Freelance Traveller

In his article, “Days of High Adventure: A Perpetual Traveller –Marc Miller”, Allen Varney writes that originally, Traveller wasn’t even supposed to have a setting. GDW figured that as with D&D, referees would just create their own. “I’ll confess that was an awakening for me,” he quotes Miller, “and I realized I couldn’t make this game all things to all players; I had to choose. Our reasoned corporate choice was to provide background and adventures for those who lacked the spare time to make up their own.”

It just so happened that the same year they published Traveller (1977), GDW also published a boardgame by the name of Imperium, but the two games, at least at that time, were in no way related. However, since it soon became apparent that Traveller needed a setting, they decided to more or less import Imperium’s setting into Traveller, elaborating on it as they went. Hence, as Wikipedia explains, “…the situation in Imperium was retconned into the Traveller Imperium’s history; it became the First Interstellar War, the first of many wars leading to the overthrow of the Vilani Grand Empire of Stars (Ziru Sirka) by the Terran Confederation and the establishment of the Rule of Man.” Varney goes on to explain that as they elaborated on this premise, GDW “…drew inspiration from respected science fiction writers (Poul Anderson, H. Beam Piper, E. C. Tubb’s Dumarest of Terra series) along with, as Traveller writer Loren Wiseman has put it, ‘a little Roman Empire, a little Star Wars, a lot of snippets of this and that from history and literature, all melded together.’” In short, although they couldn’t make it all things to all players, they sure as heck tried.

In “Deciphering the Text Foundations of Traveller” (a revised and expanded version is available from Amazon -ed.), Michael Andre-Driussi hints that Piper may have been one of the early inspirations for the Imperium’s aristocracy. He writes, “H. Beam Piper’s ‘Terro-Human’ series, a future history of novels and stories covering 30 centuries, had a big collective influence on CT, but none were so powerful as the novel Space Viking. Here was a warrior aristocracy for good and for ill, but not for ridicule.”

In Space Viking (1963), Piper seems to show himself as being somewhat of a conservative, having characters speak about the folly of government pensions for the elderly and the importance of the right to bear arms in circumscribing the power of government, but he also takes aim at the deficiencies of democracy, in part by creating a character, Zaspar Makann, who more than once he explicitly compares to Adolf Hitler, who, as we all know, used the democratic process in Weimar Germany to ascend to power before promptly dismantling the very democracy that elected him to office.

“There’s something wrong with democracy,” Piper has Prince Protector Simon Bentrik say at one point. “If there weren’t, it couldn’t be overthrown by people like Makann, attacking it from within by democratic procedures. I don’t think it’s fundamentally unworkable. I think it just has a few of what engineers call bugs. It’s not safe to run a defective machine till you learn the defects and remedy them.”

Aside from this criticism, Piper also seems to think that democracy and monarchy can be somehow fused to create a sort of classless feudalism. He writes, “The Mardukans talked a lot about democracy. They thought well of it; their government was a representative democracy. It was also a hereditary monarchy, if that made any kind of sense.” Following this, he has two of his characters engage in a conversation, detailing roughly how this imaginary political system would work:

Prince Bentrik: “Why, it sounds like feudalism to me!”

Lucas Trask: “That’s right; that what it is. A king owes his position to the support of his great nobles; they owe theirs to their barons and landholding knights; they owe theirs to their people. There are limits beyond which none of them can go; after that, their vassals turn on them.”

Bentrik: “Well, suppose the people of some barony rebel? Won’t the king send troops to support the baron?”

Trask: “What troops? Outside of a personal guard and enough men to police the royal city and hold the crown lands, the king has no troops. If he wants troops, he has to get them from his great nobles; they have to get them from their vassal barons, who raise them by calling out their people. And the people won’t help some other baron oppress his people; it might be their turn next.”

However, the problem with Piper’s line of reasoning is that in the real world, this isn’t how things typically work out, at least not in the long-term insofar as history has spoken.

