Hildegarde

So it’s Friday, the beginning of a very long week-end–bank holiday, in the parlance of those of you in the Commonwealths and England–and I’ve spent most of it getting nowhere and getting  frustrated. 

But I now have four straight days when, as far as I can figure out, I have nothing to do but write and take care of business, and no reason at all to set an alarm. 

This does me less good than you’d think, because by now my internal clock knows when it’s “supposed” to wake up, and it tends to do it whether I want it to or not.

But in the meantime, I’ve had a chance to look at most of what Elf posted, and read through it a couple of times,  and wonder why it was the program passed all his posts right through but one, which it decided to treat as evil death spam.    Since I couldn’t see any difference between it and the others, I guess I’ll just have to put it down to one of the mysteries of the universe.

All that said–what bothers me about all those articles is the assumption that, with the exception of the changes they are warning us against, all the world is going to just stand still. 

I don’t think it’s true that we are doing less and less innovation, or less and less often producing new jobs in unthought of areas to replace the old ones we have mechanized.

Transitions are not instantaneous, but they do happen.  They have always happened.  Why assume–as these articles assume, and as Elf also seems to be assuming–that they will not happen any more?

My older son is fond of saying that human beings are very bad at imagining what we’re going to get good at.  The best science fiction writers of their time took us to space, gave us warp speed…and portrayed computers as things the size of small buildings.

I have the same problem with a lot of the material on climate change.  I’ve got no problem accepting that climate change is happening or even that we’re likely to be causing it. 

I don’t understand why the only response anybody can think of is “develop huge overarching global institutions to bring us back to the status quo ante.”

Why?

It seems to me that there are many possible responses to climate change, including many possible ways of adapting to it.  And adapting would be painful, but so are most of the ways in which various people have responding to it now. 

There is too much, in all of this, that seems to me to be fear of change because it’s change.

But there’s something else, and I’ve noticed it a lot not only here, but in public discussion when I was still living in England.

The futurescape suggested in these articles–and the one suggested by Michael himself–is the futurescape seen from the point of view of the coasts, and of people who see “normal” as working for large institutions (corporations, government, universities) that provide stability, broadly based benefits, and at least the illusion that the enterprise and its largesse will outlast our lifetimes.

But most people don’t work for companies like that, and they never have.  They aren’t watching such jobs disappear.  The jobs they have never had anything to do with that kind of environment to begin with.

It reminds me of an article by a very famous mystery agent, published back in the early ’80’s, about “how to tell if you’re ready to quit your day job.”

Remember, the man intoned–and he was a sweetheart, really, I shouldn’t laugh at him–you’re not just making $50,000 a year.  You’re making that plus your health insurance, your sick days, your vacation days–add it all up, and you’re really making closer to $80,00.  So, if you’re not making that much freelance, don’t quit your day job!

I nearly laughed myself silly.  Most of the people I knew who were trying to go freelance full time weren’t making anything like $50,000 a year and didn’t have any benefits.  They were working part time for minimum wage at anything they could get that would give them time to write.  A “good” job was working part time as a clerk in a bookstore. That way you always knew what books were coming out, and some of those places gave employee discounts.   Second best was waiting table where real published authors and editors hung out.  Elaine’s was the place for “literary.”  Bogey’s was the place if you wanted to write mysteries.

And, when all else failed–well, you could do pretty well if you got some training as a bartender.

I have no doubt that jobs in big bureaucratized institutions will be keenly sought after and highly competitive.  I also have no doubt that lots of people are just not going to be interested, for the same reason they’re not interested now.

Security is a good thing to have, but most of us are not willing to trade the rest of our lives for it. 

And at the same time that Watson and company are making it possible for Big Corporations and Big Institutions and Big Government to hire fewer and fewer workers, related technology is making it possible for more and more people to do without Big Institutions.   Musicians put out their own music on their own labels.  Writers put up their own books in e-formats.  Filmmakers go off on their own and make the movie they can’t make when five guys in suits are trying to make them make it just like Last Year’s Hit, which was about a rabbit who became a nun.

Part of my difference of opinion here may come from the fact that I’ve never had much use for stocks.  I’ve owned some, on and off, but if I’d ever had the chance of wanting to own some again, the Martha Stewart case killed it for me for good.

(A point here–most people say Stewart went to jail for “insider trading.”  But she didn’t.  She went to jail for telling a meeting of her stockholders that she was innocent of stockholder trading and would not be found guilty by any court.  And, in fact, she was right–they couldn’t get it for that.  But they could get her for saying that, even though she turned out to be telling the truth.  No, I don’t get it either.  And I know when I don’t know enough to keep myself out of trouble, so I’ll just pass on that sort of thing.)

“Stockholder democracy” was always a myth.  Back in the 1950s, one of the nation’s largest and most prestigious brokerages got nailed for selling stock whose prices it knew were going to decline to its small customers–the stock having belonged to its big customers, who were therefore protected.

To the extent that the idea existed in reality at all, it consisted of just those stockholder suits I was talking about yesterday, decisions that forced management to a lot that was bad for the company in the long run while looking really neat in the short.

If more and more companies are going private, I say–good.  Excellent, in fact.  I’d rather have Apple making its decisions on the basis of the owners’ passion for computers than on its stockholders’ need for an uptick in the third quarter.

And if they act like idiots–well, they’ll go down without taking my retirement account with them.

There are two other things, but I’m getting to the end of my ability to pay attention when I write.

The first thing is an unfortunate truth, that has been with us now for centuries.  As technology advances, the minimum level of intelligence necessary to function in it gets higher.   We consider people “mentally challenged” now who would have been considered perfectly normal–hell, even average, 150 years ago.

The second thing is that that imagined future world, where there are billionaires and everybody else is starving, is an impossibility.

It’s an impossibility because the billionaires only get to be billionaires by selling things to people who are not billionaires. 

If they ever managed to manufacture a world of nothing but us and them, it would collapse on their heads. 

But I’ll leave that and some other things until tomorrow, and see what I can do about this pot roast.

I was actually having a pleasant afternoon, thinking about this blog, when I ran into a perennial problem.  Somebody or the other in an official capacity whose help I need to get something done looked at my paperwork, saw I was self-employed, and demanded to see “a profit and loss statement” for the “business.”

But, of course, I don’t run a business, I don’t even know what a profit and loss statement looks like, even if I wrote done my expenses they’d be mostly negligible and they wouldn’t make any sense (shipping, $5.95), so it is literally not possible to give her what she wants.

I’ve got a call in.  I’ll straighten it out eventually.  It just gets really tiring to have to explain this stuff over and over and over again.

But as to Mike’s dystopian future, a couple of things.

First,  I tend to think that we always bitch and moan that everybody’s job is being destroyed by technology and they’ll be left to starve in the street, but that isn’t what usually happens.  When X job becomes obsolete, people tend to move on to Y, and Y is often something nobody expected. 

