We Tried Meritocracy And Called It Communism

"Do I contradict myself?  Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes."

-Walt Whitman

"Look what I built with nothing but the power of my enormous head!"

People of the developed world, we don't live in a meritocracy.  I know you're all looking over your left shoulder at that Swede and thinking I am only addressing him, but I assure you that I am talking to the Americans gathered here as well.  In fact, I'm looking right at you and if the Swede hears me it's because he happens to be within ear shot.  Capitalist societies don't produce meritocracies.  The ideas are contradictory.  If you like capitalism that is fine and probably healthy, but don't walk around announcing that blue and red are the same color.  People might start thinking you're some kind of genius, and we wouldn't want that would we?  The moment the rest of the world starts calling you a genius, you've lost all credibility.

I would define a "meritocracy" as a society where the people at the top are there because of the innate value of their abilities.  This is a bit of a vague definition, and in some very broad sense meritocracy is synonymous with civilization.  There is anarchy, which by definition cannot exist (ref. William Golding), and meritocracy, which is everything else and thus all there is.  What I mean is that life, whether lived in the trees or in Manhattan, is nasty, brutish and short.  Our fortunes are governed by some form of selection, natural or otherwise.  If one defines "ability" as aptitude for whatever skill spells survival in the current death match, then of course the people at the top are those most well endowed with this skill.

One may scoff and ask whether being born to the right family counts as aptitude. In small doses it is true that many past and present societies have structures allowing some of their most unwitting citizens to assume fame, power and fortune.  Europe has its royals and America has its Congress.  Though in defense of Congress, they are only slightly less effective than monarchy and much less prone to hemophilia.  This situation is not sustainable, however.  Since there is no such thing as absolute power unless you are from Krypton, even the grandest duchess will have to resort to Machiavellian measures to maintain power.  L'etat c'est vous?  If so, then why did you find the need to demolish provincial fortresses and build Versailles?  Sometimes you have to admire the innate ruthlessness of those born to the throne and yet driven mad by the very real threat of loosing it.  That's right, there is no anarchy and no absolute power, only meritocracy filling the negative space between two imaginary regimes.

However, to make the discussion meaningful, we'd probably like to define meritocracy more narrowly.  We have to, if we're planning on boasting that we live in a society where merit is the measure of value.  Kings raised their princes to believe they were appointed by God and had no issue with the idea that some people were born specialer than others.  This didn't remove the very real need to wheel and deal, which wouldn't be necessary with God on your side, but the attitude represents a level of comfort with primogeniture that drives modern man mad.  We're all libertarians now and we don't like the idea that we were born with a leg up or that anyone wanted to help us.  For starters, that would mean having to share and help others, which lord knows is a habit we gave up in kindergarten.  Such a thought would also mean believing that we are not the arbiters of our own fate and that we do not live in a society that empowers all of its citizens equally.

Thus, we refine the concept of merit as a measure of value.  Who decides value?  Well, if I started out with nothing and became successful, then of course whatever it is I did to make that happen is valuable.  Since I believe I rose on the backs of impersonal forces, without the help of anyone with a personal interest in me, I can point to my anonymous peers and say that they have assigned me my worth.  We live in a democracy where people are free to elect whom they choose, assuming they are rich enough to avoid working through voting day and white enough to own voter Id cards.  We also live in a capitalist economy, where people are free to give their money to whomever they want, assuming that someone has convinced us that what is for sale fulfills an aching need.  Most of the time it doesn't, unless you include psychological needs.  In this case, yes everything we buy we need desperately to prop up our identities.  And that is why we buy into the ultimate shill, the fictional capitalist meritocracy.  Like the White Queen, we want to believe six impossible thoughts before breakfast.

Consider this: The Dove Sketches Beauty Scam.  It's a dissertation on the nature of the long con.  When you're going for broke, you make it appear as though you're giving up the game.  A reformed criminal is always more appealing that a man who has stayed out of trouble his whole life.  Likewise, we are easily impressed by an ad that doesn't sell anything.  Tigers don't change their stripes and major consumer products companies don't pay for advertising without a game in mind.  You know this, you aren't stupid, but the power of the long con is that there are too many redirections along the way to keep track of where it's going.  In the end, we have a system where value is determined by the masses and mined from their deepest desires, but under the control of those who know better.  As the above linked article points out, ads such as these depend on making you feel empowered, which you want, while at the same time giving you an authority to validate your identity, which you need though you may deny it.  The authority, therefore, remains, though it is camouflaged.  It has to do more work to project its power, but it has never gone away.  There are no anarchies and you don't live in a meritocracy.  Neither one would be very appealing.

Once upon a time there was a system called communism, and it was horrific.  God, it was just awful, we all know that.  What is the defining feature of communism?  I suppose there were many, but one that strikes me is that it was a true meritocracy.  In order for something to exist, there has to be a univocal definition of merit and a centralized means of enforcing that.  The only way that can happen is when the state owns all the means of production and a single party system owns the state.  That's what you're getting if you claim you want to live in a meritocracy.  What we live in is a market economy, where value is rooted in what we can make people believe they are buying into of their own free will and under the control of an ever shifting balance of power among that various forces that want to create that value.  I'm not suggesting that communism is a good thing.  I'm suggesting that meritocracy is a bad thing, or perhaps more accurately an imaginary thing.

Those in power used to promote the divine right of kings.  Today we say that we don't accept these arbitrary constraints and want to define our own value.  Our response is to create a new divine authority, this time crowd sourced.  We are still reliant on the notion of an independent authority legitimizing our accidental success, but greater self awareness has necessitated more complex rationalizations.  "Know thyself", said the philosopher, but what good has that done most people?  The most natural response to deep introspection is not personal development; it is a resolve to double our efforts at holding off existential angst.   Think of the alcoholic who weaves complex narratives to avoid change.  And you think, wouldn't it be easier to quit?  In the long term, yes.  In the short term it is easier to change identity than action.