Richard Aiken (Traveller Mailing List, 23-Oct-2012) writes: “When I consider feudalism as a system of government, I always come back to how my favorite college history professor described it: ‘Feudalism worked so well that it worked its way out of a job.’ By this, he meant that it was originally an emergency method for locals to defend against invaders or raiders, under the leadership of a strongman. Through various means (licit and otherwise), very unevenly and over a vast span of time, certain families of these strongmen managed to place lesser families into their debt. Eventually, the top family of strongmen in each region became a monarchy and set about dismantling the feudal system itself (in order to eliminate their closest rivals).”

As an aside, it is perhaps worth noting that there’s disagreement with respect to what exactly feudalism entailed and to what extent it even existed historically, some going so far as to argue that the word itself should be expunged from the historian’s vocabularySee Elizabeth Brown’s essay “Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe”, The American Historical Review, v79n4 (October 1974) . Nonetheless, whether it was due to economic forces, such as the natural growth of trade and towns, which led to the decline of serfdom, or whether it was due to new military realities, such as the increasing availability of mercenaries, which allowed those with the most money to raise their own armies outside of the “feudal system”, regardless of the extent to which that system actually existed, we can say that the system, whatever it was in all of its mind-numbing diversity, led in almost all cases to a strong monarchical government with the nobility hanging-on as a largely subdued aristocracy.

And this centralizing tendency is not true only of “feudalism”. Even in the United States, we started as a confederation and only later became a federation, arguably out of military necessity, but the founders were so conscious of this natural centralizing tendency of government that they built in various safeguards which they hoped would prevent power from centralizing too much. Hence, government was divided among various branches, each of which had limited and enumerated powers, and the people had various rights over which government supposedly could not tread. But, of course, despite these safeguards, the federal government has grown, assuming ever-increasing authority and power throughout the course of American historyObviously, this is a sweeping and potentially contentious generalization, but where power can be quantified as money, I think the statement is supported by the evidence. See https://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/the-growth-of-government-in-america#axzz2mYYdHh6p.

Generally speaking, that’s what governments tend to do. The longer they exist, the more powers they assume. Or to put it another way, in the absence of a powerful decentralizing force, power will naturally tend to centralize. We’ve seen this in the U.S. with the so-called Imperial Presidency. It happened to the Roman Republic, where power coalesced into a triumvirate and then finally a dictatorship. Hence, at least to me, Piper’s idea of a weak monarchy doesn’t really hold water. Sure, if the King is merely a figurehead, then I can go along with it, but if he has any real power, he’ll use it to get even more. That’s how things tend to work in the real world, and on some level even Piper recognizes this.

At one point, one of his characters, Otto Harkaman, remarks, “Our rulers are the barbarians among us. There isn’t one of them—Napolyon of Flamberge, Rodolf of Excalibur, or Angus of about half of Gram—who is devoted to civilization or anything else outside himself, and that’s the mark of the barbarian.” Or to put it more simply, shit floats (and I’m talking here about the human variety, not actual feces); moral flexibility and the hunger for power go hand-in-hand, raising the arrogant over the meek, as they will do whatever it takes to get ahead, regardless of what it costs everyone else.

It is worth noting that Piper was a bit of a history nut, but he was also self-educated, so it is possible that he didn’t fully think through all of his ideas, being that he didn’t have any history professors on hand with whom to argue. Nonetheless, he made a mark for himself, as evidenced by the praise bestowed upon him by John Carr in the introduction to Empire (1981), a posthumous H. Beam Piper anthology. Carr writes, “The Terro-Human Future History may not have the evolutionary synthesis of Gordon R. Dickenson’s Childe Cycle or the breadth of Anderson’s Polesotechnic League and Terran Empire, but Piper’s history of the future has a historian’s attention to sociological and political detail that is unsurpassed.” According to Wikipedia, “…a running theme in his work is that history repeats itself; past events will have direct and clear analogues in the future.” We see some hints of this in his short story, “The Edge of the Knife”(1957), where his character, Chalmers, a history professor, states to a psychiatrist who has been chosen to evaluate his sanity, “I’m not a Toynbean, by any manner of means, but any historian can see that certain forces generally tend to produce similar effects.”

