Using the panel
discussions of the most recent World Science Fiction Convention in London, August
2014, I will jump off, jump on, rail against, and shamelessly agree with the
BRIEF DESCRIPTION given in the pdf copy of the Program Guide. The link is
provided below…Governing the Future – Science fiction once took government for
granted. Writers like Asimov and Clarke often assumed that advances in
technology and knowledge would naturally spawn rational world governments. Speculative
societies, like Star Trek’s Federation, could be utopian or, like those of
Huxley, Zamyatin, LeGuin, dystopian, but government was central. However,
increasingly, authors like [Ken] MacLeod, [Cory] Doctorow and [Vernor] Vinge
write governments out of our future. Why has so much SF lost faith in
government? Has government failed, or has familiarity bred contempt? Does
modern science fiction value personal freedom, and resent government intrusion
into our lives, more now than it did in the past? Or does it undervalue the benefits
of government, and take its safety net for granted? With: Nicholas Whyte (M),
Charles E. Gannon, John-Henri Holmberg, Justin Landon, Farah Mendlesohn, Liz
Gorinsky (page 59)
May I be so bold as to point out that the examples of
writers eschewing government and the members of the panel are all people who
were born and raised in Developed Nations.
Secondly, may I be so bold as to point out that the only
writers who might be able to comment on the failure of government from
experience – those from African, South and Central American, Eurasian, and Pacific
Rim countries – were not apparent in the list of authors writing governments
out of the future or on the panel.
Those who have witnessed a true failure of government and
might be qualified to comment may very well have been in the audience. Yet I
hesitate to be certain of this.
“Who are you to say anything about this? You’re the same as
all of them!!!”
Au contraire,
monsieur, madame, ou mademoiselle!
In Nigeria as a missionary invited by the Lutheran Church of
Nigeria, we entered the country on December 22, 1983 under the incompetent but
democratically elected rule of Shehu Shagari. Nine days later, a military coup
d’etat placed then-General Muhammadu Buhari in power. The borders of the country
were closed, and all external communication was cut off (this being in the days
before cellphones, no one outside of Nigeria knew if anything had happened to
us). All expatriates were told to stay indoors for the duration of the unrest.
Our hosts openly talked about the problems with the Shagari administration and
more-or-less welcomed the General. As he was from the same tribe as Shagari,
bloodshed (we were told), was minimal. [As a side note, General Buhari – now the
newly elected president from the All Progressives Congress party – is the first
President to begin office in peace.] Roughly two weeks later, the borders
opened, communication resumed, and we could observe no changes of any sort in
the everyday lives of the Nigerians we encountered. We travelled the country –
though not deeply into the Muslim north – and never experienced any trouble.
When we left Nigeria for Cameroun four months later, we again experienced an
attempted coup d’etat to overthrow President Paul Biya (“Biya survived a
military coup attempt on 6 April 1984, following his decision on the previous
day to disband the Republican Guard and disperse its members across the
military.]”)
I am thinking that I may have more experience with the
failure of government than some on the panel or those noted as writers proposing
the elimination of government. I don’t know for certain as none of their
Wikipedia entries note that they were in countries in which the military
overthrew a previous government – or live in countries currently under a anarcho-capitalism
or any of the other forms of anarchism. It might be logical to say that my
experience would convince me that the elimination of government would be a
PROVEN good!
It’s not. I lean more toward the kind of government that
Roddenberry made for the United Federation of Planets. (If I’m not mistaken,
the Ferengi in his universe have a sort of patriarchal anarcho-captialist
society.)
That being said, Humans have thus far only imagined
Human-style types of government. I have no doubt that there will be others that
we’ve not stumbled across. There may even be forms of government that we haven’t
imagined yet because the technology to execute them hasn’t been invented. I’m
curious though, why none of these writers haven’t taken the ubiquitous
cellphone and computer’s interaction with government to its logical conclusion.
Everyone has a cellphone – even the poor.
What about a PURE democracy, where everyone person has,
quite literally, one vote? What are the arguments against it? What are the
implications of it? Anyone know of a novel based on this concept?
Program Book: http://www.loncon3.org/documents/ReadMe_LR.pdf
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