There’s a local primary election going on today where I live, and at least two of the candidates are running on a “common sense” platform. From what I can determine, and I know one of them fairly well, outside of the use of the term, their approaches to civic government differ considerably, but each is clear about the fact that he is the “common sense” candidate. But before I muddy the waters even more, I’d note that the dictionary definitions of “common sense” are “practical understanding” or “sound judgment.”

That said, after spending some twenty years in and around national politics, my instinctive reaction is to immediately distrust anyone who uses the term “common sense” in a political arena. The realistic translation of the term is more like: “Given my values, biases, background, and feelings, this is what makes sense to me.” The problem, of course, is that many of the rest of us may not share those values and feelings, and what is “common sense” to him or her may seem like anything but that to others.

Then, when you mix “common sense” with politics, unfortunately, the results are often anything but what reflects “sound judgment” on a larger scale. Why? Because politics requires compromise, and politicians tend to reflect the views of the majority of their constituencies, and those constituencies can and do have very different views. On the local level here, for example, the city council agreed to sell the condemned junior high school building to the university because renovating it would cost far more than building a totally new facility and because the empty building sat where it was surrounded on three sides by the university. On those grounds, the sale seemed to make sense… except the sole municipal swimming pool — which was not condemned — was located on the property. The university demolished the condemned structure and replaced it with a parking lot until the university could obtain the funding for a new theatre center [still pending with the state legislature], and leased the swimming pool back to the city for two years at a token fee.

The city council proposed to replace the swimming pool with a full-scale recreational center, including a better and larger pool, which seemed like a good idea to many, since there isn’t such a public-access facility of that nature closer than fifty miles away. One group in the community protested the spending of taxpayer funds at this time of financial difficulty as showing no common sense or fiscal restraint. Another group said that it was only common sense to have a recreational facility for a rapidly growing city — and to have a swimming pool to support the swimming programs at the two high schools, which have among the better swim teams in the state. A third group claimed it was only common sense to replace the pool with a better pool, but not to spend the money on a larger recreational center. One can cite “common sense” arguments for all three positions, but the debate ended up in a free-for-all requiring a ballot initiative on which proposal to adopt — which turned out to be, from what I can determine, a sort of compromise building that will be more than just a swimming center, but far from a full recreational center… and then last week, the council revealed that they’d under-budgeted for the facility now under construction.

So much for common sense — and this was just about one building in one small city/large town.

The current national debates involve far greater costs and complexity, and incredibly involved trade-offs between costs and life-and-death situations, and when someone starts in on “common sense,” take a good hard look at just whose “common sense” viewpoint he or she is espousing, because common sense evaluations rest on who gains and who loses, and what costs are borne by whom, and who “gets” and who does without.

And I won’t even call that observation “common sense.”

The other day I got an email from my editor telling me that the sales department didn’t much care for the title of the novel I’d just turned in. I called him back and asked him what the problem was. The sales types’ reaction was simple. The title was too much like that of a previous book of mine. Now… the two titles only shared one word, and there was a similarity and synonymy between the last word of the old title and the first word of the new title. Upon reflection, I could see their problem and went to work coming up with an alternative title — which I did and which both editor and sales types accepted as “much better.”

Except…artistically, the title wasn’t much “better.” It will certainly be commercially better, and it won’t confuse book sellers and book buyers, and I’ll definitely be better off in so far as those concerns translate into higher sales.

Even though titles cannot be copyrighted, using the exact same title as a previously published book usually isn’t a good idea, for multiple reasons, but I did it once, unknowingly, with the Recluce book Colors of Chaos, only to find out, years later, that Bob Vardeman had published a book with the same title eleven years earlier. It didn’t seem to hurt my sales, and I hope it didn’t hurt his.

Besides avoiding being a copycat, there are more than a few reasons why the title brainchildren of authors may be changed. One, interestingly enough, is that certain terms can be trademarked, and in most cases, that trademark cannot be used without the consent of the trademark holder. At least one New York Times bestselling author has been required to change a title for that reason.

Another reason is length. No matter how perfect the title, it has to fit on the cover of the book, and preferably in a type size large enough to be readable from a distance. Some art directors are not terribly fond of the word “the” to begin a title, because they think it takes up unnecessary space without adding to the clarity of the title in the slightest. And, frankly, some of my titles, in retrospect, probably didn’t need the article. Some did. And at least one is far better without the article.

The original title of Archform:Beauty was Beauty⁵. Why was it changed? First, because the sales computers couldn’t handle exponents, and second, because sales types kept asking where the first four “Beauty” books were. Yes… that’s right. They apparently don’t teach exponents in sales.