Arnold J. Toynbee

Arnold J. Toynbee isn’t a name that most readers are likely to recognize, but at one time, he was one of the world’s most well-known historians. According to Wikipedia, “…he is best known for his 12-volume A Study of History (1934–61), through which he examined the rise and fall of 26 civilizations in the course of human history, and he concluded that they rose by responding successfully to challenges under the leadership of creative minorities composed of elite leaders.”These individuals “…devised solutions that reoriented their entire society. (…) When a civilization responded to challenges, it grew. Civilizations declined when their leaders stopped responding creatively, and the civilizations then sank owing to nationalism, militarism, and the tyranny of a despotic minority.”

Piper, having lived through both world wars, was no doubt more influenced by the history through which he had actually lived than by the theories of Toynbee. Nonetheless, Toynbee was not merely writing about history; he was trying to make sense of it, to analyze it and come up with a general theory of history, and being a history nut, Toynbee’s ideas surely must have influenced Piper. From Piper’s fiction, one can tell that he was interested in matters of politics, governance and freedom as well as nationalism, militarism, and tyranny, and certainly, he must have at least entertained the notion of history being cyclical.

In Space Viking, after doing a little historical research and reading about Adolf Hitler, Lucas Trask thinks to himself, “Harkaman was right; anything that could happen in a human society had already happened, in one form or another, somewhere and at some time.” Likewise, in “The Edge of the Knife”, Piper’s protagonist, Chalmers, has the psionic power of precognition, such that he catches glimpses of future history. At first he thinks he must be going insane, so to put his mind at ease, he goes to see a movie. Piper writes, “The picture, a random choice among the three shows in the neighborhood, was about Seventeenth Century buccaneers, exciting action and a sound-track loud with shots and cutlass-clashing. He let himself be drawn into it completely, and, until it was finished, he was able to forget both the college and the history of the future. But, as he walked home, he was struck by the parallel between the buccaneers of the West Indies and the space-pirates in the days of the dissolution of the First Galactic Empire, in the Tenth Century of the Interstellar Era.” Piper goes on, likening the Spanish Conquistadors to the early period of interstellar expansion, and so on and so forth, history repeating itself seemingly without end.

I think this idea that history is not a straight line but is more like a circle is what’s ultimately at the heart of Traveller’s Imperium, and I think GDW just sort of gobbled it up from Piper, partly because they were a bunch of wargamers with an interest in history and partly because the idea of an interstellar Empire must have seemed too juicy to pass up. After all, if you assume a cyclical view of history, then you can relive the past, except with spaceships, whereas if you take a linear view, you end up with something very different.

One example of the linear view was espoused by Francis Fukuyama in his book, The End of History and the Last Man (1992), which expanded on an essay of three years earlier wherein he wrote, “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” None of which is terribly exciting if what you really want to do is hack through a bunch of Zhodani nogoodniks with your trusty cutlass!

But it is worth bearing in mind that if history is cyclical, then given the fact that democracy has existed for only a short period of time when compared to the full breadth of human history, one must naturally consider whether or not democracy is merely a fad of the current age, rather than being, as Fukuyama suggests, the final form of human government. Obviously, this is a very important question, but Toynbee showed how 26 civilizations came and went, and Piper, aside from merely having read Toynbee, experienced his own civilization teetering on the edge of the abyss (after all, he lived through both world wars). Hence, I think it was only reasonable for him to have assumed that the days of Western Civilization are numbered. Indeed, there are still many good reasons for believing this to be true. Likewise, he recognized that democracy has flaws, and I think it was partly this fact that led him to begin thinking about different types of political systems, such as feudal technocracy, which, of course, ended up being ported into Traveller.

