Category: Philosophy

Absurdity

Status Whatever

In a little over a week, I will be 70. The mind, as they say, boggles. How did this happen?

All in all, though, I have little to complain about. Physically, I seem to be in fairly good condition, I just got my COVID and flu shots, the minor inconveniences that dance around me like gnats are largely insignificant and can be ignored.

I have a lot on my plate, though, and I have noticed a marked decrease in…

I don’t know if it’s energy or just give-a-damns. There are things I think it would be a good idea to do and then I just sort of fade when it comes time. I have less time during the day when I feel like a ninja warrior able to defeat all enemies. (I haven’t done any martial arts exercises in I don’t remember,) Our local SF convention is this weekend and I have a full roster of panels and such. I’m looking forward to it, as much as I look forward to anything.

I’ve passed up some shows I wouldn’t mind seeing. Partly this is a money thing. I still cannot get my head around the price of tickets these days. But let’s not go down that path, which leads to a desperate nostalgia and does little good. At the end of the month we’re going to see a farewell tour (Renaissance) that I expect will be excellent though melancholy. All my musical heroes are aging out or dying. Kind of like the writers and actors I grew up with.

And now I have to acknowledge that perhaps for someone, somewhere, I count as one of those aging relics.

Trust me, I have every intention of seeing the Tricentennial. (I doubt I’ll make it, but everyone needs a goal.) It does, in a way it never did before, depend on whether civilization survives. We are on the cusp of that wonderous age we all anticipated from the pages of whatever SF magazine we were reading at the time. As William Gibson said, the future is here, it’s just unequally distributed.

But I for the first time actually have before me a handful of projects I could consider my last. Again, it’ll take time to do them, but I sort of know what I’m going to be working on for the next five or ten years.  In one way, that’s a bit unnerving, but mostly it’s reassuring that I have that much to do.

There’s a game some people (maybe most) play, if you died tomorrow would you be satisfied. I don’t quite understand satisfaction that way. It involves being “finished” in ways that I can’t figure into my own desires, but I get the gist. Maybe, I have to say. More so than not. The thing is, I still can’t quite accept that I’m no longer the new kid on the scene. I don’t know what has to happen to make that sense of myself go away. Not sure if I want it to. I suppose that means I’ll just keep working until.

Until whatever.

Anyway, the best part of the last seven decades has been the people I’ve met and the friends I’ve made. Fine folks. And they put up with me. I guess I still have them fooled.

So, unless something strikes my fancy between now and then, I’ll see you all on the other side of….damn….70.

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Tomorrow Denied

In retrospect, the situation we face in the country today is born of factors that have been present all along, but were buried under a common optimism about the future which used to define us, at least in our public discourse. Looking to the future has defined this country in one way or another since its inception, but very aggressively since the mid-20th Century. Once we had the technological capacity to build a common infrastructure, the Future became a destination for more people than ever before.

So what happened?

Because that is what we find ourselves on the verge of losing. The Future.

For the moment, consider the narratives. Since the prognostications of science fiction took root and grew into a forest of speculation, we have been offered visions of heroic and dynamic futures with adamantine towers and plenty and the ability to go to the stars and cure ancient illnesses and contemplate our place in the universe in ways impossible before since we were trapped on a single world with limited ability to change our tomorrows. Many of us took hold of the vision and couldn’t wait to get there. Our imaginations were fired with mission and with such stories clearer ideas of what that future might look like.

Alongside these grand possibilities, the obverse marched in lockstep. The collapse of everything, armageddon, reducing even what we had already achieved back to times when disease, famine, and immobility overrode aspirations. Often these scenarios were depicted as a direct consequence of the progress we desired. Certainly it was not implausible. Along with advances in medicine and energy and agriculture, we faced total destruction by dint of wars that might last a day and leave nothing standing. The challenge was working together to get past that to reach the better tomorrow.

What many of us did not anticipate was that so many people would embrace the dystopic vision. Not just dictators and authoritarians, not just greedy profiteers, but common people who saw themselves as perhaps heroes only in the rubble and preferred the broken landscape where they imagined having a purpose instead of brighter landscape wherein they frankly could not imagine having a place.

The emergence of so-called survivalist groups seems on its face a logical response to Cold War fears of nuclear war. But. As the Cold War came to a close and the specific threats faded, these groups found themselves unable or unwilling to move on and invented new threats heralding the end of the world, assuring them of the necessity to separate and isolate themselves from the recovering and progressing culture they have come to distrust and reject. A culture still largely based on progress. With the addition of Apocalyptic religious groups, the nature of the perceived threat/fate changed into one aggressively resistant to the usual counterarguments based on the given reality.

The persistent assertion of these positions has gradually eroded boundaries separating them from the culture at large and in often unexpected ways have changed even so-called mainstream apprehensions of previously unquestioned aspects of a progressive agenda, specifically modern medicine, economic adaptability, and a suite of characterizations of government designed to diminish or destroy public confidence in institutions. For the leaders of such groups, this is winning tactic, because as faith in said institutions is broken, systems stumble and fail, and this is seen as justification for further pronouncements of collapse. Self fulfilling prophecy.

But why does it work? 

Take vaccines. The efficacy of vaccines is a matter of established fact. The reduction and near eradication of certain diseases, many if not most of which have horrific fatality records among children, is an established historical fact. Public health institutions, through robust vaccination programs, boast a heroic degree of success. So much so that we have a couple of generations now that came of age with no direct experience of these diseases. Whereupon a peculiar thing occurred. People began treating those times as mythic. It would be reasonable to assume people would refer to such history and base decisions upon the facts at hand, but human nature is perverse in the things it is willing to accept in the absence of first-hand experience. 

“Those illnesses are gone, so why is the government still insisting on these vaccines?”

This is a question those of an apocalyptic mindset appreciate. The government programs themselves are co-opted to stand in for any fabricated theory that will advance the agenda of those who have embraced a dystopic view of…

Well, everything.

You can see the worm of perversity in the way no reasonable answer is accepted. 

But this is not about acceptable answers. This is about rejecting any answer—indeed, any question—that might entail change. Once that becomes the goal, then the capacity to process change, the need for it, becomes, if not impossible, redirected into the construction of internal fortifications that in their ultimate expression deny anything outside the boundaries of personal identity.

At this point, designations of Right or Left become nothing but talking points. The early supporters of Lenin and then Stalin here in the West indulged this refusal to examine evidence that contradicted their desired perspective.

In all this, the thing most damaged and often lost is balance.

But isn’t constant progress unbalancing, too? If not paired with an ongoing appreciation for that which has already been achieved and is worthy of preservation, certainly. 

The line is drawn elsewhere in the divergence of the desired future. Progress entails change, necessarily, and sometimes change is destructive. The question is, what is being destroyed? This goes to costs. What are we willing to give up in order to live in a better world?

You might argue that what is a Better World for some is not for others, and in the muzzy precincts of sentiment and nostalgia we might find valid concern. However, it need not be quite so exclusively personal. Certain changes spring from concrete necessities and what is displaced is not so easily consigned to the “charm” of the past. 

What, in brief, does it cost to preserve against change?

We have to look at the whole picture. If that which is being changed exists at the expense of our well-being, then there is no justification for denying the changes required to correct the systemic distress. In other words, to be broadly blunt, if the leisure and comfort of one group necessitates the bondage of another, then nothing legitimately argues for the preservation of that system.

