The other day I went to the grocery store for just one thing. Now, I’ll admit that, since I was there, I did pick up several other items, but I wouldn’t have gone if I hadn’t wanted to pick up that one item, which, by the way, happened to be Canadian bacon. When I left the store, I was departing without the Canadian bacon, because out of every single item in the meat department, the only thing the store was sold out of was, of course, Canadian bacon.

I should have known better. The time I wanted my particular shaving cream and nothing else, they were out of it. The same thing happened a month before when I went to pick-up extra-strength buffered aspirin for my wife [this is more than occasionally necessary for those who teach college students]. Or the time that I went just for dry cat food.

It’s also why I pick up two of all of those items, and try to remember to get replacements before we’re all out… because… exactly, when I wait until we absolutely need just that one thing, more often than not, the store happens to be out of it.

Whether this is because I have an unerring instinct that enables me to run out precisely when the store also runs out, or because the universe is perverse in dealing with the procurement of otherwise minor and insignificant items, I have no idea.

What I do know is that, at least for me, running out of anything leaves me with a fifty-fifty chance of finding the store without it at all… and that’s why we have a pantry with lots of duplication… and why I STILL have trouble picking up just one thing [because when you have duplicates/backups, you tend to think you have more than you do].

Enough of the surveys! Enough of rating everything! And especially enough of tests and studies conducted or designed by “impartial outsiders.”

Today it seems as though any business or institution of any size is trying to assess, study, and measure its effectiveness in doing its job and meeting its goals, from Amazon to education, from big banking to start-ups not even off the ground. On top of that, supervisors and managers are flooding subordinates with emails wanting instant progress reports on a daily basis, if not sooner, and the amount of time spent on answering such largely pointless communications continues to rise.

One of the critical points that all these “assessors” in search of data and accountability seem either to ignore or to never have learned is that every minute and every dollar spent on assessment is a dollar or minute not spent on achieving the institution’s or business’s objectives, and more and more assessment inevitably leads to less and less real achievement, no matter what results appear to come from such additional assessments.

Education is becoming the poster child for excessive and counter-productive assessment. No matter what those proponents of great testing and assessments say, and no matter what statistics they cite, American education remains at a crisis point, because, particularly at the elementary and secondary levels, and even to a degree at the baccalaureate level in college, instructors are in point of fact essentially being forced not only to test more and more, but also to “teach to the test.” Add to that the fact that at the collegiate level, they also have to teach to “student evaluations.”

While the tests show a slight improvement in basic skills, what they do not show is the losses. The fact is that the majority of graduating high school seniors cannot write a logical, coherent, factually based, and grammatically correct paragraph. They cannot analyze anything with much complexity involved, and they cannot integrate data, skills, and knowledge. Nor can they apply skills learned in one area to problems in another.

These are not skills that can be accurately measured by any “objective” test, yet they are skills vital to the continued success of a high-tech society.

We’re also seeing similar problems in the political and media arenas, as Americans seem less and less able to integrate data and analyze all the sound bites they receive, many of which are factually incorrect, contradictory, and logically flawed. Businesses over-focus on immediate short term goals, all too often in opposition to what would insure greater long-term success, because success in meeting short-term goals can be far more accurately and quickly assessed.

Metaphorically speaking, we don’t need to kill all the lawyers, as Shakespeare’s King Henry VI asserted, but a good start would be decimating the assessors.

It’s now approaching the halfway mark of the fall semester at the university, and certain all too predictable things are happening. A significant percentage of students, especially first year students, are getting sick. More of them are zoning out or only half- awake in class because of lack of sleep. A great many of them are also realizing that they’re way behind where they should be in terms of learning, reading, and getting assignments done, and the undone assignments are beginning to pile up, especially when they spend too much time on social media.

Then there are those upon whom it has dawned that they’re not special. In my wife’s field – singing and opera – this is particularly noticeable, because probably half of the incoming voice students were the top performers in their high school. Then they discover that they’re in college, amid other first year students who were used to being the center of attention, and all of them also discover, mournfully, that the singers in the upper classes are generally much better. Most of them learn that they have flaws in their technique, and that they need to learn their music far more quickly than ever before – while taking music theory, which is a far tougher course than most would-be music majors have ever seen before in their life, and also taking diction and literature, which requires scores of hours listening – on their own – to music the majority of which most of them have never heard, by composers whom they largely know only by name, if that, and not by their music, while learning things like the international phonetic alphabet (IPA)[so they can learn songs in foreign languages correctly].

And no, they won’t get a lead role. In fact, many will only get minor roles in the operas, or chorus roles. They also discover that they have to practice, and develop, if they haven’t already, basic piano skills and improve their skills enough to pass a proficiency test by the end of their second year…or be washed out of the program.

In short, many of them discover… they are not special in the slightest. They also discover that a great voice, a beautiful natural voice, is only the beginning. One of the problems is that too many of those with great natural talent have been praised every day of their high school life and have never really worked at music. Now they have to work, after discovering they’re no longer special, and every year at least one, if not more, student with great natural ability bails out or flunks out because they actually have to work, because they can’t accept that they just can’t get up there and sing, that they’re expected to develop a good technique, and learn not just arias, but art song, and things like secco recitative. These are just a few of the skills and knowledge that a good program will teach a student, the ones whose mastery will make a student special, rather than providing largely empty praise.

That’s because, in the real world, what makes one special is that you sing not only “beautifully,” but precisely and with emotion and expression, day after day, often under conditions that are anything but ideal. Only the results count, and that’s a hard lesson for students to learn, especially today. Some will… and that’s where their education for life truly begins.

Over the past several months, ISIS elements have either been in the headlines and news shows, particularly for their use of force, violence, and media savvy in getting across the point that nothing is sacred, except their own narrow beliefs, in their attempts to establish an Islamic religiously-based nation state. To this end, ISIS operatives have beheaded journalists, tortured and killed anyone who does not believe as they do, destroyed ancient cultural artifacts, sold whatever they could to raise funds for their holy crusade, and made it crystal-clear that women are not the equal of men and should be their slaves.

Much of the world, including the United States, has been appalled, disgusted, often horrified, and made the point that ISIS is not what a civilized nation should be, particularly because ISIS denies any freedom to anyone that is in the slightest against what they regard as Islamic Sharia law.

Yet…everyone tends to forget that we have an analogue to ISIS right here in the United States. And no, they’re not Muslim. They regard themselves as God-fearing, good religious Christians who often cite the U. S. Constitution – or at least their version of it – in much the same way that ISIS cites the Koran to support its horrific actions. If you haven’t guessed, yet, I’m speaking of the extreme right-wing, fanatical Republicans.