One common refrain in discussions about Traveller and democracy is that the popularity of a political system is largely immaterial. What is important in the long-run is how well it actually works. And so what some argue is that democracy cannot work with the extended communication lag imposed by interstellar distances. This really comes down to two different arguments, one social and the other political/military. The first is that a communication lag tends to lead to cultural heterogeneity. Populations that are separated by a great distance will tend not to think of themselves as all belonging to the same society, primarily because the dialogue between them, being so infrequent, causes a degree to cultural drift, and so they simply become different societies embracing different philosophies and customs. But the more immediate problem, from the political and military perspective, is that a long communication lag reduces the ability of any central government to control its peripheries. If a rebellion takes place, it takes a long time for the center to learn about it and respond, and by the time it does respond, there may be a rebellion taking place on the opposite side of its territory, which means it has to somehow recall and redeploy its forces. This results in a logistical nightmare for military planners. Hence, for all of these reasons, the general argument is that presupposing a fairly substantial communications lag to exist, centrifugal forces would tend to turn democratic federations into confederations, and confederations into independent states. Only a powerful, fear-inspiring central government that somehow, nonetheless, allows for a degree of local autonomy and for the rights and privileges of its local agents can withstand these forces. That, in a nutshell, is how we end up with feudalism.

Bruce Johnson (Traveller Mailing List, 01-July-2011) writes: “…there are purely logical limits to the power an emperor 25 jumps away can exert. The farther from the seat of power, the more abstract the power that can be wielded. (…) powers must be delegated to persons closer to the scene...but how do you keep such decentralized power centers from decentralizing completely? The answer, in Piper's case and in the Official Traveller Universe was a system of fealty; Rule of Man, where local control is devolved to the local nobility, who are bound by oaths of fealty (and the threat of the Imperial Navy) to uphold the Imperium and the Emperors’ policies.” Bruce goes on to write that the feudal system is not the only solution to this problem, but it is apparently a common one: “In the case of 18th-19th Century Britain, this was done via an extensive bureaucracy and a system whereby the distant colonial holdings were actually Crown-chartered business enterprises. (…) local governors had wide latitude and authority to manage the colonies. (…) Confucian China relied on a deeply entrenched and extensive civil service elite, thoroughly indoctrinated in the infallibility of the Emperor but with widely dispersed power. (…) The (Japanese) Shogunate relied on hostages…the local Daimyo, feudal lords who actually owned and controlled the territory (like the 3rd Imperium) were bound by oath to the Shogun and had to leave family members as ‘honored guests’ in Edo.”

The thing I don’t like about this argument is not that doesn’t make sense. The reason I don’t like it is that it frightens me. What Bruce seems to be saying, if I read him correctly, is that democracy is a fluke, that we could just as easily have ended up with a world essentially devoid of democracy, and that the way things turned out was in no way pre-ordained or even very likely. If order to understand why this frightens me, you have to understand what I more or less came to believe about the society in which I grew up. I don’t know how many people reading this are Americans, but for those who aren’t let me introduce you to our pledge of allegiance, the words that almost every schoolchild of my generation was taught to say at the beginning of every school day. It goes like this: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

I took these words to heart, believing first that there was something special about America, and as I came into adulthood, I slowly grew to believe that the primary reason that America had achieved global dominance was the same reason that democracy was spreading around the world in wave after wave of newly democratic states. The reason was this: most people (everyone except for tyrants and their stooges) want liberty and justice for all. Therefore any nation that came to embrace these qualities and to embody them as their core tenants would have reaped numerous benefits, ultimately resulting in greater economic efficiency as well as greater social harmony. I did not believe that our founders had invented a nirvana, but I believed they had constructed a much better society than any that had come before it, better not simply in a moral sense but better in terms of what actually works. To put it even more generally, I intuitively believed what Martin Luther King, Jr. had said, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” and that the human animal, by its very evolutionary psychology (which, I believe, would have been similar for any social creature evolving to the point of creating a technological society), naturally favored free and just societies, and therefore, democracy had, in a sense, been preordained from even before the very existence of human beings.