If what you are trying to conserve by denying progress rests upon addressable inequities, then you argue in bad faith.

Those who rail against public health, economic redress, social justice should consider the costs of their conservation. If people continue to live in poverty, in poor health, and are denied access to the very systems being guarded against change, then the argument that those systems are in need of revision at the very least has more legitimacy than the preservation of specific privilege. You as an individual may well argue that you have a right to refuse to participate in the revised system, but you do not have the right to demand the system remain static in order to protect your preconceptions.

This is what present-day conservatism seems all about—demanding a reset to a prior incarnation of our public systems in order to mollify a descriptive preference. Rolling back already adopted changes which redress past inequities.

The assault on fact, truth, and our perception of reality is dystopic to its core. 

Part of the dream of a better future, aside from all the technological progress and the social improvement, we believed that the superstitions of the Past would fade. That people would disenthrall themselves from the numinal ideologies of mythic interpretations. That “belief” in that which finds expression only in assertions of identity found only in the supernatural, the legendary, the unsubstantiable, that self-professed claims like manifest destiny and racial superiority and divine preference would be relegated to the margins of history. We underestimated the hold such narratives maintain on too many of us and did too little to offer a better story.

Too many of us have let this pass unchallenged. We have watched the language be hi-jacked and altered over time, a willingness to compromise taken advantage of to everyone’s detriment, and a crisis of national character emerge with frightening suddenness and ugly ramifications. We are in the midst of a struggle between progress and regress which caught too many of us unprepared. 

I grew up believing the world could be better, cooler, richer. We were on our way, all we had to do was build it. By the time I was old enough to recognize the gap between my expectations and reality, I thought, like many others, these lapses were oversights, that everyone wanted to fix them and take us further along the road to that better future. It took a while for that illusion to die and realize that the “lapses” were more often than not the result of intentional opposition to changes. Some of it was technological, certainly, but as those problems were overcome and the solutions remained unachieved, I had to realize that there are people who do not want that better future. Certainly they don’t think of it that way, they believe what they want will be that better future. It’s not that difficult to demonstrate that they’re wrong.

Or selfish. Greedy. Or simply incapable of making the imaginative leap.

Or, most frighteningly, there are those who want to be heroes in a broken world, and they’re willing to break the world for the chance to be its savior. 

I believe that is what we are facing.

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Root Division

In all the debate and analysis and angst over what those behind Project 2025 are doing and why, it is easy to get lost in the bog of details and motivations. A better question is why do so many people who would suffer under these proposals support them. When you look at the list of things they want to end, it boggles the mind that anyone who has to work for a living, who is dependent on a weekly paycheck, many whose expenses outstrip their income, and those who otherwise would wish to give their children an edge for the future would want any of this.

Let me step back from the details and indulge a little speculation about the deep motivations behind this otherwise bizarre conflation of working class reality and the dreams of oligarchs. What underlies the desire to do this much to destroy entire sets of dreams and undermine the ability of so many people to have something even close to a stable life?

Go back several decades. Look at the 1950s and 1960s, at the almost complete overhaul of social relations. Everything, from the civil rights movement to the counterculture to the sexual revolution to all the spin-off movements all demanding a seat at the table, all shared one basic interest in common. One could reasonably show that all of those movements—those revolutions—were about one thing: freedom of association.

Class boundaries, ethnic boundaries, gender boundaries, educational boundaries—the order of the established norms were all challenged and largely overturned. The common thread was people refusing to be kept in “their place” anymore. All the equal access challenges, the educational reforms, the equal employment opportunities, all of them—freedom of association. For a time, the assumed walls keeping groups of people apart became porous to a degree they had never been before.

Freedom of association. When you think about it, the lack of such freedom underpins the basis of all segregation sentiment. People refusing to have anything to do with people they consider “not my tribe.” People, frankly, frightened of having to interact with strangers.

The entire conservative movement since the Sixties has been a desire to put those barriers back in place, to keep all the disparate groups separated, to somehow prevent the possibility of their children being exposed to those they consider undesirables or bad influences or simply foreign. All the programs that are targeted in Project 2025 are designed to bridge those barriers. Programs that provide a basis and, in some cases, the means to enable people to cross boundaries.

All this upheaval over immigration is nothing more than the same fear of mingling that kept people segregated before the civil rights reforms. People in one corner looking with fear at people in the other and saying “We don’t want to have anything to do with them!” Panicked at the thought of their kids attending school with kids from the “wrong side of town.” The advent of private schools to make sure no mixing happened.

The thing is, such group isolation results in a loss of resources for many groups. It has a physical cost. But it starts there, with an unadmitted (or not) desperation to Keep Them Out.

This is neurotic. 

But this is what has to be recognized and addressed if there is to be any hope of this ever being healed. So many people feel threatened by having to be in the same room as people they don’t know, don’t like, don’t trust, in fact hate because they’re different.

That’s the basis of the economic divide. It drives the cost of higher education, I have no doubt. It informs the absurdities of policy positions which admit to no solution because any solution will not give them what they want, which is to shut those people (whoever they are) out.

Fear.

If civilization is to be saved, if we are to go into a brighter future, we have to end the arbitrary assignation of people into enclaves designed to keep them apart. This is not airy idealism, this is survival. We’re going to destroy ourselves to enable a small group of people to keep themselves apart from those they see as inferior. 

Look at this time and these issues. That is the basis for so much insoluble polarization. But we don’t talk about it, not that way, not so nakedly. Every divisive issue we have, I believe, has its roots in that marrow-deep fear of having to cross the boundary and know about people we think will harm us.

One party right now is doing everything it can to establish the old ghettoes. The other needs to work to end them, but it seems not to be able to articulate it clearly enough. Well, for what it’s worth, there it is.

Keep this is mind when you listen to the rhetoric and good luck.

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Freedom and Its Contingencies, Part Two: Liberty

Abraham Lincoln pointed out in a speech that we have never had a good definition of Liberty. That most people used the word to mean different things. At base, we can perhaps agree that two meanings offering potential conflict are (1) Liberty from and (2) Liberty to. The war of independence was a major demonstration of the driving force of the first—separation from England—while once established the subsequent political struggle from then till now has been of the latter. Because we use the terms alternately—Freedom and Liberty—here perhaps more intently, it behooves us to come to grips with what they mean. Are they, in fact, the same idea?

I would suggest, like other such pairings that become entangled and carelessly deployed, that they are absolutely related, even connected to some degree, but distinct ideas requiring a bit more observation than common usage suggests. (For instance, Truth and Fact. While certainly related, a full understanding reveals distinctions that can become vitally important in practice.)

For the time being, allow me to offer these distinctions: Freedom is ultimately a sense of personal agency in the unencumbered pursuit of Self. Liberty is the ground on which such pursuit is enabled by and within a community.

In shorter terms, Freedom is personal and Liberty is political.

Lincoln’s point in his 1864 speech was that some people hold that Liberty is to give them volitional power over themselves, while other people feel it is to allow them power over others. That one man’s sense of Liberty is to be allowed to do with and for himself unencumbered while for others it is to allowed to bind others to his desire to act in the world, also unencumbered. At the time Lincoln was referring to slaveholders. The slaveholder position was that the Liberty of a white man was the only thing that mattered.

In any discussion of Freedom, it is important to distinguish between an abstract concept of personal agency and the political field of enabled action by a self-defined group. 

