Imaginary castles
Jan. 31st, 2019 11:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethToday I got woke up, twice, by stupid scam phone call of the pay us now or get cut off variety. Rude humans, go do proper things instead.
So I was daydreaming castles, as you do.
A castle is an intentional community with a purpose and shared goal. That goal is usually survival, and the castle's part in surviving is to provide safe walls, shelter, and force projection suitable for protecting enough farmers around it to feed it. Also miners and craftsmen and so forth, obviously, an entire economy. The bit where some rich dude in charge is living large because he is The Boss of the Baddest Army is a bit annoying, but in theory a strong point and some strong warriors can provide shelter for a whole bunch of people who then don't have to worry about that side of life. It just requires specialised training and possibly more protein, and a lot of resources of metal because you can make a lot of nails for the same metal as one suit of armour. Defence budget can get extreme.
Also I liked one show about castles that reckoned building a castle was such a show off in and of itself - especially if you got it looking all fancy too - that people who could not currently build a castle didn't even try starting shit because look, these people can outspend you by orders or magnitude, you're not getting anywhere.
Like, the glitter and sparkle all belonging to the Queen is a bit annoying, but the idea that the ability to outglam the neighbours demonstrates your economic health to the point you don't need to start fights about it, that's neat.
Obviously if you have the sparkly without the walls and warriors you've got a different response, but, still, art your way out of conflict, nice.
So like, why would we need castles right now?
I was reading a science fiction story where some rich bloke took a castle to the moon basically to show off that he was the whitest white with white ancestors and so forth, which, ugh, yuck. Dude died of air loss and nobody knew because so isolated, so that's a fable for you. I definitely do not want a castle for that reason.
And it's not like anyone is invading right now. And if they did the kabooms vs fortification problem got won by kabooms quite a long time ago. Boo. Even living under a mountain like Stargate just makes it take longer. Destruction so much easier, very boring.
Castles don't seem like they'd help vs crime a lot. Plus you'd be living in a castle with a whole bunch of people and you'd better get along with them. All of them. People are difficult. Like, it's all well and good Mick Rory staying on the Waverider and being part of the team while continuously drunk, but, his gun? Is a problem? While he is not at his best? I feel there should be more doing something helpful about that. Also a breathalyser on the timeship controls wouldn't go amiss. So like, a castle is a technology, and you would need a plan for when people were not acting in a way that suggests they'd use that technology safely.
... I mean drunk in charge of the average kitchen isn't something you really want to share a flammable building with, neighbours are Tricky.
So I like castles because they are a symbol of safety, representing an ideal that can be shared with others in an emergency. But I dislike castles because it's always some berk who thinks they're all that who ends up in charge of them. And then what do you do?
Castles are also not the actual practical safety these days anyway. You'd be better off guaranteeing good access for emergency services and designing things to be accessible and not flammable. Secure nowadays does not look like arrow slits, because arrows are not a current problem, you'd be better off with decent fire exits.
... castles look so cool though.
There's a bit in CJCherryh's books, Cyteen and sequels, where there's a tension between people who want to spread out into the universe and people who want to fort up where they already are. Like, it takes a lot of resources to do either, they both want to allocate that budget to their preferred method.
And people can be politically expansionist, big empty universe, let's send people into it
but then with their friends and family they'll be trying to build that one safe central place.
Humans have few children and look after them as well as possible. That's the strategy we've optimised on, contrasting with like fish eggs that just spray everywhere. There are species that survive because they might be a bit useless individually but they make so many eggs that some of them always survive. But we humans survive because we make very few but give them every advantage we've got.
And, also, form communities to continue to support each other. Community is an important bit.
So if you want to send out colonies into a big empty universe, you're swimming against the instinct tide in many ways, because you'll be throwing your descendants out to such distances you can't continue to support them. However much logical sense it makes to spread humans widely and hope, you've got emotional ties saying you should just keep them at home and feed them real well.
And that tension works out differently when you've only got one really well populated dirt ball to explore. Sure we can go out and try to do different, but we have to meet people when we get there and persuade them, and if we could manage that part then maybe possibly we could do it at home?
Youngers leave eventually, even head off to see how far away they can get. Wanting to be Free is a big drive as well. Partly because we are almost all sure, deep down, that we could do it better if only they would Listen To Us.
... the listening is not simples. Persuasive techniques such as castles and big strong men going out of them to hit things and people have historically popular. Possibly more popular than the talk based methods.