Some have argued that the key ingredient that was present in Western civilization that was not present to the same degree in its potential rivals was social mobility. Richard Aiken (Traveller Mailing List, 24-Oct-2012) writes, “…(Feudal) Europe and China allowed social mobility in a generational sense: you might be only a poor peasant, but your son might rise to be a well-off peasant, his son might be a rich peasant, and his son might be able to secure entrance to a craft guild. Someone along the way might even be knighted on the field for valor (or, in the case of China, pass the civil service test) and the family could thus even rise into the nobility. The big change was that Europe destabilized just enough, partly due to massive death tolls from the various plagues and partly from the fallout of religious war, without actually collapsing in chaos that a person's status could change within his own lifetime. China, on the other hand, ossified to the point that even generational mobility slowed to almost nothing.”

Even if the reason that Western Civilization ascended over Eastern Civilization was primarily because of differences in social mobility, Richard posits that this social mobility was not a result of some inherent trait of Western Society, resulting from, say, a Christian ethos or some set of philosophies bestowed upon Western Civilization by the ancient Greeks, but rather that it was the result of mere chance. I can’t help but wonder what Jared Diamond or Ian Morris would think of this particular analysis.

Jared Diamond is the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997), and Ian Morris is the author of Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal about the Future (2010). Diamond argues that the main reason that a Eurasian civilization was the first to technologically, economically, and militarily dominate its rivals was an accident of geography having more to do with the relative distribution of useful plant and animal species than with any sort of innate, cultural qualities the various, contending civilizations might possess. Morris goes further, suggesting that it was the discovery of the New World by European explorers that really sparked the economies of Europe, kick-starting a chain reaction of challenges and opportunities that led to the Industrial RevolutionThis view is hardly original; J.L and Barbara Hammond in The Rise of Modern Industry (1925) write, “For the new commerce the Atlantic was as important as the Mediterranean had been for the old,” going on to discuss mercantilism’s contribution to the Industrial Revolution and giving multiple reasons for why it began specifically in England as opposed to Spain.. The key point that Morris makes with respect to this discussion is that the reason it was The West (Europe) rather than The East (Asia) that discovered the continents of America was not because The West had better ships or better sailors. Rather, it was once again because of an accident of geography. It just so happened that The West was closer (because the Atlantic Ocean is narrower than the Pacific; when you take prevailing winds and ocean currents into account, it’s around half the distance), and therefore, according to Morris, The West was simply in a much better position to discover, colonize, and exploit the New World, kicking off the whole chain of events that led to a period of relative world domination. Yet neither author expressly brings social mobility into their thesis. Diamond doesn’t so much as mention it. Morris does, but only in passing, never striking upon it as the key determiner of The West’s inexorable rise.

Another historian, Rowan Gavin Paton Menzies, argues, albeit controversially, that the Chinese actually did discover the Americas before Columbus, but that the Chinese emperor decided that colonization would be too costly. His book, 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (2002) is widely regarded as pseudo-history, because he’s been unable to substantiate his claims to the standards required by most mainstream historians. Nonetheless, his work raises an interesting question. What if The East had gotten to The Americas before The West? Would the Industrial Revolution have occurred in China? And if so, then what of democracy… what of freedom? Maybe if the Chinese civil service examination had concentrated more on math, science, and engineering and less on literary composition, maybe then we’d be living in an entirely different world. Do I believe this? Not really.

