Category: science

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Attention! Um….attention?

This weekend past I attended our local science fiction convention, Archon. I was on a number of panels and something of a theme started to emerge. More than one, actually. A couple of times the discussion came around to our lack of attention. And I coined a phrase.

We live in a Fractured Attention Ecology.

I’m keeping that. It was off-the-cuff, but the more I think about it, I think it’s something worth exploring. I’m not equipped to do that, not clinically. I’m a writer. But I realized that we keep trying to label the chronic short attention span that seems to plague contemporary life, to fit it into a manageable file to be dealt with by the appropriate expert. Everything from ADHD to a general lack of discipline. Occasionally someone points out that we have too much information to manage, but that doesn’t always explain why we can’t simply ignore the enormous quantity and just pick a few things.

For one thing, for people who apparently are inflicted with ever-shortening attention spans, we sure consume a lot of big thick novels and tune in to extended series and even movies are getting longer. We see people scrolling through their phones for hours at a time and the hours spent going through internet connections…

But then it becomes apparent that the depth of our knowledge on average is getting shallower. Many of us know a little bit about a great many things, but not much about any given subject.

Humans adapt. We adapt very well. Over the last forty years, since cable tv appeared just to pick a starting point, we have been adapting to an ever-expanding range of choices. We have been training ourselves to try to pay attention to more and more, which means we’re absorbing less and less. The urgency to try to stay abreast seems to drive us to simply not spend much time on any one thing. Added to that, the range of things we have to pay attention to is widening.

I grant you, some of the problem is organic, but it may be self-inflicted. We adapt. We’ve adapted to a changing ecology. We haven’t done so very well. But then the ecology itself has not yet stabilized.

Fractured Attention Ecology.

Now, this may be something already being studied, so I won’t suggest I have a brand new idea about this, but no one else recognized the term, so for the time being I’m taking credit for it. It does suggest a different way to look at the problem.

More information for us to deal with.

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.

Community

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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Just To Be Clear…

Just to be clear…

I will be voting for Kamala Harris in November. Nothing radical or shocking in that, I intended to vote for anyone who had a chance of winning who is not Donald J. Trump. It helps this time that the candidate I’m voting for has some policy positions I can support unreservedly. 

We like to dismiss political ignorance in this country by attempting a blasé pose that “really, there’s not much difference between the two parties.” There may actually have been a time when that was largely true, but we have been watching a divergence of positions of tectonic proportions for the last 40 years. One could make an argument for the last 70, but I think it became alarming with the election of Ronald Reagan.

Disclaimer: I voted for Reagan the first time. Like too many people, I was swayed by the optics, by the substanceless bluster. And Reagan made the usual slew of claims that he would not do this or that, to mollify those who, conservative as they might have been, were content with a great deal of what was in place since FDR. 

But Reagan put our economy on the track to suffer recurrent bubbles, resulting in higher paydays for those who knew how to play the market, and increasing disparities in income, and a degradation of middle class security. He was the first Republican president whose policies left us with a huge debt and a deficit that became a political football for the next 9 election cycles, a problem no one in the GOP wanted to solve because it was too good to run on.

Reagan brought a religious element into national politics that has brought us to a point of division as bad as the one that caused the Civil War, all in order to leverage a particular kind of political opportunism that pumped ether and adrenaline into issues that had never been controversial before, issues which went on to become talking points no one wanted to actually solve because they were such excellent campaign issues.

Reagan started the whole denigration of a federal government that had till that point worked miracles in terms of public service since the 1940s. All in the name of dividing the states and permitting a partisan war that served the interests of Big Money.

After Reagan, the allowable agendas shifted to the right and even a centrist like Clinton found himself unable to veto the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which took down the last bulwark between commercial and private banking that led directly to the 2008 collapse. The weak legislation passed to make up for what had worked perfectly well since the 1930s received death blows in the form of Supreme Court decisions on the side of Money, primarily Citizens United, which in the 1960s and 70s would have looked like sheerest nonsense to D.C.

All of which brought us into the era of politics which saw unbelievable increases in campaign spending, an environment in which the primary job of an elected official is always the next campaign (perpetual running), and a deterioration of reliable information sources which has given us a toxic media ecology that has very little to do with substantive policy.

Hillary Clinton was buried under an unrelenting media avalanche which should have had no traction. They kept bringing her back for Benghazi. She never pleaded the Fifth (one of her aides did, but Clinton herself never did), and the last time she sat for 11 hours. The fact is, if the Republicans, who were in charge of these investigations, could have found something, why didn’t they? Because wrapping it up would have taken one of their campaign issues off the table.

We are living in an absurd period. 

It is perhaps a legitimate question to ask, how is the average citizen supposed to know what to believe?

In specific, it’s a huge task. But when it comes down to identifying legitimate issues from bullshit, it shouldn’t be that hard.

