Re: CHAT: Phaleran society [was Re: The [+foreign] attribute]

Quoting Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...>:

> At what technological level does "present-day" Phaleran society
> operate on?
Their technological level doesn't readily correspond to
anything on earth today.  In many theoretical scientific
areas, the Phalerans are greatly ahead of us (especially in the
mathematics that governs hyperspatial travel, cosmology,
and to a certain extent molecular biology), but generally only in
the sense that Medieval Scholastics were ahead of 5th
century Athens or Rome:  they have received from antiquity
documents of great sophistication, but few can read these
documents, fewer can understand them, and fewer still can
make any practical use of them. They have rudimentary handling
of nuclear technologies, and more or less regularly
communicate with other inhabited worlds in the Upsilon Andromedae
system through radio transmissions, but primarily due to
insufficient industrial capacity, missions of direct contact
and trade with these worlds, much less of conquest, are so
exorbitantly expensive as to be out of the question. (Such
expense is typically seen as wasteful when not even all of
Phalera has been "pacified" under one government.) In the
humanities, the studies of history, political science and
economics are stultified because they serve the ends of the
planet's largely despotic or oligarchical regimes, while
anthrophological and linguistic field research are both burgeoning,
in part, because they provide the aristocracies with amusing
anecdotes ("In Luânsil, they have this funny way of talking...")
and ideas to fill their idle pleasures with. Theory, in these
fields, again, tends to serve political ends, generally to
reinforce the class structure, though different regimes might
claim the same data as proof that their culture is in fact
superior to all others.   Generally, new developments in
engineering (or rediscovery of past developments) depend on
government or aristocratic patronage, although there are a
handful of trading republics (generally city-states) with
merchant classes rich enough to endow large institutions of
learning.  The trade that surports and funds these movements
is only beginning to recovery two and a half centuries of
depression:  C'ali speaking regions successfully split away
from Phaleran speaking (Tlaspian) hegemony in a civil war at
that time, and the subsequent raising of tariffs to unprecedented
levels more or less stopped international and intercontinental
trade of goods, which meant prices rose for everyone and most
economies underwent a general collapse.  (Of course, since
knowledge of economics is so primitive, they did not avoid
what our world did after the 1928-1929 tariff wars that lead in
large part to the Great Depression.)

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Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
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