Honor Thy Father And Mother

Christianity shares the moral foundation of Judaism in that it asserts unconditional, perpetually binding obligations upon all mankind: the Ten Commandments. Whether you believe in these things or not, it makes sense to understand what they say, how they reflect human nature, and their relationship to culture.

American society routinely disrespects parents. I've known several professed, devout Christians who have no problem talking about how legalistic their parents were and dysfunctional their families were. I've seen Christian preachers get all Freudian about their childhood wounds rooted in a father's absence or a mother's over-protectiveness.

Had these same people said, "sh*t" or "f*ck," they'd be immediately castigated as sinners. But they slide through slanders of their parents without problem. This makes me think American Christendom regards the 5th Commandment as just a mere suggestion.

Conversely,when I see a Bollywood movie wherein the parents arrange a protagonist's marriage to the "wrong" partner, I shake my head in disbelief at the conflict. Americans are culturally programmed to feel no obligation to honor their parents' wishes in matters of the heart. Any American Evangelical would just shrug and walk away, while thinking herself more righteous than the Hindu who honors her parents.

(A common misconception is that one performs the Ten Commandments to get something nice. A better view is that one performs these obligations because they shape one's character in a beneficial way. In the Bollywood movie, dealing with the disappointment of parental opposition to a potential lover and honoring parental wishes certainly appears to build character. It certainly makes the story more interesting.)

In particular, I think it is interesting when someone honors parents who are not honorable characters. We're all human and we all make mistakes. Parents are certainly make their share of mistakes and some parents are downright evil. What does it say of a child who nevertheless honors that parent? I think it is wrong to excuse evil, but nobody requires a child be an accuser (except totalitarians).

In these cases, I feel much more sympathy toward the character, because my mind revolts at the injustice. It is not fair that the boy or the girl should be denied happiness just to honor the parents' demands.

The first objective of the novelist should be creating sympathy toward the protagonist. Americans like underdog stories. Most commonly the underdog is the poor kid who suffers at the hands of the mean girls. Or the sports team with a disgraced coach composed of a motley crew who faces off against an all-star team. But I think the adult child honoring a dishonorable parent is an even more sympathetic figure.

Who among us hasn't at one time or another said to our parents, "That's not fair."

The writer just needs to create a situation where it really is not fair to evoke the reader's sympathies. Be careful here, some of your readers are like me. I said, "That's not fair," when I was just being a jerk and I didn't know any better. The situation has to be undeniably not-fair.

You can work in a twist, too. Perhaps your protagonist is a scion of a very rich family who says, "If you marry that girl from the wrong side of the tracks, you are disinherited." The twist is to test the kid and the love-interest to see if their love is bigger than money. Just try not to be obvious about it.

Of all the Bible stories, I like the story of Joseph best, because he doesn't become bitter despite being mistreated by his brothers, falsely accused, tossed into jail, and suffering his fellow-prisoner's broken promise.

Here's a fellow who's better than I could ever be because he keeps on doing his best while suffering serial reversals. And when he has a chance at payback with his parents dead and his brothers at his mercy, he points out their evil toward him was part of a larger purpose that saved many lives.

That, dear writer, is what you must do. Feel free to be your own Old Testament deity.

Make your protagonist suffer every possible misfortune or injustice. The greater the heroism in scene N, the greater the unfairness for it in scene N+1. (This is the only thing what prevents Horatio Hornblower from becoming a Marty Stu.) Your story arc should drag  your protagonist through Purgatory. Honoring dishonorable parents is a great way to make your readers sympathize with your protagonist.

Bonus points if your protagonist can win Paradise in the denouement.

Traffic Analysis

I once worked for NSA. At that time it was unlawful for me to say what NSA did, except to say that we made codes to prevent other countries from reading our communications. The rest of what NSA did was an pretty-easily-guessed secret. My job title was cryptologic mathematician.

During WW2, if Hitler turned on a radio, and sent a message to Rommel, it might be that the predecessor of the UK's GCHQ had an antenna and a receiver that picked up the transmission. The Brits had a lot of people employed at places like Bletchley Park. And a lot of other places to do science on that sort of thing.

