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.

As long as I’ve been writing commentary on this site, I’ve received comments from proponents of  “small government,” who argue, paraphrasing Ronald Reagan and others, that small  government is better. 

What few of these proponents of “small government” seem to understand is that the combination of small government and high technology is not a recipe for freedom, but for oppression of everyone but the well-off by the well-off.  Now… I am not anywhere close to a fan of government for the sake of government or for more bureaucracy and government agencies, but the problem we face as a society is that technology, especially high technology, requires bigness, and bigness equals power, and government, and sometimes not even government, is about all that can rein in concentrated corporate power.

At one point, the United States did have small government.  We didn’t have food inspections, and the amount of tainted, spoiled, and bad food sold was enormous.  We didn’t have environmental regulations, and most major rivers were dead or dying, and little could live in them, and several were so polluted they caught fire.  The air was so filled with soot in some cities that white shirts were gray by noon. We didn’t have banking regulations, and on a regular basis there were widespread bank failures where depositors lost everything.  We didn’t even have standardized time zones, and train schedules were essentially unusable.

Today, the United States and the world is far more advanced – and complex. There are over 80,000 flights in the United States every day. Major airports average a takeoff and landing every 1-4 minutes. Despite all the complaints, the U.S. averages about one major commercial accident a year, and some years have passed without any. Without government-imposed uniform standards for operations, safety, and maintenance, those numbers would be far higher.  Without regulation of the communications spectrum, broadcasting would be either chaos or the property of broadcasters with the biggest wallets and the most powerful transmitters.

Despite the complaints and the touting of industry about its innovation, without government funding and research, we wouldn’t have the internet or the I-Phone.  Nor would we have the interstate highway system.  We would also have millions of people living and dying in extreme poverty – as they once did – as opposed to a less than perfectly efficient welfare/disability system that results in a much less than desirable and barely adequate standard of living for a majority of the unemployed or unemployable.

Yet despite the progress created by government, imperfect as it is, there is a lack of recognition of how it has improved life in the United States for virtually everyone, and the cries for small government continue.  What these people want, it seems to me, is less government regulation over that sector of commerce, business, or life that is most important to them, in particular, and fewer rules and regulations that impede their freedom of action and ability to maximize profits. 

Government is anything but perfect, and in many areas, its regulations are indeed cumbersome and sometime unnecessary.  In other areas, the regulations don’t work, and in some areas, more regulation is likely necessary.  But what that means is that we need more effective and efficient government, not the “small government” so often touted by both ultra-conservatives and ultra-libertarians. We tried small government, and it didn’t work for a moderately complex industrializing society, and it certainly won’t work for a society that’s even more complex in a world that is getting ever more complicated.

But then, the history of small government, and its copious failures, has already been forgotten, as so much of unpleasant history is, lost in the nostalgia for a time that never was.

Over the past two centuries especially, but for longer than that, authors, historians, pundits and others have debated the question of whether history repeats itself and what, if anything, we can learn from the study of history, Personally, I like Santayana’s statement about those who fail to learn the lessons of history being doomed to repeat them.  But I also like Twain’s comment that history doesn’t repeat itself, but that it rhymes.

To say that there’s been some upheaval caused by conflicts centered on the Islamic faith over the last half-century or so would be an understatement.  Some, such as Bill Maher, who dislikes all religion, but Islam in particular, have tended to overlook the historical “rhyme” presented by the crisis facing Islam today – and it is indeed a crisis, because Christianity entered a similar phase and crisis some five centuries ago, when the ideas coming out of the Renaissance, a more scientific outlook, and doubts about the infallibility of Church and the Papacy came to a head with brutal conflicts all across Europe that lasted more than a century and resulted in the Reformation and the fragmentation of the Catholic Church.  Too many Christians today tend to gloss over the brutality and the death toll that occurred during that period.  Historical records indicate that the death toll amounted to as much as half the population of the German principalities and a third of those living in Czech or Bohemian territories.  This was also the time period when the Inquisition effectively terrorized Spain, and when Protestant-Catholic strife wracked England.  In the end, the result was effectively the establishment of government in western Europe on primarily a secular basis [with a few notable exceptions], not that such governments were not initially highly influenced by religion and religious institutions.

