[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

David Brin is a scientist talking about things that are well outside his field, among them history, philosophy, sociology and literature. The PhD that he quotes so prominently at the head of his article is in Space Science, which is why everything he says that isn't directly related to astrophysics is either egregiously wrong, grossly over-simplified or common knowledge. What he does manage to do very well is to put forward an absolutely typical scientist's view that thanks to science we are daily approaching the Utopia of Technology, from which we may infer that Science is Important and that Scientists Are Our Benefactors (does that sound to anyone else like a public information film from the 1960s?). Brin is also infected with the idea that the only alternative to American republican democracy is Stalinist dictatorship (monarchy of all kinds and in all places being the same thing by another name), and that's before we even begin to consider his apparent claim that you can have either reason or romance, never both. The sad fact is that all of Brin's opinions as expressed in this article arise from ignorance and prejudice: the prejudice of the sciences against the humanities, the prejudice of the modern against the ancient, and the prejudice of the liberal democrat against all other forms of society.

I thought I recognised this article, and I've been able to track down a thread in which we all had a good old dig at it a few years ago ( J.R.R. Tolkien -- enemy of progress?). Bill Ferny in particular makes the points I wish I could make, and others that require a great deal more education. Obviously one would normally assume that someone wanting to compare the modern and medieval worlds by the application of philosophy would have first tried to acquire an extensive knowledge of those subjects, but as the thread I've linked to above makes abundantly clear, that is not always the case. Also, quoting your degrees in an irrelevant context is pretentious in the extreme, particularly when it's done to mislead the reader into thinking that you're a professional academic, when in fact you're a writer of second-rate science fiction. If you've read Brin's The Postman (in which a character tries to improve the present by resurrecting an idealised version of the past), you'll understand just how laughable it is for him to assume an attitude of superiority towards any writer, living or dead.

I was going to end there, but my natural vindictiveness demands that I attack at least one specific point, so I'll have a couple.

It's only been two hundred years or so -- an eyeblink -- that 'scientific enlightenment' began waging its rebellion against the nearly-universal pattern called feudalism, a hierarchic system that ruled our ancestors in every culture that developed both metallurgy and agriculture.

Except that feudalism didn't develop as a political system until the appearance of expensive heavy cavalry on the European battlefield, before which there was no such thing. Under feudalism, all land is owned by the king, who allows his followers to use it in return for service. Each major lord has lesser lords who owe him fealty, and so on down to the serf, who gives labour, military service and a share of his crops in return for a strip of land to farm for himself. Anglo-Saxon kingship didn't work like that, nor did monarchy in Scandinavia. In eleventh-century Iceland, there was no king at all, and the country was governed by a system of assemblies open to all citizens. For half a millennium, Rome was a republic, governed by democratically elected officials, albeit with a very restricted franchise; and this system was itself borrowed from ancient Greece, where the very term democratia was coined. So such ancestors of Americans as Englishmen, Germans, Swedes, Danes, Norwegians, Greeks and Italians did not always live under feudalism. The Irish had developed a sophisticated system of elective monarchy, combined with a rule of law from which even the highest were not exempt, before the fall of the Roman empire; and the Africans whose descendents are Brin's countrymen organised themselves in clans that wouldn't have known feudalism if it had jumped up and given them a haircut. Most of our ancestors, no matter who 'we' are, did not live under feudalism. In fact, only a statistically minute number of people ever have. Of course, if your grounding in history came from watching Ben Hur once when you were at school you might be a bit sketchy on the differences between nineteenth-century Zululand and seventeenth-century France, but in that case you shouldn't be making sweeping generalisations about their respective political systems.

Long before Aristotle became a tool of the establishment, his rediscovery during the High Middle Ages offered some relief from dour anti-intellectualism.

If Aristotle ever became a tool of the establishment, it was around the time that his works were rediscovered, courtesy of the Moslem scholars who hadn't lost them in the first place, brought to Europe via the Kingdom of Jerusalem and translated into Latin, which is scarcely the language of the common man. However, if it's anti-intellectual for Arabic-speaking Europeans to discover a lost Greek writer through the works of Moslem philosophers, for other writers to translate his corpus into Latin for wider dissemination, and for still more to use the new learning to advance European philosophy, then it's an odd sort of anti-intellectualism. If anything, medieval academics were even more eager for knowledge and enamoured of learning than their modern counterparts, seeming to delight in all forms of academic pursuit with the enthusiasm of those for whom learning was a rare and marvellous gift. The Middle Ages were a period of constant experimentation in literature, both Latin and vernacular, allied with a rediscovery of the ancient world and the development of new philosophical ideas and political systems. One of the foundations of logical scientific thought, Occam's Razor, was propounded by a fourteenth-century friar, and William of Ockham was not the only man of his age to be developing intellectual tools or scientific theories. As for keeping the fruits of learning from the common man, Alfred the Great was personally translating important Christian works from Latin into English in the ninth century, for the specific purpose of bringing important works to a wider, less educated audience. In his translation of Boethius, he introduces the new analogy of a wagon wheel to explain the interrelationship between fate and God's foreknowledge, reducing a complex idea to an image that could be understood by even the lowliest of his subjects. If this is the feudalist anti-intellectualism of early England, I think I could live with it; and Alfred was no isolated example, but working in a distinct tradition of educational revival that goes back at least as far as Charlemagne. But of course I'd say that: being that I live in a monarchical state, I must have no freedom of expression or movement, and the obligation to turn up with bow and knife whenever Lord Clinton needs to raise troops for the Duke of Devonshire.

I think that's enough sniping from me. Doubtless David Brin was not being entirely serious when he wrote his article, as I hope he wasn't entirely serious when he decided to give a book the title Tomorrow Happens; so perhaps I should take his comments with a pinch of salt. The form of technocratic utopianism that he espouses was common coin in the 1950s, but has been abandoned by all but the most determined fantasists since then, and for obvious reasons; so perhaps there's some hidden joke that I don't quite understand. Then again, how many people outside the science-fiction community care what David Brin thinks anyway? This is scarcely going to persuade dyed-in-the-wool Tolkienistas that they've wasted their lives, and outside this forum I could probably count on the thumbs of one hand the number of people I know who have even heard of the man.