The problem with Evil races is not what you think

[Dannyalcatraz]

I also flatly reject such absolutist BS.

That kind of thinking gives more power to the original racists than they deserve. It does far more harm to the search for genuine legal and social equality, too: It poisons the moderates against the progressives far more effectively than the far right can. The Far-Right is ugly; so are witch-hunts by either side.

Enlighten me then: how does one use the language of bigotry without perpetuating bigotry?

People in my subculture have been trying to “reclaim“ a certain word for decades now, and even among us, that word remains extremely controversial and divisive. Complicating matters, people outside our subgroup continue to ask if & when they can use it, some genuinely baffled, others sea lioning or reveling in linguistic judo dog whistles.

Letting it die, remaining preserved in original texts and in scholarly discussion thereof seems to me the better option.

Why borrow trouble when you can find different, non-inflammatory language? Is it because of a lack of vocabulary?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't think I used the notion of a gradient. I did talk about differences. You own use of the verb to achieve shows that there are some challenges in locutions here.

That said, Australia has no manufacturing capacity for mobile phones, nor any more for cars, yet both are pretty ubiquitous. The previous sentence is also true if "Kenya" is substituted for "Australia", except that Kenya has never had a manufacturing capacity for cars.

Notions of core and periphery can be useful for trying to get a handle on patterns of wealth and trade, some dynamics of diffusion, etc. (Such notions are also going to have to be tentative, given that the periphery (eg Mongolia, or Britain) can feed back into the core in surprising and dramatic ways.) It seems that any "realistic" treatment of the Grippli vis-a-vis Cormyr would have to accept that they are going to be on the periphery, in the same sort of way that (in Europe) Albania has been peripheral in a way that Austria has not been, or (in the US) South Dakota is peripheral in a way that California is not. We might except Grippli manufacturing capacity and trading significance to be less than found in the core of Cormyr. But we wouldn't expect "primitiveness" in the sense of - say - a resolute determination to not use those metal knives or axes that are available. Or as far as the waterproofing of houses is concerned, we wouldn't expect any significant difference in performance between the houses built by Grippli and the houses built in the nearest Cormyrean villages. Whereas we would probably expect fewer opera houses or grand cathedrals among the Grippli than in the Cormyrean capital.

Right, so maybe overall we can use notions of trade and capital formation to explain/model the uneven distribution of 'means of production' in a geographic and cultural sense. I think this is an approach which has been used quite a bit in terms of trying to understand the reasons for greater productive capacity and the accumulation of technology in certain parts of the world. It can then be used to ask questions, like "Why has Sub-Saharan Africa not developed an industrialized civilization?" (at least prior to European colonialism). Trade seems to be one factor, certainly Europe, South Asia, and East Asia seem to have developed a large-scale trading system. Africa participated to an extent, but not so much, and was geographically more distant from the main trade routes. Geography (lack of harbors and navigable rivers) has also been sited. The whole idea of technological appropriateness, Europe and China have similar climates and geographic features, allowing their innovations to be more easily exchanged (IE domesticated animals, crops, architecture, etc.). Nobody can really say for certain which factors are the most significant.

However it is hard to invoke overall cultural or biological factors. We can't find biological factors, they don't seem to exist (they cannot actually be 100% ruled out, but their magnitude must be small). Cultural factors seem not too relevant, as various polities of sophistication on the same order as those in Eurasia have existed in Sub-Saharan Africa for millennia. Not only that, but there's no sign of some sort of cultural stasis there which would make some particular social/cultural institution so prevalent over all of history as to rule out progress. If we examine the detailed history of various regions of Africa, politics and society seem pretty similar in their basic structure to other areas. The most significant factor SEEMS to be that there was little incentive for exchange of ideas with Eurasia and capital moved to the areas with easier access to technology, eventually creating a disparity in means.

I don't think notions of "primitive" or "advanced" are terribly useful. But notions of causal dependence can be useful. You gave an example: smelting iron is causally dependent on access to certain resources. Perhaps a bit more intricately, having access to vast quantities of steel is dependent on having railways to cart ore and coal, which are in term dependent on having access to vast quantities of steel - this is (one example of) the self-sustaining causal process of industrialisation that can emerge only under pretty distinct conditions.