But people have also changed the world by marrying well. Making nice trade deals. Sending really persuasive ideas.
So there's lots of ways.
The tendency to perceive resources as limited and outsiders as Threat is kind of embodied in castles too. That's not my favourite bit. I mean, sure, I'm scared of humans, but sort of generally, whereas many people are scared of them particular humans who are Not Like Us. I'm scared of people who think they're the boss because they have the biggest sharp thing. I'd rather have armour that can ignore the big sharp things. But that isn't really the current problem.
If you think of the European Union as a primarily economic entity where everyone involved should end up richer for being all connected up, then adding new countries is a cost benefit thing where the poor places don't look so tempting. But if you think of the EU as a new and nifty way of not having a war, then you want as many people to join in as possible. This thing where we all vote to have representatives shout at each other and not hit people is a most excellent development in human history. We shall make friends with our neighbours! We shall start thinking of ourselves as basically Us in a much wider geographic region! Shouting not shooting!
I mean look at the history of France and England going back to castles time, and look at now, and now is much better. We've still got land mostly most suitable for sheep, they've still got land as actually grows stuff, but all this free trade means it all gets moved around for everyone's benefit anyway. There's no need to go killing your neighbours for their decent farmland if you can just have the farm produce arrive at your tables without non agricultural sharp things. And seasonal labour can just roll up the whole continent as harvest season moves around. Excellent stuff.
I mean we still all end up richer, because wars aren't cheap, but also a lot more people get to survive and it's lovely and peaceful. For ages.
But somehow the story still feels like Outsiders Take Our Stuff. Still feels like we need big strong walls to protect it.
... I'm a fan of big strong walls emotionally speaking, I like big stones and a general Keep Out approach to architecture, right up until I apply it to, you know, politics and actual factual people.
Because I'm reasonably certain that the point of walls is people. They look after people. Looking after people is the part that needs focusing on.
And I do not, personally, think that people stop being people if they're outside the walls.
... a historically unusual position, in castle times, I fear.
But you look at how much needs doing, all the agriculture work and care work and I don't know what all else, the proportion of the NHS that's from Outside and keeps needing to be, and you look at how many people want to come here and do things we need doing, and just... people. People are excellent even in a strictly usefulness based view. We need people, there are people, it's great.
But also, people need a place to be? That has water? And an ongoing lack of war?
And hey, we have a place.
... yes I have heard 'housing crisis' but I have also heard there's enough buildings to go around if evenly distributed. People redistributing your house is also a thing castles are meant to prevent. The very strict approach to Outside and Inside decides who goes where. If I had a castle I would want to choose who was in it. I have a flat and I want to choose who is in it. So I can see how that's a problem. I just, I'm saying, we should fix this problem in a way that helps people.
... and helps people to have a door they can close very firmly with people they haven't chosen on the Outside. Because house sharing with strangers is miserable and stressful and I personally would not function at all in that context, so I am not saying anyone else should. Just, enough doors, but enough for all the people.
I don't know which bits of the house building gets stuck. I mean, we have to keep people alive at all times, so whether or not they're building a house that costs the same. So we could find a bunch of people who could do something house building related and then teach them to do it? And then they can build many houses. Except they need a place to build them, obviously, and materials to build them from. I don't know which bit of that is the tricky one. I suspect land.
Also infrastructure. There are more people in my town than there used to be, and the roads were never the greatest, and they all need to get to the same few places at School O'Clock, and it's all... very difficult. Town planning must be super tricky.
If everyone lives in a castle then they don't need to go on roads?
... I suspect the planning stays complex, because how do you make enough castles with enough classrooms?
Like there's a lot of science fiction where there's space stations and colonies and suchlike, but there's less that think about the whole supply chain of raising and training people. I mean, if you don't bring a teacher for a specific subject, that's it, no more of that knowledge. Books get you a long way, sure, and lecture series being recorded and suchlike, but teachers remain necessary because humans get in tangles in their own special ways and it takes a human to detangle their thinking. So far. I reckon by the time an AI can teach us all the things it can also do all the things. And then why people? Except for people thinking people are the actual why of everything.
... capitalism is going to have to change a lot because tech is causing distribution problems as is. I mean replacing labour with labour saving devices is only going to help people in the plural if those devices don't all belong to the one person, who then charges you for them.