In this sense, Liberty and Freedom are distinct.

This should not be a surprise to anyone. Any more-than-cursory look at history shows it to be true, and not capriciously so. Freedom to self-define is fundamental. If such self-definition comes with restrictions, this is to be expected, since “absolute” freedom in the sense of available choices to act in the world is a fantasy. We cannot choose what we cannot do by virtue of organic or conceptual limits. (See Part One) We may well imagine having powers to act contrary to nature (and in certain ways we may eventually find ways to seem to do so) but we are not sorcerers. As well, some of what we may imagine doing usually comes in conflict with those around us (and even our own selves). For functional freedom, responsible conditions must be acknowledged. In order for fulfilling action and what we might call Life Satisfaction to be realized, we must establish the groundwork within which to operate.

Such groundwork becomes the functional purview of Liberty. Liberty is political.

Which means it is a matter of negotiation and the establishment of limits. 

Because these questions impinge directly on matters of personal self-conception, there is a constant tension between what is and what one feels. 

Lincoln also said that those who deny freedom to others do not deserve it themselves. But it is clear that they themselves thought they had a perfect right to deny freedom to those they considered their inferiors—or just different—and reserved the notion that they did not deny freedom to others by defining those others exclusively as their social equals. The work to expand a personal concept of mutuality to those they thought unequal is perhaps a personal struggle, but one which had real-world consequences. Thus the confusing mingling of concepts of Freedom with the practicalities of Liberty.

How does that apply today?

Liberty can be likened to architecture. We design and build the house in which we seek to exercise our Self. In this instance, the ordered structure that enables the coherent expression and exercise of Freedom. How we then define Freedom becomes a question of agency. We can say we are free if such exploration and discovery of that agency is unchallenged. (Which is why privileged classes under almost any system call what they have “freedom” even when to an outsider it clearly is not.) But each community attempts to construct that framework so as to support the practice of its concept of Freedom. The differences then are determined by who—what part—of that community is defining Freedom.

So when change is demanded by those not sharing in that definition, it requires a rearrangement of that architecture. When the walls and floor plan change, those who have been inhabiting that structure comfortably often react as though threatened. Why, if their actual range of action has not changed? Of course, this is open to a certain degree of interpretation. If the structure has changed, why wouldn’t some people’s choices also change?

Choices to do what, though?

If among such choices is one’s assumed right to bar certain people from actions presumed to be an exclusive privilege, then we have to redefine both sets of definitions—Freedom and Liberty. (For instance, keeping children previously excluded from certain schools out of those schools based on criteria rooted in a concept of privilege.) 

But more fundamentally, the discord may be based on a misalignment of concepts. A look at our current suite of political anxiety suggests that many people mistake Freedom for Liberty and misidentify Liberty itself. In others, they invest their sense of Freedom in the structure, not in what they are free to do within it. The assertions by certain jurists over the question of Originalism are, in my opinion, indicative of a failure to see the structure as little more than the lines drawn to organize, say, an optimal range of expression. Instead they seem to argue that any alteration in that structure is a de facto curtailment of actual Freedom. Perversely, supporters of this point of  view at times demand a virtual discarding of the structure altogether because those they seek to bar from its benefits seem to be able to use those structures effectively.

At some point it has developed that what happens within the walls of our Liberty cannot be limited ethically and the only recourse for those seeking such restrictions is either the obsessive defense of those structures in accord with the original concept or an abandonment of them. What is happening in terms of accommodating actual Freedom is dismissed in this argument because it inconveniences certain groups. While certainly this can be understood as a fundamental misapprehension of what Freedom and Liberty mean, both separately and in concert, it can more pertinently be seen as a cynical insistence on a rejection of those meanings on behalf of those who never accepted them in the first place, at least not as universal ideas meant to apply to everyone equally.

I suggest we need to sort these questions out, sooner than later. In the meantime, thoughts to ponder.

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Freedom and Its Contingencies, Part One

Many words get thrown around with too little regard for their actual meaning and intent. Love, friend, truth…a long list. There are two languages, it seems, operating most of the time. One we could call Colloquial Usage, which basically is the common application of a blanket term to cover all possible manifestations of a subject. Friend is a case in point. we blithely label everyone with whom we have more than casual acquaintance of a positive nature a friend. We do this without thought, mainly because it’s easier than teasing apart the various components of what A Friend may really be. A friend is more than someone you might be glad to attend a barbecue with. A friend is someone with whom a complex lattice of support, sufferance, and deep connection makes them vital to one’s sense of self and well-being. You would go to the mat for a friend, walk (metaphorically or otherwise) over broken glass to help. Most people we label “friend” do not rise to that level, nor should we expect them to. A friend is special.

But language is what we make of it. It’s handy to have one word for a convenience when the nature of something might require a chapter in book to really explain—or even a whole book.

Such a word, it seems to me, is Freedom.

I grew up during a time when that word ramified in its applicable meanings in too many ways to codify. The cry of Freedom during the Sixties covered everything from the Civil Rights movements to the Sexual Revolution to the Cold War to Intellectual Revisionism to rejections of community expectation and onward. What it meant to Be Free for one group was occasionally anathema to another, yet the demand seemed the same across all forms. A prominent, if not necessarily widespread, meaning was to be completely without constraint of any kind. As a rejection of social conformism, one could see the source of this demand, but it reached a point where the very means by which such a condition was sought imposed different sets of constraints which resulted in a loss of viable action.

One of the more useful definitions I heard back then was the “responsible use of form.” This is a useful axiom. Unpacking it yields a myriad of conditions and leads to configurations of what we might mean by freedom that apply across diverse expectations.

We have first to understand those instances when a parochial expectation is at work that displaces a more universal application, and in this we must be concerned with the tension between Expectation and Application. It is in this where we find the failures of manifestation that plague history.

I recall seeing an interview with a Mujahideen fighter during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. He was talking about his reasons for fighting and he said “We fight because we love freedom so much.” I was puzzled. Any cursory look at the society from which he came at once shows that what he meant by freedom was certainly not what I understand as freedom. For himself, it may have meant what he claimed, but as a country? What about the women? (And I don’t even mean the tragic malaise that descended on them once the Taliban took over.) And even in the aftermath, I’m sure you could ask those now in charge if they believe they are free and they would likely say yes. The apparent contradiction brings you to the assertion that freedom is a constrained thing that rejects acts regarded as outside the reasonable expectations of what freedom means.

But that’s there. What about here? It does not require much observation to see that different definitions are at play. What is freedom for one is anarchy for another.

How to square this circle?

Immediately we must accept, from example, that the concept is highly individualized. Freedom is a subjective concept. 

Or is it? Clearly, many species exhibit an innate urge to be free of constraint. Escape is a common response to captivity. Perhaps we can attribute this impulse to some Darwinian imperative to maximize opportunity to reproduce (which captivity would severely hamper), but it’s impossible to know what other factors feed into this response.

So if it is based on a freedom from constraint, then the next question is, why do we then seek to constrain others? If it is a shared impulse, why do we in so many instances fail to recognize it as such? Is it a failure to recognize alternative expressions?

Or is it more a question of adaptation? These are the circumstances we have come to maturity within and because we are comfortable with these delineations we define living in those conditions with freedom. Change in those parameters increases a level of discomfort and if the changes are significant enough we begin to chafe and the talk of loss of freedom begins.

