SFNF: Eshbach, Of Worlds Beyond

Posted on Wednesday 20 December 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

I’m revisiting some classic critical nonfiction books about science fiction, beginning with Lloyd Arthur Eshbach’s OF WORLDS BEYOND, a collection of essays by Heinlein, Campbell, Williamson, and others. This is the book where Heinlein identifies 3 basic plots and his 5 rules for being a successful writer, and A.E. van Vogt describes his technique of writing in 800-word scenes that include every idea that pops into his head as he writes.

Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, ed., OF WORLDS BEYOND: The Science of Science Fiction Writing (1947)

Eshbach (http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/eshbach_lloyd_arthur) founded Fantasy Press, one of the earliest small publishers devoted to science fiction, in 1946, and compiled this ‘symposium’ of seven essays a year later. It’s a short book at 96 pages. I have a fine copy of the first edition, hardcover with dust jacket inside a Brodart plastic wrapper, that I bought from Robert Madle at World Fantasy Con in 1993. I read it at the time, and am rereading it now.

Eshbach’s Introduction notes that, in 1947, that while “stories of worlds beyond” are as old as human imagination, the field of “speculative fiction” had formed only in the past 20 years. “It appears to be well on its way toward becoming the fiction of the Atomic Age.”

The essays are by Robert A. Heinlein, John Taine (pen-name of CalTech mathematician Eric Temple Bell), Jack Williamson, A.E. van Vogt, L. Sprague de Camp, Edward E. Smith, Ph.D., and John W. Campbell, Jr. Each short essay is preceded by page or two ‘editor’s preface’ and a black and white photo of the author, in the formal clothes and generally stern expressions of the day. (Except for van Vogt, who looks a bit wild-eyed.)

At least a couple of these essays formulate authorial philosophies that have been passed down over the decades as common writerly wisdom, at least in the SF field. The star of the show is Heinlein, whose essay is “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction”. The editor’s intro notes that Heinlein had recently begun to sell stories to the ‘slicks’ – that is, the high-end glossy general interest magazines, like Saturday Evening Post, that paid much more than the SF magazines of the day, like Astounding and Amazing. (In retrospect, Heinlein was and remained an outlier, with the limited exceptions of Bradbury and Clarke, for the next two or three decades.)

Here are some salient points from Heinlein’s essay:

  • He quotes Kipling: “There are nine-and-sixty ways / Of constructing tribal lays / And every single one of them is right!”
  • He starts by claiming there are two ways to write speculative fiction: write about people, or write about gadgets. He prefers the former. [ Apparently ‘gadget’ fiction was more prevalent in the very early SF magazines, in stories which nowadays are never reprinted. ]
  • He states the three main plots for the human interest story: “boy-meets-girl, The Little Tailor, and the man-who-learned-better”. He credits the last to L. Ron Hubbard, only because he had not realized that many of his own stories fitted that plot.
  • The first plot is obvious, and has many variations. The second is about “the little guy who becomes a big shot, or vice versa”.
  • The third is about “a man who has one opinion, point of view, or evaluation at the beginning of the story, then acquires a new opinion or evaluation as a result of having his nose rubbed in some harsh facts”. He mentions example stories, including his own.
  • He dismisses various supposed SF stories as being fictionalized essays, or faux SF stories which could easily be translated to “Fifth Avenue, in 1947”; and he sets aside stories of contemporary advances in science or technology.
  • “A story is not about the new situation; it is about coping with problems arising out of the new situation”, p15
  • And he defines the “Simon-pure” sf story: conditions are different from now; they must be essential part of the story; the problem, the “plot”, must be a human problem; this problem must be derived by that new condition; and, finally, no established fact shall be violated (with various exceptions).
  • He gives examples.
  • And then finally, he gives his famous fives business habits for a successful writer:
    • You must write.
    • You must finish what you start.
    • You must refrain from rewriting except to editorial order.
    • You must put it on the market.
    • You must keep it on the market until sold.
  • And he concludes: “[I]f you will follow them, it matters not how you write, you will find some editor somewhere, sometime, so unwary or so desperate for copy as to buy the worst old dog you, or I, or anybody else, can throw at them”.
  • [[ Thus, is my thought, is that Heinlein’s famous five rules were appropriate to the era of writing when very many cheap magazines were being published, some of which had very low criteria for acceptance and were desperate for material. That’s not so true now. On the other hand, in the 21st century a person can self-publish anything, so in that sense no editorial vetting need apply. ]]

The second essay, by John Taine, is titled “Writing a Science Novel” and his main concern is keeping up on current scientific developments. His key points are Knowledge, Education, and Consistency.

(Taine, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Temple_Bell,  is probably the least-remembered of all the writers in this book; but he wrote over a dozen novels, of which the most prominent might be Before the Dawn, included in Donald A. Wollheim’s The Portable Novels of Science Fiction in 1945, along with works by Wells, Lovecraft, and Stapledon. (I have a 1st edition copy of that book too.)

