Gowachin

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Gowachin are a fictional race of frog-like humanoids featured in the Frank Herbert books Whipping Star and The Dosadi Experiment. Herbert developed the race from a brief mention by Jorj X. McKie in the short story The Tactful Saboteur.

[edit] Society

Gowachin are organized in phylums, or extended clans; their phylum identification is tattooed onto their eyelids; one of the rituals of meeting other sentients is a long blink that clearly exposes the Gowachin's phylum identification to the other. Criminals are exiled from their phylum by having their tattoos burned off; while the tattoos are still visible as scars, the scars themselves are a mark of tremendous shame.

Gowachin are born in a graluz, an indoor pool into which the tadpoles are born and live until their father tests them by swimming through the graz, eating those he can catch. This winnowing process is used to eliminate the slowest Gowachin who betray an insufficient desire for survival.

The Gowachin are generally a patriarchal oligarchy, where elder male Gowachin rule the phylums, and female Gowachin are sheltered and sequestered in the home. Status in Gowachin society comes from one's relative rank in the phylum and from the phylum's overall reputation.

[edit] Legal customs

The Gowachin regard their legal practices as the strongest evidence that they are civilized. Gowachin law is based upon the notion of a healthy disrespect for all laws; the purpose of this notion is to avoid the stultifying accretion of a body of laws and precedents that bind Gowachin mechanically. In a Gowachin trial, everything is on trial: every participant, including the judges; every law; even the foundational precept of Gowachin law. Legal ideas from other systems are turned on their head: someone pronounced "innocent" (guilty in other terms) by the court is torn to pieces by angry spectators; judges may have bias ("if I can decide for my side, I will"), though not prejudice ("I will decide for my side, regardless"); defendant and plaintiff are chosen at trial by the side bringing the complaint choosing one role or the other; torture is permitted; and all procedural rules may be violated, but only by finding conflict within procedural rules (an example of Nomic).

Gowachin law is illustrative of a dominant theme in Herbert's books set in this universe: that governments, law, and bureaucracy (collectively, society's tools for regulating itself) are dangerous when allowed to escape human (sentient) control. In both novels, the Bureau of Sabotage (BuSab) plays a major role. An official bureau, its mandate is to slow the workings of government(s) to ensure that the machinery of governance never overpowers those subject to its power. Historically, BuSab was created when government had become terrifyingly efficient, with laws conceived, mandated, and funded within hours, thus subjecting sentients to an overpowering bureaucratic juggernaut.

Gowachin legal practices are to law and the courts what BuSab is to government bureaucracy: a governor on an engine, preventing a static pronouncement on the state of things (real or intended) from ever over-ruling sentient judgement or discreation at the contingent moment. Inasmuch as only sentience or full consciousness is capable of dealing with a dynamic universe, no procedural set judicial algorithm can ever supersede or effectively protect sentience.

This aspect of the novels is echoed in Dune Messiah, when the Emperor, Paul, rejects a request from a subject world for a constitution. Ostensibly, the purpose is to provide basic guarantees for the people; in reality, it's an attempt to check the Emperor's power with legal limits. Paul justifies his decision by arguing, in his official pronouncement, that constitutions are dead things, limited and limiting to what can be currently conceived as a threat from which the people require protection, ultimately enfeebling them by depriving them of the essential human challenge to deal with an ever-changing universe.

Jorj X. McKie is the only human ever admitted to the Gowachin bar. His greatest and most admired legal victory in a Gowachin trial came when he demonstrated to the court that "eternal sloppiness was the price of liberty".