So virulent are these responses—again, from both the Left and the Right—that I believe it is only a short step to the attempt to use the power of the state to enforce one’s views. On the right we have attempts to use the government to punish flag burners and to enforce state-sponsored praying. On the left, we have a ban on free speech and peaceable public assembly in front of abortion clinics and the attempt to use the power of the state to force the acceptance of homosexual relationships as equal to marriages. Each side feels absolutely justified in compelling others to accept their views.
It is puritanism, not in its separatist form, desiring to live by themselves by their own rules, but in its Cromwellian form, using the power of the state to enforce the dicta of one group throughout the wider society, by force rather than persuasion.
This despite the historical fact that the civilization that has created more prosperity and freedom for more people than ever before is one based on tolerance and pluralism, and that attempts to force one religion (theistic or atheistic) on the rest of a nation or the world inevitably lead to misery, poverty, and, usually, conflict.
Yet we seem only able to see the negative effects of coercion caused by the other team. Progressives see the danger of allowing fanatical religions (which, by some definitions, means “all of them”) to have control of government—they need only point to Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Taliban, or, in a more general and milder sense, the entire Muslim world, which is oppressed precisely to the degree that Islam is enforced as the state religion.
Conservatives, on the other hand, see the danger of allowing fanatical atheistic religions to have control of government, pointing to Nazi Germany and all Communist nations as obvious examples of political utopianism run amok.
Yet neither side can see any connection between their own fanaticism and the historical examples that might apply to them. People insisting on a Christian America simply cannot comprehend that others view them as the Taliban-in-waiting; those who insist on progressive exclusivism in America are outraged at any comparison between them and Communist totalitarianism. Even as they shun or fire or deny tenure to those who disagree with them, everybody thinks it’s the other guy who would be the oppressor, while our side would simply “set things to rights.”
Rarely do people set out to start a civil war. Invariably, when such wars break out both sides consider themselves to be the aggrieved ones. Right now in America, even though the Left has control of all the institutions of cultural power and prestige—universities, movies, literary publishing, mainstream journalism—as well as the federal courts, they feel themselves oppressed and threatened by traditional religion and conservatism. And even though the Right controls both houses of Congress and the presidency, as well as having ample outlets for their views in nontraditional media and an ever-increasing dominance over American religious and economic life, they feel themselves oppressed and threatened by the cultural dominance of the Left.
And they are threatened, just as they are also threatening, because nobody is willing to accept the simple idea that someone can disagree with their group and still be a decent human being worthy of respect.
Can it lead to war?
Very simply, yes. The moment one group feels itself so aggrieved that it uses either its own weapons or the weapons of the state to “prevent” the other side from bringing about its supposed “evil” designs, then that other side will have no choice but to take up arms against them. Both sides will believe the other to be the instigator.
The vast majority of people will be horrified—but they will also be mobilized whether they like it or not.
It’s the lesson of Yugoslavia and Rwanda. If you were a Tutsi just before the Rwandan holocaust who did not hate Hutus, who married a Hutu, who hired Hutus or taught school to Hutu students, it would not have stopped Hutus from taking machetes to you and your family. You would have had only two choices: to die or to take up arms against Hutus, whether you had previously hated them or not.
But it went further. Knowing they were doing a great evil, the Hutus who conducted the pogroms also killed any Hutus who were “disloyal” enough to try to oppose taking up arms.
Likewise in Yugoslavia. For political gain, Serbian leaders in the post-Tito government maintained a drumbeat of Serbian manifest-destiny propaganda, which openly demonized Croatian and Muslim people as a threat to good Serbs. When Serbs in Bosnia took up arms to “protect themselves” from being ruled by a Muslim majority—and were sponsored and backed by the Serbian government—what choice did a Bosnian Muslim have but to take up arms in self-defense? Thus both sides claimed to be acting in self-defense, and in short order, they were.
And as both Rwanda and Bosnia proved, clear geographical divisions are not required in order to have brutal, bloody civil wars. All that is required is that both sides come to believe that if they do not take up arms, the other side will destroy them.
In America today, we are complacent in our belief that it can’t happen here. We forget that America is not an ethnic nation, where ancient ties of blood can bind people together despite differences. We are created by ideology; ideas are our only connection. And because today we have discarded the free marketplace of ideas and have polarized ourselves into two equally insane ideologies, so that each side can, with perfect accuracy, brand the other side as madmen, we are ripe for that next step, to take preventive action to keep the other side from seizing power and oppressing our side.
The examples are—or should be—obvious. That we are generally oblivious to the excesses of our own side merely demonstrates how close we already are to a paroxysm of self-destruction.
We are waiting for Fort Sumter.
I hope it doesn’t come.
Meanwhile, however, there is this novel, in which I try to show characters who struggle to keep from falling into the insanity—yet who also try to prevent other people’s insanity from destroying America. This book is fiction. It is entertainment. I do not believe a new American civil war is inevitable; and if it did happen, I do not believe it would necessarily take the form I show in this book, politically or militarily. Since the war depicted in these pages has not happened, I am certainly not declaring either side in our polarized public life guilty of causing it. I only say that for the purposes of this story, we have this set of causes; in the real world, if we should ever be so stupid as to allow a civil war to happen again, we would obviously have a different set of specific causes.
We live in a time when people like me, who do not wish to choose either camp’s ridiculous, inconsistent, unrelated ideology, are being forced to choose—and to take one whole absurd package or the other.
