On Hating Humanity

Western thought, both conservative and liberal, has a long tradition of viewing human beings, individually and collectively, as a scourge that must be contained. I think it goes back to the Bible and the Judeo-Christian acceptance of Original Sin. In Genesis, Adam and Eve listen to the Serpent’s twisted counsel, disobey God’s commands about touching certain fruits, and eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In consequence, they are banished from Eden before they can also eat from the Tree of Life and become immortal—essentially becoming gods themselves.

In the myth, this disobedience was the root of all human wrongdoing. Humans became differentiated from the other animals of creation which, lacking such knowledge, retained their innocence. The tiger might eat a lamb, a ram, or a human being and yet remain innocent because savage predation is the tiger’s nature. The tiger simply knows no better. But a human who lies, steals, murders, or does other harm is condemned because he or she now has understanding of moral choices and their consequences and knows right from wrong.

This ought to be an advanced state. The human perceives and understands more deeply than the tiger. The human is capable of self-awareness and self-examination, can know about cause and effect, can predict consequences, and can choose a proper course of action. The wise human will of course choose moral actions leading to a good life, but he or she is also aware of other possible, less desirable actions. The tiger simply kills whatever crosses its path that is warm-blooded and looks like prey.

Presumably, if Adam and Eve had closed their ears to the Serpent, obeyed God’s injunction, and not eaten from the Tree, then they and their progeny—the whole human race—would still be innocent. We would live according to God’s rules but not know why. We would obey without thought or conscious choice. We would not need to examine or think about our actions. It might even be argued that, like the innocent creatures, we would have no need of self-awareness, no need to identify ourselves as beings separate from the world around us and operating in the context of our own actions.¹

From a religious viewpoint, where obedience to God is the highest good, this would seem to be an ideal state. Unfallen humans could not disobey. God would obtain obedience from his creatures without the troublesome effort of monitoring human actions, judging them, and disposing of the operators upon their deaths to a place of either punishment or reward. The world would function in perfect harmony: humans eating fruit, hawks eating sparrows, tigers eating lambs, and nothing to mar the peace except the occasional stricken cries from sparrows and lambs.

In such a world, there would be no distinction between humans and the other animals. Humans would roam forest and savannah eating roots and berries and now and then scavenging the bones left over from a lion’s kill. Society would be limited to the family and an extended kinship of uncles, aunts, and cousins that approached the definition of a tribe. Gorillas and chimps live this way in the wild. Perhaps Australopithecus lived this way. If one chimp or hominid happened to kill another—well, accidents do happen, and male bears have also been known to innocently kill and eat their own cubs.

Certainly, such a world would be free of organized society and its preferences for class and ethnic distinctions, ownership, trade, warfare, and hierarchical religion. That means there would be no inequality, no possessions or greed, no massacres or genocides, no climate of fear, no courts or inquisitions. There would also be no stories or plays about personal or societal conflict and choice. There could be no heroes or villains, no one to look up to or down upon, no context of action, no reason and no way to dedicate one’s life to something greater than roaming and picking berries.²

Several authors who shaped some of my early reading and whom I still greatly respect—among them C. S. Lewis in the Perelandra series and James Blish in his novel A Case of Conscience—have viewed human space travel as a potential disaster for planets with races that still lived in innocence without moral distinctions. Humans would infect them with our original sin and destroy them.

Other authors and thinkers whom I do not so much respect—among them John Muir and most of today’s radical environmentalists—apply this thinking to our own planet. Because humans have developed technologies that draw metals and fuels from the ground, cut trees for their wood, change the course of rivers, and expunge natural habitats, we have destroyed Eden. We are a scourge upon the planet, like a microbe that will consume all the nourishment in its petri dish and drown in its own wastes.³ Their view of humans—at least in the aggregate—is that we are a beast of the belly who doom both ourselves and our planet.

Like most humanists, I believe that human beings, both individually and in groups, are capable of self-knowledge, understanding of consequences, and choice of action. We are capable not only of astounding evil and depravity but also of astounding good and nobility. Further, I believe that it is only through the possibility and example of evil that the possibility and example of good can be known.

Like the ancient Greeks, I believe that human beings belong in, and function best in, the polis—the city, where strangers may meet and interact in cooperation or competition—rather than in the wilderness. The wilderness is the place of instinct and sudden violence, while the city is the place of reflection, order, reasonable debate, and reasoned action.

This is not to say that I don’t marvel at life in nature. I am fascinated by the interplay of environmental forces on established genomes to foster the development of new, unexpected traits and species to exploit previously unknown environmental niches. I look upon the energy-conserving lope of the kangaroo in pure astonishment. I am also fascinated by the physical world of stars and their origins and proper motions, of planets and their complex tectonics and geology. I look upon earthquakes and volcanoes in pure awe. But I am also reminded that the ability to know and study and respect these natural forces and their outcomes is based on a human activity—science. A human mind has experienced a mystery, applied the processes of observation and logic, tested its understanding of consequences, and used the languages of words and numbers to communicate this understanding to other human minds. Life, the Earth, and the stars do not know themselves—they are understood only by humans.

I am fascinated by technology: machines and engines that move of their own accord, circuits and software that manipulate data, structures and processes that control and oppose natural forces like gravity with bridges and dams. I am fascinated by the inventiveness of the human mind, which can conceive of a wheel and piston driven by steam, enhance and compact that engine through internal combustion, and optimize it with cams and valves and fuel injection. Here is a complete history of human thought written not in brushstrokes on papyrus but in linkages of steel.

Far from being a scourge on the Earth, I believe we humans are the best thing happening within a sphere of open space approximately four light years across—the distance to the nearest star—and perhaps in a much larger space. We may meet like minds out in the galaxy, or minds that are very different. But if they are the innocent minds of animals, lacking self-awareness and the capacity for good and evil, then they will be of little interest. We should treasure them for their oddity, as we treasure tigers and lambs and hawks and sparrows for their unique qualities. But we won’t have much to say to them.⁴

Various thinkers have looked on this human capacity, to know good from evil and then choose to do either good or evil, and despaired. They would create a different kind of human through education or indoctrination or breeding pressure. Utopian societies dream of forcing a new, benevolent, unquestioning lifestyle that knows only good and cannot conceive of evil. The Russian communists hoped to breed or bully their people into becoming a new race, Homo sovieticus, imbued with egalitarianism and selflessness. You can achieve much the same effect—quieting the human impulse to know and plan for the future, trace the possible course of events, and make informed choices—with an ice pick and a prefrontal lobotomy.⁵ But the result will always be something less than human, or at least lacking in human potential.

I don’t believe we are fallen angels. We are not outcasts from some mythical garden of peace and harmony. And we are not perfectible, except through the exercise of individual and group choices from among courses that we are free to evaluate as good or evil. That process is always going to be uncertain, messy, sometimes disappointing, and occasionally disastrous. The lobotomy or its social equivalent is certain, clean, predictable, and beneficial to religious reformers and social planners. … But it just ain’t human.

1. Presumably, we would also be vegetarians. Fruit-picking seems to have been the dominant occupation of Adam and Even while they lived in Eden. But possibly we would share the tiger’s innocence and kill among the sheep and cows of paradise in order to put mutton and beef on the menu. Certainly, as omnivores made in God’s image, our metabolism was designed to ingest and derive nourishment from meat as well as from fruits and grains.

2. This is a trend of thought in western civilization that probably started with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his Discourses.

3. Of course, microbes are innocent creatures that respond only to their biological imperatives. They have no brains to evaluate resources and see consequences. They cannot choose other than to suck all the good out of the petri dish and contaminate it with their wastes. Nature itself imposes consequences and limits the spread of microbes so that land and water are not inches deep in slime.

4. In fact, I would be very surprised if creatures that lack self-awareness could even attain language—anything more complex that the warning cry of the monkey troupe or the howl of the wolf. Whether whales’ songs and dolphins’ clicks and squeaks are communication or simple echo location is still to be proven.

