Our talk today about the New Brotherhood Army, otherwise known as the cannibals, reminded me of Montaigne’s essay entitled “Of Cannibals”. In his essay he details some of the rituals that these “barbarians” practice on a daily or seasonal basis, including eating the flesh of an enemy of war after killing him. The Europeans in Montaigne’s own society thought this act was despicable and savage and unruly, though Montaigne took a different view on the situation. His claim is that the Europeans may see these acts as barbarous, but in fact how they treat their own people is even worse. Montaigne’s point of view is complicated because he switches from his own view on the cannibals to their view of the Europeans on themselves according to Montaigne. It’s layered and difficult to decipher until the very end, where he drives his point home, and gives an account of a few of the cannibals’ visit to France, and where they ask some reasonable questions. They ask how the upper class French citizens can pass by a beggar on the street and not help her out, how he lets her starve and live without shelter when he has a house and food he could provide. They also ask why no one is willing to go to war for their country and why they don’t do more to protect their own people and how does anyone have any honor if there are no heroes. The point is that these acts are more barbarous than eating dead flesh because pain is inflicted to live beings and hatred is involved.
To bring this back to Lucifer’s Hammer, I wonder how we as readers are supposed to view the cannibals. They can be seen as the “other,” the savage, barbaric clan that has no redeeming qualities, or they can be seen as no worse, and perhaps better, than a tentative society such as the Stronghold. The Stronghold prides itself on not reducing itself to eating human flesh, just as the French did above, but they still turn people out of the safety they could provide and don’t show any care or remorse for their fellow man. Perhaps Niven and Pournelle’s intention to include the cannibals is to bring this kind of discussion into focus.