The other day, I came across a reader review of one of my books, which described it as formulaic.  And I’d agree… and I’d also call the reader who wrote the review either lazy or an idiot, if not both.  All books are formulaic, at least all books that more than a handful of people want to read.  Books require the formula of passable style and grammar, although better style and grammar are definitely a plus.  They require the formula of a plot of some sort.  They require the formula of some sort of resolution. In short, a book is an organized formula for providing entertainment or information, and possibly a great deal more.

So what do lazy idiots who use the term “formulaic” really mean?  According to A Handbook to Literature, “formulaic” is a term “applied to a work that relies excessively on set patterns of plot, character, sentiment, and language.”  The problem with this definition is that all fiction relies on patterns of plot, character, sentiment, and language, and that there is no standard for defining “excessively,” except in the mind of the reader or reviewer.

As a writer, once I’ve set the parameters of a story, I try to make the systems and the characters true to themselves, if you will.  The magic systems or technology are consistent throughout.  The characters develop more as the story progresses, but those developments are a result of who they are and what happens to them. This, frankly, creates a problem for some readers, because people behave like people.  They seldom do strange things, and when they do, it’s for very good and logical reasons, at least to the character in question, and much of what shock there is in what I write comes from characters taking situations and abilities to their logical ends in order to accomplish what they feel is necessary. Formulaic?  I don’t think so, because I don’t find it “excessive,” and most of my readers don’t seem to… or if they do, they like that kind of order and organization.

Part of determining what is “excessive” is strictly a matter of personal taste.  While technically I think George R. R. Martin is a good writer, I find his use of violence and brutality excessive, and I could claim that his best-selling series is “formulaic” on those grounds.  The same could be said of Piers Anthony and his Xanth books, given the incredible overuse of puns.  And I, or any other well-informed reader, could make a similar case for any number of well-known and even critically acclaimed writers.

As in the case in many instances of comments about books, the use of the term “formulaic” may reveal far more about the reader or reviewer who uses the term than about the book being reviewed because, as I said at the beginning of  this commentary, in the broadest sense of the word, all books are formulaic.

Last week the Utah congressional delegation all affirmed that they would be true to their principles and oppose any tax increase for anyone, rich or poor. That got me to thinking, as such sweeping generalizations often do.  Over the years, there’s been a current of approval, in commentary and even in popular song, for people who have insisted on being true to their principles.  I have a problem with this.

In 1861, the leaders of the Confederacy decided to be true to their principles, those of states’ rights embodying the idea that states had the right to hold people of color in slavery and to buy and sell them as property. Following those principles, they led their states into secession.  Earlier, the Catholic Church held to the principle that torturing and killing people to “redeem their souls,” and then officials of the Anglican Church retaliated in various ways based on various principles. Then there was this fellow by the name of Adolf Hitler, whose principles included the idea that people who weren’t of Ayran genetic heritage were inferior, especially Semitic peoples, particularly the Jews, and that ethnic cleansing and mass extermination were principled.  He was certainly true to his principles to the end, even using railroads and troops to continue killing Jews when they could have been used to fight against the allies invading the lands he had earlier conquered.

I may just be an iconoclast, but I guess I just don’t see much virtue in being true to principles that are either suspect – or wrong.  Now… I know, “wrong” is a judgment on my part, but we do have to make judgments in life.  The problem, of course, is determining a moral basis for such judgments, and that gets into a detailed discussion that has consumed much time and effort, both on this blog and throughout human history.  Still, there are some areas of consensus, such as the fact that human slavery is wrong and that killing people solely because of their religious beliefs is as well… and there are certainly others. Likewise, there are the cases where valid moral values clash – which is what makes the abortion debate so thorny [if human life is sacred, and the mother will die without having an abortion, how does one choose without destroying one “sacred life”?].