And of course, sometimes a title is just plain bad for any one of a number of reasons. It may make perfect sense to the author, but not to anyone else, or it may be culturally limited. The original title of The Green Progression was the Russian word for “green.” That made sense to us, but not to anyone else. Unfortunately, even the title change didn’t help sales much. On the other hand, “Recluce” doesn’t translate into Swedish, not with the overtones the word has in English, and finally the Swedish translators — through the efforts of a Swedish acquaintance of mine, for whose perspicacity I am most grateful — changed “Recluce” to “Sarland.” I’m told this makes much better reading in Swedish, and I have to take their word for it, but since the Swedish publisher is still acquiring Recluce books, the sales evidence would seem to support that conclusion.

Now… I’ve had generally good experiences with Tor with regard to titles, but I understand other authors have not had entirely sanguine results with their publishers over titles, and I occasionally see titles on the shelves… and shudder, but that’s another matter entirely, since I’m clearly antiquarian in my thinking that titles should exhibit some modicum of taste… whether the title refers to a cookbook or a vampire novel.

Years ago, a friend who worked in the consulting field with me deplored the growing use of the computer mouse, which he still called a GUI [graphic user interface], as the first step toward a “post-literate” society. At the time, I thought he was over-reacting. Now… I’m not at all sure.

The College Board just released its latest statistics, and the SAT reading test scores for last year’s graduating seniors were the lowest since 1994. That choice of 1994 as a reference point is particularly interesting because, in 1995, the College Board “recentered” the SAT reference point, which had been based on the average scores set in 1941. The practical effect of this “recentering” was to raise the median score by roughly 80 points. That means that last year’s reading scores might well be the worst in far longer than a mere fourteen years.

In addition, just a few weeks ago, the ACT test annual results were released, and ACT officials noted that, according to the test results, only 25% of test takers, again graduating seniors, had the ability to handle college level work.

Add to these data the facts that the number of young adults reading is down by over 40% from those of a generation earlier and the fact that close to 40% of those young adults obtaining graduate advanced degrees have inadequate verbal and reading analysis skills, and my friend’s suggestion that we are headed toward an electronic and post-literate society doesn’t look quite so far-fetched.

Why am I concerned? Besides the fact that fewer readers will result in fewer book sales?

Because:

1. The ability to frame complex thoughts correctly is vital if we wish to retain a semblance of a representative government in a complicated and highly technological society, as is the ability to analyze what others have written and to be able to sort out the misinformation based on understanding and logic, rather than through preconceptions and emotional reactions.

2. There is a vast difference between emotional responses to an individual on a personal basis, where first impressions are often correct, and emotional responses to complex issues framed simplistically by talking heads and politicians.

3. Perception and understanding are severely limited if one cannot read quickly and understand well, and those limitations make people more vulnerable to shysters, deceptive business practices, and clever politicians.

4. Enormous parts of our culture and history will be lost, and most people will not even understand that they have suffered such a loss.

5. History can be “changed” at will in all-electronic formats. Have people forgotten that Amazon just recently eliminated two electronic books without anyone being able to stop them? What if they’d just altered the text? How many people would even notice? And… if the news is all graphic and auditory… then what?

As for the decline in book sales… well, it will likely be gradual enough that I won’t have to worry about it. The younger authors… that’s another question. Maybe they ought to consider graphic novels as a fall-back.

Recent studies on brain functions and learning have determined that learning associated with increased brain function is largely dependent on three factors: concentration, difficulty, and leaving one’s “comfort zone.” The first makes perfect sense and certainly is nothing new or unanticipated. If you don’t concentrate on learning — whether facts, concepts, or new skills — you won’t learn them, plain and simple.

The second factor is a little trickier. If what you’re trying to learn is simple, you may learn it, but it won’t improve brain functioning. If it’s so difficult that you can’t even begin to understand, you won’t learn or improve brain functions, either. The optimum for learning and increasing brain function and neuron creation is trying to learn something that is very difficult for you, and at the edge of your ability, but still possible.

The third factor is that for actual learning to take place, you have to consider factors and facts that move you outside your “comfort zone,” possibly to consider other viewpoints or facts that you might otherwise reject and to examine them open-mindedly, and not with a view merely to dismiss or discredit them.

Now… what do these findings have to do with “decline,” as indicated in the blog title?

