The Divine Right of Kings

[Svrtnsse]

This got me thinking about something else; technological and scientific progress. If the Great Chain of Being can be maintained more easily, for example through magic and the actions of the gods, how would that affect science?
My spontaneous reaction is that science would progress at a slower rate. It would still progress, but I'm thinking that authorities concerned with maintaining some kind of balance would be reluctant to allow for inventions that could potentially upset said balance. Yes, no?

 

[Guy]

This got me thinking about something else; technological and scientific progress. If the Great Chain of Being can be maintained more easily, for example through magic and the actions of the gods, how would that affect science?
My spontaneous reaction is that science would progress at a slower rate. It would still progress, but I'm thinking that authorities concerned with maintaining some kind of balance would be reluctant to allow for inventions that could potentially upset said balance. Yes, no?

I'd say so. The church was largely resistant to much scientific knowledge, their little disagreement with Galileo being an example many are familiar with. Also, medical knowledge was retarded because dissection of human corpses was often (though not always) considered desecration of the dead.

 

[Svrtnsse]

Cheers, makes sense to me.

Add to that the fact that it may be possible through magical means to provide some (privileged) people with benefits that non-magical inventions would have been able to provide to everyone. - I can see how that would break down the speed of progress.

 

[Malik]

I needed to justify medieval stasis for my series. The availability of magic - primarily telekinesis, telepathy, and heightened psychic ability; not so much the fireball-throwing sort - has certainly slowed scientific progress simply because nobody needs to know why trees grow or fire burns. Herbalism and psychic surgery supplant the need for medical research.

Also, the world is orbiting a giant planet, and the tidal pull causes cataclysms every thousand years or so, on a scale that would make Michael Bay blanch. (It also makes for really cool landscapes.) Not everybody dies in these cataclysms, but civilization in general takes it in the shorts. Then it's a few hundred years of rebuilding, and several hundred years of relative stability before the next Big One. Psychic ability is more or less hereditary, so it sticks around each time, and their society is built around the idea that there are people who can do this stuff.

The privatized rule concept of feudalism, with areas of responsibility resident in the estates and a system of checks and balances among the ruling class (even if enforced from horseback with a great big axe), seems to me like an expedient way to rebuild each time. It works, and it's what they remember. They go with it.

I would love to read a series set in what the Middle Ages would have looked like if the Islamic Caliphates had conquered Europe: engineering, medicine, libraries, public education, philosophy, art, social welfare, and elected councils of educated people advising a dynastic autocracy.

But with dragons, wizards, and axe fights.

 

[Guy]

I needed to justify medieval stasis for my series. The availability of magic - primarily telekinesis, telepathy, and heightened psychic ability; not so much the fireball-throwing sort - has certainly slowed scientific progress simply because nobody needs to know why trees grow or fire burns. Herbalism and psychic surgery supplant the need for medical research.

One of the rules regarding magic in my world is that not everyone responds well to it. Just as some people have fatal reactions to some medicines, so some people have fatal (or at least very nasty) reactions to magic. For that reason, physicians still exist in my world.

Also, the world is orbiting a giant planet, and the tidal pull causes cataclysms every thousand years or so, on a scale that would make Michael Bay blanch. (It also makes for really cool landscapes.) Not everybody dies in these cataclysms, but civilization in general takes it in the shorts. Then it's a few hundred years of rebuilding, and several hundred years of relative stability before the next Big One.

Damn, I wish I'd thought of that.

 

[Malik]

Damn, I wish I'd thought of that.

Don't feel bad. It took me five years of hand-waves before I came up with it and about ten more to work in all of the effects. The seas are impassable, with long, tsunami-like thirty-foot swells on a calm day. Lakes have tides. Fertility rates are slowed way down. The giant planet takes up a huge chunk of the sky . . .

Nix the domed city, but about this big.​

. . . and glows purple at night bright enough to cast shadows; yet there's a six-day period of total, abject darkness four times a year as they transit and pass through its shadow. I had to build a whole social and supernatural background about darkness for a people who lived in perpetual light; they use the same word for "dead" and "dark." It goes on and on.

/hijack.

 

[Jabrosky]

I actually have thought up a world with periodic cataclysms that would knock civilizations down even before reading Malik's post. However, I attribute the inspiration for that concept to Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age.

 

[skip.knox]

So, modern folk tend to have rather odd ideas about kingship. For example, they picture the institution as being more or less one thing. But there were many kinds of kings. Hereditary kingship, inheritance restricted to eldest son, fits only a handful of European countries (I can't answer for elsewhere in the world) and only for a few centuries (~1300 to 1900). Even then, as others have noted, the powers of the king were limited in a variety of ways, both theoretical and practical. Pre-modern states were incredibly inefficient. Add in human bungling (seems to be a constant), and it's astonishing kings could get much of anything done. Getting it done consistently across generations was even harder.

Kings did not make up the rules. They inherited the rules. Rules (i.e., customs as well as formal laws) were all around them, and they ignored them at their peril. On all the important points, kings made do with a rickety system in which they never knew how much they would collect in taxes, never knew how many soldiers would show up for a war (nor for how long they would stay), and got new laws implemented only through endless arguing with their barons. In some kingdoms, the new king had to swear he would introduce no new laws. Innovation was a nasty word, something to accuse a king with.

A common medieval trope was to picture a king as a father, and the parallel is not bad. In theory a father could do all sorts of terrible things within his own family. In practice, he was constrained by custom, nosy neighbors, social conventions, rebellions children, and so on. Rule by naked power could work, but it wasn't the norm and it was disapproved of. In extreme cases it might even be squashed. Another common metaphor was that the king was the head, with other parts of society the hands, legs, heart. The head was helpless without the other parts and should take care of them; then, they would take care of him. For most people, these metaphors made sense, not least because they reinforced the social order. Inheritance was incredibly important. People believed character traits were passed on through the blood (blood will tell). This applied to Joe the Carpenter as much as to the royal line. Scoff at the one, you scoff at your own importance, however modest.

There are, btw, in response to the OP, on record more people who tried and failed to seize a crown than those who did so violently. With all respect to Mel Brooks, it wasn't always good to be the king.