The question then is, are these changes actually oppressive or are they more unsettling? It makes a big difference, I think. Take for instance the current assertion among certain evangelicals that they are being oppressed. It is legitimate to expect an explanation as to how. Are there new laws in place that bar them from practicing their religion? Or is it just that they find the shifts in common practice unsettling? If their next door neighbor stops going to church and then puts a political sign on their lawn supporting someone who is seen as a secularist, how is that oppressive? 

Within their own conception of freedom, living in a community that privileges their faith, which allows an expectation that they are part of a culturally dominant ideology, it may well appear that the scaffolding of those expectations is being dismantled and leaving them without a previously unexamined support. In other words, more and more it appears that, in this particular instance, they’re on their own.

Again, is this oppression?

Assuming the support you have till now enjoyed was built in by fiat—a community declared privilege which required support from all members of that community, regardless of personal disposition—and now that support is being withdrawn, then perhaps an argument can be made. If, on the other hand, what support there had been was simply assumed, without any codified commitment to back it up, then its loss is less a matter of conscious oppression than it is evidence of a shift in common priority. Naturally, this will upset many people who based their conceptions of living within that community on the erroneous assumption that their perspective was a fundamental right. 

Let’s move this example to a different (though in many ways related) area. Women living independently of so-called traditional family structures.

In this we have competing claims of oppression and demands for freedom. 

If we accept that “freedom” is based on an assumed right and ability for action within a given form, then it becomes clear that when a group, for whatever reason, is denied an opportunity for said action by another group, we may plausible label such denial oppression. If such denial of action is done for the presumed benefit of the dominant group, then we can see how oppression can edge into a deeper form, even slavery, especially if the benefit claimed is the justification for the continued oppression. 

Now we have a basis on which to evaluate claims of oppression. Range of available action combined with the comfort of assumed privileges constitute the rough parameters of a particular claim of freedom.  The constraint of said actions for the maintenance of said privileges for a dominant group constitutes oppression. We have a term that usefully sums up the net result.

Denial of agency.

What do we mean by “agent”? I will refer to a definition, from the Oxford Guide to Philosophy.

Agent: a person (or other being) who is the subject when there is action. …the property of an agent is (i) possessing a capacity to choose between options and (ii) being able to do what one chooses. Agency is then treated as a causal power. 

This is fairly neutral. When applied, the question is who can act and who cannot. It follows then to ask why one who cannot act cannot do so.

A further question relevant to this discussion then is: does one agent’s freedom to act require the curtailment of another’s equal freedom? If it does, then it must be asked if the former is asserting a legitimate claim for freedom.

Being inconvenienced is not oppression.

People who are not used to being inconvenienced unsettle easily.

When confronted with a claim that “my freedom is being taken away” it is always necessary to ask how? Basically, what can’t you do now that you could before [fill in the changes being challenged] occurred. If the response is that one’s assumption of dominance is being constrained, then perhaps it’s not “freedom” being taken away but privilege.

Still, freedom is in this sense a very personal thing, a feeling perhaps more than a set of objective conditions. To say one is free when that sense of being encumbered unfairly occludes clear assessment is difficult to get past. To this extent, we construct (or yield to) our own internal metrics.

But this is a problem of preference. Choosing the metrics by which you claim freedom or lack of freedom would suggest, since they are your own and you can choose them, you are, to that extent, free. The question then is, why doesn’t this contribute to your sense of freedom?

It may seem that this is playing games with the idea, that deconstructing the parameters in order to change a perspective which may or may not be valid is insincere. But I refer back to that statement by the Mujahideen fighter, who was clearly self-defining, on some level, his own metrics of what freedom meant. The consequences for his view prevailing may well have validated his sense of freedom, but by broader standards it did nothing for those bound to his view who did not meet his criteria.

There are two elements involved, one metaphysical, the other political. They are entangled, of course, but for many people the differences present no distinction. Metaphysically, though, we are dealing with determinism. Questions of Free Will stem from questions of what aspects of our apparent will to choose are in fact matters of unfettered choice and which are defined by all the other factors which constitute lived reality. In other words, what does it mean to Be Free when we are not able to choose actions closed to us by virtue of being both inconceivable and undoable. We might wish to choose to fly without artificial assistance, but we have neither the biology or the environment to do so. It becomes a matter of wishful thinking. A question of whether we are free to fly on our own is meaningless outside the imagination. Further, we may wish to transcend our mental limitations, but without knowing what that might look like, how that might manifest, it is a choice without a conceivable goal. Again, in the realm of imagination, we might come up with a variety of scenarios in which the consequences of such transcendence might be imagined, but the core transcendence itself is too incoherent to “see.” Likewise “interdimensional” travel. We have the term and popularly might imagine it much like moving from one room to another, but we have no basis for knowing what it would look like to actually do so.

We can spin scenarios endlessly, but I think the point is made. (Note though that conceiving the ideas can result eventually in some manifestation that conforms to our expectations—hence airplanes, subatomic physics, AI…)

Setting that aside for now, we come back to the question of what it means to be free to do what we want in a world where what we want is not doable. Are we not free, then?

While this kind of thing can be fun as a game, it is a good way to lose the point of the question. Besides, we are here more interested in the political aspect of the question. They are, however, conjoined. In that sense it comes down to a question of what criteria does one use to define freedom and are such criteria legitimate?

To an extent, this can become an inversion of the previous state of being unable to do what is inconceivable, wherein one establishes what cannot be done (or, in many instances, what is not allowed to be done) and then using that as justification for claiming a loss of freedom. The question slips back and forth between legitimate restrictions and imagined constraints. And of course the paradox arises when we ask whether or not we are free to imagine whatever we like. 

To a great extent, it’s a silly question. How can anyone stop us? But at some point the freedom to do so bleeds over into actions. Are we free to act on anything we conceive?

It is within those two states—conception and action—that all political questions of freedom reside. (Perhaps, as an amusement, it might be fun to compare this to the above notion of interdimensional travel.) 

Clearly, we are not free to act on just anything we might conceive. There are many reasons, both metaphysical and concrete, but the chief one is that we must be mindful of how such actions impact and impede others.

Which brings us back to the question of form. The responsible use of form. This goes to the question of determinism in key ways, but basically it is the ground upon which a social contingency to enable the optimum manifestation of freedom may be constructed. Insofar as it impinges on Agency, the question is one of compromise before all else based on a recognition of Other Minds. In other words, room must be made to accommodate others who have the same interest in finding a field of action consistent with a sense of freedom.

I’ll leave this for now and come back later. For now, some things for consideration.

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Hope Projected

An idea occurred to me recently while reading a history of the early christian church (a very good one, I might add). I have little patience with the absolutes advocated by religious sentiment, the whole idea that one must, above all, believe. That to “have faith” is the most important thing. The materialist in me always come back to the same question: in what? That is the shoal upon which any ship of faith I might board runs aground. And without a clear What, the rest splinters and sinks.

But while I have a firm distrust of calls to faith—likewise demands for belief, for loyalty, for boundless commitment to causes for which I may be sympathetic even if unwilling to suspend all critical analysis of them—I cannot deny at least a set of habits that draw me to it. Historically, we see examples of faith empowering people to do amazing things.

I have not for many decades been able to “put my faith” into anything I cannot define. Further, just defining the thing is insufficient. There must be some basis in accepting its reality. I do not believe in gods.

