Professor Douglas Hartwell Chair, Department of Law and Covenant Studies Provincial College of Porterville Year 3015
I should begin, as any honest editor must, with a confession about this book’s origins.
The First Porterville Symposium on Bravian Law and Public Affairs was not, in its initial conception, intended to produce a book. It was intended to produce a long weekend of useful argument among colleagues who, in the ordinary press of teaching and community service, rarely find time to argue usefully with each other. The Provincial College of Porterville had been hosting an informal annual colloquy of this kind for some years — a gathering of faculty and invited guests organized around a broad theme, conducted over three days with morning sessions and afternoon walks along the River Walk and evening meals that tended to run considerably longer than planned. The proceedings were not recorded. The papers were circulated among attendees and then filed. Nothing was published.
That arrangement suited most of us well enough. Bravians are not, as a general matter, a people who feel an urgent need to put their thoughts before the public. We are more inclined to work things out quietly among ourselves before exposing our conclusions to the scrutiny of people who were not in the room when the thinking happened. There is a case to be made for this approach — it is at least honest about the provisional nature of what gets said at colloquia — but it has the disadvantage of keeping genuinely useful work from reaching the people who could benefit from it.
This year, circumstances changed the calculation. The year 3015 has been, by any standard, an eventful one for Bravia. The completion and formal opening of Cueva Septimus, the provincial capital of the Over-The-Eastern-River Province; the settlement of the Delta Province and the formal integration of the Fremen people into our commonwealth; the Second Battle of Cape Esperance and the opening of the Cape Esperance Naval Museum; the announcement of the comprehensive regional alliance with the five landlocked river nations to our east; the signing of the Treaty of Port Esperance; the negotiation of the non-aggression pact with our neighbor to the west — all of this in a single year, while the ordinary business of settlement, development, and governance continued at its usual relentless pace across six provinces and a growing network of allied and associated territories.
It seemed to several of us, when we gathered in late summer to plan this year’s colloquy, that a moment of such compressed development in our national life called for something more deliberate than our usual informal proceedings. Events of this scale create precedents. Precedents, if they are not examined and articulated, become invisible — followed because they were followed before rather than because they have been reasoned about and found sound. Our national life in 3015 has produced a remarkable quantity of precedent in a very short time, and we thought it our responsibility as a college with a particular obligation to the public life of the nation to examine that precedent with care and to put our findings somewhere that others could find them.
The result is this volume. What follows is a record, substantially revised and in several cases significantly expanded from the versions presented at the symposium itself, of the papers delivered at the First Porterville Symposium on Bravian Law and Public Affairs, held at the Provincial College over four days in the autumn of 3015. The papers are organized thematically rather than in the order of their presentation, and the editors of each paper have had the benefit of written responses from their colleagues in revising for publication. I am grateful to all the contributors for the quality of their work and for their patience with an editing process that was, I will admit, more demanding than I initially represented it would be.
Before introducing the papers themselves, I want to say something about why this symposium took place in Porterville, and about what it means that it did.
The Provincial College of Porterville has been described, in a paper included in this volume, as exemplifying what we call the academic-practitioner model — the institutional commitment to scholarship that serves practical ends, conducted by people who know from their own experience what the practical ends feel like from the inside. That description is accurate, and I would add only that the academic-practitioner model is not a pedagogical technique we have chosen to adopt but a consequence of where we are and who we are.
Porterville is, as our colleagues across the river are quick to remind us, an ordinary town. It was founded by a dairy family. Its streets are named after people who were important to the Porter family’s network of relations and associates. Its downtown faces the Eastern River because that is where roads have always brought people who wanted to cross to the other side or trade with those who had. It is not a capital city. It is not a Free Port. It is not a gateway to the Southern Sea or a mountain fastness from which royal governors contemplate the geography of a new province. It is a Middle Bravian market town on a river, surrounded by family farms and modest commercial enterprises, inhabited by people who are comfortable bourgeoisie in the precise sense of that term: people who own what they work, work what they own, and have no particular interest in being anything grander than what they are.