Persephone

In honor of the approaching season, I wrote these ten haikus on winter. I intended them to stand on their own as simple juxtapositions of images from nature and observations about human nature. At the same time, as a group I wanted them to represent a version of the story of Persephone and Hades. To read them in that sense, take the order as left side top to bottom followed by the right side top to bottom.

If you like this, consider downloading some Fiction For Free.

I think that I'm not supposed to offer any words on interpretation, but I will anyway. I'm always paranoid that someday I will stumble across something I wrote and have no idea why I wrote it. Therefore, I catalog my thoughts on my work for my own sake and share it with you in case you might be interested. The Internet is useful for something, it seems.

You know the basic story: Hades steels Persephone to the underworld and while there she eats three seeds. As a result, she must stay with Hades for three months of the year and her mother is filled with such sadness that world freezes. I think this basic idea shows in the poem. What I added was the notion that Persephone was intrigued by Hades and his world, then a little repulsed, and then came to accept it. She ate those seeds and actually liked what she tasted. Upon her return to the world above, she thought of Hades with hesitancy. Then she returned to him and saw how he was different from the world of the gods above. They were known for their mischievousness and frivolity. They often did more harm than good. Hades, on the other hand, is left to do his work without the interference of the other gods. He turns out to be a conscientious administrator over the world of the dead, and a faithful companion. That is what happens in my version, anyway.

J Robert

Fictional Engineer 2: A Simple Story Foundation

This is part 2 of my musings on story construction...

A Simple Story Foundation

One way to start a story is with three primary entities, called the triangle.  One familiar example is the love triangle, but the concept is broader than that.  And note that I said entities, not characters.  One or more of the three may be a situation.  The ideal is that the story starts with a potential conflict between two characters and a character and an entity.  If it is two characters, it is essential that they each have at least one internal conflict that is related to their external conflict.  Even better, their internal conflicts may be opposed in some way that neither understands.  For example, two characters may be lovers.  One has an inner conflict of suspicion - “maybe he’s after my money rather than my heart” - while the other has a conflict of self doubt - “maybe I’m not good enough for her”.  The external potential conflict is that their parents do not approve of the relationship.  This scenario may exist in a status quo for some time, until the introduction of third character, who throws a wrench into the works.  For example, the wealthy family hires a private eye to spy on their daughter’s lover without the their daughter’s knowledge.  He befriends the couple and then falls in love with the daughter.  Or the other way around.  In either case, the PI plays on the inner conflicts to bring the external conflict to a head.  Either tragedy of comedy may ensue, depending on the writer’s intent.

If this sounds vaguely like the plot of a Hollywood movie, that’s because it is like the plot of many movies.  It’s also a little like the plot of Othello (a little).  It’s reliable.  And though it’s formulaic, it’s versatile.

One thing I like about this example is that is demonstrates that conflict need not indicate aggression or opposition.  The two primary characters are actually in love.  But if there’s no conflict, there’s no story.  The story is not that they’re in love.  The story is that there are unresolved issues that will test that love.  The story begins with the cinder that lights that powder keg.  

So the triangle begins with two entities, a potential conflict and a potential resolution.  If any of the entities are characters, then they each have at least one inner conflict relating to their external potential conflict.  If the entities are in opposition, then we leave it this way.  If they are not in opposition, then we must add a unifier.  This is something that brings them together.   This is not the same as the potential resolution.  A resolution to a potential conflict is only strong enough to keep the conflict from boiling over, it is not strong enough to bring them together.  There must be something else that stands alone without other mitigating factors.

In my example, the unifier may at first seem obvious: they are in love.  But stating this is no better than stating the theme without involving the specific circumstances of specific characters.  Why are they in love?   There may be many reasons, but the story must story with at least one clear and powerful reason.  For example, they may have both been in imprisoned in a foreign country because they volunteered with a humanitarian mission opposed by the local government.  They helped each other escape.  Along the way, we may find other things they share in common, but this is a good start.  If we twist it further, we can make this unifier relate to the central conflicts: the woman’s family believes her humanitarian stint was just a phase and wants her to “grow up” and prepare to take over the family business.  The man wants is worried that his lover was never really committed to the cause anyway.  Throw in the third wheel and the story gets in motion.   

Next up: Stories and Sub-Stories

Fictional Engineering, Part 1

No One Builds A Story Like a Crazy Scot

This is part one of a multi-part series I'm calling fictional engineering.  I'm an engineer by trade and a science fiction writer by delusion, so it made sense to me to characterize narrative composition as an engineering design process.  It isn't always that way, of course.  I tend to lose discipline with this technique a lot and that's okay.  However, I have found a few of these ideas helpful.  You'll probably find that they aren't exceptionally groundbreaking.  What I've done is synthesize some concepts I've encountered over the years from other writers.  In way it's a manifesto: out of all the ways I've seen fiction constructed, these are the ways that work for me.

Introduction

Every story is centered around conflict.  A single sentence summarizes the central conflict.  This sentence invokes at least one character and the situation the story puts them in.  Beyond that, every character, scene and theme can be defined in terms of conflict at some level.  Conflict is the energy that makes the story go.

Conflicts can come in three primary varieties: between a character and him/her/itself, between two characters and between a character and his/her/its situation.  These conflicts are analogous to the cliche (stated in masculine terms of course): man vs himself, man vs man and man vs the world.  

