Growing Old

Warning! This posting is not going to be “happy thoughts.” So, if you’re at all depressed or suicidal, look away!

As I enter the eighth decade of my life, and after losing my wife of forty years just two years ago, I have come to a certain realization: the future, for me, is not what it used to be. This is not a good thought, but it’s also not something I can put away as idle rumination. It’s staring me in the face.

Ever since childhood, the direction of my life has been forward. I have anticipated, planned for, expected, and tried to divine the next step: next job, next project, next vacation, next holiday, next week, next day, next meal … next stage in my life.¹ My head, my thinking, have all been about what’s coming. And yes, you can to some extent foretell the future, because you live in the prefrontal lobe of your brain where the planning and scheming parts reside. You can make plans for tonight, tomorrow, next week, and even next month and year, so long as you allow a marginal calculation for uncertainty, the unexpected, the occasional accident, and even tragedy.

I have lived so much forward, in the future, that memory, for me, is a hazy thing. I know generally what I was doing in 1988. I can remember details of past jobs, projects, and vacation trips, mostly as random flashbacks. But the exact sequencing and duration are a blur. And as for what I had for dinner last week, that’s a guess. The past has no special meaning to me, except as the foundation for what is to come.

But now … With seven-eighths or nine-tenths or whatever amount of my life left before me, the future is more and more foreclosed. All I’m supposed to have left is memory—and that’s still somewhat hazy, because my natural direction is still forward. But now that forward is into grayness and eventually darkness.

I knew from approximately my days at junior high school that I was not ever going to fulfill every little boy’s dream of becoming President. I knew from sometime in high school that I was never going to be a serious professional like a lawyer or doctor, with an upward career course and riches assured. I knew from that terrible night that the Selective Service introduced the draft lottery during my senior year in college that I would never be a soldier, unless I wanted to enlist.²

After an adolescence and early twenties with no serious romantic attachments or prospects, I began to suspect that I would live my life as a single man. And then I met Irene and the course of my life took a sudden turn. She introduced me to many things, including traveling for pleasure, going to the theater, Celtic music, cooking and entertaining as an art form, a broader political scope, and a new sense of family. She made me into a different person. But now I am single again, and my prospects for another life companion are dwindling to the point of extinction. That part of my life is just memories—disjointed ones at that.

Now, although my body is relatively healthy and strong, I am beginning to appreciate some of the things I once could do without a thought. Now I need to plan for them and allow time for recovery. For instance, a week or so ago I took a long motorcycle ride into the mountains: 375 miles from the Bay Area up to Lake Tahoe and back in one day. I used to make this trip with friends and think nothing of it the next day. Now I needed a day and a half of idleness, sitting in my chair, reading and dozing—plus a couple of aspirin for the strain in my right wrist—in order to recover my poise and balance. An airplane flight across country is wearing, and the twelve-hour flight to Europe is daunting because of the seats, the limited legroom, the cramping, and the dehydration.

So I am beginning to foreclose the idea of future travels to either Europe or Asia. And I suspect that long motorcycle rides—especially the cherished idea of a road trip of several days on the bike, off to see the Northwest or other parts of this great country—may no longer be possible.

I still have family and friends, and I see them about as often as ever. So far, I have been spared the cycle of deaths that afflicts older people. I believe that’s because we have all been leading healthier lives since our young age: vitamins, nutrition, exercise, the Surgeon General’s report, and a health consciousness that our parents never had. I still do my karate katas, although sometimes less frequently when I get busy or when my back hurts in the morning. I watch what I eat, but not as much as I should. My morning pills still comprise more supplements than actual medicines. But I know that all of this will slowly change as my eighth decade slides into my ninth.

I still have some new books in me, along with the mental energy and focus to write them. The two ME novels need a third book, I think, to go along with the third books that I have written for The Judge’s Daughter and its sequel, and for The Children of Possibility and its prequel.³ And after that I have a half-dozen other story ideas to develop. If I can produce a new book every year or so, these ideas will take me a long way through this decade. So that’s a future to hang my hopes on.

Growing up is a hard transition. You put your childhood dreams and ambitions at risk against the development of your actual skills, intelligence, endurance, energy level, and personal prospects. Going from youth to middle age is hard, too. You adjust to a new set of dreams and ambitions, with a certain amount of bitterness as you gain an understanding of how the world really works and regret for your own lost naïveté. And finally, growing old is hard. If you’re lucky, you may have achieved a stable place in life—financially, emotionally, spiritually, and politically—but now you take your store of knowledge and skills, your preserved wisdom, your surviving sense of wonder, and your failing expectations into the long twilight that precedes night.