Ultimately, I do believe that social mobility took center stage but that this could only have resulted from economic opportunity, which The East did not have nearly to the same extent as The West. The burning question of history is whether this was due primarily to the accidental discovery of the Americas by Europeans or whether it was due to something else about European society, such as the fact that there were so many rival nations packed so close together. If Asia were more balkanized, or if the Chinese Emperor had been less powerful, of if The East had experienced a long period of conflict between church and state, as had The West, would things have turned out differently? Maybe, yes. But I think that the key ingredient here is that risk-takers had to have options.

If Spain didn’t want to finance a voyage of discovery, then maybe Portugal, France, England, or Italy would do so. There was no shortage of European princes. Perhaps even the Pope could have been persuaded, if only to save the souls of foreign heathens. There is actually very strong evidence now that the Norse beat Columbus to the Americas by several hundred years, but they were unable to found any long-lasting colonies except in Greenland.

Hence, if I had to put all this into a general thesis, I would state that the decentralization of power leads to greater opportunities for risk-takers and therefore greater social mobility, which in turn leads to greater social, economic, and technological progress, whereas the centralization of power does exactly the opposite, ultimately resulting in missed opportunities and comparative social, economic, and technological stagnation. But, of course, my earlier thesis, that power tends to centralize (because shit floats) explains why civilizations tend to fall after they rise, and like Jason Barnabas said, bad leaders can destroy any sort of government if they put their minds to it.

Derek Wildstar (Traveller Mailing List, 24-Oct-2012) relates all this back to Traveller by noting that just as Earth was segregated into different societies, so too is Traveller’s Imperium, and so we shouldn’t make the mistake of casting the Imperium as monolithic: “In the Imperial core, it is practically impossible for anyone to become a member of the Imperial Nobility without being born into one of the noble families. In the core, particularly in Vilani cultural areas, disruptive innovations are heavily discouraged. However, even in the Classic Imperium, there are also places that are dynamic, particularly in the economic sense. IMTU, the Domain of Deneb is one of them. It is far enough from the Core that the megacorporations don’t dominate the economic scene, and it is possible for an entrepreneur to parlay a small stake and a lucky break into a relatively large business enterprise, particularly if he or she is based on a world with a dynamic culture and favorable government. It is still pretty hard for an ordinary citizen to rise above the rank of Knight, but not impossible.”

However, Derek’s argument about social mobility is predicated on the notion that there is greater economic opportunity at the periphery of the Imperium than in the core, and he explicitly notes that the prospective entrepreneur still needs a government favorable to entrepreneurship. Would these conditions even be likely to exist? It really all depends on the Imperium itself. It could be the case that the Emperor’s advisors have diligently studied their history, and so they realize that if you want to avoid stagnation, you have to allow some freedom. The question is how much, and how do you manage it: Do you have to allow freedom of speech, or is allowing economic freedom sufficient? If they are wise enough, and the Traveller literature seems to suggest that they are, then I could perhaps see the Imperium as an interstellar government that could exist for some period of time, but given the history of monarchies so far, I’d be very surprised if the Imperium allowed more political freedom than it deemed necessary.

Modern China appears to be a good example. They are allowing their subjects a fair degree of economic freedom while simultaneously clamping down on political speech. For how long will they be able to do this? I sincerely hope that I’m wrong, but I’m guessing that they’ll be able to keep doing it for as long as they want. Furthermore, suppressing dissent will become easier over time as technology increases in key areas such as surveillance, both physical and electronic. Instigating any sort of resistance right now is hard enough, but in the near future, it seems to me likely to become an increasingly infrequent exercise in futility and despair.

Every Traveller referee is, of course, free to determine how the Imperium would behave, despite the present example offered to us by China, and perhaps playing Traveller in a tyrannical Imperium would be too depressing for most players to handle. But honestly, I wish more Traveller referees would play the Imperium in just this way, if only to get their players to better appreciate the freedoms bequeathed to us by our predecessors who, unlike us, had to fight for them. Perhaps this might get the players to ask the question of what they themselves would be willing to do if the leaders of their own nation ever tried to take away this most sacred of all freedoms, the freedom of speech.