The other day was, as one children’s book puts it, “an awful, no-good, horrible, very bad day.”  Well… it wasn’t THAT bad, by any measure, but it was incredibly frustrating.  I discovered that a document required by a government agency, a document that had been sent twice, had apparently been lost or misplaced twice  — which required sending it once again. I also discovered that the manuscript that I’d sent to my editor by UPS two-day air had not arrived, and had been sitting for almost two days in Salt Lake, and when I tried to follow-up, no one knew where it was.  Now, I’d sent the manuscript by two-day air, at his request, so that he could get it and read it during his travels. Another day passed, and UPS finally located it in Des Moines, and I was assured it would be only a day late [which was too late for my editor, meaning a three-week delay before he could read it]… Another day passed, and the manuscript finally reached Philadelphia.  It finally reached New York and the Tor offices five days after being sent as a two-day air shipment.

Both the government and UPS are large institutions, and I think the thing that bothers me about institutional incompetence is that, in essence, no one is accountable.  If I screw up as an author, there’s no doubt that I screwed up.  I can’t blame anything but the price and the package on anyone else, and, in the interests of full disclosure, I will point out that, with the advent of electronic publishing, the vast majority of typos are my fault.  The editors and I both try to catch them, but I made them, not my editors.

The other problem with institutional incompetence is that too many of the “solutions” simply don’t work very well, particularly those which attempt to reward good employees and not less competent ones.  In every institutional, educational, and government or corporate setting in which I’ve worked, and in every one for which I did consulting work, the one thing that was common to all was that the highest rated employees were the ones who knew how to work the system.  Some of them were also quite good at their work as well, but there were many who were far less competent than lower-rated employees who were not as politically skilled, and many incompetent employees managed to keep jobs they screwed up through their political skills.  Yet, as time and experience have shown, reliance on purely “subjective” standards results in massive discrimination and even more corruption, not to mention unbridled nepotism.

Why does this happen even with laws dealing with the matter?  Because the law demands that procedures be “fair,” i.e., not only applied equitably to all employees, but also that employees be judged on objective and measurable standards.  One of the big problems there is that subjective standards are often more accurate.  I’ve watched organizations be torn apart by gossip and back-biting, by underhanded use of accurate information to misinform and to undermine the performance of others, who then appear incompetent, and sometimes do incompetent acts because of such misinformation. Individuals who engage in this kind of manipulative and unscrupulous behavior are usually skilled enough in doing it that they never violate any objective standard.  Thus, the most a supervisor can do is refuse to promote them, and that can be tricky as well, both legally and in practice.  I’ve seen individuals promoted just so that a supervisor could get rid of them.

Do I have any real and workable answers?  Not really, because, like it or not, a certain measure of incompetence is inevitable in any large structure… and that’s why I, and others, have late packages and must sometimes submit forms time and again.

More than a few times in my life, I’ve seen a legal decision and thought, “How could that ever be considered just… or even ethical?”  I’ve certainly heard others voice similar sentiments. Now, I know that while many lawyers and judges, perhaps the vast majority, believe that the highest priority of law is the pursuit of justice, I also know that as a tool for obtaining justice, the law and those who enforce and interpret it often fall short in seeking justice… or in many cases even being able to seek it. Part of the reason for that, besides incompetence or corruption, is the simple fact that we as a society must reconcile conflicting ethical hierarchies.

In the United States, the Congress and the courts have made an effort over the life of the nation to press for the equality of individuals under the law, and that includes the rights of people to be able to vote based on their qualifications rather than their appearance or color or gender, and more recently to be considered for employment based on qualifications. Obviously, we have a ways to go, but the legal emphasis on equal rights has been broadened and, in this regard, matters have improved over the years.

