But all too often “true beliefs” are the enemy of knowledge – and that sometimes even occurs within the so-called hallowed halls of science and academia.  True believers exist in all fields, and all of them are characterized by an unwillingness to change what they believe as knowledge and understanding of the world and the universe improve.

Human beings are far from knowing everything, but both as individuals and as a species, we are, so far, continuing to learn.  What we believe about the world is largely based on what we have observed and what we have heard or read.  The more we learn and advance, the more our beliefs should reflect that change, and yet more and more people seem to think that the opposite is true, even though the largest problem with “belief” and with “true believers” occurs when what people believe is at variance with what is.  Or, as the old saying goes, “It isn’t what you don’t know that hurts you so much as what you know that isn’t so.”

From the reaction to the last blog post… and others in the past, I’m getting the impression that at least some of my readers feel that I’m against or opposed to “faith” or religion.  I’m not.  I’m opposed to those versions of religion that deny what is, and what has been proved to be.  When some die-hard fundamentalist insists that the Earth was created in 4004 B.C., given the wealth of scientific evidence and facts to the contrary… well, rightly or wrongly, I don’t think that such a view should be given public credence, nor should it be allowed to impede the teaching of science that has an array of demonstrated facts to show that the universe is somewhere around 14 billion years old, while the fundamentalist only has scripture and faith.

Some branches of certain religions “honestly” believe that women are not the equal of men. While one would be a fool not to accept that there are differences in the sexes, including the fact that for a given body weight, men generally have more muscle mass, in most highly  industrialized economies it’s become very clear that women do at least as well in almost all ranges of occupations as do men, and the fact that women are now surpassing men in academic honors in most fields of higher education in the United States should prove the idea that in general women are at least equal, if not superior, to men in intellect.  Yet such statistics and achievements have little impact in changing the views of such religious “true believers.”

Another problem with “true beliefs” at variance with what can be proved or demonstrated, particularly those that get enshrined in legal codes and laws, is that they create moral conflicts for honest and less doctrinaire individuals.  For example, if a law, as did Tennessee’s law at the time of the Scopes trial, prohibits the teaching of evolution, then a teacher must either teach a falsehood or not teach what he or she knows to be accurate in order to obey the law.  If the teacher obeys the law, then the teacher is essentially false to the very goal of education.  If the teacher is true to the goal of education, the teacher breaks the law.  This dilemma is far from new; essentially the same kind of conflict led to the death of Socrates over 2,400 years ago. 

Is there a God?  At present, there’s no scientific proof one way or the other, and I really don’t care if you believe in a greater deity or you don’t.  What I do care about is how you act and how whatever you believe affects me, those I love, and others in society.  All throughout history, beliefs that have been at variance with what is have resulted in oppression, repression, tyranny, and violence, not to mention a lack of progress and human improvement.  And given the fact that we’ve tendencies in those directions anyway, the last thing we need as a species is the support and encouragement of such misguided “true believers.”

The other day I happened to catch a few minutes of the movie Inherit the Wind  [the 1960 Spencer Tracy version], a film which is essentially a fictionalized version of the Scopes trial of 1925, where a Tennessee public school teacher was convicted of  teaching of evolution in the public schools, in violation of then state law. In the film and in the actual trial, the presiding judge forbid the defendant’s attorney from calling witnesses from the scientific community on the grounds that the science was not relevant to the charge, because the question was not about whether the law was accurate, but whether the defendant had violated that law.  Scopes was found guilty and fined $100 [equivalent to roughly $1,250 today], but the verdict was later overturned on appeal by a technicality, and Scopes was never re-tried.  In 1968, the Supreme Court ruled that prohibition of teaching evolution was unconstitutional because it represented the favoring of one religious view over others [a fact seemingly overlooked or forgotten in the forty years following].

What struck me, however, about both the trial and the film was the underlying problem faced by the scientific community whenever a scientific theory, factual finding, or discovery conflicts with popular or religious beliefs.  All too often, the popular reaction is a variation on “shoot the messenger” who bears bad or unpleasant news.  The plain fact, which tends to be overlooked, is that a significant proportion, if not an overwhelming majority, of deeply religious individuals who identify themselves as Christians do not trust scientists, or indeed, anyone who does not share their beliefs.

This viewpoint is certainly not limited to Christians, and there are more than a few scientists who do not trust the ability of deeply believing Christians to guide public policy, especially in regard to science and education.  The radical factions of Islam are unlikely to trust western secularists on much of anything, and all stripes of militants are going to be skeptical of those who do not share their views of how the world should be.

In essence, one person’s “truth” can all too often be another’s heresy, even when there is overwhelming factual evidence of that truth.  That overwhelming factual evidence can be denied is most easily seen in dealing with hard science [regardless of belief, there is far too much evidence of the development of the universe to allow any credibility to the idea that the earth and the cosmos were created in 4004 B.C.], but the problem exists in all areas of human endeavor. 

Simply put… how do we know whether what someone says is accurate or truthful?  Generally speaking, we weigh what is said against what we know and believe, but how do we know whether what we know and believe is accurate?

The “traditional” answer to that question was the basis for so-called liberal education, where an individual studied a wide range of subjects, questioning and experimenting with facts and ideas and obtaining a broader range of knowledge and perspective.  Unfortunately, the increasing complexity and technological basis of modern civilization has resulted in a growing class of individuals who are highly educated in narrower and narrower fields of knowledge, and who believe that they are “knowledgeable” in areas well beyond their education and experience.  Some indeed are.  Most aren’t.

Nonetheless, the problems remain.  How can society educate its citizens so that they can distinguish more accurately between what actually is and was and what they wish to believe that cannot be supported by facts, observation, and verifiable technology and science?  And how should society deal with those who wish society’s rules to be based upon beliefs that  can be factually shown to be false or inaccurate?

The day before yesterday or thereabouts, Borders Books announced bankruptcy and the closure of more than 200 superstores, following its announcement last month that it had deferred payments to its creditors, including the monies it owes to my publisher. Yesterday, one of the largest Australian bookselling chains announced bankruptcy.  Last week, the Canadian distributor for my books [and all those titles released by Macmillan and its subsidiaries] announced bankruptcy and immediate shut-down.  And now, Walmart has removed the already small F&SF section from at least some [if not all] of its stores. The circulation numbers of print versions of F&SF magazines are generally down once again, as are the paperback book sales. On top of that readers are complaining to me that they either can’t get ebook versions of my work outside the USA… or that there are only a few titles available.

Needless to say, this is a worrying time for authors, especially new authors or those whose recent sales numbers are considered “borderline” by their publishers.