5. The front part of the brain’s cerebral cortex is where humans perceive future courses, plan complex behaviors, make decisions, adapt personal expression to socially correct behavior, and coordinate thoughts and actions with internal goals. The prefrontal lobotomy was supposed to make aggressive and anxious mental patients become docile and pliable. Of course, if you can’t think ahead and perceive outcomes, if you don’t have a mechanism that lets you test the future and your place in it, then you don’t have much to care or worry about, come what may.

On Being a Romantic

In the matter of music I am vaguely eclectic. I like most of the Rock’n’Roll of the last century, some New Age,¹ most Celtic music and ballads, and of course Classical music. And in the latter area, I tend to lose my heart to the composers of the mid-19th to early 20th century: Brahms, Dvorak, Saint-Saens, Sibelius, Vaughan Williams, and Wagner² among others.

In reading, I like stories with high stakes and involved plots that test the characters’ ingenuity and endurance. I like characters who know themselves, understand their place in the universe, battle against adversity with honor, grace, and humor, and are prepared to die gallantly. I find a lot of this underlying attitude in science fiction and lose my heart to writers like Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Tim Powers, John Varley, and many more.

With such tastes, I have finally come to realize that I am, against all appearances, a romantic.³ The word—especially in the context of “romantic sensibility”—conjures images of a delicate spirit. Romantics supposedly live by their hearts, their feelings and intuition, rather than their heads, their foresight and calculation. Romantics are supposed to weep easily, fall fainting, blush at the hard realities of life, and draw back from pressing an attack with cold steel.

Well, that’s not me. But I’m invoking a more robust definition of romanticism.

I believe a romantic is someone who believes that human life has purpose and meaning. That humans collectively are not an accident on this planet. And that each human individually has a purpose in life, a destiny, to follow and fulfill. Whether that purpose is assigned by God, or chosen freely and consciously, or thrust upon one by circumstances, is not all that important. (I personally believe that part of growing up is to determine your own meaning, but not all may share that view.) Each person has something they are here on Earth to do.⁴

That view has a number of implications. If you have a purpose to your life, a particular meaning, a mission, then you are susceptible to success and failure. You are constantly either moving toward fulfillment (success) or moving away from it, or not moving at all (failure). With the possibility of success or failure, you have the possibilities of struggle, of ennoblement, and of tragedy. Thus each person’s life follows a path, a plot, a story arc.

I cannot imagine a novelist who does not share this romantic viewpoint. Stories might be written without it—many modern stories are, such as the works of Samuel Beckett—but they are clearly dismal, sad, and unsatisfying. To have real possibility of greatness, and emotional fulfillment, you must have purpose and the chance of failure and loss. The greatness is measured against the purpose. For reference, see the sad little aims of a movie like Sideways.

This sense of purpose also supplies the groundwork for a code of personal honor. Without a conscious sense of purpose and mission, it’s hard to have a stance that says, “I will always do this. I will never do that.” Again, some people can hold to those rules without the purpose, but then they are just routines, tics, empty strictures. “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.”

What the purpose one chooses may be great or small, from helping others, to saving the rainforest, to finding the white whale, to finding the perfect glass of Cabernet. For each person the mission is different, but the emotional background, the suspense, the fulfillment are all similar. In a way, this sense of purpose and the possibility of failure are what makes war such a rich source of satisfying stories—because people engaged in battle are risking their lives for a purpose that lies beyond their own satisfaction. In fact, I would say the only thing that makes death meaningful—satisfying, ennobling, worth contemplating—is when it occurs in the pursuit of a worthwhile goal, or at the end of a life filled with meaning. Otherwise, death itself is an accident.

Sometimes that purpose is wrapped up in a person, someone to love, to be together with, to strive and suffer with, to raise children with, to grow old with. A person can have more than one purpose—to love one special person, and also to hunt the white whale—and then you have the bittersweet challenge of making choices and seeing the inevitable disappointment of one or the other goal.

According to this definition, a romantic is innately and unalterably opposed to certain opinions, philosophies, and attitudes—most of them arising in the 20th century. One is Skinnerian behaviorism, the view that says people are just glorified, more complex lab rats. That all life can be reduced to stimulus and response. See the cheese, learn the maze, run to the cheese. My hostility to this view is immediate and visceral.

Another anti-romantic view is represented by most socialist/communist doctrines, the view that people are just productive units, available to line up in service to the state, cogs in the society. The viewpoint that underlies most sociology and anthropology texts has this cold, calculating view of people as indiscriminate things, and I detest it.

Curiously, most overtly capitalist—or we might say mercantilist—principles are also anti-romantic. This is the view that says every man has a price. I imagine the producers of reality television shows, from the old Beat the Clock to Survivor, crowing, “For a million dollars we can get them to eat their young!” This is also the view that every thing has a price, too, and that if you put the right price and the right advertising spin on a shoddy piece of work, you can make people buy it. Some people, some of the time, maybe, but not those who respond consciously to a purpose and see value in the things they commit themselves to own.

And finally, romantics reject the modern view of love, that people are drawn together only by the attractions of sex and lust, and that they stay together, if they do at all, only through inertia, timorousness, fear, or ennui. That people are basically interchangeable breeding rats, and there is nothing special or important about the object of one’s love. That’s Skinnerian behaviorism in the bedroom.

The romantic believes that people have intrinsic worth, based on the virtues they possess and their potential for action, as well as on the purpose and destiny that they will fulfill. That objects have intrinsic value, based on concepts like beauty, utility, efficiency, design, and other aspects to which people respond. The romantic responds to purpose, is inspired by it, hungers for it.

This view may be wrong. It may be a form of hallucination or self-deception. Life and humanity may indeed be accidents. But, deep down, I just don’t believe it.

Certainly, there are people who try to write plays and books without recognition of this romantic spirit (e.g., Waiting for Godot), make products without it (the Chevy Malibu), live in intimate contact among other people without it (“No strings, just so long as it feels good”), and form societies without it (name your socialist tyranny). But I cannot understand such people. I have no feeling for them. I don’t hate them, but I turn my eyes away in confusion and sadness. They are like men who deny their manhood, or women who deny their femininity. They ignore an essential, informing part of themselves. It is possible to do this—but why would you? How is this better? What do you gain compared with all that you lose?

Now you know why I hate the 20th century. It’s given us such frightfully barren doctrines and attitudes. Many of our wars, certainly WWII and the Cold War, have been a struggle against people who would paint all life with this barrenness, the marching morons of Nazism and Communism. But out of that struggle, for many modern people, has come a kind of despair and a resignation to the sterility of life without purpose. Dada-ism. Inanity. Shostakovich—most of whose work, except for a few bright passages,⁵ I consider organized noise, or prelude to a migraine—instead of Prokofiev.

You may call all this a response to God, that God makes both human and personal meaning possible. I wouldn’t call that wrong, exactly. But certainly there have been people—a whole religion full of them right next door, who worship a black stone in Mecca—who do not recognize this romantic sense of purpose and mission. To them, the purpose of life is to submit to the whim of the divine and obey the laws of their religious theorists. And some people—here I’m thinking of the Calvinists—believe in a type of tyrannical god who treats his creations as mere things to torture and abuse. No romance in either of those views. And while indeed most romantics link their mission to a religious purpose, organized religious belief is not absolutely necessary to a sense of purpose in life.

What I call the romantic sensibility may actually be a striving to define God, to make the divine instruments of beauty, justice, courage, and caring into facets of everyday life. It is the union of heart and head, thought and feeling, into a whole that works.

1. Especially composers who use melody, like Vangelis and Ray Lynch.

2. Yes, yes, I know. “Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.” But I still like him.

3. The word has many meanings, of course. For the purposes of this essay, I’m using a definition picked up from my reading—but I can’t say where, or whether it’s from one author or a pastiche of several. This is the dreaded gestalt.

4. Note carefully my use of the word “believe” in the first sentence of this paragraph. I am also a Darwinist and understand life on Earth to be a chemical phenomenon, a reversal of entropy, and not directed by the will or thought of a divine intelligence. So as noted above, each person must create, accept, and adopt a purpose in life that fits his or her needs. I believe making such a choice is a noble undertaking. People who don’t—who sink into a life of purposeless lechery, hopeless debauchery, or nihilistic thuggery—are less than fully human.