But I do accept an idea of the numinous.

Recently, while listening to To The Best Of Our Knowledge, during an episode about hope, it occurred to me that we may have the whole idea of faith backwards. Humans have a habit of projecting concepts onto externalities. We attribute qualities to all sorts of things that cannot, in many instances, possess them of themselves. We do this across the spectrum. People, cars, boats, books, buildings, money. Luck is a prominent one. Public figures provide endless opportunity for us to project our desires, our preconceptions, our dislikes and prejudices, our sense of self worth.

I have always conceded, at least intellectually, that Faith (with a capital F) goes beyond concepts like trust, relying upon, dependence. All those are conditional.  Faith is supposed to be absolute, unconditional, ever reliable. Faith defies reason. Faith asserts infallibility.

And I realized that there is one thing we carry inside that fits all that, to varying degrees, which most often we take for granted, but occasionally elevate to supernatural status given the right circumstances. Hope.

Hope is a mercurial idea. Part optimism, part fantasy, part will, it is a view of the world that our place in it will be acknowledged and rewarded. To hope is to choose the positive outcome, no mater how unlikely, over the despair resulting from surrender. It is, in fact, one of the factors in getting out of bed in the morning feeling that the day will come out all right. It operates often without evidence. In short, it exhibits all the characteristics of Faith with one exception—it is entirely self-generated. In fact, there is one thing that faith supposedly provides that hope does not: comfort.

Or does it?

My conclusion is that faith is only hope projected. We put it on an external something then attribute that something as the source and then proceed to believe in it as if it actually existed. (Now, it may be that we do this to another person, in which case it is concerned with something—someone—that exists, but there is still that confusion as to the actual source.) The much-vaunted “faith in god/providence/the supernatural/etc is usually what is meant when we talk about Faith.  Also, because so many people have difficulty investing ideas with loyalty, at least in any sustained manner, we personify the idea and make into…

The question always comes back to, “do you have faith?” I have hope. I may be unable to do anything about that, it comes with the equipment. But I know the source, and curiously that gives me comfort.

It also makes me responsible for any misconceptions I might have about matters of…well…faith.

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The Unrealized Dream

I’ve gotten to the point where I nearly tune out when someone in the public eye starts going on about the Founders and what they intended. Pro or con, it’s a surmise, and cherrypicking is rampant, though some pick bigger cherries than others. A few don’t even bother, they just make up whatever feels right and layer it over a 10th grade understanding of history. They can do this because we Americans in general couldn’t care less about history. That has always been the case, just as we, who have freedom to do so, read very little on average.

Some things have emerged from what I’ve read over the years pertaining to what the good folks in 1787 intended, not so much what they wrote down (though many of them did) as to what a reasonable assessment of the history of the times tells us.

The first thing I conclude is that the vast majority of Americans, once the ties were severed from England and the nation established, went on to pay precious little attention to the Constitution or the intent of the Founders. They were too busy doing what they then felt at liberty to do, which was carve out a bit of something for themselves and their descendants, legally if they could, by whatever means they had at hand. To live their lives as they chose. Adhering to the vaunted principles set forth by the framers of the Constitution was not top of their agenda. Not that they paid no attention to what was going on in Philadelphia, seeing that whatever emerged from that august body was bound to affect them directly. But I believe their interest was largely self-directed. They had just gotten one pest off their back, it would be annoying if another took its place.

And I’m sure they were fine with the results as far as it went, probably proud of it, since the majority voted for it, but it was not about to change how they saw or made their way in the world. For one thing, it did not seem to require that they change. Those few passages in the Bill of Rights which later in our history caused some upheaval just didn’t seem all that big a deal then. As far as the self-defined audience for the new Constitution was concerned, it was for their benefit and any restrictions applied to someone else. From all appearances, especially the Bill of Rights, it was designed to interfere as little as possible with the aspirations of the average citizen.

That average citizen/settler came here or migrated west in order to succeed at some form of self-sufficiency. The “dream” here that attracted so many from Europe and other places was that you, whatever your origins, could actually own something, and the law was there to see that no one could take it away arbitrarily. This was not unprecedented—English common law offered something similar, and the 13 colonies were overwhelmingly English—but the opportunity to actualize that goal seemed far more possible here. Enough folks managed a degree of it to give real force to the idea. And the new Constitution was by and large a set of restrictions on government, to keep it from acting arbitrarily.

This goes to one of the questions about the American revolution that teases people from time to time, which is out of all the revolutions that followed, why did this one work and the vast majority of the rest did not?

Simple. Our revolution—the war, the severance from England—was done in order for the people living here to continue doing what they had been doing all along. With relatively minor modifications (initially) the institutions already established had been up and running for over a century and in the aftermath very little changed. They had been doing fine and wanted England to butt out. Likewise, the Constitution seemed designed to guarantee the same continuity. The ones that followed, almost all of them sought to completely change the institutions and machinery of their countries. They were trying to do things differently, from top to bottom. We, by contrast, had it easy in the aftermath. (Plus, it there was something you didn’t like that the new establishment was doing, you could pick up and head west, out of reach, at least for a while.)

The idealism of a freedom of the press, the separation of church and state, the guarantee of due process, all could be regarded not as radical instantiations of a new communal ethic, but merely as a promise that the government—specifically the federal government—would not intrude upon local custom. 

The big problem left on the table, of course, was slavery. Every high-minded phrase from the Declaration of Independence on talked about individual liberty, and yet the necessary changes to guarantee that were not made. Things, as I said, went on much as they had always gone on.

Aside from slavery, other problems continued. Newspapers were burned down, the presses smashed, when they disturbed local sensibilities. No one prosecuted the perpetrators on the basis of the first amendment, but on property destruction and, in some instances, assault and murder. The “Constitutionality” of the acts were not taken into account (naturally, since such actions were rarely if ever instigated by the government). The people doing the smashing and burning likely never considered the higher ideal involved. They only knew they were offended by the newspapers in question and felt they had a right to shut the down. Vigilantism overrode juris prudence and due process. And, per the early supreme court, contracts were held to be more important than individual circumstance and rights.

And of course the “rights” of indigenous peoples were almost never considered, even though the founding ideas of the country aimed at All Men. (Of course, that left women out as well.) There were several “oversights.”

It has been pointed out that the Founders didn’t think much of democracy, which is why they established a republic. Aside from educational assessments, I suspect they knew fairly well that for too many of their fellow citizens, the ideals they had managed to enshrine in the Constitution mattered very little. They knew, though, that they could not just mandate the new structures, because that would have caused many of the same problems they had just finished fighting a war with Great Britain over. So the ratification was an open vote, universal, one man one vote. The first time and for a very long time the only instance of allowing an open plebiscite. The population voted for it, en mass. It was a fairly literate population and the campaign to get it all approved resulted in the Federalist Papers. (There were also opposing viewpoints, the Antifederalist Papers, which I suspect most people today know nothing about, but it was a debate, a very public one.) People had a chance to vote no.

So did they not approve of all the highmindedness? I mean, they voted yes, they had to know.

Well, yes and no. We’ll never know for sure, we can’t, but I have a feeling that many if not most looked at what was being proposed, saw it as a set of restrictions on the federal government, and believed none of it would apply to them. It was a legal framework that gave them freedom to live the way they wanted.

No matter at whose expense. 