This ordinariness is, I have come to believe, an advantage for the kind of thinking this volume attempts. The great questions of Bravian public life — how covenant law should function at different scales, how provinces coordinate across their boundaries, what military doctrine should govern a covenant people’s relationship to force, how settlement patterns express our understanding of property and stewardship, what our obligations to our neighbors near and far actually require of us — these questions look different depending on where you are standing when you ask them. From the capital, they look like questions about the architecture of governance. From the Free Port, they look like questions about commercial interest and diplomatic strategy. From Cueva Septimus, still raw and provisional in its first year of operation, they look like questions about institution-building in difficult terrain.
From Porterville, they look like questions about ordinary people trying to live decent lives in community with their neighbors, which is what they actually are. The view from the middle of the country, from the middle of the settlement hierarchy, from a city that is neither exceptional in its prosperity nor exceptional in its difficulties, is not the most dramatic view available. But it may be the most representative one. When we ask how the Bravian covenant system actually functions in practice, the answer that matters most is the answer visible from communities like ours — where there are no spectacular cases, no crises of state, no famous battles or famous diplomacy, only the daily work of neighbors governing themselves in accordance with obligations they have freely undertaken.
Several of the papers in this volume were written by people who came to Porterville from elsewhere — from the capital, from provincial capitals, from communities along the Eastern River and the coast — and their perspectives have enriched the symposium considerably. But the symposium itself was convened and organized from Porterville, and that provenance shapes the collection in ways that I think are worth making explicit. These papers are written by people who believe, as Middle Bravians generally believe, that the most important things in Bravian life happen not at the dramatic center but in the quiet middle. We believe this not because we are parochial — several contributors to this volume have spent significant portions of their careers far from Middle Bravia — but because the evidence supports it. A nation that functions because its ordinary communities govern themselves well is a nation whose analytical attention ought to be fixed on those ordinary communities. That is where the governing actually gets done.
The papers are organized into four parts, each addressing a distinct domain of Bravian law and public affairs, though readers will find that the domains bleed into each other in ways that are, I believe, instructive rather than merely untidy.
The first part collects the papers concerned with the foundations of Bravian civic life — who we are, how we came to be this way, and what the principles are that organize our shared existence at every scale from the household to the nation. These papers provide the conceptual vocabulary for what follows. They address the formative elements that distinguish Bravian civilization from other national traditions; the specific character of our covenant framework and how it differs from both the arbitrary authority structures of neighboring nations and the merely contractual arrangements that some have confused it with; the role that a clear-eyed and sometimes uncomfortable honesty plays in our public culture; the question of what it means for a people to govern themselves through genuine consent rather than through the theatrical performances of consent that most nations substitute for the real thing; and the particular challenge of creativity in a culture that values tradition and distrusts luxury while still insisting that beauty is a legitimate and serious concern.
One paper in this section requires particular acknowledgment. The analysis of why the Exilarch accepts the austerity and constitutional constraints of his position — which might seem, to those unfamiliar with our national life, like a topic of purely antiquarian interest — is in fact one of the most practically important papers in the collection. The question of why those who hold power in Bravia submit to constraints on that power, when they could presumably resist those constraints if they chose, goes to the heart of how our covenant system remains functional across generations. The answer, which the paper develops with some care, is that the constraints are not experienced as limitations by those who have genuinely internalized the covenant understanding of leadership. This is not a comfortable answer for those who find it easier to believe that power always seeks to expand itself. But it is, I believe, the accurate one, and accuracy seems to me the appropriate standard for papers in a collection like this.