But there is no sense in having regrets. And no sense, either, in fearing the inevitable slide and the dark pit that awaits you at the bottom. All you can do is buckle your belt, tighten your laces, check the loadout of your weapons, sharpen your wits …

And move forward as if everything is still the same. Because nothing has really changed.

1. Everything except next the next woman, the next romance. Irene sealed all that for me. We were an item.

2. With a lottery number of 347, I took a big sidestep away from my generation’s war: Vietnam.

3. I don’t call them “series,” because that presupposes a dedication to producing a whole string of books. Let’s call them “groupings.”

War No More

War is innate to the human species. It’s part of our hierarchical social structure and goes back to our heritage as primates in the monkey troupe. Anytime a group of human beings gets large enough—whether tribe, city-state, country, or nation—to have common interests—whether political, social, economic, or cultural—among its members not related by blood, you will find an instinct to defend those interests. We will defend them against competing socioeconomic or national groups, whether human or not. It’s in our nature.

The apparent exception to this would seem to be the U.S. involvement in the two world wars of the last century. In each case, there was a strong isolationist, America First sentiment that kept us out of the first war for three years and out of the second war for two. Both of those wars were European and, in the case of the second, European and East Asian affairs.¹ America had economic ties to both sides and good reason to stay neutral—at least until the war finished up in each area and had the potential to cross one or the other ocean to reach us. But we had strong cultural affinity with the Anglo-French side of the first war (“Lafayette, we are here!”), and we were attacked in Hawaii—our territory, not yet a state—in the second. That attack was a blunder on the part of the Japanese, but it gave us an excuse to follow up on our cultural affinity with the British and Australians in both theaters. And, given the expansionist nature of German and Japanese foreign policies, we suspected they both would sooner or later be coming after us.

So yes, even when the U.S. is fighting on foreign soil without a direct and immediate threat to our irreducible national interests, we still feel the need to go to war.

War has become a terrible thing. It is no longer a matter of trained soldiers killing each other with swords and spears, slings and arrows, and occasionally torching the villages, raping the women, and slaughtering the children of the vanquished side. War has become a mechanized business that, with the invention of saturation bombing and nuclear weapons, threatens to obliterate whole civilian populations and render present military capability obsolete.

And yet, terrible as the nature of war has become, no human society is prepared to give it up. We become inured to terror; we try to put rules on the nature of conflict; we hope that some spark of human decency—or at least self-interest—will help us refrain from global annihilation. But we are not prepared to give up the idea of war altogether.

And there is a reason for that. War—taking up arms, banding together, and preparing to go down fighting—is the last resort of any group. It is what you do when there is no alternative.

After those two world wars, enlightened minds in the West conceived of a grand, globally supported council that would keep this atrocity from ever happening again. The League of Nations after World War I and the United Nations after World War II were both supposed to be places for reconciling national differences short of war. The League died quickly, and the United Nations limps along as a debating society, public “conscience,” occasional source of toothless “peacekeepers,” and promoter of international good works through non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to less developed countries. But no one actually goes to the Security Council for redress of grievances, and no nation would wait to adopt resolutions and legislation from the General Assembly in place of its own laws.²

Under the pressure of the Cold War and potential nuclear annihilation, many science-fiction memes arose about alternatives to war. In one Star Trek episode, for example, the opposing governments on a planet suffering an interminable global war agreed not to fight but instead feed their battle strategies into a common computer. The computer would dispassionately consider all the factors, declare a winner, and then assign civilian casualties on each side. And each nation pledged to send that many docile people into internationally monitored cremation chambers, rather than risk a further outbreak of their devastating global war.

In other scenarios, authors have suggested that instead of fighting and dying, nations resolve their differences through games. Pitting our best chess or go player against their best and pledging to stand down and honor the result was seen as a way to avoid war’s devastation. Of course, that system would be open to cheating: one side might, for instance, hire a mercenary chess master to represent it. And any other game with less than perfect knowledge—for example, poker with its capacity for bluffing, or Risk^®with its reliance on dice rolling—would have the potential for outright deception and cheating. Not to mention bad sportsmanship.

In ancient times, two armies facing one another might put forward a champion, their best fighter, to take on and beat the other army’s best. But how many times did the side whose champion fell in single combat quietly put down their spears and relinquish the ground? Maybe, sometimes, if it was a Sunday afternoon’s entertainment, or if both armies were out to claim a disputed valley that neither side really wanted but they didn’t care to let the opposing side have. But if national integrity, right of survival, hearth and home were at stake, the side with the fallen champion would gird their loins and prepare for all-out battle. Because the stakes were important.