5. Okay, I like the Symphony No. 10. All the rest is noise.

On Writing Female Characters

As a fiction writer, I generally create stories that are told from multiple viewpoints, a technique that has recently been picked up by the best of the cable television series.¹ To make this technique work, I have to get inside the character’s head, see with his eyes, and report and comment on only the parts of the story that he knows, using his limited understanding. This imposes limitations, of course; for example, unlike the omniscient narrator, I can’t be on both sides of a door when there’s a knock and let the reader know simultaneously who is knocking and who is responding. And sometimes—about half the time, actually—the viewpoint character is not a he but a she.

So, while not being a woman, I routinely have to adopt the persona and write from the viewpoint of a female character. Some writers on both sides of the gender aisle will insist that no one born into the opposite sex can really understand how a woman thinks and feels, or for that matter how a man perceives and relates to the universe. Personally, I believe this argument puts too low a value on human empathy and imagination. But when I have to write a woman character, I do adopt a particular trick: I accentuate the commonalities of human experience rather than the differences.²

Really, secondary sexual characteristics are the least part of a character’s viewpoint. My male characters don’t go through the story wondering about the orientation of and pressures on their penis or when they will next need to shave their face. So my female characters don’t agonize over the size and weight of their breasts or when they next need to wash and comb their hair. I don’t follow my characters into the bathroom and comment on their sanitary habits. Occasionally, my characters may think with their libidos and feel attraction to persons of the opposite sex. Trying to be an old-fashioned gentleman, and not caring much for eroticism and pornography, I generally keep these encounters brief and tasteful. Actually, most people do not spend their entire day wondering about their next sexual encounter and the attractiveness or availability of every person they meet.³

If writing from the female (or the male) point of view means focusing on the commonalities—then what are they? What makes a character decidedly human? I have a list of human wants and needs that my characters must reflect and project. Here are the basics.

Self-respect. Every character is a serious person and expects to be treated seriously. No one considers his or her own life to be unimportant, unexceptional, frivolous, or comical.⁴ The people and principles they hold dear do matter. They may sacrifice themselves to save another person or to serve an ideal, but they are conscious of the cost. They have a sense of personal honor, which means they hold themselves accountable and responsible for their actions. They hold some thoughts to be shameful, and some actions to be unworthy.

Competence. Every character has something he or she is good at. It may be a specific set of skills, or an attitude of resolve and resourcefulness that lets him or her master many challenges. When confronted with life’s or a story’s difficulties, my characters may be surprised, become fearful, or even hesitate, but they don’t back down.

Self-confidence. The flip side of competence is confidence. My characters know they have mastered their skills, because understanding when you are truly good at something is built into human nature. They are confident of what they have learned and trust they can meet challenges within their chosen field. Aligned with respect, they know they have an innate right to breath the air and walk the earth.

Survival. My characters have something to live for and, when challenged, they will fight. They may occasionally despair, but they do not surrender to existential angst and hopelessness. They see value in life and in the world around them.

Operational space. Every character has freedom of action within the limits imposed by his or her own skills, knowledge, belief, morals, and physical reality. While the character may start in a limited sphere—a prison cell, a confining job, or a smothering relationship—the story must draw the character out into the wider world to explore those limits. The world challenges the character’s competence and confidence.

Goal seeking. Every character has one or more things he or she wants to achieve: a problem to solve, a fight to win, something to prove, someone to save, a relationship to settle.

Some doubt. The flip side of confidence is realization of limitations. Every character knows he or she still has something more to learn, to understand, to become. Characters know there is reason for caution in some situations, particularly situations of impending danger or opportunity. They acknowledge their limits.

Every person reflects some combination of these traits. The conflicts between them—between self-confidence and doubt, between survival and goals, between competence and the challenges of operational space, between self-respect and the challenges of life—establish the choices a character must face and the difficulties he or she must overcome. Life is a matter of complications and choices, and so are the best stories.

There may be people living whose lives and outlooks don’t reflect these traits. Bodhisattvas and Ascended Masters may lack a need for respect or a tendency to doubt. But they don’t usually make good characters in a story. Stories arise from conflict, and conflicts involve real people.

These principles have worked for me in creating characters like Margot and Jane Dobray and Libby Wheelock in The Judge’s Daughter, Janey Pulaski and Rae Howell in Sunflowers, and Ariel Ceram and Grace Porter in The Doomsday Effect. So far, no one has criticized these books because the quality of their women.

On both sides of the gender aisle, we are human beings with human needs and conflicts that come before the demands of sexual differentiation in the zygote.

1. Think of HBO’s Rome, Game of Thrones, and Boardwalk Empire, or FX’s Sons of Anarchy. In each installment, various scenes start with and play through the viewpoint, understanding, and expectations of one or another of a broad cast of characters. For the duration of the scene, the viewer is asked to sympathize with that character and experience the story from his or her viewpoint. In my opinion, this makes for a richer experience than revelation by either an omniscient narrator or from a single-character or first-person viewpoint. Cast in the form of a novel, where the narrative comes from inside each character’s head—a technique I call “first-person narration in third-person voice”—this approach allows the writer to show the reader when certain characters are being wishful or deceitful, following a wrong trail, or being misled. That’s a luxury denied to writers who work only in the first person. And an omniscient narrator exposing other thoughts and viewpoints by hopping from head to head during a scene or piece of action can be clumsy and annoying. The formal, controlled technique of following multiple viewpoints makes for a richer reader experience.

2. Or as Orlando said (at least in the Tilda Swinton movie): “No difference at all.”

3. And, if any character is supposed to have this on the brain, most people would say it’s the male rather than the female.

4. Although, at the end of life, in the last twenty seconds or so, I would hope my characters can reach for the grand jest—the throwaway line—to show they are unafraid and hold lightly to the gift of life.

The Coming Robotics Age

I keep returning to this topic because I think it’s important.¹ The population of talking heads in this country presumes that the current malaise in our job market has a variety of possible causes, for which politicians of both the left and right are proposing various solutions. Prominent among these causes would be:

1. The Chinese, the Indians, the Mexicans, the Vietnamese, and anyone else in a poor but aspiring country are more productive than U.S. citizens because they live in a lower-cost environment and are willing to work harder for a lower wage.

2. Businessmen are ruthless and mean, constantly seeking to exploit workers willing to take less pay and make less fuss over work rules, and so they are moving their factories to China, India, Mexico, etc.

3. Tax rates and the regulatory environment in the U.S. have dimmed the average businessman’s enthusiasm for building and expanding factories here, and so he is eager to move production to China, India, etc.

4. The recent failure of the financial institutions and pressures on the banking system have dried up loans, so that U.S. businesses cannot obtain the capital needed to build and expand factories—and create the jobs that go with them—in this country.

Causes 1 and 2—which are actually the same situation from two points of view, with a bit of Marxist venom thrown in—would seem to be confirmed by a visit to any Wal-Mart store. And yes, inexpensive consumer goods and electronics are made offshore because (1) the goods are low value and low margin, meaning that (2) at the moment it’s easier to make them with cheap labor. But we still make a huge amount of goods in this country, and many of these domestic products are high-value goods that require precision work and could support high wages.

Cause 3 has some merit, but with any offshore move the businessman faces a whole new set of taxes, work rules, regulations, and restrictions in the host country. In addition, with many countries, the threat of nationalization hovers in the background of every decision. The biggest reason that U.S. businesses move their production to China is not so much cheap labor as the foothold they acquire in the Chinese market, which they believe will be huge in the 21st century. The Chinese government encourages this view, although their stated intention is to obtain technology on their own terms.

Cause 4 also has some merit—except that businesses seem to have the cash to expand overseas, and it’s not all a gift of the host government. And offshore companies—particularly automakers like BMW, Toyota, and Honda—seem to be able to expand their operations and factories in this country.