Right, I mean, science fiction has basically identified this process with ideas of a 'singularity' etc. That is basically the notion that there is a NON-LINEAR effect in which employment of capital in an area leads to greater effectiveness of more employment of capital in that area. One instrumentality piles on another. This also explains the current divide between the North/West and the South. It is vastly easier to invest $'s in the US markets and make a good return than to attempt to do so in somewhere in Africa or Latin America, generally. One would thus expect that diffusion will, at this point, probably never produce a homogeneous result, not unless the 'First World' runs into fundamental limits which change this effect. I'd note that we may well be seeing signs of that, but since the ramifications are global, it seems this alone will not do the trick. Perhaps if we get off our high horses and look at what other cultures actually have to offer in terms of social organization and ecological knowledge, that might help. I'm not sanguine.

Which relates to your remarks about a "novel set of tools". This is, at its core, the rationalisation/technicalisation thesis found in (eg) Weber and Hodgson. In one sense, this social form is very durable - once it emerges, it appears that it absorbs/destroys all others that it comes into contact with. (One version of this idea is Weber's "iron cage"; another is Marx's idea of the power of liberal capitalism to dissolve all other relations of production.) In another sense, though, there is no reason to think it is can last - Weber flagged as the limit the consumption of fossil fuels; it seems more likely now that the limit is the consumption of atmospheric capacity. In this way it is different from hunter-gatherer or pastoralist technologies which have shown themselves to be very durable on their own terms (I use that last qualification because they have also shown themselves highly liable to destruction/absoprtion by industrial modernity - see the opening sentences of this paragraph).

In all fairness, h-g, pastoralist, and traditional agriculture have not necessarily produced sustainable results either. I cited 2 examples where local knowledge proved to be superior, but even that knowledge cannot guarantee long-term sustainability. Every system is vulnerable to certain kinds of weaknesses, has blind spots, runs into things beyond its control. I mean hunter-gatherer people once roamed a fertile northern Africa, but nothing they could have done would have prevent the Sahara from forming (largely a consequence of orbital dynamics). Nor were they probably keeping records detailed enough to even discern the problem's existence.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't think this is true. Or at least I doubt that you have any evidence for its truth.

I say the above because I remember a conversation I had a couple of years ago with a professor of agricultural science, who was talking about research he had done in Benin. This showed that the adoption of techniques recommended by the FAO supposedly to increase production were actually, over the medium-to-long term, reducing production because those techniques - by changing land and plant forms - were destabilising micro-climates that had generated necessary rainfall.

My guess is that my previous paragraph would be an example of the sort of thing @AbdulAlhazred had in mind in his post.

Right, you can reference for example talk about 'building a green wall'. This notion isn't crazy, but the techniques attempted proved to be vastly inferior to, and even undermined, those of the local farmers, who were already well aware of how to mitigate desertification. I believe that there is at least some talk/research/action taking place to adopt some of those practices, and a greater understanding that local technology is actually pretty sophisticated in this regard.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The western world had this knowledge in the past, but ditched it for something more effective.
But when you really think a steel blade is useless in the rainforest because it would rust away then I do not think that there is any point in discussing with you any further as you are dead set in your "everything is equal" thinking and are not willing to hear any counter arguments.

It is not that I think the steel blade is 'useless in the rain forest'. It is probably more useful than the ones made from local materials, up to a point. Again, what I am saying is that effectiveness and sophistication aren't the same thing. It takes at least as much skill, and probably a good bit of social organization, to create a stone tool crafting culture on a par with those seen today in remote areas, or in the late paleolithic. Look at the fine craftsmanship. Surely it took years, maybe decades, of instruction and practice to achieve. It also required long-distance trade for good raw materials in at least some cases. Is that 'more primitive' than building a blast furnance, etc.? I think it produces a somewhat less effective product, but there are, as discussed in later posts to yours between @pemerton and myself, some fairly good explanations for why capital formation and production has occurred in some areas and not others.