Alternatives to war like chess games, poker games, and other personal battles are too easy to lose—but also too easy to declare and try to win. And the stakes are not always clear. Sure, in the case of nuclear war, the stakes are your life and your family’s, plus the ground you stand on, all reduced to a sheet of radioactive glass thirty miles across. But if war is easy and painless, based on achieving a checkmate or turning over the right cards, then where does it end? Does Belgium declare war on Germany for the right to rule Europe—on the basis of a game? And if they lose, are the Belgian people prepared to become German vassals? Or march passively into cremation chambers?

Not bloody likely.

The same would go for the rulings any supposed international court of justice or the decisions of some international executive or legislative body. Would Belgium give up territory, or its national sovereignty, just because Germany brought suit in the Hague? Or because of a ruling in the U.N. Security Council? How has that worked out in Palestine?

Not all wars have to happen. Not many wars should happen. Not if human beings were rational, sober, honest, sympathetic, charitable creatures. Not if human beings took the long-term, Olympian view of gods or angels. But we aren’t and we don’t. If we all were as rational as Vulcans and dispassionate as Buddhist monks, we would no longer be human but something else.

Maybe that “something else” wouldn’t need war. Maybe that something else could look at enemies pouring across the border with weapons of mass destruction or intolerable social, cultural, or economic demands, and resign themselves to giving up gracefully and peacefully. Maybe they would bend and bare their necks, rather than stoop to pick up a sword or a sharp rock and fight back.³ But they wouldn’t be human.

War is the last resort. War is the resolution when policy, diplomacy, and negotiated advantage fail, when political, social, economic, and cultural survival are at stake, when the alternative is worse than dying in a fight. And that is our human heritage.

1. In the case of Europe, World War I (“the Great War”) was a total disaster. The political, economic, and social differences between the Allies (Britain, France, Russia, Italy) and the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, the Ottoman Empire) were mostly minor and potentially reconcilable. A lot of the buildup to war had to do with feelings of national honor between the sovereigns—even though the English King, the German Kaiser, and the Russian Tsarina were all family related—plus some cultural and economic differences. It was a war that didn’t need to happen, except that Europe hadn’t had a good rousing war—other than the Crimean, and that didn’t count— since the days of Napoleon a century before and … it was time.

2. Can you imagine the U.S. allowing a General Assembly that is dominated by a coalition of Muslim states to tell us what to do with our Jewish population?

3. And maybe that would be a good thing: human beings as docile and careless as cattle walking up the chute to the knacker man. They would be a lot less trouble as a group and a lot easier to control. But they wouldn’t be human.

Where Are They?

It’s called the Fermi paradox, after nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi: if the galaxy is host to billions of stars and potentially millions of planets, a huge number of them capable of generating intelligent life, then why don’t we see signs of that life? Why haven’t we been visited? Where are the signals from planets broadcasting their own versions of the evening news, I Love Lucy, and Xenobia’s Got Talent out into the universe? Where are the space aliens?

Personally, I think it’s a naïve question. Considering the time scales involved, and then the distances, I would be very surprised if we ever met intelligent life forms other than ourselves and possibly other species on this planet like whales, dolphins, elephants, and gorillas.

Our solar system—the Sun, the Earth, and other planets—formed about four billion years ago. In a universe with an imputed age¹ of approximately thirteen billion years, that’s about a third of the lifetime of the existence of everything we have ever known or can know. Our Sun is then either a third- or fourth-generation star—which is to be expected, since all the metals in the dust cloud that formed our system had to be born in the fusion reactions of earlier stars (for elements lighter than iron) or in the compression forces of supernovae (for the heavier elements). Given the generous amounts of lead, gold, and uranium found in just the Earth’s crust, and the huge proportion of iron and nickel that makes up its core, fourth generation sounds about right.

Earlier generations of stars would be different from ours. The clouds of dust and gas from which they formed would have had a much lower content of metals and of the minerals we value, like the silicon that makes up most of our soils and rocks, and the carbon, calcium, phosphorus, and other light elements that make up most of our bodies. Earlier-generation stars, which comprise the first two-thirds of the time span of the universe, would not be likely to have any kind of life that we would recognize. Even if they had plentiful water on planets within their solar system’s habitable zone, where that water remained liquid most of the time, they would still lack an abundance of the complex chemicals that support our kind of life.²

So we are only likely to find creatures whom we would view as intelligent, organized in complex, multi-cellular forms, and capable of recognizable communication out among the planets in solar systems of our own generation.