We have politicians railing against tampon distribution in schools. Really? Are you that hard up for a campaign issue?

This is simple, at least for me. Those who continually attempt to deny voting rights to various groups are the enemy.

Those who seek to strip rights from otherwise legitimate groups are the enemy.

Those who continually tell you who to fear, especially with no evidence to support their positions, are the enemy.

Those who support book banning, under any circumstances, are the enemy.

Those who refuse to acknowledge the chief components of violence are the enemy.

Those who reject science are the enemy.

Those who back corporations instead of neighborhoods are the enemy.

We can go on. And, unfortunately, there are people who wholeheartedly support the enemy. In the absence of a larger perspective, their personal intolerances and knee-jerk fears supplant coherent thinking. All of these things are the trademark today of one party. For the first time in my life I am rejecting any Republican out of hand. The GOP is, in my opinion, on the wrong side of history—indeed, civic morality—on every issue.

And for the moment it appears they are finally beginning to implode from it.

The cherry atop the sundae is Trump. I have never been so dismayed by the categorical blindness of so many of my fellow citizens over something which should be obvious to a child. The man is a trash fire. He managed to accomplish two things during his presidency (three if you count packing the Supreme Court with ideological drones): another enormous tax cut for the top 1%; a tariff program that set the stage for all the distribution nightmares triggered by a pandemic he then refused to take seriously until the situation was dire (which set us up for the inflation we are still trying to contain); and, though this was unofficial, chaining the GOP to him in such a way that he is still telling them how to vote even though he is out of office…which led directly to one more failure in congress to deal with the immigration problems he exacerbated. Why? Because, like so much else, it is too good an issue to solve.

He has stated pretty much unequivocally his desire to be a dictator. For a day or life makes no difference to me, he treated it like a joke, but his actions around January 6th show clearly that he’s one of those politicos who believe he only has to win one election and he should be there for life.

It is part of the incoherence of his supporters that they will not understand reality. Biden has performed incredibly as president, and yet none of the MAGA camp can tell you what he has done much less why it should be seen as bad. The repeated canard that Biden has and is destroying the country is so blatantly untrue, yet people—many of whom have benefited from Biden’s programs—believe in their bones that we are about to collapse, when the opposite is true.

And then there are those who like to position themselves as somehow morally superior who refuse to consider voting for either because, a pox on both houses. This is little more than a refusal to accept how politics function and an excuse to not compromise, without which we have the gridlock we are all so justly tired. Third parties never do anything but sow chaos, at least when they come out of the gate going for the top prize without having done the decades long work of grassroots community building. People like that keep their gaze fixed on the presidency while their local school boards end up run by religious zealots who prefer a high teen pregnancy rate and rising STDs to actually dealing with the problems as things which can be solved and, oh, while they’re busy with Abstinence Only nonsense they’re trying to ban books and shove the Ten Commandments into the classroom. They don’t, by the way, do that because they think these things will help, they do it because they want the problems shoved back in various closets, the costs notwithstanding.

I want more people to vote and for it to be easier for them.

I want books of all kinds available to everyone.

I want women to be equal not just before the law but before the community.

I want wealth to remain in communities.

I want us to stop burning the planet down in the name of a few more points on the Dow.

I want people to be cared for without it bankrupting them.

And I want Being American to mean everyone, not just code for Being White.

I want the stupidity to end.

Now, that last one, I realize, may be hoping for too much. But we might start by actually educating kids rather than just trying to make them conform.

We might start by getting rid of those who traffic in intolerance just to hold office.

Big job. Maybe we should actually start by stop mistaking political expediency for being fair.

So, yeah, I’m voting for Kamala. Not because I expect her to magically solve all the problems. If she solves one it will be an achievement. But the other guy—the other Party—seems uninterested in solving anything. Rather, they’d like there to be a few more, so they have something to get their base stirred up and keep voting for them.

See you in November.

Community

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.

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Belief and Other Matters

By now it should be obvious to everyone that the so-called Pro-Life movement is not interested in confining itself to abortion. They have a definition of it so flexible that some designate birth control as a form of it. The line is not clear. Not to mention that in individual cases there is an evident record of hypocrisy. It’s all right for me, but no one else. It should not be legal.

It makes me uncomfortable.

I do not wish to get into the gears of the matter. I have a couple of observations about the framing issues.

Firstly, the division is largely (though not wholly) a consequence of Belief. At base, if you believe that the fetus is fully human, separate and distinct as a person from the woman carrying it, then you established a moral line difficult if not impossible to cross. There can be no compromise over that. Like other questions of assumed rights, it will not matter what counterarguments are made, the reality is you believe this and there can be no fact that will persuade you otherwise. For a change to occur, you would have to abandon your belief. That would not alter the substance of the belief, only your position in relation to it. Either it is a belief you embrace or it is not.

