Absolutist moral pronouncements may be good guidelines for personal behavior, but they make very bad laws. And there’s a very good reason why this is so: absolute moral pronouncements are simple, and neither the universe nor society is. Equally important is the fact that human society has never been able to agree on exactly which moral codes should be enforced and how. Secular laws are by necessity a compromise between conflicting moral codes and beliefs based upon points of agreement [at least, ideally].

One of the basic principles behind the structure set up by the Founding Fathers of the United States was the idea that laws were to be legislated by a civil body, not by religious authority, and that those laws should recognize fundamental civil rights as superior to religious doctrine and rights. The reason for this was basic. They had seen and often lived through a time when people were tortured, killed, or otherwise persecuted for what they believed, and those acts were enabled by laws enacted pursuant to religious authority.

Yet today, we have tens of millions of Americans who are demanding laws to enforce their religious beliefs on others under the guise of religious freedom, effectively repudiating the idea of civil rights through their determination to enact and enforce laws restricting the rights of others based on religious beliefs.

One of the great ironies I see in today’s political debates and often hate-filled rhetoric is that the same people who are so deathly afraid that President Obama or others might impose Islamic Sharia law upon the U.S. are all too often those same ultra-conservative evangelicals who want to impose the “Christian” equivalent of Sharia on the United States – effectively limiting rights for women, legal recognition of religious practices, and the arrogation of religious beliefs over civil rights. Yet those individuals cannot see that what they want is essentially the same structure as ultra-traditional Islamists, but a structure supporting their own ultra-conservative beliefs and enforcing those beliefs on those who do not share them.

I’m very much in favor of civil rights, the right of an individual to do what he or she pleases so long as those acts do not physically harm others – and that includes forms of indirect harm. You should not have the freedom to pollute the air others breathe or the waters others must drink. I have great problems with laws that effectively marginalize others under the guise of religious freedom. I also have problems with those who wish to eliminate laws that protect health and the environment on the grounds that such laws restrict the freedom to do business. Obviously, no law can be perfect, but legislating absolutes is the route to tyranny, not morality.

Almost invariably, the majority of mail that we receive is from charitable organizations, the preponderance of it from so-called charities to which we do not contribute nor most likely never will. There are some, I admit, that once received a contribution in a moment of weakness on our part, but never will again. The unanswered telephone solicitations are even more disturbing, because we have never contributed to anyone or anything based on a telephone solicitation.

It appears, in fact, that everyone and everything has its own charitable organization. While this perception is in fact erroneous, it still feels that way to me, perhaps because there are over a million and a half charitable organizations in the United States alone. And after the scattered revelations of the past few years about the compensation of those running charitable organizations and the fact that, in all too many cases, far too much of donated funds to legally permitted 501(c) (3) organizations goes to anything but the purposes for which they were ostensibly founded. From what I can tell, there are foundations for almost every form of ill-treated or endangered species, particularly mammals, land-based and aquatic, and large avians, not to mention scores of foundations dealing with social ills, justice, discrimination, civil rights, conservation and environmental improvement – the list is truly endless.

The problem, of course, is that a great many of them address very real problems. Far fewer do so efficiently and cost-effectively. Some address problems that don’t seem to be problems to me, such as the “need” to “return” federal lands to either the people or the states [not that either ever held those lands], and some spotlight problems that cannot be solved by greater application of resources.

If people wish to give money to these causes, so be it, but should all these donations be considered tax-deductible? For that matter, should donations to religious organizations be tax-deductible? Such deductions add to the federal deficit and, in essence, require higher taxes on everyone.

Now, I know that many conservatives feel that government attempts to do too much in social programs and believe that private charity is more suited to dealing with many of these problems, but isn’t providing tax deductions for charitable and religious organizations effectively the same as a government subsidy? And all too often, the cost of subsidies is far greater than anyone knows because it’s essentially hidden. The more than one and a half million U.S. charities spend 1.5 trillion dollars every year, an amount equivalent to the 40% of the federal budget. Given the billions poured into charities, if charity were that effective, shouldn’t we be seeing better results?

Arthur C. Clarke once observed that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” While many – and I’m one of them – would generally agree with his words, I’d take it a step further. We live in a magic world, indeed, a magic universe. Einstein theorized that this was true in his equation E = mc2, which essentially equated matter and energy. In practical terms, the development of technology since then has proved that the only difference between “matter” and energy is form, in that all matter is composed of structured energy.

While what we perceive and experience as matter is not “solid” in the sense we emotionally believe and physically experience, since on the sub-atomic level matter is largely empty space, but what could be called, in an over-simplistic sense, the interplay of energy fields. Part of the effect of those fields is to create what we experience as matter, essentially barriers, or at least limitations, to the inter-penetration of other “matter-energy-fields” – a universe, if you will, of energy whose flows and fields we interpret variously as energy and/or matter within a space-time framework.

Theoretically, anything can be transformed into anything else, given enough energy and a sufficiently advanced technology to restructure the energy flows and structure. Whether we as a species will ever master such restructuring doesn’t take away from the fact that it is at least theoretically possible.

