Hildegarde

I’ve been looking at the comments from yesterday, and I find them very interesting.  I seem to have confused two different attempts at railroad building in 19th Century America.  I’ll try to be more careful as I go on. 

But the really interesting thing is the statement that “absolute property rights” would have resulted in there being no Paganini.

In the first place, it’s important to note that I said NOTHING about “absolute property rights.”

In fact, most of what I was talking about had nothing to do with property rights at all, unless you’re using the Lockean formulation that the origin of property rights is that every man owns first and foremost himself.

It’s not that I don’t think that property rights are important.  They are very important, and they are more important for the poor and disenfranchised than they could ever be to the rich and powerful.

Running on about “absolute property rights” is a straw man argument.  No one denies that there are times and circumstances when  there needs to be a public project for the long term advantage of the country or the city or the county or the town–the building of dams, the building of roads, all kinds of things.

The trick is to frame the policy of what we now call “eminent domain” to make sure that the use of it is a) restricted to absolute necessity and b) restricted to actually public projects and c) not available for use by the government to deprive some people of their property in order to enrich other private parties.

In other words, I think the Interstate highway system is defensible.  I think the Kelo decision is not.  Kelo, by the way, is a great example of why property rights should be closer to absolute than they now are.  And you’ll notice that the majority decision that gave New London the right to through Kelo et al out of their homes was a result of the legal philosophies of the justices that call themselves liberals.  The conservatives were all on the side of the homeowner.

But on top of that, none of what I said even implies that civilization COULD NOT advance without the use of coercion.  I don’t think it’s possible to know.

I DO think, however, that if the only way we could get Paganini would be to make people suffer through slavery and oppression, then I’d be happy to give up Paganini.  That’s no choice at all.  I am not George Steiner.  Art, no matter how great, is no excuse for millions of people living in misery.

There is nothing to say that civilization would not have developed anyway, although more slowly.  And there is a lot to say that every country that has increased properity and comfort for the majority of its citizens has done so through respect their individual natural rights as human beings.

Democracy may or may not produce great art–personally, I think it can do that, too, Steiner notwithstanding–but what it definitely does do is give us “relative” poverty instead of the absolute kind, so that conservatives can be driven crazy by poor people with cell phones and air conditioning and plasma TVs, and liberals can insist that none of that matters because you can have all that and be poor anyway.

What I was actually talking about, though, was not the property problem, but something else:  the extent to which the state should be allowed to interfere in the private decisions of private people about their private lives.

The democratic revolution–English version–says that each human being is an end to himself and may not be used as the means to the ends of others.  It says that government power must be tightly restricted in order to make interference in such things as rare as possible, and even then only when there is an overwhelming need to get a job done.

There is no question that sometimes, such overwhelming need actually exists.  The institution of laws forbidding dumping human waste in the streets of growing cities was definitely one of them. 

And sometimes such laws are legitimate in some places but not in others–that NYC requires its citizens to have professional garbage service makes sense; in a small rural town with only a couple of thousand people, letting people make their own arrangements (even taking their own garbage to the dump by themselves) also makes sense.

 The issue is to what extent must governments treat their citizens AS citizens and AS human beings, rather than a fodder (cannon and otherwise) for “the public good.”

The problem begins with the very phrase meant to defend the practice:  who is the public? what constitutes their good? who gets to decide that? And the problem gets more acute when you look at the fact–and it is a fact–that most declarations of the public good have not been good for the public or even for the elite forces that imposed them.

Both left and right want to engage in cultural coercion. They see the wrong of it in some cases and not in others.

The left waxes indignant about such practices as forcing Native American children into boarding schools to be trained out of their own culture and into the white majority’s.  They reject–as “cultural imperialism” and virtually without condition–any suggestion that African American children should be trained out of their colloquial speech and customary cultural habits.

At the same time, they have no trouble with imposing mandatory national curricula on private as well as public schools, with an eye to ending fundamentalist Christian teaching against evolution.

In the meantime, the right will fight for the rights of fundamentalist Christians to raise their children their way (including teaching creationism), but often vigorously support imposing cultural mandates about things like Ebonics and teen aged sex.

The list of topics about which each side is convinced that allowing people to make their own decisions will bring on the apocalypse is very long, and each side, once in power, resorts to coercion first rather than last.

And that is, as I’ve pointed out, been the truth throughout history.

But it’s also the truth that it is only when governments began to retreat from that posture that we begin to see nations with near universal prosperity, nations where even poor people are richer than rich people have been throughout the centuries.

And it’s even more so the truth that all those projects for “the public good” MOST often brought no good to the public and lead to nothing but more efficient forms of oppression and pain for the vast majority of the populations they’d been foisted on.

The Mayans  didn’t produce a Paganini either.

Yesterday, in the comments, Robert brought up the building of the intercontinental railroad system in the US as a counterexample to things like the Sui building of the Grand Canal–but that’s not a very good example, because it, too, depended heavily on coercion.

