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- What actions do your beliefs make easy?
Visiting Southeast Asia after almost a decade and a half away shook me.
One smaller heart-dropping moment was passing a sales room for BYD, the electric car manufacturer. It put something in place.
Yes, Malaysia had come closer to the American dream. Suburbs, and a car-based culture, where once it was cities, villages, and plastic-bodied scooters.
How?
It was China. Chinese credit brought the American dream to Malaysia.
And this car dealership in Singapore showed something else. It offered five course meals. Can you imagine an American car company doing that? Can you imagine massage seats in a Chevy Tahoe?
In India, I got a whiff of the frenzy of street capitalism. The hope and life it held.
Against all that, it felt like I was from a dying world. Once resplendent, once a city on a hill. Now waning.
Yet, I should've known. Different belief systems yield different results.
Like picking the tool that fits the job, our descendants will need a toolbox of belief systems.
Consider space colonization in phases.
Decision to leave Earth.
Breakout, the first dangerous missions.
Foothold, keeping the first settlement alive.
Growth, turning a foothold into a population.
Expansion of settlements.
Stabilization of many worlds.
Persistence across millenia.
Of the worldviews we've experienced, not all are suited to each. And in some cases, one might fit better than all others.
For example, the Decision to leave Earth. This doesn't strike me as very Confucian or Daoist.
Rather, it feels like an impulse from the ancient Greek. The impulse that strives for excellence which makes glory immortal.
Perhaps you've watched Troy (2004).
Consider Glaucus, on the side of Troy, talking to Diomedes, an Achaean. Enemies who respect each other.
Hippolochus begat me and of him do I declare that I am sprung; and he sent me to Troy and straitly charged me ever to be bravest and pre-eminent above all, and not bring shame upon the race of my fathers, that were far the noblest in Ephyre and in wide Lycia. This is the lineage and the blood whereof I avow me sprung.” So spake he, and Diomedes, good at the warcry, waxed glad.
And from Alexander the Great to his men:
Glorious are the deeds of those who undergo labour and run the risk of danger; and it is delightful to live a life of valour and to die leaving behind immortal glory.
Do ye not know that our ancestor reached so great a height of glory as from being a man to become a god, or to seem to become one, not by remaining in Tiryns or Argos, or even in the Peloponnese or at Thebes?
The labours of Dionysus were not few, and he was too exalted a deity to be compared with Heracles. But we, indeed, have penetrated into regions beyond Nysa; and the rock of Aornus, which Heracles was unable to capture, is in our possession.
Do ye also add the parts of Asia still left unsubdued to those already acquired, the few to the many. But what great or glorious deed could we have performed, if, sitting at ease in Macedonia, we had thought it sufficient to preserve our own country without any labour, simply repelling the attacks of the nations on our frontiers—the Thracians, Illyrians, and Triballians—or even those Greeks who were unfriendly to our interests?
If, indeed, without undergoing labour and being free from danger I were acting as your commander, while you were undergoing labour and incurring danger, not without reason would you be growing faint in spirit and resolution, because you alone would be sharing the labours, while procuring the rewards of them for others.
But now the labours are common to you and me, we have an equal share of the dangers, and the rewards are open to the free competition of all. For the land is yours, and you act as its viceroys.
What shape of attention that worldview must create.
One that searches to be first, to win a place in memory from action thought impossible.
This lives on in the American spirit, shaped as we are by the ancient Greeks.
What of the breakout?
That time when all will seem doomed.
Boldness is better than plaints can be
For him whose feet must fare;
To a destined day has mine age been doomed,
And my life’s span thereto laid.
On the ground, full low, the slain are lying;
Most are there of the men of thy race.
Nought hast thou won, for thy fate it was
Brave men to bring to the battlefield.
Then Sigrun wept. Helgi said:
“Grieve not, Sigrun, the battle is gained;
The fighter can shun not his fate.”
Here we have the Norse, a culture fit for going out to certain doom.
So our settlers have made it. They have to make the first foothold. Now, they will need a different worldview. One that emphasizes system.
We can look at Octavian.
I rebuilt it without any inscription of my own name.
I restored the channels of the aqueducts, which in several places were falling into disrepair through age, and doubled the capacity of the aqueduct called the Marcia by turning a new spring into its channel.
I completed the Julian Forum and the basilica between the temple of Castor and the temple of Saturn, works begun and far advanced by my father. When the same basilica was destroyed by fire, I began its reconstruction on an enlarged site, to be inscribed with the names of my sons, and ordered that, in case I should not live to complete it, it should be completed by my heirs.
From the Roman Principate, we get a culture that seeks to order. This is closest to the Confucian/Legalist/Daoist trifecta.
Where the Greek looks for what can elevate, and the Norse looks at what must be faced, the Roman sees what needs order. Which any settlement will need to succeed.
So we get our foothold. What will grow it best?
But, said he, notwithstanding our afflictions, we have obtained a land of promise, a land which is choice above all other lands—a land which the Lord God hath covenanted with me should be a land for the inheritance of my seed.
Yea, the Lord hath covenanted this land unto me, and to my children forever, and also to all those who should be led out of other countries by the hand of the Lord.
Perhaps the Mormons. Those who look for what can take root, and multiply.
And again, as pertaining to the law of the priesthood—if any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another, and the first give her consent, and if he espouse the second, and they are virgins, and have vowed to no other man, then is he justified; he cannot commit adultery for they are given unto him; for he cannot commit adultery with that that belongeth unto him and to no one else.
Next week we'll continue this exercise with the Expansion, Stabilization, and Persistence phases.