Now consider that, while we have evidence of life on this planet going back some three and a half billion of those four billion of the Earth’s life-span, such life is mostly in the form of bacteria and blue-green algae. These microbial forms were necessary to create the oxygen-rich atmosphere and sustainable ocean waters that allowed higher forms of life to develop. And those higher forms took a long time to develop. The Earth did not see the birth of multi-celled creatures, with nucleated DNA and differentiated cells and organs, until just half a billion—five hundred million—years ago. That was an explosion of life, to be sure, but none of it was what we’d call familiar or friendly.

Our kind of life did not come out of the oceans onto dry land until about three hundred million years ago, give or take—at least for the animals. The plants had taken over the land sometime earlier. But no one looking for extraterrestrial life forms is expecting to find plants.

Life on the land flourished and developed to fill all the available environmental niches: plant eating, flesh eating, walking, burrowing, and flying. Almost all of it was reasonably intelligent, if you consider intelligence as a spectrum and not the special capacity of H. sapiens. Frogs, turtles, lizards, reptiles including the dinosaurs and birds, and the early mammals all had the cerebral capacity to find food for themselves, recognize and move away from danger and toward comfort and safety, and bear and occasionally nurture their young. Survivals of those creatures today—think of dolphins, elephants, dogs, and cats—are able to recognize and respond to human beings and even understand some of our verbal commands.

That does not mean that any of these life forms—going back through the history of our planet—was capable of building a radio or television station able to broadcast the evening news or I Love Lucy out to the stars. Even human beings, who have been around for at least the past hundred thousand years—a mere fraction of the domain of life on this planet—have only had that capacity for the last hundred years or so. And, for all our science and technology, we have only sent a handful of probes out beyond our solar system and only landed human representatives half a dozen times on our nearest celestial neighbor, our own Moon, at a distance of a mere 240,000 miles.

So if it took life on this fourth-generation star this long to get to the very edge of interstellar space, why would we expect so much more from the life on other, similar planets? For one thing, though, that other life might be a lot older. A few million years of difference in the time frame of stellar formation might put the putative human beings of some not-too-distant planet a million years ahead of us. Imagine what we could achieve in a million years beyond the Apollo Moon landings, the deciphering of the human genome, or the invention of radio astronomy. But then, we might also be a million years ahead of our nearest interstellar neighbors. They might still be in their equivalent of the early Pleistocene, with the closest thing to a human mind still roaming the savannah and hooting at their moon, like our hominid ancestors.

And then there is the question of distance. If the speed of light is an immutable boundary, and the currently available forms of energy are all that humankind will ever invent or discover, then crossing the gulf to our nearest stellar neighbor, the Alpha Centauri group, is going to take a long time. Chemical rockets shooting out reaction mass just can’t achieve the speeds needed to cover such a distance in less than many human generations. Travel by interdimensional means, such as artificial wormholes and warp drives,³ are still figments from the minds of science fiction authors. There may still be some magical—in the sense of Arthur C. Clarke’s “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”—means of energy release, like Star Trek’s controllable matter-antimatter reactions, and some fantastic reactionless drive, like the gravity polarizer from Larry Niven’s Known Space universe. Maybe one day, in a lot less than a million years, we will discover such wonders. After all, it’s only recently that we’ve stumbled upon materials that work as high-temperature superconductors.

But until we make some significant scientific breakthroughs, the distance between the stars is still a limiting factor. We aren’t getting there—and by “there,” I mean someplace more friendly and habitable than Alpha Centauri—anytime soon. And we can’t expect intelligent aliens at our level of technology or even a bit more advanced to come visiting here.

But what about those radio and television signals? Shouldn’t we have heard the alien versions of the evening news and I Love Lucy by now? After all, we’ve been listening with radio telescopes to every likely star for more than sixty years, and analyzing signals with the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program for almost as long. And yet not a peep.

Well, there’s that distance thing again. Our random programs—and presumably theirs—are all by broadcast: the radio or television station sends out a signal in all directions. Any such signal is going to be subject to the inverse-square law, which says that signal strength diminishes with the square of the distance. By the time one of our programs—or one from the alien broadcasting network—reached past Alpha Centauri, its signal would be barely a mouse squeak, drowned out by the clanging together of two hydrogen atoms in space. And our signals—and presumably theirs—are not that strong to begin with, usually about fifty thousand watts on Earth, because we limit the power of broadcast stations to prevent them overpowering other users in the same band of the electromagnetic spectrum. And, finally, many of our broadcasts—certainly in the UHF and VHF television bands—are now converting to cable, or to signals beamed by geosynchronous satellites down toward the Earth. So they would become invisible to interstellar aliens.⁴

To have any chance of communicating with a civilization around another star, you would need to know where they are and then beam your signal—direct it with a parabolic antenna or similar device—to that location. Given the vastness of this galaxy, let alone the whole universe of galaxies, and the distribution of four-generation stars likely to have advanced civilizations, the chances of our planet crossing a coherent beam and interpreting it, are diminishingly small.