The owners of railroads may have hired voluntary workers to do their building instead of pressing unwilling conscripts into service whether those conscripts wanted to work or not, but the system could not have been successfully built if the US government hadn’t been willing to confiscate large tracts of land from very unwilling farmers.

And something similar happened when we built the interstate highway system. 

All such large scale projects seem to require a certain amount of coercion, if only because it only takes a single hold out somewhere to bring the entire thing down. 

I am not saying that this is a good thing, only that, as a matter of historical record, it is a fact.

Democracy–or at least, the 18th century English-Englightenment version of democracy–did not end this practice entirely, although it definitely slowed it up some.

But only some.

The English Enlightenment began with the premise that in a just society, all citizens are assumed to be able to handle their own affairs by themselves and without the “protection” of an aristocracy, and to run their own governments without such protection.

“All men are created equal” may have been defined restrictively in 1776, but it still created the expectation that the lives of ordinary people were supposed to count and to be under their own control, rather than being fodder for whatever the elites wanted to do next.

And the elites always had something they wanted to do next, even though those elites kept changing and their projects kept changing with them.

An awful lot of what elites want is self-serving, even if it is necessarily (in a democratic society) presented as “for your own good.” 

Elites are always interested in expanding their own power, and they’re always helped along by people who desperately want to be “safe.”   It never ceases to shock me how many people are afraid of living–of risk at any level, of the possibility that their fellow citizens will run amok and do damage, at the possibility (and it is always a possibility) that bad luck may happen and sweep away everything they have.

But to say this is not to say that elites are always wrong in what they want to do.

The public health drives that resulted in cleaning up city streets and making sewer systems both available and effective did more to reduce mortality than antibiotics.  Mass vaccinations made polio so rare my sons had only heard of it because it appeared in a Superman comic from the 1930s.  The Interstate highway system is one of the wonders of the world.

Unfortunately, there is nothing to say that elite projects are always the right ones, or that they always do more good than harm. 

And I think, if you took a survey, you’d probably find that most of them do more harm than good, in the long run as well as the short.

What’s more, they tend to erode the principle of self government.  They do this by giving the impression–not only to elites, but to their fellow travelers–that the ordinary citizen is too stupid to know his own good, and therefore should not be allowed to define it for himself.

And once you get started in that direction, there’s a veritable stampede to the position of changing the status of people from citizens to children.  Or, as often in the present day US, patients.

The problem with elite projects and the will to impose them coercively takes two forms.

The first is the obvious one:  most elite projects that demand the ability to coerce are bad ones, wrong in fact and assumptions.  We tend to get amnesia about the wave after wave of “expert opinion” that has flowed over us and then turned out to be absolutely and often harmfully wrong.

The second is that they almost always create an institutionalized presence that is virtually impossible to dislodge even once the projects are proven wrong, or once they become out of date.

None of this, of course, gets out from under the possibility that something may come along that legitimately requires such a project.

The people who concern themselves with climate change would definitely say that climate change is one of these things.   I don’t support them for reasons I outlined a few posts ago.

But the fact is, it is entirely possible that under a government that strictly observed the individual natural rights of its citizens, NO such projects could be carried out, no matter what good they did and no matter how the good would outweigh the bad.

It is also entirely possible that a government that did so observe the individual natural rights of its citizens is only viable once a certain level of progress has already been made–that, in conditions of less technical and infrastructure development, say, such a government would get in its own way and leave its citizens technically free but practially miserable.

The usual way around this is to declare that some practice–not vaccinating your children, or homeschooling them, or whatever–causes “harm,” with “harm” being defined as broadly and flexibly as possible.

And sometimes it entails simply lying.  A lot of people who claim to base their opinions and priorities on “science” buy into math so creative it lets them claim that “second hand smoke” and (now) even “third hand smoke” is “just as damaging” as smoking itself.

I just love the kind of contortions they get themselves into with e cigarettes.

And, of course, mostly we just get a resurgent of the same old argument that people do not know what is good for them, but somebody else does.

In case you’re wondering where I’m going with this, I don’t really know.  It just occurred to me how consistent this has been–that progress, real progress, almost never seems to be entirely voluntary.

But I am still me, and I’d rather see the end of large scale progress than allow government to coerce its citizens and treat them like children, so there’s that.

I’m going to go do some more work and play Paganini while I do it.

So it is Sunday, and I have had what I think of as a very good Sunday morning:  Mozart’s 40 and 41 (the Jupiter), and a great big book.

I’ve also had that thing I wanted to talk about last week–remember the Sui dynasty and the Grand Canal?–and I came up with a connection I hadn’t thought of before.

So let me start with the connection, and go from there.

There is a short story out there called “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. LeGuin.

I know this short story because it was included among the readings in a book we used for several years for teaching composition.  That book had almost no fiction of any kind, so any fiction that was included in it was noticeable just for being there.

The little biographical sketch of LeGuin called her a science fiction writer, and after I’d used the story a couple of times I saw her referred to that way again in several other places. 