These people aren’t terribly interested in anyone’s freedom except their own, no matter how much they declare they are, except perhaps for the freedom to carry deadly weapons [another similarity to ISIS]. Their idea of freedom is exemplified most recently by Kim Davis, the county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples because the idea of gay marriage is against her faith. Let’s get this straight. No one is forcing Ms. Davis personally to marry someone of the same sex. The law and the Supreme Court have stated that any two single individuals, regardless of gender, have the right to get married. No one is forcing anyone into a single-sex marriage. But her freedoms are infringed because she can’t impose her views of marriage on others?

These right-wing groups also oppose environmental regulations in almost any form, claiming that such regulations are everything from excessive to unwarranted because the costs infringe on their rights to make money. In effect, they’re claiming that their right to make money trumps the right of the public to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and not to inflict huge ocean level rises and higher global temperatures and more massive storms upon our children and grandchildren.

Despite the fact that the minimum wage is well below a living wage, the right-wingers insist that they should be able to make a living by paying other people less than is adequate for those people to make a living… and then they complain that government should cut back on programs for the poorest Americans because taxes, especially on right-wing capitalists, are too high.

Likewise, in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court declared that, under certain reasonable conditions, women had the right to have abortions. The most violent members of the Republican right wing are insisting, literally, that a woman who will die if she brings a child to term has no right to save herself by having an abortion. This is anything but the defense of freedom; it is the use of religion to dominate someone else.

And let’s not get into the “life is sacred” or “right to life” simplistic mantras. Both are largely right-wing hypocritical propaganda. The same people who spew this crap are the very ones who oppose all the programs for the poorest and most disadvantaged. If there is such a thing as a right to life, then it should be manifested by support of all lives throughout their lives, not just until they’re born… and then left on their own. As for the sacredness of life, where did that come from? From religion, of course, and that means that using religion to restrict a woman’s freedom to control her own body — and to survive – is effectively using the law to arrogate one particular set of beliefs over every other… and that is, at least in spirit, the use of law to push a particular religion, and not all that different from using the law to create a nationally required church [which, by the way, is in fact forbidden by the Constitution]. Also, as for life being sacred, these are the same people who want, under the right to bear arms, the right to defend themselves by killing other people, waging war on other nations, and using and shooting every form of life that can be hunted, while supporting actions that have effectively resulted in the latest great extinction of planetary life-forms, suggesting that what life they regard as sacred is a tiny fraction of planetary life, and essentially white-skinned.

Admittedly, the Republican right wingers are making this assault on the personal freedoms of those who do not share their values largely through two essentially American tools – money and law – although in some cases, a few more fanatical right-wingers have actually used weapons to gun down doctors who performed abortions. Not only that, but each year the extremists push for more and more measures to restrict the freedoms of others, continually threatening to shut down government if they don’t get their way.

And, frankly, like all too many moderate and good Muslims, who are loath to strongly and publicly criticize Islamic extremists, all too many of the more decent elements in the Republican party have also been loath to speak out, largely because, I suspect, they immediately tend to be attacked, ignored, or ostracized.

As a life-long Republican, who retains his registration in spite of seldom being able to find a Republican candidate I can support, and who served in positions from precinct committeeman, state delegate, Congressional Staff director, and the politically appointed director of the Office of Legislation and Congressional Affairs at the U.S. EPA during the Reagan Administration, I am absolutely disgusted and appalled that the most conservative elements of the Republican Party have more in common with ISIS than with the Constitution drafted and envisioned in their writings by the Founding Fathers… and that they fail to realize that fact.

Over past years, I tried to explain what my wife the voice and opera professor does, day in and day out, and why what she does is so brutally exhausting. I’ve largely given that up, because no amount of explanation seems able to convey the totality of what she does to people who don’t already understand the profession and little explanation is needed for those who do. I also tend not to talk about certain aspects of writing for similar reasons.

Since I am most obviously not a racial minority, gay, or a person of color, I hesitate to make comparisons, but I do think the same mental mechanism is at work in the majority of people of any culture or society. There’s an old saying about not judging until you’ve walked and worked in another person’s shoes, but in today’s digital and data-driven world, all too many people make judgments based on their own experience… and data. The problem with data is that it reveals demographics, distribution, and results… and, for the most part, not much beyond that. Sociological data can be so badly skewed by a multiplicity of factors that it’s difficult to determine which studies are truly valid for what purposes. Add to that the fact that today’s American society is perhaps the most segregated it has ever been in terms of income, occupation, and education. On top of that, pervasive but subtle racial and cultural segregation also still exists, and sometimes and in some places, that segregation is still anything but subtle. Not only are there glass ceilings for women, but those ceilings exist for others as well.

Yes, there are those who have lived with or in sub-cultures or groups outside those into which they were born, raised, or educated, but they often remain a minority, often untrusted by those in the group from which they came and often by those in the minority group.

Data, statistics, policies, and bureaucratic programs don’t solve the problems of feelings, especially the feeling of not being understood, especially in a society that has become more and more centered on the “me culture.” People, especially those with light-colored skin, tend not to look outside their own self-selected groups. And the less they do, the less they can even come close to understanding.

All one has to do is to look at some of the numbers. Despite all the rhetoric about police killings of blacks, for example, in New York those deaths are a fraction of what they were forty years ago. What hasn’t changed significantly is the ratio of black men killing black men, compared to whites killing whites. Death is far more omnipresent in black minority communities than in even the poorest of white communities. Yet while police killings of minorities have dropped, the other homicide levels have not fallen to the same degree, and the discrepancy between black and white homicide rates remains.

Under these conditions, it shouldn’t be that difficult to see why minorities, especially black minorities, are protesting and essentially saying, “You don’t understand!” And they have reasons for making that claim, because they believe if the rest of us really understood, we’d make a more meaningful effort to address the problems that lie at the root of all those black-on-black homicides, and not just to address police behavior alone.

There are two basic aspects to any problem that an intelligent person should consider: (1) the cause of the problem and (2) the most practical solution. The first aspect is a good idea so that you either don’t repeat the problem [if you’re the cause] or that you can hopefully do something about a similar problem if you see it happening again [or at least get out of harm’s way]. The second aspect is the starting point for doing something to remedy the problem.

But what if the problem was caused generations ago, and since then all sorts of other problems have been created as a result of the original problem? And what if your forebears weren’t the cause of the original problem, but either weren’t in a position to do something about it or chose not to? Maybe I’m just being simplistically pragmatic, but it seems to me that the pressing question isn’t who was to blame back then, but what’s to be done right now… and what CAN be done right now.

I’m making this generic, because there are a great number of difficult situations across the globe where various countries, people, cultures, and sub-cultures are fixated on WHO caused the problem, rather than on what needs to be done. Not only that, but in a number of those cases, it’s not all that clear who was originally to blame. Blacks in the United States tend to blame the United States and white slaveholders for the institution of slavery, but virtually all of the original black slaves shipped to what became the United States were enslaved and initially sold by other blacks. It was wrong to buy and have slaves, but there wouldn’t have been any slaves if the institution hadn’t already been established in Africa, where, by the way, it seems to be undergoing a resurgence.