And finally, there are accidents. Many science fiction authors and others responding to the Fermi paradox believe that advanced civilizations necessarily destroy themselves. These are minds bruised by catastrophic thinking: first the vision of a Cold War nuclear holocaust—something I and most of my generation grew up with—and then the succeeding visions of totalitarian takeover, population explosion, and climate collapse, and finally culminating in the presumed death of computerized commerce in the Y2K fright. The popular notion is that organized civilization is a force for stupidity and always poisons and destroys itself. But somehow we humans have managed to survive.

Still, there have been accidents beyond human control. The Earth has supposedly undergone five mass extinctions, whether from asteroid strikes like the Chicxulub meteor that took out the dinosaurs and most of the other animals on the planet, or from natural variations like Earth’s orbital perturbations. In the lifetime of the human species, we have experienced and survived the last of the great glaciations, which covered parts of the planet in ice a mile deep. Humanity is still in no position to ward off a large incoming asteroid, and our civilization might not survive another glaciation, although our species just might.

It doesn’t take the human stupidity of a nuclear war or the mismanagement of a population explosion to set back a developing planet. It happened five times around here. And who knows, without the Chicxulub event, the dinosaurs might eventually have grown smart and started building radios and rockets a couple of million years ago.

But given all these factors, I’m not surprised that we haven’t seen any aliens yet. We’ve only been thinking about them and listening for their signals in the last sixty years or so. And maybe we’re just not that interesting a species, or not yet, to make visiting us worthwhile.

1. Working backward through the expansion rate following the Big Bang—if, in the first place, you actually believe in a “Big Bang” and its consequences.

2. This would discount, of course, energy beings, ghosts from other and older dimensions, and similar denizens of the science fiction canon.

3. See Warp Drive from March 17, 2019.

4. Of course, some of our Earth stations communicating with satellites in geosynchronous orbit are beaming up, away from the planet’s surface and toward those satellites. Those transmissions might be strong enough and focused enough to travel through interstellar space and still be recognizable to alien intelligences—although they are not aimed at any particular star.

Good Manners vs. Political Correctness

I first remember seeing the phrase “political correctness” sometime back in perhaps the 1980s.¹ At first, as I remember things, it was used disparagingly: when someone objected to an off-color remark or a joke about women or minorities, their objection was dismissed as being “politically correct,” along with being “too sensitive.” That is, the term “P.C.” was generally used by the reactionary forces of the right against the progressive forces of the left.

Except … no thinking person of average sensibilities, even at the time, would defend making an off-color remark or joke that separated, isolated, and ridiculed a person or group based on non-relevant and inconsequential attributes like gender, skin color, ethnic background, or religious viewpoint. And if a person had an obvious and consequential mental or physical deformity, then the appropriate response was to overlook it or tacitly compensate for it, rather than making a point of it.

This was not a political position from one side of the aisle or the other; it was simply good manners. A well-brought-up person, a polite person, a civilized person did not make jokes at other people’s expense, did not point and stare when someone with an obvious physical or mental difference entered the room, did not consider all the possible human differences of gender, skin color, ethnic background, or religious viewpoint as subjects for levity, disdain, or even much notice and distinction. A person of good manners tried to make others feel welcome and comfortable, and strove to put them at their ease. Such a person extended good will and provisional respect to everyone within his or her circle—even within his or her vicinity—as a gesture of presumed equality. And that good will and respect remained in effect until and unless the person who was its object showed by word or action that he or she did not merit such presumption.

These were the attitudes of a gentleman or a lady. It was a code of honor. It was expected in polite society. And it worked. Of course, not everyone was brought up that way. A person needed parents and teachers, aunts and uncles, grandparents, and family friends who were kind and thoughtful themselves, who understood that youth is often a time of distinction-making and difference-mocking, and who moved positively and directly to instill the virtues of politeness and social blindness before that distinguishing and mocking became ingrained. Not everyone was fortunate enough to be raised in such a household. But enough of us were that most social encounters could be endured without rancor, screaming, and fisticuffs.

