The Probability Broach, chapter 20
We’re up to chapter 20 (of 24) in The Probability Broach. This chapter opens with another of L. Neil Smith’s fake quotes. This time, he puts words in the mouth of Lysander Spooner, an anarchist and abolitionist who served as president in Smith’s alternate history:
The entire concept of “law” is vain and fallacious, for what shall we have accomplished by enacting one? Those who agree with it will obey it, as they did before it existed. Those who disagree will break it, so it has no effect upon them. We have been occupied in an empty gesture of which but two consequences shall follow: those who take comfort in such things will be comforted, and those who derive perverted pleasure by enforcing their will upon others may now find positions among the police.
—Lysander Spooner
First Inaugural Address, 85 A.L.
Okay, look.
I’m not saying there’s no good argument for anarchism or its related philosophies. I believe individual freedom is generally a good thing, and we should seek to maximize it, consistent with respecting everyone else’s ability to enjoy the same right.
That being said, this is a fantastically stupid argument for anarchism. If Smith wanted to be taken seriously as a political philosopher, he fell flat on his face in the attempt.
This ignores the extremely obvious point of deterrence: the fear of being caught and punished will dissuade some people from breaking the law, even when they might otherwise be inclined to do so. There’s also the fact that people who commit serious crimes tend to be imprisoned, where their opportunities to commit further crimes are severely curtailed.
Of course, there are further replies to these points. You might argue that laws are badly designed and oppressive, punishing behavior that harms no one; that police have too much power to enforce them in excessively harsh or discriminatory ways; that most people who commit crimes don’t rationally weigh the costs and consequences; that prisons are cruel institutions that tend to make people worse rather than better. You could make all of these arguments.
What you can’t do is the thing Smith does here: just pretend that no one has ever offered any reason why laws and the justice system should exist, and then posture about how ridiculous it is that they exist anyway. It’s more than mere ignorance, it’s fundamentally dishonest.
You could construct a parallel argument for Smith’s position, like so: “L. Neil Smith says that everyone should carry firearms to protect themselves against violence, but what does that accomplish? Those who didn’t want to hurt you wouldn’t do so anyway, whether you have a gun or not. Those who wanted to hurt you will try to do so anyway, whether you have a gun or not. Therefore, guns are useless. They only give perverted pleasure to people who want to hurt others with them.”
Getting back to the main plot, Win Bear and his allies have just shown the Continental Congress the film of nuclear weapons from his world, which stuns and horrifies them:
Liberty Hall emptied in stunned silence, leaving Lucy and me behind. I’d lived all my life with a nuclear sword dangling over my head; it’s something else to be informed suddenly, to be shown, that your whole world’s slated for flaming destruction. That, or abject surrender, and Confederates didn’t strike me as the kind to lie down and spread their legs, even threatened with holocaust.
This is an incredibly gross and sexist analogy, equating willingness to have sex with passive acceptance of one’s own death. What does it say about the mindset of a person who’d write a sentence like that?
To be fair, this is Win’s internal narration, and an author doesn’t necessarily have to have the same opinions as his characters. A good writer can depict a character who’s a regressive misogynist without endorsing that view himself. But nothing in this book gives me the impression that L. Neil Smith was capable of that kind of subtlety.
My impression is that Smith held sexist views, but tried to tone them down so as not to alienate his readers (recall the earlier chapter that mentioned the availability of “hookers… organic or mechanical” but wisely said no more about it). However, there are places where it bleeds through in spite of him.
As we staggered out of the assembly hall through the portrait gallery, there were a dozen blinding flashes. I was suddenly showered with difficult questions: “Mr. Bear! Are you from another planet?” “Mr. Bear! Isn’t this whole thing an elaborate hoax?” “Mr. Bear! Is your planet radioactive?” “Mr. Bear! How do you like Confederate women?”
As Win squints and hunches against the glare, Lucy comes to his aid. She dismisses the journalists as “vermin” and says he could dismiss them by invoking his privacy rights. But she concedes it would help their cause if he answers a few questions, so he grudgingly agrees:
“Sam Hayakawa, Interplanet News. With me is ‘Win’ Bear, focus of the Seventh Continental Congress. Lieutenant Bear, may I call you Win? Would it be accurate to say you’re from another dimension?”
“I haven’t figured it out myself. I come from a place—a time, really—where history’s different, where—”
“I’m sure that’ll interest our technical-minded viewers, heh, heh. For us laymen, what’s it like to escape from a Federalist dictatorship, and win free to—”
“Now wait a minute! In the first place, I didn’t escape, I was pushed. In the second place the United States isn’t a dictatorship, it’s—”
“Win, since arriving here, you’ve left a wake of shootings behind you. We ordinarily expect perhaps a dozen murders per decade. You’ve killed that many in a month, and—”
No, just no.
