We need to agree on terms. In the context of this specific discussion, when I say "culture" this is shorthand for "the culture possessed by each biologically distinct sophont race which evolved on a separate homeworld prior to contact with other sophont races."

Is this also what you mean? Because sometimes your use of "culture" seems to mean something a bit different.


On Sun, Oct 12, 2014 at 3:46 AM, Tim <tim@little-possums.net> wrote:
On Sun, Oct 12, 2014 at 01:32:06AM -0400, Richard Aiken wrote:
> However, you are apparently assuming that individual systems within
> a given racial culture will be *aware* of how much other systems
> sharing that original culture are diverging from the baseline (or
> from their own divergent line).

Yes, the outer regions will know via the increasing divergence of
their own culture's mores and assumptions from the central
government's rules and regulations.


Central governments always diverge from outer regions. That hasn't kept central governments from ruling outer regions, at least to the extent of controlling their external affairs, It also hasn't kept such central governments from remaining part of the same racial culture, in the eyes of the outer population of that same race.

Such divergence as does happen is not quite the same thing as change from the cultural baseline, since the laws and regulations of the central government define only the barest fraction of a culture. Nor is it at all the same thing as a given region of the overall culture knowing how and to what extent other regions of that culture are diverging from the baseline.

 
> How did you get all those races living together for thousands of
> years, in the first place?

It's canon that they did, through some of the descriptions of life in
the Ziru Sirka.


It's also - IIRC - canon that the Ziru Sirka had a habit of carpet-nuking rebellious worlds . . .

 
  I'm contending that even if the relationship begins
as "subject/master", it's going to slowly shift toward "common
oppressed citizens of the distant subjugating state" in quite a lot of
cases.


This is interesting.  As you stated previously, you don't believe that a race (specificaly humans) already accustomed to living together in close proximity on the same homeworld would unite in the face of extraplanetary rivals. Yet you propose that several distinct races - each of which evolved in isolation prior to off-world contact - must have united in opposition to a common central government.

I don't see why they must have so united, frankly. If they had so united, that government (the Ziru Sirka) would have fallen long before anyone ever heard of Terra.

Like I said earlier, I think that each race would end up hating the *other* subjugated races and the central government roughly equally, but only assuming that they saw this central government as foreign to themselves.

In the case of a monoracial/monocultural state, I just don't see any reason why they would automatically see their "own" central government as the enemy. Even in the seminal case of the early American colonies, modern scholars largely agree that only roughly a third of the population considered rebellion to be necessary; another third remained loyal to the crown and the final third just wished that it would all go away.

 
  I.e. some state having multiple species, not through any noble
attitudes, but merely through long generations of familiarity and
having shared a common enemy.


Why should they - disparate separate racial cultures, each alien to all of the others - unite over those long generations? Rather than continue to harbor festering enmity?


  How long that state lasts, I don't know
and don't really care as it's not really relevant to my point.


> Point: For thousands of years, the Balkans have featured several
> separate cultures living in close proximity to one another. The only
> significant period of peace which the region has known was the
> 70-odd years when a strong external state *imposed* such a peace.

Certainly -- and in many other regions as well.  That rather supports
my point that cultures *within* a species can be extremely fractious,
and One State Per Species is ridiculous.

It is only ridiculous of one were to write off (as you have done) the concept that discovery of extraterrestrial competition would unite each species.

As I point out above, achieving unity appears to only work when it's between and among myriad distinct races, rather than within the same race. I can't see where unity in the one case is somehow achieveable when it is not in the other.


 
I'm primarily arguing that there should be at least
dozens of states per species.


I would agree with you, if this were a universe with only one significant race. But it isn't. In the universe as it stands - where there has always been a "big boy on the block" (the Empire in it's various incarnations) - if a lesser race wants to have any real chance at independence, then its membership must hang together.




> Point: Most of the cases where different intelligent races have
> evolved together on the same world or within the same solar system -
> both in Traveller and in science fiction in general - have resulted
> in near-constant warfare between those races.

That's completely begging the question.  The existence of fiction
exhibiting a point is not evidence that the fiction *should* be
written that way.


Certainly not.  But it does show the general trend of thought on the matter. It's hard to think that all of those authors are wrong.

--
Richard Aiken

"Never insult anyone by accident."  Robert A. Heinlein
"A word to the wise ain't necessary -- it's the stupid ones that need the advice." - Bill Cosby
"We know a little about a lot of things; just enough to make us dangerous." Dean Winchester