Stagnation

[TMA_1]

I have been thinking about this for a bit, and iti s rather important to talk about.

Stagnation in the Duniverse is such an important key, culturally, mentally, and physically. The ages in Dune always follow the same climax, followed by a slow degradation over time until a sudden and abrupt cultural reaction follows. Sometimes this is intentional, and sometimes it isnt.

In the Butlerian Jihad, the machines had put humanity into a complete state of apathy and weakness. Thinking machines, and largely those tyrants who controlled the thinking machines took advantage of the state of weakness in those times and tried to conquer.

The Butlerian jihad was there to answer the call to stop that though. Undoubtedly the jihad did almost as much harm as it did good, and many things that were good were destroyed. Not only this but a phobia of any sort of digital computer plagued the post jihad era. This was because of the extreme subjectivity of the term "thinking machine". Still though the jihad itself revitalized humanity, and was important to keep humanity alive. We can see this in the great schools of thinking that were created after the great revolt. These schools retrained humanity for goals that were much different than the pre-jihad era. Even space travel had to be controlled by organic means with the help of the spice forced evolution of the navigators. It is obvious that the jihad wasreally a way of taking humanity out of the stagnation of that same apathy and weakness that would eventually be the doom of all.

even after this, thousands of years into the future when paul inadvertantly started the future jihads, we can see this same situation. paul eventually laid the ground-works, even if he didnt know it yet, for his son Leto II to start the new war against human stagnation which would be called The Golden Path. This was done as a means to force people to travel outside their own bounds. For thousands of years, humanity had been cornered largely on their own specific worlds, unable to spread their differing genetic traits through the galaxy. Leto II would again change this all with his plan of forced repression which created the slingshot effect of the scattering.

It seems to me that Stagnation is an important theme in the Dune books. The idea that change is a matter of life and death. It seems to me so amazing that Frank Herbert would point out that without real change, something really does die inside us. Without change around us, how can we change as humans? I just throught I would write on this because I thought it was really important to bring up. We as humans require change. Maybe we dont even see that for all the evils that great events create, they also stir something within us, and wake us up.

What do you guys think? 

[Mahdi]

Well, I've been saying that for years.  In every Leto II vs. Paul and Golden path discussion on this forum I've said stagnation and its avoidance was the single biggest driving force in Paul.

[Sober]

It's been happening over history just like Dune.

Take the Crusades for instance. (They are also Jihads, if you believe it.) Before, the Europeans were intolerant morons that hated anyone (specifically the Arabs) and their religion, culture. At the time, the Arabs had medicine, the number 0, they took baths regularily. The Europeans that went to the Crusades came back and there was this revitalization of Classical works (Greek + Roman) that they once thought were pagan, and they started adopting things like the Arabic number system (as apposed to the Roman numerals), they started taking regular baths, using medicine that didn't involve the 4 humours. (Otherwise, we'd still be doing bloodletting, I guess). Many other things were established during the Crusades such as many knight orders (Teutonic Knights, for instance). Before, there was just a bunch of people going about their daily lives with what their religion had taught them, etc.

Close parallel to Stagnation/Expansion in Dune. People go about their daily lives, some kind of "catastrophe" and all of a sudden, cultural/econmical/technological expansion. Since Herbert's stagnation involved such a large scale, he obviously made it more important that it included the human race and it's survival.

[TMA_1]

hehe I know mahdi, in fact I myself have noticed this for quite awhile and posts in the duniverse section have helped cement my ideas. Its just that there hasent been a new thread on Dune Theory in a bit, and this is a huge theme in the dune universe.

Good points too sober, but if this thread was in prp, I would argue with ya on some of the details. hehe  :)  revisionism can go a bit too far sometimes in my opinion. But lets not discuss this or else it will all go off topic and this is a cool topic to explore.

*by the way sober, want to talk about the specific issues of the crusades sometime? would make for an interesting discussion.*

[Egeides]

I have the impression that, while some other factors also come in, an extreme opens paths for the other extreme (as in the stock market, human psychology). For example, when humans debate and discuss non-stop about how everything is nice and perfect, it gets biased on one side; then the more time passes, the more artificially/unbalanced it builds up and the more that possibilities show to bring the opposite in the discussion to balance.

The Renaissance and its arguments, with what followed, seems to show this. Hegel, Kant, Schopenhauer and so on: while the Renaissance brought men to discover a world of new and magnificent things, they went alot on this without showing both sides (that is, without also portraying some particular uglinesses instead of staying on universal beauty). Thus some came to say "Nope, there's that and this". And so, to balance the gold on one side of the balance, lumps of lead were thrown on the other side, with the unsecure period that may follow due to the balance restabilizing to such heavy weight thrown around.

This is of course on the ideological field, but it seems to be like this on other fields as well, from stock market (material production) to art (feelings). And so we get an Hegelian mechanism: argument, counter-argument, synthesis. And again. I would hope for a more efficient society to keep a mechanism of balance instead of getting stuck in any kind of cycles (where energy is lost: just look stock market bubbles and crash).

Sometimes it is getting unrealistically pink, sometimes pitch black. Sometimes it is utopically risky, sometimes just too darkly underestimating. Sometimes too "apocalyptic scenario" and postmodern, sometimes too "Atlantide-like" created utopia. Sometimes it is too rationally positivist, sometimes too empirically destined. Sometimes too oriented towards an ideal Platonism, sometimes too down-to-Earth Aristotelism. It's all one and same thing, and so Herbert inscribes his stagnation/revival in this scheme, just as he inscribes himself within this boom/bust conception of history just as Hegel is seen by some as post-Renaissance.