This is from an email Eric wrote, copied here with permission from his family. The only change was to remove the name of the original recipient in one spot.
– Bethanne Kim (Publisher, Eric Flint’s 1632 & Beyond magazine)
Baens Bar
October 23, 2010
Orwell’s view of things was much darker than my own. I think that may be because the socialist political movement I entered in the late 60s and early 70s was one that was already very familiar with the disastrous consequences of Stalinism, whereas to Orwell the betrayal of socialist principles was new and shocking.
To me, it’s always essential to maintain a sense of perspective. Specifically, I would point to the following:
1) The estimated death rate for males in hunting-gathering societies from violence at the hands of other men is in the vicinity of 30%. To put it another way, for at least 90% of our existence as a species we humans experienced a level of ongoing violence and brutality that was far worse than that experienced even by today’s inner-city gang members. Or members of Mexican drug cartels, for that matter. Or soldiers in World War II with the exception of a very small number of units.
2) The Thirty Years War is estimated to have killed at least 25% of central Europe’s population. Although it had a religious element, that war was fought primarily for narrow dynastic reasons. In contrast, at the end of World War II, the most destructive war in modern history and the one invariably pointed to as the example of the consequences of political extremism on the right and the left, the population of Europe was larger than it was at the start of the war.
3) Every year, at least one million people die from malaria, a disease which is quite controllable but because it now afflicts mainly poor people is not profitable to treat. Every year, an estimated five to six million children die from malnutrition, in a world which pays farmers not to produce food because there’s a glut of it on the market. To put it another way, business-as-usual:
a) sets off the equivalent of an Hiroshima atomic bomb every week, week after week after week;
b) kills as many people as in one year as Hitler killed Jews in six years;
b) kills as many people in three years as Stalin is claimed to have killed in twenty years (I say “claimed” because the estimates are based on Conquest’s methods which are preposterous)
And, just to put the cherry on top, business-as-usual tortures its victims to death — malnutrition is a drawn-out and hideous way to die — where Hitler and Stalin were comparatively merciful.
4) Over the past decade, probably as many people have died from violence (or its indirect effects) in the eastern Congo and southern and western Sudan as died in the Holocaust, and for no “great causes” whatsoever.
Yet… no one writes despairing essays about this ongoing, routine process of murder. No one goes to live in a stone hut in the Hebrides in order to write a bleak novel about business-as-usual.
Why? Well, it’s basically a gross lack of perspective. It’s honestly not much different from people gawking at the wreckage of a car accident or listening to the 10:00 PM news, which makes the world appear a very dangerous place. Yet the fact is that at least twenty times as many people die from smoking or over-eating as die from car accidents and fifty times as many as die from violence.
That’s why I have a basically sunny view of human history and our future. First, it’s nowhere near as bad as people think it is; second, things continue to improve as we deepen our civilization, although certainly not in a smooth and even manner; and, third, the great enemy is the same one it’s always been since Ugh swiped a stone ax from Grunt — not rampant ideology, which is a piker in the slaughter-wholesale department, but just the everyday routine habits of callousness, selfishness, greed and indifference. But that’s always been with us. These things take time. We evolved, we weren’t created.
Best, Eric