I have no idea whether science fiction writers and fans would agree with that assessment, and I’ll leave it to you.

It’s the story I was to talk about and the way it connects with the Grand Canal, and Athens in the time of Socrates and and company.

The story is relatively simple: there is a country that is the most wonderful place to live.  Its citizens are happy and prosperous and content.  No other place anywhere affords its citizens greater freedom, greater prosperity, greater spiritual satisfaction.

If you are born a citizen of Omelas, you need to do only one thing to keep that citizenship.  In your early adolescence, you must be taken down to a deep place.  There, you will find a small child in excruciating pain and misery, with no hope of ever escaping his fate.

You will be informed that the great happiness and prosperity of the citizens of Omelas depends on the misery of this child.  If Omelas is to continue in happiness and prosperity, then this child and others like him to come must hurt, day after day, year after year, without any hope of release, until he dies.

Most of the citizens of Omelas who see this spectacle go back to their everyday lives and think nothing more about it.   If this is the price of their happiness, then it is.  And since they have no intention of giving that up, there’s no more to be said about it.

Every once in a while, though, there is someone who will not accept this state of affairs, who refuses to be happy and prosperous at the cost of this pain. 

Those are the people who walk away from Omelas, who leave and take their chances in the harsher world outside.

This story used to annoy me a little when I was teaching it, because the symbolism was so hamfisted, and because I suspected that the writer was doing an anti-Capitalism rag.  Knowing what I know now about Le Guin’s politics, I’d expect this was true.

But over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been reading Susan Wise Bauer’s The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade, and something keeps coming up.

It is remarkable how often civilization everywhere–not just in the West, but everywhere–is a story of Omelas.

Which is how we get to the Grand Canal.  In China.

Somewhere in the late sixth to early seventh century, the emperor Sui Wendi had constructed what was called the Grand Canal, which was actually a series of canals connecting two rivers in the middle of the Sui territory.

This construction brought many benefits to the Sui empire–greater agricultural production, more efficient trade routes between parts of the empire.  I could go on at length.

The only problem was that the Grand Canal could only be constructed by coercion.  Sui Wendi drafted tens of thousands of ordinary people into the construction.  Working conditions were brutal and mortality was very high.  Many thousands of people died and even more were broken in health by the time they were released from their sentence in the project.

For the many millions more who were not drafted into the project, though, life was demonstrably better. 

And what’s more, life was also demonstrably better for their descendants, and for the descendants of the people who had died or been broken in the project, too.

And Sui Wendi was hardly alone.  You can find similar stories concerning kings in the South Asian peninsula, about the pre-Conquest (and post-Conquest, for that matter) South American civilizations, about…just about anybody.

Even the Greek city-states had their versions.  Athens, most notoriously, was only able to have a golden age because the wealth of the city was being hewed out of silver mines by a slave class that was whipped and starved and who died by the score to bring the metal out of the ground.

Civilization is spread by conquest, and it’s also spread by coercion.

All the time.

We have, of course, come to a place where we find such conquest and conversion unacceptable, and where brutality on that scale is rarely necessary.

But the question remains that we only got to this place–where such brutality is rarely necessary for progress to happen–because when it was necessary, rulers decided to go ahead with the coercion.

These days, people are less informed than the people of Omelas.  They don’t worry about their own complicity in a history of conquest and coercion because they largely don’t know about it.

For them, conquest and coercion started with “capitalism,” and only continues because capitalism continues.

And in the cases where they are happy to apply coercion, the coercion is of a kind that seems so different they think it ought to be classed entirely separately from Sui Wendi’s drafting farmers or Athens brutalizing its slaves in the silver mines.

Most of them know nothing at all about the human costs of five year plans or great leap forwards.

But that’s something else, isn’t it–sometimes conquest and coercion brings tangible benefits, and sometimes it’s just wrongheaded, and all that carnage is for nothing.

But I think I’ll leave that, and the kind of coercion that is requiring all children to attend school whether their parents want it or not, and other things like that, to another day.

I’m making a pile of Greek food for dinner.

Before I get started on this short note, I want to point out one thing–I don’t moderate this blog.

But although I don’t moderate it, the program does, and what the program seems to especially dislike is links.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t post links. Links can be useful and informative, and the program doesn’t actually hate all of them.

I’m just saying that if you find your comment in “moderation,” what’s happening is the program is refusing to let you post until I check out your links, which I do eventually.  It can just take a little time, especially since we’re not all on the same time schedule, never mind time zone.

That having been said–the scare quotes around the word “science” above are deliberate.

I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve been burned too many times by social “science” “studies” that turn out to be anything but science–so much so, in fact, that I tend to hold them guilty of fudging until proven innocent.

Too much of what calls itself “social science” consists of  starting with conclusions and picking and choosing the supposed “evidence” to make them look like they’re supported. 