The second part turns to external relations — how Bravia conducts itself in relationship to the peoples and nations around it, and what has made that conduct, at its best, genuinely successful. Two papers address this domain. The first examines the principles underlying Bravian diplomatic success across a wide range of partners: the absolute insistence on equality in all treaty relationships, the graduated menu of relationship options that we extend to those who seek association with us, the co-religionist principle and its graduated application, the non-interference commitment that has made our relationship with the Forest peoples workable in ways that less disciplined approaches could not have achieved, and the exile consciousness that generates in Bravians a genuine capacity for empathy with peoples who are different from us in almost every visible way. The second paper in this section addresses the military dimension of our external relations, examining what two decisive fleet battles at Cape Esperance — separated by a century and a half, fought against wholly different enemies, producing identical results — reveal about the doctrine of prepared-ground defense that has kept our people secure since the founding generation made their stand on the shore with their families watching from the beach.
I should note that the Cape Esperance paper generated the most spirited discussion of the symposium, and not only about its analytical conclusions. Several colleagues objected to including a paper on military doctrine in a collection focused on law and public policy, arguing that military affairs constitute a distinct and specialized domain that ought to be addressed in a separate venue. After extended debate, the symposium voted to include it, for reasons that I think the paper itself makes clear: military doctrine in Bravia is not separable from the covenant framework that organizes our public life. The zero-casualty ideal is a covenant obligation, not a tactical preference. The prepared-ground doctrine is an expression of the same patience and preparation that our covenant understanding of governance requires in every other domain. A collection that addressed law and public policy while leaving out the military expression of those same principles would be incomplete in a way that Bravian readers would immediately recognize.
The third part addresses what is perhaps the most practically urgent set of questions facing Bravian governance in the current year: the governance of cross-boundary development as our population growth generates functional integration across Amphoe and provincial lines at a pace our constitutional framework has not yet fully absorbed. Three papers form this section. The first examines the Porterville–New Porterville conurbation as the most developed and best-documented instance of a phenomenon that is occurring or will occur at multiple other locations across the national landscape — Port Esperance and the Delta Province, New Port Cumberland as a tri-provincial junction, the Western River crossings, and the forest-edge settlements at the boundary of the Forester autonomous zones. The second paper in this section proposes a model standard instrument for the establishment of a Cross-Provincial Regional Development Area, drawn from existing Bravian precedents in covenant law, treaty format, and enabling act procedure, and presented in enough detail to be immediately usable by the communities that need it. The third paper takes a step back from both to examine the planning philosophy that underlies all of it — the principles by which Bravians have organized their built environment from the provincial capital compound to the High Bravian farmhouse-fortress, and why those principles constitute a consistent vision rather than a collection of local habits.
I confess that these three papers are closest to my own scholarly interests, and I have had to exercise some discipline in not burdening them with more editorial commentary than they need. The question of how the covenant framework scales — how the same principles that govern a household code can generate a standard template for a cross-provincial governance instrument — is, to my mind, one of the most intellectually interesting questions in Bravian jurisprudence, and the year 3015 has made it urgently practical as well. The colleagues who produced these three papers have done work that I hope will be read not only by scholars and students but by the governing bodies of the Amphoe that will need to use the CPRDA instrument in the years ahead. Academic writing that is useful to practitioners is, in the Porterville tradition, the only kind worth producing.
The fourth and final section collects papers that address specific dimensions of Bravian social life that both inform and are informed by the legal and institutional framework: education, which at every level is understood as a family and community responsibility rather than a state function; courtship and marriage, which the Bravian system structures with more deliberate care than observers from outside the country generally realize; the particular creative culture of a people that values tradition without being imprisoned by it and values beauty without succumbing to luxury; and the difficult subject of trauma — how a people whose founding was itself a traumatic displacement has developed an understanding of trauma and its remediation that is embedded in the legal, ritual, and social fabric of the community.