That understanding of the universe colors my view of “virtual reality,” because “virtual” or, more accurately “cyber-enhanced-partial representation of physically modulated perception,” seems to me to be a denial of the very wonder of the physical universe, or at least a wish-fulfillment escape from it. Now, I’ve seen enough of death, misery, and oppression to understand all too well why many are embracing virtual reality. It’s a very real attraction, one whose dangers and pitfalls James Gunn outlined more than half a century ago in The Joy Makers [and even earlier in “The Hedonist”], but as Gunn pointed out, it’s so much easier to escape into one’s personal virtual reality than to remake a failing and imperfect society.

And that would be a tragedy in a universe already so magical… but the choice is ours.

The other day I had a discussion with a friend about what I perceive as the excessive level of pay and bonuses received by the CEOs of large corporations and financial institutions. I even mentioned the study that showed no relationship whatsoever between the profitability and success of the corporation and the salary levels of the CEO, as well as one of its conclusions that comparatively lower-paid CEOs often headed up better-performing businesses.

He was anything but convinced. His argument was essentially that, if companies were willing to pay that amount, the executives were worth that much, and that there was nothing wrong with the fact that, in some companies, the CEOs made thousands as much as the salary of the average employee. I’m not against CEOs getting much higher pay than everyone else, but it seems to me that what’s overlooked is that large businesses aren’t successful just because of one executive at the top. The fact that they survive and even prosper while turning over CEOs on the average of every five years suggests to me that CEOs are high-level interchangeable parts, and that means that they’re merely more highly skilled workers, meriting great multiples of the average worker’s compensation, but not to the degree of thousands of times the average salary, and in a few cases up to ten thousand times the salary of the average employee. In fact, until about thirty years ago, they were paid only a hundred times or so the salary of the average employee.

Seemingly lost in the current self-reinforcing beliefs of higher executives are some of the old and truthful adages, such as a chain being only as strong as its weakest link, or the fact that no person is indispensable. Instead, the grandees of industry pose and parade, taking full and often sole credit for the work of thousands of individuals, while giving little but lip-service to those below them and while extolling the benefit of cost-cutting and cost-effectiveness. Yet isn’t it strange how there’s no measurable cost-cutting and cost-effectiveness in the executive suites and boardrooms?

Part of that is because, in a multi-billion dollar corporation, wasteful overpayment to a single individual, i.e., a CEO, is almost noise and doesn’t directly affect the bottom line that much. Indirectly, I’d submit, the effect is much greater, particularly among middle and upper management, because those grandiose salaries inspire brutal and often highly unethical internal power struggles in pursuit of what is often literally a golden fleece. Both the power struggles and the outsized upper level compensation also tend to demoralize lower management and create higher stress levels there. Study after study has shown that stress levels actually are lower in upper management and higher in those who work for them and that the highest stress levels are created at lower levels of management when the expectations of upper management conflict with the lack of adequate resources for achieving those expectations and when the compensation differential between those tasked with a job and those supervising them is highest.

These findings also tend to get buried and never find their way to the executive boardrooms, most likely because corporate emperors are as adverse as other emperors to learning that their imperial garments are illusory and their beliefs self-serving. At least as I’ve observed, the great majority of CEOs are in fact at best marginally more talented than their subordinates, yet the great fallacy of corporate leadership remains — the CEO-perpetuated idea that extra-special individuals preside as CEOs, when in fact a great body of evidence, both statistical and anecdotal, strongly suggests otherwise.

The other day I was reading a book review of A.O. Scott’s Better Living through Criticism, which was interesting in itself, since a magazine book critic was critiquing a movie critic’s book, when I realized something basic about almost all reviews, either by professionals, semi-pros, or even readers. Such reviews report what the general story line is and what the obvious strengths and weaknesses of a book are, at least from the reviewer’s perspective, and while that is valuable to many readers, that is as far as most reviews go.

What most reviews don’t mention is what is not obvious in a book or movie. And from what I can tell from the review of Better Living through Criticism and from what little I’ve quickly read of the book, Scott apparently thinks that critics should go beyond the obvious. I honestly don’t know if he does in his own reviews, because I seldom read movie reviews, but whether he does or not, it’s a valid point, and one I’d recommend to all reviewers.

I’ve had lots of books reviewed over the years by professionals or semi-pros, and most of those reviews, at least the ones I’ve read, fall in the category of finding what I write either acceptable or moderately good, which is certainly better than many possible alternatives. A few reviews have castigated a given book, and a few more have offered fulsome praise. Several times, I’ve had both a castigating review and one of high praise about the same book.

Seldom, however, do reviewers actually mention what is truly different, or even unique, about a book. Now, from an author’s point of view, uniqueness is very much a double-edged blade, as the reviews (and comparative sales) of my more unique books – such as Archform:Beauty, Empress of Eternity, Haze, The One-Eyed Man, Solar Express, or the “Ghost” trilogy – seem to indicate. Yet the majority of reviews of those books never mention the unique aspects of the books, let alone note why they’re different. Instead, most concentrate on the strengths and especially the perceived weaknesses of the conventional aspects of the books. That’s understandable, and in itself, should be expected, but the failure to dwell upon what else lies within the pages and the story shortchanges the reader of the review.

Now… having said that, I could be far better off that the reviewers didn’t mention the different or unique aspects of any of those books, because a great many readers are looking for comfortable escapism and predictable entertainment.

Perhaps, just perhaps, I’m better off that readers don’t know in advance, because some readers will find that difference entrancing (as various emails and letters have told me) when they might not have even picked the book up had they read a review that highlighted the differences.

Which reinforces the thought that more insightful reviews are indeed a double-edged blade.