What tends to be forgotten in all these stories and depressing financials and figures is that, at least in the United States, the past fifty years have been either a golden age in publishing and writing [that’s if you’re an optimist] or a prolonged “bubble” [if you’re a pessimist].  Prior to a century ago, only a few handfuls of writers could make a living strictly from their writing. Even some thirty years ago, Isaac Asimov calculated that there were less than 500 U.S. writers making a living wage in speculative fiction, and most were barely scraping by. Over the past two decades, I’d wager that there well might have been ten times that number.

Will that level of “prosperity” continue? 

I hope so… but I’d have to say that I have my doubts… for a number of reasons.  First, despite fluctuations on a year by year basis, surveys indicate that the number of young people reading books continues, overall, to decline. Second, the number and geographic range of book sales outlets is also declining, and this will be accelerated if Borders Books fails, which, unhappily, is looking more and more likely despite the attempt to remain in business through bankruptcy restructuring.  Third, the rate of high-level functional literacy is also declining.  Fourth, the range and scope of other entertainment options, particularly visually-video-oriented and interactive ones, is increasing.  And fifth, the amount of uninterrupted time free for reading is also declining.

Now… I’m not saying that reading or books will vanish, but unless these trends reverse dramatically, book readership will continue to decline markedly, and eventually, so will book sales, more than the annual declines over the past two years.  Some of this longer-term decline will be masked when more and more baby-boomers retire, because they will have more time to read, and most likely will, but as they die off, they’re not likely to be replaced, and book sales will decline more significantly.

So… for those young writers who are selling well now… I’d recommending saving a lot more than you are at present because the good times never last forever.

I was struck by the observation made by two comments on my last blog, the point that, in the quest for efficiency – and higher profits in the case of corporations – both government and industry are effectively destroying redundancy in industry and infrastructure and in the production of goods and services.  That lack of redundancy, inventory, or reserves results in higher costs, often the destruction of businesses, and unsafe or dangerous conditions for millions of people.

Airlines, for example, strive to fill every seat on the plane and have virtually no back-up aircraft available – and even if they do, airports have no more landing/take-off slots. So… when bad weather or other delays occur, thousands upon thousands of passengers may literally have to wait days or weeks to make a business trip or return home.  Last summer a crane knocked over one power pole here in Cedar City.  One pole on a residential street, and a quarter of the town was without power for the entire day. Again, here in Cedar City, one of the pumps providing water to the town failed, and it took two weeks to get and install a replacement pump – and for two weeks severe water restrictions were in place because the city didn’t have a replacement pump. 

One of the reasons for the financial melt-down of several years ago was another lack of redundancy, if you will – the lack of capital reserves on the part of banks, investment banks, and brokerage firms.  To be “efficient” and squeeze every possible drop of profit from their investments, they leveraged themselves to the hilt… and they had no reserves left when large parts of their portfolios went sour.

State governments are guilty of the same sort of short-term thinking.  They cut taxes or spend more funds when tax revenues are good, never setting aside reserves, and then have to cut services or raise taxes at the very time when such cuts are not only the most painful, but when such cuts have a multiplier effect that makes the economy even worse.

All this so-called efficiency is nothing of the sort.  What the quest for efficiency has become is an on-going pressure to get more work out of fewer people and more profit out of less investment, all of which results in the inability to deal adequately with the inevitable but unpredictable disasters that will always occur, whether caused by weather, human error, or economic collapses of one sort or another.

There’s a point where the pursuit of efficiency becomes, as the old saying goes, “penny wise and pound foolish,” and most businesses and governments passed that point long ago.  What’s even sadder is that those who guide both don’t have either the wisdom or the guts to say, “Enough is enough.”

Last week the winter resort community of Brian Head [Utah] lost electric power for 19 hours during a bitter winter storm.  Because the outage was caused late in the day by a downed power line and insulators broken by subzero temperatures, blinding snow, and high winds in a mountain area not accessible except by foot or snowcat in the winter, it was more than twelve hours before power crews could even locate and then reach the site.  This loss of power caused an estimated $30 million worth of damage to more than 200 condominiums and resort homes from frozen and burst pipes.

There are, of course, a few questions as to why this happened.  How could so much damage occur in such a short time?  After all, I live some thirty miles away, as the crow flies, from Brian Head, and the temperatures here weren’t that much colder. In fact, we turn the heat down from 65 degrees to 50 at night, and the house didn’t even cool fifteen degrees that night.  But then, we have a well-insulated house, and the starting temperature was 65 degrees.  The majority of the dwellings damaged in Brian Head were rental units, many of which were unoccupied at the time, and the baseline heating level was probably around 50 degrees. Second, those units were not all that well insulated and depended on continuous power in the winter.

Even so, what happened in Brian Head illustrates just how dependent how most of us in the United States are on the continuous flow of power, water, and other infrastructure services.  We’re also often ill-equipped to deal with massive disruptions, as witness what happened in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.  Our daughter and her husband in Houston, not even in the direct path of the Hurricane, were without power for nearly a month because the power crews could not get to their street because the number of downed trees overwhelmed their capabilities.

Yet neither the majority of Americans – or U.S. politicians – seem to recognize either our degree of dependence on our infrastructure or its deteriorating state.  The electric grid is outdated and held together with creative fixes… and hope.  Tens of thousands of bridges are deteriorating.  The water system serving New York City is over a century old and leaks millions of gallons a day.  The list goes on and on… and only when there’s an emergency – or a disaster – does it seem like either businesses or government even take notice.

They’re all like the rental property owners in Brian Head – build it and operate it as cheaply as possible, regardless of the possible damages and costs if something goes wrong – just another example of short-term thinking on the part of both the public and the private sector.

The headline read “Useless Degrees?”, and the newspaper story went on to tell about a state lawmaker who was upset about the fact that too many students, especially here in Utah, obtained degrees in areas of study for which there were either no careers or very few jobs for the number of students with academic degrees in those fields.

This sort of questioning raises a fundamental question about both the value of an undergraduate collegiate degree and the purpose of such a degree.  Is the principal purpose of an undergraduate degree to provide what amounts to vocational training or is it to teach the student how to think?

Immediately, of course, the response from most people would be:  “Why not both?”