We now have refugees flooding out of Africa, out of parts of Asia, even out of certain parts of southern Europe. There are millions of refugees crowded into small areas on the edge of Israel. The United States has millions of illegal immigrants who fled terrorism and poverty in Latin American countries. In all of these instances, dealing with WHO created the problem has very little to do with how the world or various countries need to deal with resolving how to make these people safe and productive. And frankly, even when the problem has a current cause, the costs of dealing with those who caused it may not be practical. The United States, and even the world, doesn’t have enough troops and equipment to mount a military takeover of much of the Middle East and Africa to get rid of all the rebels and regimes that have created the massive flow of refugees.

Original sin is great for theologians, but it’s a lousy excuse for solving problems, and it also gets in the way of solutions, because people hate being blamed for what their ancestors did, and that just makes fixing things even harder politically and practically. But then, blame is far easier and cheaper than implementing solutions, especially when it’s far from clear how much blame belongs to whom and when.

Mark Twain is reputed to have said that, on average, a man with his head in the oven and his feet in a bucket of ice water is comfortable. Today, that aphorism is more worth heeding than ever. Everyone seems to be obsessed with numbers, but most people really fail to understand all the numbers they so blithely cite or follow.

For example, in Cedar City, in January the relative humidity is often over 70%. Sounds really humid, doesn’t it? It’s not. Not in the slightest. The average high temperature is 42 degrees Fahrenheit, the average low 17F, and the altitude is close to 6,000 feet. At those temperatures, the maximum amount of water the air can hold [at 100% relative humidity] is between 2 and 4 grams per kilogram of air, and with the higher altitude, that kilogram of air is larger than at sea level, which means the water vapor is even more diffuse. By comparison, on a mild spring day, at sea level, with the temperature at 70F, and a relative humidity of 50%, each kilogram of air would hold 8 grams. So 50% percent relative humidity at 70F means twice as much water vapor as 100% relative humidity at 42F. Of course, that’s why it’s called relative humidity, and why it doesn’t mean near as much in the winter as in the summer.

In terms of income, averages can be extremely deceptive. In 2014, the mean [or average] U.S. family income was $72,641. That doesn’t sound so bad, but the median [the midpoint income, with half the incomes above and half below] family income was $59,939. And neither the median nor the mean indicates that 15% of American families, or roughly forty-five million people, have incomes below the poverty level of $23,500 for a family of four or $11,770 for a single individual [before federal and state benefits], that 66% of all Americans earn less than $41,000, or that half of all income was earned by the 20% of families earning over $100,000.

EPA estimated mileage numbers are another case where it helps to know what’s behind the numbers. The EPA test protocol is based on the car model in question being driven at legal highway speeds 45% of the time and in city traffic 55% of the time. Virtually all cars get better mileage at highway speeds than in local traffic; so if you drive exclusively in the city and suburbs, your vehicle is almost never likely to reach the EPA estimated mileage figures. Nor will it reach those figures if you’re one of those drivers who drive at speeds in excess of 80 mph.

Another problem with numbers is that far too many organizations are so obsessed with quantifying performance that they insist on quantifying the unquantifiable. My wife the voice and opera professor faces this every year, and each year the quantification demands get stronger and the insistence on a wider range of objective performance data gets louder… and the accompanying paperwork gets more involved and more time-consuming. One of the basic problems with rating voice performance is that, to begin with, unless a singer can match pitch, sing on key, and in the proper tempo and rhythm, they fail. Above that basic level of performance, objective quantification becomes close to impossible. Beyond that level there are no objective standards that apply across the board. Some professional singers are limited to two octaves or so; some few can sing a range of four. How does one quantify the richness or timbre of a voice, or the phrasing, or the breathing? What about the occasional voices that are unique, that go beyond mere technique? But the educational mavens want numbers! The same is true of writing. I’ve seen a great deal of writing over the years that is grammatically correct… and terrible. I’ve seen great storytellers with terrible grammar. Objectively weighing writing through a set of rubrics or “objective” parameters is close to useless – except for weeding out those who can’t write at all.

So why are we so obsessed with numbers when it’s very clear, at least to me, that there are places for numbers and places where relying on numbers makes no sense?

One reason is because, as a society, we fear what we think is the “tyranny of subjectivity,” of relying on personal and professional judgment that can be warped by factors unrelated to the quality [or lack thereof] of what is being measured or judged. Numbers seem so much more “impartial.” The problem is that they can be just as biased in their own way… and very few people seem to realize that. Except Mark Twain, who also said, “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Yet we are swamped in a sea of statistics demanded by more and more institutions and organizations, and government bureaucracies who all seem to think that the numbers, and only the numbers, hold all the answers.

This past weekend I was in Denver, visiting family, and I took my usual morning walk along one of the walking/running/biking paths… and it seemed like I ran across more than a hundred people, most of them incredibly fit-looking, not exactly a surprise, given that Colorado is rated as the most “fit” state in the union. As a walker, albeit a fast walker who can almost keep up with the slower joggers, the few other walkers and I were definitely outnumbered by runners and bikers. And I was definitely outnumbered by all those who carried water-bottles and water back-packs; even some of the slowest walkers seemed to be carting water bottles.

I’ve never seen so many people carting water, and I have to ask why.

Living as I do in Cedar City, which is high desert, and dry enough most of the time to make Denver seem tropical by comparison, I’m well aware of the dangers of dehydration. I always make sure I’m hydrated before I take my walk, and then again after I return.

While the average humidity in Denver is around 50%, in Cedar City, from April to October it’s around 22%, and the high temperatures are close to those in Denver. But I don’t see the same proliferation of water paraphernalia in my home town as I was seeing in Denver.

What exactly is the concern with hydration that goes with the physical fitness cult?

I definitely understand the need for adequate fluids, especially on hot days,or if you’re well away from civilization. I certainly understand the need for endurance and long-distance runners to carry water bottles… but for 20 to 40 minute walks or runs, especially early in the day when it’s cooler? But then, when I did a little research, it turned out that if you’re exercising and in good health, it’s just about impossible to drink too much water.

But I still wonder if hydration is being overemphasized. Does everyone need to carry water all the time, especially in the middle of a city?

From my point of view, there are four basic reasons people read: (1) for entertainment, which includes escaping reality; (2) for knowledge, or to learn about things they don’t know in some fashion; (3) for inspiration, and/or to think about matters in new or different ways; and (4) for occupational/scholastic necessity, although I’d hope scholastic necessity includes learning (which it doesn’t, unhappily, for all too many students today).