I don’t know if the workers in the buggy whip factory were feckless enough to drift off into nothingness when the automobile arrived, but my guess is that most of them–or their sons–got jobs in automobile factories.

My friend’s mother who was a keypunch operator many years ago became a data entry clerk working on a computer, then a customer service rep where all her work was on a computer and the data was already entered.  Those jobs didn’t exist when she got the keypunch job, and the keypunch job didn’t exist when she first started working.

That said, I know the transition isn’t easy most of the time, and it’s impossible for some people.  But I don’t know what you’d even want to do about that.  Stopping change isn’t a good thing, and it isn’t possible in the long run. 

I don’t expect that we’ll end up with the “owners” who own everything and the rest of us starving in the street, for a number of reasons.

The most important of these is that the “owners” only get their money by virtue of the rest of us spending ours.   Nintendo won’t make gobs of money eliminating work for the people who buy GameBoy DSes and Wiis.  That’s not the stuff you buy when you’re poor. 

The stuff that worries me is not the rich having lots of money, but a couple of tendencies that are society wide.

The first is the “professionalization” of everything, and its concommittant bureaucratization.

That tendency wrecks not just individuals, but entire businesses. 

I’ve spent the week watching Borders crash and burn, and it’s a classic case.  When that chain started, it had several things going for it over its competitors, as well as economies of scale going for it over the local mom and pop places in the towns were it moved in.

It had a staff that knew books, for one thing.   They knew them and they loved them, and they stayed for years in a single location just to be around the books and talk to people (customers) about them.   It had carefully constructed ties to the local communities, too, staging events and targetting displays with what it knew to be local interest.

Then the money men moved in, and the inevitable happened.  The experienced and knowledgable staff was let go for cheaper clerks who might never have read a book, but were willing to work for peanuts.  Cut costs and you’ll make more money, right? 

The local interest stuff mostly went, too, in favor of campaigns directed for the central office.  After all, why give away free publicity when you could get publishers to pay for it.  Want a place for your book up near the front doors?  That’ll cost you.   How about a place on the newsletter’s “recommended” list?  That’ll cost you, too.

This is an enormously stupid way to run a bookstore, but in and of itself it wouldn’t bother me.  Doing nonsense like that will usually get you…well, what it got Borders this week. 

And that’s life.  The next guy who comes along will look at your mistakes and do things differently.  That’s how the world runs.  Oh, well.

Except, not now. 

The big problem with what just happened to Borders is that the next guy to come along can’t fix it.  Even Borders can’t fix it.  Why?

Because it would take literally decades to prove that the more expensive plan is a better business plan in the long run.  In the short run, if you do all those expensive things Borders did when it was first starting out, and you’re a public company–there will be a stockholder’s suit in no time flat, and the courts will demand that you do that cost cutting stuff right now.  Otherwise, you’re not acting in the best interests of the stockholders, which are defined as having their stock go steadily up in price.

This is, by the way, why you can’t find anything to watch on TV.   Advertisers pay a premium for a single demographic:  single people without children between the ages of 18 and 34. 

The more of this group your television station can attract, the higher the price it can charge per quarter minute of advertising time. 

Of course, this demographic is naturally limited in size, and with everybody chasing after it you’re going to lose what profit you could have made satisfying the other demographics who are searching desperately for something to watch–but, hey, your stockholder’s action group sees you’re targetting senior citizens and the ad dollars you can get from that are half what you can get for the golden demographic, and there comes another law suit.

Too many decisions aren’t discretionary any more.   And that includes everything from the core mission of a business (see above), to who it hires (don’t care what the labor pool is like in your area, your numbers better not trip any wires at EOC), to how it furnishes its offices (no stationary chairs at computer stations, even if you have to let go your best secretary when she can’t sit in them).

Businesses hire incompetent college graduates and turn away very competent high school graduates for the same job–because you can’t prove competence at a discrimination hearing, but you can prove credentials.  They follow elaborate rules on workplace “safety’ that often don’t make much sense but that are the only protection they have if somebody complains. 

But it’s not just businesses that have that problem.  Under the HIPPA laws, a nurse can lose not just her job, but her license, for giving out information she isn’t authorized to give out.  Under mandatory reporting laws, she can lose both if she doesn’t report any “suspicion” she might have of child or elder abuse.  It just makes sense to refuse to give out any information at all until she’s ordered to, even if that means that an old woman will die without being able to see her children at the end.  It just makes sense to report anything at all that anybody at all might think is strange, even if her gut is telling her that it isn’t that kind of thing at all.

Then there are teachers, who find themselves in the position of having to deliver mandated results made up by people who seem never to have entered a classroom at all–and to do it while making sure that virtually all of their charges get to graduate from high school. 

The nearly breathless stupidity of this is hard to fathom unless you’ve taught somebody these days.  The No Child Left Behind standards seem to have been somebody’s wish list of what every child should learn, unrelated in any way to what children actually learn and even more unrelated to the facts on the ground about differences in school populations.

It might have been plausible if the other side of it had been simply to flunk the kids who didn’t meet standards.  Here’s what it means to complete the sixth grade.  If you do it, fine.  If you don’t do it, come back and try again next year, or not. 

Instead, we blamed the teachers and the schools and acted as if there weren’t anything at all in the way of “success” except the schools not trying.

Which doesn’t mean they were trying, but you see what I’m saying here.

The other thing that gets to me is this:  we aren’t seeing “jobs” disappear, we’re seeing certain kinds of jobs disappear.  The issue isn’t doctors and lawyers and university professors and architects and engineers.  We’ll still have those.

The issue is bogus “white collar” jobs, many of which were makeshift to begin with.  They existed because we needed some place to put our kids who got “college” degrees that weren’t really college degrees. 

It doesn’t bother me at all that paralegals may be elbowed out by smart machines.  I know what paralegals do, at least in the law firms I’m used to.   They’re paid better than secretaries–most law firms insist their paralegals have “degrees”–but they do work the secretaries did better. 

As to the “junior associates,” the fact is that we’re turning out far more law school graduates than we have work for anywhere, and more and more of them from largely undistinguished and undemanding programs. 

They’re like a lot of other “college graduates” we’re producing, including a fair number of PhDs who do not in fact have the training their “degrees” say they have and who in fact cannot do the actual work of the business or profession they want to enter. 

But we’ve turned university education into a vast industry, the health of which requires more and more “students” taking more and more courses, no matter how lame or useless.

And those students will come out and simply refuse to take the kind of job they went to “college” to escape from.

And the result of all this is that kids who are not rich now have a harder time than they ever have before getting an actual college education.  When the budget cuts hit, the local state college isn’t going to cut business administration and elementary education.  It’s going to cut French, classics and physics, because, you know, nobody takes those.

I seem to have gone on and on forever here, and done it without ever getting into Kelo.

Maybe I’ll get to that tomorrow.