By ‘Knowledge’ he means keeping up on current science, via books and journals. He notes p23 that “It is wise to glance at the date of publication of any book on science. If the book is more than ten years old (two or five in some of the physical sciences), it had probably better be put back on the shelf.” This I have echoed in my own recent thought that, while religions venerate the most ancient books (no matter how overtaken by later discoveries and understandings), for science or philosophy it’s the new books that count; the newest books take into account the older books and build upon them.

He discusses scientific journals, but advises that “there is not a single periodical of this kind published in the United States that is worth its subscription price” and suggests unnamed titles from English and Germany instead. (This was 1947; what did he mean? Not Scientific American? But Nature and Science?) And he suggests attending lectures at local universities.

By ‘Education’ he means “the narrow sense of learning how to write a story that people will read”, and goes on to be skeptical about classes in learning to write. And he wonders, once the science is settled, “we land at once in unsettled controversies. What, for example, about a love interest?”

Yikes. We are in 1947. These notions about females in science fiction appear in several of these essays. Taine goes on:

If there is some logical (or biological) reason why a luscious heroine should display her charms in a science novel, she does not have to be lugged in by the hair. She will enter by herself, usually uninvited by the writer and sometimes to his exasperation. As a general rule, love interest in scientific fiction is a red herring to bewilder the reader and turn him off a trail that should, but does not, lead straight from the beginning to the end of the story. If there is not sufficient sexless interest in the story to hold the reader’s attention, no fortuitous blonde is going to lure him on to the last page. Yet many a misguided writer has got not only himself but his stories all fouled up with superfluous women.

…

Science fiction is one of the places where a pretty girl can be a damned nuisance. Conversely, almost any type of scientific fiction is no peg on which to hang a love story.

This passage also touches on another recurring theme in these essays: that the whole point of writing stories is to sell them and appeal to readers.

And by ‘Consistency’ he means what we’ve come to expect: no matter what the premise of an SF story, its consequences need to flow logically and consistently. And on this point, to give editor Eshbach credit, this essay flows logically to the next…

The third essay is Jack Williamson’s “The Logic of Fantasy”. He cites two principles, one from H.G. Wells: to assume in any one story only a single basic premise. The second is about the logic of character. He considers several of his own stories as examples. And he mentions things like this: “Science fiction is doubtless more popular nowadays than fantasy of the supernatural type, because science has become the modern equivalent of magic.”

One must go on, remembering this is 1947:

Now, when the news is filled with atomic weapons, rocket test flights, and astounding reports of “flying saucers,” the threshold of doubt is very low for scientific wonders. Old-style magic is somewhat out of fashion—thought doubtless some readers turn gladly to it, just to escape the harassing wonders of the scientific age.

And then he talks about the various current SF magazines.

One chain caters to sheer paranoia. Another magazine is mostly action-adventure, excellently written, with a minimum of heavy science. A third group offers a wide range of more adult material, ranging from ghost stories to highbrow science. A fourth magazine is deliberately edited for technicians, often using heavily scientific stories and articles. And the general magazines, including the “slicks,” are beginning to feature fantasy and science fiction.”

He discusses more examples of his own stories. Then he generalizes:

In the story-opening, the chief character responds to something in terms of purpose—and the plot interest depends greatly on how novel and vital his purpose is. In the body of the narrative, that same purpose impels him to make a series of attempts toward satisfaction. Usually he meets failures which test his motive traits, incidentally stirring his own emotions and the reader’s. In the ending, he either wins or fails, and the significant outcome of the test is made clear.

He attributes this frame of the action story to Dr. John Gallishaw, about whom I find this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gallishaw. I recall hearing this basic strategy for an SF story – problem, one attempt to solve that fails, a second attempt that fails, finally a third attempt, which either succeeds or fails – from Algis Budrys on a convention panel many years ago.

In striking contrast is the fourth essay, by A. E. van Vogt, titled “Complication in the Science Fiction Story.” Van Vogt’s scheme is to break every story down into scenes of 800 (or 600 or 1000) words, each scene with a purpose that is either accomplished, or not, by the end of the scene. Van Vogt’s scheme, furthermore, is:

Ever since I started writing for the science fiction field, it has been my habit to put every current thought into the story I happened to be working on. Frequently, an idea would seem to have no relevance, but by mulling over it a little, I would usually find an approach that would make it usable.

At the same time, he gives a couple examples from his own stories in which an intermediate conclusion (e.g. end of scene three) provides that “all the rest followed logically.” (p54) (I confess I don’t find the examples terribly persuasive to commend this kitchen-sink style of plotting.)

He also discusses what he calls plot “threads”, wherein longer stories need more threads, even if some are very minor. Some of these “minor threads” derive from “theme, science and atmosphere.” P57b. His example of atmosphere, from the opening of his story “M33 in Andromeda,” is what I think most readers today would call purple pulp prose:

The night whispered, the immense night of space that pressed against the hurtling ship. Voiceless susurration it was, yet somehow coherent, alive, deadly. For it call, it beckoned and it warned. It trilled with a nameless happiness, then hissed with savage, unthinkable frustration.