Imagine you have an enemy who uses the radio and you have smart guys who want to wring as much information out of the enemy's communications as possible. The really juicy stuff is encrypted, so you don't know what exactly they're saying. But you do know that Hitler talks to Rommel, and Rommel talks to Fritz and Fritz talks to Brunhilde. Studying these patterns is called traffic analysis. It's the best you can do if you can't get hold of the internals of messages.

By doing traffic analysis, we may not know what is said, but we know who is talking and when. For instance, suppose you want the Nazis to think George Patton is going to cross the English Channel at Calais. You might put up a bunch of inflatable tanks and planes on the coast, but the Nazis won't fall for it unless you've actually got "ole blood 'n' guts" talking on the radio and lots of radio replies between those rubber tanks and planes. This was one of the reasons why Hitler could not believe that D-Day was going to be at Normandy. His technical boffins told him where Patton was and how much Army he had around him.

The US is smarter than that. We get eye-witness accounts of one of the 9-11 terrorists being in Prague and the 9-11 Commission denies them because we know his cell phone (that won't work in Europe) is in the US. Nobody would ever think to lend his cell phone to a friend while he's travelling.

I figure all of the Al Qaeda operatives are dead who haven't already figured out how traffic analysis works. There's a sort of Darwinian selection process that winnows out those terrorists who don't luck into effective NSA-evading strategies.

Here's another application of traffic analysis that you might be a little familiar with. Your wife asks you some difficult, pointed questions about an unfamiliar number that keeps showing up on your cell phone bills. 

Maybe you escape those difficult questions because the phone number doesn't show the name "Bubbles Mattressthrasher." Your adulterous communications are a little bit easier to hide because your wife can only see one piece of the puzzle. She can't see Bubbles' cell phone bill, and infer from her communications with furriers and jewelers that certain charges on your credit card can be explained thereby.

If you have the morality of a politician, you're grateful spouses can't do the deeper kind of traffic analysis data I just outlined.

One of the reasons why the US came into WW2 and threw so much effort into the European Theater (as opposed to the Pacific Theater where we'd been attacked), was the collapse of Isolationist opposition. And one of the reasons for that was the active intelligence operation conducted against US politicians by the Brits who actively set up Isolationist politicians with honey traps to blackmail them into voting favorably to the UK. Arthur Vandenberg was a Michigan Senator from my home town of Grand Rapids who mysteriously voted FOR the lend-lease bill despite his Isolationist politics.

But that's OK because they were fighting Hitler. And they were foreigners, no US bureaucrat would do anything like that.

Of course, J. Edgar Hoover managed to stay in charge of the FBI for all of his adult life despite serving Presidents all over the political spectrum who hated him. And despite concerted efforts to depose him, or retire him, he always managed to hang on. It was almost like he had some magic that he could use against his enemies.

Since 9/11 a lot of blood and treasure has gone into creating a comprehensive surveillance regime of digital communications passing through the US. It seems that our wise and benevolent leaders have access to AT THE VERY LEAST all the cell phone bills in this country. 

Despite all of this a couple foreigners managed to plot and perpetrate a bombing attack on the Boston Marathon. So, why did we spend all that money?

If it doesn't catch terrorists, what does it catch?

Put on your tin foil hat before I ask the next question: 

Have you ever noticed how politicians change after they go to Washington? I'm sure there are lots of reasons: getting the money from lobbyists for reelection campaigns comes to mind. Or playing to a National stage.

But if I were a politician with any damaging secrets that could be penetrated by traffic analysis, I'd assume they're known to persons within the NSA. 

And we can trust them like we trust the IRS with our financial data.

Assigned Reading

My daughter, wife, and I were comparing notes about the books we were all assigned to read in school. I escaped "Lord of the Flies," and "In Cold Blood," but had to endure "1984," "The Jungle," "Catcher In The Rye," and "The Grapes of Wrath."