People also delude themselves about those reasons. Reading about cinema stars or the Kardashians, or reading tabloid stories about natural disasters and the like isn’t learning; it’s entertainment. And reading to obtain knowledge in order to use that knowledge to reinforce existing thought patterns is certainly reading for knowledge, but it doesn’t do much for thinking when the mindset is already ossified.

One of the great benefits of fiction, especially science fiction and fantasy, is the best of books in these genres can not only entertain, allow a certain escapism, but also impart knowledge and spur thought. On top of that, they can provide income and a following for the critics who review them, although, from what I’ve seen over the years, a certain percentage of those critics neither learn anything from some books nor are able to think about what the book contained, but then they probably weren’t the best students, either.

In any case, F&SF at its best does all of the above, and at its worst still provides entertainment…and that’s not something you can say about an awful of aspects of society today.

So… keep reading.

One of the latest political polls I saw showed that the three “non-political” candidates [Trump, Carson, and Fiorina] for the Republican Presidential nomination now hold over fifty percent of the likely Republican voters. Another showed Bernie Sanders leading Hillary Clinton in several key primary states. Whether these numbers are totally accurate or whether they rise or fall, they’re highly significant in two regards.

First, they show how much anger and dissatisfaction there is among the electorate with professional politicians and Washington, D.C. And second, they show the lack of political and economic understanding on the part of most Americans, not to mention a high degree of hypocrisy.

I’ve already written about the anger, and that’s pretty obvious to many Americans as well as the political commentators.

I’ve mentioned aspects of the lack of understanding before, and some comments in response to my observations also illustrate that there’s a wide-spread failure to understand why seeming “simple” and “common-sense” solutions, as many proposed by Trump and others are called, are neither simple nor common-sense…and certainly not affordable under current taxation levels. A tremendous percentage of the American people, when it comes to government, have no comprehension of the costs involved, one way or the other.

Most Americans believe that wasteful federal spending should be eliminated, but they won’t support the elimination of excess military bases, because they represent jobs in their districts. The army has more tanks than it can use; that’s one reason why the army had no problem turning over excess armored personnel carriers and other equipment to police forces. The BLM runs essentially runs in the red because federal grazing rates are between half and a fifth of what private grazing rights go for. IRS audit rates are the lowest in years, if not forever, and getting to the taxpayer assistance lines takes hours at times because Congress cut IRS funding so much. Lower audits mean less revenue and more successful tax cheats. The list of Congressionally mandated requirements that reduce tax revenues and subsidize special or popular interests, virtually all in response to popular or contributor political pressure, would take pages and pages to even summarize.

There was a huge hue and cry over corporate profits and American companies moving their headquarters abroad, and the popular and political response wasn’t to deal with the reason behind those moves, which is the U.S. tax structure, but to make it more difficult for companies to do that… which is already proving ineffective and giving more companies to move their headquarters abroad — exactly the opposite of what would be desirable.

Minimum wage workers want higher wages, and need them if they are to be able to support themselves without federal aid, but small businesses don’t want higher wages mandated, and most voters who aren’t minimum wage workers don’t want to pay higher taxes to provide income support and welfare benefits to the working poor who need those benefits because their wages are so low.

In short, voters want lower taxes, but no cuts in federal programs that benefit them, only in “other people’s programs,” and they also want to beef up programs such as immigration enforcement, law enforcement, without any increase in taxes.

Yet they’re angry that the “career politicians” can’t deliver this impossible package, and they get angry at any politician or public figure who points out that what everyone wants costs more than anyone wants to pay.

So they’re voting for the “outsiders.” The problem is that basic economics doesn’t care whether a politician is an insider or an outsider. We’ve reached a point where we can’t keep borrowing more than we’re willing to taxes ourselves… and a huge percentage of the electorate isn’t willing to face the problem. They just want someone else to pay for it, and they’re voting for anyone who will support their delusions.

With all the conflict during “Hugo season” about diversity, multi-culturalism, social justice and their relation to story-telling, I thought a little perspective might be useful, particularly with what I see as an underlying and incorrect assumption that F&SF was a white man’s province bereft of diversity and multi-culturalism until recently, say, perhaps the last twenty years or so.

To begin with, multi-culturalism and diversity in science fiction and fantasy didn’t start in the 1980s or 1990s. Andre Norton [aka Alice Mary Norton] was writing about full-blooded Navajos in the 1950s. Leigh Brackett featured Eric John Stark, with skin almost as dark as his black hair. The Left Hand of Darkness, the acclaimed novel by Ursula Le Guin featuring a biologically hermaphroditic alien human society, was published in 1969, and those are just a small smattering of the F&SF novels featuring diverse racial and gender settings and themes published long before the current “diversity” movement. Ironically, of course, a good many of those novels were written by women and published under male or gender-neutral pseudonyms. And yes, such novels were not in the majority. They were a definite minority, and often such efforts were overlooked when they were plainly there.

Ursula Le Guin has noted more than once that the dark skin of the protagonist of A Wizard of Earthsea has been continually overlooked by readers and cover artists [or perhaps that artist was instructed to overlook it for marketing purposes]. Heinlein’s main character in Starship Troopers was a young man of Philippine heritage who spoke Tagalog, something that still gets glossed over in critiques of the novel.

By the 1ate 1980s, more than twenty-five years ago, F&SF novels with culture, race, and gender issues were certainly prominent, and the works (and death) of James Tiptree, Jr. [Alice Hastings Bradley Sheldon] had inspired even greater discussion of gender and diversity in F&SF. Octavia Butler began publishing short stories in the early 1970s and went on to become a major voice for black themes and writers by the 1980s.

A number of other writers have quietly incorporated multi-culturalism, gender and gender issues, and other forms of diversity in their books as well, even if they have not been recognized as “standard bearers.” I’ve written eight books strictly from the female point of view and another three with multiple POVS, one of which is female in each of those three books. I’m also known for strong female characters. I’ve written two books from the “minority” POV, one a black male officer in a predominantly white space force, the other a blond Anglo in a predominantly Asian/Shinto culture, both of whom face quiet discrimination. I’ve also had strong minor characters [and not villains!] who have been gay, lesbian, and transgendered. I didn’t do any of this in service to any ideology. Those were the stories I was telling, and they were based on the kinds and types of people I know. I’m not claiming any honors or demanding praise, but I am saying that too many authors who quietly include what might be called multicultural societies and diversity in their worlds and who write a good story often have that diversity ignored or dismissed because it isn’t blatant enough, or because diversity itself isn’t the story. This often amounts to the minimization of non-obvious excellence and the elevation of often less-excellent message stories.