That’s enough, though vV quotes on. He reiterates his 800-word scene thesis, with new ideas appearing ideally one per scene. And he mentions, as do most of these essays, how the ultimate goal of writing is to sell stories.

There are three remaining essays: L. Sprague de Camp on “Humor in Science Fiction”; Edward E. Smith, Ph.D. on “The Epic of Space” (I don’t think anyone this days, except the occasional writer of science fact articles in Analog, bylines themselves with academic credentials, but it was common back then, and Smith’s was the most prominent such); and John W. Campbell, Jr. on “The Science of Science Fiction Writing”.

The ideas in de Camp’s essay are unremarkable. The essence of humor is a surprise: an oddity, or an anachronism. He stresses that humor should avoid offense in the realms of religion or politics. He mentions, p69, that “Western culture in general has become increasingly humane – or squeamish if you prefer—during the last few centuries, so that a lot of formerly legitimate subjects for humor are no longer considered as such.” And provides examples about the hilarity of burning witches, denigrating certain racial and religious minorities, and so on. This subject dovetails with a theme of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature (which I’ve finished and will summarize here soon) that social standards have ‘progressed’ to the point where things once taken for granted, such as casual violence against various targets, is now unthinkable.

De Camp mentions one notion I had not heard, the Polynesian word ‘noa’ as a counterpart to ‘tabu’ [taboo], where ‘noa’ means profane, vulgar, or commonplace (p70). You can’t joke about something tabu; nor can you joke about something noa, something too commonplace. The ideal area for joking is in the middle, as in relaxing standards about nudity. In any event, de Camp concludes, a humorous story still must have all the qualities of any good story.

Smith, author of the popular early space opera series Skylark and Lensmen, discusses how to write a “space story.” He discusses the elements of a good story; here are a couple examples, p76:

It is a well-known fact that many readers, particularly those whose heads are of use only in keeping their ears apart, want action, and only action. Slambang action; the slammier and the bangier the better.
…

Should the characters grow, or not? Many writers—good ones, at that—do not let their characters grow. It is easier. Also, it allows a series of stories about the same characters to go on practically endlessly…

He goes on to consider various elements of a story, including whether the author should have his hero be married off by the end. (While not familiar with much SF of Smith’s era, I recognize this plot point as common from what I have read, including Smith’s first novel, The Skylark of Space.) He passes through coincidence, and motivation, and then dwells at length on how he went about concocting a ‘space-police’ story. First, by reading every prior example he could find. And then by outlining his story, first in a few pages, then with a graph to plan “the peaks of emotional intensity and the valleys of characterization and background material.” A pencil draft; notes to it; a second pencil draft; then ‘typescript’ draft typed up by his wife; notes on it from his fan clubs in Michigan and Los Angeles; then a final typescript, typed by his wife, which goes to John W. Campbell.

Finally, “The Science of Science Fiction Writing” by John. W. Campbell, Jr. Here again is the utilitarian angle: the first line is “The author’s effort in science fiction writing, or any other type of writing, is to please the editor sufficiently to make a sale.” He goes on to describe what he, as an editor believes is needed for a good science fiction story: Prophetic extrapolation; and a story about human beings.

In older science fiction, the Machine and the Great Idea predominated. Modern readers—and hence editors!—don’t want that; they want stories of people living in a world where a Great Idea, or a series of them, and a Machine, or machines, form a background. But it is the man, not the idea of the machine that is the essence.

He discusses, from his editorial perspective, how frequently stories have good ideas but poor treatment; while even overly familiar ideas can be treated well, with examples of stories by de Camp and Williamson. He sighs about having to reject stories that are mere ideas.

The author’s function is to imagine for the reader, of course—but he must either (a) imagine in greater detail than the reader has, or (b) imagine something the reader hasn’t thought of. Ideally, the author imagines something new, in greater detail.

Examples from Asimov and Heinlein (mentioned as Anson MacDonald). He rails against the first-person story, which limits what can be told. And he opines that writers are born, not made, considering how many of his writers – Heinlein, van Vogt, de Camp – sold their first stories submitted.

Then he addresses “style” – “it is based on the way an author puts his ideas into English”. And contrasts various writers, including Sturgeon. But then explains that such techniques cannot be used consciously, and describes how L. Ron Hubbard would “gather momentum” in order to write (on an electric typewriter!) 3000 to 4000 words an hour.

Finally, he discusses how writers start their stories, and whether or not they know how to end them. For Astounding, “We do not insist on a happy ending!” With examples from Williamson and Padgett [Henry Kuttner].

Well, no, *finally*, he advises against submitting manuscripts that are handwritten, or typed in red ink on yellow paper. Don’t send it rolled. Last line: “If you take the trouble to write a yarn—send it in!.

Posted in Science Fiction Nonfiction | Comments Off on SFNF: Eshbach, Of Worlds Beyond

Links and Comments: SF, fantasy, and SF cinema

Posted on Monday 18 December 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

» io9: 10 works of science fiction that are really fantasy

I love lists like these, and I still mean to compile many of them. Still, I’m not sure I agree with some of the selections on this list. This goes to my own definition of SF vs. fantasy, which I am still exploring.