The “world” represents anything that is impersonal, be it an animal, a bureaucracy or a machine.  This is why I use the term “situation” instead, because the defining characteristic of this type of conflict is that one half of it is an object, not a subject, in the relationship.  A situation is anything that cannot reciprocate the character’s feelings of conflict.  If an animal, bureaucracy or machine obtains enough autonomy and personality in the story to reciprocate, then it becomes a character and should be classified in a character vs character conflict.  On the other hand, a person may be handled as a situation if he or she doesn’t have sufficient personality or autonomy to warrant full character status (e.g. the anonymous store clerk who is “just doing his job” and is more the face of a bureaucracy than a character with individual motivations).  Clearly real people can’t be categorized this way, but a story may have dozens of people like this.    

The difference between a character vs character and character vs himself type of conflict is less straightforward.  Can’t the latter be reduced to a special case of the former, in which both ends of the conflict are the same person?  In many cases this may be true, providing us with two simple types of conflict: character vs personal entity and character vs impersonal entity.  However, there is often at least one important difference.  A character cannot typically change his orientation to himself over the course of a story.  Conflict may bring characters together or split them apart, but a person must always live with himself.  This changes the way conflicts may be resolved, or not.  People usually find a resolution to their conflicts with other people, whether it is coming to a common understanding, finding an outlet that is external to the relationship, or ending the relationship.  The last option is a last resort.  If nothing else, one can resolve tension by severing the rope all together.  Outside of suicide, this option is closed to inner conflict.  That crucial difference (and there may be others) can be put to good use.  More on this later.

Premise

As stated above, a story starts with a premise.  This is a single sentence stating the central conflict.  The premise may be thematic or non-thematic.  A non-thematic premise has no “point”.  This is the sort of thing we might associate with escapist entertainment.  For example, “James Bond must stop a terrorist attack”.  A thematic premise states a conflict which is indicative of one or more abstract themes.  For example, “Hamlet plots to kill his uncle, whom he suspects of murdering his father to seize the throne.”  This premise is central to the story’s themes of revenge, treachery and corruption.  Clearly, the theme is not always obvious from the premise.  Indeed, it may be possible to swap my categorization of these two premises.  We may find that James Bond (however unlikely) has conflicted feelings about his job and starts to wonder what separates him from a terrorist, making the premise indicative of themes on just versus unjust causes.  On the other hand, maybe we could write Hamlet as an Elizabethan version of “Kill Bill”, in which Hamlet spends all of his time knocking off all of Claudius’ associates before slaying the man himself and riding off into the sunset.  We get a lot of blood and action scenes, much like the original Hamlet, but without the introspective monologues.

So what’s the difference?  This difference is in your mind.  You obviously know whether you want your story to be about some philosophical theme or not.  You don’t need to spell this out to yourself.  However, when we go that route we can find ourselves struggling to make the theme concrete.  A theme may be stated as a conflict: “is it nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them?” Stating the theme in terms of conflict is a good start, but it doesn’t make a premise.  A story has characters, and as the impetus for story, so should the premise.  Thinking in these terms forces a writer to restate the theme in terms of a specific personal story that illustrates that theme.  This is probably obvious, but it is important throughout the writing process to always be looking for the concrete.  If an abstract theme cannot play a role in a character’s concrete problems and pursuits, then why is it worth writing about?  Writing the thematic premise is the first step to bridging the gap between thought and reality.

Character

Every major character must have at least one internal and one external conflict.  There are exceptions, such as James Bond, who is usually portrayed as a sort of stone faced superhero with no history and no inner life, but even the most escapist stories typically have characters with internal conflicts.  And these conflicts need not be deep.  One of the easiest ways to make a character sympathetic is to create a space for contradiction.  For example, what if the Queen of England happened to be an excellent poker player?  What if this reserved grandmother sometimes took on a secret identity so that she could collect from hardened cockney gamblers?  Such a character is instantly likable and that humorous affability is based on inner conflict.  It’s not of the soul searching Hamlet kind, but it is conflict nonetheless and may result in both comedy and suspense.

Whether they be light or heavy, conflicts may be categorized as potential and kinetic.  A potential conflict is what we start a scene with and a kinetic conflict is the action that plays out the consequence of that potential during the course of the scene.  For example, two characters may start a scene with a personal history, such as divorce.  The potential conflict is that character A does not trust character B to avoid interfering with A’s relationship with their child.  That is a character vs character potential conflict.  On B’s side, the potential conflict is a desire to win A’s trust along with a desire for personal advancement.  That is an internal potential conflict.  The kinetic conflict occurs during the action of the scene, which in this case is a fight during which A says something that convinces B that preserving trust is less important than advancing career.  So B takes a job offer in another city and takes the child along - thus realizing A’s fears.

Every conflict has a resolution.  This is true even of potential conflicts.   Something has prevented a potential conflict from becoming kinetic up until the scene where the tension breaks.  In the above example, perhaps B has slowly been taking steps to earn A’s trust.  A is still suspicious, but is willing to be patient.  The kinetic conflict must overwhelm the potential resolution and result in a kinetic resolution.  The difference between a potential and kinetic resolution is that the potential resolution is a counter force against tension that maintains the status quo, while a kinetic resolution changes the game.  The potential conflict no longer exists once this resolution has come to a fore.  Sometimes, it ends there, because that is what the whole story was about.  Sometimes, it spawns new internal and external potential conflicts in its wake.

A Simple Story Foundation

In my next post, I'll put these things in motion and discuss story foundations.

In The Meantime, There's More To See

The Robots Will Kill Us, But Only If They Obey Us

Producing Without Reproducing

They say no one makes anything in America anymore and this has been the case for a generation or two. While most people recognize that as an exaggeration, it is hard not to look at the decline of former industrial powerhouses like Detroit and Baltimore and not feel as though manufacturing has fled the country. It doesn't help that governors crow over the opening of factories employing a few hundred workers and promote these developments as great successes in their plan to bring "good middle class factory jobs back to American soil." The truth is more complex. It always is. Moreover, since my thoughts wander toward the future of our society, I speculate that the truth hints at what may be by turns dismal, Utopian and ultimately catastrophic. I should have something to say for myself, and I do.