In the pending “fiscal cliff” political situation, one side’s principles state that “rich” people should pay more – or at least they shouldn’t pay lower effective tax rates – than poor and middle class families because the society in which they live has allowed them to receive more.  The other side’s principles state that, in effect, that tax rates shouldn’t be increased on just those who make more.  Both sides are insisting on being true to their principles while the country faces a possible return of recession if the issue isn’t resolved and long-term financial crises if the overhanging issue of excessive deficit spending isn’t resolved.

Perhaps I’m just being a curmudgeon, but I don’t see much moral value in either side “being true to their principles,” particularly since both sets of principles being touted are flawed.

Why do people vote the way they do… and believe what they do?  A growing number of studies show a link between attitudes linked to heredity and political beliefs.  The issue has gotten hot enough that one U.S. congressman spearheaded an amendment to the National Science Foundation budget last May to cut a billion dollars. While the amendment failed, Congressman Jeff Flake’s second amendment to the NSF budget – one that banned any NSF funding of political science research – did pass, because Flake did not want the NSF funding research into the biological roots of political behavior.

According to a recent article in the British New Scientist, “there is a substantial body of data suggesting that conservatives and liberals really are different tribes, divided not by opinions so much as by temperament and even basic biology.”  Also interesting is the fact that the article and research were written by Americans and published in a British science magazine.  The article itself is comparatively even-handed, pointing out correctly that most research in the field is conducted by liberals and that there are difficulties with some studies.  But one of the underlying problems is that, by temperament and biology, the majority of scientists in most fields, excepting those involving engineering and directly related fields, tend to be “liberal” in outlook and politics.

All that said, more than 25 years of study indicate that political attitudes have a high degree of inheritability, and such studies include identical twins raised in totally different environments, who are far more likely to share political attitudes than do fraternal twins or genetically unrelated family members.  As a rule, but not invariably, conservatives are more likely to prefer people of their own ethnic background, straight people, and high-status groups.  Liberals are more comfortable than conservatives with those of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, as well as with members of ethnic or sexual minorities. Liberals tend to be more morally offended by inequality, while conservatives tend to be more morally offended by betrayals of the in-group, by disrespect for authority, and by signs of sexual or spiritual weakness or impurity.  These characteristics have been linked to anatomical differences in the size of various brain structures.  Conservatives have a higher need for certainty, while liberals tend to revel in mental challenges.

In this regard, I’ve always had the feeling that conservatives can’t find the truth because they’ve known it all along, whether it’s true or not, and liberals will never recognize it because they’re so involved in looking for the next thing that they’ll look right past it.

What is clear about all this research is that all of us are biologically inclined in a certain direction in what might be called our social outlook, some more so than others, whether that direction be conservative or liberal.  What is also true is that each of us does have the ability to examine those predilections… and to decide whether blindly following our feelings makes sense in any given situation or whether we need to examine what we feel more closely. Obviously, both outlooks are necessary in human society… or those with one inclination or the other would have been weeded out or marginalized, and given the near equal polarization in political outlooks in the United States, that hasn’t happened… and that means, again, blind insistence on doing either just the “conservative” thing or the “liberal” thing is counterproductive.  Working out a compromise is necessary.

Unfortunately, I don’t see many signs of this happening in our political situation here in the United States at the moment… and it’s something that needs to occur.  As a society, we can’t afford to follow blindly just one of the genetic predilections that evolved to make us successful hunter-gatherers. Nor can we turn our back on what science is revealing about who and what we are. Those are recipes for disaster in a high-tech complex world.

The “business model” has triumphed again.  Last Thursday was Thanksgiving, a holiday first officially celebrated in the entire United States on the last Thursday of November as a result of a Presidential proclamation of Abraham Lincoln in 1863, and then moved to the fourth Thursday of the month by Franklin Roosevelt, in order to give the country an economic lift. Little did Roosevelt know what he started.

