Reasons: the Culture
It was, the Culture knew from the start, a religious war in the fullest sense. The Culture went to war to safeguard its own
peace of mind: no more.
But that peace was the Culture’s most precious quality, perhaps its only true and treasured possession.
In practice as well as theory the Culture was beyond considerations of wealth or empire. The very concept of money—regarded
by the
Culture as a crude, over-complicated and inefficient form of rationing—was irrelevant within the society itself, where
the capacity of its means of
production ubiquitously and comprehensively exceeded every reasonable (and in some cases, perhaps,
unreasonable) demand its not
unimaginative citizens could make. These demands were satisfied, with one exception, from within
the Culture itself. Living space was
provided in abundance, chiefly on matter-cheap Orbitals; raw material existed in virtually
inexhaustible quantities both between the stars and
within stellar systems; and energy was, if anything, even more generally
available, through fusion, annihilation, the Grid itself, or from stars
(taken either indirectly, as radiation absorbed in
space, or directly, tapped at the stellar core). Thus the Culture had no need to colonize, exploit
or enslave.
The only desire the Culture could not satisfy from within itself was one common to both the descendants of its original human
stock and the
machines they had (at however great a remove) brought into being: the urge not to feel useless. The Culture’s
sole justification for the relatively
unworried, hedonistic life its population enjoyed was its good works; the secular evangelism
of the Contact Section, not simply finding,
cataloguing, investigating and analyzing other, less advanced civilizations but—where
the circumstances appeared to Contact to justify so
doing—actually interfering (overtly or covertly) in the historical processes
of those other cultures.
With a sort of apologetic smugness, Contact—and therefore the Culture—could prove statistically that such careful and benign
use of “the
technology of compassion" (to use a phrase in vogue at the time) did work, in the sense that the techniques it
had developed to influence a
civilization’s progress did significantly improve the quality of life of its members, without
harming that society as a whole by its very contact with
a more advanced culture.
Faced with a religiously inspired society determined to extend its influence over every technologically inferior civilization
in its path
regardless of either the initial toll of conquest or the subsequent attrition of occupation, Contact could either
disengage and admit defeat—so
giving the lie not simply to its own reason for existence but to the only justificatory action
which allowed the pampered, self-consciously fortunate
people of the Culture to enjoy their lives with a clear conscience—or
it could fight. Having prepared and steeled itself (and popular opinion)
through decades of the former, it resorted eventually,
inevitably, like virtually any organism whose existence is threatened, to the latter.
For all the Culture’s profoundly materialist and utilitarian outlook, the fact that Idir had no designs on any physical part
of the Culture itself
was irrelevant. Indirectly, but definitely and mortally, the Culture
was
threatened… not with conquest, or loss of life, craft, resource or territory, but
with something more important: the loss
of its purpose and that clarity of conscience; the destruction of its spirit; the surrender of its soul.
Despite all appearances to the contrary, the Culture, not the Idirans,
had
to fight, and in that necessity of desperation eventually gathered a
strength which—even if any real doubt had been entertained
as to the eventual result—could brook no compromise.