The problem with the “both” answer is that learning “how” is often very different from learning how to ask “why.”  Asking why often requires challenging the status quo, and accepted beliefs, as well as examining what lies behind what created society, or a certain discipline, in its present form.  The original concept of the university was based on educating a comparatively small percentage of the population to question and to master a limited number of high-level skills, such as law and medicine, and later engineering. Other skills were learned on the job through what amounted to apprenticeship.  Today, however, many occupations require young people to have a much higher degree of knowledge and skill and some form of formal education in order even to be considered for employment. Part of this is because society has become more mobile and businesses are often reluctant to spend the money and time to train people in order for them to master skills and then leave and use those skills elsewhere

The problem that colleges and universities face is that, first, many are not equipped to operate as high-level vocational schools, nor to determine which students belong in what field of study, and even when they can, societal expectations essentially restrict their ability to determine which students take which courses.  Second, not all students are suited to all disciplines, and very few know their strengths and limitations.  Third, our society is changing rapidly enough that any “vocational” education provided to a student will be time-limited because the field itself will either change drastically over the course of a student’s later life or may even vanish.  This is one reason why many educators fight the idea of “vocational” education and emphasize trying to teach students to think. Another reason is simply that universities shouldn’t play occupational “god” and insist they know what a student should study, although it’s fair to say that they are equipped to determine, by allowing a student to try a course and fail, what a student should not study.  But, of course, giving students such a choice is expensive, both for the student and the institution.

As many of you know, my wife is a college professor, and I’ve taught at the collegiate level.  So it’s likely that I’m apt to see matters in a different light from that politician who wants more students to obtain degrees in math, sciences, health care, and computer-related fields.

From a student’s point of view, there’s one critical question that should drive a choice of a collegiate major or field of study:  Does the student have the aptitude for that field?  I’m not talking so much about preparation as the raw capability.  No matter how great the desire, in some fields, without certain basic aptitudes, a student will not succeed. I think it’s more than fair to say that, although I’m fairly bright, I’d never succeed as a music major.  I can’t tell whether I’m on pitch/key, whether I’m singing or playing an instrument.  Nor do I have any sense of rhythm.  It doesn’t matter how bright I am.  Without those capabilities, I’d fail at music.  Other students and relatives I’ve known simply have limited mathematical capabilities. Others didn’t develop linguistic skills early enough in life, and therefore will never succeed in areas requiring written skills.

Yet our collegiate system encourages students to follow what they think their “passion” may be, regardless of what their abilities may be.  This often results in a student taking far more courses than required to get a degree… and higher costs at state-supported schools… and law-makers wanting to mandate restrictions or higher costs.

Even if colleges become what amount to high-level vocational institutions – which I think would be a disaster for the United States – such a change wouldn’t address the problem of students not knowing what their capabilities and desires are.  The capability problem could be addressed by a secondary school system that demanded more rigor and course content, and less teaching to the tests, but less teaching to the tests would result in less certain assessment, etc., all of which points out the basic problem:  Education is being labeled as the cure for everything, and it’s not.  Education in itself cannot instill drive or ambition.  Nor can it provide discipline or self-discipline, not without the support of parents and community.  Nor can it provide the desire to learn, only the opportunity.

For all these reasons, among many others, while education is vital to society, what kind of education is best depends on the student, and no one kind of education, with a simple degree path of the sort that everyone from lawmakers to parents seem to be demanding, will suffice.  One size never did fit all, and neither will a simple fix, even one backed by law, achieve any real solution.

Last week I watched a political talk show which included a pair of “liberals” and a pair of “conservatives.”  Among other things, for some reason, the subject of evolution came up, possibly because the moderator wanted to show the conservatives as either not excessively bright or not excessively consistent, and out of nowhere one of the liberals [non-American] made the statement, “You’ve seen the evidence that bacteria grow and change in response to exposure to antibiotics, how their descendants become resistant?” Then came the follow-up question, “If you can accept evolution on the bacterial level, why can’t you accept it on a higher level, as in the case of humans?”

One of the conservatives immediately made the point that there wasn’t enough evidence to prove human evolution, just “scattered” fossils.  The other one had no response. In point of fact, there’s a great preponderance of evidence, and the volume of that evidence grows every year.  But… no matter how great the evidence becomes, it won’t ever be enough to convince individuals such as those whom I observed, neither of whom, I might add, could be considered stupid or unintelligent.

So why do intelligent and thinking individuals, often those who have been incredibly successful in various fields, find it so hard to accept a mounting stack of evidence that reinforces the accuracy of the theory of evolution?

The simple answer, and the one most often offered, is that they truly believe that the theory is not correct – but not one of those people, including scientists, can offer evidence to the contrary.  The best that they can offer are various reasons along the lines of:  there isn’t enough evidence; the theory doesn’t explain “X” [and there are several different Xs]; there’s no way evolution could result in a being as complex as a human; etc.  None of these reasons refute evolution; they’re merely reasons for insisting that, until the theory is perfect and airtight, evolution can’t possibly explain the development of life on Earth.  They’re all rationalized forms of denial.

The real reason, it appears to me, for most unbelief in evolution, as illustrated by the exchange dealing with bacteria, is that most who reject evolution want to believe that human beings are truly special, and that, being special, we’re different from all the other species that have ever existed, even when DNA analyses show that over 99% of our DNA is the same as that of chimpanzees. 

This feeling of being special and different can inspire someone to great accomplishments, but it’s also dangerous.  It’s the same sort of rationalization that supported slave-holding.  It’s the same sort of mindset that allows financiers to think they’re so much superior to the “little people” their schemes fleece, the same sort of mindset that’s behind every ethnic-cleansing movement in history.  Yes, each of us is indeed different in some degree from anyone else, even from an identical twin… but that difference, held up against the universe, pales in comparison to our similarities.

Denial of evolution is more of a scream of protest that humans, especially the screamers, are truly different and special, and that’s more than ironic, because all too many of the monsters of human history have said exactly the same thing, in one way or another, even creating massive monuments to prove their difference and specialness.

In 1967, Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase, “The medium is the massage,” often as not corrupted to “the medium is the message.”  What he meant was that the medium had become so all-embracing as to massage the receiver and to affect the meaning of the message.  In the years since, particularly in the last decade, Americans and, indeed, most of the technological world embraced the corrupted version of his philosophy with a vengeance, despite the fact that, in fact, the medium is NOT the message, because all form has to have some sort of content.

The problem is and has always been that the obsession with form [the medium] tends to dilute the content to the point where it’s so vapid at times that the information content and value is insignificant, trivial, or irrelevant.  Even when it’s not, that content is often overpowered by the form of the message… or in the case of Twitter, e-mail, texting, etc., the existence of so many competing message-forms. As I’ve noted before, the amount of “real” information I receive, either in paper or electronic form, is less than one percent of the total information sent to me.  I’m fortunate; I can read quickly and dismiss the junk without missing much.  I’ve learned that most people can’t, and, because they can’t, or won’t spend the time to sift logically though all those “communications,” many just prioritize by the flash of what hits them, by, if you will, the effectiveness of the massage created by the form of the message.