This ties back to my point about biological evolution. In terms of culture/society, every one of them has evolved through the same time frame. it isn't clear to me why we would assume that one made 'more progress' than another, and is thus 'more advanced'.

Nor do I think the western world has simply 'discarded' certain ideas. I mean, maybe they have discarded some, but a Medieval European farmer wouldn't have solved the Sahel's problems either. It relied on knowing how to use certain specific tree species and where, when, and how to plant them. This is clearly locally determined knowledge. It was ignored simply because westerners held local knowledge in contempt. It is just as silly to imagine modern hunter-gatherers coming to England and telling the people there how to knap flint and ignoring their ability to smelt iron and make steel.

 

[pemerton]

That was because through colonization technology was forced upon them.
I was talking about the time before colonialization. There has been contact and in many cases trade between the cultures for centuries, but technological diffusion didn't happen, or only very slowly.
The pulp tropes as you call them happened exactly that way in history as could the difference between Cormyt and Grippli.

Frankly I have no idea why you inject modern situations into the FR with a more or less medieval/renaissance technology base.

Technological diffusion prior to modernity tends to happen at a sufficiently slow rate that (at least typically) new technologies are able to be incorporated without immediate social disruption.

Of course there may be tremendous social change - the process of incorporation of the stirrup and resultant mounted warfare in agragrian Europe took hundreds of years and saw the emergence of the feudal social order.

How long have Grippli lived in contact with Cormyr? What processes of diffusion are taking place? I am extremely confident that the canon materials provide no answer to this second question, and rather that they simply stipulate the "primitiveness" of Grippli. (As per @Doug McCrae's post #310.)

 

[Ixal]

Technological diffusion prior to modernity tends to happen at a sufficiently slow rate that (at least typically) new technologies are able to be incorporated without immediate social disruption.

Of course there may be tremendous social change - the process of incorporation of the stirrup and resultant mounted warfare in agragrian Europe took hundreds of years and saw the emergence of the feudal social order.

How long have Grippli lived in contact with Cormyr? What processes of diffusion are taking place? I am extremely confident that the canon materials provide no answer to this second question, and rather that they simply stipulate the "primitiveness" of Grippli. (As per @Doug McCrae's post #310.)

Why is that important to the current situation that the technology level of the Grippli being primitive compared to the place the adventurers come from?
You now seem to be grasping straws because you do not want this situation to be plausible, even though there are ample examples in history where similar situations happened. An in D&D/FR progress is extremly slow for everyone anyway. In the current situation in the adventure the technology the Grippli use is primitive compared to the PCs, its as simple as that. This is a description of the current situation and has nothing to do with racism.

It is not that I think the steel blade is 'useless in the rain forest'. It is probably more useful than the ones made from local materials, up to a point. Again, what I am saying is that effectiveness and sophistication aren't the same thing. It takes at least as much skill, and probably a good bit of social organization, to create a stone tool crafting culture on a par with those seen today in remote areas, or in the late paleolithic. Look at the fine craftsmanship. Surely it took years, maybe decades, of instruction and practice to achieve. It also required long-distance trade for good raw materials in at least some cases. Is that 'more primitive' than building a blast furnance, etc.? I think it produces a somewhat less effective product, but there are, as discussed in later posts to yours between @pemerton and myself, some fairly good explanations for why capital formation and production has occurred in some areas and not others.

This ties back to my point about biological evolution. In terms of culture/society, every one of them has evolved through the same time frame. it isn't clear to me why we would assume that one made 'more progress' than another, and is thus 'more advanced'.

Nor do I think the western world has simply 'discarded' certain ideas. I mean, maybe they have discarded some, but a Medieval European farmer wouldn't have solved the Sahel's problems either. It relied on knowing how to use certain specific tree species and where, when, and how to plant them. This is clearly locally determined knowledge. It was ignored simply because westerners held local knowledge in contempt. It is just as silly to imagine modern hunter-gatherers coming to England and telling the people there how to knap flint and ignoring their ability to smelt iron and make steel.

Do you even know what kind of knowledge and resources are required to make a blast furnance? Yes, making a stone tool, even a really well made one, is primitive compared to that.

