to be both noble and of German blood. There is no mistaking the religious nature of the Order; no brother might hold private property or marry, and all had to follow a very harsh discipline and rule.”

For Clergy to rule along with the Forum would be difficult, since rule by God often exists in tension with rule by the people. Finer suggests one exception: Congregationalism, when the people choose their own religious/political leaders, almost always in small communities where people know their neighbors face to face. I would add another possibility: when the Clergy sees its role as maintaining a religious rule that underpins effective rule by the people, such as a taboo against monarchs or military dictatorship.

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As authors, here are some key questions to keep in mind: what religious/spiritual beliefs does the Clergy base itself on? What personal sacrifices does it make to distinguish itself from “normal” pious nobles? How does it secure compliance from the rulers, even without an army? What would make the Clergy lose its moral authority and threaten its influence? Does the populace take the Clergy seriously? Do the elites? How can a member of the Clergy exploit its moral authority for personal gain, and how many members actually do so? Does the Clergy have any tangible basis for power, like land holdings or a military force? What happens if someone (Clergy or otherwise) has a crisis of faith? What would happen in a religious schism?