Even the “studies” that are honestly done too often emply inadequate protocols, unrepresentative samples, flawed methodologies (see self-reports), and correlations presented as causation in whatever direction the researcher wants them to go.

This doesn’t mean I won’t read the studies if you post them.  I will, once I’ve got a little time to see if I can look into them and find the research design and other information I need to know if what they’re saying is worth paying attention to.

I’m especially hinky about studies purporting to show the effectives of Idea A in a country other than my own, because countries are very different in a lot of different ways. 

Okay, that was a horrible sentence.

But you know what I mean. Countries and populations have temperaments just like people do, and what will work for largely monocultural Scandanavia may not work so well in very multicultural Brooklyn.

Hell, what works well in one monocultural society may work badly in another monocultural society.

I get especially annoyed at three things:

1) the tendency of lots of these studies to use college students as their research population, as if there is no significant difference between an Art History major at William and Mary and a coal miner in Appalachia.

2) the tendency of lots of these studies to use self reports, which seem to me obviously completely worthless.  People say lots of things.  They may or may not be telling the truth.

3) the tendency to use correlation as causation in the direction the researchers want it to go.  It may be the case that having guns in an area makes that area more violent.  But it may also be the case that in more violent areas, more people want to have guns.

I wish at least one of these gun studies would acknowledge the time factors involved–if you have one school shooting every 15 years, the fact that you don’t have any school shootings in the five years after you passed your gun laws doesn’t mean your gun laws have had any effect on school shootings.

And I would point out something else–if the old assault weapons ban had been in place at the time of the Newtown shooting, it would have done NOTHING to prevent it.  None of the guns Lanza used were covered by that law, and none of them were covered by the far stricter Connecticut gun laws that WERE in place at the time of the massacre. 

Then, of course, we get to the “mental health” thing, which, in a world where virtually everything is labeled a “disorder,” suggests a vast expansion of government power on a par with–well, lots of places you wouldn’t like to live.

But even on “mental health” grounds, nothing Lanza had ever been suspected of having would have predicted his violence, and none of it would have prevented him from buying a gun if he wanted to.

Unless we’re going to start depriving people of their rights and their status as citizens because they’re subject to “anxiety” or “depression”–which I’d fight to my last breath–we’re not getting anywhere in that direction either.

So I’ll stick to my conclusions in the last post, and go check out Michael’s links.

I’ve been having a long and stressful week.  First, and most important, the copyedited manuscript of the new Gregor, called Fighting Chance, was due in yesterday.  In order to get it done, I had to spend a lot of time with papers strewn out over the living room in little stacks with Post It notes on them.  The Post It notes were mine.  I was trying to keep track of two different sets of questions.

The other thing was the fall out from midterm grades, which were posted where students could see them just as we started back up from spring break.  There was a wailing and a gnashing of teeth.

In the midst of all that, I’ve been thinking for some time about writing a post about the Sui dynasty in China and the building of the Grand Canal, but just as I thought I was in a place where that was possible, the second Fort Hood shooting happened.

I’m not going to write about the Ford Hood shooting here, at least not now.  The cable stations are doing a valiant job of blathering nonstop with no real evidence to inform anything they’re saying, and I’d do no better.

 No, what’s been striking me over the last few hours is what I think of as the bounce back phenomenon–in no time at all,  FB posting and blog opinion started to circle around this case as another example of why we should impose much stricter gun control, or even get rid of all the guns.

I suppose I could fulminate here about how such outbreaks are opportunistic and morally wrong, but I won’t, because I don’t actually feel that way.  If there is some issue you care passionately about and an event occurs that seems to provide proof that your position is the right one, I thought you ought to use it as part of your argument.

My problem is not with the use of the issue, but with something that makes me considerably more nervous, and that is this:

To the extent that the people using the second Fort Hood shooting as an example of why we should get rid of the guns are sincere–and I think most of them are sincere–they’re asking for something that never has been, never will be, and never can be.

It’s not just that gun control laws as they have been devised up until now haven’t had the effect of reducing guns in private hands to anything near zero, it’s that no gun control legislation ever devised could do that no matter what it said.

The problem is structural in a way that cannot be changed no matter what we do or how we do it.

We could wipe out all the guns in the Northeast and California and everyplace else with even a mild cluster of population density.  We could end gun manufacturing and seal off the borders so that no unauthorized guns got in from outside.

But you see that “unauthorized” thing? That’s in recognition of the fact that we have places in this country like Wyoming and Idaho and Montana where people live on ranches and farms many thousands of acres in extent, and where the nearest law enforcement is a good hour to an hour and a half away.

Those people need guns.  They cannot rely on law enforcement to come to their aid if they’re robbed or raped or in danger of being murdered.  They need to keep wild animals out of their livestock pens. 

And unless you’re ready to install internal travel controls between states–and I’ll bet none of the gun control people actually would–then guns in those places means guns are going to reach all the places with the super duper gun control.