Do all those tweets, texts, voice-mails, and even cellphone calls really carry any meaning?  Aren’t most of them merely reaching out so that their senders and receivers can be reassured and “massaged” in some way?  All this massaging is having an effect, and much of it is anything but good.  Mayors in several cities, and legislators across the USA, are calling for restrictions on cellphones, ear buds, and other devices being used, not just by drivers, but by pedestrians as well, as the number of fatalities caused by both distracted drivers and walkers/runners has begun to increase markedly. 

This wide-spread need for instant reassurance and instant information is also reducing the attention span of students and younger Americans, and recently a large number of professionals have begun to publish books and studies on the deleterious effects of too much instant communication.  Interesting enough, several of these have been called “attacks on the information age.”  Yet, none of the critics are attacking the technology; they’re attacking the way in which people are using it and the growing dangers posed both to individuals and society by such uses. 

Another impact of the growing impact of the “medium massage” is the dumbing down of mass media to make it “more reassuring.”  One example is in cinema. My wife is a movie buff, and over the years I’ve been exposed to movies I never knew existed, but one thing that’s become very clear to me is that many third-rate movies from fifty years ago have better writing [not necessarily better plots] and more clever dialogue than most first rate movies today.  Why?  There may be a number of reasons, but I think the bottom line is simply that there was more emphasis on message and meaning than on medium.  Special effects and brilliant cinematography are now what draw the most viewers, not provoking and insightful dramas.

I’m not attacking the media or the technology, but I am attacking the glorification of the gadgets and the use of technology to swathe users in continuously-communicating social reassurance.  A social massage once in a while is fine; continuous social massaging is like any other addiction – destructive, and it’s well past time to call it what it is.

The other day I read a report on studies that tend to confirm the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – the idea that language affects the very fashion in which we think and even how we think. In turn, that got me to thinking about theories and the controversies which surround them.  While what Whorf postulated almost seventy years ago certainly made sense to him, and the idea behind the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis made sense to me when I read Jack Vance’s The Languages of Pao years and years ago, long before I even knew that Whorf and Sapir even existed, much less that Whorf had postulated what Vance wrote about more than thirty years before the book, at the time Whorf offered their theory there was no proof… and no real way to offer such proof.  The same was also initially true about the theory of continental drift and the idea of plate tectonics, and even, if for a shorter time, that of Einstein’s theories of relativity.

The lack of proof didn’t mean that the theories were right – or wrong – but merely that they could neither be proved nor disproved at the time they were first offered.  In the cases I’ve mentioned, the preponderance of evidence suggests the theories were correct, or at least largely so.

But… how can you tell the difference between a theory which might be true, if proof existed, and one that is absurd because no proof can ever be developed?  Can you?

And what about the cases where the “proof” itself is not accepted, as was certainly partly true in the case of continental drift?

Human beings want certainty in their science, but the more we learn the more we discover, in essence, that there are exceptions, i.e., modifications, complications, refinements, etc.  Just as the human genome is finally sequenced, research discovers that genes are not even the genetic end-all and be all, because there’s an epigenetic mechanism that can modify and even override genes. 

Unfortunately, the all too understandable reaction of many people is to claim that scientists don’t know what they’re talking about, or that they’re always changing their minds.  Part of this reaction, I suspect, is based on the human arrogance that we should be able to know everything, and that if our supposedly best scientific minds don’t, then they’re not the best… or they’re not good for anything. Another reaction is that mankind was never meant to know everything, and we should just look to our favorite deity for explanations – which are, of course, simple and comforting… and explain very little.

Of course, a little humility in the search for answers and explanations wouldn’t hurt, either, along with the understanding that in a universe that’s taken over fourteen billion years to develop, it might just take a bit more time than the few hundred years humans have had the technology to seek the answers to the complexity of the universe.

But then, that means you can’t get the answer on Google instant.

Over at Tor.com, a blogger under the nom de plume of “Stubby the Rocket” recently conducted a poll, asking readers to vote on the best fantasy and science fiction novels of the past decade. Fortunately or unfortunately, the readers aren’t.  They’re voting for their favorite books, and, apparently, reading between the lines, they’re even voting for their favorite authors, almost without regard for the comparative excellence or lack thereof of some authors’ works. What is also interesting is that when one internet-popular author made an on-line appeal, his readers immediately flooded the voting thread, and pushed his book to the top.

I have no problem with readers pushing their favorites. I’d love to have my readers push all my books – but I’m not making an appeal, because that isn’t the point of this blog, and besides the voting closed several days ago. The point is, as one commenter on the Tor.com main site observed, that most of the voters aren’t voting for what they believe to be the best, but for their favorites. So why didn’t Tor.com and Stubby the Rocket just ask for the books readers liked the most? Then they could publish, more or less honestly, “Reader Favorites for the Decade.”

As I’ve discussed recently and not-so-recently, there’s a great deal of subjectivity and ignorance involved in determining what comprises a good book, and while I believe that the majority of readers, if pressed, would make a distinction, the poll-takers didn’t emphasize that there’s a difference between “favorite” and “best.” Another weakness with all of these polls, and that includes such awards as the Hugos [the World Science Fiction awards, for those readers not familiar with such], is that a comparatively small number of voters are represented, usually from a distinct sub-set of readers, and are usually self-selecting, which means that they don’t represent the majority of readers.

Years and years ago, Betty Ballantine, one of the great ladies of F&SF publishing, made the observation that there are two kinds of awards in publishing, those awarded by various organizations with varying memberships and agendas and those represented by the sales figures.  A number of years ago, many of those involved with the World Science Fiction convention were truly horrified when the winner of the best novel award went to a Harry Potter book.  Was it the best book of the year, technically?  I doubt it, but it was at least an honest “favorite,” one whose sales figures also declared that it was truly a favorite.

I honestly doubt that there’s any fair or accurate way to determine a “best” book.  So why don’t all the pollsters ask for favorites or books that are best-liked?  That way, at least, we wouldn’t have the charade of popularity being mistaken for excellence or the equally misleading charade of self-selecting groups foisting off their favorites as the “best of the decade” when they really mean the “favorite books of this group for the decade.”  But then, who wants to publish a list of “favorites” when “best books” sounds so much better and more “official” in print?