» Daily Beast: Blame ‘Star Wars’ if You Think Science Fiction Is Brain Dead

This captures my own stance: Science fiction is brain dead in terms of most movies — with occasional exceptions like 2001 and Arrival

Posted in Films, science fiction | Comments Off on Links and Comments: SF, fantasy, and SF cinema

Lunacies: On Finland and Flat-Earthers

Posted on Friday 24 November 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Vice, from December 2016: This Dude Accidentally Convinced the Internet That Finland Doesn’t Exist.

The article touches on how some people will believe anything, and the notion of Poe’s Law

There is an internet adage named after a commenter by the name of Nathan Poe, who was arguing creationism on Christian forums (because of course he was, this is the internet). Poe’s Law states that “it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers or viewers as a sincere expression of the parodied views.”

“I like to think that the Finland conspiracy is a perfect case study of that,” Jack told me. “I would say 90 percent of people view it as a parody and joke and can take it as such. But there are 10 percent of people who genuinely believe it’s something that needs ‘proving’ or ‘debunking’ from both sides.”

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And from July, the Denver Post covered a meeting of people who believe the Earth is flat. These Coloradans say Earth is flat. And gravity’s a hoax. Now, they’re being persecuted: The Flat Earth movement is growing in Colorado, thanks to technology and skepticism about science.

At the Tuesday night meet-ups, dubbed “Flat Earth or Other Forbidden Topics,” believers invite fellow adherents to open discussions in which the like-minded confirm one another’s hunches and laugh at the folly of those still stuck in the Enlightenment.

“There’s so much evidence once you set aside your preprogrammed learning and begin to look at things objectively with a critical eye,” says Bob Knodel, a Denver resident and featured guest at a recent Tuesday meeting. “You learn soon that what we’re taught is mainly propaganda.”

…

“They want you to think you’re insignificant, a speck on the earth, a cosmic mistake,” Sargent says. “The flat earth says you are special, we are special, there is a creator, this isn’t some accident.”

As with creationism (and belief in God for that matter) you can see psychological motivations at work. The need to feel special.

Jerry Boyne noted this on his blog, er, website: Flat Earthers are still with us!.

This would seem to be the height of lunacy, even dumber than creationism, but it’s not all that surprising. If you can deny the evidence for evolution, which is as strong as that for a spherical Earth, why not deny that round Earth?

This is also partly about what I’ve referred to as ‘intuitive physics,’ a deep-seated suspicion that the world is nothing more than what can be immediately perceived. Have you ever been to Finland? Have you ever floated in space and seen the round Earth? No one can have personal experience of everything it is reasonable for most people to believe is true. How it is some people develop that attitude of reasonableness (what I think of as ‘savvy’) and a few don’t. This kind of rote suspicion is akin to the children of creationists taught to challenge biologists about evolution: “Were you there?”

Well, no. Have you been to Finland? There are many indirect ways of knowing things, and many reasons not to think that everyone is trying to put something over on you.

Later, Jerry Coyne reports that Four flat-Earthers write in and quotes from their comments.

Some people really do think that if the Bible something (the ‘firmament over the Earth’) then it must be literally true. Some are convinced there is “overwhelming evidence in favor of a geocentric universe with an immovable Earth as a flat plane and the stars, moon and sun all contained within the firmament.” And some deeply resent experts who claim things outside their own intuitive local experience, e.g. “bullshit spinning ball nonsense that the media NASA and the government shoves down our throats.”

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Around the same time we got reports of celebrities who believe the world is flat, including a rapper named B.o.B., who wants to prove it.

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And just a couple days ago: This man is about to launch himself in his homemade rocket to prove the Earth is flat.

Will be fun to see how that works out.

Posted in Lunacy, Psychology | Comments Off on Lunacies: On Finland and Flat-Earthers

Perspectives: Dozois and Bryson

Posted on Friday 24 November 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Recently on Facebook, Gardner Dozois quotes from At Home, by Bill Bryson (author of A Short History of Nearly Everything), on the closing years of the 19th century:

“From the perspective of domesticity, there has never been a more interesting or eventful time. Private life was completely transformed in the nineteenth century — socially, intellectually, technologically, hygienically, sartorially, sexually, and in almost any other respect that could be made into an adverb. Mr. Marsham was born (in 1822) into a world that was still essentially medieval — a place of candlelight, medicinal leeches, travel at walking pace, news from afar that was always weeks or months old — and lived to see the introduction of one marvel after another: steamships and speeding trains, telegraphy, photography, anesthesia, indoor plumbing, gas lighting, antisepsis in medicine, refrigeration, telephones, electric lights, recorded music, cars and planes, skyscrapers, motion pictures, radio, and literally tens of thousands of tiny things more, from mass-produced bars of soap to push-along lawn mowers.”