And it’s not that they had ambitions to do bad things, but exclusivity was seen as natural. The idea that the privileges and rights held by a white male in 1790 should be shared with everyone else…well, perhaps the theory may have sounded fine, but to actually establish that in his own neighborhood? 

By the the time the Civil War came around, a lot of people were probably thinking what a nuisance this whole All Men thing was. That perhaps the Founders had pulled a fast one on them. It had never occurred to too many of them that there was a slow bomb in the thing they had agreed to.

That slow bomb was an idea let loose from the beginning, which is at the heart of all the Constitutional controversy down through to today. Equality. Perhaps they thought it wouldn’t matter—after all, they had said that All Men were created equal, which by implication left women and children out. But Native Americans are men (those who are not women) and so are African Americans, Latinos, and so forth. Once the claim was made, it was only a matter of time before all those groups who were denied equal regard would begin pointing out the disconnect and others would agree. But it likely never occurred to those who in subsequent generations grew angrier and angrier by the assertions of rights from groups they never themselves considered equal on any grounds that what the Constitution said would actually mean things would have to change. 

(Perhaps if they had written All Humans, it would have been clearer. But as we know from history, people here and there have no problem designated Others as Not Human.)

Now, on the other side, no doubt many people knew very well what they had just voted for and liked it. Which is why they were so angry about the degree to which their country had failed to live up to its stated ideals. These populations were not monoliths. And they fought with each other. The Founders—some of them—had, in the old aphorism, put the cat among the chickens, quite intentionally.

The fight over equality has been about an assumed right to acquire the power to dictate to people with less power. Not overseas, although one can hear that being argued among certain people, but right here. The unquestioned right to accrue wealth and power which can then be used to control those with no money and no power. The argument? That this is not a right, but a privilege that has the drawback of impacting actual rights. 

That one is still being argued. Of course, there’s nothing in the Constitution about that, other than that implied mandate for equality in several sections and in a good deal of the Bill of Rights, that these freedoms and protections are meant to be applied equally. We’re having a difficult time with that. The first successful skirmish after slavery over that was back during the Trustbusting days, which was an ethical fight using the commerce clause of article V to base the federal government’s legal right to interfere in financial systems. FDR nearly finished that job, not quite, and here we are again.

(Consider how often an obvious argument about equality has been side-stepped judicially in order to avoid certain ramifications. Reproductive rights, for instance, has been mainly argued as a right to privacy rather than an obvious matter of equality. When gay rights came before the courts, attempts were made to put them in the same category, but the decision was made to argue them as matters of equality. It should be noted that in the subsequent decades, reproductive rights ended up more and more vulnerable while LGBTQ rights have only gained valence. When arguments that are best made based on equality are set aside it is almost always because someone is afraid of losing a perceived privilege.)

Because that was the aim, to find a system wherein everyone had a share, a say, and no one could take away their voice. Wherein everyone had an equal right to the possibilities of community.

The American Dream has for too long been characterized as a materialist fantasy—money, property, etc. True, much of the dream requires a material component, but only in service to the larger dream, which is for each of us to be able to live in the world as who we are without arbitrary limits imposed for reasons that have nothing to do with the principles upon which we were ostensibly founded. 

But living that way requires we respect everyone else’s right to live their way. The unimagined (but perhaps not unanticipated) varieties of tolerance necessary did not have so many challenges to the people then who felt it was simply and exclusively all about them. They probably knew that at some point there would be a reckoning, between principle and reality, certainly over slavery—in fact, they did know since the argument was built in to the Constitution (the 20 year delay in allowing the issue to be addressed in congress), so some of them might well have had an inkling that there would be more and for them stranger examples of the meanings they had set to emerge.

My point? Well, the obvious one with regards to the nonsense foisted on us about Originalism. Even if philosophically there were some validity to the idea of Originalism, it’s an impossible argument to make, because we continually refuse to address the obvious, that people then were not much different in key respects than they are now. They did not go forth to conquer and settle this country spurred by the vaunted ideals of the Founders, but to make as much money and guarantee as much security as they could, and were quite happy to have a legal structure—they thought—that approved of their personal ambitions. The Founders knew that and some of them managed to create a guiding document intended to open up and emerge with more and more force as circumstances arose to trigger those inherent meanings. This would be the very definition of a Living Document.

But for the sake of argument, let’s suppose Justice Scalia was right when he dismissed the idea of the Constitution as a living document. It doesn’t matter. Because it is a document based on an idea and ideas are useless without a living mind to embrace them. Assume then that the Founders, some of them at least, knew what they were doing when they put all those bits about equality into these various instruments, that in the future the living minds that accessed the underlying principles of those documents, the ideas, would have to unpack them and interpret them. (Alexander Hamilton said there was no need for a Bill of Rights because the structure of the Constitution would force people to oppose each other over ideas, issues, and rights.) There are only so many ways to interpret Equality. The document may not be alive but the ideas cannot be otherwise. Many of the Founders likely had a constrained idea what equality meant. Or maybe not, maybe they just had a limited notion of who they intended it for. But they likely knew their understanding of it would not be the only one through time. And they put it in there anyway.

Meantime, we’re having the same fight. Between people who wish to live in a better, more equitable society, and those who wish to be free of any interference so they can get what they can, preferably without having to be brutal, but certainly prepared to be if they can’t manage any other way. The latter group are the ones complaining today about Wokism and frankly terrified of education. Born of the previous generation who hated Political Correctness, something they misunderstood and/or mischaracterized then. And they came from those who hated Civil Rights, because they thought they’d lose power if actual equality were established. They’re the same sorts who back in the day thought nothing of wiping out native tribes and stealing their land because of some nonsense called Manifest Destiny. The idea of actual equality would have sounded…foreign…to them. Certainly frightening.

Imagine what it would be like if we actually did embrace equality…

From 1789 on we have had two Americas. The one we like to brag about, but which too many people really don’t want. And the one we live in, which is still stuck in an anti-idealistic struggle engineered by people who have a stake in keeping us frightened of each other. It’s troubling to me how eagerly we seem to embrace our fear, even while we often sing praises to the unrealized dream.

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I Do Not Believe

It was a toss-up what this post would be. Something about upcoming books or…this.

It is said that we are more polarized than we have ever been. I do not believe that. What I think is that in the last 40 years the band-aid has been ripped off and because of the emergence of social media we are now seeing just how polarized we have always been. Look at any period of our history and ask a simple question: were people more tolerant then or was it that anything that might challenge them in their complacency was simply kept buried and they didn’t have to deal with it?

There’s nowhere to get away from it today. Which I think is all to the good, because unaddressed problems, wounds, dysfunctions, and ruptures never just go away by themselves. The rising cry against so-called Wokism is nothing but people who never had to deal with their erroneous assumptions complaining that they don’t want to own their shortcomings. During the last few decades we have seen a resurgence of Lost Cause nonsense in the form of denials that the Civil War was all about slavery. In response, a flood of actual data was presented to show that, no, in fact, it was all about slavery. All of it, at every level, and by the Secessionist’s own admission. The objectors to this historical reality have been living with the solace of muffled history all their lives. It was unpleasant for them to be confronted with the fact that they had accepted misstatements, propaganda, and lies about something they wanted to feel no connection to. Even as they continued to support, implicitly or otherwise, a civic ecology of racism that exists out of all the unaddressed inequities of that soft-focus, romanticized Gone With The Wind* mythology.