Well… it’s now “bonus season,” I understand, for high-level executives among the banks, investment banks, brokerage houses, and the like.  At a time when even supposedly well-off working professionals aren’t doing all that well, early reports are that the financial institutions are set to pay near-record bonuses once again.  Why?

Oh, I know the official reason.  Profits are up, and therefore these executives are to be compensated for playing a part in obtaining those profits.  But then again, the entire country played a part, last year and the year before, in rescuing the financial community from the results of its excessively reckless pursuit of profit at any cost.

At the same time, unemployment is hovering close to ten percent nationally, and it’s likely in excess of fifteen percent if you count in the people who aren’t included because they’ve been out of work so long they’ve given up looking.  Those figures don’t really include people who are working part-time because they can’t get full-time jobs, and the unemployment rate for minorities is close to twice the overall rate.  Even once-secure high-paying professions are feeling the pinch.  Law firms are booting out partners and aren’t hiring.  Thousands upon thousands of law school graduates have no jobs and student loans that can amount to $100,000 and more.  The fees paid to primary care doctors – you know, the ones who actually see you – are essentially frozen, while insurance and other costs continue to rise.  And unlike specialists, primary care physicians don’t rake in the big bucks.  Middle management jobs are continuing to shrink, as are positions for teachers all across the country.  And, as for us authors, paperback book sales are down, and ebook sales haven’t yet, if they ever do, made up the difference in royalties.

And the finance community is going to pay record bonuses?

For what?  Are banking services improving?  Not when banks are automating everything and trying to use as few real bodies as possible.  Not when they’ve grown ever more adept at finding fees for everything and reducing the billing cycle.  And now, my wife has discovered yet another indication of just how little the banks care about you and me.

The other day, she was trying to balance her account – and it wouldn’t balance.  The reason it wouldn’t balance was because the bank deducted $253 from her account for a check she wrote for $153.  Even the bank’s photocopied records showed that the check was for $153 – but they still deducted $253.  When she finally got a real person on the line, after a ten minute hold because “we are experiencing unusually high call volume,” and explained the situation, it took five minutes more to verify that the bank had goofed, and then the customer service [this is service?] representative explained that it would take 3-5 business days to rectify the error in my wife’s account.  Three to five days in this era of instant electronic banking?  When they made the error in the first place?  Oh… and when this isn’t your local bank but a large regional bank?

Would they have rescinded all the fees they would have collected if their error had caused her to overdraw her account?  I have my doubts.

So… tell me again how all those finance types deserve record bonuses?  They’re either totally out of touch with the rest of the United States… or they’re so contemptuous that they don’t care.  Either way, they don’t deserve those bonuses.

I just read a review of a recently released movie, and since I haven’t seen the film, and may not, I can’t say how accurate the review is, but one line of the review struck me as particularly relevant, especially in view of my previous blog.  That line said approximately, “You can’t tell whose movie this is, the star’s, the co-star’s, or the supporting actors’.”  From the rest of the review it was quite obvious that there was no confusion about the story lines or who was doing what to whom or why.  What the reviewer was stating was that he wanted the movie to emphasize without a doubt which story was the predominant one, and to make every one else subservient.

My question to the reviewer is:  “Why?”  Have viewers become so simple-minded that they can’t enjoy intersecting story lines, and the fact that at one time one part of a story becomes more dominant and that at another time another character and part do?

Certainly, life is like that, and much as we’d all like to be the center of attention and action, no one always is, not even the most powerful and most famous among us. Or is it that we feel our own lives are so complicated that we can only enjoy a movie when it’s straightforward and simple.

Or is it that, while many of us enjoy complex movies, more and more the media pundits and critics want to oversimplify matters for us.  That’s definitely been the case among the political analysts and the media talking heads who report on national politics.  It’s become the case with the economic “analysts” who present such data in the national general media.

As I’ve noted more than a few times before, we live in a highly technological society, and such societies are anything but simple.  And, in a riff on that theme, perhaps that’s really the gulf between the United States and many of the fundamentalist Mid-East cultures.  They want to hang on to the comforting simplicity and clarity of their traditional past, and can see all too well that such clarity vanishes in the conflicts of a modern technological society.  For that matter, even within the United States, that conflict exists, although so far, despite the horrible events in Arizona earlier this month, the violence around political events has been largely confined to verbal outbursts, despite the growing [until last week]intemperance of both media and political types.

And this movie’s review may well have bothered me because it’s yet another symptom of the conflict between “comforting” and clear traditional simplicity and modern complexity.  The problem with those old traditional clarities is that they cover up a multitude of injustices and prejudices under the guise of morality, rather than striving for a better ethical code, and one more suited to a technological society. Like it or not, until we can juggle those complexities better, and in an overall improved ethical fashion, we’re going to have problems, and all the entertainment that regales us with comforting simplicities won’t help in the slightest, just as the majority of the “popular” literature at the end of the 19^th century did little to prepare Americans for the need for the changes required in a developing technological society.

A week or so ago, I received the worst review of a book of mine in thirty years.  Not surprisingly, it was the Publishers Weekly review of Empress of Eternity.  The only good thing I can say about the review was that it appeared almost two months after the book was released.  Now… I’ve had good reviews and not so good reviews, and questionable reviews throughout my career, but never a review that so thoroughly trashed a book, especially a book that had received numerous rave and favorable reviews elsewhere.  I’ve already been the first to admit that Empress of Eternity, like Haze, is not a book to appeal to everyone, and I certainly wouldn’t object to a review that said just that… and said why.  What bothers me about this particular review is that it exemplifies a trend in both books and movies that is both deplorable and, I believe, culturally dangerous.

By its very approach, the review essentially states that, if something isn’t immediately obvious and clear, it’s trash.  If it’s not simple and direct, then it’s worthless.  That’s like saying a one pound hamburger with American cheese is far superior to a custom-broiled filet mignon with cordon bleu béarnaise sauce.  Obviously, tastes differ, and there are times when a hamburger just hits the spot… but please don’t tell me the hamburger is superior in culinary terms.

It’s becoming so that too many reviewers and readers can’t tell the difference between a book that has no characterization to speak of and one in which the characterization is nuanced and subtle.  If the writer doesn’t effectively come out and say, “Joseph was devastated,” these readers and reviewers don’t pick up the other clues.  The same is true of foreshadowing.  The author practically has to post signposts that state “this is important,” or it goes over their heads.  This tendency isn’t new.  There have been readers with such problems since there have been books.  What is new is that, in this “new” era of “everything in your face,” there are more and more of them, and they’re infiltrating the ranks of the reviewers and critics.