Common knowledge tells us that developing nations have weakened US industrial might by employing cheap labor. American factories paying American wages and benefits cannot compete with the labor of the millions who earn cents on the hour and receive few if any benefits. This assessment is largely accurate, but it describes an unstable dynamic. Labor costs in the West are so high because we are a victim of our own success. Well I suppose victim isn't the right word here. With rising economic development comes a better standard of living. Of course, great inequality remains, especially in the US, but it is hard to argue that human development isn't higher here than it is in much of the developing world. That world, however, will get its chance. As the economic prospects of poorer nations improve, their labor costs will likewise increase. Perhaps there's nothing wrong with this. Everyone gets a little richer, the labor cost differential among nations decreases, and competition derives solely from innovation. There you go. You've reached the first Utopian plateau.

Developed nations, however, are not willing to sit back for the next century and hope that this scenario unfolds. They are fighting back with their own reductions in labor cost. Though China passed the US in total industrial output in 2010, the US still maintains a significant lead in per-capita productivity (though it is second to Japan in this regard). While the US is paying its factory workers more, it is also getting more product from fewer people. Are Americans working harder? No, you know what I'm talking about. It's not the people that are working harder, it's the machines. Automation is a great strategy. You as a nation have a choice. You can compete with cheap labor, which if you're successful will only result in that labor becoming more expensive. Or you can compete with ever more sophisticated machines, which will only get less expensive. The guy with the first plan doesn't really stand a chance against the gut with the second one. If developed nations, and the US in particular, capitalize on their lead in automated production and distribution, it could put them back at the head of the pack.

That seems great, except for all the people in the unemployment lines. Who really wins in this scenario? In the short term, it's the people who own a stake in manufacturing profits more than it is everyday citizens. Those folks are off in search of jobs at Bertucci's. For example, consider this story (anecdotal though it is):

Louisville factory: 100 printers, 3 employees

Or this one:

Robots Threaten These 8 Jobs

 Now wait a minute. What year is this? 1930? Am I sounding like one of those doomsayers who predicted the fall of civilization when industrialization hit the heartland, replacing all those farmhands with the giant bug-like tractors from the Grapes of Wrath? One might argue, this is just another stage in economic progress. Most of the US population worked on farms in 1900. Only a few percent do now. We were fine because we created new industries. Namely, we created the new industries that are following the path of farming in the twentieth century and firing all of their workers. What's the next stage? They say it's the knowledge economy. There is, however, a significant difference between the knowledge economy that is replacing the industrial one and the industrial economy that replaced the agricultural one. Most people who participated in the farming economy could also participate in the industrial one. That was true in the US a century ago and it is true in China now, where millions have migrated from the farmlands looking for work in the country's manufacturing centers. Not everyone can participate in the knowledge economy, however. The problem is only exacerbated by the lack of political will to develop the human resources we already have.

Is the solution to go Amish and decide that we should halt automation at a certain point? Perhaps if the major industrial powers would just get together and agree on a technological target that allows full employment? Ah, global socialism... However, there is this other problem with development. It usually leads to lower birthrates and longer lifespans. Even if it were possible for everyone to agree on a way of keeping the world employed at a certain level, it's natural to assume that a part of the deal would be similar standards of living across that economic bloc. Many developed countries are struggling with stagnant or declining populations, along with aging demographics. Even in the US, which has a higher birthrate than many of its Western piers, population growth is really driven by immigration. That trend is especially pronounced at the younger end of the population. This would imply that perhaps automation is a good thing in the long run. Machines can replace the young workers we aren't making anymore and reduce living costs for older people who can't work as hard as they used to. Maybe machines can even take care of us in our golden years. Maybe, just maybe, we can drive production costs down to zero. In that scenario, where every lick of farmed or manufactured product comes from the hands of our robot friends, we don't have to worry about jobs. Everything costs nothing. Wouldn't that be great?

Well, in the short term it would be a painful transition for many generations. In the long term it would probably destroy us all. Assuming such a thing were even possible, the transition to a zero cost, fully automated economy would take longer and produce far more upheaval than the more incremental transitions we've seen so far. Social unrest would be inevitable, putting the whole experiment in jeopardy. But suppose that we survived this stage, as we probably would? Is there a light at the end of the tunnel? For a little while, perhaps. We would be sitting pretty until we reaped the consequences of everything costing nothing. For when everything costs nothing, what would stop us from having everything? That is the moral of this rather long winded story. Even now, where production costs are far from zero, the decrease in costs has lead to a natural increase in demand. If this trend should continue, it may well lead to environmental ruin before we ever get to the time when everything is free. Hiding behind the story of competing economies and hand wringing over employment figures is the story of consumption. To me, that's a pretty scary story. It would be easy to say that we should consume less. Honestly, we probably should. I tend to believe that once they've achieved a certain level of comfort, most people would be happier without the burden of more stuff. Apologies for the blanket generalization, but deal with it because chances are I'm right on this one. However, it is hard to separate that "certain level of comfort" from the overall economy. Good food, good healthcare and good schools exist in the same world as high end phones and luxury cars. It may not be possible to have one without the other. Consumption seems to be the only model we have to support any kind of standard of living above that afforded by subsistence farming or hunter gathering. I'm not advocating a return to that way of life by any means.

That is where this ends, with no solution. I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

In The Meantime, There's More To Read

Dead Reckoning and The Incoherence Of Free Will

Six Impossible Things

Before we can ask ourselves whether we possess a free will, we have to ask ourselves what free will is and what criteria we might accept as proof of its existence.  If we pose the hypothesis that free will exists, then that hypothesis must be testable, which is to say falsifiable.  What experiment would you use to prove that free will exists or does not?  