And your idea of capital is a modern concept which has no use in this example as there was no market economy where "money is king". Besides, Africa was very wealthy thanks to the slave trade and gold mines so the basis of your theory is wrong to begin with.

 

[pemerton]

Why is that important to the current situation that the technology level of the Grippli being primitive compared to the place the adventurers come from?
You now seem to be grasping straws because you do not want this situation to be plausible, even though there are ample examples in history where similar situations happened.

What historical examples are you referring to?

What can you tell us about (say) the technological differences between western Ireland and Kent 800 years ago? And is the social and geographic relationship between Cormyr and the Grippli comparable to that between mediaeval England and mediaeval Ireland?

 

[Ixal]

What historical examples are you referring to?

What can you tell us about (say) the technological differences between western Ireland and Kent 800 years ago? And is the social and geographic relationship between Cormyr and the Grippli comparable to that between mediaeval England and mediaeval Ireland?

I have mentioned the Zulu before. Guns are not the only thing they did not adopt from Europeans. And this is just one example in Africa. Generally the technology from Europe did not spread there all that fast, or at all the further you go inland, despite centuries of contact with the islamic community and later European traders.

North American tribes also did not adopt much technology from the Central American empires despite long contacts and later from Europeans with some exceptions like guns and horses. But for example smelting got reintroduced very late (19th century).

 

[Malmuria]

Ask that to the designers of the FR.
Also, why has there not been a diffusion of technology from Europe, through Costal Africa, to Central/Interior Africa? Or from Europe to the Natives in North America? Or China/Japan to South East Asia? That technology is not adopted is hardly unheard of. A concrete example would be that Shaka Zulu refused to buy guns when it was offered to him as he thought short spears (impi) and shields are superior.

You are talking about not an instance, but one singular individual who argued against the adoption of firearms, and not because they wanted to stay "primitive," but because they would have to entirely change their tactics. By the mid-late 20th century, firearms were much more common among the Zulu and the Zulu were very much interested in defending themselves against Boer settler incursions. This example is still instructive, however, as the firearms that were traded to the Zulu (in exchange for mining labor) were obsolete and difficult to maintain compared to the firearms their colonizing opponents were using. So you are correct, there was a difference in technology which granted the Boers and the British an advantage, at least in their task of efficient killing.

But what was the historical context of this technological difference? As the above indicates, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in South Africa were periods of rapacious and genocidal settler colonialism and appropriation, especially after the discovery of diamond deposits. It was also, not coincidentally, when the notion that Africans were more "primitive," and in fact, incapable by themselves of "advancement" along European lines was taken as common sense (that was taken as a universal goal of "civilization"). The conception of the Civilized/Advanced and the Savage/Primitive suffused all of these interactions with the Zulu. Versions of these concepts were developed and advanced by leading scientists of the day, and they were ubiquitous in European and American popular culture (including, in many cases, the pulp fiction that inspired dnd (see Haggard and others)). "Primitive" was the logic of "In Darkest Africa," and gave rise to the notion that "Civilizing" Africa was a European duty and birthright.

Famously, Joseph Chamberlain:

You cannot have omelettes without breaking eggs; you cannot destroy the practices of barbarism, of slavery, of superstition, which for centuries have desolated the interior of Africa, without the use of force; but if you will fairly contrast the gain to humanity with the price which we are bound to pay for it, I think you may well rejoice in the result of such expeditions as those which have recently been conducted with such signal success—(cheers)—in Nyassaland, Ashanti, Benin, and Nupe—expeditions which may have, and indeed have, cost valuable lives, but as to which we may rest assured that for one life lost a hundred will be gained, and the cause of civilisation and the prosperity of the people will in the long run be eminently advanced. (Cheers.)

The level of violence (between European colonizers as well) is what led to the creation of the modern concentration camp, as a type of wartime space and technology. South Africa, as is well known, retained the racial categories of the nineteenth century into most of the twentieth through the totalitarian and oppressive system of Apartheid.