The same trends have already occurred in movie-making, and it’s to the point where almost any movie trailer will tell me if it’s an “in your face” movie.  In fact, almost all the block-buster movies are these days, and it’s getting harder and harder to find movies with depth, subtlety and nuance.  Once upon a time, the banana peel humor was largely limited to the Saturday morning movie serials, and the scatological humor to pornography.  No more. Once upon a time, many movies [certainly not all, or even a majority, but enough that one didn’t have to search through a haystack of dross] actually presented brilliant dialogue and depth.  No more.

This cheapening and over-simplification of societal entertainment bleeds over into everything else, from supersizing fast foods to the Sarah Palinization of politics, where “in your face” direct simple solutions are the answer.  And because everyone has a “simple” solution, no one can understand that big simple solutions don’t work… and never have, not without an extraordinary cost to people. Unfortunately, this past weekend we’ve had what appears to be a reminder of those costs with the shooting of a moderate Congresswoman in Arizona, who, from all accounts was popular with the majority of her district, and unpopular with the extremists in both parties.

So I’ll say it again.  Big, simple, extreme solutions aren’t the answer, and never have been. After all, the Russian Revolution of 1917 was certainly a big and simple solution.  So were Hitler’s Third Reich, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and Castro’s Cuban Revolution… as well as all the ethnic cleansing movements throughout the globe.  By contrast, from the beginning the American Revolution embodied compromise, a fact conveniently overlooked by the Tea Partiers. Interestingly enough, what it created lasted… so far, but will it survive the “in your face” era?

As a result of the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords last week, there has been an outpouring of rhetoric and petitions along the lines that Americans need to turn away from appeals to hatred and violence.  I certainly agree with the sentiment, but this movement in a large degree begs the question.  The first question is why in recent years Americans have turned to more and more violent rhetoric and why the political climate has turned uglier and uglier.  The second question is whether “debate” is the answer.

I don’t think so, at least not given the way debate is being approached today.  It all reminds me of a woman I know, who divorced her husband when no one could understand why, since he was such a rational and logical fellow. Her answer, which almost no one accepted or understood, was that his logical and rational approach was the problem.  Whenever she disagreed with him and tried to explain her views, he was so busy thinking up arguments to undermine her position that he never listened to what she was saying or what lay behind what she was saying.  And that is the problem with political and social debate and problems today – on all sides of the political spectrum.

Everyone’s talking, and no one is listening.  The Republicans are determined to repeal the health bill.  Is anyone there listening to the more than forty million who don’t have and can’t get health care in a time when healthcare costs are spiraling out of control.  The Democrats refuse to consider limitations on legal claims and windfalls for attorneys proposed by the Republicans, which certainly add to health care costs.  The Democrats demand tax increases on the “wealthy,” but insist the wealthy include the upper middle class and small businesses that have always generated the majority of “new” jobs in the economy, while the Republicans want the uber-rich, those who make millions, to get the same tax cuts as everyone else, when the corporate fat cats are the ones who are making millions by cutting jobs. Citizens in border states face huge problems with illegal immigrants, and Congress has done nothing.  On the other hand, there are hundreds of thousands of young people brought to this country illegally as children who know no other homeland, and Congress isn’t listening to them, either, and yet deporting or allowing them no legal status punishes them not for what they did, but for the sins of their parents.  The Democratic Party ignores the problems illegal immigration has created, and the Republican rhetoric ignores the suffering of too many innocents.  The Republican rhetoric, if followed literally, would create an American version of the Berlin Wall, but not doing anything isn’t working, either, and not allowing a path to citizenship for children of illegal immigrants who’ve lived here for years and who had no choice in the matter, isn’t exactly in keeping with the American tradition.  The list of polarized issues goes on and on… and everyone’s talking, and no one is listening… and the anger continues to build.

What we need is more listening… and some compromise… so that Americans can get a sense that something is being done.  Try splitting the difference.  Let each side get something, and I don’t mean the past political compromise of spending more money and splitting the spoils. And it might not hurt to ask another question when facing yet another “simple” solution: How will this benefit or affect everyone? 

Debate isn’t an answer.  We’ve had years of it. Without more listening, more debate will only create more hate.

In 1865, an Englishman named William Stanley Jevons published a book entitled The Coal Question, as I discovered in an article entitled “The Efficiency Dilemma,” in the December 20^th issue of The New Yorker.  What was striking about the book was its “proof” that energy efficiency leads not to less energy use, but more.  Over the years, economists have debated this proof, and others that followed, but the conclusions noted in the article seem indisputable:  Energy usage for any given application of the same task and scope tends to decline, but overall energy usage increases.  Cars become more efficient… so they become larger with more capabilities, and their overall worldwide usage increases markedly.  The same is true of refrigerators and air conditioners, computers, cell phones, etc.

And the result?  Overall energy usage continues to climb… and it will continue to grow even as energy efficiency increases as well.  In short, we can’t “efficiency” our way out of the energy problem.  Does that mean we shouldn’t continue the efforts toward greater efficiency?  No… we need all the efficiency we can squeeze out of our technology. 

The problem is economic… and political.  When goods or services are less expensive, we humans use more of them.  We also have a “good idea” [whether we do or not] of what those goods and services “should” cost.  An example of how this perception can be skewed was the furor over ebook prices in mid-2010.  Many readers insisted ebooks should be cheaper because electronic downloads and copies cost almost nothing, and blank discs are cheap.  They really didn’t consider all the other expenses going into producing a book.  In essence, they were insisting that ebooks be priced at the marginal cost of production, rather than factoring in any of the sunk costs, or the lost revenues coming from the decline in hardcover and paperbook sales.

In the case of energy, however, governments and societies face a different problem.  Energy is cheaper, in real terms, than it used to be, and people are using more.  The only way to cut back on energy usage is to make it more expensive, or to ration its usage.  And since technology is making it currently less expensive overall, and since people don’t want to pay more for “cleaner” energy such as wind and solar power, the only way to increase costs is either to mandate greater use of cleaner energy or to increase the taxes on energy.  This, needless to say, is politically unpopular, even if government made such energy taxes “progressive,” with higher tax rates on larger energy consumers.  People would create a political backlash, and others would opt for their own generators and solar panels once the taxes got too high.

Energy rationing would effectively be a non-starter in most democratic nations.

And, as a result, it appears that the energy “problem” will simply be pushed farther into the future, until true costs can no longer be denied, and prices inevitably rise, along with the costs of goods and services requiring energy inputs – and that’s almost everything.