I have just had one of those days on the Internet that makes me wonder why we don’t all go back to using manual typewriters and get it over with.  It would be faster.

I did it in order to get hold of this link:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/14/944388/-Nine-Pictures-Of-The-Extreme-Income-Wealth-Gap

And getting hold of it was so bad, and took so much time, that before I came onto WordPad to write this post, I sent it to myself.  And now I’m going to stop for a moment and make sure I’ve saved this to drafts, because I don’t want to spend another two hours trying to find it and get it to load again. 

Really.

The article is from a web site called The Daily Kos, which is at

http://www.dailykos.com

and which is a fairly predictable liberal-to-left.

I don’t look at it very much, not because it’s liberal to left–I look at a lot of those–but because its owner has been on Olbermann’s show a couple of times and come off as an arrogant ass.   I get all the arrogant ass I want these days from eye surgeons.  I don’t need to go looking for it on the Web.

This article was posted to Facebook by a friend from rec.arts.mystery, which is a site I used to visit a lot and now have very little time for. 

I’ve reposted it here because I found myself being oddly ambivalent about its message–or rather, not its message, but some of the things it touched on.

Let’s clear up a couple of the little things first.

1) Like all these sites, on the right as well as on the left, the writers simply cannot pass up a chance to be tendentious.   In this case, the tendentiousness arises in the form of reporting “inequality” by “mean individual income” rather than mean household income, something that makes the gap look much wider than it actually is. 

2) The article also leaves out the elephant in the living room–the problem is never that there is “a huge gap between rich and poor.”  That’s always the case.  The problem is whether or not there is a gradually increasing level of wealth and income between the rich and the poor.   When we say of a country that it has a large gap between rich and poor, what we’re almost always saying is that it lacks a middle class.  There are rich people and poor people, and that’s it.  This is not our problem, and never has been.

3) The article relies–as all such articles do–on an assumption:  that the very fact that some people have far more than other people is prima facie evidence of “injustice.”

But I don’t think this is true.  I think it is entirely just that Bill Gates lives in a house he needs a golf cart to get around in and the local crack addict lives on the street.  I think it is entirely just that Bill Gates lives in that house and I live in mine, which is, after all, somewhat smaller.

I don’t even have a problem with people who inherit the stuff.  If I make money honestly, it is mine by right, whether it amounts to 50 billion dollars or 50 cents, and as mine by right is mine to distribute as I wish.  If what I feel like doing with it is leaving it to my intellectually challenged relatives–well, I’m an idiot, but that should be nobody’s business but my own.

Nor does it bother me that so many of the people who get rich do it by doing things I have little or no respect for.   There is no cosmic value system by which one set of things is “really worth it” and others are not even if people want them.

In a capitalist system, people get rich by giving the public what it wants for what it wants to pay for it.  The public often has the taste of a pet rock, but that, too, is nobody’s business but its own.

And it would do us all good to try to remember that Stephen King isn’t “worth 5 million dollars a book.”  He’s worth $7.99 to five million people, or more.  And, really, it’s hard to argue that the books aren’t worth $7.99.

But I said I was ambivalent about this piece, and I am, so I might as well get to what makes me ambivalent.

First is the fact that a lot of people are making money not by selling books at $7.99 or software packages at $300.   They’re making it by getting the government to give it to them.

And I’m not talking about “welfare queens,” either.  The thing that bothered me most about the crash of the financial system was not that people were doing stupid reckless things–it happens.   Nor was it that a bunch of big banks nearly went belly up and took the rest of us with them.

What bugs me is that most of those people still have their jobs and all of them still have their money.

The entire idea of risk to reward is this–you take big risks, you win big rewards, if you win.  If you lose, you go crash on the sidewalk, and you’ve got nobody to blame but yourself.

The guys who lost should, right now, be taking bottles back to the grocery store to see if they can work up enough money to take the kids to McDonald’s tonight–and they should be doing it in Hope, Mississippi, because Manhattan is now way too expensive.

Instead, most of these people have their private jets and their pied a terres on the Upper East Side, and none of them that I know of has to worry about how to pay the next electric bill.

I do know people who worked on Wall Street and crashed and burned after the meltdown, but they were all low level traders who had no responsibility at all for setting the policies that got their firms into this them. 

I should not have to listen to bankruptcy court judges fretting about whether giving Mr. CEO of the Mortgage Company enough left over after his debts have been discharged to “live as he is accustomed to.”

I mean, what?

The second thing is something I’ve brought up before–it bothers me how we’ve somehow become a culture where nothing matters but the money.

Something has gone wrong when we no longer really care how somebody got his money, as long as he has it, and the more the better. And something has gone wrong when “having money” means spending as much of it as possible for stuff that is…well, it’s just stuff.

If you’ve made your money honestly–and not by getting the government to bail you ought of wrecking your bank–then I think you have an absolute right to buy a car for a million dollars.  I just think we were a better culture when most people would have been embarrassed to do it, because it’s…stupid.

And you know, gauche.

A bit much, as they used to say when I was growing up.

I also think it’s one thing to really love writing horror stories and dedicate you life to it and then find that you’ve made a pile of cash, and another to dedicate your life to making cash any way you can get it. 

Most of the people I admire in this world have done the first thing and not the second.  Most of the things I truly hate about modern life–the way “not for profit”  hospitals take tax deductions for being charities and then have collections departments that would put credit card companies in jail; the way everything from elementary school education to nuns providing services to the poor and homeless to little church quartets doing Bach fret about cost/benefit ratios and maximizing revenue flow.

The streets need the potholes fixed.  Your public library is supposed to be a repository of the culture and carry even the stuff you don’t think you want to read.  The Middlebury police really do deserve working police radios.

I’m not making that last one up.

In the middle of all this, I find myself what I can only say is not sanguine about the prospects of anything changing any time soon.

The Democrats are completely clueless about why people so strenuously oppose all their programs for “the public good.” They fall back on “well, those people must be stupid or racist or both.”

But when your average American attracted by the Tea Party rants and rails about “too much government regulation,” he isn’t talking about the regulation of Wall Street banks and huge corporations.

He’s talking about the regulation of himself.

You want a single payer health care plan, expanded public benefits and a stronger financial regulation bill?

Do what you have to–support the passage of Constitutional amendments if you have to–to end the endless government nattering and regulating of private habits.  Shut up about “the obesity epidemic.”  Stop passing laws forbidding smoking in restaurants (and talking about passing laws forbidding smoking at home when there’s a child in the house).  Reform the juvenile and family court systems so that people don’t lose their Constitutional rights as soon as they have to deal with them.  Get used to the fact that some things may have to differ between states, including some very big things, like abortion, gay marriage, and whether or not the local school gets to give a Christmas concert.

I wonder endlessly if the Democrats are ever going to understand just how much of the public opposition to the new health care reforms comes from the fear that a new government benefit will be a wedge for yet more government regulation of private and local life.