And no reasoned argument will alter that.

If, in other words, somehow it could be demonstrated that the fetus is not a person, it would change nothing. That would have no validity in the face of your belief.

(To move this out of the abortion arena for a moment, take for example the debate over the Second Amendment. For some, what the framers of the constitution actually meant would now make no difference—the belief in the right to personally own firearms is unassailable, regardless of what facts may be shown to the contrary.)

In any confrontation between deeply-held belief and fact-based alternatives, the latter has no purchase.

However, the chief flaw in the overall Pro-Life argument lies in its deployment as a feint. Again, this is connected to a species of belief, but since it was for so long buried in the rhetoric of “unborn rights” it only recently emerged. Given that a fairly substantial number of those who align themselves with that movement have proven to have feet of clay—namely, many who talk the talk end up availing themselves of the services they so loudly decry—it becomes clear that abortion is not the main issue. They are now going after contraception.

To my mind, going back to those with marrow-deep commitments to the Second Amendment, the reasons for such positions emerge only later. The why of such positions. We should all know now that a sizeable cadre of such gun rights advocates are not insisting on them for matters of self-defense or sports, but because they believe they have a right, even a duty, to overthrow the government. They are nascent revolutionaries. Along with this, there are those who seem to believe they are in an unacknowledged war for the supremacy of one tribe over others. The philosophic issues surrounding the constitution and its presumed properties are secondary to their assumed “right” to defend themselves against the boogeyman of potential oppression. Often in the guise of other ethnicities, immigrants of all stripes, and even political opposites. The insistence on personal firearm possession is part and parcel with an ingrained paranoia that holds that a presumed set of cultural privileges is sacrosanct and will have to be defended against abrogation. We do not have to go far to find historic examples—the entire history of the KKK is based on exactly this kind of thinking.

Such duplicitous thinking underlies many otherwise insurmountable divisions. Within a given group, the supposed “purity” of purpose can be seen to break down on closer examination. It is not a monolith.

Curiously, the one thing that seems to offend them all within their group is the idea that it should be left up to the individual.

So the two issues I’d like to address are conjoined in this instance—firstly, the presumed sanctity of Belief, and secondly the shell games that come about when belief runs into politics.

Let me clear up first the potential pitfall—belief vs Belief. In order to navigate the day, we all have to base certain actions on a level of belief. You have to believe certain things just to get by because there is simply no time to verify every single thing we take on some species of faith. We have to believe that the food we buy from the grocery store is safe. When something goes wrong and there’s an outbreak of e. coli, we have to believe the agencies responsible for our safety will do their jobs. We would go insane to act otherwise. And as a consequence of statistical reality we are right to do so.

(For me, one of the most important things to cultivate in life is a healthy skepticism and an appreciation of doubt. Doubt is essential. I was asked once by someone, quite sincerely, why they should doubt that which they know to be true. The only answer that serves is that while the thing being believed may well be innately true, it is our ability to understand and interpret what it is that we must always doubt. That we have it right is the necessary question. I have no doubt the universe is real and operates according to certain principles. What I must always doubt is my ability to know and understand what those principles are and how they operate. What the True Believer seeks is to eliminate doubt altogether. I do not know if it laziness or impatience or insecurity, but I find this the most baffling aspect of such a position.)

In the back of our minds, though, it is conditional. Under certain extraordinary circumstances, we are also right to suspend our belief in all this, at least temporarily.

I’m not talking about that kind of practical assumption of reliability.

I’m talking about the moment belief becomes Belief, which is a different order perspective. It is the conviction that in all instances under all conditions, Something Is Always True and Reliable, regardless of any evidence to the contrary. With Belief comes intransigence. With Belief comes a conviction that one is being lied to by those who do not share said Belief. With Belief comes a rejection of evidence arbitrarily, based on how it may or may not conform to the scaffolding of Belief.

With Belief comes a vein of conviction, often constrained but always there, that anyone living otherwise is a potential if not actual enemy. And because of the presumed lies and the nonconformity and the absence of like-mindedness, any level of duplicity is justified because this is a war. In other words, Crusade is an acceptable response to differences of opinion and an insistence that there is more than one way to live one’s life.

Most of the attributes of a personal view of life well lived have long since subsided into minor things that cause little friction between people. All that is required for social harmony is a modicum of attention and respect for differing choices. We do not see seismic convulsions over dietary differences (although it may be possible to imagine one over the omnivore vs vegan question). We simply recognize differences and do not impose a monolithic preference.

Underlying and permeating this level of Belief is a deep and often unexamined insistence that the world conform to our expectations. That contrary positions be extirpated. That differences over key issues be eradicated. That everyone should be the same. And underlying that is the assumption that the Believer has the right viewpoint and has not only the right but the obligation to impose it on everyone else.

Mostly, this rarely rises above an ongoing anxiety that things do not conform.