The divisions of which we hear today have always been there and we were able to largely ignore them because of the weight of sheer numbers. The oppressed were too few, too weak, and therefore too voiceless to cause discomfort. Except for those times when it became intolerable even for the majority to bear. Eruptions of social justice movements burst forth, often violently, and Things Were Done to mollify the genie. After which things settled back into an uneasy stasis of hoped-for quiet.

There have been strides, changes we can collectively be proud of, but too often it was left unfinished. Too many people have been left out of the solutions and certain people would like to go back to believing everything is fine. The entire MAGA movement is nothing more than a demand for the cosmetics of a misremembered past when people didn’t complain and we could be pleased with our place as some kind of icon of decency…and power. The dissonance of the demand—Make America Great Again—begs the question, especially at a time when we have an unprecedented capacity to do genuine good in the world. And every time we are tasked to do that, the MAGA crowd howls in discontent that we ae somehow less and the country must be rescued and remade according to Hollywood history.

At the base of this is a habit of cognition which, in proper perspective, should not be a problem, but when pushed past the limits of its utility has become a serious problem.  “What do you believe in?” In normal usage, it’s merely a question of conditional acceptance, a placeholder, if you will, until better information can either modify or replace how one understands something. But when used as a litmus test of trustworthiness, it becomes toxic and inimical to the one thing that might save us from destruction, namely our ability to see clearly.

For years I’ve had a problem with the phrasing “Do you believe in science.” I know what it’s supposed to mean and what it often does mean, but I still chafe at it. The usage carries implications that are the exact opposite of what is intended. And it is those implications that those who intend something else know very well and use to subvert the legitimacy of any casual answer. I’ve gotten to where I will not say Yes. No, I do not believe in science. I accept science as a valid and useful tool, I accept the answers it provides, I privilege its product above mere statements of belief. I trust it, yes, but as a process. The question “Do you believe in science?” reduces science to an object, one with innate qualities on par with a deity. It renders ones acceptance of it as a volitional act of surrender to those qualities and its dictates. It redefines the proper relationship and turns it, by degrees, into a faith, a religion.

No, I do not believe in science.

Go down the list. That question, about anything, is generally a shorthand, a quick way to determine the basis for further discourse, but for some people it is a statement of fidelity and admission to an exclusive club.

Long ago, in my adolescence, I became entranced by the speculations of Erich von Daniken. Along with the whole UFO craze, I thought his ideas percolated with a coolness actual archaeology could never hope to achieve. But I was raised by a father who was determined that I never be taken in. By anything. Question. Never accept that we know everything, in particular that I know everything. It is impossible to go through life constantly off-balance by doubt, but always be aware that certainty is conditional. So I did finally go looking to genuine archaeology and found out that the nonsense Van Daniken espoused was little more than the stuff of a good story. I felt betrayed. I liked the notions he put forth, the part of me that preferred a great yarn wanted very much for his implications to be true. I wanted to believe. But I couldn’t, not after I found out the facts. The same thing happened to my affection for UFOs. And Atlantis. And so many other things that turned out to be mere stories woven from a few threads of reality by what I later understood as the practice of conspiracy theory.

How does this relate to our present divisions? When people are trying to ban books, ignoring history, asserting faith over fact, it should be obvious. Our divisions manifest in multiple ways, but are rooted in the desire by one faction to above all believe. It is, perhaps, easier than constantly reassessing. Reassessment always comes with the possibility of having to discard a favorite story as Not Fact.

In the constantly escalating heat of our divisions, one is forced, it seems, to take hard positions just to maintain equilibrium. So I will here state that I Do Not Believe In…anything. Not in the sense meant by those seeking to undermine everything I find of value.

Authority is never absolute and it seems to me that those most invested in proclamations of What Do You Believe want above all to end all questions. Aside from everything else, it is this assertion of absolute authority—in the guise of taking back our country—that I find I cannot support and which the Republican Party is now deeply invested in. Only they aren’t doing it by finding better information, clearer facts, a firmer grasp of reality, but by trying to silence the debate. I cannot accept that and heads the list of the things I do not believe in.

 

 

 

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*Which is itself a species of selective apprehension. There are two ways to watch Gone With The Wind, the most common apparently being as a love letter to a vanished utopia. But there is such a thing as subtext and below the surface throughout that film one can read all the hypocrisy and ugliness that valorized surface covers. In many ways it is a thorough condemnation of the South and the Peculiar Institution and the rose-tinted notion that there was anything beautiful about the antebellum world.

Art

Considerations Going Into 24

It has been a year of highs and lows, as are most years, but generally we pick one by which to characterize the whole. I can’t do that this time, because it is all of a piece.

The highs? A new novel appeared in April, Granger’s Crossing, the first in what may turn out to be a series. I have ideas anyway. I could stand a bit more love for it, not to mention reviews, both at the link and on Goodreads. But after a seven year gap, to have a new book out is amazing.  Likewise, my Secantis Sequence is about to be reissued in ebook format (paper copies will be available, I’m told) and that is something I never expected to see. When I have a proper release date I will post it here and elsewhere. And I was approached by the State Historical Society of Missouri, who contacted me about hosting my papers. This removed a nagging weight from my shoulders. The other day I handed over two more bins to them. I’m still assessing how this makes me feel, but it’s all positive.

What else…I found a new gym, where I’ve been experiencing better workouts than in the past several years. We made a couple of major improvements to the house. No major trips, but we did get to see some very good friends in Kansas City we hadn’t seen in several years. And I’ve been connecting with my mother. Not that we were out of touch, but the months since dad passed have been rocky. She seems to be handling it better than one might expect, but I’ve been getting together with her once a week for a couple of years now and she’s been telling me stories I’d never heard before. I’m happy to report she has more friends in her neighborhood than she knew and while perhaps not thriving, she’s doing quite well. She just turned 89.

We’re approaching the final year of Donna’s fulltime employment (fingers crossed) and that will take some planning. We intend traveling a damn sight more than we have been.

Our friends are all doing well, some in much better places than they had been.

Retirement has been a cliché-ridden experience—not knowing how I ever had time for a job kind of revelation—but I have been accomplishing more.

Lows? Well, expectations on certain fronts are still not being met, and I am getting….tired. I no longer jump out of bed of a morning ready to take on the world. And when I do settle down to work, there’s a bit of a drag in the back of my brain, like “why are you still bothering?” Goals have not been reached, a couple of them now bordering on the never-to-be-achieved. It would be so helpful to have a good agent—or just now any agent. After 35 years as a professional writer, I find myself still in the position of a beginner when trying to get representation—only, a beginner with baggage. A paradox, I know, but there it is. There are projects I have on hold that quite possibly I’ll never get to at this point.

But the big low was dad passing. I’ve written about that, so no need to go over it again, but from time to time I find I still have a conversation or two I’d like to have with him. Nothing earth-shattering, nothing with dire psychological consequences, we made our peace with each other, said our says, and we were good. Just…I think he’d be really pleased with the new novel and it would have been nice to talk about it with him.