I wonder endlessly if the Democrats are ever going to understand that they can have their social agenda, or their economic agenda–but that they will never have both.

FDR understood that. 

In the meantime, when the Republicans say they want to shrink government, the left thinks “they want to let corporations off the hook!”  And they’re largely right.

The ordinary guy in the street thinks, “yes! this means I can tell that obnoxious social worker from school that Johnny isn’t going on Ritalin and there’s nothing she can do about it.”

If you’re sitting on the left and thinking that it’s impossible, letting East Podunk, Louisiana have Christmas concerts, teach abstinence, and eliminate all mention of Darwin from biology class is just going too far–people have rights!

Well, if you’re thinking that, try thinking instead of what you’d feel if the law demanded that your school pray to Jesus every morning and spend health class teaching that any girl who has sex before marriage is a slut. 

In the end, it’s all about the culture.

And, in a way differently than this article intends, the money.

So, I had a very nice evening, curtesy of a good friend of mine who sent me a copy of the best cozy ever written, Charlotte MacLeod’s Rest You Merry. 

It manages to be a cozy in the way I have defined cozies without driving me up a wall, and I don’t really know if I can analyze why that is.  There is a certain amount of cutesy, but it doesn’t cloy.  Everything is light without making me feel as if I’ve been transported into a world of sugarplums where a bloody corpse on the living room floor exhibits about the same level of emotion as a badly done steak at a moderately priced restaurant.

I knew Charlotte when she was alive.  She was a nice woman, exactly what you’d expect from the books–and very New England, in everything from taste in teas to politics.

That said, there’s another reason why I had a nice evening last night, and that had to do with the mail, which brought with it second half statements on sales of Gregor Demarkians last year.

Without going into a lot of specifics that are none of the Internet’s business, let me just say that it was obvious from those statements that Cheating at Solitaire is out there doing a lot better than my books usually do.

And it’s Cheating at Solitaire in particular, not the books generally.

Which brings me to a set of interesting questions.

Okay, questions that are interesting to me.

The first is that there is only one thing I can think of that was truly different about the publication of Cheating at Solitaire–and that was the reviews.

Specifically, the very print reviews, in prestige organs, that we were talking about the other day, and that most of you, and I, dismissed as being largely irrelevant to why we buy anything.

Cheating at Solitaire got starred reviews from all three of the big three major pre-pub review organs, Publishers Weekly, Books in Review and Kirkus.

That was, as far as I can tell, the only real difference.   Except that the book was, you know, not on a very “serious” subject.

And although the book was reviewed well in print, it wasn’t reviewed all that well online. 

Most of you say you read for escape.  I apparently have a number of constant readers who large read for escape from trash television and manufactured celebrities, so the worst online reviews I’ve ever gotten have been for Cheating at Solitaire and Wanting Sheila Dead. 

I wonder what it’s going to be like for the one coming out this summer, Flowering Judas.  That one is neither celebrities nor politics.  It’s just dead people in a small town.

But at the moment, the book business is in free fall.  One of the large chains is rumored to be days away from bankruptcy, and their sales have fallen off so badly that  even reliably best selling authors are off from last year, but just in that one store.

I’ve been thinking about the line about publishers publishing what people want to read, but I think that may be harder than anybody realizes.

For one thing, the audience is fragmented.

For another, you’ve got those people who don’t read much that you have to sell books to, and as far as I can figure out, they have very different requirements than Constant Readers do.

Constant readers hated the celebutantes. First time readers loved them.

Finding something that will satisfy everybody’s particular ideas about what they want to read this week would take a lot of calculating with a lot of unknown variables.

And I’ve never been all that good at math.

So, it’s Saturday, and I’m having a very strange day.  For one thing, last night I got the first decent sleep I’ve had since all this stuff started with Greg. 

I have no idea why this was the case.  Nothing had changed, at that point–nothing much has changed now–and everything I’ve been worrying about is still there to worry about.  Maybe my body just got to the point where it couldn’t help itself.  At any rate, I slept.

Still, as is the way with these things, even though I woke up many hours past my usual hour, I was still exhausted, and I still am.  This means I have been dragging myself around the landscape without getting much of anything done, and without being able to concentrate very well on what little I did get done.

I’m still wending my way through Augustine, and yesterday I’d gotten to a part that really wasn’t what I needed.   Wrath of God.  Worthlessness of the human being after the Fall.  That kind of thing.

Fortunately, by the time I arrived on my love seat this morning, we’d gotten past that, and I found myself in a long set of passages about two things I actually find interesting instead of just distressing.

(I don’t know what theologians thought they were doing when they got into that miserable worm thing (think Jonathan Edwards and “Sinners at the Hands of an Angry God”), but it really isn’t conducive to getting nonbelievers to think Christianity is a good idea.)

Anyway, the two things that interested me were first a section on the exegesis of various things in Genesis, and next a little talk on the reported marvels of the world.

Genesis first.  I have on my bookshelves a thick hardcover book called The Encyclopedia of Biblical Errancy, by C. Dennis McKinsey, put out by Prometheus Books in 1995.   It contains page after page after page of supposed mistakes of fact, science and history in the Bible, and whole lists of places where the Bible is supposed to contradict itself.

I say supposed, because although some of the items are perfectly legitimate, a lot of the others are tendentious in the extreme.  Some depend for what force they have on a sort of know-nothing refusal to understand how a literary text actually functions.  In this category I’d certainly put the supposed “contradictions” in the four Gospels about the scene at Christ’s tomb on the day He supposedly rose from the dead.   The “criticisms” rely on the assumption that each Gospel writer was of course attempting to describe the scene in every precise detail. 

But anybody who has ever looked through eyewitness reports of anything knows that this is not what happens.  Instead, each witness stresses those things that seem important at the time.  They’ll say, “There were a bunch of people there.  Mary and Shirley were there” because Mary and Shirley are important to them in some way.  They don’t mean nobody but Mary and Shirley were there.

If you see what I mean.

At any rate, the guy used to have a website, but I couldn’t find it this afternoon.  I did find a lot of other things in the same vein, and you’re welcome to google them if you want to.

But what interested me about this portion of Augustine was this:  the issues argued in Augustine’s book are the same as the ones argued in McKinsey’s. 

Nothing has changed, in all these years, about what people find credible and incredible about the Bible.  There it all is, written in the year 410 or so:  problems with the proportions of the ark, with the which animals were on board and what they ate, with how the animals got from the ark and onto remote islands after the Flood waters receded.

In fact, there were some issues that I’d never seen argued in any modern forum, including some about discrepancies between translations. 

Adam and Eve were there, though, with Augustine cheerfully saying that, of course, their children married each other, sisters and brothers, because it would have been okay then because that was all there was to marry.

Well, okay, among other things.

But quite a few of the issues that make modern day defenders of Biblical literalism squirm caused Augustine no problem at all–but then, he wasn’t a Biblical literalist.