But the central tension resides in a refusal to acknowledge that those who do not share your Belief have a right to hold their own.

We come now to where it erupts into conflict, namely social policy.

We’re seeing another example in Oklahoma right now, where a debate over the opening of a new—religious—charter school is unfolding because public funding is involved. I understand the concerns of both sides of this argument, and have felt personally for years that this is a conundrum with an easy solution, at least in terms of policy. My solution, however, would have the added consequence of driving partisans into the open to declare their actual intent. People have a tendency to camouflage their true desires, probably because a bold statement will be met with bold resistance. We live in an era in which major policy demands are too often couched in euphemism or hidden inside secondary or tertiary issues in order to slip the real goal in like a trojan horse. To state baldly that you want a school where children are spoon-fed religious ideology is a non-starter. So all the other reasons for establishing a separate, non-public institution are given. (My solution? Include religion in public schools, as part of history or even separately as a class on World Religions. Teach them all, give them all equal time. I suspect the howl of protest would quick strip the veneer of First Amendment concerns touted by partisans of a given creed.)

This is where Belief comes into conflict with the World. Belief dictates a preferred state, a template of how things ought to be, and where possible informs a drive to make the world conform. Giving equal time and respect to competing Beliefs is simply nonsense against such deeply held desire.

In a democracy, it is the back-and-forth that we recognize as the Will of the People that undermines any and all such attempts at enforced conformity. This is a brute-force method, of course, and too often satisfies no one, but it allows for the one thing that does effectively alter Belief—experience.

Even a cursory look at history shows that once deeply-held Beliefs have changed significantly, that the unquestioned givens of one period are the subject of bewildered speculation now. The only thing common to all this is experience, which erodes the details and eventually forces what we know to be true to change to accommodate a world that apparently had never been what the Beliefs of the Day said it was. Time and experience work like tides to alter and sometimes obliterate Beliefs.

Which understanding serves only to underscore the impermanence of them. We are taunting fate to insist that we must hold fast to ideas in the face of a reality that cares nothing for our wishes.

But then we come to the most intransigent aspect of Belief and that is where it coincides, reifies, and validates Identity. Our Beliefs, we imagine, are who we are.

What we have done historically in this country could be described as a series of holding actions, one part of the community erecting barricades to another until something new emerged from the confrontation. This has happened repeatedly and rarely without pain. The one thing that makes it all seem different now is our ability to see it as it happened, even if we are not directly involved. And that seeing elicits an opinion, a stand. The buffer of long communication has eroded to almost nothing. In many ways, this is a good thing. We have no excuse being surprised by injustices happening somewhere else. But the erosive effect on Belief has also accelerated. We are trying to establish that which will not change, under the assumption that principles are eternal. Well, perhaps some may be, but their formulation and the conditions in which they are expressed are not. What they are is water. Water is always water but the way it flows, where it rests, its very manifestation is mutable.

What makes this all the more difficult is the fact that there are dispassionate forces willing and able to take advantage of these differences to exercise power. I say dispassionate, but only in very specific aspects—those who crave power could actually not care less for the specifics of a given Belief. If they could get what they want by fostering and manipulating completely different sets of Beliefs, they would. All they want is the chasm between partisan advocates into which they may step and benefit by the conflict.

And we let them, because we are blinded to that by the nature of the Beliefs they exploit to their advantage.

I’m examining all this in order to find a way to navigate the current landscape. It has always bothered me when reason, backed by fact, fails to persuade. It took a long time for me to realize that I was not facing a reasoned position, but an expression of Identity that cannot yield, not without fundamentally changing its own nature. That is a tremendously difficult ask. It may or may not help to understand that eventually, the separation itself will yield to the erosion of experience. When some one or some group thrusts their Belief into a question that bears on people with whom they disagree, such disagreement a consequence of those same Beliefs, it comes down to a matter of assertion alone. Commonalities go by the wayside until—finally—experience erodes the division enough that some kind of compromise or altered perspective has a chance to manifest. In the meantime, other factors enter into the argument that most of time alter the question sufficiently that it becomes a new issue.

This is not conclusive. I’m still working all this over. But my inclination is to reject the assertions of those who offer only the testimony of their Belief as sufficient argument to impose their views on everyone.

I’ll come back to this in future.

 

 

 

 

Community

School Prayer

Over the years, I have modified my opinion on this many times. For a long time I believed it was a non-issue—how do you prevent it? If a student is intent on praying, what would prevent it?

Nothing. Which leads to the next realization that the people complaining about, demanding it, leading the charge against a prohibition that does not, in fact, exist are not interested in prayer in school: they’re interest in School Prayer, which requires public demonstration. What they want is openly-led prayer, as a group, with full participation.

