Roughly twenty years ago, Allan Bloom published an incendiary book entitled The Closing of the American Mind. In it, Bloom charged that abandoning the traditional literary canon in favor of multiculturism and gender- and ethnic-based literary selections effectively had gutted the American liberal arts education. I’m oversimplifying his charges, but they run along those lines.

During the 1960s and 1970s, and thereafter, but particularly in those turbulent years, there were numerous and loud cries for “relevance” in higher education. Those cries reverberate today in such legislation as the No Child Left Behind Act and the growing emphasis on institutions of higher education as a version of white collar and professional trade schools. Less than ten percent of U.S. collegiate undergraduates major in what might be called “liberal arts,” as compared to twenty percent in business, sixteen percent in health, nine percent in education and six to ten percent in computer science [depending on whose figures one uses]. Less than three percent major in English and history combined.

As a writer who effectively minored in English, I’ve thought about the writers and poets I had to study in the late 1950s and early 1960s and those studied by students today. Back then, for example, there was a fairly strong emphasis on poets such as T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, and Wallace Stevens, none of whom are now listed as among the topmost poets assigned in college English classes. Now… times do change, but I realized that poets such as Eliot bring certain requirements that poets and writers such as Maya Angelou, Jane Austen, and Toni Morrison do not. For much of Eliot or Yeats to make sense, the student has to have a far wider grasp of literature and history. Much of the difference between those writers once assigned and those now assigned, from what I can tell, is that a far greater percentage of those now assigned are what one might call self-affirming writers. They affirm a set of values that are either explicitly contained in the work at hand, or they affirm current values. By contrast, poets such as Eliot and Yeats often question and use a wide range of references and allusions unfamiliar to most students, some of which are current and some of which are historical and few of which are “common” knowledge.

In that sense, the best of F&SF, in my opinion, is that which stretches the reader into considering old values in a new light and “new” values through the light of experience, accepting neither at face value. Many F&SF writers present the “new” in a way that proclaims its value uncritically, while others present and trash the “new,” as does Michael Crichton all so well. Then there are those who appear to believe that shocking readers is equivalent to making them think and stretching their horizons. Most of the time, it’s not.

According to Mark Lilla, a professor of political philosophy at Columbia, recently quoted in The New York Times, “What Americans yearn for in literature is self-recognition.” But struggling with unfamiliar themes and values, searching out allusions and references require work and can be an alienating to students, and certainly doesn’t boost self-recognition.

Particularly in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it seemed to me, there was a concerted effort in the SF field to raise issues while adhering to some degree to the tradition of the “literary canon,” and this effort continues with at least some authors today. This melding represents, again in my opinion, one of the great strengths of the field, but paradoxically, it’s also another reason why F&SF readership tends to be limited, at least for these types of F&SF, because a reader either has to be knowledgeable or willing to expand his or her comfort zone.

This gets down to an issue at the basis of education, primarily but not exclusively higher undergraduate education: Is the purpose of higher education to train people for jobs or to teach them to think so that they can continue to learn? Most people would ask why both are not possible. Theoretically, they are, but it doesn’t work that way in practice. Job training emphasizes how to learn and apply skills effectively and efficiently. Thinking training makes one very uncomfortable; it should, because it should force the student out of his or her comfort zone. At one time, that was one of the avowed goals of higher education, and part of the so-called literary canon was chosen so as to provide not only that challenge but also a cultural history of values as illustrated by literature, rather than a mere affirmation of current values.

In addition, today, with the smorgasbord approach to education, a student can effectively limit himself or herself to the courses that merely reinforce his or her existing beliefs and biases. It’s comfortable… but is it education?

Once more, just the other day, someone said to me and my wife, “We never really went to the moon. It was all a fraud.” This person is not uneducated. In fact, the individual has an earned graduate degree and spent some fifteen years as an executive in the financial industry.

It doesn’t seem to matter to this individual — or the millions that share such a belief — that scientists are bouncing laser and radio beams off the reflectors left on the moon by our astronauts. Nor do the photographs and records that could not have been obtained any other way count against this belief. Nor the fact that ground-based and space-based evidence agree. Nor does the fact that we and other countries have put dozens of astronauts into space matter.

Nope. To such people, the moon landings were all a fraud.

Maybe this kind of belief has something to do with the brain. A recent study confirmed that there is indeed a difference between the way “liberals” and “conservatives” process and react to information, and that that difference goes far beyond politics. Liberals tend to be more open to new experiences, conservatives more entrenched and unwilling to move away from past beliefs. And, of course, interesting enough, there are those who classify themselves as liberals who actually have a conservative mind-set, who will not deviate from what they believe regardless of evidence, and there are those who claim that they are conservative who are very open to new evidence and ideas.