As with the equally unbelievable claim that there are only a few hundred traffic deaths per year, Smith implausibly claims that violent crime is almost nonexistent in his anarcho-capitalist utopia. But the principles of this world make it impossible for anyone to know this.
How can a journalist—or anyone else—make any confident statement about how many murders there are in the North American Confederacy? There’s no agency that investigates suspicious deaths. There’s no bureau of vital statistics you can consult. There’s not even an authoritative list of the population. If a person just disappears, it’s very possible that no one would notice. The fact that murder is apparently rare might just mean that murderers are good at getting away with it—which is very likely when there are no police!
“Friend, I’m going to explain this once: I didn’t ask to be here; I didn’t ask your Hamiltonians to—”
“Well, how many people have you killed, then?”
“Nobody who didn’t have a weapon out and pointed. Until now. I’m thinking of making an exception in your—”
“Umnh, one more question, Win…”
“Call me Lieutenant Bear.”
“Erh… since your nation-state—is that correct?—has a long history of atomic warfare, do the ruins of your once-great cities really glow in the—”
“How’d your viewers like it if I took the mike and shoved it right up your—”
“This—this is S-sam Hayakawa, Inner-Interplanet News. G-goodnight!”
Tough guy Win Bear threatens to kill a journalist for asking him questions! How’s that going to play with the folks at home?
Lest we forget, the whole purpose of this is because Win and his friends want to win the Continental Congress over and persuade them of the threat they face. Logically, outbursts like this one—or last week’s scene where Win roughed up Madison and his henchmen in full view of the delegates—should turn everyone against him. They go against everything this world is supposed to stand for.
Shouldn’t the Hamiltonians be able to make an argument like: “Our views may be unpopular, but at least we’re peaceful. This man is a savage from another world who picks fights, disrespects our customs, and assaults people for saying things he doesn’t like. He’s not one of us. Don’t listen to his lies!”
When he wrote his main character, Smith was going for a classic template, depicting him as a rough-around-the-edges macho man who’s crude but honorable and eager to unleash violence in defense of what he cares about. It’s the right-wing worldview summarized in books like Jesus and John Wayne.
But that kind of character only works in the other kind of anarchy—the violent, chaotic Mad Max world where it’s every man for himself. That character shouldn’t find a welcome in the peaceful, civilized, twelve-murders-a-decade society he wants to depict.
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“This is an incredibly gross and sexist analogy, equating willingness to have sex with passive acceptance of one’s own death.”
It sounds very much like “if you don’t struggle against your rapist, it’s not really rape — you accepted his penis!” Which is an argument people make in the real world, so that’s probably what it means.
You’re right about how Smith is just transplanting manly action man tough-guy cliches into a book where they don’t fit. His handling of the press is in the same vein. It’s the stereotyped view of the media as pushy, asking stupid questions, not respecting boundaries, and yes, sometimes reporters do that. In our world. Why would they behave in exactly in the same way in the Confederacy when, as has been discussed in multiple posts and comment threads, everyone else behaves so differently and better than in our world.
For that matter, why didn’t the reporter whip out a gun and informs Smith that violent talk might work in his dystopian hellplane home but they know how to deal with savages like him in the Confederacy.
That’s an excellent question. You’re right – isn’t the whole point of this world that everyone is armed to defend against exactly this kind of aggression from strangers?
FTR: Samuel I. Hayakawa, for a time president of San Francisco State College (appointed, iirc, by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan), served one term in Washington as California’s first Asian-American Senator. He was a hero to Republicans for his rude treatment of student protestors and calculated theatricality, but became a laughing-stock for his tendency to nod off during meetings.
Hayakawa’s academic field was English, but he published lay books on general semantics (a sort-of psychological cult, but his works struck me as on the reasonable side of same).
Why Smith chose him to represent a caricature of the news media in his alt-universe, I can only guess.
Thanks for that tip! I didn’t realize this was another allusion to a real person.
We’ve gotten Nixon, Jimmy Carter (a peanut vendor at the Congress), William F. Buckley (cunningly disguised as “Buckley F. Williams”), Sam Hayakawa, and probably others I’ve forgotten. In one of the sequels, I’ve heard that the villain is a thinly disguised Walter Cronkite.
The whole issue with the press being annoying is a very real world issue. People tend to forget that if the press isn’t asking annoying questions at least some of the time they are not doing their job.