In my view, these are all temporary situations and transitional states. For now, Chinese or Indian hands are cheaper to employ than U.S. hands. For certain classes of goods and certain services, like customer phone centers, it makes sense—economically if not socially—to employ these offshore workers. Americans as a group have too high a standard of living for anyone to employ them making, say, lawn mowers. A mower made overseas costs $250 to $350. One made by American hands would cost $800 to $900—and the utility value simply is not there. We can also see many classes of jobs right here on American soil that the average established American worker simply won’t do—pick lettuce, clear tables, scrub toilets—and so these jobs provide a foothold for newcomers to the country, who come from lower-wage backgrounds and have not yet adjusted to our pay scales and lifestyles.

For each of these supposed causes of job loss there are proposed government rules and actions: impose tariffs on foreign-made goods and services to raise their effective cost of production and make American labor more competitive; write “made in America” clauses into government contracts, so that companies will move factories back home and hire more American workers;² make emergency government loans and stimulus funds available to banks, so they can loan money, and to companies, so they can start building factories and provide more jobs. These solutions will work for a while, they will reverse a temporary situation—but in the long run they won’t bring the jobs back.

The reality is that any job that requires repetitive movement and simple eye-hand-coordination—other than entertainment activities, like throwing a baseball—can now be done, or very soon will be done, by machine. For example, assembling the case, circuit components, and battery—all modules made elsewhere by machines—into a finished iPhone or iPad is work currently done by Chinese hands. In future generations of these products, these components will either become a single module—a circuit etched on glass—or be assembled faster and more accurately by a machine. No Chinese need apply. (For more such examples, see the references in my blogs in Note 1.)

As a general rule, any job for which you don’t need special training and which your supervisor can teach you in a morning is vulnerable to automation. Automation comes in various forms and is not always through direct replacement of a worker by a machine. Sometimes, automation involves (1) introduction of labor-saving devices and technologies that lower the number of workers doing the task;³ (2) redesign of the work environment to employ more computerization and machine interaction; and (3) redesign of the product or service to allow for more modularization and computerization of production.

For the past twenty or thirty years, computers and machines have made the average American worker more productive and therefore more valuable to the company that employed him or her. But we’re reaching a point where, instead of employing a person who knows how to operate a machine or work with a computer, the machines and computers themselves are becoming sophisticated enough—not to mention costing less, working tirelessly, and making fewer mistakes—that the person can be taken out of the productivity equation entirely.⁴

Outside the factory, the internet has mechanized information transfer and is putting the printing press and the local television station out of business. Computerized logistics using barcodes, Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes, and mechanized conveyors and routing have overhauled the processes of inventorying, transporting, and stocking goods and providing services. Computerized money-handling through credit cards, direct deposit, and other accounting systems have overhauled the way we conduct business. Yes, the bank might still employ a few tellers inside a cage, but those people are basically problem solvers; for simple transactions like getting cash and depositing checks, you go to the ATM on the outside wall.

None of these advances has anything to do with the availability or willingness of workers in China and India. When the automation wave that’s now engulfing the U.S., Japan, and Europe reaches their more distant shores, it will simply put a billion people out of work in each of those countries.

The mechanization of industry will not stop. In the meantime, as more and more goods are manufactured and distributed with inputs from fewer and fewer people, the economy has been quietly shifting to provide jobs in support positions in order to maintain the lifestyle of the average middle class person. This accounts for the growth of administrative, regulatory, and compliance-enforcement positions in the federal and local governments. They establish complicated business regulations and requirements for meeting social, environmental, and financial controls and goals. In turn, that leads to the growth of corporate jobs in corresponding support departments like human resources, information technology, environmental health and safety, communications, compliance, and legal. As companies become richer from investing in machines to achieve their production goals rather than paying the salaries of semi-skilled workers, they can better afford to pay for these “information age” jobs that support the enterprise as a whole.

However, these non-productive “information age” jobs will always be less available than the production jobs they replace. So, the biggest source of this country’s malaise is our growing idleness. More people are out of work, exhaust their generous unemployment benefits, then move on to become discouraged workers. At that point, they either apply for disability insurance for non-life-threatening injuries and mental conditions, or move to part-time, temporary, or contract and “consulting” work that meets temporary business needs but has no long-term future.

In response to the temporary rise in information and support jobs, more and more young people are studying non-productive courses in college like sociology, anthropology, gender and ethnic studies, environmental science, and English literature. While these studies have traditionally prepared students for a purely academic career, they believe the knowledge will enable them to move into administrative and compliance positions with business, government, and academia. And perhaps these jobs will endure for another generation—the half-life of the people now studying for them. But if computers are good at handling anything, it’s information. The need for human brains to churn sociological, environmental, or linguistic data will eventually disappear like the need for human hands to manipulate manufactured parts.

This economic situation is not sustainable. Not the mechanization—that can be sustained and grow indefinitely. It makes perfect sense to have machines swiftly and efficiently make society’s goods, both the basic necessities and the entertaining, ephemeral, fun stuff. And now, through the marriage of electronic communications, computerized logistics, electronic banking, and machine programming, the new automated factories can respond to individual choices, making goods in customized styles, sizes, and forms for individual consumers, overwriting the economies of scale entirely.⁵ All of this frees human hands and minds to do the creative work we need done.⁶

What’s not sustainable is the notion—borne of the Calvinist work ethic and the pilgrims’ prosperity—that the man who does not work shall not eat.⁷ That one must be a productive member of society in order to be worthy of receiving the food in his mouth and the clothes on his back. But in the coming age of robotics, you might as well say that a person should not eat bread unless he trod the fields where the wheat was grown, sowed the seeds, and pulled weeds with his own hands. We have seed drills and pesticides to do that work. We have combine harvesters to reap, thresh, and winnow the wheat and mechanized bakeries to turn it into bread. We have computerized inventory systems to say how many loaves the factory should make and the store should stock, and trucks routed by computer to deliver them. We have payment systems based on the electronics of credit and debit cards to help the buyer pay for the bread.

What we don’t have is something for the person to do that lets him or her participate in the economy and have the money to buy the goods on display. Perhaps, since the basis of mechanization is investment of capital rather than hiring of labor, the state should tax more heavily the gains from capital investment to support our growing number of hungry but economically useless people. (It would certainly be better than having them riot in the streets!) The only trouble is, whenever the tax burden increases, the taxed activity goes down. Taxing productive capital to extinction is not a solution in the robotics age, which is solely supported by capital.

Perhaps the government should push all the businessmen aside and simply make the investment in automation itself. That’s the approach favored by socialists. I don’t like it, however, because that sets up a central authority which defines where all investments will be made. Someone in Washington would be deciding what kind of bread I’ll eat and what model car I’ll drive and when I can have it and how much of it I get. I’d prefer some aggressive businessman trying to figure out what I want and supplying it, in competition with others who will also be figuring me out and perhaps investing in different solutions. Capitalism yields better choices for consumers.

If human minds and hands are freed from work—and who really wants to do the routine, mechanical, boring, soul-deadening, put-the-nut-on-the-bolt factory jobs?—we should find something better for them to do. Society certainly has needs that machines do not yet serve, may not serve in our lifetime, and indeed may never serve. Birth a baby, hold a sick person’s hand, comfort the dying, tell a story, sing a song, create a vision, paint a picture, teach someone to dance, carve a statue, teach someone to carve a statue, help someone carve a mountain, design a new perfume, design a new and more comfortable kind of chair, design a desk or cabinet with all sorts of clever little drawers and hiding places, invent a new kind of machine, write the code to run it, bake a really flaky croissant, grow a prize-winning rose. No matter what it is, and that some machine can make really fast, there will always be certain categories of goods and services where someone, somewhere will pay more for work by human hands and minds guided by vision and inspiration.

But we still have to figure out how to pay them. What we need—and sooner rather than later—is a new definition of what it means to be a citizen, a valid member of society, with access to its cornucopia of goods and services showered down from hard-working machines. We should at least solve that puzzle before the robots acquire their own citizenship and start voting against us.