This year, from Wal-Mart on – or up – retailers across the United States invaded Thanksgiving with “Black Friday” specials on Thanksgiving Day itself.  Oh, there were Wal-Mart employees protesting at hundreds of stores, but the shoppers largely ignored them and surged into stores, greedily grabbing whatever specials they could find.  From my antediluvian viewpoint, the invasion of Thanksgiving by rampant commercialism signifies, in both a metaphorical and practical sense, that the majority of Americans have become totally unaware of how fortunate we are as a society.  Can we not set aside a single day out of the entire year in which to consider and reflect on those aspects of life for which we are grateful?

Last year, at this time, I cited a short story by Frederick Pohl called “Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus,” published in 1956 and set in a future where the “Christmas season” begins in September, and I wondered how long it would be before Halloween and Christmas squeezed out Thanksgiving.  Based on the blizzard of ads in my newspapers – more than fifty separate ad sections – on Thanksgiving day itself and the media hype of Black Friday beginning on Thanksgiving, it appears as though the original purpose of Thanksgiving has already been all but lost to the “ecstasy of unbridled avarice,” to steal a quote from another Christmas staple.

Then again, perhaps people who cannot maintain a Thanksgiving tradition deserve exactly what they are getting from the businesses who push Black Friday – lots of cheap goods produced all too often in third world sweatshops by people who have little to thank anyone for, fewer and fewer good American jobs…and more than a few business leaders who insist that paying lower tax rates than their underpaid employees is necessary for jobs creation.

With the so-called fiscal financial cliff facing the United States government after December 31^st, there are likely to be those in the public calling for cuts in “non-productive” federal spending, and one of the perennial candidates is federal spending on basic research in any number of fields, particularly in areas such as solar power and expensive physics research. Some advocates of such cuts claim that the private sector, and in particular, the corporate world, can take up the slack, and some cite the failures in federal research choices, such as Solyndra, the solar power company that received a $535-million federal loan guarantee as part of the $787 billion economic stimulus package… and then went bankrupt.

In point of fact, there is a real distinction between basic scientific research and the follow-on development of a new scientific breakthrough into a practical product.  While the private sector can develop new products far more effectively than government can, the private sector is seldom willing to undertake the basic research necessary to make the breakthroughs from which such developments can be made… and the reason is simple.  The vast majority of basic research fails to make such a breakthrough.  Estimates of the failure rate range from 80% to 99.99%.

What is also overlooked is that negative results of research are positive.  They show approaches that will not work and often point the way to those that will.

Thomas Edison tried over 1,000 different substances before he was able to find one that would serve as the filament for a light bulb… and some sources claim it was closer to ten thousand.  Edison is quoted as saying, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”  Octave Chanute, the forgotten mentor of the Wright Brothers, listed hundreds of failed attempts to developed powered flying machines, as well as almost 60 detailed illustrations of different major serious attempts that failed before the Wright Brothers flew. More recently, Bill Gates pointed out that funding basic research naturally has a high failure rate, and that more than 90% of the Energy Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency’s projects will likely fail.  Gates went on to note that the U.S. government’s investment in energy research was woefully underfunded and called for a government investment of $16 billion per year into basic research to deliver energy innovation.

Even the one of the most profitable areas in return on research – the pharmaceutical industry – has staggering costs. According to Francis Collins, the Director of the National Institutes of Health, “The average length of time from target discovery to approval of a new drug currently averages about 13 years, the failure rate exceeds 95 percent, and the cost per successful drug exceeds $1 billion, after adjusting for all of the failures.”

The truth of the matter is that, first, the future economic health and physical well-being of the United States depend on continued extensive scientific research, research that a private sector dependent on short-term profitability largely cannot and will not make, and that, if government does not fund such research [and the education of those who will make the such breakthroughs, from whatever part of the globe they come from to be educated in the United States], scientific breakthroughs will be made in countries whose governments do fund that research… or not made at all.

Yet too many penny-wise and pound foolish politicians fail to see the difference between basic research and the subsequent development and exploitation.