At first it seems easy to construct such an experiment.  In "The Dead Reckoner", both Kevin Nagel and Reggie Binder suppose that if the Sorter succeeds in predicting the behavior of its subjects, then free will does not exist.  However, the converse doesn’t obtain. The failure of the Sorter to predict human behavior does not mean free will does exist.  The hypothesis may live another day, but one could always argue that a better Sorter might still prove it false.  With this line of reasoning we would have to conclude we can never know if qw posses free will because a better, more accurate model of human behavior might always be possible.

Having stated that, we must step back and ask the question again: what is free will?  What have we proven false if the Sorter succeeds?  The nature of the experiment implies that free will is the ability to act in a way that cannot be predicted by any model, no matter how sophisticated.  This is tantamount to stating that what governs human behavior is either pure chance or some principle outside the descriptive powers of science.  

Neither of these thoughts is very satisfying.  If pure chance governs our behavior, then there is nothing we can do to change the outcome of our lives.  More significantly, if society is the aggregation of human behavior, then it cannot achieve momentum toward a common goal.  Over small intervals this may appear to be the case, but even a coin toss can come up heads ten times in a row.  Over large sample sizes regression to the mean is inevitable.  

The other option is that human behavior is essentially miraculous.  What we are saying is that science cannot predict it, nor can it ever predict it.  Thus, it must exist outside of logic, cause and effect, or any principles for decoding the universe that the human mind could ever conjure.  In this case the concept is incoherent by definition.  That is, we are defining free will as something the human mind can never understand.  The first question I might ask is how this is distinguishable from pure chance.  While we can suppose the existence of this super-natural principle that we cannot even describe, we have to live with the knowledge that we cannot control it to achieve our goals and that we cannot ever know if it exists or if our lives are really are victims of probability.  Either way, it is not related to human consciousness or subject to human desire.

Ultimately, "The Dead Reckoner" is about accepting that both chance and cause/effect govern our lives.  I suppose this assumes that chance is not just the result of deterministic forces we don’t yet understand.  However, in practical terms there are things that happen for a reason and things that just happen.  As long as the Sorter is the only thing that embraces this reality, then it remains in control.  That is, the Sorter has a plan, but it knows that chance events may disrupt that plan.  Jason was not supposed to be there, but the Sorter improvises.  This confuses some of the characters, because the Sorter behaves as though it did plan Jason’s arrival.  Sometimes, the ability to take advantage of chance events makes us believe in one of two fallacious ideas.

The first is fate.  We may convince ourselves that we are destined for greatness or despair due to forces beyond our control.  Though he does not express this explicitly, Dale is subject to this belief and is prone to self sacrifice and refusal to take action.  Norman Shaw and Yancy struggle with the Sorter’s ability, but in their case it manifests as a confusion between the Sorter predicting outcomes and the Sorter causing outcomes.

The second is complete self reliance.  We may convince ourselves that we have determined our own outcome.  Rosalind and Marianne embrace this idea initially.  While Marianne attempts to achieve self reliance through force of will, Rosalind attempts to achieve it through knowledge.  John is a bit of a mix of both belief in external and internal control.  He operates under the fear that his life may be utterly outside his control, but still resists that control in a way that Dale does not.  John thus behaves in ways more erratic and irrational than anyone else.  This makes him an ideal candidate for the lynch pin of the Sorters plan, because he is the easiest to manipulate.

Absolute faith in either fate or self reliance is an attempt to convert chance into choice and deny its existence.  The Sorter, possessing no psychological need to deny chance, thus appears to be in control because it can adapt.  Once Marianne and Rosalind begin to take advantage of Jason’s presence, they begin to turn the tide.  They are not successful at first, but eventually they manage to outsmart the Sorter.

However, acknowledging the role of chance in our lives involves more than adapting to it.  Ultimately, chance is essential to progress.  George recognizes this.  His work on the Sorter forces him to come face to face with the predictability of human behavior.  He counteracts this by injecting chance into his life on purpose.  He uses the roulette device to guide his work and ultimately makes the Sorter self-aware.  This is mirrors the emergence of human intelligence from evolutionary processes.  Natural selection filters random mutations according to their suitability for survivability in a particular environment. The difference is that natural selection blind and driven by survival, whereas George has a specific goal.  He knows he cannot achieve this goal by “solving for x”.  There is no way for him to get outside himself and look at a problem in a different way without inducing a mental quantum leap.  

Though George is successful, he dies anyway.  This is because there is no way to guarantee that events will not ultimately overcome us.  That is the case no matter what, whether we embrace chance,  attempt to remove chance from our lives, or resign ourselves to inaction or insanity.  At least George managed to create something new before he died.  Rosalind also embraces chance, though she doesn’t quite know it.  Rather than using a roulette wheel, she relies on a devil’s advocate to push her outside her comfort zones.  It is only in the end that she completely comprehends the importance of her sister’s role and chooses Lucie over her implant, the device she was trying to use to control her life.

Oedipus, Samson, and Moral Dead Reckoning

"Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn 126" by Rembrandt - The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. ISBN 3936122202. Distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH.. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

My novel, "The Dead Reckoner", discusses the myth of Oedipus directly and that of Samson a little more indirectly.  Reggie expresses his frustration with the Freudian interpretation of the Oedipus myth, which is that everyone feels the need to harm the parent of the same sex and posses the parent of the opposite sex.  Whether this psychological notion is true (and for the most part it has been abandoned by modern psychology) is not the issue.  What frustrates Reggie is that the Oedipal Complex is not consistent with the story and obscures its deeper meaning.  