This is not to say that I’m happy with all kinds of very unsuitable people having guns.  It’s just to say that if you’re going to do something about the gun violence problem, you’ve got to deal with reality and not with a fantasy less likely to occur in real life than a Sharknado.

Granted, I also wouldn’t put up with the non-solution of giving the social services people more power to declare more people at-risk and therefore locking up or forcibly medicating people who have committed no crime and whom the psychological profession is not in fact capable of identifying as real threats–but the constant ideological skew of the gun control debate has driven all discussion of ACTUAL approaches to the problem off the field, and left us with these two.

The other area in which fantasy is trumping reality is the climate change debate, and I’m NOT talking about the fact of climate change itself.

For the purposes of this discussion, let’s stipulate that climate change is happening, the world is getting warmer, and man made actions are a large part of the cause of all this.

Because of all this, lots of people are jumping up and down demanding that we reverse this by doing all kinds of things, like lowering carbon footprints and eating less beef and a hundred other things.

I have no idea if all these measures would work if the world as a whole committed itself to meeting them–but it doesn’t matter.

Because the world as a whole is not going to commit itself to meeting them.

The whole “what to do about climate change” argument is an exercise in ethnocentrism so profound, I find it sometimes hard to credit.

Even if the climate change people could get everybody in the US and the EU and the scattered other countries (Australia and New Zealand, say) to do everything exactly as they proscribe, they’d still be stuck with India and China.

India and China are the two most populous countries in the world, and although one or the other of them sometimes makes noises about being concerned with global warming, neither one has any intention of doing anything about it that would slow down their growing economies.

China goes farther than that. On several occasions, when pushed too hard by the rest of us on carbon emissions, it’s made itself perfectly clear:  global warming is a fiction invented by the West to stunt and destroy China’s march to becoming the greatest economy in the world.

If China and India are not on board with doing things to reverse global warming, then nothing the rest of us do to reverse it will do much good at all.  If any.

And China and India are not on board.  China is even perfectly willing to allow near lethal levels of pollution in its own cities, affecting its own people, rather than reduce the rate at which those people buy and use cars.

All the actually possible, realistic answers to these problems are politically unworkable.  I suppose we COULD invade China and try to take it over and impose our will on it, but we won’t.  We don’t even want to.

We are not going to reverse the effects of global warming.  It can’t be done.

Which means we ought to be concentrating on how to adapt to it–but we’re not doing that, either.  

Climate change has become an ideological question, and ideological questions tend to break free of reality rather quickly.  We therefore don’t do what can be done to ameliorate problems, and each side goes home smug in the conviction that THEY’RE the true and virtuous ones.

I’ve picked on two mostly left-leaning questions for this post, but there are certainly issues on the other side.  My favorite one is “abstinence,” whose proponents seem to believe that with the right kind of sex education (“abstinence only”)  they can stop teenagers from having sex.

Hell, there are countries on this planet that will execute teenagers for having sex, and teenagers still have sex.

Somebody once said that the best is the enemy of the good. 

I think the ideological is the enemy of the possible.

I am sitting here having a rather interesting morning, if interesting is what you call a situation like this.

Late yesterday afternoon, I went to a place–which shall remain nameless, for reasons that should become obvious–I went to one of my usual places, and there in the office where I work was a big plate of frosted cookies made by one of the secretaries.

There is nothing in the least bit odd about this.  The secretaries in that place often bring in stuff they’ve baked or stuff they’ve bought.  Sometimes somebody is having a birthday.  Sometimes it’s a holiday, like Valentine’s Day or Halloween.

So as I was passing through the office, I took a couple of these cookies and went to the back to get some work done. 

I was very tired, because it had been an unusually early morning, but otherwise I was feeling all right–until about half an hour later, when I suddenly began to feel not very well at all.

This was not the usual kind of thing you get with food poisoning, but it was very bad, and when I finally got home I did something I almost never do–I went to lie down in the middle of the day.

Greg made dinner.  He even tried very hard not to fry everything, which is his usual approach to cooking.  If it was possible to fry air, Greg would fry it.

But he did all right, and I was still feeling awful, and all I wanted was–tea.

With lots and lots of sugar in it.

Enough sugar to drown myself in.

I don’t usuall put sugar in tea, although I do sometimes when I’m sick, so that in itself wasn’t so odd.

What was was that the tea I was drinking was definitely the kind with lots and lots of caffeine. 

And that wouldn’t be odd either, except that usually, when I drink tea with lots and lots of caffeine in it within, say, five hours of having to go to sleep–I can’t sleep.

Last night, I managed to go to sleep without a problem, and I even went early.

This morning I’m a little better, but not much.  The symptoms are less like food poisoning than like the reaction I get to certain milk products.

No, I’m not lactose intolerant, but I do have an allergy to milk in some forms.  I’m fine with milk that’s been made into something, like cheese and most yogurts, and I’m fine with heavy cream.  But the lower the fat content of the milk, the more likely I’m going to end up with the kind of cramping I’d imagine you get when you swallow glass.