This is not prayer, this is indoctrination. This is taking a position and directing the students to attend to what is being advocated. One major problem with this is that those students who decline to participate will be singled out and self-identified. What, one may ask, is wrong with that? Did you never go to school in the United States? Any deviation from a presumed “norm” is an excuse for bullying.

What is desired is an imposition of conformity.

Well, one might ask again, what is wrong with that? Isn’t that part of the point of attending school?

To which I must concede, yes, it is. We wish our people to have a common grasp of what it means to be a citizen and for that a certain degree of conformity is required.

Which is why this is such an intractable issue for many people.

How do I feel about it now?

Well. I believe the problem is not so much with a relative dispositions of a required set of conformist doctrines so much as that this is not supposed to be what school should be about in the first place. School—ideally—is where we should be sending children to learn how to apply skepticism. We should teach them how to think, how to examine the world, take things apart and put them together again. We should be allowing them to discover, in lightly directed ways, how the world works, what it means to develop understanding, and how to approach life critically. We should be teaching them, in short, how to avoid being duped.

While there may be schools where that level of actual learning takes place, for the most part it doesn’t happen other than by accident. I’ve always felt, at least after reaching an age and a level of understanding that allowed it, that public schools are not there to teach but to produce Citizens—consumers, workers, voters, patriots, parrots. Therefore, School Prayer is just another aspect of this and would be consistent with the programmatic inculcation of the conformity too many people prefer to the possibility of having a population of critical individuals questioning every damn thing and maybe challenging the status quo regularly.

So (again) how do I feel about it now?

Absolutely not. Religious instruction of any kind, unless done within the context of history classes, should be kept out of school, because it is by definition antithetical to skepticism. Which is of course why some people want it in there.

Somehow, some way, many students manage to acquire the tools of critical thinking even through the often mind-numbing “instruction” that passes for learning. They emerge as questioners, as independent thinkers. Apparently enough of them that the proselytes of conformity want to throw this in to the mix to see if something can be done to shut it down. So in the name of giving actual freedom of thought a chance, I must declare that I prefer religiosity of any kind kept out of public education. The fact is, religion depends on faith, which is incompatible in concept with skepticism. Mature believers certainly do find ways to balance them, but it seems unfair to expect kids to find that balance before they are even acquainted with the power of their intellects.

The day comes when we actually teach critical thinking as a matter of course, then by all means, admit prayer. Until then, I say leave it out. We do too much already to instill a stifling conformity.

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Trekness

I sometimes marvel at my own inability to apprehend the cluelessness of my fellow beings. Some positions come out of the zeitgeist that leave me gobsmacked at the utter feckless density of people.

And then I recover and reconsider and realize, no, I’ve been hearing this kind of nonsense my entire life. One just never expects it from those one considers allies. It calls into question all assumptions, then, about what one considers an ally, and the realization (which has always been there, really) clarifies that it’s all surface.

There are fans of Star Trek who have apparently only ever cared about the ship, the uniforms, the phasers, and the astronomy (such as it is). When it comes to the message? Not so much. They groove on the coolness of the æsthetics and manage never to quite grasp the underlying themes. Their favorite episodes, no doubt, are those with the maximum number of phaser blasts. Stand-offs between the Federation and the Klingons/Romulans/Cardasians/etc are held up as the whole point of the show. Somehow, they have reduced the entirety of the universe to a military SF genre.*

Fair enough. There has been a great deal of that. It’s exciting, it pulls in eyeballs, it offers a kind of astropolitical board game view of the future interstellar gestalt. But after 50-plus years of an expanding milieu, I can’t say that those have been the episodes or arcs that have stayed with me or had the deepest impact or resonance with me.

I do not see those as the soul of Trek.

They’re aberrations. They are presented as the thing to be solved so they stop happening. And the thing being defended is the vast, peaceful diversity of a polity steeped in nurturing the best of what is possible. The motto that started the whole thing and continues to be the basis for each new series—seek out new life and new civilizations—is the heart and soul of it, but that seeking and finding comes with a commitment to learn, grow, adapt, and remake ourselves in the face of the new.

In other words, it’s not about conquest, it’s about mutuality.

To be perfectly clear, Star Trek has been “woke” since the very beginning, when that multi-ethnic bridge crew appeared in living rooms all across a white-dominated United States. Equality and diversity have been the underlying given throughout the whole franchise. Poorly handled at times, muffled at others, occasionally embarrassingly unaware, but all through it.

Here’s the thing about aliens in science fiction. They have always, for the most part, been stand-ins for humans who are different. They have always been there as something against which to react and learn about differences. They have always been there as challenges to assumptions.

The conflicts? In the best and most memorable examples, breakdowns in communications, understanding, or intolerance unmitigated.

Oh, sure, there has been a great deal of war-fueled SF born out of recasting our own conflicts. More than a few based on WWII, the Cold War, Vietnam. But even among the best of these, there is the message, to be read if willing, that the whole thing is a mindless, stupid mistake that brings all parties down in the end. “Winning” is a lesson in irony.