... castles don't really touch that problem. I mean, if everyone who lived in one owned it collectively that seems like a helpful start, but then they could each decide to knock holes in it so you need a lot of building codes, and... I'm sure this is a solved problem, I just have only lived in this flat owned by the housing association, so I'm just now thinking of it. Here, you ask the owner, and the owner fixes things, when they get around to it. If everyone is owner, who do you ask? Uneven maintenance endangers everyone eventually.
Castles are so much smaller than cities. I mean you get story cities like Atlantis where there's a theoretical 200 people and you only meet 20 of them, but, I daydream castles partly because I feel like it's a much more manageable scale than the tens of thousands of people I'd have to deal with in a market town, much less the hundreds of thousands in a city. And you can put a lot of smaller scale units together to make those cities, but humans have been moving from the small places to the big ones for a long time now, and for reasons. Castles might not address those reasons.
Like, okay, I've seen a castle that had its own pub. But one pub. What about the other dozen in a market town? What about the other few hundreds in a city? Not everyone wants the same things out of their pub! Scale things down again and you're back to like it or lump it.
... and of course when I'm daydreaming it I can design the perfectly perfect one, but, communities don't stay the same, you'd need to find a community who agrees with you in the first place and then you'd need to maintain it and the adjustment of environment to community and vice versa is a never ending task. So the idea of a centuries old castle that remains Just Right is a silly sort of daydream because what do you do when your kids want to redecorate? Or their wives do? You don't get to choose everyone who moves in, they choose each other. Then what?
I sit down (or curl up) to daydream a castle, because castles are cool, and I end up with all this psychological and political stuff coming up. Castles make me feel safe and like life is basically under control. But whose control? Safe from what?
And then when you're writing stories, so many unexamined assumptions filter through.
I don't want a castle to defend against the goblin hordes for centuries, I want a decent farming system guaranteeing subsistence level food for all my neighbours, the small shouty green ones included. It seems like that would work much better. Universal basic income or big thick walls? Well which one actually addresses the problem? Which one will remove the problem at source?
So now we have very few castles, and they're mostly museums or hotels.
Which, you know, yaaay.
But then I go back to daydreaming castles...
Because they seem like a nice safe place to start.
Since it is much easier to make friends and influence people when you are not, yourself, dead.
... actually in a suitable F&SF setting that's not necessarily true. Ooh, support your local necromancer, his food distribution methods are the fairest, since he don't need any himself...
So I was daydreaming castles, as you do.
A castle is an intentional community with a purpose and shared goal. That goal is usually survival, and the castle's part in surviving is to provide safe walls, shelter, and force projection suitable for protecting enough farmers around it to feed it. Also miners and craftsmen and so forth, obviously, an entire economy. The bit where some rich dude in charge is living large because he is The Boss of the Baddest Army is a bit annoying, but in theory a strong point and some strong warriors can provide shelter for a whole bunch of people who then don't have to worry about that side of life. It just requires specialised training and possibly more protein, and a lot of resources of metal because you can make a lot of nails for the same metal as one suit of armour. Defence budget can get extreme.
Also I liked one show about castles that reckoned building a castle was such a show off in and of itself - especially if you got it looking all fancy too - that people who could not currently build a castle didn't even try starting shit because look, these people can outspend you by orders or magnitude, you're not getting anywhere.
Like, the glitter and sparkle all belonging to the Queen is a bit annoying, but the idea that the ability to outglam the neighbours demonstrates your economic health to the point you don't need to start fights about it, that's neat.
Obviously if you have the sparkly without the walls and warriors you've got a different response, but, still, art your way out of conflict, nice.
So like, why would we need castles right now?
I was reading a science fiction story where some rich bloke took a castle to the moon basically to show off that he was the whitest white with white ancestors and so forth, which, ugh, yuck. Dude died of air loss and nobody knew because so isolated, so that's a fable for you. I definitely do not want a castle for that reason.
And it's not like anyone is invading right now. And if they did the kabooms vs fortification problem got won by kabooms quite a long time ago. Boo. Even living under a mountain like Stargate just makes it take longer. Destruction so much easier, very boring.
Castles don't seem like they'd help vs crime a lot. Plus you'd be living in a castle with a whole bunch of people and you'd better get along with them. All of them. People are difficult. Like, it's all well and good Mick Rory staying on the Waverider and being part of the team while continuously drunk, but, his gun? Is a problem? While he is not at his best? I feel there should be more doing something helpful about that. Also a breathalyser on the timeship controls wouldn't go amiss. So like, a castle is a technology, and you would need a plan for when people were not acting in a way that suggests they'd use that technology safely.