I will be 70 next year. As they say, more of my life is behind me now than before me, barring some revolutionary medical breakthrough that might give us another 50 plus years. (Even if such a thing is developed, I’m cynical enough to know it won’t be available for people in my income bracket.) I’m supposed to be wiser now than ten, twenty, fifty years ago, but I’m not at all sure how to gauge that. The shock of living to now is realizing how unwise too many of my fellow humans are, and how their unwisdom affects those around them, even tangentially. That could very well be hubristic on my part, which is why I distrust claims of wisdom. My dad, who was one of the sharpest people I ever knew, used to say that he wasn’t very smart. A completely baffling assertion, I always thought, but I can understand now why he might say that. He and I, we may well be smart, but we’re not smart enough.

One of the reasons I write—or, more accurately, one of the reasons I write what I do—is to understand. In my youth, I read science fiction because it presented a clarity about the world I did not find in literary fiction. It offered possibilities, likely answers, or at least asked the right questions, and I could put a novel down and feel like I understood something better than I had before.  An illusion, of course, a byproduct of the inherent didacticism in the genre, but it would be nice to have that feeling again, just once in a while. I think fostering that feeling has a benefit, in that for a short while it enables the chance to act positively in a world seemingly determined to negate every good thing we attempt. It offers the possibility of right action, and for the duration of that feeling we might do some good, at least more effectively than from a vantage of gloomy surrender to the morass of the world’s contradictions. I write to find that clarity and maybe offer it to others. It is not an answer—there are no solutions in such a space—but a clearing of fogs so we see better what might be done.  I write what I do to find that for myself. I’m trying to explain the world to me.

An endless task, but after all this time still the only worthwhile path I know.

2024 will bring challenges and more muddle and into that path if someone shines a light or offers a hand or shows you a possibility, then be cheered that you are not the only one walking it and searching.

Meanwhile, be well, be safe, and love each other. Above all, love each other.

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The Meander

I’m a bit tipsy as I write this. A nice bourbon, at an inappropriate time of the day. But my mind is bouncing from topic to topic, so I thought I’d let folks know what’s going on.

Is the next Granger novel going well? Well. Depends. I have a bit over forty thousand words done on the first draft. I ran into a wall, called the Osage, and have been semi-diligently researching this rather impressive tribe of Native Americans in order to say things about them that will not make me look stupid. They had an intricate if inconsistent relationship with first the French and then the Spanish, at at least two geographical points—the Arkansas River and St. Louis—that made things complicated for the Europeans at the time. While researching, I’m writing nothing. I stopped at the pivotal scene where some negotiation is required, and later in the story they will again be pivotal. So.

We’re planning a road trip down to Kaskaskia, just to get a feel for the place. Virtually nothing remains today of what was there at the time (1785) but it would still be useful to walk the ground. And then there is Fort de Chartres, which is pretty much on the same spot, but completely rebuilt.

Consequently, I have been brought face to face with one of my internal contradictions, which is bound up in the rush of writing new material but having to stop till I know more. I do not do the degree of research some writers do. I do enough to write semi-confidently. Others will learn a period or place down to its DNA. I do not, though I generally end up knowing more than I realize. Then someone asks a question and voila! there’s this font of data I didn’t even know I had. But really, I meander through the material, picking up bits here and there, searching for the threads that bind the times together. In time, I meander over quite a lot, just not in a rigidly organized way.

Since turning 69, I’ve been doing these periodic reassessments. Another meander. How much of what do I have the stuff to do? I have no concrete answer. I get tired more easily, but that may just be that I haven’t yet slowed down or taken on less.

I’m in a bit of a slump. I’ve been trying to push the book more, and I’ve tried a couple of new things, but I have no way of gaging what is or is not working. It would be nice to see a few more reviews in the various places where such things appear (and appear to matter). There is about a year and a half till my better half retires and we have some negotiations to do for the after time. It’s easy to fall into habits that may not work well when the situation changes. I’ve been fortunate in that I have a wonderful partner who has allowed me to pursue dreams that have not exactly produced the desired results. We’re still indulging our read-alouds and right now we’re reading Nicola Griffith’s Hild, which is superb, to be followed by her new one, Menewood.

Speaking of whom, last month we attended the World Fantasy Convention in Kansas City. Mainly because friends said they’d be there and it would be great to see us. It was good to be there, with them, but it led me to the conclusion that except for connecting with good friends, there really seems to be no reason to continue attending conventions. I’m not a Name. Again, I don’t know how to gage this, but in a 35 year career I’ve been a GoH only once.  Hmm.

But these people, these connections, these friends…how did this happen? I have been so lucky to have met and connected with such marvelous people from so many places! That is its own kind of success and I feel I’ve been gifted with a dream-come-true aspect to life I never thought to have,

Now, then, where was I? Oh. All future things depend on all present things. For those of you interested in the Granger story, I have ideas for several novels. (More meandering, from one book to next, with other things in between.) It could well be a long series. I’m finding considerable pleasure just now revisiting the territory, so to speak. As to whether those future stories appear, that is, of course, dependent on market forces over which I have little say. Christmas is coming up, If you know readers, then Granger’s Crossing would be a great gift. I have no budget, word of mouth is the best I can manage, so brag about me. Get those numbers up., Make my publisher happy and then the next one may appear. (I think you’ll like the next one, I really do; at least I’m having a good time writing it.)

As for the science fiction, well, soon I’ll have an announcement concerning my Secantis Sequence. I’m pretty excited about it. Stay tuned. There are more short stories in the works.

It would be helpful to have an agent, but after my last one dropped out of the field, I’ve been just a bit despairing of that. Too many places are unwilling to look at unagented work, and I can understand that, I can, but it makes it more difficult to shop work around. (Several years ago, in my new position as consignment book buyer, I had a conversation with a young writer whose novel I had rejected. He was trying to convince me to change my mind and then said the wrong, or possibly the right, thing: “You have no idea how hard it is breaking in.” In one of my rare moments of “I don’t give a shit candor” in that job, I explained who I was, what I had done, how many years I had been doing it, and what my track record was to date, ending with “So, yes, I do know how hard it is and I’m telling you, your book is not ready for prime time. Go somewhere and learn how to write.” Which to my pleasant surprise did not get an angry hang-up, but a long pause and a heartfelt, “What would you suggest?” We then had a long conversation about workshops and how long and why and so forth and I hung up feeling that he just might pursue my advice to good result. No, I do not remember his name, nor would I tell you if I did. Point being, this is not an endeavor for those unwilling to stay the course and put up with a lot of obstruction.)

Changing the subject, I am still working out, trying to stave off the erosion of age as best I can, and fortunately the only negative effect has been a need for more sleep. But I am trying to assemble a regular discussion group again. We had belonged to one that last many years, sometimes based on a pure philosophical discussion, then at others times around a book (Dante, Joyce, Melville), but always in as deep a dive as possible, with sharp people among whom I always felt like the dullard. Some died, some moved away. I’d like to start that again, but there’s an organic aspect to that which cannot be planned for. I do feel a bit slower, mentally. Until I get involved in a deep conversation and then al the cylinders seem still to fire as they should.

2024 is coming up. I’m more than a little concerned for next November. I’m actually a bit anxious about my fellow citizens. It is difficult to feel confident in a community that once sent a berserker into office and may have the potential to do so again. I fear for my friends, some of whom would be sorely put upon under more of that kind of dysfunction. For the first time in my life, I really do not know what will happen.

But I’ll comment on that in more detail later.

In my own little pocket of life, things are not bad. I have great friends, a wonderful partner, health, a bit of optimism, and the ability to appreciate it all. So, onward.

This update has been brought to you by my optimism. I’m going to meander off now.