I’ll also admit that, at times, diversity can and should play a larger part. The Left Hand of Darkness is an amazing novel, and was especially so when it was written and published, particularly because it featured a straight protagonist facing politically and physically life-threatening situations sparked by the interplay of his very presence and two cultures whose hermaphroditic nature created a far more ambiguous and indirect weave of societal pressures than the protagonist could ever have anticipated. The story and the culture cannot be separated, and that’s the way it should be.

That doesn’t mean that every good or excellent F&SF story needs to be about diversity, or gender, or multi-culturalism, although not including a diverse cast of characters, given the makeup of our world today, strikes me a highly unrealistic. Nor should a novel be elevated unduly or praised merely because it features diversity, but a novel that has a good plot, and good characters, with diversity as well, should rate higher, in terms of literary value, than one that is simply a rip-roaring adventure story.

All of which underscores what I’ve been trying to point out for months – it should be the totality of the story or book, not the current flavor du jour [or decade] of what’s on readers’ social agendas, that determines the value of a book.

As a result of some of my comments about the Hugo kerfuffle, I’ve received several comments, here and elsewhere, that state or imply that I just don’t understand what happened and why. I think I understand it very well. But I obviously need to go back to some of the basics that appear to have been overlooked.

Human beings work through groups. Those groups range from cliques and gangs to various organizations and businesses all the way up to government. All these groups have rules. Those rules fall into two categories: explicit rules and implicit rules. The explicit rules can be verbal, but in modern society are usually written. The implicit rules are always unspoken and supposed to be understood by members of the group. Often, if people don’t understand the unspoken rules and follow them, they’re considered to not really be a part of the group. Generally speaking, the more structured and larger an organization is, the more it operates on explicit and formal rules. And the more diverse it is, the more it needs a greater amount of written rules to make sure that everyone understands what those rules are, and the consequences for breaking them. That’s why governments tend to accrete more and more laws and regulations as they grow and age.

The World Science Fiction Society is closer to cliques than to governments. It has specific rules and written procedures for how the Hugo awards are determined, but, as the recent Hugo kerfuffle demonstrates, there are clearly unspoken rules of behavior expected by the group I’ve termed “the new traditionalists,” which has dominated the proceedings and award selection process for at least two decades.

Just in the past few days, author and editor Eric flint offered an essay describing, with statistics, the change in F&SF “literary”/award standards and how the field has changed from one where there was considerable overlapping between “popular” fiction and the works getting awards to one where there is very little, if any. This change suggests that “story” alone is no longer as important a factor in determining “excellence.”

The “sad puppies” were formed by a loose group of writers and fans who felt, rightly or wrongly, that the new traditionalists were sacrificing “story” to other factors such as diversity and gender issues in determining what represented the “best” in F&SF. They raised the issue, and, predictably, because they constituted the minority of those voting, were effectively ignored and their concerns dismissed and minimized. So, after several years, this past year, they came up with a “slate,” something that was not prohibited (and, in fact, probably could not be prohibited in any way that would be effective).

Immediately, Vox Day, aka Theodore Beale, came up with an even more radical “rabid puppies” slate, out of motives that appear to be far more grounded in self-interest, and possibly gaining lots of publicity for his small publishing house and the authors he publishes.

At this point, the new traditionalists and their supporters expressed outrage, and have continued to do so, claiming that the puppies “gamed the system,” despite the fact that what the puppies did was well within the written rules. Why such an outpouring of outrage? Because the method used broke the tacit and unwritten rules accepted and followed by the new traditionalists.

What is continually overlooked in this kerfuffle is that the sad puppies expressed a concern, which was overlooked and minimized. Exactly why did they have any incentive to follow unspoken rules which they believe put them at a disadvantage in expressing their concerns?

This underlying conflict then provided Vox Day with the perfect opportunity to “self-publicize” and gain a platform he could not have possibly gained in almost any other way… as well as, incidentally, to further negate the actual underlying issues originally expressed by the “sad puppies.” The reaction to his acts clearly confirmed that there are unspoken rules and that the majority of Hugo voters did not like others breaking those rules. Whether the Hugo majority actually represents the feelings of the majority of F&SF readers is also another question, because even the massive increase in the voting membership of WorldCon represents less than one percent of all fantasy and science fiction readers.

In any case, the fact is that the unspoken rule against “slates” has been broken, and if the new traditionalists and their supporters do not greatly increase their participation in the initial nominating process, something that a number of others have already stated, the same sort of slate versus anti-slate confrontation could happen again next year. And if it does, the only “winner” will be Vox Day.

We have two groups with very different perspectives on what constitutes excellence. Each believes the other is wrong, misguided, or the like. Those on each side can argue quite logically their viewpoint. The problem is that, all too often, people with fixed mindsets believe absolutely and firmly that their understanding of a situation is the only way it can be accurately perceived. It has nothing to do with whether one is liberal or conservative, or any other social outlook. It has to do with a certain firmness of thought, described as “principled” by each of themselves, while describing their opponents as misguided or unprincipled.

In the case of the Hugos, as I see it, and I’ve certainly been criticized for the way I see it, there is some truth in both the cases of the “sad puppies” and the “new traditionalists.” [I have to say that I don’t see much truth or objectivity in the points of the “rabid puppies,” but perhaps my mindset just doesn’t accept what seems to be hateful provocation or use of hate to self-publicize.] And, as I’ve said before, not only do I think the field is big enough for both viewpoints, but the sales of a range of authors prove that rather demonstrably.

Yet each side is contending that the other did something hateful and discriminatory, largely because one side refused to abide by unspoken rules that they believed minimized their concerns. In the end, the other aspect of groups that this conflict illustrates, again, is why unspoken rules tend to be superseded by written procedures in larger groups.

One thing I have observed over a moderately long life is that when two sides both feel so strongly, usually neither is as “right” as it professes… and until each addresses the other’s concerns in some fashion, the conflict will persist – unless one side just destroys the other, which has certainly happened in human history.

Last week I attended the World Science Fiction Convention in Spokane, Washington, where I was on a few panels, signed books, met and talked with fans, editors, and other authors, and attended the Hugo ceremony, where awards in various categories were presented – or not. Over the course of the past year, there has been a great controversy over who was nominated for these awards and by whom. The “puppy” crew claimed that the voters in recent years had become more and more fixated on race, diversity, and social justice and nominated only works with those underlying settings and themes while ignoring basic story-telling. The “new traditionalists” claimed that the puppies only wanted works by white male authors, or the equivalent, and urged that all those who cared about science fiction and fantasy vote “no award” in any category dominated by “puppy” nominees.

The resulting kerfuffle ended up creating the most votes in Hugo history, and ostensibly the “new traditionalists” won. When the vote totals were finally released, essentially all of the areas where the “puppy” nominees dominated ended up with the winner being “no award,” even in the case for best editor, where the top nominee – Toni Weisskopf – received a record number of votes for an editor. In addition, last year, she placed second, but because she was considered as “puppy nominee” this year, she was denied that honor by 2496 votes for no award – more than three times the number of votes for any winning nominee ever.