Neither mindset is necessarily “good” or “bad.” As many conservatives would say, and have, “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.” That can be very true. On the other hand, no matter how hard one wants to believe that the earth is flat, I’m sorry. It just isn’t. When new information arrives that is soundly and scientifically based, regardless of opinion and past beliefs, a truly intelligent person should be willing to look at it objectively and open-mindedly.

In a sense, I think, most people are basically conservative. We really don’t want to change what we believe without very good reason. In evolutionary, historical, and social terms, there are good reasons for this viewpoint. Just as in mutations affecting an organism, most changes in social and political institutions are bad. Only a few are for the best.

The problem occurs when the probability of danger from an event is not absolute, or unitary, as some economists put it, but still likely to occur, and when that occurrence would be catastrophic to the human race. Over the history of homo sapiens, some hundreds of thousands of years, or millions, depending on one’s definition of exactly when our forebears became thinking human beings, this kind of situation has not occurred until the past half century. While it might be unthinkable and improbable to most, a nuclear war would be devastating to the human race. So, it appears, will runaway global warming, regardless of cause.

The “conservative” view is to wait and let things sort themselves out. After all, hasn’t this worked throughout history? Well… not always, but in terms of survival and civilization, there was always someone else to carry on. When the Mayan civilization fell because they hadn’t planned well enough for unforeseen droughts, other human civilizations carried on. The same was true of the Anasazi, and now recent satellite measurements and photographs suggest that the same occurred to the Cambodian peoples who built Angkor Wat, then a city complex of over a million people, when drought struck in the 1500s.

But what happens when we as a race face a potential climate catastrophe as devastating as global warming could be? One that affects an entire world, and not just a continent or subcontinent? Can we afford to be conservative? Or is it a situation where, in reacting, we could fall for anything?

Is global warming a fraud perpetrated by scientists, as those who deny the moon landings believe about that? Or is it a real and present danger? Or is it over-hyped, the way all the warnings about DDT appear to have been – a real danger in limited areas and to certain species, but truly not the harbinger of a universal silent spring? And how should we react, whether conservative or liberal?

As some of you know, I’ve been involved in fantasy and science fiction for some time — otherwise known as “too long” by those who don’t like what I write and “please keep writing” by those who do. For almost as long as I’ve been writing, I’ve wondered why a number of good solid, inventive, and talented writers failed to be recognized — or when recognized, were essentially “under-recognized” or recognized late. That’s not to take away from some who were recognized, like Jim Rigney [Robert Jordan], but to point out that sometimes recognition is not necessarily fair or just.

One of them was, of course, Fred Saberhagen. Another, I believe, was Gordy Dickson, as was Murray Leinster. Among writers still living and writing who haven’t received their due, in my opinion, I might include Sheri Tepper. There are certainly others; my examples are far from all-inclusive.

But why has this happened, and why has it continued to go on?

One of the problems in the F&SF genre and, indeed, in every field of writing — and, as I discovered over nearly 20 years in Washington, D.C., also in politics — is that the extremists among the fans, reviewers, academics, and critics have a tendency to monopolize both the dialogue and the critical studies. And, for better or worse, extremists generally tend to praise and support, naturally, the extremes. In writing, from what I’ve seen, the extremes tend to be, on one end, extra-ordinary skill in crafting the individual sentence and paragraph, usually to the detriment of the work as a whole and, on the other, incredible action and pseudo-technical detail and devices and/or magical applications in totally unworkable societies and situations.

While I can certainly appreciate the care and diligence involved in the construction of the Gormenghast trilogy, books whose “action” moves at the speed of jellied consume, uphill — and that may overstate the pacing — that trilogy is not a work of literature, regardless of all the raves by the extremists. Likewise, month after month, I see blogs and reviews which praise books, which, when I read them, seem not to have much depth and rely on action and clever prose to disguise that lack; or on well-crafted words and not much else; or almost totally on humor, often at such basic levels as to be embarrassing; or… the list of sins is long. What I don’t see much of is reviews which note books with deep and quiet crafting, relying neither too much nor too little upon words, actions, inventions, or humor, but balancing all in a way to create a realistic world with people and situations which draw in the reader in a way to engage both emotion and thought and provoke a reconsideration of some aspect of what we call reality.

Now… I have no problem with brilliant unrealism, or incredibly moving prose. I do have great difficulty with books being termed good or great solely on such criteria, particularly when the critics of the extremes often tend to overlook excellent prose, plotting, and even incredibly credible devices and societies because the author has presented them so quietly and convincingly.

In a determined but comparatively quiet way, by creating Jim Baen’s Universe, Jim and Eric Flint attempted to create a sold-paying market for good stories that appealed to a wide range of readers, and not primarily to the extremists. Will this effort work? I hope so, and it looks promising, but it’s still too early to tell.