First… concentration. The growth of the computer and video culture has resulted in a generation that is having an increasingly difficult time concentrating on a single subject for any appreciative length of time. In addition, all too many schools, particularly in the lower grades, are pandering to this decreased attention span by switching subjects more frequently. Any subject — or book — that requires time and effort to master, particularly if not filled with action or gee-whiz amazing facts, is termed “boring.” Unfortunately, a great many basics of any culture and civilization could be termed boring, yet mastery of many is vital to maintain civilization and technology. Perfection in engineering requires painstaking and often tedious work, but without it, equipment, bridges, highways, and buildings all can fail… with catastrophic results, as we have been recently reminded.

Second… difficulty. Because of the “every child is wonderful” syndrome permeating U.S. culture, there’s also an increasing tendency to praise young students rather than to challenge them to the limits of their ability. There’s also a tendency to limit challenges in the classroom because it will hurt the “self-esteem” of less talented or less motivated students. While many private schools and some charter schools are not falling into this trap, all too many other schools are… and since future learning patterns are set by early learning patterns, all too many children are not only not learning, but they’re not learning how to learn.

Third… comfort zones. Our entire high-tech communication and learning systems are designed and operated to allow people to maximize remaining inside their comfort zones. Pick only the friends you want. Talk to them on your cellphone, and ignore anyone else. Pick only the music you want, and isolate yourself with your earphones. Watch only the news that caters to your biases. Study at your own pace, never under pressure. This also translates, more and more, into behavior patterns where people listen less and less to those with whom they disagree, while becoming more and more intolerant of differences. We can see this playing out in our political discourse daily.

I’ve talked to scores of teachers over the past few years, from all over the country, and most of those I’ve talked to agree that, while students are certainly as intelligent, if not more so, than their parents, a majority of them have difficulty learning anything that challenges them. They especially have difficulty in transferring skills learned in one discipline to another, or even learning from their own mistakes in writing one paper and applying what they should have learned from those mistakes to the next paper.

At a time when we live in the most complex and high-tech societies in history, the ability to learn and to keep learning becomes more and more important, and even as we have discovered what is necessary to enhance and improve that ability, as a society we’re turning away from the kind of education and discipline necessary. Almost fifty years ago, in The Joy Makers, James Gunn postulated a future society where everyone eventually retreated into their own comfortable self-reality bubble, blissfully unaware that the machines that maintained them would eventually fail and unable to comprehend that, let alone develop the expertise to continue society.

Is that where we’re headed?

While I’ve often bristled, especially as an author, at the slogan “the customer is always right,” perhaps because I don’t think that fiction should be totally consumer driven on all levels and that authors should make efforts to elevate their readers’ understanding, there’s definitely more than a grain of truth to the adage. It also invites a tremendous amount of hypocrisy in the business community.

In the previous blog, I noted how certain products often aren’t available because the re-sellers are actually selling space and not the product per se. In this instance, customer service clearly takes a back seat to other considerations, i.e., maximizing profit rather than customer satisfaction. While I’m the first to understand that those businesses that don’t make a profit won’t remain in operation long, I have trouble when they also talk about their commitment to the customer. The other day, my wife found a product that she really liked, from a company that was sending her a similar type of product. She liked the new product much better, but when she called to change her monthly order, the company representative told her that they couldn’t change her order, that the “new” product couldn’t be shipped under the old program. My wife’s reaction? She canceled the old order and now buys the new product from a local merchant. Her total spending for products from that company is less, and she probably would have continued to buy more if the company had been more accommodating.

There’s another firm that has a slogan along the lines of “we haven’t forgotten who keeps us in business.” I don’t patronize them very much any more — except when I absolutely have to — because they tack fees onto everything and at every turn. And I’m getting more and more irritated at the airlines for all their fees for everything. I often travel long distances, and given what I do and how I do it, it’s simply not possible to cram all the handouts, press packages, and the clothes into a carry-on. So I have to collect more paper [for the IRS, to document more expenses] that I’ve lost more than once, which costs some money over the course of the year. Then, there’s the boarding pass/baggage routing problem. Because of where I live, there are often considerable layovers, and the computers won’t issue a bag tag if too many hours elapse between first take-off and last take-off. That means I have to program extra time into things so that some overworked airline clerk can laboriously override the computer and make sure my baggage tags are printed to the right destination.

I could go on and on… with example after example, but the point behind all of this is that all too often the slogan or the idea of customer service comes far down the line of business priorities — and yet all too many companies tout it, some of which provide very little of either customer consideration or service. I understand that there are other business considerations, but if there are, I’d really appreciate it if companies in such a position weren’t so fawningly hypocritical… and I suspect I’m probably not the only one who feels that way.

But then, if the ad or the internet says that they really serve customers, it has to be true, doesn’t it?