Orson Scott Card makes me think…

Today a friend, and fellow Sci-Fi enthusiast, told me that I should read a book called “Empire” by Orson Scott Card. Having read a fair amount of Card’s work in the past I recently picked up the Empire and read the first two chapters.

There is one bit of test in the second chapter that I found very thought provoking. The scene is that a American soldier is in a political science class at Princeton university being taught by a professor who is somewhat famous for his left wing ideas. The professor is having his class compare modern day America with Imperial Rome. The professor has stated that, in his opinion. America is still in a Republic phase, not an imperial phase. The professor also states that America only buys and sells things, that it is a successful nation state because it has a very powerful military and economy, but it lacks an Augusts to push it into an imperial age

America is at the end of its republic. Just as the Roman Senate and counsls became incapable of ruling their widespread holdings and fighting off their enemies, so America’s antiquated Constitution is a joke. Bureaucrats and courts make most of the decisions, while the press decides which Presidents will have enough public support to govern. We lurch forward by inerita alone, but if America is to be an enduring polity, it can’t continue this way… The American idea was thrown out with Social Security. We nailed the coffin shut with group rights. We don’t want individual liberty because we don’t want individual responsibility. We want somebody else to take care of us. If we had a dictator who did a better job of it than our present system, then as long as he pretended to respect Congress, we’d like his hands like dogs.

The American Soldier says that given the choice between becoming a imperial power the way that Rome did under Augustus and falling, he would rather that America just fall.

The complexity of this issue, and the way that Card turns the roles of Princeton professor and American Soldier on their heads is very interesting to me. Both as a reader, and someone who thinks about politics.