Anyway, I woke up this morning with some of that going on, but also ENORMOUSLY hungry, and I’m sitting here before eight in the morning craving crazy things like pizza with sausage and fried eggplant, which I couldn’t indulge in if I wanted to. 

I’ve got to correct papers today, and I think it’s going to be interesting.

It’s that time of the term–midterm grades are due in tomorrow morning no later than 9, and students who have been told that late papers cannot be graded before midterm grades unless they’re in to me by midnight last night…well, they’re nowhere to be found.

This is not as knock down, drag out as it might be, because midterm grades are not permanent.  If you get an F at midterm but your final grade is an A, the midterm grade will just disappear and nobody will ever know about it.

Unless.

And this is where things get a little sticky.

Unless you want to transfer to a four-year starting in summer term.

In the old days, the four years went by the grades you had in previous semesters, and only checked your present semester grades at the last minute, after they’d already admitted you, in case they might think they should change their minds.

In practice, they almost never reversed an admission decision, and kids in their last term before moving cheerfully let their grades go to hell and had a good time for a few months before the transfer.

Some of you have probably noticed kids doing the same thing when they’re in the spring of their senior years in high school.  The acceptance letters come out, everybody goes “wheeeeeee!” and it’s impossible to get anybody to settle down until graduation.

Lately, the transfer schools have not been amenable to this kind of thing.  If you are applying to enter for a term where admissions decisions must go out before the final grades of the term you’re in will be available, you must submit your midterm transcript.  The transfer schools then treat those grades as “real,” even though they are not.

It is possible that some courses have midterm grades that are “realer” than English composition midterm grades, but the problem with English composition midterm grades is that they are INHERENTLY unreliable.

They are inherently unreliable because we teach writing as a process, and that means that the first time you hand a paper in isn’t going to be anywhere near the last.

One way to handle this is to put no grade at all on a paper until you have the absolutely last, final draft–but that presents two problems.

The first is that many students take nothing seriously EXCEPT the grade, so a paper that comes back with no grade on it to be revised gets revised only very little. 

Then you find yourself in a marathon tug of war trying to get the kid to DO something to the piece, over and over again, until you don’t have a grade for anything until the last week before the break.

To a kid who cares only about the grade, a paper returned with no grade on it is, by definition, not a big problem, no matter how many red marks there are all over it. 

The other problem is that grades are like voodoo–a fair number of my students are convinced that grades come from the ether with no connection at all to anything they’ve ever done, or that grades are about “effort.”   If you try really hard, it doesn’t matter what the quality of your work is.

There is actually a trope in Ayn Rand novels about this–people who whine that they “did their best” when what you need them to do is their jobs. 

I have no idea how people like this manage to survive in a real world where nobody is going to hire them for effort unconnected to performance standards, but there we are.

There are other people who obsess about grades, however, and with this group, I have more sympathy.

These people are looking to enter programs where the standards for entry are both very high and (almost) completely unforgiving.

The most popular of these are the nursing programs, where the four years won’t accept anybody with any grade below a B.

ANY grade below a B.

If you’ve got a grade below a B, rejection is automatic.

They then fill two thirds of their slots with the best credentials submitted to them.

They then fill the last third with students chosen at random. 

But before you can get picked at random, you still have to have that transcript with no grade below a B.

My nursing students are almost bat crazy about grades.  The advising system in the nursing program seems to be pretty good.  Most of these kids come in having had the selectiveness of the four year nursing programs pounded into their heads in a manner we used to call having the fear of God knocked into them.

What’s more, a lot of them come in from high school programs where math was low-level to nearly nonexistant, and the nursing programs want a lot more than that.

They camp out for days before math and biology tests, quizzing each other and making a mess of the common cafeteria.

I have never quite understood why the program requires them to take a literature course, even an elementary one.  I understand the composition course–it’s a good idea if nurses can write notes and other material clearly and unambiguously–but I’m not sure why a grade in a literature course should be a requirement for entry into a nursing program.

God only knows I think it is important to learn about literature, and to understand it, and to understand how it fits in with history and philosophy and all the rest of it.

But one semester of “Lit and Comp” won’t get them anywhere near that, and in the meantime they’re stressing out over arguable theses in papers about the similarities and differences between Shakespeare’s Lear and Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus. 

I think I’d be less perturbed by this kind of thing if we were actually making a good effort to get them to get it. 

Instead, I’m not too sure what we’re doing.  For the benefit of the state legislature (DON’T get me started) and the cooperative agreements with four years (so that they give credit for our courses for the transferees), we label English 102 a “writing course.” 

And it is that, sort of.  But if what we’re really doing here is trying to pound more basic writing into them, we should make 101 a two semester course and have done with it.

In the meantime, I try to get students to talk to me, so that I know who is in need of what, and I don’t accidentally blow up their entire lives with a midterm grade that bears no relationship to the final grade they’ll get in the spring.

And by the time I’ve got my midterm grading done, I’ve got a headache.