1. For example, see my previous blogs Gutenberg and Automation from February 20 and Automation, Work, and Personal Meaning from February 27, 2011. The Gutenberg blog describes the rise of automation; the Personal Meaning blog describes the response of our economy.

2. If you think imposing government contract rules isn’t a powerful tool, consider that most of this country’s largest companies sell some fraction of their products to the U.S. government. If the rule is written expansively enough, it can change incentives for the company’s entire operation.

3. For example, as recently as about 30 years ago office settings had large numbers of humans, originally called “secretaries,” whose sole function was to answer telephones, type letters, and file documents. These were often employed at a ratio of 1-to-1 with executives and managers and 1-to-2 or 1-to-4 with average employees. Computers, email, voicemail, and other labor-saving technologies have virtually wiped out the job. Now “personal assistants” hold the position but do little that is personal and nothing menial. Instead, they have higher functions like reporting statistics, coordinating meetings, making travel arrangements, and ordering supplies on a department- or division-wide basis.

4. If you don’t believe this, watch any episode of “How It’s Made” on the Science Channel to see machines at work. In many cases, the only human hands in the video are taking semi-finished goods from one machine’s out bin and moving them to storage or to another machine’s loading bin. As soon as technology develops a robot with image-interpreting eyes and flexible manipulators, that job too will go away.

5. If you doubt the ability of automated machinery to provide for individual tastes, consider the modern experience of buying a car. Within each model line, the factory makes available units in dozens or hundreds of combinations from among choices of color, trim level, and optional features. The carmaker distributes these variants throughout the dealer network based upon what each dealer thinks will be locally popular. But if you want some other mix of trim and features, the dealer can locate it at another dealership somewhere in the sales territory and have it delivered within a day or two. If no such car exists, the dealer can order it from the factory. This puts to shame Henry Ford’s original insistence that mass production meant all Model T’s had to be black. If you can have this variation in a machine as large, complicated, and expensive as an automobile, how much easier is it to code for the fabrics, colors, and button treatments on a jacket or shirt?

6. However, even many jobs that we think of as “creative” can be automated these days. For example, where once a computer programmer labored over lines of code, inventing individual operations and then writing and proofing hundreds or thousands of individual code statements, we now have computer assisted software engineering (CASE). The programming language modularizes code fragments for specific tasks and techniques. The programmer has become a kind of design engineer, simply flowcharting what he or she wants the software to achieve, and background processes select the modules and edit them together into the finished product.

7. Actually, it goes back to the Bible, Second Thessalonians 3:10, “If any would not work, neither should he eat.” Or as my mother shortened it, when I would balk at doing chores, “No work, no eat”—although she never actually starved me.

Capitalism and Civics

The tenor of discourse in American conversation¹ has run so far into the anti-capitalist, anti-free market vein that we seem to have reached a kind of rhetorical dead end. People in the private sector are now generally viewed as some kind of primitive, unteachable, gibbering ape—with apology to all living apes—who cannot be trusted to know right from wrong, refrain from messing in the house, or even recognize their own best interest. If capitalists were driving down a mountain road, they would be laughing maniacally and steering for the cliffs. They are thought to be people really too ridiculous to be believed.

Now, I am the old-fashioned sort who believes that any group is made up of individuals. While groups as a whole may advocate and pursue mad, impulsive, categorically imperative courses,² individuals tend to take actions that seem reasonable and justified in terms of their own worldview. That is, I will credit people with the ability to think, reflect, change their minds, and act accordingly.

So, in this context of individual enlightenment, what is a capitalist? As the concept has developed over time, he or she is anyone with liquid resources—that is, wealth not locked up in a house and land, jewelry, or some class of transportation hardware—available to invest. The time value of money³ suggests that leaving dollars under the mattress, where inflation can gobble them up, is pretty stupid. And putting them in a bank savings account, where they earn about 0.02 percent per year under current Federal Reserve policies, is foolish. Of course, the mattress and the savings account are the most risk-free, thought-free, and care-free ways to treat money. Any other use requires more risk, thought, and personal responsibility. And generally, the more risk and thought required, the greater the return that use of the money will command.⁴

A capitalist invests his or her spare money so as to get the greatest growth, or return, consistent with an acceptable level of risk. Of course, some people see huge returns to be made by guessing into which numbered pocket on a spinning wheel a little ball will bounce, or which horse out of eight or nine can run the fastest, or what string of numbers will come up together in a random drawing. For most of us, however, the risk of losing the principal altogether in these ventures is too great. We prefer a lower level of risk and a more modest return.

Capitalists buy stocks in companies that they think will do well, grow, and tend to increase in value.⁵ Or they buy the bonds of companies that have a good reputation for honoring their debts and will pay back the principal with interest. In this sense, the mass of employed Americans who participate in 401(k) savings plans and individual retirement accounts (IRAs) are capitalists. They look ahead ten, twenty, or forty years to a time when they will not be able or want to work, and they expect their money to grow on the way to meeting them there. Let’s call these passive capitalists, because they are making investment decisions that will ride the coattails of those who manage the companies in which they invest.

Active capitalists, then, are people who take this money that’s borrowed through bonds or raised through stock sales—plus, usually, some of their own money—and invest it actively in a business. They use the money to buy productive and logistical capabilities such as manufacturing equipment and trucks. They hire workers to use the machinery and drive the trucks. They rent or purchase property for their factories and warehouses. And they hire or contract for support in areas like accounting, advertising, or human resources. If it’s a new business, the stock and bonds usually go to paying the costs of starting up. If established, they may pay for an expansion. Eventually, however, the business has to pay its own way plus a bit more—through profits and sales growth—to reward investors in terms of stock growth and dividends or bond yields and interest.

All of this is basic Microeconomics 101. What seems to have gone off the rails in recent discourse is the expectation that active and passive capitalists will act rationally. The presumption seems to be that, without intense government supervision, goal-setting, and micromanagement, capitalism will explode, poison the earth, ravage people, and destroy society. The sum of all the good things that government management is supposed to achieve through regulation and policy setting is usually described as “sustainability.” By that is meant encouraging or forcing capitalists to adopt social, environmental, and governmental goals that stand above and beyond the basics of earning a profit by providing goods and services that people want at a price they will pay—that is, by satisfying a demand in the marketplace.

Now, granted, the focus of business managers has shrunk over the past couple of decades. I can recall from the early years of my career when corporations rewarded employee loyalty and spent extra time cultivating community values. Companies used to see their role as balancing the natural tensions among four groups: customers, shareholders, employees, and community. Then, in the 1980s, a hardball style of stock analysis came into vogue and the words “shareholder value” became the cry. The term usually meant that a company worked to meet “the Street’s” expectations for stock price, earnings per share, and dividends each quarter. It made American managers less inclined to invest in growth and stability over the long haul. But any company that doesn’t keep one eye on the horizon will die in the long term anyway.⁶

It is my view that social goals, environmental goals, and government goals (except those represented by actual laws) are all secondary and pretty much unnecessary. If the intent of a business is to maximize its profits, then you do that by obeying the law (i.e., not paying fines or spending idle time in jail) and operating efficiently (i.e., not losing money to waste). Does it pay to treat your workers fairly? Of course. That way, you attract the best talent and generally avoid losses due to theft, obstruction, negligent damage, and downtime. Does it pay to be a good corporate citizen? Of course. If you do bad and hurtful things—such as ignoring social norms relating to racial equality, ethical and humane treatment, or respect for people and the environment—then someone will observe and report it. Then you'll lose money to competitors with a better name, because you’ll have to lower your prices to attract a less thoughtful class of customer.

As a case in point of operating efficiently, I once worked at a large oil refinery and commented to my supervisor that it didn't smell like the refineries I remembered from afar in the New Jersey of my youth. He said that this was by design. In fact, if I did smell anything, the company would pay me to report it. This wasn't simply a case of conscientious environmentalism. The plant’s chemical technology was tuned to such a degree that any odor meant a leak—“and that means we're losing product,” he said. The management’s self-interest made it a more vigilant environmental watchdog than any EPA investigator dropping in for the annual inspection.