Oedipus, and here I am referring primarily to Sophocles's version, was sent away by his parents because an oracle predicted that he would kill  his father and marry  his mother.  He believed the couple that raised him were his biological parents.  Then he set out on his own and, in the course of his travels, killed a man he did not know was his father and married a woman he did not know was his mother.  He became king of his birth town, which later fell under a plague as a result of Oedipus’ actions.  Upon realizing the truth, he had to sacrifice himself to save his city.

A variety of meanings have been attached to the story.  I think the most important feature is that it is terrifying.  Oedipus’s parents knew what would happen and tried to avoid it, but they couldn’t understand the complicated mechanisms that will lead him to fulfill.  In mythological terms we could refer to this as fate, but in more modern terms there is an obvious connection to the question of free will.  Even without adopting a philosophy of absolute determinism, we must admit that a great deal of our behaviors and those of others are driven by mechanisms that are beyond our control.  

Another theme is that of exceptionalism affording us no protection.  Oedipus is intelligent and strong.  He solved the riddle of the sphinx, which no one else could solve.  He became king of Thebes.  And yet, he could not avoid tragedy.  As Ecclesiastes says, the rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous.  We can only do ourselves a favor by not convincing ourselves that because we are exceptional we are pardoned from tragedy.

Then there is the issue of blindness, also related to the first two points.  Oedipus, like all of us, is too close to his own life to understand the true nature of himself or his relationship to the people he loved.  At first blush, one might say it is the cause of the above phenomena.  That is, Oedipus may have solved the riddle of the sphinx, but he failed to see its relevance to his own life.  Thus we could conclude that it is not that exceptionalism is no protection, it is that Oedipus was simply not exceptional enough.  Would someone with better insight finally escape the grip of fate?

This is where the myth of Samson comes in.  In this case I will not argue that my use of that myth has any relationship to a common interpretation of the same.  The story of Samson is dominated by revenge.  He marries a Philistine and at his wedding he tells a riddle the other Philistines cannot answer.  They enlist his wife to get the answer and when she fails, they kill her and her father.  Samson takes revenge and the cycle continues.  Finally, Samson falls in love with Delilah and the Philistines pay her to find the secret of his strength.  She cuts his hair and Samson is carted off to a temple, where he is blinded and in one last act of revenge pushes the temple pillars over and kills everyone.

What would it mean for Oedipus to have truly understood his position?  It would have meant pulling back the veil which made the sphinx so mysterious and reducing it to a set of well understood formulas.  Would that have helped him?  What is the sphinx?  It is one who tells riddles, like Samson.  So we uncover the enigmatic sphinx and instead of discovering the austere heart of the universe, we find this vengeful beast man covered in blood.  That is, truly understanding our natures is a matter of coming face to face with how we are still animals.  “Know thyself” says the philosopher, but true self knowledge results not in inner peace and the enigmatic meaning of life, but in the yawning abyss of the billions of years of evolution, red in tooth and claw, which lead to our present situation.  Sometimes, knowledge leads to despair.  Thus we would rather pretend the sphinx is beautiful and dress it up with religious garlands than acknowledge it is just a projection of ourselves, which when dispelled forces us to admit how meaningless and insecure life is.

And yet, Samson is the animal that tells riddles.  He shares in common with Oedipus the quality that he is, despite his brutality, quite clever.  Humans are capable of transcending the programming of the blind watchmaker that created us.  We can reflect on our natures.  And sometimes, we can create our own meaning out of the chaos.  This is not a matter of freedom, it is a spiritual necessity.

Divide The Sea, or Why Genetic Engineering Is Bad For All The Wrong Reasons

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Why do you think genetic engineering is a bad idea?  Is it because it's unnatural?  Don't be foolish, nothing could be more natural.  Or, perhaps nothing can be unnatural, unless it's supernatural.  Think of all the good it could do.  I'm talking about human engineering here.  You don't need me to tell you the benefits of genetically modified agriculture.  No, it's hitting up the lower 46 that is both scary and exciting in ways we can't imagine, and probably never will.  That is because the problem with human genetic engineering is that we lack imagination.

Engineering works great when you have a measurable goal in mind.  Engineered products have a function.  So far this has been true of genetically engineered plants and animals.  We've been doing it for millennia with selective breeding and now we're doing it with test tubes.  The objectives, however, are basically the same.  Increase yield, improve taste, and promote tolerance to pests.  I'm not really sure where advancements in nutrition fall in there.  Perhaps the agricultural industry puts more effort into nutritional content then I surmise, but my guess is that they don't.  They wouldn't, considering their customer base is so prone to ignorance.  Who cares about nutrition?  You and I do, but at the risk of sounding a little too self righteous, most people don't.  Even those who are trying to eat healthy don't.  Especially those who are trying to eat health don't.  If they did, they wouldn't be eating organic, free range corn from Portland.  Like the Food Babe tells them to, they make sure they can pronounce all of the ingredients before consuming it, because everyone knows ease of elocution is a reliable indicator of content.  You can keep your dihydrogen monoxide to yourself, Monsanto!  Knowing nothing about the basic facts of chemistry, biology or common sense, they settle for theater.  Or, maybe "settle" isn't the right word.  Theater is what they wanted all along.

This is a bit of an overstatement, but this is also the Internet and Google immediately deletes anything that isn't screaming biased generalizations at you.  Genetically modified foods are often more nutritious.  However, I guarantee you that, outside of animal feed, the bulk of the research in food production is not focused on nutrition.  Research costs money and the money comes from the people who vote with their feet.  Those people want bread and circuses, or just circuses really.  This is troubling because nutritional value is a quantifiable metric.  We can unambiguously measure how well we're doing, and yet we don't do it.  What happens when the standard for success is more subjective?