Scientific findings in two areas seem almost in conflict, at least with regard to the question of whether there’s other intelligent life in the universe and how frequent it might be.  The first set of findings reports that life exists across a far greater spectrum of temperatures and pressures than most biologists dared to hope.  The second set of findings comes from astronomers, who are finding that, at least so far, other solar systems appear far more bizarre than ours, with planets in odd orbits, planets circling their suns in retrograde orbits, massive gas giants in tight solar orbits, all creating conditions that appear less favorable to life, or to complex cellular life, than in our solar system.

At this point, it’s clear that we are far from knowing enough to speculate knowledgeably about the frequency of life in the universe, let alone intelligent life… and yet…

Could it just be that life, of all sorts and kinds, arises under all ranges of conditions and under strange suns and stars?  Given the billions and billions of planets in the universe, and given the range of conditions under which life has evolved on earth, how could there not be life elsewhere?

But… given the immensity of the universe, and the distance between stars, will we ever know for certain?  And does it matter?

I’m afraid it does.  It matters because too many people in too many cultures have come to believe that somehow “we” – homo sapiens – are special merely because we exist, that some deity created the entire universe and put us at the center of it.

Yet… how special are we?  In almost every decade over the past century, archeologists and paleontologists have discovered yet another variety of human forebear – homo neanderthalensis, homo floresiensis, homo africanus, homo erectus, etc., and many of these were not our ancestors, but cousins.  And all of them are extinct, with the exception of the Neanderthals, who live on in the genes of much of the world’s population.

Recently, a team of archeologists discovered a big-brained dinosaur, one they believe was on the way to what we would call true intelligence – except it ran out of time when the climate changed.  Perhaps it, too, thought it was special, merely through the fact of existing.

Will it take the discovery of alien artifacts and signals to prove that we’re not that unique in the grand scheme of the universe?  Or would that discovery just trigger xenophobia and racial paranoia?

I don’t know, and I doubt anyone does, but what I do find intriguing as a science fiction writer is that the majority of novels written in the genre and dealing with such subjects tend to deal with humans trying to prove they’re special or acting as if we are.  All that, of course, raises the question of whether, if there are aliens out there, they’d even want to deal with us at present.

Certainly, there were many changes in the world, and in the United States, in 2010, but in many areas things seemed to stay the same.  Yet, which of the changes were “real,” and which of those things that seemed unchanged truly did change?

In the book field, an area obviously of concern to me, it’s fair to say that ebooks “arrived,” not that they haven’t been available to some degree for years, but 2010 marked the first year in which they accounted for a truly significant fraction of total book sales, although the analysts will likely be trying to ascertain exactly what that fraction was for months to come.  With ebooks has also come the rise of publishers who are essentially ebook only, and who rely on print-on-demand trade paperbacks, if pressed for a physical product.  Whether such publishers will become a larger part of the market or fade away is uncertain, as of the moment.

In science, one of the “biggest” announcements, although it received comparatively little media attention, was that astronomers have determined that the universe contains more than three times as many stars as previously thought because the number of so-called red dwarf stars had been grossly undercounted, largely because optical telescopes on Earth could not pick many of them up, even in stellar areas comparatively closer to Earth.  This also increases the chances for alien life because red dwarf stars have a much longer and more stable lifespan than do brighter stars.  Will this change anything here on Earth?  Hardly likely. 

In U.S. politics, of course, the balance of power in the legislative branch shifted considerably with the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives and the Democratic loss of a “gridlock-proof” [not that it always was] Senate.  That shift will likely result in very little being accomplished in 2011 or 2012 because the Republicans don’t want to accomplish anything but to roll back what the Democrats did, and the Democrats have enough votes – and the President – to stop such efforts, and neither side has either the initiative, intelligence, nor the will to work out compromise solutions.  So there really wasn’t much change there, either.

The war in Afghanistan continued in 2010, with escalating U.S. casualties, and is now the longest military conflict in U.S. history.  While the media continues to report, in small stories and back pages, various events, the majority of the American people remained content to pay lip service to the military, to allow private contractor profiteering, and in general only complained about it in terms of siphoning off funding for their desired social programs.  In short, no real change – except, of course, to the families and lovers of the increased numbers of dead and wounded.

2010 has been established as one of the three warmest years on record, at least in technological times, despite unseasonably cold winters in the northeast U.S. and in Europe, and that apparent paradox will continue to fuel opposition to dealing with the real issue of global warming, resulting in no real change in actions or positions.

The other real social change heralded in 2010, especially in western Europe and the United States, memorialized in part by the movie – The Social Network [because all momentous social movements need cinematic commemoration] – was the verification that the only forms of social contact that matter are those created and maintained by electronic means.  This is indeed a significant change, marked by the decline and possible demise of:  first meetings with significant others conducted with physical presence; actual conversations without overt and covert electronic interruptions and/or additions; efficient work habits and sustained mental concentration; and, of course, social niceties such as written paper thank-you notes.

In the end, did much really change?

I just returned from visiting family over Christmas, and, as a result of twelve hours spent in transit (and that was with NO delays), I got to thinking about “speed” in our modern society. We’re always told that technology is better and faster, but I have my doubts about such speed in the real world. It doesn’t matter how potentially or theoretically “fast” something is.  What matters is how fast it does what it does in the real world.

Because airports are ever more crowded, and over scheduled, and because commercial aircraft don’t fly any faster than they did thirty years ago, flight times are longer than they were thirty years ago – and that doesn’t count all the extra minutes, and occasionally hours, spent in security lines and screening.  Train travel isn’t any better, either. The Acela is supposedly capable of traveling between Boston and New York at 150 mph.  It doesn’t even approach 60% of its capabilities, of course, because the tracks it travels won’t handle that speed… and because it doesn’t have a dedicated rail system, but must share the rails with much slower freight trains.  All that may be one reason why, except in bumper-to-bumper rush hours in cities, most drivers exceed the speed limits on freeways and interstates whenever physically possible.  But because freeways everywhere are getting more and more crowded, they aren’t getting to their destinations any faster.

Even spacecraft aren’t flying any faster than they did in the 1960s, not markedly, anyway, and we certainly haven’t been able to get human beings any farther from Earth than we did a generation ago.

But aren’t we in the age of electronic superspeed?  Not from what I can tell.  Because of all the bells and whistles, firewalls, and electronic security, even my brand-new laptop loaded with one of the fastest processors, and more memory of more types than I’ll ever come close to using, takes longer to boot up and load than my ancient 1996 laptop.  Email doesn’t get there any faster, and the whole process effectively takes longer because, even with all those electronic devices and systems, I still have more and more spam that results in my having to take more time than I used to… and any way you look at it, that means slower.