I’m not so sure that everyone didn’t lose, because the real winner was the “NO” vote. It became a question not of what was the best work or writer/artist of those nominated, but of what works or people were acceptable or “not acceptable” because of the reputed philosophical/gender stance of those who nominated them.

As a side note, though, I’d have to ask all those male authors who were “no awarded” because of gender perceptions, many of them inaccurate, how it feels to be marginalized the way women and minorities have been for years. I’d also like to ask all the “new traditionalists” who drummed up the overwhelming “no award” votes how it feels to be just like the old-style chauvinists who marginalize on the basis of color and gender, because they just marginalized a number of good writers and editors on the basis of who nominated them, rather than on the basis of how good they were, although I have to admit that a number of the “puppy” nominees weren’t close to the best.

In any case, as I’ve noted earlier, this same current of negativity underlies the current contest for presidential party nominees, with candidates such as Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders effectively representing a vote against the current political structure.

In both F&SF and national politics, ideas and concepts are not being evaluated on their individual merits, but upon who happens to be proposing what, rather than on what is good and workable. The cults of blind belief and personality are becoming ever more dominant, and that’s anything but a good sign for either politics or literature… or for society as a whole.

I was reading the other day about what might be called “antipathy gaps,” as measured by a series of sociological surveys, which revealed that there is a greater and stronger divide in terms of antipathy between Republicans and Democrats than there is between races… for the first time in decades, and probably ever, although there aren’t any studies that go back that far.

As someone who was active in politics for roughly twenty years, I can certainly attest to the growth of the divide between parties. When I began my career as a political staffer on the national level, there were numerous friendships across party lines, and there were even a great number of issues on which both parties worked and reached agreement. That began to change in the 1970s, and by the early 1980s existing friendships were often fraying, and very few cross-party friendships were formed between newcomers to the U.S. House and Senate. This process appears to have continued, and I suspect any politicians who are friends with their peers in the other party appear to be keeping any such friendships under wraps – assuming more than a handful of such friendships even exist.

I’ve noticed the same among politically active acquaintances, and it’s very clear that almost any discussion of political issues almost invariably degenerates into party-line positions among the vast majority of them. So far, at least, we’ve remained on good terms with friends who have other political leanings, if at the cost of never discussing certain issues with them in any depth. This “social” polarization is also reflected in the letters to the editor in the local and regional newspapers, but I suspect part of that reflects an editorial predisposition to fan the flames in order to generate controversy and, thus, sales.

As a nation, we’re faced with incredibly complex issues, all of which have arisen from the conflict of multiple factors, and none of which can be resolved by the simplistic rhetoric and “solutions” of either party’s current political stance on the “hot-button” issues because both parties have developed positions reflecting the views of their activists, and those views are seen as extreme, not only by the opposing party, but also by a significant number of Americans. Neither set of so-called solutions will work, either, because they ignore social and economic realities in favor of comforting “common sense” bromides that ignore unpleasant and inconvenient facts.

Yet, increasingly, the so-called dialogue has come to consist of both sides shouting past each other, and with the shouting getting louder every year, those seeking common ground have less say and less input… and the only change I’m seeing is a hardening of position on both sides.

It’s past time both sides looked at the facts – ALL the facts, and not just those that support each side’s position, but then, that’s not likely to happen because there’s far too much money for the media in fomenting conflict and far too much profit for the gun-makers and military industrial complex in arming everyone for the coming disaster… and the financial community doesn’t care so long as they can keep increasing their share of the national wealth.

There’s more unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, and the “black lives matter” movement certainly hasn’t gone away as more and more people, especially African Americans, are demanding that the “justice system” be fixed. I agree that it needs fixing, but I’m not so sure that the most necessary fixes are the ones the protesters are demanding.

I got to thinking about this as the result of reading about two events. One was the fatal shooting of a young unarmed black man who apparently attacked an automobile dealership with his car, finally driving through a showroom window. The other was about a Utah county commissioner who has been convicted on misdemeanor charges and faces up to one year in jail, $100,000 in fines and possibly large restitution awards for damage he and other protesters caused to the archaeological resources on federal lands by leading a mass ATV ride through an area where motorized vehicles were prohibited. The state legislature attempted to pass a bill to pay the fines and restitution awards, and when that failed, the governor contributed $10,000 from his campaign war chest toward legal fees. Then I got to thinking about Cliven Bundy, the rancher who has failed to pay federal grazing fees for over twenty years and who threatened armed resistance to BLM agents who attempted to confiscate his cattle to pay those fees. The BLM backed down, over a year ago, and Bundy still hasn’t paid up, and nothing has been done about the fact that he and his supporters offered armed resistance to federal officials.

Somehow, I just can’t imagine a black rancher, assuming one could even obtain grazing rights, ever being allowed to offer armed resistance to the federal government without being gunned down post-haste.

The Justice Department has rightly condemned the town of Ferguson for operating a police system that preyed almost exclusively upon lower income blacks, and reports of other towns operating in exactly the same fashion have also come to light and have been condemned, but I don’t see the federal government doing much condemning of the billionaire finance types who nearly destroyed the U.S. economy. Nor do I see much support for those who protest illegal government leases and procurements unethically benefitting the corporate sector.

In fact, as an example, after Tim DeChristopher offered a fraudulent protest bid at a BLM mineral rights auction, he ended up serving 21 months in prison for that bid – despite the fact that his acts hurt no one and cost almost nothing and that the U.S. Attorney General declared the auction illegal and voided it – even before DeChristopher went to trial. No one was ever prosecuted, let alone tried, for attempting to illegally sell drilling rights to industry. When that happened in the Teapot Dome scandal in 1923, the Secretary of the Interior went to jail for accepting bribes, but, unsurprisingly, the official of Pan-American Petroleum who paid the bribes was acquitted. You can see how far we’ve come… or not.

There’s been a great focus on the police for a whole string of events which resulted in the deaths largely of black men. In a great percentage of cases, however, those black men had done something wrong, often illegal. The problem wasn’t, in my opinion, with the attempts to arrest them, but how those attempted arrests were carried out… and what happened after that. Yet no one shot Cliven Bundy or any number of white criminals.

Part of this is perception, a very deadly perception. Because of the amount of guns in American society, and because of the high level of violence and death in the majority of black communities, the police too often perceive any black man, especially one caught in a questionable or illegal act, as a deadly threat. Sometimes, those men are a deadly threat, but as recent events have shown, all too many times, the threat is not that deadly. And, at times, there has been no threat at all. But how are the police to tell?