At the same time, with the increase and widening of individual rights, other historic “rights” have been limited, such as, at least for white males, the right to associate with those they chose and the right not to be forced to associate with those they do not choose, the right of to whom they might sell property, and the right to choose the employees they feel are “best” for a position, regardless of more objective qualifications.  So, while at one time, the right of employer’s choice and an individual’s “free association” ruled supreme, now, under current law, those former rights to discriminate on the basis of creed or color or gender have been placed lower on the legal hierarchy than the right of individuals to be considered on their other qualifications.

 The same shift in rights has also occurred in determining the membership in clubs and organizations, so that it has become far more difficult for a club to reject applicants because of gender, color, or religion.  One predictable reaction is that initiation fees at private country clubs have, in general, soared to astronomical levels, so that the discrimination has become, at least theoretically, purely economic.

There is another area where there is a conflict still playing out, and that is between the general “right to life” of a person and the right to property and to protect one’s property.  In general, the general framework of the law has historically allowed the use of deadly force in self-defense, but not to allow in a broad construct the use of deadly force “merely” to protect property, and in recent years there have actually been court cases where burglars have been awarded damages because a property owner used excessive force in protecting his or her property.  In some states, even the right to self-defense was limited if the person whose property was being invaded could withdraw safely.  And most police and lawyers say that, no matter what happened even a few moments before, shooting an intruder or attacker in the back is definitely a dangerous move from a legal standpoint.

The often unspoken justification for this particular “hierarchy” is that no property has a value equivalent to a human life, because one cannot put a value on life.  Even as a general principle, however, there are some problems with this justification. First, both government regulations for the environment and safely are based on fixed [if varied] values for human life, as are the limits for wrongful death under law in many instances. So are insurance policies. Then there’s the question of what property is and what it represents.  If you work and use some of your income to buy various goods – a house, a car, a television, a stereo – you have literally “spent” some of your life on those goods.  If someone steals or destroys those goods, in a sense, they’ve taken part of your life.   This is also true if someone hacks into your bank account or credit card.

But, for the most part, the law doesn’t see it that way.  So you have criminals who”steal,” if you will, small or sometimes significant parts of people’s lives getting minor sentences, and then serving them and returning to doing the same thing, while someone who is convicted of  killing someone will be punished more severely… yet if you add up the “pieces” of lives stolen by so-called non-violent criminals, the total damage to people in society might be far greater.

But that’s the way the hierarchy of law works.

The November issue of The Atlantic contains a feature article with the results of a survey designed to suggest on the fifty greatest inventions. I read the list before I read the article, and it struck me immediately that there was a large “something” missing from the list.  It took me a few minutes to realize what I thought it was – the domestication of animals. Now it turned out that since I didn’t read the article until after reading the list, I missed the fine print, which specified that the inventions had to have been made after the use and discovery of the wheel.

Even so, I remain convinced that human beings would not have civilization as we know it today without the development of domesticated animals, particularly large beasts of burden. As a practical matter, there has not been a technologically advanced human society that did not have beasts of burden.  Even the handicapped Incas had lamas, but for all their wizardry with stone, they never reached the level of wide-scale iron-working, for example [admittedly, the lack of trees and easily reached iron didn’t help either], but the North American native cultures had plenty of trees to work with, but no domesticated beasts of burden, except dogs, and they couldn’t make the technological leap into the iron age, either.

Why not?  Because the development of technology requires an agricultural surplus, and creating such a surplus appears to be close to impossible without organized and productive agriculture, and that has never developed anywhere on the planet without some form of large beast of burden.  A hunter/gatherer or an early planting culture has never made that leap without beasts of burden.

All of which points out to me, at least, that the vaunted human ingenuity needed some help, that we couldn’t pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, so to speak, without the horse, the ox, the water buffalo, the donkey, perhaps the elephant.  In turn, that suggests that there are indeed limits to human capabilities… something that we, as a species, really don’t like to consider.

Just a thought.