The lesser material revels in the glory of conflict and the “honor” of coming out on top.

I can see no instance of Star Trek in which this has ever been a laudable scenario. Even Kirk, cowboy that he was, almost always did everything he could to avoid conflict. His worst moments were those in which he gave in to the easy solutions and wore the mantle of revenge.

For the rest of it, everywhere you looked the show extolled the virtues of cooperation, of dignity, of equality, of diversity. It was just there.

So the complainers, those who have somehow been taken by surprise that there is a core of empathy and acceptance and tolerance and an examination of difference and an exaltation of plurality and discussions of what it means to live in a society where everyone by right is accorded the agency of self-worth and the benefits of choice and that, yes, these are the bases of political discourse, have frankly not been paying attention.

Maybe their filters have been set too high and now that we have a few recent examples where the continual, ever-present message has been a bit more foregrounded than in past examples, they are shocked that what they saw as one thing, is actually much, much more. Star Trek has not become Woke (and I find it fascinating that a term intended to signify a state of awareness, of people paying attention, of recognizing what is around you has been repurposed as a pejorative by those who clearly would rather not be challenged by any of that, much the same as all past slurs of the anti-intellectual, the empathetically-stunted, the self-satisfied, the privileged ignorant) it has always been.

Just what do you think all the controversy over Kirk and Uhura kissing was about if not a bunch of unself-conscious racists reacting against an example of what we term miscegenation? Maybe go look up Loving v Virginia for a bit of then-current background. This was Trek saying “this should not be an issue!” But it was and it offended and had the term been current then, people would have been calling the show Woke.

Certain people have a deep investment in not seeing what they find challenging to attitudes with which they are comfortable. In this case, I’m quite pleased they are being unsettled. Squirm.

What I challenge here is the a-historical nonsense being touted that SF has never been political. SF by suggesting the future will be different is fundamentally political. SF by suggesting that change is essential is  fundamentally political. SF by suggesting that we still do not know what Being Human means is fundamentally political.

And SF that actively seeks to deny all this and puts forth a philosophy that such matters are settled and all that remains is for us to assert an end to self-discovery…well, that kind of SF comes in two forms: dystopia and crap. (The dystopic form is aware that this is merely an assertion of power and is basically wrong. The other form is philosophical onanism and is essentially anti-science fiction.)

I find it sad that these things need to be said. I grew up with Star Trek and from the very beginning it was the most positive piece of science fiction on television. It offered a future free of things like poverty, the KKK, anti-intellectualism, tribalism. Those are the aspects of it that sank in, made it a narrative that could not be denied, and has led to what it became today. Not the guns, not the wars—the aspirations of a future worth living in, for everyone.

If that’s being Woke, I’ll take it. Better than staggering through life asleep and destructive.

 

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*”But I don’t wanna see stuff about LGBTQ+ or compromise or learning about alien life forms so I can live with them or about empathy or how flawed humans are or any of that gooey touchy-feelie let’s-all-love-each-other shit!” Then all I can ask is, “Why in the Verse are you reading or watching science fiction in the first place? Just for the SFX? How sad.”

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Is Scrooge Merely A misunderstood Businessman?

It was a tradition in our family for many years that at Christmastime we get together, eat, drink, make jokes, and endure the Yule Season with a skeptical resolve to give unto Santa what is Santa’s. We appreciate the spirit but the actual mechanism leaves us a bit chilly. In rejecting the corporate gloss of Xmas, though, we’ve sort of recovered some of what the holiday is supposed to mean, at least according to all the armchair philosophes.

My mother is more enamored of the childlike aspects of Christmas than my father ever was, and he indulged her. She still holds to that in her small way, even as circumstances have changed. We still try to get together around this time, though it has long been a loose calendrical event. 

However, one ritual had worn on me for a long time. I write about it now because the entire country seems in the grip of ethical and moral contests which echo this seemingly minor one and it may be that exploring the small might illuminate the large in some useful way. 

My father, who should be a charter member of the great Curmudgeon’s Club, picks bones as a hobby. He’s good at it. He can find something to carp about with almost any topic. He can be fun to listen to and more often than not we find ourselves nodding with sympathy at some sage formulation from his mouth. 

Except this one. He thinks Ebeneezer Scrooge is a maligned and misunderstood character.

Classic conservative business-speak: “What the hell, he’s employing Cratchit! And Cratchit has a house! A house! How poor can he be if he has a house? As for Tiny Tim, what could Scrooge actually do to save his life? The kid’s a cripple, they didn’t have the medical technology back then. Would just paying Cratchit more help save his life? Everybody beats up on Scrooge and in all honesty, just what can he do?”

