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[General User]

dildeinstein wrote...
When you say

General User wrote...  The thing is asari culture has been a major driving force behind some pretty horrific stuff. I have such a low opinion of asari culture in general that I have a hard time seeing it as being worth preserving in its current state.

What are you basing that on?

I’m mainly referring to the asari’s collective role in the creation of the Citadel Council.  But there are others.  Benezia's arrogance that led her to directly aid in the extermination of entire populations.  Or Illium's fondness for "indentured servitude.”  Or the fact that no asari seems to even so much as question the existence and role of the Justicar Order.

dildeinstein wrote...
Maelon tried to use this exact line of logic in Mordin's loyalty quest...speculation not based on fact or evidence.

Quite so, as is any prediction of how the peoples of the galaxy will react to an event was traumatic as the Reaper invasion.

dildeinstein wrote...
The Asari were the founders of the Citadel Council and created a stable galactic government with seven other Species in the Galaxy.  They have been striving towards stability. 

Stability is only admirable if it is a stability that preserves other freedoms, if not, it’s just tyranny and/or stagnation.

American General Russell E. Dougherty put it best:  "The issue is not war and peace, rather, how best to defend our freedom."

dildeinstein wrote...
The Citadel Council ended the First Contact War ensuring that humanity could be brought into the galactic fold.  

Correction, the asari and salarians on the Council intervened to end the First Contact War, and the Hierarchy acquiesced.  The Republics and the Union wanted the Alliance to serve as their cat’s-paws against the Batarian Hegemony, and as a military counter-balance to the turians.  The Council intervention was not an act of benevolence, but self-interest.

I'm not knocking that.  By no means!  Mutual enlightened self-interest is the very cornerstone upon which productive relations between nations should be built.  As it was in this case. 

dildeinstein wrote...
They look at the bigger picture and promote the strengths of other species while ensuring that each is moderated for the larger community. 

The Council looks out for itself and it's own interests, first, last, and always.  All their concerns begin and end with their own power.  Hence the SpecTRes. 

dildeinstein wrote...
After a Reaper invasion what would be more valuable than reconstruction and stability?

The same things that were more valuable before: Liberté, égalité, fraternité!

Modifié par General User, 25 juin 2011 - 11:08 .

[Aimi]

Incidentally, as an antiquarian, I rather disagree with the idea that the destruction of the Library of Alexandria made it some kind of "cultural backwater". Alexandreia continued to be a key cultural center long after Iulius Caesar's soldiers had their little "accident" in Kleopatra VII's civil war. The Jewish population didn't suddenly disappear, nor did the trade routes or the number of rich merchants and gentry willing to fund the construction of public buildings. Arguably, Alexandreia was the most important philosophical and theological center of early (pre-Nikaian) Christianity, and regardless of your opinion of Christianity and Christians, that's pretty bloody culturally important. (Besides, as the eminent Roger Pearse recently noted, perhaps the works that did survive the destruction of the Library of Alexandreia did so because they were worth saving. Most of the classical works that are obscure and which have been recovered in some form or another seem to have been rightfully obscure - crap from a literary or an analytical standpoint.)

I think that instead what matters more are the material circumstances. Knowledge, if it is sufficiently foundational or important, is usually reproduced and decentralized; it takes more of a catastrophe than the destruction of a single repository to reduce a culture to a total lack of key knowledge. The "Great Simplification" that happened in Europe after the destruction of the Western Roman Empire didn't happen because a single important library was destroyed, it happened because of a crisis that affected all levels of society across an entire continent. Whereas, in the case of Baghdad, a city that had long since ceased to be the **** of the walk in the Muslim world suffered additional indignities during the sack by Hulagu qan - terrible indignities to be sure, but not ones that displaced it from the seat of military, economic, or even cultural power. Luoyang and Chang'an were sacked several times in each their history; none of those times led to anything approaching a cultural dark age on the North Chinese Plain, because the foundations of Chinese material society remained strong and the people who had interests in retaining elite culture simply moved to the south, colonized the old Yue lands, and passed it on down with their own alterations.

Now, these individual tragedies certainly have the capacity to change things all the same, and I think it's some of the other things Dean mentioned that are more interesting. What if this collective trauma alters the asari psyche? (Depends on the trauma, I imagine, and on one's willingness to subscribe to an asari collective cultural unconscious.) Nothing like a new dark age, but certainly something that might have a pretty big impact further down the road, all the same. (Incidentally, the way this plays with the whole Planet of Hats trope would be right up the Mass Effect writers' alleys. Sometimes they run with it, sometimes they mock it.) But this doesn't really have anything to do with Shepard's decisions, unfortunately. I dunno, there might be a lot to this.

[Medhia Nox]

I think "the Original" vs. "Copies" is a very important argument here.

Take something written in its original language - read a translated copy - and you might get totally different meanings. Something translated over and over over thousands of years might also change in meaning. The Original's worth is in its purity.

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Then, you have things that couldn't be copied, but would likely also be found in a "library". Illuminated texts and manuscripts where pictures detailed complex concepts.

Artifacts of a races antiquity that are quite literally "one of a kind". The Nag Hammadi codices come to mind. The "value" of any single relic could be up for debate - and the significance of their loss might never truly be known - but the possibility that they could provide future insight into a culture makes them all invaluable (in my opinion).

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I am actually fascinated by a "Barbarians at the Gates" concept - and while I don't play a Renegade, I would not be opposed to seeing humans take on this role in future ME material. But I will confess - it's largely because I have zero confidence in my species as a whole.

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I would do everything in my power to prevent the burning of any institution of knowledge - be it a library, university, religious structure, etc.

Individual lives may be lost - but what Asari would not willing die for what it "means to be Asari"? Though the game would not allow the possibility - I would sacrifice Shepard at a moment like this believing that somewhere, an Asari will rise to this occasion and carry on using the "chance" Shepard possibly afforded their entire species.

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The best example I truly think you have on our planet is the destruction of the Native Americans (of course, we are actually just talking about a library).

They are a perfect, and terrible, example of what happens to a people when their culture(s) is(are) destroyed.

No - I would never do that. Having meat survive means nothing - if you strip away what it even means to "be". Cheif Seattle's speech is beautiful, horrifying in its implication, and tragically fatalistic.

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Lastly, if the library were to be a data storage unit as well as holding books - the data could be destroyed throughout the entire Asari culture.

If the internet collapsed - I think a LOT of data would be permanently lost (though, admittedly, it would be "internet exclusive" data)

And back-ups aren't always practical. At least - not another "completely unified collection" of the same data. So - re-collecting all the backed up information after a war that likely would destroy the entire infrastructure of a planet - might be akin to current archaeology (and it's an imperfect science at best).

Modifié par Medhia Nox, 26 juin 2011 - 01:33 .

[Dean_the_Young]

The idea of the Library holding the comprehensive extranet backup of all Asari Culture would be interesting. While there would be others, how much and how complete they would be could always be up for debate.

If all servers in the US were wiped clean tomorrow, would the internet still exist? Yes. Could it be re-created? Mostly. Would we ever get it all back, or know everything that we lost?