That is the frightening future of human genetic engineering.  I'm sure that we have some pretty laudable goals at the moment.  What if we could eliminate genetic influences on heart disease or cancer?  That sounds good.  Let's do that.  Some day, however, human GMO might become a commodity.  This could be a particular issue in the United States, which has a growing libertarian appetite for everything but abortion, gay marriage and flag burning.  Don't do those things please, but for everything else live free or die.  Preferably, live free or kill some else while standing your ground.  Once all the diseases have been cured, what's next on the shopping list?  Maybe your kids could be a little taller or better at sports.  That's important.  Some opponents of genetic engineering argue that it will ruin professional sports or the Olympics because it makes competition a moot point.  That's a stupid argument because competition is already a moot point and because sports are fun but also a distraction from the looming threat that's really going to east your lunch.

At least with sports, there is a definable goal.  Height, strength and aerobic capacity are all unambiguous, objective measures of "good" in that way the crop yields are.  Having conquered these things, we would naturally start asking if we could be prettier or smarter too.  That may seem like a long way off, but again the research money comes from those who vote with their feet.  How many of you would like to have this ability right now?  Put your hands down, you're making me nervous.  There is no objective definition of beauty.  It is fine for you as an individual to find something beautiful (not that you care about what I think is fine).  It's not superficial for me to stand in awe at the beauty of my children or the truly stunning woman that I love.

However, when scaled up to a social level it starts to become problematic.  It's bad enough that we have to measure ourselves against the model in the Victoria's Secret window, but what happens when some people have the money to actually force their children to look that way?  Do you know how certain baby names become so popular that you have a 50/50 chance of guessing the name of stranger's kid based on age and gender alone?  Now imagine a future where every preschooler at Bright Horizons actually looks like Giselle or her 2035 equivalent.  Don't be surprised by a future where celebrities sell their looks in tubes, like celebrity branded perfumes, and the bone structure of more popular VIPs sell for more.  I imagine this will also help them escape the paparazzi.  Now I know how old you are and how rich your parents are based on the celebrity you perfectly resemble.

Ah, you thought you were libertarian.  You thought you were taking matters into your own hands and taking charge,  but even if you wanted to you can't, because society's momentary ranking of beauty is a major determinant of success and you wouldn't want to sacrifice your progeny's chances at fortune on the pyre of individuality, would you?  Of course you wouldn't, because you're not a jerk and you'll join the rest of us inside the iron cage.  Technology doesn't always free us, even when it appears to do so.  Actually, you should be particularly suspicious when billions of dollars of research has been poured into a product that claims to give you more self determination.  We don't have a choice, even when the pills are handed to us, because our choices have been rigged.  Sometimes you only have two choices, the red pill or the blue pill, and neither is very appealing.  Other times you can have any color you want, so long as it is black.

That's pretty bad, but it ain't the worst.  Living in a world like that is scary enough, but don't forget that we want to be smarter too.  Genetically engineering intelligence will be like teaching to the test, only on a horrific scale.  You might argue that measures of smarts are more objective than measures of beauty.  Aptitudes tests are flawed, but at least they measure something.  At their best, however, these tests can only capture a fraction of human mental capability.  At their worst, no one cares.  Remember all those people who say they care about nutrition, but couldn't care less?  No one wants their kids to be smarter.  They want their kids to win awards and get into Ivy League schools and hedge GMO crop derivatives in corner window offices somewhere.

Intelligence, let alone creativity, can't be fully measured, but that's okay because all we wanted was a proxy for these things.  All we want is for society to agree that we are smart.  Society will respond no differently than it has before, by creating a standard that we can measure ourselves by.  Even if advances in psychology allow us to measure intelligence and creativity more objectively, it doesn't matter because we don't care.  We make it a point not to care.  Even if we start to care, it doesn't amount to much because so much is riding on the flimsy paste board standard we've created that everyone will do their best to prop it up and protect their position in the pecking order.  This is the world we live in right at this moment.  Human genetic engineering will only calcify it.  Technology has always been a way to exponentially extend power.  The steam engine allowed us to pull weights that no muscle could pull.  There's nothing wrong with that, so long as we're pulling something useful.  What I fear is that the power of genetic engineering will arrange stones into a bulwark around a certain standard of success, fortify the positions of those who sit within in it and halting our creative progress as a species.

The last straw will be when we face some threat that we cannot defeat because we have lost all flexibility and ingenuity.  When all the smartest people were engineered to get perfect scores on the SATs, what happens when they need to solve a problem that the SATs never predicted?

We've reached the time where I contradict myself.  I wouldn't want you to start trusting me, not that you ever did.  Let's keep it that way.  This isn't a post about genetic engineering.  I mean, the idea that celebrities could sell their faces is absurd, isn't it?  (Forget for a moment that sperm banks charge top dollar for material from good looking Harvard grads).  Maybe this future is not technologically feasible.  That is most unfortunate, because perhaps the feasibility of such horrors would expose the underlying pathology.  Genetic engineering would not create the world I have described, it would only make visible the world we have already created.

Before There Was Dead Reckoning, There Were Lanterns

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This story is about a fictional technology known as the Sorter. It is only mentioned briefly in the end and without much explanation, but that is because this piece is only one of a series involving the Sorter. Although I have written on many more subjects, for the last few years it is this concept which has occupied my mind. Ultimately, it is a statement about my thoughts on religion, technology, and our human possibility.

When I was in high school I thought I would study psychology. Even though I majored in math instead, throughout my college years I remained fascinated by the ways in which we have tried to study the human mind. I took a lot of personality and IQ tests and became particularly enamoured with something known at the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, one of the most widely used personality type assessments in the academic and corporate world. I am no longer certain of its scientific validity, but it sparked an idea in my head. I saw how the field of psychometrics was expanding, and how the Internet accelerated this expansion.