(And then Dozois comments himself:)

It’s striking that although we talk about the dizzying pace of change these days, our world is still basically the same in its fundamentals as it was a hundred years ago, changing in degree — better telephones, better planes — but not really in kind. Your grandfather (perhaps even your great-grandfather) would have known about telephones, indoor plumbing (in most places), electric lights, cars. Even the atomic bomb is over sixty years old. The internet is perhaps the biggest change — but Victorians also had the ability, never before experienced in human history, of being able to instantly communicate with people in other communities and even other countries, via the telegraph, which has been called “the Victorian internet,” and had many of the same impacts on society then as the internet has had on society today. The way you live your life today has fundamentally not changed as much from the turn of the 19th Century to today as it did from 1822 to the turn of the 19th Century.

I suspect that major, substantial changes are ahead in the later part of the 21st Century. Some of them we won’t like (catastrophic climate change), some will be marvels beyond our current comprehension. Whatever marvels there may be, though, I’ll willing to bet that we’ll take them for granted and maybe even be bored by them before another couple of decades go by.

Posted in Human Progress, Technology | Comments Off on Perspectives: Dozois and Bryson

Links and Comments: Evolution of Evolution Denial, and American Gullibility

Posted on Tuesday 21 November 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

A ‘Retro Report’ article in the NY Times, Questioning Evolution: The Push to Change Science Class, summarizes the by-now familiar litany of how objections to Darwin’s theory of the evolution — along with the many lines of supporting evidence and detailed implications of the theory, of which Darwin was unaware (he knew nothing of genetics, for example), that have been discovered since Darwin lived — have changed over time. Evolved.

Darwinism has long been under siege in parts of the United States, even if its critics have practiced their own form of evolution, adapting their arguments to accommodate altered legal circumstances. This installment of Retro Report shows the enduring strength of the forces that embrace the biblical account of Creation or reasonable facsimiles of it. For some of them, the rejection of broad scientific consensus extends to issues like climate change and stem-cell research.

The article is accompanied by a 10-minute video. The article starts with the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial, followed by the ploy of Creationism, followed by its ‘stepchild’ intelligent design. That last, also, was rejected by the courts.

And so, once more, the anti-Darwinists were forced to evolve. What emerged were state laws with descriptions like the “science education act” and the “academic freedom act.” One of the earliest and most successful of these endeavors, the Louisiana Science Education Act of 2008, carried echoes of a “wedge strategy” advocated by the Discovery Institute — a step-by-step program to “reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.”

The Louisiana law permits public schoolteachers to use materials critical of established scientific thought, with “evolution, the origins of life, global warming and human cloning” singled out as targets. No blatant advocacy of creationism or intelligent design is authorized. But those concepts make their way into classrooms all the same, as a means of fostering “critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories.”

Of course, the deep motivations of evolution-deniers are revealed by their singling out of that topic and others that threaten the verities of religious fundamentalism, and more particularly, that threaten human vanity. If the Bible is literally true, then surely the fields of geology, astronomy, and astrophysics are as misguided and wrong as are the entirety of modern biology, about which one scientist remarked “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.” But you don’t see the advocates of ‘teaching the controversy’ concerned about physics or astronomy.

The article goes on, “Georgia Purdom, a molecular geneticist who is also a creationist, offered much the same view. ‘I am a scientist, and I have looked at the science, and I see that it confirms God’s word,’ Dr. Purdom said.” This would be called motivated thinking; that is, you can be sure Dr. Purdom was raised as a religious fundamentalist and then went on to learn biology and strove mightily to reconcile the two. No one without such a background, looking at the evidence of the world, of biology and geology and astronomy, would come to the conclusion that the Earth and all life is only 6000 years old, any more than they might conclude the world, with all of its evidence of antiquity, was created 5 minutes ago.

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This topic aligns with several other items recently:

Op-ed by David Leonhardt: America Is Now an Outlier on Driving Deaths

The reason?

Over the last few decades, however, other countries have embarked on evidence-based campaigns to reduce vehicle crashes. The United States has not. The fatality rate has still fallen here, thanks partly to safer vehicles, but it’s fallen far less than anywhere else.

Evidence! The strategy of drawing conclusions from evidence is antithetical not only to religious fundamentalists, but also to the current US administration.

And the themes of several recent books…

Slate: The Long Con: Hoaxes, fake news, and phonies are nothing new in America. But has it ever been this bad?, about Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, just published last week.

And Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History.

And Tom Nichols’ The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters.

American exceptionalism!

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Evolution | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Evolution of Evolution Denial, and American Gullibility

Link and Comments: Fractured Reality

Posted on Monday 20 November 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

The cultural theme of this second decade of the 21st century seems to be the fracturing of consensus cultural norms, even of consensus reality, especially in the US. I’ve observed this in tandem with reading about advances in psychology, over the past decade or so, that identify various cognitive errors and mental biases that largely ‘explain’ these differences; these understandings have been filtering down into the consensus understanding among intellectuals, at least, if not ordinary people, hiding in their silos, or bubbles, of cultural identity. Yet examples among intellectual writers of op-ed essays keep mounting. Here’s another.

Timothy Egan: We’re With Stupid. (The print title was “Look in the Mirror: We’re With Stupid”>

But the problem is not the Russians — it’s us. We’re getting played because too many Americans are ill equipped to perform the basic functions of citizenship. If the point of the Russian campaign, aided domestically by right-wing media, was to get people to think there is no such thing as knowable truth, the bad guys have won.