The second thing that interested me was a glancing reference to reports of marvels in faraway countries–of men with no necks and their faces coming out of their torsos,  of people whose voices came out of their hands, or lots of things like that.

By the time you get to the high Middle Ages, this sort of thing is a popular genre.  People would go off on long trips and write books when they came back, describing their travels and all the wonderful and strange things they saw.

The most famous of these is, of course, the travelogue produced by Marco Polo about his trips to China in the fourteenth century.  But what they don’t tell you in school is that the reason Polo’s book is famous is because he managed to write it without…making stuff up.

Most of the people who wrote these things simply went off the deep end and invented all kinds of nonsense, including the kind of thing I was talking about above.

A lot of them claimed to have found and visited the kingdom of Prester John, who supposedly ruled over a kingdom of Christians entirely surrounded by hostile Muslims and Pagans somewhere in “the Orient.”   That would have been sane enough if it wasn’t also said that his kingdom contained the Fountain of Youth and bordered the Garden of Eden, where an angel stood guard at the gate. 

He was supposed to have a mirror from which he could see any part of his kingdom, in detail, no matter how far away, sort of like a Medieval magic version of those neighborhood satellite cams where you can get on the Internet and look at your house from space. 

It was that kind of thing.

A few years ago–eh, maybe back in the Eighties or early Nineties?–Umberto Eco produced a novel called Baudolino, which was supposed to be just one of those Medieval travelogues, complete with marvels and wonders.   I loved that novel. 

And I wondered then, as I wonder now, why people did that–why they do it now, for that matter.  Why does a James Frey write fiction and call it fact?  Why did the Medieval travel writers do that?

And then, of course, there’s always the possibility that it wasn’t really fiction, or not all of it was.

It did turn out that there were people in Africa called Pygmies. 

And they were very, very short.

This morning I got an e-mail from a friend of mine, an actual person in actual publishing, that said something I’ve been sort of hearing on and off for a few years but never really took in before:

Print reviews, in magazines and newspapers, now seem to have absolutely no effect on sales.

To the extent that reviews have anything at all of an effect on sales, those reviews are online.  I’m not clear, quite yet, if he meant formal online reviews by online reviewers who make at least a long-range hobby of it, if not a career, or stuff like the reader comments on Amazon.

Oh, and while we’re on that one–what do I have to do to get some of you guys to post reviews of my books on Amazon?   I mean, please.  I end up with six people who hated the book for reasons I don’t understand, one perpetual pain in the ass who has “reivewed” every single one of the things as negatively as possible without having (as far as I can tell) having read them, and Harriet.  And I love Harriet, but she could use some help here.

Anyway, I read this e-mail, and it occured tome that I’ve bought exactly one book, ever, because of a reviewer’s judgment on it.

That’s one.  Singular.

The review was in the New York Times Book Review, and I don’t remember what the book was, except that it was some kind of thriller by a writer I’d never heard of.

I went out and bought the book the same day, because the review was so bad, it felt like a hatchet job.

And I was really angry on the writer’s behalf.

Unfortunately, the hatchet job was entirely justified.  So there was that.

That was almost two decades ago now.  Greg wasn’t born.  Matt was amall.  Bill was alive.

That said, I have in the years since sometimes bought a book because I saw it reviewed, but never because the reviewer did or didn’t praise it.   Reviews have mostly served to tell me one of two things:

Either there was a new book out by an author I get everything from

OR

There was a new book out by an author I didn’t know on a topic I cared about. 

Beyond that, reviewers seem to provide me with no information I’m interested in. 

My taste in books is idioscynractic, and unlike a lot of people I don’t read nonfiction by choosing only one side of the political divide and holding fast to it like letting go would mean giving up my oxygen.   I read Thomas Franks and Thomas Sowell, Victor Davis Hanson and Katha Pollitt.  Life is more interesting that way.

But it occurs to me that I don’t know anybody else who buys books on the recommendation of the New York Times, say, or The New Republic.   And one of the things I like about The New York Review of Books is that you don’t have to read the books they review, the “reviews” are actually long articles on particular topics with books to serve as jumping off points.  And the articles are interesting, if politically predictable.

But the thing is, I don’t know anybody else who makes decisions about which books to buy on the basis of what reviewers have to say about them.  Most of the people I know who get recommendations get them from friends, or their librarian or local bookstore person who’s known them forever, or on online forums like rec.arts.mystery. 

Maybe this was what my friend meant by reviews “online,” I don’t know.

Okay, maybe I should have asked more questions before I started writing this.

But here’s the thing–my friend sounded as if he hated this idea, as if it wasn’t a good one.

And I don’t know why not.

The problem in publishing has always been, it seems to me, the near impossible task of finding the target audience of a book and letting them know the book is there.

Maybe online reviews, peer to peer reviews so to speak, are taking over from the professional kind because they do a better job of telling readers what books are out there that they might want.

The problem with professional reviews, from what I’ve read over the years, is that, at least for me, they always seemed to be concerned about things I didn’t care about, and not at all concerned about things I did.

They also tended–in the high end review vehicles–to rave about books I would almost always find pedestrian when I actually got hold of them. 

And let’s face it.  As a reader, I’m far more receptive to the kind of fiction that makes a lot of noise in elite publications than a lot of readers are.

In the end, different readers are looking for different things in books.  What’s a “good read” to one person isn’t to another.

Lots of readers will say, as Bookwyrm did yesterday, that their choices are character driven–but not all readers want the same thing in their characters. 

I tend to be strongly draw to books with a sense of place, but it has to be the right kind of place.  I want urban, not rural.  I want sophisticated urban and not gritty dying industrial city.

And if I can’t have that, I want Greece.

I was never able to discover this kind of thing, except very peripherally, by reading book reviews.   And since my idea of a great book and the average reviewer’s were not really in line, I wasn’t able to find out of the book was “good” either.

So I think I’ll go with the idea that peer to peer reviewing–rather than professional reviewing–seems like a good idea. 

I’m not much interested in having a reviewer “form my taste,” which was part of the older system, and my guess is most other people aren’t either.

I am interested in finding new authors that I’d like but haven’t read, and I’m interested in finding readers who have never heard of me but might like what I do.

I figure we can get into the whole educated taste thing in other places, where it fits better than in the simple retail selling of books.

So, here I am, you know, sitting in the office, wondering what I should be writing, if anything. 

I’ve gotten some work done, which is good.  On the other hand, I’m very distracted.  So there’s that.

Here’s the thing:  starting about the 2nd of January, my younger son started to complain of blurry vision.   Then he’d say he was okay.  Then he’d complain again.

This did not particularly worry me, because he was obviously getting around the house fine, playing video games, watching DVDs, all the rest of that stuff.  If anything was odd, it was that he wasn’t reading as much as usual, but he goes through phases where he doesn’t, so I was just mildly annoyed.