Similarly, modern approaches to systems engineering, operating methods, data management, and people management mean that the modern company will run efficiently and effectively by choice, or suffer negative consequences. The focus of public attention in a transparent and open information environment means that a company will operate ethically by choice, or suffer the consequences of lost sales and lawsuits.

Is this approach—through self-interest—better than trying to write a law that covers all cases? Not always, because people are not uniformly smart or thoughtful, and the outcome is not certain. But with a law, the outcome is not certain, either. Laws must always be enforced through continual observation, routine apprehension, and credible penalties operating as deterrents.

If you doubt this, consider the California highways. With a speed limit of 65 mph, the average speed is usually above 70 and often closer to 80. Drivers go with the flow, and the California Highway Patrol usually cruises right along with them. The officers are more concerned with reckless and aggressive driving than trying to control the actual speed of the flow. This may be supremely sensible, but it’s not strict enforcement of the speed laws.

But making it in the capitalist’s best interest to undertake a course of action is more likely to have results, because capitalists are very good at looking out for their own interests. They are also very good at finding loopholes and workarounds when a law is not in their interest. And any enforcement strategy must obey another economic principle: the law of diminishing returns.

Simply put, pushing too hard on any one factor in a process reaches a point where more emphasis on that factor won’t achieve much. If you try to improve adherence to or compliance with a rule by enforcement alone, without addressing other incentives, you reach a point where a hundred patrol cars—in the example above—are no more effective than ten in reducing traffic speed. That may be why the California Department of Transportation has resorted to speed control by other, passive, physical means—like narrowing lanes, limiting lines of sight, and designing “weaves” between adjacent on and off ramps. When people have to slow down or risk breaking their necks, they usually comply.

Regulations that work through natural processes and the self-interest of the operator simply have a better chance of achieving their goals.

1. By “conversation,” I’m referring to what I hear from the mainstream media, bandied about in the blogosphere, and readily subscribed to by friends in the social media.

2. Think of the sort of fixation on a single principle that turns a zero-tolerance policy toward drugs or weapons into a scavenger hung for baby aspirin and butter knives in school backpacks, or an abortion rights advocate into an enthusiast for infanticide at the moment of birth.

3. Basic economics: everything is moving; everything is changing. Anything that is not growing is dying. The economy is like an ecology, always growing in one area by dying somewhere else. In such a dynamic environment, any asset that isn’t finding a productive use and growing is going to shrink and die. Money over time should grow in value. Otherwise, why did God give you eyes to see and a brain to think?

4. See Risk Free from December 4, 2011.

5. Speculators, day traders, and others who take a temporary position in a stock, believing it will go up or down in the short term, are less like capitalists and more like gamblers.

6. Managers who intentionally ride their companies to the block and chop them up for the current value of the parts are not really managers. They are corporate undertakers, and the business is already in a terminal state.

Formula for a Golden Age

Since we seem to be so far from having one right now, I think this is the time to pause and consider what makes a Golden Age in any civilization. Is it something you always have to look back on and discover in hindsight? Is it something that’s more satisfying and fun to remember than to experience? Is it possible to engineer the conditions for a Golden Age? And is it possible, however inconceivable, that we are in the midst of one right now?

Certainly, it is easier to identify a Golden Age in the rearview mirror. Think of the times that have been so identified: the Edwardian period, between 1900 and the Great War; the Elizabethan period, between 1558 and 1603; the Augustan period, between 27 BC and 14 AD; and Periclean Athens from roughly 480 to 404 BC.¹ These times have a sentimental glow about them. They make us think of the golden light of late summer afternoons, bountiful harvests, full-bodied vintages, exuberant paintings, epic poetry, and a world at peace—perhaps not least because of the chaos and turmoil that came after them.

Those are image fragments, of course, but they still ring true. For example, the arts were on display in all such periods. The Athenians enjoyed the plays of Sophocles and Aeschylus, and the wit of Socrates. The Augustans were given Virgil’s epic Aeneid on the founding of Rome. The Elizabethans saw a flowering of the theater and the genius of Marlowe and Shakespeare. The Edwardians inherited the Impressionist painters and the Romantic poets and composers from preceding centuries and made the most of them. These were all arts within the reach of the average literate person and anyone with the time to attend the theater or gallery—say, the upper middle classes. In that sense, the arts of these times extended beyond the wealthy patron and his immediate circle, and could be enjoyed by a wider slice of society.

In these periods, like most times, it was good to belong to the upper tiers of society. The wealthy could eat well, drink well, and play well. What marked these Golden Ages was a surface stability and lack of active war, which is a devourer of the leaders of society as well as the other ranks. Edward—whether by intention or through lack of attention—managed to avoid the wars of Queen Victoria’s reign, such as the Crimea and South Africa. He could jolly along his nephew the Kaiser and celebrate English and German rivalry with yachting displays at summer regattas. Elizabeth ended a religious revolt between Catholic and Protestant factions and extended her father’s and grandfather’s buffer against the dynastic politics of the Wars of the Roses. Augustus ended a hundred years of civil strife between contending leaders and their pledged legions, and initiated the Pax Romana. The Athenians existed in a sliver of peace between the Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian Wars.

But under the surface? Edwardian England was the center of a technological arms race in Europe that led to the first of two world wars. Elizabeth was in constant struggles with her ministers over the succession and with France and Spain over the future of Europe, and avoided the latter’s invasion only through a fortunate combination of wind and storm. Augustus maintained the peace only by clamping down an army-backed dictatorship as the last man standing from the civil wars, and he also struggled with the succession. The Athenians were in constant conflict with their neighbors and allies. For anyone paying attention, none of these were idyllic, restful periods.

Each of these periods grew wealthy with trade. The Edwardians prospered from the empire Victoria consolidated in the Middle East and India. The Elizabethans stood at the dawn of New World exploitation and picked the first fruits of Spain through piracy. Augustus welded the corn harvest of Egypt and the riches of the eastern Mediterranean onto the Roman sphere. Athens drew masses of tribute from her Delian League in the Aegean and from colonies overseas.

Although it’s never been a good time to be poor, these periods had something for the lower classes as well. The Edwardian period saw the beginnings of a progressive concern for those in need. It was also, in the United States, a period of massive immigration and new beginnings. The wealth of Elizabeth’s reign was beginning to spill over to benefit the merchant classes.² Augustus settled legionary veterans on newly conquered lands, rebuilt the City of Rome and ensured its food supply, and reorganized the tax structure. Fifth-century Athens regularly heard the political voice of the average person—so long as he was born in Athens and not a slave or a woman.

So, what are the ingredients of a Golden Age? One part a period of fragile stability, usually with war and political upheaval as bookends. One part growth in trade and public prosperity. One part a flowering of the arts. One part opportunity for the common man. These conditions generate a spirit of public confidence. People are willing to speak their minds. People look ahead to better things.

But a Golden Age is not just about having a full belly and personal security. That way lies relaxation and a long nap. The spirit of confidence is tinged with just enough insecurity and doubt that people are inspired to scramble. And there must be a promise of improvement, so they know how to direct their steps. In this sense, living through a Golden Age might provoke more anxiety and require more hard work than people are likely to remember later.

Can a ruler or the leaders of society engineer these conditions? They can try. Political stability is well within a ruler’s or society’s grasp. Ironically, this usually requires a projection of strength rather than the cautious desire to avoid conflict: Enemies are more likely to avoid a snarling dog than a cowering one. Elizabeth, Augustus, and Pericles were all rulers who projected confidence and strength; Edward seems to have inherited the reputation from his mother. Trade and opportunity are usually within the control of government—if, that is, its ministers will release their grip a bit and trust in the efforts of entrepreneurs. The arts can always be publicly encouraged.³ Harder yet is to enlist the common people and capture their imagination: The average person is incredibly sensitive to what’s blowing on the wind.⁴

I would maintain that, despite all appearances, we are now living in a Golden Age, one that started with the end of World War II and persists up to the present. Consider these conditions:

War and political unrest: Yes, we have endured a cold war between various ideologies, first between free-market capitalism in the West and totalitarian communism in the East, then between tolerance of religious belief in the West and consolidation of a single belief in the Middle East. And yes, we have experienced numerous small wars at the edges of these greater conflicts: Korea, Vietnam, the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan. But we have not experienced massive invasion into the heartland of either set of beliefs and a final resolution by conquest. Communism collapsed peacefully under its own inadequacies; religious consolidation will eventually do likewise under the onslaught of trade and education. The wars we have experienced are on the scale of the border conflicts of Imperial Rome and the skirmishes of Elizabethan England.