As we crossed the 300-day mark of Donald Trump’s presidency on Thursday, fact-checkers noted that he has made more than 1,600 false or misleading claims. Good God. At least five times a day, on average, this president says something that isn’t true.

We have a White House of lies because a huge percentage of the population can’t tell fact from fiction. But a huge percentage is also clueless about the basic laws of the land. In a democracy, we the people are supposed to understand our role in this power-sharing thing.

…

Fake news is a real thing produced by active disseminators of falsehoods. Trump uses the term to describe anything he doesn’t like, a habit now picked up by political liars everywhere.

The essay matches Roy Moore’s Christian theocracy with that of Islamic Sharia law.

Lost in the news grind over Roy Moore, the lawbreaking Senate candidate from Alabama, is how often he has tried to violate the Constitution. As a judge, he was removed from the bench — twice — for lawless acts that follow his theocratic view of governance.

Shariah law has been justifiably criticized as a dangerous injection of religion into the public space. Now imagine if a judge insisted on keeping a monument to the Quran in a state judicial building. Or that he said “homosexual conduct” should be illegal because his sacred book tells him so. That is exactly what Moore has done, though he substitutes the Bible for the Quran.

The essay closes with examples of Americans’ historical ignorance — how one in three fail the citizenship test that legal immigrants are required to pass.

There’s hope — and there are many ways — to shed light on the cave of American democracy. More than a dozen states now require high school students to pass the immigrant citizenship test. We should also teach kids how to tell fake news from real, as some schools in Europe are doing.

But those initiatives will mean little if people still insist on believing what they want to believe, living in digital safe spaces closed off from anything that intrudes on their worldview.

Posted in Culture, Psychology, Religion | Comments Off on Link and Comments: Fractured Reality

What We Learned from This Morning’s Newspaper

Posted on Sunday 19 November 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Robert H. Frank, Molly Worthen, Anthony Doerr, and Nicholas Kristof on cutting taxes for the rich, rejecting Roy Moore-style evangelicalism, how even the conscientious among us react to warnings of climate change, and how Blue States do better at practicing the family values that Red States preach.

Robert H. Frank: How Cutting Taxes Makes Life Worse for the Rich.

This speaks to the known cognitive error whereby we evaluate our good fortune not to any absolute or historical standard, but to a relative standard in comparison to those around us.

It is perfectly natural, of course, to believe that extra cash will help them buy the special things they want, such as more spacious homes or better performing cars. But that belief is a garden-variety cognitive error.

The mistake occurs because “special” is an inescapably relative concept. A spacious home is one that is larger than most other homes. A high-performance car is one that outperforms most other cars. Successful bidding for such things depends almost entirely on relative purchasing power. Taxes affect absolute purchasing power, not relative purchasing power. The upshot is that the ability of the already rich to bid successfully for special things is not enhanced by tax cuts.
…
Little wonder, then, that context shapes our evaluations of virtually every purchase we might consider. The standards that define “special” are therefore highly elastic. When everyone buys larger houses and faster cars, or stages more elaborate wedding celebrations, standards adjust accordingly.

Failure to appreciate that reality has also contributed to the tax resistance that has made it so difficult to restore America’s crumbling public infrastructure. Even proponents of minimal government concede that private cars would be of little use without public roads. And although it’s difficult to reach agreement on the best mix of public and private spending, studies show that the current mix in the United States is strongly biased against public spending.

The irony of his discussion is that if the wealthy can buy even more expensive high-performance cars, they won’t be able to use them if the infrastructure supported by taxes deteriorates.

Suppose that the Ferrari would universally be judged better if both cars were driven on good roads. But since the Porsche already has every design feature that affects performance significantly, the Ferrari’s edge would be tiny at most. No one could reasonably claim that the Ferrari would be more pleasing to drive on pothole-ridden roads than the Porsche on well-maintained ones.

Yet, among the super-wealthy, the actual quality mix of cars and highways in the United States more closely resembles Ferraris on potholes than Porsches on smooth asphalt. That’s puzzling, since the latter combination could be achieved at much lower total expense.

What Frank doesn’t note is that this observation won’t change the dynamic of how Republicans will try, for any reason whatsoever, to cut taxes for the wealthy, because the wealthy are their biggest contributors. The wealthy, like all of us, always want more; and they can afford to buy politicians.

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Molly Worthen (author of The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism): How to Escape From Roy Moore’s Evangelicalism.

The writer considers an evangelical woman with a “sterling pedigree” at Liberty University and other places, who is troubled by evangelical support for Roy Moore.

This “liturgy” is the nightly consumption of conservative cable news. Liberals love to complain about conservatives’ steady diet of misinformation through partisan media, but Ms. Schiess’s complaint is more profound: Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson aren’t just purveyors of distorted news, but high priests of a false religion.

“The reason Fox News is so formative is that it’s this repetitive, almost ritualistic thing that people do every night,” Ms. Schiess told me. “It forms in them particular fears and desires, an idea of America. This is convincing on a less than logical level, and the church is not communicating to them in that same way.”