This last paper, on trauma and what we have called the trauma-informed dimensions of Bravian culture, was the most contested at the symposium — not in its conclusions, which most colleagues found well-supported by the evidence, but in the question of whether the subject was appropriately addressed in a symposium on law and public policy. The objection was that trauma is a personal and pastoral matter, better addressed by the priesthood than by legal and policy scholarship. The response, which I found persuasive, was that the third tithe, the anti-slavery provisions of our national law, the power-rape legislation, the Living Death ceremony, and the feast calendar’s ritual processing of communal suffering are all simultaneously legal instruments and pastoral ones — that in Bravia, as perhaps only in Bravia, the legal and the pastoral cannot be meaningfully separated. The law exists to serve the community’s well-being at every level, including the levels at which trauma operates. A legal scholarship that declines to examine this is a legal scholarship that has decided, for reasons of professional tidiness, to be less useful than it could be.
A word about what this volume does not contain.
It does not contain everything that was discussed at the symposium. Several papers were presented and debated that the authors chose not to submit for publication — on topics ranging from the specific governance challenges of the Free Port’s relationship to the provinces that surround it, to a detailed examination of the Grand Parliament’s procedural history, to a preliminary study of how Fremen legal traditions might influence the covenant framework of the Delta Province over the coming generation. I hope that some of these papers will find their way into print through other venues. This collection is not intended as the definitive treatment of any of its subjects but as a contribution to ongoing conversations that I trust will continue in future symposia, in the pages of our provincial law review, and in the kind of extended argument over dinner that has always been, for my money, the most productive form of scholarly exchange.
It also does not contain any paper that I am satisfied with as a treatment of the educational system — a subject addressed in preliminary form at the symposium but not, in my judgment, developed to the point where publication serves the reader better than further work would. The relationship between the tripartite educational model — family as primary educator, the faith as provider of theoretical and religious formation, the Amphoe grange as provider of practical education — and the Provincial College’s own hybrid function is a subject that deserves better treatment than it received in our sessions this year. I look forward to addressing it properly at a future symposium.
Finally, this volume does not contain any paper from the Free Port. We invited several colleagues at the Free Port’s Commercial Academy to submit, and received in return polite demurrals on the grounds that their work addresses a different set of questions from those we were organizing around. That is fair. The Free Port operates under a different set of constraints and a different relationship to the national covenant framework than any other community in Bravia, and its scholars’ preoccupations are correspondingly different from ours. I do not think the collection suffers from their absence — the perspective from the middle of the country can be articulated without constant reference to the perspective from its most cosmopolitan edge — but I acknowledge that a full accounting of Bravian public life would need to include voices from places that are not represented here.
One last thing should be said before the papers speak for themselves.
This collection was produced in a year of remarkable national development and not inconsiderable national anxiety. The opening of two new provinces, the integration of a new people, a significant military action and the diplomatic settlement that followed it, and the rapid expansion of our international relationships have all occurred within the space of months. The people of Porterville, sitting on the Eastern River bridge and watching another wagon-load of settlers head east toward the new province, could be forgiven for finding the pace of change somewhat vertiginous. We are an ordinary town watching our country become, very rapidly, an extraordinary nation.
The papers in this collection are, in various ways, attempts to make sense of that transformation — to articulate what remains constant in our national life amid all that is changing, and to identify the principles by which the changing ought to be governed. They are not triumphalist; Bravians are by temperament suspicious of triumph, aware that the history of peoples who believed themselves exempt from ordinary consequences is not an encouraging one. They are not anxious either, or at least not paralyzed by anxiety. They are, I hope, honest — which is the only thing that the Bravian scholarly tradition has ever asked of those who work within it.
I am grateful to my colleagues for the quality of their thinking, to the Provincial College for its support of the symposium, and to the governing body of the Porterville Amphoe for the small but genuinely useful grant that covered the cost of printing and binding these proceedings for distribution to all six provincial capitals, the national libraries, and the grange educational collections of every Amphoe that has requested a copy.
Bravia is, in the end, a nation that governs itself through the accumulated wisdom of its communities. It seems right that the communities should have access to the scholarship that tries to understand how that governance works, and why — when it works, which it does more often than any of us who study it expected when we began — it works as well as it does.
Douglas Hartwell, Porterville, in the forty-seventh year of the current Exilarch’s reign Year 3015