It was an aggravating rant because the rest of us knew there’s something he fundamentally missed, yet, like many arguments from specific points, it’s difficult to counter. My mother attempted to explain that the story isn’t about what Scrooge can do for others but what he needs to do for himself. He’s got a lot of money but he’s poor in spirit, and I imagine most people see it that way.

But I grew impatient with it after years and did a little digging.

Dickens wrote four Christmas tales, A Christmas Carol being the most famous. Each was intended to be edifying about some aspect of the Christmas Spirit and they were hugely popular in their day, and A Christmas Carol has remained so, through many reprintings and several dramatic adaptations. If all one is familiar with are the movies and television versions, it might be understood that certain aspects of the story are misapprehended, but I always found this particular view stubbornly obtuse. 

Firstly, you must credit Charles Dickens for his powers of observation. Read any of his other novels and you find a severe critic who was engaged in the close inspection of the world around him. He put down in detail the ills and failures of the society in which he lived and when considering a work such as Oliver Twist or Bleak House one would be hard pressed to complain that he had gotten anything wrong. His chief power as a writer in 19th Century England was as a social critic. So, given that he was not one to complain about something just to complain and was unlikely to abandon truth and fact just to make a point (since his points were all pointedly about truth and fact), why gainsay him in this tale?

Oh, well, we have ghosts and flights of supernatural fancy! Obviously he didn’t mean it to be read at face value in those passages concerning the “real” world. 

Nonsense. Credit him with keen observational skills.

Scrooge paid Cratchit 15 shillings a week. “Fifteen bob” as it says in the book. It’s difficult to be precise, but rough equivalencies can be found. The story takes place in 1841 (or thereabouts). Fifteen shillings then would be the equivalent of approximately 56£ today, or about $90.00. 

Now, it is unlikely Cratchit owned that house. He likely rented it. A great deal of housing in London at the time was owned by people who may have kept a townhouse but more than likely lived elsewhere. Rental fees ranged between 2£ annually to over 300£. Dickens doesn’t discuss that, but just the cost of food, clothing, and heat especially, which was from coal, and not cheap, would have eaten up most of Cratchit’s weekly salary. Anyway one looks at it, taking care of a family of eight on less than $90.00 a week would be a challenge. 

The goose was likely from a club in which funds would be pooled, paid in advance and over time, so geese could be purchased in bulk (reducing the price somewhat) and then made available to the subscribers at Christmastime. Cratchit was hardly buying such things on a weekly or even monthly basis.

As to what Scrooge might have done for Tiny Tim, well, that is difficult to say. Medicine was not advanced, causes of diseases were only vaguely understood, and many ills befell people simply from living in squalid conditions. The onset of the industrial revolution had drawn people into the cities from the farms by the thousands and they ended up shoved into tenements where the normal barriers that kept disease proliferation in check broke down. Poor hygiene, close quarters, bad water.

Patent medicines were big business. Some of them actually had palliative effects, like Turlington’s Balsam of Life, which sold for between 2 and 5 shillings a bottle (about 12 oz.). That would have been between 8% and 33% of Cratchit’s salary to treat Tiny Tim on a regular basis.

But treat him for what?

There wasn’t much accurate diagnosis of disease in 1841, but Dickens assumes in the story that Tiny Tim’s condition can be alleviated by Scrooge “loosening up” his wallet. Certain diseases Tiny Tim might have had, granted, there would have been no cure. The best that might have been done might have been to make him comfortable. But if we allow for Dickens’ accurate powers of observation, then this wasn’t one of the guaranteed fatal ones.

Tiny Tim might have had rickets. They were rampant in London at that time. The coal used to heat homes, run factories, drive boats up the Thames had filled the air with a dense soot that effectively cut down on sunshine, which would have cut down on vitamin D manufacture, and, subsequently, rickets. A better diet would help—better diet from maybe a raise by Scrooge. But rickets, even untreated, was rarely fatal.

There is a disease that fits the description. Renal Tubular Acidosis. It’s a failure of the kidneys to properly process urine and acid builds up in the blood stream. Enough of it, and it begins to attack the bones. Untreated in children, it is often fatal.

But the treatment was available at the time as a patent medicine, mainly an alkali solution like sodium bicarbonate.

Scrooge’s penny-pinching didn’t just hurt himself and his miserliness could cost Tiny Tim his life.

But it’s also true that Dickens was talking about a wider problem. The tight-fistedness of society was costing England—indeed the world—in spiritual capital. Interestingly, Dickens never, in any of his novels, suggested legislative or government intervention in poverty. He always extolled wealthy individuals to give. He thought the problem could be solved by people being true to a generous nature. It’s interesting in a man so perceptive that he recognized a problem as systemic but then suggested no systemic remedies.

In any event, on the basis of the information at hand and a couple of shrewd guesses, we can see that Dickens was not just telling us a ghost story. The consequences for Scrooge and company were quite real.

