Jonathan_S wrote:Seems about right.
Because (as has been brought up by others here before) if they'd spent that 600 years not stirring up anti-genetic modification feelings through their genetic slavery programs they probably could have brought much of the galaxy to see Beowulf's Life Sciences Code as too restrictive, and gotten them in favor of Mesa's greater willingness to make the genetic mods that people want for themselves of their offspring.
Basically a well run 600 year PR campaign was pretty likely get them their stated goal. But not their unstated goal of dismantling everything Beowulf created and rubbing their success in Beowulf's face. (Getting shut down and exiled really seems to have given the Detwilers a 'thing' about Beowulf)
Indeed, Johathan. In Cauldron of Ghosts, no less than Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou spells it out:
“Absolutely. I’ve been thinking about it a lot since you dropped McBryde’s bombshell on us, and I’ve come to the conclusion that what’s really behind this entire master plan of theirs—assuming McBryde got it right, of course—is more than simply finally accomplishing Leonard Detweiler’s dream of creating a genetically superior species. That’s obviously part of it, but looking at what we did already know about Mesa and Mesans, I’d say an equally big part of it is proving they were right all along. It’s been a long, long time since the Final War. The feelings of revulsion and horror it generated have largely faded, and the prejudice against ‘genies’ is far weaker than it used to be. In fact, I would argue that if it weren’t for the existence of genetic slavery, that prejudice probably would have completely ceased to exist by now. If this Alignment had been willing to take even a fraction of the resources it must have invested in its conspiracies and its infiltration and the development of the technology that made Oyster Bay possible and spend it on propaganda—on education, for God’s sake—it almost certainly could have convinced a large minority, possibly even a majority, of the rest of the human race to go along with it. To embark, even if more gradually and more cautiously than the Alignment might prefer, on the deliberate improvement of the human genome. For that matter, in the existence of people like Honor and Yana we’ve already deliberately improved on that genome! But I don’t think it ever really occurred to them to take that approach. I think they locked themselves into the idea that their vision had to be imposed on the rest of us and that as the people whose ancestors had seen that division so clearly so much sooner than anyone else, it’s their destiny to do just that. Which is one reason I compared them to the Faithful, Catherine. Their whole purpose—or the way they’ve chosen to go about achieving it, at least—is fundamentally irrational, and only someone as fanatical as the people who built ‘doomsday bombs’ to destroy their entire planet in order to ‘save it’ from Benjamin the Great and the rest of the moderates could possibly have invested so much in that irrationality.”