We’re seeing a huge socio-politico-religious upheaval involving Islam today, largely centered in the Middle East and Northern Africa today, and that strife is largely the result of the impact of Western secularity and technology on societies that have essentially been governed on an Islamic basis largely at odds with the fundamental secular basis of western nations. and most likely at least partly, if not largely, incompatible with high technology and science.  Such secular beliefs as individual worth outside the religious structure, the greater personal value and political independence of women, the supremacy of science and the scientific mindset over religion and doctrine pose a tremendous threat to the existing social and religious structure in those nations – just as the Renaissance and the rise of science did to the Catholic Church five centuries ago, and that established Islamic structure is opposing and will continue to oppose change, just as happened in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and, frankly, just as some fundamentalist Christian sects still oppose change.

Unhappily, the “lessons of history,” or their “rhymes,” as Twain put it, as well as what we are already observing suggest that the death toll will continue, and may well rise, because the fight over belief is central to human and social identity…and few give up old and familiar beliefs for newer “truths” without a struggle, especially if the new beliefs result in less power for those individuals (in this case, traditional Islamic males) who stand to lose the position that they have held through religion.

Recently, an article in New Scientist cited a study that showed readers of “literary fiction” displayed more empathy than did readers of “popular” fiction.  After the wave of nausea, disgust, and anger passed, I couldn’t help but think how great a disservice the  English-speaking “literati” have done to both authors and the reading public by making an artificial distinction – that supposedly represents quality – between popular and/or genre fiction and so-called literary fiction. This disdain seems to be less pronounced in the United Kingdom than in the United States, but that’s my view as an outsider to British literary circles.  Unfortunately, this distinction is reinforced by a goodly number of the F&SF publishers, possibly because they really don’t want it known that the distinction is artificial and that there are “literary-quality” genre books.  Heaven forbid, people might not read any F&SF book if they thought they might have to think, or perhaps it just makes marketing that much simpler.

Personally, I think most readers know exactly what they want to read, and even what type of book suits their mood at a particular time.  Despite the labels and marketing hype and misleading cover blurbs, experienced readers find authors who appeal to them. 

I have no problem with observations about the quality of writing, provided those observations are accurate and based on the words of the author, but I have a huge objection to automatically categorizing fiction on the basis of either genre or popularity. It’s definitely true that a great amount of best-selling “mainstream” fiction, i.e., popular fiction, does not present great depth and sophistication, and the same holds true for much of genre fiction – but not all of either is without depth and great skill in writing.  Just look at the consternation when everyone discovered that J.K. Rowling had published an “adult” novel under a pseudonym… and that it was considered rather good.

 Margaret Atwood, whether she will ever admit it or not, writes science fiction in a literary style, but it’s still science fiction.  So does Gene Wolfe, but Gene’s work is considered F&SF, while Atwood’s is literary fiction. There are more than a few F&SF titles published every month that, in terms of style, sophistication, and depth, meet every so-called “literary” criterion.  Yet, particularly in the United States, it seems to me, the literary establishment cannot seem to bear the thought that a genre writer, or a popular writer, might actually exhibit some skill while actually telling an entertaining story with depth and an exploration of life and meaning beyond the tried and true tropes that still seem to shackle so much of so-called literary fiction.

Despite the disdain of genre fiction, particularly F&SF, by American “literati,” more and more ideas and approaches from F&SF are turning up in so-called mainstream fiction, and, likewise, more “literary” approaches to writing are appearing in F&SF.  Both are very good developments;  it’s just too bad that all too many members of the self-proclaimed [if quietly and in a falsely self-deprecating manner that ostensibly denies such membership] American literati don’t understand that.  They’d do far better to concentrate on celebrating good fiction, regardless of labels.