My wife reminded me that not only is the mail slower, but deliveries are fewer than when we were children.  It also costs almost 1500% more per ounce than then.  This is progress?

As far as I can figure, about the only thing that, in practice, goes faster than it did a generation ago is the money, because, regardless of the “official” statistics, everything that most people need costs more every year.  Now… if we could just get everything else moving that fast…

In fiction, a great deal has been written on the theme of the “other,” the outsider, the stranger, the one who doesn’t fit, and what has been written ranges from horror to the romantic, from the impossible to the trite, from Camus’s L’Etranger, the man who looks and acts normal, but isn’t, to Alien, a creature so different that it screams of otherness, even to the vampires of Twilight, who apparently seek sameness and try to conceal their otherness… and the list and examples go on and on.

But to me, there’s another “other” that is far more socially, politically, and economically horrifying. Or in political terms, as the late senator Russell Long proclaimed, “Don’t tax you; don’t tax me; go tax that fellow under the tree.”  Unhappily, this practice of singling out the “other” for responsibility, whether it be for taxes, political change, educational blame, immigration problems, etc., has gotten so far out of hand that no one seems to even recognize what’s happening.

Take education.  This morning I just read an article about the problems a local, open- enrollment university has in getting students to actually complete their degree programs and graduate, and, once again, the “other” singled out for responsibility was essentially the faculty – the faculty has the sole responsibility for inspiring these students, for making sure they’re “interested” enough to attend classes, to choose their curriculum responsibly, to study, to learn the material.  On top of that, the state is pushing the idea that raising the percentage of college graduates will effectively solve a various assorted problems, from high unemployment to creating “better” jobs.  The target is something like 50% of all high school graduates graduating from college.  Duh… has anyone looked at the jobs required to maintain a civilization, including highly skilled ones that don’t require a college degree?  Electricians, plumbers, heating and air conditioning contractors, computer technicians, sheet metal workers, machinists, the list goes on for pages.  People need skills, but thinking that 50% of them should come through college degrees is insanity.  And, as I’ve noted before,  rather than deal with the problems of lack of student initiative and responsibility, lack of resources, lack of work ethics, failing parental responsibilities, it’s so much easier to focus on the teachers.

Then there’s the responsibility for paying for federal government services.  While I’ll concede that those who make more should pay more, the exact formula being far more questionable, why exactly should close to 40% of the population bear no responsibility for those services at all – and insist that a smaller and smaller minority of the population bear a greater and greater share – that the so-called rich become the “other.”

Immigration falls into the same category.  Massive numbers of Hispanics have flooded and are flooding into the United States, if at a lesser rate in the last year or so, and most of them are looking for a better life – why are they to blame for that, when ALL of our forebears did exactly the same thing?  Why are they to blame for fleeing the drug-trade induced violence that permeates Latin America when the high demand for those illegal drugs in the United States is what has caused that violence?  Especially when we seem powerless to stop the trade through criminalization and by imprisoning millions of users… and unwilling to control it by legalizing it?  Rather than looking at the root causes of the immigration problem, it’s so much easier to single out the stranger, the immigrant as the cause, when they’re only the symptom.

The problem of teenage pregnancies follows a similar pattern.  Because of the “benefits” of modern civilization, young people are becoming sexually mature at younger and younger ages, yet the complexity of a technological society is such that the economic maturity comes later and later.  Human beings are not built biologically to abstain from sex for the ten to fifteen year gap between physical maturity and social-economic maturity – and the vast majority can’t and don’t.  Yet religious fundamentalists of all stripes and varieties preach “abstinence” and “morality” – and blame sexual “immorality” on everything from culture to the media [not that they both don’t contribute], while pumping billions into purchasing the offerings of the media and ignoring the root causes and addressing them in a meaningful way.

Whatever the problem, there’s always an “other,” whom all too many of us find convenient to blame… and I find that “other-seeking” mentality far more horrifying than the “others” of cinema and fiction.  More than thirty years ago, the cartoonist Al Capp, in his Pogo strip made the observation, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

The problem is that it’s so much easier to blame the “other.”

That’s the question my wife asked me the other day as she reflected on the semester she’d just completed.  As director of the university opera theatre program, she produces and directs at least one student production every semester, and she has done so for more than twenty years.  What she noted was that even ten years ago, students would offer cards or notes, or even small tokens of gratitude, for the efforts she made in producing and directing these programs – a gratitude, if you will, for the funds she expended that were not reimbursed by the university, the hours and hours of extra time provided in rehearsing and providing additional personal instruction to performers who needed it.

This year, for the first time ever, she received not a single card, even though she is teaching more students than ever before.  Paradoxically, this was also a year in which her student evaluations were among the best ever; so the lack of cards or tokens of appreciation weren’t likely due to student unhappiness.  It’s also not something that happened this year.  Fifteen years ago, it wasn’t unusual for her to receive thank-you notes from students who successfully completed senior recitals, or from those she helped into graduate programs. Over the last few years, those notes have dwindled away to nothing as well, again, even though she is even more successful in getting more and more students to perform at a higher level.  And this is not something limited to my wife, but a change in social climate that her colleagues both in her university and elsewhere have noted.

There’s also an increasing interest in grades and less interest in mastering the techniques of singing and performing. Along with this increased emphasis on grades and “credentials” and the decline in expressed gratitude, or perhaps because of it, she and others have noted a growing attitude among students – and among younger faculty and professionals in the field – that these younger people have “done it all by themselves.”

There’s little or no awareness or recognition that no one “does it by himself or herself.”  Virtually all of us have had mentors, teachers, or benefactors somewhere along the way, who made a difference, whether or not we wish to recognize them or not.  Along with this, I’ve also overheard more and more young professionals ask, when requested to do something professional, “What’s in it for me?”

To me, this growing focus on self, both in academia and in business, is a disturbing trend, and one that is mirrored by the trends in the financial community, where the focus seems to remain on how much compensation individuals can build up, rather than upon what they are accomplishing.  In the political area, the focus is on getting re-elected, no matter what the cost to the community or nation.  And in all areas, there’s less and less gratitude for what we’ve received and more and more complaints about what we haven’t… and yet, at the same time, more and more people are less and less willing to go out of their way for others.

Might it just be… just perhaps… that so much of the polarization in society is fueled by anger that others don’t appreciate what we’ve done, even as we fail to appreciate what others have done?