... I mean drunk in charge of the average kitchen isn't something you really want to share a flammable building with, neighbours are Tricky.
So I like castles because they are a symbol of safety, representing an ideal that can be shared with others in an emergency. But I dislike castles because it's always some berk who thinks they're all that who ends up in charge of them. And then what do you do?
Castles are also not the actual practical safety these days anyway. You'd be better off guaranteeing good access for emergency services and designing things to be accessible and not flammable. Secure nowadays does not look like arrow slits, because arrows are not a current problem, you'd be better off with decent fire exits.
... castles look so cool though.
There's a bit in CJCherryh's books, Cyteen and sequels, where there's a tension between people who want to spread out into the universe and people who want to fort up where they already are. Like, it takes a lot of resources to do either, they both want to allocate that budget to their preferred method.
And people can be politically expansionist, big empty universe, let's send people into it
but then with their friends and family they'll be trying to build that one safe central place.
Humans have few children and look after them as well as possible. That's the strategy we've optimised on, contrasting with like fish eggs that just spray everywhere. There are species that survive because they might be a bit useless individually but they make so many eggs that some of them always survive. But we humans survive because we make very few but give them every advantage we've got.
And, also, form communities to continue to support each other. Community is an important bit.
So if you want to send out colonies into a big empty universe, you're swimming against the instinct tide in many ways, because you'll be throwing your descendants out to such distances you can't continue to support them. However much logical sense it makes to spread humans widely and hope, you've got emotional ties saying you should just keep them at home and feed them real well.
And that tension works out differently when you've only got one really well populated dirt ball to explore. Sure we can go out and try to do different, but we have to meet people when we get there and persuade them, and if we could manage that part then maybe possibly we could do it at home?
Youngers leave eventually, even head off to see how far away they can get. Wanting to be Free is a big drive as well. Partly because we are almost all sure, deep down, that we could do it better if only they would Listen To Us.
... the listening is not simples. Persuasive techniques such as castles and big strong men going out of them to hit things and people have historically popular. Possibly more popular than the talk based methods.
But people have also changed the world by marrying well. Making nice trade deals. Sending really persuasive ideas.
So there's lots of ways.
The tendency to perceive resources as limited and outsiders as Threat is kind of embodied in castles too. That's not my favourite bit. I mean, sure, I'm scared of humans, but sort of generally, whereas many people are scared of them particular humans who are Not Like Us. I'm scared of people who think they're the boss because they have the biggest sharp thing. I'd rather have armour that can ignore the big sharp things. But that isn't really the current problem.
If you think of the European Union as a primarily economic entity where everyone involved should end up richer for being all connected up, then adding new countries is a cost benefit thing where the poor places don't look so tempting. But if you think of the EU as a new and nifty way of not having a war, then you want as many people to join in as possible. This thing where we all vote to have representatives shout at each other and not hit people is a most excellent development in human history. We shall make friends with our neighbours! We shall start thinking of ourselves as basically Us in a much wider geographic region! Shouting not shooting!
I mean look at the history of France and England going back to castles time, and look at now, and now is much better. We've still got land mostly most suitable for sheep, they've still got land as actually grows stuff, but all this free trade means it all gets moved around for everyone's benefit anyway. There's no need to go killing your neighbours for their decent farmland if you can just have the farm produce arrive at your tables without non agricultural sharp things. And seasonal labour can just roll up the whole continent as harvest season moves around. Excellent stuff.
I mean we still all end up richer, because wars aren't cheap, but also a lot more people get to survive and it's lovely and peaceful. For ages.
But somehow the story still feels like Outsiders Take Our Stuff. Still feels like we need big strong walls to protect it.
... I'm a fan of big strong walls emotionally speaking, I like big stones and a general Keep Out approach to architecture, right up until I apply it to, you know, politics and actual factual people.
Because I'm reasonably certain that the point of walls is people. They look after people. Looking after people is the part that needs focusing on.
And I do not, personally, think that people stop being people if they're outside the walls.
... a historically unusual position, in castle times, I fear.
But you look at how much needs doing, all the agriculture work and care work and I don't know what all else, the proportion of the NHS that's from Outside and keeps needing to be, and you look at how many people want to come here and do things we need doing, and just... people. People are excellent even in a strictly usefulness based view. We need people, there are people, it's great.
But also, people need a place to be? That has water? And an ongoing lack of war?
And hey, we have a place.