With discussion of Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option” — the idea that Christians should withdraw from modern society and live in a kind of permanent cultural bubble; another woman who tried that idea before it became trendy; and her reaction.

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Anthony Doerr (a novelist): We Were Warned.

Twenty-five years ago this month, more than 1,500 prominent scientists, including over half of the living Nobel laureates, issued a manifesto titled “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity” in which they admonished, “A great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.”

Since then, he describes, even those of us conscientious to this warning have found it hard to act in way that would reverse this trend; try as we might, it’s difficult to make sacrifices in behavior that would truly make long-term difference.

Since the “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity,” humans have done extraordinary things. We stabilized the stratospheric ozone layer; we connected people in instantaneous and previously unimaginable ways; we landed a golf cart on Mars and drove it around. We even got every nation-state on earth (except ours, apparently) to agree to try to achieve net zero greenhouse-gas emissions by midcentury.
But we’ve also removed enough forests to cover Texas nearly twice, pumped almost half of the carbon emitted in human history into the atmosphere, grown the population by over two billion and cut the number of wild animals on earth by something close to half.

And now there’s a new warning. He concludes,

For decades science has been warning us that we are compromising earth’s systems, and that none of us will be immune to the consequences. Everywhere you look, people are trying: adopting renewable energy, working to guarantee women control over their reproductive decisions, fighting food waste, shifting to plant-based diets. Maybe the most important thing the rest of us can do is take our fingers out of our ears and join them.

Needless to say, the evangelicals and the current US administration are not helping; they are aggressively making the problem — the survival of our species — worse, by the day.

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Nicholas Kristoff: Blue States Practice the Family Values Red States Preach

[I]f one looks at blue and red state populations as a whole, it’s striking that conservatives champion “family values” even as red states have high rates of teenage births, divorce and prostitution. In contrast, people in blue states don’t trumpet these family values but often seem to do a better job living them.

Red states have higher rates of teen pregnancies, shotgun marriages, lower rates of average age of marriage and first births. And higher rates of divorce. And of adultery and prostition. The big exceptional group: Mormons. Kristoff concludes:

More broadly, conservative values don’t directly lead to premarital sex or divorce. Rather, statistical analysis suggests that religious conservatives end up divorcing partly because they marry early, are less likely to go to college and are disproportionately poor.

So the deeper problem seems to be the political choices that conservatives make, underinvesting in public education and social services (including contraception). This underinvestment leaves red states poorer and less educated — and thus prone to a fraying of the social fabric.

So let’s drop the wars over family values. Liberals and conservatives alike don’t want kids pregnant at 16, and we almost all seek committed marriages that last. It’s worth noting that Bible-thumping blowhards like Roy Moore don’t help achieve those values, while investments in education and family planning do.

Posted in MInd, Politics, Psychology, Religion, Science | Comments Off on What We Learned from This Morning’s Newspaper

Passages from Pinker

Posted on Friday 17 November 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

As a palette cleanser from my last post, here are some thoughts from my ongoing reading of Steven Pinker’s THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE, a history of the world with focus on violence, that summarizes that history through phases: the Civilizing Process; the Humanitarian Revolution, in concert with the Age of Reason and the European Enlightenment; the evidence of the Long Peace of the latter 20th century; and Rights Revolutions since the mid 20th century.

I’m working out of order here, since I haven’t yet summarized his chapter about the Humanitarian Revolution. But from the later chapters about the apparent “New Peace” of the past few decades, and the recent Rights Revolutions, some quotes.

“A world that is less invigorated by honor, glory, and ideology and more tempted by the pleasures of bourgeois life is a world in which fewer people are killed.” (p309.8)

“The mind’s habit of essentialism can lump people into categories; its moral emotions can be applied to them in their entirely. The combination can transform Hobbesian competition among individuals or armies into Hobbesian competition among peoples. But genocide has another fateful component. As Solzhenitsyn pointed out, to kill by the millions you need an ideology.” (p328)

“Religion thrives on woolly allegory, emotional commitments to texts that no one reads, and other forms of benign hypocrisy.” (p367) Echoing earlier comments; it’s just as well.

A long section about the ‘Rights Revolutions’ is about how, in the past 50 or 60 years, tolerance of violence has diminished toward “vulnerable classes of victims that in earlier eras fell outside the circle of protection, such as racial minorities, women, children, homosexuals, and animals.” p380.

Key insight: “The code of etiquette bequeathed by this and the other Rights Revolutions is pervasive enough to have acquired a name. We call it political correctness.”

You realize that those who rail against ‘political correctness’ are those who still wish to demean the various classes mentioned above.

Posted in Humanism, Social Progress, Steven Pinker | Comments Off on Passages from Pinker

Links and Comments: Roy Moore and Religious Hypocrisy

Posted on Friday 17 November 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

The Roy Moore scandal fascinates me for several reasons.

