A question for David Weber: Does survival outweigh personal freedom?

[Dr. Strange]

Tor publicist Kyle Avery recently sat down with David Weber, author of By Schism Rent Asunder, to talk about politics, religion, and character in Weber’s Safehold series. This is an excerpt from that conversation.

KA: The leaders of Safehold believe that the survival of the human race—at any cost—is far more important than any abridgement of basic human rights. In your mind, does survival outweigh personal freedom? If so, to what degree?

DW: The leaders of “present day” Safehold don’t believe that the survival of the human race is far more important than any abridgment of basic human rights. But the founders of Safehold and the creators of the Church of God Awaiting believed that, after a conflict in which the human race really did face extinction.

Their actions were an example of “the ends justify the means” on a cosmic scale, and I personally have always rejected the notion that “the ends justify the means.” It’s true that people and nations often have to choose between two evils, and sometimes someone has to violate deeply held principles or fundamental rules of law to accomplish something which seems to be—and may well be—of overriding importance. When that happens, however, I think we have a responsibility to go back later and admit the violation. And to explore whether or not the violation truly was necessary, both for our own sakes and for the sake of posterity.

In large part, that’s what the Charisians are doing in the Safehold novels. They are looking at the decisions made by the “Archangels” and judging them from the perspective of the people who have had to deal with the consequences of those decisions. Frankly, the “Archangels” aren’t making out very well in the Charisians’ opinion.

Still, it’s just a bit too easy to fault Langhorne and the other Archangels. They were confronted with an extraordinarily stark decision, and they knew that whatever they decided was going to determine whether or not the human race survived at all. That’s an awful hefty “end” when it comes to justifying “means.”

I like to think that if I’d been there, I would have been on the side of Pei Shan-wei and the other dissidents who died for their principles. I think my love for and study of history would probably have convinced me that Langhorne and Bédard were wrong because the system they were setting up was ultimately unsustainable, but if I’d spent my entire life watching the human race being hammered closer and closer to extinction, that might not have seemed quite so clear to me.

In the end, I think, what it comes down to is that for personal freedom to exist, it is first necessary to survive. If we do not survive, then nothing of our philosophical legacy, our belief in the value of the individual, will survive either. But if we do survive, then even if that entire philosophical legacy is lost in the process, there is always the possibility that those beliefs, or something very like them, will someday emerge once more.

People tend to misremember the story of King Canute. The story that is usually repeated is of the vain king standing on the beach forbidding the tide to come in as a proof of his power. The actual legend holds that King Canute went to the beach because he was exasperated with the flattery of his courtiers, who kept insisting that he could do anything he wanted to. So he stood just below the tide line and commanded the tide not to come in. Then, when it was sloshing around his ankles, he walked up to his courtiers and advisers and said, more or less, “Well, it would appear that there are in fact some things I can’t do, wouldn’t it?”

Langhorne and Bédard were a reflection of the more widely cited, flawed version of the story, guilty of the vanity of believing they could control the tides of history and human development. Shan-wei and her adherents were the recipients of the wisdom of the actual legend and realized that ultimately, humans who survive will still be humans, and that personal freedom cannot be permanently destroyed so long as that is true.

If you're on the Tor/Forge mailing list, you probably already saw this. The book By Schism Rent Asunder sounds interesting. Anybody read it?

[needledriver]

1. By Schism Rent Asunder

Yes. I read it as soon as our library got it. Not as tightly paced at the first one, but it has a lot more ground to cover. It spends a lot of time laying groundwork for the next in the series. You might almost choose to wait until the next one is published - a major plot thread is not resolved in BSRU. Altogether a good read!