But there was also another dimension to this attitude of politeness. While one did not call out irrelevant distinctions and make fun of them, that also generally extended to relevant distinctions. A person might not personally practice or approve of—and might even detest—dubious or immoral pursuits like adultery, prostitution, promiscuity, incest, sodomy, pedophilia, gambling, gluttony, loan-sharking, and all the other old vices and/or antisocial behaviors that take place behind closed doors and might be known only by inference and rumor. But a well-brought-up person did not take notice of them. A person of good will tried to look past such negative and unseemly distinctions in the interest of social harmony, especially when the abhorred practice did not affect one’s own life and person directly. However, that did not mean a polite person had to approve of, condone, or celebrate such behavior.

Is this a form of hypocrisy? Of course, it is. But it’s a trivial bit of social dishonesty because, again, the goal is to put others in the immediate vicinity at their ease, avoid discomfort, and extend a measure good will—not to point and hoot and chase them out of the room.

Where political correctness has gone in the last forty years or so, and the teeth it has grown, is that this sort of polite disinclination, social blindness, and hypocrisy are no longer allowed. It seems no longer possible to have one attitude in public but another in private. It is no longer a matter of manners to publicly ignore a vice or behavior that a person might disdain in his or her private thoughts. With the naïve intolerance of the very young, the advocates and practitioners of current political correctness appear to have decided that there can be no private thoughts. And since public ridicule of practices and opinions that many of us consider immoderate, vicious, or shameful would be impolite on the face of it, then we must all condone—no, celebrate and rejoice in—those negative distinctions.

Rather than presume commonality and lack of distinction in the people around us, today everyone is supposed to notice, presume, and celebrate distinction, whether relevant or not. This is a complete reversal of past norms of politeness.

Well, complete reversal for a start … Where the impulse toward political correctness has headed in the past few years seems to lead away from celebrating differences and toward denigrating² the sameness that once was presumed and extended. The values of the once-dominant majority—middle class, heterosexual, Christian, and yes, traditionally European (e.g., from the north side of the Caucasus Mountains)—are now becoming objects of scorn. To assume any kind of norms or common values is considered backward and oppressive. The term “cis”—derived from the Latin, meaning nearer to the subject, as in Cisalpine Gaul—has become a pejorative. “Cisgender,” as in conforming to the idea of traditional male and female attributes, behaviors, and attitudes, is derogative.

All of this goes beyond good manners and becomes an attack on the structure of values themselves. I try not to become conspiracy-seeking and hysterical, but the current trend has gone too far. Instead of valuing the good will that people of good intentions once—in the Christian, Western Civilized, Enlightened tradition—extended to people who were different from themselves in trivial, non-relevant ways, political correctness was then urging the mainstream of our culture to value—even to prefer and celebrate—those differences, whether trivial or not, and whether they encompassed a moral distinction or not. And now the canons of political correctness appear to be attacking and denying all Christian, Western, Enlightened, and traditional moral values in favor of a value-free, nonjudgmental, and ethically and morally absent viewpoint. At the same time, persons operating from any other cultural, moral, or even biological perspective are invited to deny, blacken, and detest those once liberating values. And this is all in the name of refuting past oppressions, colonialism, mercantilism, consumerism, and any other nit you care to pick with what was once a remarkably successful, free, and accepting cultural tradition.

If this all ended up in some place that was more free, more accepting, and more successful, then I could accede to it. But I don’t see any kind of reciprocity here. Those different cultural, moral, or biological viewpoints are not bound to return the favor to the Christian, Western, Enlightened tradition on the basis of its past sins. And they also don’t generally extend the favor of politeness, acceptance, and social blindness to each other—or not that I can see. In fact, I cannot see that the current trend presumes the existence of any human values being shared and agreed to among the different cultural traditions and biological viewpoints. So the current political situation tends to favor centrifugal, disintegrating forces without the gravity and cultural cohesion that can hold a society together. Forcing things to fly apart and cheering as they depart, without the offer of a better set of values to replace them, is in my mind a recipe for disaster.

Is all of this planned? Is any of it planned? Probably not, in the sense that the Illuminati, the Fifth Column, or the Wobblies have worked it out in their secret, smoke-filled soviets and written it all down in a manifesto to which we will, every one of us, sooner or later, have to swear allegiance. And some of it is probably the natural tendency of human beings to grow bored with a system that generally works, trundles along producing social cohesion, and appears never to need the individual’s conscious preservation for it to keep working. Perpetual sameness and contentment are a breeding ground for contempt and the itch to fiddle.

But some of this cultural process serves a political purpose. And I think none of it is well-intended, liberating, or … polite.