Then, about halfway through the month, he announced that he could no longer see anything at all except colors and shapes, all fuzzy and indistinct, and that he was “freaked out.”

Yes, well.  That’s putting it mildly. 

After that we went through two weeks of trying to get appointments with doctors and keep them. 

You have no idea what kind of a mess your life becomes when it puts down two feet of snow every five days for weeks at a time.   Appointments were made.  Doctors cancelled them. 

And in the meantime, my son got more and more frantic and so did I. 

The one hopeful sign was that he obviously wasn’t blind blind–he could (and can) see enough to get around at least in familiar places.   His pupils were obviously dilating normally when exposed to light.   If he got something close enough to his eyes, he could usually make it out.

But still.

The weather finally cleared up this week, more or less.  At least the snow banks down my front walk aren’t shoulder height any  more, and it isn’t snowing every time you turn around.

And we know what’s wrong with Greg’s vision:  cataracts, in both eyes.

In case you’re wondering, yes, this is a thing–a congenital condition, a rare one, but nowhere near as rare as some things.

Usually, it would have been caught at an earlier stage, because he would have been having increasing problems with his vision over time.

But he wasn’t.  As late as his last physical, his eye exam was perfectly normal and didn’t even suggest the need for glasses. 

Nobody thought to check for something like this because–well, why would you?  There’s nothing in his medical history of anything like it happening to anybody in the family.  He doesn’t have any of the conditions that can sometimes cause cataracts in children and adolescents (like diabetes).

Anyway, everybody tells me that I shouldn’t feel so badly about this, that it’s a minor operation (true) that is virtually always entirely suggessful (also true), that unless something extremely weird and at this point completely unexpected show up on the next round of tests, he’ll almost certainly get back his sight at least to the level it was when he lost it.

And all of that is true, but I’m freaked and upset anyway, and depressed as hell.

I’m worried about him and for him and feeling a little shell shocked all at the same time.

The last five years have been one avalanche of crises after the other, some of them solvable, some of them not.

You’d think  just the law of averages would bring some easing up somewhere, especially for Greg, who just seems to get hit with one damn thing after another.

Ah, but I know more about the law of averages than that.

Okay, I apologize for the title at the outset.  I’ve just woken up.  I haven’t got enough caffeine in me yet.  And the day is going to be really horrible–and could be worse than that.

But here’s the issue.

A woman named Barbara Fister–who writes mysteries published by SMP, and who is a librarian–has posted to Facebook a link to an article at The New Republic about gender bias in the reviewing of books.  The article is here, if you want to read it:

http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/82930/VIDA-women-writers-magazines-book-reviews?id=+4Ixqyghv2GJYy+6aW4JjJ691ls3vJalg7flkdXjliHKVdLUY5u+euGzvunArz5F

I will admit that I don’t generally pay attention to things like this, because I tend to think that they’re silly.  Publishing is one of the most woman-heavy professions available.  Women are editors, senior editors, publishers, publicists, writers, copyeditors, agents, reviwers  and even best sellers in numbers large enough to make the feminization of the field over the last thirty years fairly obvious to anybody who spends any time in it.

What’s more is that the great virtue of capitalism is that companies out to make money don’t usually give a damn if the people who make it for them are male or female, black or white, gay or straight, or trolls who normally live underground at Mount Vesuvius.  If you sell 25,000 copies in hardcover, you’ll get published, and you’ll get reviewed.  If you sell 100,000 or more, they’ll turn you into a movie star.  Sell like, say, J.K. Rowling–the single best selling author in the world today, and obviously female–and they’ll make you a god.

Goddess.

Whatever.

I have no idea if women are represented in equal numbers among the writers and reviewers of American fiction these days.  I do know that if they are not, it’s unlikely that the issue is gender bias. 

I would say there is a certain get-no-respect factor, but I’m not sure if that’s gender bias either.  In mystery fiction, for instance, women tend to be associated with cozies.  But cozies are very often badly written books, and would be no matter who read them.  And women who write better crime fiction–from Kathy Reichs to Laura Lippmann to P.D. James–get all the respect that anybody could ever want or need.

Well, okay.  No.  There’s never enough.  I get that.

But you see what I mean. 

It’s also true that the most woman-heavy genre of all–romance–gets the least respect of all, but it’s also true it’s the genre with the largest percentage of really bad books, and the only one that forces a large percentage of its writers into the straitjacket of a “tip sheet.” 

So I’m fairly sure that, if there is gender disproportion in the publishing of modern American fiction, it does not result from gender bias in any straightforward definition of that term.  It’s not entirely possible that we are all subconsciously programmed to recoil at the sight of a woman’s name on a book, but I don’t know how we’d test for that.

Now, I will admit that part of the reason why I don’t read articles like the one Barbara Fister posted is that these things–the realities of women in the publishing world I’ve known for 30 years–seem so obvious to me that I can’t understand how anybody could fail to notice them without being terminally addled. 

It was a good thing I read this one, though, because there was a good reason why the writer of it couldn’t recognize the realities I saw.

She couldn’t recognize them, because she wasn’t looking at them.

And, in fact, neither was anybody else connected to the project she was discussing.

The first thing the writer of this article did was to exclude all genre fiction from consideration.  Then she proceeded to exclude all fiction that was “obviously commercial.”

I’m not talking about cook books and self help books and that kind of thing.  She later excluded those, too, but given what it was she was trying to prove, she had a point there.

But by restricting “publishing and reviewing fiction” to “publishing and reviewing self-consciously literary fiction,”  she changed the very industry she was claiming to examine. 

Literary fiction in the United States today is not only a separate genre–and it is, by and large, a genre–but is as well a separate industry, distinctly apart from the rest of publishing and running by very different rules.

In what I think of as “normal publishing,” a writer writes what matters to her in the way she thinks works best, and a publisher publishes because she believes the book can find an audience.  Then the book goes out into the world.  Then the book goes out into the world.  Everybody but the writer forgets it ever existed.  It does or does not find an audience.  The writer publishes another book, or doesn’t.  The publisher publishes that book or doesn’t.   The agents all get heartburn.

I’m the first to say that publishers are lame to cringingly awful at knowing how to sell books.  Authors are often left to try to market their books themselves.  Publishers often pick “surefire best sellers” that crash dismally in the stores and mark their writers as one more career wrecked by a million dollar advance.

It’s one of the reasons why I’ve never been the kind of writer who tries to push for more and more advance money irrespective of how well I’m earning out.  

On the other hand, I’m not sure that all the publicity in the world will really sell books.  There’s certainly a way to manufacture a best seller–once or twice for an author.  Because if the author whose sales are artifically inflated turns out not to be writing what anybody wants to read, she will in the long run crash and burn.

The writing and publishing of literary fiction is not like this.

For one thing, it has an established credentialing system.  Writers of popular fiction, genre or otherwise, do all kinds of things before they sit down to write their books.  They’re insurance salesmen and housewives and librarians and engineers and just people who like to read and think they’ve got something they can try out on computer.