Sometime last week, in response to my post about Fallen Angels, a friend suggested to me that I would like, or get a kick out of or something–I can’t remember how he put it–a short story called “The Marching Morons” by C. M. Kornbluth.

So I sat down and read it, and I have been circling around and around the approach to writing about it on this blog ever since.

I’ve decided that all I can do is say what I think the way I thought it, and let whatever happens, happen.

This was not a “b ad” short story.  On the technical level that really matters to me, it’s a very good one.

It’s good fairly good music of the prose going on, and it’s well constructed (except for one quibble–the change in pt of view after the initial scenes, which IS sort of awkward).

And if this were another kind of post, I might quibble–two people told me how surprised I’d be by the ending, just as two people told me how surprised I’d be by the ending in Fallen Angels. I was surprised by neither, and had anticipated where the story was going by no more than a third to halfway through each one.

But here’s the thing.

I don’t care if I’m surprised by the ending or not.  I read through other people’s posts with lots of spoilers of stuff I haven’t read yet, and I don’t care. 

“Surprised by the ending” is not on the list of requirements for me to think that a work of fiction is good. 

And in this case, it’s so beside the point I wouldn’t know where to go with it if I wanted to.

Because what matters here (for me) is this:  this story is very good, but it is also something that I have found in only one other piece of fictional work.

It’s repellant.

It reminds me, in fact, of the only other story that ever made me feel like this.

That one is “The Kreutzer Sonato,” by Tolstoy.

So don’t you dare start telling me I only feel this way because the Kornbluth story is science fiction. 

I was repulsed by the Tolstoy story long before I knew what science fiction was.

But let me get to the particulars, and the warning–from here on out, spoilers are going to rage across the landscape, and I don’t care. 

There’s no way to explain this without giving away the plot.

The plot, in a nutshell is this:  in a future earth, the smart people have become the slaves of the stupid people, because the stupid people had more children, LOTS more children, and that means they could vote themselves into power.

The smart people are thoroughly and terminally sick of this situation, which they call The Problem, and are desperate to find some means of fixing it.

One day, a man working in an isolated area finds the body of another man sort of flash-preserved.  The flash preserved man is from out time, and in the years since he was accidentally petrified, we have learned ways to fix the condition he’s in and bring him back to life.

The smart people–who do all the work–do indeed bring him back to life, and after they do they explain The Problem to him and ask if he has any ideas about what they could do about it.

Resurrected Man then demands that he be made absolute dictator of all the earth, with statues erected to him everywhere, and if he gets that, he’ll tell them how to fix The Problem.

FWIW, this was when I knew how this story was going to end.  But, like I said, that’s hardly the point.

Resurrected Man gets–or thinks he gets–everything he wants, after which he puts in place a plan to convince the stupid people that theyw ant to relocate on Venus.  This is very successful, and the stupid people rush to sign up for relocation, whereupon they’re delivered into the jaws of death with their disappearances being masked by fake letters and postcards sent to their families talking about how wonderful Venus is.

When enough of the stupid people are dead to make The Problem no long a problem, the smart people push Resurrected Man into a space ship and send him to Venus, too.

Or, you know, fake Venus.

What’s more, they’re delighted with Resurrected Man, because Resurrected Man being a high end stupid person, has just enough cunning to think of things the smart people are not able to think of themselves–like checking with Hitler and the policies of Nazi Germany to figure what to do about the surplus population.

And no, the Tolstoy isn’t about surplus populations.  It’s about a man who has just been let out of prison after a long sentence for killing his wife, who explains why women are so foul and wretched they all ought to be killed.

But my point about “The Marching Morons” is this:  there isn’t a single decent person in the entire thing. 

Not a single one.

There isn’t a single decent suggested point of view on the state of the world or the country. 

The smart people may not have been able to think of Hitler and Company on their own, but they knew who they were, and they had NO compunction about using Nazi tactics to kill off all the stupid people.

The stupid people are the kind of stupid that makes you wonder how they manage to chew gum and walk forward at the same time, and their basic attitude to life is that intelligence and science are dirty conspiracies against them and out to be beaten up if not wiped out.

If the only two choices we have are between these two groups, I’d say nuke the planet and get it over with.

I have read nothing else by this writer.

With Tolstoy, I’d read quite a lot, and Tolstoy’s view of women were spot on with the murderer’s in “The Kreutzer Sonata,” so I knew what I was looking at.

With Kornbluth, there might be something out there somewhere that would mitigate what seems to be the message here–if I could decide on a message, and I can’t quite.

In the meantime….

Bleh.

I have been trying to get around to this post for a couple of days now, but Life has been intervening–and not, as is usually the case, with downers and trouble and general cussedness.

I’ve just had actual work to do, and Spring Break arrived and I shut the alarm off on the clock, and then one day I slept in until past eight.

And I didn’t care.  That was the serious revelation here.