Trade and prosperity: The Second World War left the United States as the last man standing, like Augustus after the civil wars. It also offered the former combatants, Germany and Japan, the chance to rebuild their destroyed, 1930s-era industrial bases with modern, postwar technology.⁵ The U.S. encouraged this and made them trading partners. The fall of communism in Russia and eastern Europe, and its commutation to a form of state capitalism in China, opened up global markets. Advances in computer technology and automation improved productivity and made possible a flood of inexpensive goods and efficiently delivered services. The Green Revolution expanded the global food supply. Countries like China and India ceased being economic failures and became global exporters.

Flowering of the arts: Technology—especially computers and the internet—have opened a floodgate of the arts. Books, music, movies, and the ideas they represent are readily at hand to anyone. More than that, the barriers to producing art have never been lower, because the same technology also allows anyone with a computer, a video camera, a microphone, and internet access to become a writer, musician, or moviemaker. While we may not yet have found the age’s Sophocles, Virgil, or Shakespeare, we still are experiencing a period of tremendous creativity.

Welfare of the common man: In the developed countries of the West, the life experience of the average person has never been better. Yes, there are still poor people,⁶ and yes, we are still in a recession. But most people expect and live a middle-class life. In the developing countries, there is more opportunity for growth and achievement. In the long view, science and technology have enabled levels of education, communication, nutrition, travel, leisure, entertainment, and personal satisfaction once reserved for kings and courtiers.

That looks like a Golden Age to me. Yes, we still have instability and anxiety. Yes, there are reasons for thinking the road ahead might be going over a cliff. But then, the Edwardians had some inkling of the Great War ahead, and the Athenians were already sliding into the war with Sparta by the time Pericles died. But the lights still shine and the music still plays.

The question is, what will people in a hundred, a thousand years, or more be looking back on? The last six decades as a time of relative peace and plenty? Or the quiet before the storm?

1. It’s interesting to note that these periods are all named for monarchs. But then, most of history has been identified with the person nominally in charge, from native American war chiefs to U.S. presidents.

2. Shakespeare’s grandfather was a tenant farmer. His father started a retail trade in wool and corn, took up leather working, and became a glover. By the third generation the family was fully employed in the theater arts.

3. Promotion of the arts may be a necessary but not a sufficient cause of a Golden Age. Certainly, the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s promoted and paid for the arts vigorously, and that wasn’t anyone’s idea of a Golden Age.

4. As one of the smartest people I know—a former journalist—once said, “People ain’t stupid.” That might be the founding stone of democracy. It links to Lincoln’s quip about fooling some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time. John Brunner in Shockwave Rider caught the flavor of this with his projection of the Delphi poll: “While nobody knows what’s going on around here, everybody knows what’s going on around here.” The Germans call it the spirit of the times, Zeitgeist: what everyone knows and recognizes.

5. To cite just one example: in the 1950s, new technologies in steelmaking became readily available, from the Linz-Donawitz (LD) oxygen process to electric-arc furnaces to continuous casting. Germany and Japan rebuilt with these technologies and leapt ahead of U.S. steelmakers, who were still working with open hearth furnaces and rolling mills built in the 1920s and ’30s.

6. Consider that people in America who live below the “poverty line” actually live better than most of India’s or China’s middle classes. We simply cannot conceive of letting our poor live at the level of their poor.

Trust No One

We’ve recently had revelation 2.0, the second-anniversary outpouring, in the undying story that is “Climategate.” Whether by theft, internal leak, or public request under the Freedom of Information Act, we are getting a look inside the ruminations and not-for-public-consumption exchanges of opinion among the experts in the new field of climate science. Not having read more than the snippets that appear embedded in internet stories, I can’t say that the revelations are damning proof of anything. The consensus about human-made, or anthropogenic, global warming (AGW) may be God’s own truth, or a cynical hoax, or merely misplaced enthusiasm about some worrisome trends.¹ But what the revelations do seem to show is disappointing.

Before I get into that disappointment, some caveats. First, I am thrilled by the internet and the access and transparency it makes available to the average person. The news of the world is no longer the private product of three broadcast networks, two wire services, and half a dozen major metropolitan newspapers. Now everyone can blog and respond online both to the mainstream media’s postings and to other bloggers, expressing personal opinions and beliefs that may or may not always be firmly fixed in the provable facts. The sunshine of the open exchange of ideas and beliefs is really the best disinfectant for private obsessions, hatreds, and manias.

Second, I am depressed by the internet and the access and transparency it makes possible under the rubric that “information wants to be free.”² Everyone needs to have some secrets: the salary figure you’ll really accept in a job interview; your rock-bottom price for that car; what you actually do in the bathroom and the bedroom. Governments and other organizations also need secrets: what wild-guess alternatives they might discuss before deciding on the actions they officially take; how much risk they’re prepared to tolerate in pursuing those courses of action; and when the diplomacy will stop and the war begin. Some secrets and illusions are simply necessary to a functioning society. Total exposure to media and internet attention 24/7 is now burning up every public figure who’s even brushed by the spotlight.³ Public certainty about facts and findings, discoveries and statistics, is disappearing into a raging sea of personal beliefs, manias, and unpublished agendas.

Third, I’ve worked most of my adult life with engineers and scientists as a technical writer and corporate communicator. I have tremendous respect for these people. They are admirable because, in a world of opinion and fantasy, they treat data seriously and scrupulously. They have to, because if an inconvenient fact intrudes on their formula for a new medicine or biological assay, their design for a dam or nuclear reactor, then really bad things can happen, and their signature is on the reports and drawings. They may have opinions about statistical outliers and obvious errors—why some data can be ignored safely because, for example, the instrument or reporting conditions were known to be suspect—but such doubts are always revealed, addressed, footnoted, and explained for all to see and understand.

In the matter of anthropogenic global warming, that level of publicly available scrutiny does not—according to the email fragments I’ve seen—appear to have taken place in reaching the consensus among climate scientists. In order to make clear the picture of human carbon burning as the main cause of rapidly rising planetary temperatures, these scientists seem to have been cavalier about some inconvenient facts and findings. The scientists involved mention these facts privately but, in order to keep the picture clear and simple, they appear to agree among themselves that they will not treat such facts as meaningful.

In this matter, they step beyond the bounds of science and into the realm of science fiction.

The scientist’s job is to make observations, draw preliminary conclusions, make hypotheses about these observations, and devise experiments that will test and prove them—which means trying to falsify them, if possible. The final step is to open the whole question to other scientists, who are then invited to examine the original data, reproduce the experimental work, think of and try other tests, and finally either support or reject the hypothesis.

Only in science fiction does a scientist become the popular hero leaping into the breach. Only in stories does he or she become a partisan for the implications behind his or her test results and rush to a microphone in order to save humanity from disaster.⁴ In fact, to the extent that a scientist becomes a partisan for any particular point of view, his or her credibility declines. The scientist as advocate is distrusted, whether he or she works for a panel that reports to a drug company, a tobacco company, or an agency of the United Nations.

Consider Charles Darwin. If any scientist had ever fashioned a dagger to plunge into the heart of divine creation, he did. Darwin presented a convincing argument for the natural, cause-and-effect changes in environment and opportunity that transform one species into another. This was implicitly a criticism of the idea that each species was created in its perfection by an all-knowing deity. Yet Darwin merely presented his ideas and let them speak for themselves. He did not move on to attack the church or the country’s education system. In fact, he remained a churchman and, apparently, a believer throughout his life. His business was with the science, the knowing, not with changing his society’s attitude toward it.