1. It may have been used earlier, but it seems to me it came into common usage with its current meaning about thirty to forty years ago … which for many people is a lifetime ago and by now suggests “lost in the mists of the 20th century.”

2. If that’s even a word now. From the Latin de for a general negative and niger for black, it means to darken, cast aspersion, or deny value. And that use of color attribution itself has now become a racially loaded behavior.

Survival

Again, if living well is an art—and I believe it is—then managing your life and taking care of yourself are certainly an important art form. Note the active verbs here: “managing” and “taking.” Living is not a passive activity. Those who drift through life or expect others to take care of them—other than in instances of grave disability—cannot expect to have a good life.

When I was growing up, children were told they could be anything they wanted. And they were encouraged to “dream big.” After all, every little boy in America could “grow up to become President.”¹ Perhaps today’s parents, teachers, and guidance counselors still tell children that. It would be a shame if they didn’t tell children to dream big dreams. But … there’s a caveat with that.

To get what you want, to become who you want, to live as you want—and not as other people command, direct, or allow—you have to scramble. You first need to dream, of course, but then you need to work, to do, to persevere, and to fight. And sometimes you have to do these things not just to have your dream job or preferred way of life. Sometimes you have to scramble and fight just to exist. But the alternative is death, either the slow and lingering death of the soul for lack of fulfillment, or the fast and hard death of the body for lack of eating and breathing.

I think too many people today, brought up in the richest, freest, most bountiful, most dream-inspired country in the world, believe that having what they want, living how they want, with the dream job, the inevitable success, and a comfortable living situation, with the big house, plentiful toys, and personal indulgence that go along with it—that all of this will be easy. That all a person has to do is show up, put in a maximum eight hours a day, and not screw up—or not too badly—and then success will be assured.

When I was growing up, everyone in the family thought I would follow in my maternal grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s footsteps and become a lawyer and perhaps one day a judge. I did not have the head for numbers that would have enabled me to follow my paternal grandfather and father into engineering. But I did have a certain facility with words and logic. The law seemed to be a natural fit until I also demonstrated a facility for writing and the imagination to tell stories. I began to think of myself as a fiction writer, even a novelist, after the fashion of a John Cheever, Robert Graves, or Herman Wouk. And my parents did not actively discourage this.

Other members of my extended family certainly did. Two friends of my grandfather, who were editors at the advertising trade magazine Printers’ Ink, advised him to warn me that very few people make a living by writing fiction, and this was echoed by my aunt, who also knew these friends and their negative opinion. Their estimate was that probably only ten or twelve people in the whole country—and this was in the late 1950s and early ’60s—lived solely by writing novels.²

On reflection, I can see the sense of this. A novelist, even one with a bestseller or two, cannot survive an entire career—a span of forty years or more, from the end of college at the traditional age of 22 until retirement at age 65—on the royalties from one or two bestselling books, even with movie tie-ins. A productive writer working in novels must produce a book every year or two. (A writer of short stories has to produce even more in terms of words, because the payout per story is lower and the market is actually smaller.) And then, not every book is going to be a bestseller, because the public is fickle and the competition is fierce. The most reliable way to make a living at writing—if you can—is to find a formula and stick to it. Think of Ian Fleming, who found his model early in the James Bond thrillers and pursued it through fourteen popular books, publishing one a year from 1953 to 1966. Or J.K. Rowling, who fashioned a series of books on the sequential school years of young wizard Harry Potter and his friends and pursued them with miraculous success.³

But still, that’s a handful of authors. And most writers would feel trapped writing book after book to a popular formula, as Stephen King suggested with his novel Misery. A creative writer naturally wants to branch out, try new forms, new genres, new characters in new situations. I certainly tried to do this, with books ranging from science fiction to literary fiction, and various novels based on history, computer science, biotechnology, and time travel. Doing the same old thing year after year is a kind of living death. So you try new things and experiment with genres and forms, but even with loyal readers, not every effort is going to be well received. Look at the difficulty Rowling has had with her novels set outside the Potter universe.

I also discovered that learning to write takes time and effort. Even someone with a big imagination and a facility with words needs to learn the craft of storytelling: how to structure and pace the story, where to place emphasis and what to leave to the reader’s imagination, how to inject the elements of character into action and dialogue, and on and on. I wrote my first novel—a dreadful space opera which could never be published—while in high school. That nailed my ambition to become a published author. I studied English literature in college, which grounded me in the background of storytelling but did not teach me the necessary skills; those I had to pick up on my own by reading and analyzing current fiction.⁴

But when I graduated from college I discovered an awful truth: most twenty-something people have little to say.⁵ My knowledge of the actual world was limited to my career as a student in academia. And my knowledge of science fiction and fantasy was dependent on what others had written before me. It would take me at least ten years working in two different industries—first in engineering and construction, then at an electric and gas utility—before I had enough experience of the world and the real people in it to begin framing stories.