As a supporting point to the critical role that perception plays, recently I wrote about a man fatally shot in a nearby town, a very white man. I’m convinced that one reason he was shot was because most of the police in the entire county knew that he was violent and dangerous when drunk. When he refused to drop his gun and aimed it at the investigating police officer, the officer believed that the man was a deadly threat, which he likely was, and fired in self-defense. I suspect, although we’ll never know, that had the officer been faced with the same situation with someone who had no record, he might have waited just a bit longer…but how that might have turned out is another question.

There are two deadly sides to the perception problem. First is the fact and the perception that, in general, whites get away with a lot more during and after being arrested, and the fact that often they don’t even get arrested, especially if the wrong-doing is large enough and financially related, no matter how many people it hurts. Second is the fact that, like it or not, black men doing things that look to be illegal are considered dangerous, and that perception can be all too deadly, usually to the black man.

“Community policing” can certainly help the problem in black communities, but a good part of the anger that has led to demonstrations and violence is simply because of the rather accurate perception that the justice system continues to show a double standard, particularly in the areas of drugs and theft. Blacks who use crack cocaine, for example, which is more prevalent in minority areas, face far harsher penalties under law than whites found with cocaine powder with the same amount of the drug itself. Likewise, a black man who commits comparatively small theft is likely to spend more time in jail than most of the white men who crashed the economy.

Interestingly enough, the white collar criminals who get the longest sentences aren’t the people who crashed the economy or tried to illegally auction off federal lands or drilling rights – they’re the ones convicted of “insider trading,” profiting from non-public knowledge to make money for themselves. But at whose expense are they profiting? You guessed it — the multibillion dollar investment firms. What makes this so fascinatingly hypocritical is that the high level executive can decide to make a decision or move that will impact stock prices, can then buy or sell stock, and then, weeks or months later, actually carry out the decision… and profit enormously… and that’s perfectly legal, just so long as he tells no one.

What bothers me, again, about the “black lives matter” movement is that all the debate over what has happened seems to be limited to black deaths alone – and continues to avoid the far larger questions of justice and fairness. And that means that, once the current furor dies down, and it will, no matter what anyone says, the underlying problems will largely remain. I sincerely hope I’m wrong, but I’m certainly not betting on it.

August sixth, last week, was the seventieth anniversary of the destruction of the Japanese city of Nagasaki with the second, and last, atomic bomb used in warfare. The two atomic bombs dropped on Japan killed almost 130,000 people immediately, and the eventual death toll was estimated at close to a quarter million people, of whom only about 20,000 were military personnel.

In ceremonies memorializing the event, at least one speaker asked for the abolition of atomic weapons as “inhumane.” That got me to thinking. While there’s no doubt that an atomic weapon is “inhumane,” is there any effective weapon used in war that is “humane”?

The allied firebombing of Dresden in February of 1945 killed 25,000 civilians. The Japanese attack on the Chinese city of Nanking in 1937, known popularly as “the rape of Nanking” resulted in 200,000 civilian deaths, according to the International Military Tribunal, largely inflicted by rifles, grenades, and bayonets. Arrows, swords, and trampling by horses resulted in the death of over 200,000 civilians when the Mongols sacked Bagdad in 1258. If my sources are correct, there have been at least seventy wars in the last 2000 years with death tolls exceeding 100,000 people, and almost thirty with death tolls exceeding a million people.

So why are atomic weapons any more inhumane than any other weapons? Given all these wars and deaths, all of these wars that were waged by people, human beings attacking other human beings, what do we mean when someone talks about atomic weapons being especially inhumane?

The word “inhumane” and its linguistic roots mean “not human” or “not having the qualities of a human being.” Yet, obviously, it’s very human for human beings to slaughter other human beings. As far back as archeologists have been able to find human remains that can be analyzed, they find a significant percentage, roughly fifteen percent, of the individuals died violent deaths from weapons.

Today, we use the word “humane” to denote kindly or civilized conduct toward others and showing a lack of cruelty toward animals, but isn’t that almost a combination of wishful thinking and hypocrisy?

Despite predictions that his support will fade, polls show Donald Trump well ahead of all other contenders among Republican voters, despite his boorish and brusque ways. More than a few political pundits have asked how that can possibly be. To me, the answer seems obvious, despite my personal uneasiness with simple or obvious answers [which so often turn out to be neither].

Trump is articulating all the concerns that millions of Americans have – that the political system is broken, that career politicians are only interested in themselves, that excessive concern for those at the very bottom and very top of the economic ladder has resulted in screwing the middle class, especially the working middle class, and that corporate leaders and politicians have conspired to destroy millions of American jobs by allowing those jobs to be outsourced overseas while allowing millions of illegal immigrants to flood into the United States to get both welfare and take jobs from Americans by being willing to work for less under miserable conditions.

The people to whom Trump is appealing aren’t just angry, they’re furious, and they feel no one is listening to them.

On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders is appealing to similar concerns, except his platform also includes appeals to minimum age workers and to minorities by doubling the minimum wage and taking on the economic structure that creates barriers for the financially disenfranchised. Over the past two decades, minimum wage workers have seen their purchasing power decline more than any other economic class in the United States, which has resulted in some cities and states increasing state and local minimum wages, but those increases have had a limited effect so far. Sanders is also talking about reforming Wall Street, making the very wealthiest Americans pay more in taxes, universal affordable health care, and affordable college.

The political pundits thought Sanders didn’t have a ghost of a chance – except he’s already raised more than $15 million exclusively from small donations, is drawing crowds in excess of 10,000 people, has enlisted more than 100,000 in support efforts, and is within ten points of Hillary Clinton in early primary states.

If these two very different campaigns don’t tell you that there are a lot of angry Americans out there who want change… you’re not seeing what’s really there.

While I still doubt that either Trump or Sanders can capture a nomination, history shows that angry and unhappy voters can totally change the political calculus. There was this mountebank candidate, a racist anti-Semite that no one took seriously in a faraway time and place… Germany, I think it was…

In the first Republican Presidential debate, Donald Trump reiterated his proposal to build a fence between the United States and Mexico, and even said he’d get Mexico to help pay for it. Given Trump’s current polling figures, millions of Americans believe that it’s a “common sense” proposal.

The fence issue illustrates one of the big problems with so-called common sense ideas. Often they’re anything but sensible. The land border with Mexico stretches 1,969 miles, and the Department of Homeland Security has already fenced some 651 miles of that border, mostly near urban areas and international bridges. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, with over 58,000 personnel and a budget of $4 billion, also patrols that area and the more remote borderlands in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, using 16,875 vehicles, 269 aircraft, 300 watercraft, and 300 camera towers, as well as aerial drones.