For literary fiction, and for a reviewing spot on one of the magazines or journals that review such fiction, the path is much narrower.  Solid majorities of present day literary writers have been through one of the writing programs.  The Iowa MFA is the best, but there are plenty of others around these days.  Agents who handle literary fiction and editors interested in publishing it know these programs and are regular participants in the endless “writer’s conferences” they stage. So are the editors of the little magazines that usually provide the first platform for such writers in print.

If o\you are a literary writer who has never been published and wants to be, your best chance it to get into one of these programs and show your work to the visiting editors who come through every once in a while looking for new talent.

And if you want to get into one of these programs, your best chance is to have a very particular kind of undergraduate experience–the Ivies are nice, but even better are the small, pricey liberal arts colleges with reputation for being serious about the quality of education.  Smith and Wellesley.  Kenyon and Swarthmore. 

And yes, okay, Vassar, because I have to own up to my own.

Most of you by now know where I’m going with this, so I won’t be coy.  What is going on here is not a gender bias, but a class bias–with class defined not as the income bracket from which your family came but as a set of attitudes, tastes and experience shared among a cohesively comprehensible set of people.

Because the trick is this:  if you go this route, you can be sure that the editors who buy your work and the reviewers who review it will have virtually the same educational background, the same tastes in everything from music to what to drink with dinner, and the same life experiences in general. 

If you go this route, you major in English at Swarthmore, go for an MFA at Iowa, have your worked looked at by visiting editors from Granta and then published there, have your work discussed at editorial meetings of little magazines and literary journals until there’s a “buzz,” meet your agent at the Christmas party at the The Kenyon Review, sell your first book to an editor at Knopf who knew your agent’s roommate when they were both at Breadloaf, and get your book reviewed by a guy who was one of four English majors at Vassar before he moved to New York and went to work for serious magazines.

Okay, I’m being snarky, and I admit it.

I’ve got nothing against colleges like Swarthmore and Kenyon, I went to one.  I even majored in English.

My point, though, remains, and that is that we have erected an institutional framework for “literary fiction” in this country that is very good at making sure certain people get published and make a living at it, but that is really, really bad at producing writers who will be, in any sense at all, “important” in the long run.

It is also an institutional structure that must be negotiated like any other bureaucratic career path.

And that means that it attracts people with personalities congenial to such a career path.

And that career path is almost certainly likely to get you fewer women on any level than would have been there with a looser, less rationalized route to success. 

It’s also likely to get you a lot of excruciatingly boring, determinedly mediocre books.

Look, let’s make a little sense here.

First, women tend to get derailed on their march toward careers more than men do, for a number of reasons not all of which are “sexism.” 

Second, the chief problem with bureaucratized career paths to writing “literature” is that they force the potential writer into a narrow, myopic, self-referential world whose paramenters start to look like “truth” because none of the people inside them knows anything about what goes on in the outside world.

The old cliche about writers “learning about life” by taking off on a tramp steamer might have been silly, but it was a better paradigm for what it takes to be a good writer than three years in the Iowa Masters of Fine Arts program. 

Jonathan Franzen, Ann Beattie, Sue Miller, Alice Hoffmann all write beautiful, perfectly crafted prose, but they all seem to be writing about the same people doing the same things.  And what’s worse, when they do try to venture out into the world of convenience store clerks, local trash collection businessmen and people who go to Die Hard movies, they all seem to meet the same stereotypical stock types.  Everyday office workers are alienated and deeply disastified with their lives.  People who work at McDonald’s are either brain dead stupid or else sad sack cases of people who got degrees in Slavic Literature and couldn’t find a job.   Even people who say they believe in God don’t really.  People who are dedicated to religion are hypocrites, lusters after power, or worse.

No work of modern literary fiction will ever give you a world in which God exists as a real presence, or where businessmen live satisfying and fulfilling lives, or where working class people have good and cogent reasons (not racism, not stupidity) to identify with the Tea Party.

For better of for worse, the last forty years have seen American literary fiction become a hothouse genre with not only limited appeal–these are, after all, the people who think “accessibility” is a problem–but with limited scope as well.

Part of the reason I’m not worried about a lack of gender equity in the writing, publishing and reviewing of these books–assuming such lack of gender equity actually exists–is that I think they’re largely irrelevant to the writing and reading in America today, or any other day.

A hundred years from now, people may still be reading Stephen King, of J.K. Rowling.  They will not be reading Jonathen Franzen or Ann Beattie.

Popular fiction produces a lot of total crap, but it does that for the same reason Babe Ruth held the all-time records for most strike-outs as well as most home runs.

You can’t hit a home run unless you swing at the ball, and most of the chances you take will turn out badly.

American literary fiction stopped taking swings at chancy balls a long time ago.

It’s the start of one of those long and complicated days, which is going to be followed by an even longer and more complicated day tomorrow.  And, of course, I’m not getting any sleep.  But the end result of taking a week end is that you wake up Monday morning having to worry about things again, so here I am.

Today I’ve got teaching followed by two interviews and a meeting.  Tomorrow I’ve got doctors’ appointments.  It gets to the point where I don’t know what I’m doing, even though what I’m doing has the potential to ease up the situation here on at least some points.

I’ll keep my fingers crossed, which is what I do instead of pray.  Hey, Isaac Asimov used to knock wood. 

As to the present run of conversation:

Robert says I want to hear from somebody who witnessed the Crucifixion and Resurrection but did not believe.

That would be nice, but what I was really asking for was a lot less.  There were other events that are supposed to have occurred, according to the Gospels,  at the time of the Crucifixion.

For instance, there was, by the Gospel reports, an earthquake.

An earthquake is a public event.   Even people in the area who had never heard of Jesus and knew nothing about his Crucifixion should have experienced the earthquake if it happened. 

So far, however, there is no evidence that anybody not connected with the Gospel movement ever experienced this earthquake.  There are no official records of it.  There are no diary entries.  There are no letters–gee, Livia, you wouldn’t believe the shake out we had here yesterday.

It seems to me that, with all the archeology we’ve done in that area in the intervening centuries, we would have come across something, somewhere that would amount to an independent verification of what would have been a very public event.

And, like Schleimann finding Troy, we may stumbled across just that at some point in the future.  It seems to me to speak to the unreliability of the Gospel story, however, that we haven’t yet.

That said, I do get Robert’s point about the Jews.  It’s not just that they’ve survived as a culture–and a very distinct culture–while being run over by one conquering mass after another.  It’s that they’ve inspired, over those same centuries, a really remarkable history of being the target of people who desperately want to wipe them off the planet and who take a good shot at doing so.

Genocidal anti-Semitism precedes Christianity in the area we now call Germany and Austria by at least 500 years. 