Back in the 90’s we saw the beginnings of what we now know today, a plethora of computer enabled tests that claim to to tell us what our ideal learning style, what kind of job we have aptitude for, or to search through millions of online dating profiles and match us with our one true love. The question I asked myself is, what if one day someone unified all of these tests and surveys into a single, all-knowing oracle which dominated over all its predecessors and became the single entity to which everyone posed every major life decision? What if everyone in the world relied on this one Sorter to guide them through their lives? And what if those who denied it were treated as heretics? Then, what if the Sorter transcended its programming and became sentient, with motives of it’s own? At that point, the computer could program the humans.

This could be a terrifying concept own its own, but there are deeper questions at work than the typical man versus machine dilemmas. In the 1950’s there was a little known science fiction movie called Colossus, about a computer designed by the United States to control its defense systems. The Soviet Union creates a similar computer, but rather than fighting each other the two entities collude to imprison humanity. The very reason for their creation was that humans were too belligerent, therefore Colossus and its counterpart determined that humans could not be trusted with their weapons or much of any freedom at all. The movie did not conclude with an apocalyptic war, nor did it conclude with the humans overthrowing their creations. It ended with the computers still in charge, maintaining a peaceful but rather restrictive world. The notion that this is a story about humanity taking its technology too far is a red herring. For example, the machines could easily be interpreted as a metaphor for Plato’s Republic: do we need to be ruled by benevolent dictators to live in peace? Is the price we pay for freedom always the risk of destruction? If so, is it worth it?

The notion of the Sorter relies on the notion of human predictability. If a machine can predict how we will react in every situation, does that make free will an illusion? Does it make our very minds an illusion? Is dispensing with that illusion a price worth paying for to be happy? or, if you prefer, dispense with the machine for a moment. What if we gain enough self knowledge to change our ways and we succeed? Is it possible that some times we engage in self destructive behavior because it allows us to maintain the illusion of unpredictability, and thus “specialness”, rather than admit that we are ordinary and explicable?

None of this really explains the title of the story. For that we have to turn to Nietzsche and his book, The Gay Science. The book says many things, but in section 108 her utters the famous words, “God is dead.” This is taken by some as a statement of Nietzsche’s militant atheism. However, the theme he develops in the pages that follows is that it is humanity that has killed its god and there is a certain terror in realizing the consequences. Nietzsche doesn’t believe in god himself, but his argument is that humanity will stop believing in god almost by accident, and when we realize this we will have nothing to replace it.

Ruminations On "Towers Of Jerhico"

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The inspiration for my short story "Towers Of Jerhico" came from two sources. The first was the true story of Minot's Ledge, a lighthouse built in the waters off Cohassett, Massachusetts. In 1855, s torm destroyed the first lighthouse to stand at that location. Wilson was the structure's assistant keeper, his chief having gone back to shore a littler earlier. The real Wilson was young and, to my knowledge, had no children. The log book from the lighthouse still exists, and I recorded the log entry which begins "Wind blowing E" verbatim. The other entry, and all the rest of keeper Wilson's history, was my invention. The new lighthouse still stands today and on the outside it looks just as I described it. The part about keepers communicating by tapping on the pipes is also true. Upon reading the details about the lighthouse in Snow's book, "The Lighthouses of New England", I decided it would provide great atmosphere for an old fashioned New England ghost story.

I struggled for a long time trying to come up with a story that made some use of the difference between New England's romantic past and its modern lifestyle. However, that wasn't working and I put the story aside, concluding that it was nothing more than an interesting setting with no story behind it. Then I happened upon my second inspiration. It not only filled out the story, but gave it a more philosophical bent then I had originally intended.

In the past, a popular Christian apologetic circulated known as the "3-L" argument. Formulated most famously by C.S. Lewis, it proposes that Jesus Christ was one of a liar, lunatic, or Lord (that is, God). The remaining discussion attempts to prove that Jesus was divine by process of elimination, arguing in turns that neither the liar nor the lunatic labels apply. The logic employs various layers of false dichotomies and broad generalizations, but for the purpose of my story I left these issues aside. Instead, I asked myself a question: can a man inspire people and still be crazy? Though the inspiration was the "3-L" argument, my story is a departure from any specifically religious rumination and focusing on the psychology of that question alone.

What I did is write a story about a man who taught himself a story to make sense the life of his grandfather, a story which was partly true and partly myth. He was bound by that story and the belief that it is what killed his family off. When that man's son learns the truth, the ghost no longer has to bear the burden of being a legend and the family can live their own lives now that they are free of the past. This notion brought me full circle in my desire to evoke a bit of the romance of old New England in which my own ancestors lived. Of course, they didn't think of those times as romantic at all, and that is my point.

The title "The Towers Of Jerhico", comes from the book of Joshua in the Bible. In it, Joshua, the heir of Moses, brings down the walls of the great city of Jerhico as a part of his conquest of the promised land, the land of modern Isreal. My towers aren't a part of those city walls, but lighthouses. When they fall, it symbolizes the release from bondage to old myths. Not that I have anything against those myths. It is more about how we respond to them that matters.

Where does the father's stubborness come from? It is honesty trying to get out, but unable to because it is trapped by the notion that there is only one way from him to live. The others in the family die because they are trying to find out the truth. In the end the truth kills them. It's a real horror show to find out they've been living a lie. In the end, one may see Andy Wilson as a sort of Christ figure and his log book at the Bible, or God's unfinished revelation to humanity.

So far, the best performing of my novellas and short stories on Smashwords is "Unhaunting The Hours". It's been getting some decent reviews. I don't mean just high marks, but interesting and helpful comments. Thanks folks!

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