We live in a time when moderates are treated worse than extremists, being punished as if they were more fanatical than the actual fanatics.
We live in a time when lies are preferred to the truth and truths are called lies, when opponents are assumed to have the worst conceivable motives and treated accordingly, and when we reach immediately for coercion without even bothering to find out what those who disagree with us are actually saying.
In short, we are creating for ourselves a new dark age—the darkness of blinders we voluntarily wear, and which, if we do not take them off and see each other as human beings with legitimate, virtuous concerns, will lead us to tragedies whose cost we will bear for generations.
Or, maybe, we can just calm down and stop thinking that our own ideas are so precious that we must never give an inch to accommodate the heartfelt beliefs of others.
How can we accomplish that? It begins by scorning the voices of extremism from the camp we are aligned with. Democrats and Republicans must renounce the screamers and haters from their own side instead of continuing to embrace them and denouncing only the screamers from the opposing camp. We must moderate ourselves instead of insisting on moderating the other guy while keeping our own fanaticism alive.
In the long run, the great mass of people who simply want to get on with their lives can shape a peaceful f
uture. But it requires that they actively pursue moderation and reject extremism on every side, and not just on one. Because it is precisely those ordinary people, who don’t even care all that much about the issues, who will end up suffering the most from any conflict that might arise.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My First and greatest thanks must go to Donald Mustard and his team at Chair Entertainment, who began developing the videogame of Empire and yet held off on committing to any storyline so that I would be free to let the characters, situations, and events of this novel develop organically. Their development work provided the premise of a new American civil war, the mechs and the hovercycles, the falling and rising water level in a lake in the state of Washington, and the hero whose life ends, leaving others to carry on to victory. These were potent seeds to nurture in a story that is otherwise my own.
Over the past few years, as my novel Ender’s Game has been more and more widely read and discussed within America’s military communities, I have had opportunities to meet many soldiers and have been deeply impressed, not just by the standard military virtues of courage, commitment, and loyalty, but also by the level of intelligence, education, open-mindedness, initiative, tolerance, patience, and wisdom that are not just the virtues of individuals, but the virtues admired and striven for within a surprisingly vibrant and healthy portion of American society. Our military is, of course, not immune to the diseases that afflict all such institutions throughout the world, but they are aware of those potential problems and many brilliant and dedicated officers and soldiers constantly seek to avoid them in their service to our country. I salute them.
However, I do not name them, mostly because I would not want any of them to be blamed for the many errors I am bound to have made in this book. I have never served in the military, and when trying to depict a complex and long-lived society, no amount of research can compensate for lack of membership in it. The mistakes here are my own. To those who have helped me achieve such understanding as I managed to achieve, I give my thanks. You know who you are. Godspeed to you.
During the writing of this book I relied, as never before, on the Internet. When I make up a fantasy or science fictional world, or work in a historical period, the Internet is usually quite useless. I am relying either on my imagination or on historical information so arcane and detailed that it can only be found in books. With Empire, however, I was working in the very near future, and so contemporary information was essential.
The website usmilitary.about.com provided me with information about the specific weapons that my characters would be carrying into combat. Google Maps took me moment by moment through chase scenes and combat in Washington, D.C., and New York City and helped me find Cole’s route into Washington State; Google Earth gave me two imaginary reservoirs behind impractical dams in the stretch of land near Highway 12 between Mount Saint Helens and Mount Rainier.
As always, I relied on my team of pre-readers. Since they have lives of their own, I sometimes churn out chapters when they can’t take time to read them. Thus over the progress of a novel, I will be helped now by this reader, now by another. Early in the writing of this book, Aaron Johnston and Erin and Phillip Absher gave me quick and valuable responses; later on, the burden shifted onto Kathryn H. Kidd and Geoffrey Card, who kept me alert to problems and possibilities. Errors were also caught by members of the online forum at my Hatrack.com website, including Alexis Gray and Marc Van Pelt.
Of course Donald Mustard, who was creating the game right along with my writing of the novel, saw every chapter and responded helpfully. In particular, I owe to him and his brother Jeremy some of the closure in the last two chapters.
And I was much encouraged by the observations of my friend and colleague Lynn Hendee, on whose judgment I have long relied.
As with all my books, every chapter was seen first by my wife, Kristine, who as always caught many errors and alerted me to problems that no one else noticed. Until she is pleased, the chapter is not done.
And my editor, Beth Meacham, not only gave me excellent suggestions at key points in the writing process, she also set aside other work to read the chapters the moment they were written. Because of that, and her heroic labors on behalf of the book when it took longer to develop the story than I had anticipated, we were able to meet the deadline to get this book published in the fall of 2006, a mere four months after I finished writing it.
I also appreciate the rest of the staff at TOR who have gone the extra mile to make up for my lateness and to compensate for my errors. I’m proud of how you made this book look and how you brought it before the public.
And to my publisher, Tom Doherty: Thank you for betting on a pig in a poke and trusting me to deliver. That you do not have an ulcer is entirely not my fault.
Barbara Bova, my agent, is both my protector and provocateur—it’s been an exciting thirty years, hasn’t it?
And to Zina Card, who spent hours watching episodes of 24 with Kristine and me so I could keep in mind the rhythms and energy of an effective thriller, thank you for your delightful company and your patience with my need to make you visit Washington, D.C., twice this summer. Now you get your normal family back—at least until the next book.
Orson Scott Card, Empire
(Series: Empire # 1)
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