I appreciate that you'd like to filter out all of this history in order to retain use of a word in your fantasy wargame (even though it is ironic that you choose perhaps the least felicitous historical example for this purpose). And that, you don't care if all of that history, encoded as always in language, matters to a POC writer and POC readers, because you want to defend an established white editor who works for a large corporation in inserting that word without asking the writer or considering its implications (and in a product attempting to highlight the company's willingness to hire a diverse set of writers). In fact, not only do you not care, you seem offended that anyone else would care, thus your comments in this thread.

 

[Ixal]

You are talking about not an instance, but one singular individual who argued against the adoption of firearms, and not because they wanted to stay "primitive," but because they would have to entirely change their tactics. By the mid-late 20th century, firearms were much more common among the Zulu and the Zulu were very much interested in defending themselves against Boer settler incursions. This example is still instructive, however, as the firearms that were traded to the Zulu (in exchange for mining labor) were obsolete and difficult to maintain compared to the firearms their colonizing opponents were using. So you are correct, there was a difference in technology which granted the Boers and the British an advantage, at least in their task of efficient killing.

But what was the historical context of this technological difference? As the above indicates, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in South Africa were periods of rapacious and genocidal settler colonialism and appropriation, especially after the discovery of diamond deposits. It was also, not coincidentally, when the notion that Africans were more "primitive," and in fact, incapable by themselves of "advancement" along European lines was taken as common sense (that was taken as a universal goal of "civilization"). The conception of the Civilized/Advanced and the Savage/Primitive suffused all of these interactions with the Zulu. Versions of these concepts were developed and advanced by leading scientists of the day, and they were ubiquitous in European and American popular culture (including, in many cases, the pulp fiction that inspired dnd (see Haggard and others)). "Primitive" was the logic of "In Darkest Africa," and gave rise to the notion that "Civilizing" Africa was a European duty and birthright.

Famously, Joseph Chamberlain:



The level of violence (between European colonizers as well) is what led to the creation of the modern concentration camp, as a type of wartime space and technology. South Africa, as is well known, retained the racial categories of the nineteenth century into most of the twentieth through the totalitarian and oppressive system of Apartheid.

I appreciate that you'd like to filter out all of this history in order to retain use of a word in your fantasy wargame (even though it is ironic that you choose perhaps the least felicitous historical example for this purpose). And that, you don't care if all of that history, encoded as always in language, matters to a POC writer and POC readers, because you want to defend an established white editor who works for a large corporation in inserting that word without asking the writer or considering its implications (and in a product attempting to highlight the company's willingness to hire a diverse set of writers). In fact, not only do you not care, you seem offended that anyone else would care, thus your comments in this thread.

You forget that in monarchies the word of one man shapes nations. Napoleon could not wrap his head around the concept of steam driven ships which destroyed any chance of breaking British naval superiority. And Shaka Zulu rejected guns, resulting in the military stagnation of the Zulu and ensured that no effort was spend in acquiring or even manufacturing their own guns which resulted in them having very few and inferior guns in the Anglo-Zulu war. (Don't forget that the Zulu existed for way longer than when Shaka lived. Plenty of time to adopt some technology from Europeans and Arabs).

Was this difference used as pretext to justify colonialization? Yes. But that difference existed and was no invention by the Europeans. There were numerous instances where people with a vast difference in technology met and also many instances where technological diffusion was very slow or not existing for various reasons, the same way there were instances of rapid adoption of technology.

And being offended lies squarely with those people who complain that, in order to better describe a situation where there is a huge technological gap between two groups, the word primitive which fits perfectly to the actual situation. That you bring race into it also makes me wonder how objective you are.

By the way, when talking about editors, you know that they often do much larger changes without asking, right? Right here on Enworld a editor changed a "Worlds of Design" articles headline and intro so much that it had a completely different meaning and was very confusing to read without informing the author at all.

Worlds of Design: When Nations Expand

When considering how nations expand beyond their borders in your fantasy campaign, there are several options to choose from. Picture courtesy of Pixabay. Trading Colonies We can go back to very ancient times, when the Assyrians had a trading colony in Hittite territory, far from the heartland...

www.enworld.org