While the number of illegal immigrants crossing from Mexico annually has declined more than sixty percent since 2000, the Border Patrol still apprehends more than 100,000 illegals annually, and agency cost estimates to fence the entire border top twenty billion dollars, not including annual maintenance. And even fences are not secure, since each year the agency repairs more than 4,000 breaches in the existing fencing. To effectively seal the U.S.-Mexico border would require the equivalent of a 1,969-mile Berlin Wall, and maintaining and staffing it would likely cost well over $100 billion over the next ten to fifteen years. And illegals would then take to the seas, or tunnel under it. Also, does anyone really think Mexico can come up with that kind of money when they can’t even control the crime syndicates in Mexico?

In the meantime, there are over eleven million illegal immigrants in the United States, and trying to apprehend and deport them would require the equivalent of Nazi Germany’s SS troopers. Gee… a Berlin Wall and the storm troopers… what ever happened to America, the land built on the hopes of aspirations of immigrants, the land where 95% of the entire population consists of immigrants and the descendants of immigrants?

Likewise proposals to “bring back American factory jobs” are nonsense. The United States manufactures far more than it did twenty years ago – and it does so with far fewer workers through the use of computers and automation. Those kind of jobs are never coming back.

Yet tens of millions of people swallow such simplistic political promises. Yes, we need a better handle on immigration and better jobs for millions of Americans, and a lot of other improvements, but simplistic political promises based on wishes and so-called common sense aren’t going to do anything effective to deal with either.

1. Almost everyone is suited to college.

2. College’s principal function is to prepare a student for a specific occupation.

3. Everyone should complete college in five years or less.

4. Colleges should meet all student needs.

5. Popular professors are good professors.

6. College courses should be entertaining.

7. Student evaluations improve college level education.

8. Colleges should accommodate all ranges of personal beliefs.

Each of these “myths” is widely held by a great number of college students and their parents, as well as by a significant segment of the U.S. population. Each has a grain of truth behind it but is effectively misleading if not totally false.

Not everyone is suited to college, either in terms of intellectual ability, ambition, inclination, and determination. While everyone needs a skill set to succeed in providing for himself or herself, the traditional college education isn’t always the best place for each individual to obtain that skill set. Often, for some individuals, it’s absolutely the worst place.

With the increasing cost of college, more and more students have to work to pay for their education. Working means they have less time to devote to studying an often these students either take lighter course loads or drop out for a semester here and there to obtain the money to continue. Others, such as in Utah, often take off several years for various reasons, including church missionary work, voluntary “sabbaticals,” or even just to “find themselves.”

College is not a vocational school. Most college-educated young people graduating today will change jobs and/or fields at least several times after graduation, yet some state legislatures and others, such as accrediting bodies, are now “grading” colleges on the percentages of graduates employed in their undergraduate field of study.

Colleges are now required to provide an ever-greater range of “personal” services to students, going far beyond course advisors to counseling, special arrangements for test-taking, study-abroad programs, even design-your-own course/major options. This proliferation of “services” is a significant factor in increasing college costs. At the same time, students are less and less willing to spend time outside the classroom in pursuit of their studies. Even so, the demands for more “services” and options continue to grow at the same time as colleges and universities are trying to reduce the instructional costs by utilizing more adjunct professors and fewer full-time faculty.

There are good professors and popular professors. Some few popular professors are good, and quite a few not-so-popular professors are good. Studies show, however, on average, that the very most popular professors are the least demanding and easiest graders.

Likewise, education is about widening the students’ knowledge bases and skills, and for most students, that process is often uncomfortable. Courses that are primarily entertaining seldom stretch the students to improve their capabilities and understanding.

A rather wide range of studies show that the more student evaluations are employed as an evaluation tool, the greater the likelihood that the curriculum is being dumbed down. The age period when most students attend college is that period of their life when they’re the most self-centered and, therefore, the most resistant to change. It’s also the period when they need to come to grips with the fact that they are not special and that they are not the center of the universe. That’s a large part of what a good college education does. Students at this age evaluate based largely on what they want, not what they need. Giving them what they want is the easy way for colleges to fill seats… and create empty and/or closed minds.

When I taught, I had students who were offended by the beliefs and the words in certain assignments, and who wanted special assignments in place of those works assigned. There have been numerous court cases of students demanding not to have to read passages that conflicted with their personal and religious beliefs. A college education is not about restricting knowledge, but about exposing students to a wider range of information and opinion. They’re not required to agree with it, only to be exposed to it so that they know what it is and what it represents.

If these “myths” continue to proliferate, colleges will continue to become more like high schools… and neither the students, nor society, need another four years of high school.

An article in the latest Scientific American presents the case that the success of homo sapiens in dominating the planet and essentially wiping out the Neandertals and Denisovians, if not other yet undiscovered hominid species, resulted from the ability of humans to cooperate on a larger scale than other hominids.

It appears from the fossil and archeological evidence that we’ve so far discovered that Neandertals never congregated in large groups, and yet they were successful in making weapons and hunting rather large game. They were physically stronger than homo sapiens, and their brain size was comparable, possibly even larger. But it’s pretty clear that over time, they never had a chance once homo sapiens moved into the same territory.

The article also postulates that the human tendency toward cooperation is at least partly genetic. If so, this leads to a very interesting corollary – that prejudice indeed “has to be carefully taught.” And, in fact, human history bears this out in large degree. In every war and conflict that there appears to be a record of, and probably in all those without any records, at least one side has gone to great lengths to dehumanize the other side… and in many cases, both sides have attempted to dehumanize their opponents.

The same is true in terms of discrimination. From the beginning of slavery in the United States, blacks/Afro-Americans were considered inferior. Even the vaunted Constitution only counted each of them as three-fifths of a person. The same pattern exists with regard to gender discrimination, particularly of women, with pervasive and long-standing suggestions that women were inferior because they were “emotional” or “weak” or whatever else would make them “lesser” than men.

Yet experience, science, and history all refute such allegations. There have been great “black” civilizations and cultures and some pretty abysmal “white” ones. There has been no shortage of black “geniuses” or white idiots, or vice versa. And whenever women have been given equal opportunity and resources, they’ve done just as well as men in terms of intelligence and achievement… and in innumerable instances far better than the “best” men in almost any given field.

Given all this, it seems apparent that, because humans actually have a tendency to cooperate, dehumanization has become a cultural tool for overriding the cooperative trait and for gaining personal power. We don’t necessarily think of it that way, but even I find myself doing it, for instance, by calling people “idiots” when they do something stupid or thoughtless. Admittedly, individuals can be idiots, as we all know, but idiocy is generally individual, not cultural, and there’s a very fine line between accurately assessing someone’s lack of ability on an individual basis and applying that “lack” to an entire group in order to dehumanize them, yet dehumanization persists,and it’s usually used in pursuit or maintenance of power.