... yes I have heard 'housing crisis' but I have also heard there's enough buildings to go around if evenly distributed. People redistributing your house is also a thing castles are meant to prevent. The very strict approach to Outside and Inside decides who goes where. If I had a castle I would want to choose who was in it. I have a flat and I want to choose who is in it. So I can see how that's a problem. I just, I'm saying, we should fix this problem in a way that helps people.
... and helps people to have a door they can close very firmly with people they haven't chosen on the Outside. Because house sharing with strangers is miserable and stressful and I personally would not function at all in that context, so I am not saying anyone else should. Just, enough doors, but enough for all the people.
I don't know which bits of the house building gets stuck. I mean, we have to keep people alive at all times, so whether or not they're building a house that costs the same. So we could find a bunch of people who could do something house building related and then teach them to do it? And then they can build many houses. Except they need a place to build them, obviously, and materials to build them from. I don't know which bit of that is the tricky one. I suspect land.
Also infrastructure. There are more people in my town than there used to be, and the roads were never the greatest, and they all need to get to the same few places at School O'Clock, and it's all... very difficult. Town planning must be super tricky.
If everyone lives in a castle then they don't need to go on roads?
... I suspect the planning stays complex, because how do you make enough castles with enough classrooms?
Like there's a lot of science fiction where there's space stations and colonies and suchlike, but there's less that think about the whole supply chain of raising and training people. I mean, if you don't bring a teacher for a specific subject, that's it, no more of that knowledge. Books get you a long way, sure, and lecture series being recorded and suchlike, but teachers remain necessary because humans get in tangles in their own special ways and it takes a human to detangle their thinking. So far. I reckon by the time an AI can teach us all the things it can also do all the things. And then why people? Except for people thinking people are the actual why of everything.
... capitalism is going to have to change a lot because tech is causing distribution problems as is. I mean replacing labour with labour saving devices is only going to help people in the plural if those devices don't all belong to the one person, who then charges you for them.
... castles don't really touch that problem. I mean, if everyone who lived in one owned it collectively that seems like a helpful start, but then they could each decide to knock holes in it so you need a lot of building codes, and... I'm sure this is a solved problem, I just have only lived in this flat owned by the housing association, so I'm just now thinking of it. Here, you ask the owner, and the owner fixes things, when they get around to it. If everyone is owner, who do you ask? Uneven maintenance endangers everyone eventually.
Castles are so much smaller than cities. I mean you get story cities like Atlantis where there's a theoretical 200 people and you only meet 20 of them, but, I daydream castles partly because I feel like it's a much more manageable scale than the tens of thousands of people I'd have to deal with in a market town, much less the hundreds of thousands in a city. And you can put a lot of smaller scale units together to make those cities, but humans have been moving from the small places to the big ones for a long time now, and for reasons. Castles might not address those reasons.
Like, okay, I've seen a castle that had its own pub. But one pub. What about the other dozen in a market town? What about the other few hundreds in a city? Not everyone wants the same things out of their pub! Scale things down again and you're back to like it or lump it.
... and of course when I'm daydreaming it I can design the perfectly perfect one, but, communities don't stay the same, you'd need to find a community who agrees with you in the first place and then you'd need to maintain it and the adjustment of environment to community and vice versa is a never ending task. So the idea of a centuries old castle that remains Just Right is a silly sort of daydream because what do you do when your kids want to redecorate? Or their wives do? You don't get to choose everyone who moves in, they choose each other. Then what?
I sit down (or curl up) to daydream a castle, because castles are cool, and I end up with all this psychological and political stuff coming up. Castles make me feel safe and like life is basically under control. But whose control? Safe from what?
And then when you're writing stories, so many unexamined assumptions filter through.
I don't want a castle to defend against the goblin hordes for centuries, I want a decent farming system guaranteeing subsistence level food for all my neighbours, the small shouty green ones included. It seems like that would work much better. Universal basic income or big thick walls? Well which one actually addresses the problem? Which one will remove the problem at source?
So now we have very few castles, and they're mostly museums or hotels.
Which, you know, yaaay.
But then I go back to daydreaming castles...
Because they seem like a nice safe place to start.
Since it is much easier to make friends and influence people when you are not, yourself, dead.
... actually in a suitable F&SF setting that's not necessarily true. Ooh, support your local necromancer, his food distribution methods are the fairest, since he don't need any himself...
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Date: 2019-01-31 04:52 pm (UTC)~
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Date: 2019-02-27 09:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-27 02:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-27 09:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-09 03:17 pm (UTC)earlier thoughts on related themes, building shelters