Shock value and novelty do indeed attract readers. Sometimes they even sell books. I won’t contest that. Nor will I contest the fact that much of what doesn’t appeal to me is obviously very appealing to others. What I will point out is that work which engages readers on all levels and raises fundamental issues tends to sell and stay in print over the years [so… maybe I was wrong about Gormenghast… or maybe it’s the exception that proves the point].

For those young men who have a good voice and the ability and desire to learn music… how would you like a job where you can travel the world — or at least the United States — and get paid for it, and where adoring young women often follow your every word and note? If so… have you considered being a collegiate-level professor of voice?

While the openings in full-time, tenure-track university positions for female singers with doctorates are almost non-existent, universities and colleges are always looking for qualified and talented male tenors, baritones, and basses. “All” you have to do is become a classical singer qualified to teach on the university level. This does require work in addition to talent, and getting a doctorate in music is not for everyone, nor is it without some cost, but the very top positions in the field can earn close to $100,000 a year, and that doesn’t count fees for performing outside the university. Now… admittedly, a starting salary for a male tenure-track junior voice faculty member is “only” $35,000-$50,000, but a full-time position usually includes health care and one of the best and most portable retirement pension systems in the country.

More than a few times, when my wife has suggested that male students might have a future by majoring in music, the usual response is that “I won’t make enough money.”

And exactly how true is that? The latest data from the Census Bureau notes that the median income of men working full-time in the USA is slightly over $42,000. The median for men with professional degrees [law, medicine, science, MBA] is around $72,000. Of course, all young men and women will be above average, just as the children in Lake Wobegon are all above average, and all will make fantastic salaries.

But what is fantastic? The average veterinarian makes $65,000, the average architect $57,000, the average accountant $41,000, the average secondary school teacher $47,000. For every junior attorney making $130,000, there are many more making $40,000-$60,000. With the median salary of attorneys around $80,000, that means half are making less than that, often after years of practice.

So how unaffordable is the possibility of a $75,000 a year income after 15 years, for a nine month contract, with all sorts of fringe benefits — such as health care, retirement, tickets to sports and cultural events, and even free or subsidized parking?

But don’t apply if you’re female. Because schools can legally discriminate by specifying voice type, there are on average at least twice as many positions for men, despite the fact that most voice students are female, and on average, you’ll only make 75% of what the men do.

A century or so ago, and certainly earlier, the general consensus, both among the public and the scientific community was that homo sapiens was the only tool-using creature, and certainly the only one who had self-consciousness. But recent studies of various primates, Caledonian jays, and other species have proved that mankind is not the only tool-user, merely the most advanced of tool-users. More recent studies also suggest that some primates and jays, and possibly even elephants, have at least a form of self-consciousness.

What led to this conclusion? Experiments in the use of deception and self-imagery. In essence, certain species hide food and deceive others as to where they’re hiding the food. The way in which they used deception, and the varying levels of deception, depending on the closeness and relationship of those nearby, suggests that they are aware of themselves as individuals, and are also aware of others as individuals.

What I find intriguing about these studies is that there appears to be a link between intelligence and greed and deception. Now… a wide range of species accumulate food and other items, but only a handful exhibit what might be called “greed.” Greed can be defined as the drive to acquire and maintain possession of more physical goods or other assets than the individual or his family/clan could possibly ever physically utilize, often to the detriment of others.

One thing that’s interesting about human beings is that we also possess the greatest degree of concentrated greed and deception of any species. No other species comes close. This raises an intriguing question: To what degree is intelligence linked to greed and deception?

Are greed and deception by-products of intelligence, or are they the driving force to develop intelligence?

While the evolutionary/historical record suggests that species capable of greed and deception tend to be more successful in attaining control of their environment, what happens next? Intelligence develops tools, and individuals with greed and deception put those tools to use in varying ways to enhance their own power to the detriment of other members of the species. As the tools become more powerful, their use by those who possess them also tends to concentrate power and wealth, yet almost every successful society has also incorporated deception of some sort into its social framework.

Kurt Vonnegut made the observation in Slaughterhouse Five — through a Nazi character, of course — that the greatest deception perpetrated by the American system was that it was easy to make money. Because it was then thought to be so, income inequality was justified, because anyone who wanted to work hard could “obviously” become wealthy.

Historical institutional “deceptions” include the divine right of kings, the caste system of India, Aryan racial supremacy, the communist “equality of all” myth, and on and on.

But what does this bode in an increasingly technological information age, where hacking, phishing, and all other manner of informational deception has increased, involving not just the criminal element, but industry, politics, and entertainment on all levels? Does it mean that the survivors will have to be even more intelligent, or that social structures will come crashing down because no one can trust anyone about anything? Or will we manage to muddle through? Will survival of deception be the ultimate Darwinian test of the fittest? Maybe… there’s an idea for a book…