I always get amused and sometimes angered when someone insists on “debating” questions or issues that have been settled, especially those settled by science [and yes, I know, some science issues turn out not to be so settled, but those issues get re-settled by evidence, not debate].  For example, like it or not, global warming is happening, and like it or not, there is absolutely no genetic basis for “racial superiority.”  When people insist on “debating” those issues again, especially without new evidence, and either the politicians or the media give into them, it gives air time and publicity to bad ideas.  Just look what has happened time and time again, even under democratic regimes, when various bad ideas were debated, such as “racial purity” in the Weimar Republic that became as result of such issues the Third Reich, or, for that matter, segregation in the United States after the Civil War, by which racial superiority was resurrected through “debate” over the worth and capability of black Americans and ensuing legislation and then an infamous Supreme Court decision.

Here in the United States, I understand fully that the federal government cannot continue to run massive deficits indefinitely, but giving publicity and debating time to Ted Cruz so that he can espouse the idea that the United States should not pay its bills because the deficit is too high?  Not paying your bills is a bad idea, especially when the world’s economy rests on our currency.  This shouldn’t have to be debated.  Not paying our bills shouldn’t even be considered.  That’s not a debate; it’s demagoguery.  So is the always-resurrected idea that an income tax is somehow unconstitutional. 

Evolution is not speculation.  It’s a theory that has literally hundreds of millions of years of evidence behind it, not to mention some recently documented cases of evolution among current living species.  For Texas state legislators, and others, to insist that “creationism” be given equal time in the states’ high school curriculum, as if there is any factual basis to debate, isn’t debating the issues.  The issue is scientifically settled.  It’s just not religiously settled, and that’s not something that should even come into the content of textbooks in a nation founded on the idea of separation of church and state.

Debate on the basis of belief alone is a fool’s game, because it inevitably degenerates into a contest resolved by some form of power, not on the evidence or facts, and the most powerful fool wins.

As I’ve noted before,  at times there are not two equal sides to some issues, at least on a factual basis. There are times to say, “Enough.  Until you have new, real, and tangible evidence to demonstrate conditions have changed, this debate is over.” But, of course, that seldom happens, because true believers are never convinced by facts that don’t agree with their beliefs.

In the science fiction community, another well-known and controversial figure has just recently declared that no one has really debated his ideas.  In a recent interview, Orson Scott Card said about the muted uproar over his views that has followed the turning of Ender’s Game into a movie, “I’ve had no criticism.  I’ve had savage, lying, deceptive personal attacks, but no actual criticism because they’ve never addressed any of my actual ideas.”  This statement is true only in the sense that the attacks have not been made on the issues raised by either the book or the movie, but absolutely false in the sense that the attacks have indeed addressed head-on ideas that Card has expressed elsewhere. 

Card has said, “Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down…” [Mormon Times, 2008].  In an interview[Solon.com, February 3, 2000], Card actually stated that “It should be perfectly legitimate to fire somebody for that reason [for being a homosexual] or reasons like it.” 

He’s also recently said words to the effect that, while he opposed the changes in the laws that now prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation/gender and allow gay marriage on a state-by-state basis, now that these laws exist, they’ve made his past comments moot.  Legally, that’s largely true, except…he did say that he intended to bring down the government if it “changed” the definition of marriage, and those words were rather close to advocating the violent overthrow of the government.

Now, I have met Scott on two occasions, and he certainly did not come across as stridently as those quotes indicate, but the quotes I cited are anything but isolated instances of his views.  And, like it or not, those views are at variance with both the law and public opinion, and pointing out that fact is not a personal attack.  It’s a sad truth.  Scott can talk all he wants about his critics not addressing the issues, but they have.  They just haven’t addressed the issues he wants addressed.

And as a public figure, which Scott definitely is,  especially with the coming release of the Ender’s Game film and the position of the book atop the New York Times paperback bestseller list, he should also know that once you open your mouth on public issues, especially if you say something nasty or hateful to or about others, it’s not going away.  Not ever.  Just ask Paula Deen.