At any rate, I’ve been pattering around not doing much of anything organized, and in the middle of all that, I read a book–Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn’s Fallen Angels.

Now, for those of you who are science fiction fans, I want to make one point perfectly clear.

The following are notes about WHAT I HAVE READ AND SEEN in science fiction movies, books and short stories.

There may very well be all sorts of other things in science fiction movies, books and short stories, but if they are not WHAT I HAVE READ AND SEEN, then they are completely irrelevant to anything I will say here.

Having gotten that out of the way, and knowing full well that the comments will be full of passionate declarations about how I said x and y about “science fiction” even though I ONLY said x and y about science fiction I HAVE READ AND SEEN–

Let’s start here.

Fallen Angels is a novel about a time in the near future when the United States has been taken over by anti-science Greens and Feminists.  Most technology has been banned, and the changes have caused the start of a new ice age.

And the first thing it made me think of was this:  the only reason Apollo 13 isn’t science fiction is because it’s science fact.

Apollo 13 is my favorite movie of all time.  I’ve probably watched the thing over a hundred times.  I own it, but in spite of the fact that I own it, if I come across it on television while flipping channels, I’ll stop and watch it through to the end.

There is never a time when this movie fails to make me happy.

And yet, if the Apollo 13 incident had never happened, somebody could have made that exact same movie as science fiction, and it would be good science fiction, and I would still love it.

Granted, it makes me happier because it really happened, because that tells me that we were once these people, and that therefore we could be again, for real–

But that’s a kicker.  It’s a really, really, really good extra-added, but it’s not at the core of what I love about things like that.

And Fallen Angels is a thing like that–it gets the villains right, and it gets the heroes right. 

That’s part of it.

Thinking about it, I realized that an awful lot of the science fiction I have watched as movies has consisted of Faust narratives of one kind or the other–stories about how Humans and especially Scientists have screwed up the world in one way or the other and doomed us all.

This is especially true of the old black and white American International movies, where you can’t be in the same room with a microscope without causing worldwide ecological disaster of one kind or another.

And the kind is always whatever the fashionable we’re-all-going-to-die scenario is this week.  The Atomic Bomb (pick any of several), the hole in the ozone layer (Arctic Blast), climate change (The Day After Tomorrow).

It doesn’t matter what we’re doing, it doesn’t matter that the last twenty things we’ve thought were going to doom us all haven’t–if we’re doing ANYTHING, it’s a bad idea.

In an odd way, Fallen Angel sort of has this kind of plot, because things we are doing–ill-considered environmental regulation, a fear and terror of “technology”–have indeed caused the mess the earth is in.

But in Fallen Angels, the problems are not caused by science but by the rejection of science, which is the first good news.  Our Heroes do not exist to beat back the human ability to change the world through scientific and technological experiment and innovation, but to bring it all back.

 So that’s the first thing.  I’m not a big fan of the kind of science fiction where science is the enemy, and the ability to do science is a Bad Thing. 

What’s more, as far as I’m concerned, Fallen Angels gets the villains exactly right:  the crystal-gazing morons trying to bring back magic, the people-are-the-worst-thing-that’s-ever-happened-to-the-earth people, the precautionary principle people, the kind of “feminist” who runs around trying to constrict and inhibit everybody’s behavior in pursuit of making everything “safe”–I could go on, but the writers do that themselves.

But Fallen Angels also gets the heroes right.  They’re the people who will not be “appropriate,” who insist on living a politically incorrect life at nearly every level, who like risk and who like challenge.

And that brings me to the kind of science fiction I actively like, although I’ve only seen it in movies and not read anything like it in books or short stories.

Of course, I see more science fiction than I read.

The best example of it would be the two movies of the Star Trek reboot, the ones in which Kirk is–well, maybe you have to see it. 

There’s a sequence in the first of the two where Spock shoots Kirk–not yet captain of everything–off the Enterprise and onto a Godforsaken frozen planet.

It’s the kind of thing that would normally make me at least somewhat uncomfortable, but in this case Kirk isn’t scared,  he’s just royally pissed off and roaring about it, and the entire thing ends up being fun.

But that’s what I want.  And not just in science fiction.  I was the risk takers and the intellectual outliers.  I want a good clear statement against the sort of people who are so afraid of everything that their entire lives become a frantic and unrelenting attempt to regulate everybody else’s behavior.

And those people exist at least as much on the left–if not more–than on the right.

Of course, it helps that Fallen Angels is a book about actions on the level of plausibility by people who are plausible enough as actual people who would live now.

The action is improbable but not impossible, and does not require me to leave the realm of plausibility for…whatever.

(FWIW–I find space travel to other galaxies perfectly plausible; I find intergalactic war less so.)

On the downside, I have the same problem with Fallen Angels as I do with a lot of Niven and Pournelle–there’s not a lot of character development, and the action tends to take place on the surface.

But I had a very good time.

Sometimes I don’t believe it when I DO see it.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/03/12/a_warning_system_for_disturbing_college_courses_121885.html