One would imagine that, in describing a possible global catastrophe, a person of honest and humane intent would naturally include a discussion of variability in the data—what are called “error bars” on a graph—and any possible alternative conclusions to be drawn from the data. And if there is a recommended course of action that is difficult or demanding, then the importance of open and free discussion of the variables rises in direct relation to the difficulty of the task. We all want to be sure we’re right before causing major disruptions.

However, as I understand it, the scientists who report so absolutely on anthropogenic global warming have:

1. Chosen to track the concentration of one gas, carbon dioxide, out of a complex atmospheric mix, including water vapor and methane among other greenhouse gases. The choice was apparently made because CO₂ is the one gas whose concentration has been widely affected by human activity in the last 100 years and it’s also the one that scientists can actually show to be increasing.

2. Tracked regularly and reliably recorded temperature fluctuations from only about the last 100 to 150 years. The rest of the temperature data points are estimates, interpreted from other data series like tree ring patterns, which are themselves susceptible to other influences.

3. Fed these concentrations and temperatures into various models of the planet’s climate. Weather and climate are complicated phenomena, with many variables in play. So the construction of these models, including the assumptions they make and the dependencies they describe, is critical to shaping the results.

4. Come up with a prediction, within a span of degrees and with narrow error bars, of conditions that will exist 100 years into the future.

5. On the basis of this temperature prediction, prophesied a number of possible related effects on conditions like ocean level, rainfall, storm severity, agriculture, and other phenomena of interest to humans.⁵

Making a prediction based on a model is what I would call a conjecture. A conjecture about the Dow Jones Industrial Average for a century from now, based on similar data sets and model types, is not something I’d bet on. A prediction is not a fact, like the tested strength of a steel bar or the measured activity of an enzyme.

The corrective course that these scientists are advocating will be neither easy nor undemanding. They suggest that carbon burning in the developed western world has already caused irreparable damage to the Earth’s climate. They and the politicians, economists, government administrators, and citizens who accept their findings are demanding immediate and rapid changes in our energy infrastructure. They want to replace coal- and oil-based electric generation (currently about half of our installed capacity) with wind and solar (currently just a few percent) over the span of a decade or so—much faster than any economic replacement program.⁶ They also want to increase the prices of motor fuel and electricity so that the average customer will use less. These actions will result in misallocation, deprivation, rationing, lower economic activity, and declining lifestyles.

It won’t be a global catastrophe to ask Americans, Europeans, and upscale Chinese and Indians to accept these hardships. Certainly, a lot of people in less developed parts of the world already live that way. But the sudden collapse of economic activity will be a dislocation approaching within one or two orders of magnitude the projected dislocations that might occur, a century from now, because of a warmer climate.

Now, if all this advocacy is based on scrupulous attention to and treatment of the data—collected, evaluated, annotated, open to discussion and dispute—and based on the operation of models whose variables, source code, dependencies, and assumptions are open to review, criticism, and reproduction, then it would still be advocacy, and so suspect.

But if the advocacy is based on a belief or predilection that comes before the data and the models—that is, if the climate scientists are no better than tobacco company scientists—then who can you trust?

We have a long-standing tradition in our democracy that anyone has the right to scream, wave his arms, and call for massive and immediate societal changes right now! in order to correct some perceived injustice or avoid some prophesied catastrophe, based purely on personal opinion and belief.⁷ But we also have a tradition of letting the average citizen look critically at the screamers and arm-wavers, decide whether or not their arguments are persuasive, and vote accordingly.

If the climate science consensus is based on sincerely held belief and a willingness to trim the data and nudge the model in the direction of that belief, then the public is in danger of accepting a false proposition. The proposition is that the conclusions are the result of good, honest, respect-the-data science—such as has provided us with new views of and advances in biology and medicine, physics and electronics, chemistry and materials over the past two centuries. But the honest intent may not be present in climate science and its predictions. Even if these scientists are pursuing the noblest of motives to avert the direst of catastrophes, the published emails hint at a basic dishonesty in their approach. And anyone who accepts the consensus because it has been couched in the language of science and attested to by scientists is in danger of accepting that false proposition.

Trust no one. If these physical scientists can disrespect the data to prove their point, then who can you trust? Not some politician or social scientist who has joined hands with the physical scientists because he or she shares their viewpoint. Not a government of such people elected by a population of voters who blindly accept whatever a scientist says and writes. And if we can’t trust the scientists on this, a scientific question, then how will we ever know? Anthropogenic global warming may be God’s honest truth, a cynical hoax, or misplaced enthusiasm about some worrisome trends. Who is to say?

Frankly, I’m more afraid of certain economic collapse brought on by massive infrastructure change attempted over the next nine years than I fear possible collapse due to predicted temperature and environmental changes over the next ninety. But then, I’m not a scientist.

1. My personal belief? It doesn’t much matter what humankind does. As a greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide is only one of several atmospheric components regulating heat re-radiation. And greenhouse gases are only one of several factors influencing climate. Solar output is a bigger factor, and we seem to be ending a recent sunspot maximum (where more sunspots yield higher energy output) and heading into some kind of sunspot minimum. Whether that minimum is short-lived or prolonged, no one can predict. But even if we could prove—unequivocally, undeniably, without the slightest doubt—that every shovelful of coal burned serves to dig the grave of an innocent human being, it still wouldn’t change a thing. No society—not ours, nor the Europeans, Chinese, nor Indians—will seriously handicap their economy to prevent a temperature rise of a few degrees over the next century, no matter what the predicted effects. Individuals may be smart and have free will, but societies are like a wave in the ocean: a million water molecules pushing and pulling each other along, all going somewhere—and eventually getting there.

2. I also firmly believe—although it’s off topic for the discussion here—that the information an individual or group has worked to produce must be adequately compensated. Yes, the novelist has used the language’s public-domain words and the society’s publicly discussed themes to create his or her new and exciting story that others want to read, but the novelist’s effort in arranging those words and displaying those themes is a product that should no more be stolen and handed around than the products of Ford and GM should be stolen off the streets and taken for a joyride. The same goes for the work that a scholar does in uncovering old facts and presenting them in support of new conclusions; or a musician does in putting together common notes and song lyrics to create new music; or a photographer does in framing a public sight and capturing it in values of light exposure, contrasts, and shadows to express a new vision. Intellectual property is not theft, and it shouldn’t be forced into surrendering its labors as a gift.

3. For example, as a young man I enjoyed the inspiration of John F. Kennedy’s speeches without having to know he was, apparently, an oversexed, promiscuous cad who routinely cheated on his beautiful and articulate wife.

4. And yes, my characters have done that—most notably the geologist Ariel Ceram in The Doomsday Effect. But that was science fiction.

5. And when they do change—when sea level rises against the shore and the band of arable land moves north and upslope—what will happen to people? They’ll adapt. Will there be dislocations? Disruptions? Hardship? Yes, certainly. But consider that much of the investment we’ve made in sea-level infrastructure and current farming methods did not exist a century ago. Or it existed in more primitive forms, like wooden docks or horses and plows, all of which have since been rebuilt to handle changes in technology like containerization and factory farming. If sea level were going to rise twenty feet in ten months, that would be a screaming catastrophe. But if it rises that much over 100 years, then sea level simply becomes another factor in your investment decision and lifestyle choices: move or stay, put down roots along the shoreline or go live inland? And believe that the climate and sea level will change, one way or another, in the next century. Go ask the Ephesians.

6. Personally, I think coal, oil, and natural gas are all too valuable as chemical feedstocks to be burned for electricity or motor fuel. My preferred energy solution is to take solar power from orbit, where the number of available kilowatts per square meter is about ten times the number that reach the ground. For a possible way to do this—and kick start our entire use of space in the process—see my novel Sunflowers.

7. In fact, we’re seeing some of that behavior in the Occupy Wall Street crowd.