There could be an interesting interaction here in that Win is probably used to blowing off the press because he can’t talk about ongoing investigations or court cases. Win doesn’t understand the politics and beliefs of the alternate world either. If suddenly asked questions by the alternate world journalists Win wouldn’t know how to answer well. One thing that Win would know how to do is redirect journalists to official spokespeople. If he is on the ball he would redirect the journalist to Lucy, who is obviously well prepared to handle such things. If he doesn’t think of that immediately he should at least stop to think about what he is saying before threatening the press.
In many cases there is also a large factor of codifying the law in way that works for everybody. Traffic law is probably the best example of this. It’s poorly enforced but it’s intentionally setup in a way so that everything works better if you follow the rules. Trying to cut around corners when it’s not your turn is very risky because traffic coming the other direction isn’t going to be paying as much attention. Stop signs can be annoying but it provides a consistent protocol for who goes next. That reduces issues and makes getting through the intersection faster when there are multiple cars.
And it doesn’t matter whether everyone drives on the left side of the street or the right side, as long as everyone drives on the same side.
As a journalist, I agree. And we can ask calm intelligent questions — most press conferences aren’t just a matter of screaming at the interviewee.
Which made me think, what would I ask? Most probably about proof — okay, the Probability Broach is real but that doesn’t prove Wyn’s gone through it. Does he have evidence? Are the films faked? I’m sure they have great movie f/x in this world.
If I took him seriously, the question of what effects nukes have had on his world (that used to be our world — I wonder if Smith just changed his mind and didn’t bother to revise?) is legit. And possibly a few stupid questions, as this is mind-blowing stuff. Also a lot about the changed history — the reporter sniggering that the details of alternate history are just silly technical stuff ain’t doing his job.
And of course, covering a plot to take over the country should be front page news. Even the worst reporter won’t be worried about “what do you think of our women?” This is a major news story.
Yeah… it’s like he thinks all reporters are actually just muckrakers.
I’m also reminded of folks like Roger Ailes, a Nixon staffer who seemed to believe that the biggest problem with Watergate was that the way the news covered it made Nixon look bad and got people to push him to resign, and who went on to support right-wing Talk Radio and eventually found Fox News to ensure that such a ‘travesty’ of holding right-wing people accountable would never happen again. Part of the whole backdrop of that was encouraging the concept that all the ‘real’ reporters were lying and just saying what they were told to say, or making stuff up to sell papers.
It’s part of the whole denigration of the entire concept of expertise that’s all over the place. And it’s definitely a part of Smith’s idea of ‘anarchy’, because at the core his idea is really just ‘nobody gets to tell me what to do!’
Man, the reporter business just raising so many questions. In spite of Win’s new devotion to the NAC over his home world, he’s annoyed at the suggestion that our Earth is a radioactive wasteland. Why is this a stupid question? Win’s Earth has nuclear weapons by the thousands – assuming that a lot of them have been used is pretty rational. If Smith wanted to have a redemption arc for Win, showing that his police work had made him into someone who threatens to torture people, and can’t resist threatening people when he has strong motivation to be on his best behavior (in order to persuade people to believe him), then he’s portraying Win just right. But that’s not what Smith is doing with Win’s character, is it?
Especially because they showed films of them being used at the Continental Congress!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence
That source gives a muder rate (by firearms alone) of ~3.5 per 100,000 population in the US. For the US population in 1980 (when the book was published) that’s ~8,000 murders by firearms.
And this nut is claiming, despite availability of guns in the US resulting in a full order of magnitude more gun deaths than any other comparable country, with utterly unrestricted gun ownership and control there’ll somehow be 12?
Sorry I missed that he says 12 per decade not year!
X-D
I didn’t even notice that reading it. 12 per decade is lying. Being generous he means 12 per 100,000 citizens per decade and the count itself is very bad because there is no official organization doing it. Counting that way it’s plausible if the count is limited to proven murders, not all firearm deaths. That way if person A kills person B but a shoot out breaks out and 8 people end up dead there is still only 1 murder.
Far more likely though Smith is just going with the first number that jumped into his head. He didn’t stop to consider it against actual fire arm deaths, he just knows that it would be very low in his heavily armed utopia.
Smith: “Everybody has the capability to run their own life, and should be allowed to do it. Government just gets in the way. Violence and threats of violence are just wrong”
Also Smith: “In a society that has been libertarian for generations, there are a lot of folks who seem to exist just for the main characters to belittle, threaten and strike”
I have to admit, I kinda like the opening of every chapter with a fictional in-universe quote. But mostly just because it’s obviously ripped off from Frank Herbert, who did the same thing in his “Dune” novels.