There is at the center of the Christmas Spirit, so I have been told and taught from childhood, a benefit to abandoning questions of profit and cost. That generosity should be its own reward. That mutual care is balm to the pains of society as a whole. Scrooge is a Type, one that is with us magnified in ways perhaps Dickens could not have imagined possible, a constricted soul who sees everything in terms of costs, returns on investment, labor, and balance-sheets. Everything. The point of Dickens’ story is that such people not only poison their own spiritual pond but can spread that harm to others simply by never seeing things any other way. The stubborn money-soaked impoverishment in which Scrooge lives does no one any good and the point of Christmas is to at one time a year stopping living that way. 

But Dickens was not all of the spirit. He was a materialist and for him the costs were very real, in terms of hunger and disease and crippling disorder and agonizing despair, and that a man like Scrooge has real, destructive impact on the people around him, whether he knows them or not. The potential for him to Make A Difference was not some sentimental concept bound up in airy essences of fellow-feeling, but in the actual material well-being of people and, by extension, society.

I must here explain that my dad, curmudgeonly as he was in such debates, was in no way a selfish or stingy man. His response to need—need that he saw, that was tangible to him—was axiomatic and without strings. He never was a Scrooge.*

But I think it behooves us to stop paying lip service to the very old and too-oft repeated idea that “there’s nothing to be done.” We may not as individuals be able to fix everything, but we can fix something. We start by fixing ourselves.

The last word here I leave to Tiny Tim

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*To be clear, my dad is still alive, but circumstances have changed somewhat, and certain traditions have had to be modified to suit.

Added to the present: dad passed away in May of 2023. He is, curmudgeonliness and everything, much missed.

Community

Space

I must confess, I am conflicted about this.

Richard Branson made a suborbital flight in his own spaceship. Elon Musk is talking about going further. Together with Jeff Bezos, private space flight is a real thing and it’s getting realer.

Make all the jokes you want about wealthy people spending absurd amounts of money to book passage on one of these in the near future, but the fact that it’s happening at all leaves me a bit gobsmacked. Would I rather this had been achieved by the government? Probably. But would I rather have not seen it achieved at all? Absolutely not.

I’m going to be fairly unapologetic about this. Going to space was the one thing I have been consistently dreaming about since I can remember. (And no, I don’t personally feel the need to Go There myself, just so long as We get there.) As a kid being unable to get enough science fiction, aware eventually that the Real World was lagging behind the dreams I held dear, any endeavor that came along to advance that purpose I welcomed. I thought the whole moonshot thing in the Sixties was conceptually cool but awkward and dull in execution. The X-15 project was well on its way to building an actual spaceship, but that would have required considerably more funding which Congress was unwilling to dole out, but we definitely needed missiles (we thought) to counter Russia and Kennedy was (we forget) a fervent Cold Warrior. But we Got There.

And then turned our back on it.  Even then the detractors were hammering away at the perceived waste of spending money to send people to the moon instead of feeding the hungry. That tension is still at hand and it is certainly based on legitimate concerns.

My problem with it has always been, Why is this an either/or question?  We should have been doing something about poverty, yes, but we should also go to the moon.  And Mars and the Jovians and onward.

Because without Big Dreams, the rest is just…

Not pointless, but once we have solved the problems of poverty and fed everyone and seen to social justice, what next?

This is not a First World question. Every vital culture has a Big Dream, a set of stories if nothing else that inject transcendence into their lives.

The problem is, solving problems never happens in a logical order.

So while I understand the cries of frustration (why are these Billionaires doing this instead of—?) I can’t quite condemn the quest. As far as I’m concerned, this may be the one truly legitimate thing any of them could do with all that money (that they would do). As long  as we have billionaires, I would rather they build a significant part of the future with it. Going to space is the Big Dream of my childhood, and if we can’t elect representatives who will fund it, then let’s not stop these guys. It’s not like the things they achieve will be one-shots that no one else will ever get to do. The point of all this is to open that so-called Final Frontier, which will produce jobs, sure, but will also feed the need for Big Dreams and Wider Vistas and, ridiculous as it may sound to some, we ain’t gonna create the Star Trek world unless we Get There.

So, yeah. I’m conflicted.  I hate that it’s These Guys, but I don’t hate that they’re doing it. When I watched that single-stage rocket actually land, my ten-year-old heart pounded in excitement.  Yes! Yes! Yes! And that tech and those tools, they’ll remain when Musk is dust.

But let us get over this binary nonsense of either/or.  There is no reason we can’t have both. There are plenty of reasons we have to have both. Tax them, for pity’s sake. Even a hefty tax will leave them with the resources to do this thing. Impose a community profit-share on them. There are ways of achieving that.

But I’m not going to beat up on them for doing something ultimately very cool for the time being.

That’s how I feel.