And it’s not true that the Romans didn’t care what the Jews did.  They cared quite a bit, mostly because the Jews would not sacrifice to Roman gods.  That mattered because Rome didn’t see sacrificing to Roman gods as a matter of belief, but as a statement of loyalty to the empire.   The idea that anybody would refuse because of a “belief” just seemed ridiculous to them–so if the Jews were refusing, I had to be because they were fomenting rebellion against Roman authority.

Then there’s the nearer history, the history of pogroms and persecutions throughout Europe during the Christian era–forced out of England wholesale in the Middle Ages, restricted in where they could live and what they could do for a living, killed wholesale on a whim or forced into exile because the latest plague must have something to do with the fact that those horrible Jews who killed Christ lived in your capital city. 

Never mind the Spanish Inquisition, which we tend to forget was directed not against “heretics” in general but against both practicing Jews and “conversos,”  Jews who had converted to Christianity but were suspected of not really meaning it and being Jewish in secret.  After all, they still had so much money…

And then we have Hitler and Stalin both.

It’s a remarkable history, and unique in the world.   And it continues as we speak, with half the population of the planet declaring they’re going to drive Israel into the sea and a fair minority of that same population saying that their goal is to wipe every last Jew out of existence.

I wouldn’t call it a miracle, but I think it’s a remarkable thing anyway.

As for “God is too big and beyond me for me to expect to understand Him,” it always seems to me to be a euphemism for “shut off your brain and don’t think.” 

My brain is all I have.  It’s the only tool for survival I’ve been given.  If I don’t know something and I want to find out, I have to use that brain to figure it out–and what violates the laws of logic is probably not the best way to go.

If I can find no sensible explanation for why, in a world supposedly created and sustained by an omnipotent and  benevolent God with the best interests of his creatures always in mind, three year old children die in horrible pain from incurable cancers, good and decent people are swept away in tsunamis and hurricanes, and raging, destructive sociopaths win multistate lotteries while their upright next door neighbors see their houses lost to foreclosure–well, the most sensible thing for me to do is to conclude that God may or may not exist, but if He does exist, he is either not benevolent or not omnipotent.

Nothing else fits the facts as I know them, and I have to go by the facts as I know them.

That said, I am here to report that much of Book XII of Augustine’s City of God reads like a compendium of mid-twentieth century science fiction plots.   We have multiple universes, multiple alternative universes, universes that reincarnate generally and universes that reincarnate specifically.

In case you haven’t run into those last two–a universe that reincarnates generally starts a life cycle, lives it through, and then regenerates and does another life cycle.  A universe that reincarnates specifically does the same, except each and every succeeding universe contains the same people and the same events in the same order as the one before it.

Then there’s a lot about the nature of time, what it means to be outside time, what it means to be inside time, what time travel would mean–and that part sounds a lot like Dr. Who.

I’ve said once or twice that part of the importance of studying intellectual history is learning where our ideas came from.  I don’t know if your standard twenty-first century science buff would be happy or annoyed to find that he’s not said anything very different from a bunch of guys living in 410 Rome who thought that what they were doing was being heretics–but here we are.

I wonder why this kind of speculation disappeared for so long from the culture at large, and only started popping up again in the nineteenth century. 

Whatever the reason, most of Augustin’s Book XII could be reprinted in Analog as an overview of science fiction concepts about the nature of the universe and the nature of time–and nobody would know the difference.

I have to go be sensible.

I am sitting at this computer this morning  feeling more addled that I can say.  I’ve only been up since eleven, which is something I never do.  In this case, however, it’s not that I decided to sleep in and now feel sluggish because of it.

What happened was that our power went out last night around half past twelve, and I got up at one forty five to find that my two sons were sitting up in the living room together, waiting for it to go back on again.

My younger son has been having vision problems lately, and he didn’t want to go upstairs in the dark.  My older son was keeping him company until there was light to see with.

I ended up downstairs, too, and we called the power company to see what was going on.  The automated system cheerfully informed us that our power would go back on by “seven fifteen a.m.”

I managed to stay downstairs and awake until seven fifteen came and went without any sign of the power.  Then I went back to sleep while Matt stayed down until the sunlight was absolutely blazing.   I woke up again around ten to find that the power was still not on.  I turned over and was finally awoken by the sound of the water in the heating pipes suddenly circulating.

That’s how I got here.

I’m going through all this just to make sure that you understand I might not be all that coherent.    Also, the typos might be worse than usual.

But to answer John–Augustine had the same answer for the problem of evil every Christian writer I’ve ever read has had–God is too big for you to understand, just trust that this all makes sense in the end, and you’ll know eventually.

It’s the kind of thing that, in general, just makes me crazy.  Too much of the discussion about religion with religious people depends on arguments that rely on the nonbeliever having an artificially restricted set of options.

Either think the universe is full of chance and circumstance and radically meaningless, or take this on faith and believe that there is a God who will make sense of it in the end.

This would be a weak argument even if the only two alternatives were atheism or Christianity.  It’s something worse than that when you start to take into consideration all the other religions that require you to take on faith whatever it is they have to offer.

If I stick to a very strick rule of no double standards–once I’ve set a standard of belief, I have to apply it evenly to all comers–I find myself in a position where I am unable to choose between any of them.

If I decide that it is legitimate to take the word of believers for what they have seen and experienced, absent any other evidence, then I have to take the testimony not only of Mark and John and Luke and Matthew and Paul, but of the prophets of Islam and the seers of Hindusim as well.

Many people from many traditions claim to have witnessed miracles and talked to God.  

Robert said, last time I discussed this here, that you have to determine which of the witnesses you’re listening to is the most credible. 

But I see no way of proving that the witness of Paul is more credible than the witness of Mohammed, or vice versa. 

All I can judge, at this late stage of the game, is what has resulted from the fact that other people have believed them.

And the witness of history–which is what that is–is not negligible. 

The problem is, it’s also not decisive in determining the credibility of the witnesses to the Resurrection.

I am certainly more attracted to where Christianity got us than I am to where Islam got the other people over there,  but that does not prove that Christ actually rose from the dead or that when He died the graves opened and the dead walked.

And although the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence, it bothers me that there is no third party, non-faith-connected witnesses to any of these things.  Surely if these things had really happened, somebody, somewhere would have taken notice of them, if only to say “Gee, the other day in Jerusalem, the oddest stuff happened.”

But in the end the simple nature of the world, the way in which truly terrible things happen to anybody at all at random, and good ones do too, convinced me, more and more, that if we ever do find a way to prove that God exists, the God that does exist will not be the one described in Christian doctrine. 

I think this universe is possessed of a lot of things, but a benevolent creator is not one of them.

I’m going to go watch something cheerful, like a slasher movie.

This morning, with my schedule all turned around, I drank tea and listend to Beethoven’s Eroica.

That, from the same culture that gave us the three H trio of totalitarianism–Hegel, Heidigger and Hitler–and then threw in Marx for good measure.