In the meantime, I had to scramble. I started in business by using my English degree to work in book publishing, but that’s a hard business with low salaries. I took that experience into technical editing at the engineering company, and from there I got into communications writing: doing newsletters, magazines, and promotional brochures. From engineering I went to the utility company, and then with a few science fiction novels published in paperback—plus a small inheritance from an uncle—I tried to make a living with my fiction writing. I never made more, in total advances and royalties, than one year’s salary from working at my day job. And I was slowly starving to death, because my talent would always be that of a midlist author: a writer with a small following and reliable but not remarkable annual sales on that book-a-year treadmill. And then the midlist died with the collapse of the traditional publishing business in the early 1990s. So I had to scramble again, working as a temp or contractor at a petroleum refinery, a waste disposal company, and finally at a pharmaceutical company. Only then could I translate that experience to direct-hire employment as, first, a document writer, then as internal communicator at the biotech firm. And that was my last regular day job before being forced into retirement.

In short, to pursue my dream of writing fiction, I had to use my writing and editing talents—that facility for words and logic—in a variety of roles at various industries, whose requirements I had to learn on the fly and understand in order to survive. I had to continually reinvent myself. And only now, in retirement with an income based partly on Social Security and partly on conservative investment of my 401(k) savings, can I live the dream of writing fiction full time. I still don’t make much money at it, because I have no talent for self-promotion and marketing, which are required for both independent authors and those who can still make a sale to traditional publishers.

It’s been a hell of a life. I’ve never actually wavered from my dedication to words, logic, and storytelling. And I’ve learned a tremendous amount about the way the world works—and how people survive and prosper in it—at every industry for which I’ve written. It was not exactly my dream on my terms. But it came close.

I hope every child in school today, when told to “dream big,” gets the same chances I had and can make similar choices to survive and prosper. Because the alternative is a slow death or a quick one.

1. It wasn’t the same for girls, of course, back in the fifties and sixties. They could grow up to become good wives and mothers. Or, if career-minded, they could become nurses, secretaries, or librarians—some nice, indoor job where they would be helping and nurturing other people. President, senator, astronaut, truck driver, baseball player, brick layer—these were not in the cards for young girls. Thankfully, that has changed now.
    Oh, and a boy could not be President if he wasn’t a natural-born citizen and resident in the country for at least 14 years. And then he would have to wait until he was 34 years old. Other than that, it would help to have served a lifetime in politics and been rich, but those weren’t absolute requirements.

2. I also had an encouraging letter from the science fiction master Ray Bradbury, when I tried to send him a short story in high school. He declined to read it, but he did advise that if I wanted to be a writer, I should not go to college but instead get a job as a dishwasher and write, write, write every day, then submit and submit until my writing was accepted. Luckily, I did not follow this advice and did go to college, which was the basis for my being able to work at “day jobs” significantly better than washing dishes.

3. Some of the series and authors we think of as wildly successful—the Nancy Drew books by Carolyn Keene, the Hardy Boys series by Franklin W. Dixon—were actually collaborative works by a group of serial ghostwriters. Both of those two young adult series, and a number of other familiar titles like Tom Swift and the Bobbsey Twins, were originated and packaged by advertising genius and writer Edward Stratemeyer. Other long-established and successful authors, like techno-thriller writer Tom Clancy, have extended their range by bringing on serial collaborators who often end up writing the whole book under direction of the senior author. Early in my career, I wrote four books that way by arrangement with my publisher—and I was lucky enough to get my name on the cover, which many collaborators do not.

4. Some writers—even a few I know personally—have learned the craft by joining writers’ groups, attending formal, author-led classes, and going to workshops and retreats. I was never much of a joiner, and I found that what other authors, mostly amateurs themselves, had to say about writing tended only to limit—rather than expand—my sense of the possible. Maybe the workshop model works for some, but I have to explore my talent on my own, driven solely by my inner ear and my personal vision, and ultimately by what works.

5. Yes, there are brilliant young novelists who produce first bestsellers, but most of these books are about young adults coming of age. I was looking for an adult view of the world, like the fiction I tended to read. And I know from experience than any published “first novel” is generally the author’s third or fourth attempted manuscript. Look at Harper Lee’s first effort in Go Set a Watchman. The craft takes time to learn and many tries to master.