First, because Roy Moore has been a villain, a sort of comic-book villain, for years and years, among progressives who observe his brand of religious zealotry as a sign of the most regressive aspects of American society (especially in the South). He’s a Biblical fundamentalist; he insists on mounting monuments about the Ten Commandments in defiance of law (and regardless of the fact that our judicial system does not, in fact, endorse all of those commandments — the law does not insist on worshiping one god, closing on Sundays, etc. etc.) Again and again, I think religious zealots are just not too bright; they basically don’t understand, or refuse to understand, the American system of government.

And second, because the support for Moore reveals the deep hypocrisy of the religious right. Apparently, as far as I can gather, they’ll support Moore (and Trump) because the conservative agenda, especially the drive to repeal Row v. Wade [which, even if accomplished, would leave progressive blue states with laws that permit abortion], overrides any concern about the morality of elected officials.

Many items to link, of which here are just a few.

Right Wing Watch: Roy Moore: A History of Bigotry, Extremism and Contempt for the Rule of Law

A comprehensive catalog, that includes his contempt for gays, whom he would outlaw.

Slate: One Group That Thinks Grown Men “Courting” Teen Girls Is Natural? Fundamentalist Home-Schoolers.

No surprise here. Morality in the world has progressed over the past two millennia; those who adhere to Biblical morality have not. (Much evidence in Steven Pinker’s history of the world The Better Angels of Our Nature, which I’m still working my way through.)

Joe.My.God: Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks Stands By Moore: The Right Wing Agenda Is More Important Than Sex Charges

The hypocrisy of the right.

Slate: We’ve Always Known Roy Moore Is Lawless: “It’s why Alabama Republicans voted for him.”

Via Morning Heresy, Max Boot in USA Today says the Moore episode has to be the last straw for the Republican Party, which just needs to die now:

In the final analysis, no indictment of their candidate will convince the faithful. As Trump once said, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Or, more to the point, Roy Moore could molest a 14-year-old girl and not lose votes. Because for Republican partisans, their opponents are “the forces of evil,” and anything is preferable to that. Even Donald Trump. Even Roy Moore. So in ostensibly fighting evil, Republicans have become complicit in it.

This is a party that does not deserve to survive.

More to the point– Valerie Tarico at Alternet: Alabama Conservatives Are Right: Roy Moore’s Behavior Is Perfectly Biblical—and That Is the Problem

Citing Biblical passages about the ownership of women, how rape is a violation not of the woman but of her male owner, and so on.

Another example of primitive morality, that has been overcome in the modern world.

The Bible contains fragments that are uplifting and beautiful—verses that contain timeless wisdom and elevate humanity’s shared moral core. But that’s not all it contains. When it comes to relationships between women and men, the contents of the Bible confront modern Jews and Christians with a difficult choice. Believers can treat the “good book” as the literal and perfect word of God or they can embrace an egalitarian view of men and women, one in which sexual intimacy is rooted in shared desire and consent. These two options are mutually exclusive, and people who say otherwise are engaged in a desperate attempt to protect the Bible from itself.

Roy Moore has made his choice. You can call him disgusting or vile or sexist, but don’t use the word hypocrite. Moore is living the script.

Posted in Bible, Religion | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Roy Moore and Religious Hypocrisy

Links and Comments: The Profound and the Pernicious

Posted on Monday 13 November 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

From NPR, The Answer To Life, The Universe — And Everything? It’s 63.

The headline is a riff on the famous episode in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Wikipedia) in which a vast computer called Deep Thought is assigned to calculate the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything” (Wikipedia), and responds with the answer, “42”. And then explains that the answer is incomprehensible because the question wasn’t properly formed…

Now we have a new book by Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe, which explores the magnitude of the universe, from the very large to the very small. An order of magnitude difference of… 63. He summarizes a key point of the book in this NPR piece.

It’s on our biological scales that the universe does something very, very funky. Billions of years of elemental and chemical brewing have produced structures capable of awareness, and capable of trying to decode the very thing out of which they’ve come. It’s the ultimate bootstrap, going from a near featureless primordial reality to something that deduces its own existence.

That’s what exploring 63 orders of magnitude leads us to. The nature of us.

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On a completely different matter, noting current political controversies, we have Valerie Tarico pointing out that Alabama Conservatives Are Right: Roy Moore’s Behavior Is Perfectly Biblical — and That Is the Problem.

Indeed, Biblical morality reflect the primitive tribalist past of our species, an era when, as the Bible explains, “females are created for the benefit of males”. Tarico cites many passages and examples.

Just another reason why the Bible, I think, is a fascinating historical document, providing keen insights into the childhood of our species, but is not just wrong-headed but actually pernicious as a guide for any kind of morality, let alone insight into the actual nature of the world and humanity’s place in it, in the modern world.

Roy Moore has made his choice. You can call him disgusting or vile or sexist, but don’t use the word hypocrite. Moore is living the script.

And, given the tribalistic loyalty of conservatives discussed in the previous post — despite any signs of contemporary morality — Alabama might yet elect him to the Senate anyway.

Posted in Cosmology, Morality, Politics, Science | Comments Off on Links and Comments: The Profound and the Pernicious