(Last night I watched a TV show where Gordon Ramsey witnessed a woman rub red chili peppers into her eyes. My wife just said, "Why?") These books gave me as much literary pleasure as a capsaicin eye-wash.

All of the above were inflicted upon us as tender young high school students without the experience and gumption to cry, "Bullshit!" Such assigned reading easily explains why I chose a career in math, science and technology.

Star Trek techno-babble notwithstanding, science, technology, engineering, and math have the common virtue of having to work.  If you bluff your way through a degree in one of those fields, something big can fall down--say a bridge or a building. People tend to notice those sorts of failures a lot more than when little Johnny doesn't know compound interest or thinks that voting for Santa Claus is sound fiscal policy.

My first inclination is that forcing kids to read lame novels should be a firing offense. On the other hand, lame novels can drive smart kids so far from literature that they'll become Engineers instead. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose.

Let the little dears wait until they are enrolled in a hard-science major and then they can discover Robert Heinlein.

I Prefer Green Slave Girls

As a tender lad I read exactly one dystopian novel, 1984. Being properly inoculated against the genre, I went back to reading Heinlein, Asimov and pretty much any book with a spaceship on the cover.

The future of my past was nifty. NASA was sending men to the moon and Star Trek was in its first run. I was expecting a future of rocket ships, flying cars, jet belts, and green Orion slave girls. Sure there were some nuclear war nightmare scenarios like On The Beach, or Dr. Strangelove, but they were the exception, not the rule.

Contrast that with now. Contemporary writing trends are dystopian up the yin-yang. Want to read an American rip-off of Battle Royale? There's a dystopian novel for that. Want to read racist claptrap about saving pearls? There's a dystopian novel for that, too. Does YA stand for Yet Another dystopian novel?

Is there market pull for bleak or is this just producer push of bleak? I'm not going to put on my tinfoil hat. But I will note the power of group think. If you have an island wherein folks don't "know anyone who voted for Nixon," then you should expect some insular attitudes and a disconnect from the market. Certain things will go without saying about what's right and wrong, good and evil, beautiful and ugly. Surprisingly, humanism is in decline among the Anointed.

I think the decline of humanism is at the root of the rise of dystopianism. I recently had someone tell me that Snow Crash had a dystopian setting to better illustrate the humanity of the protagonists. I wasn't all that sure Snow Crash was dystopian.

This raises a question in my mind. Maybe the lines are fuzzier about what is and isn't dystopian. Was A Clockwork Orange dystopian? I'd say that it is more U-topian than DYS-topian for the following reasons:

• The dole kept Droogs in spiffy hats
• Nobody was homeless except for a drunk
• There was free medical care
• No polluted air or water

Nevertheless, the society of Clockwork Orange was not all beer and skittles. (When I saw the movie I thought, "what a compelling argument for the 2nd amendment." A small handgun discretely brandished by a putative rape victim would do marvels to concentrate a Droog's mind, but I digress.) The evil depicted in Clockwork Orange stems from the in-humanity of the Droogs. How is a society that solves all the social problems listed above capable of producing the likes of this?

Perhaps a more idyllic setting should be considered: perhaps a Village in rural Pennsylvania seemingly at the end of the 19th century. Though The Village is civilized in ways that are light-years beyond Clockwork's England, the Village lives in constant terror of what lies beyond the pale. And this society proves equally capable of producing a murderer as Clockwork.

Is The Village a dystopian tale? Probably not, though it demonstrates the same lesson as Clockwork Orange: the fault is is not in our stars, but in ourselves. As Solzhenitsyn said, the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man. Put fallen man in an ideal setting, be it socialist utopia or Elysian fields, and he'll bring in some measure of depravity.

So, do we give up? Does the world suck, it's falling apart, and in the long run we're all dead? Ah, now that's probably a better question than dystopian or not.

Though there is the demonic in each of us, there is also the angelic. Though we've fouled our nest on planet Earth, we've also cleaned things up. Though many children go to sleep hungry each night, many more are fed or overfed. The world has gotten better at solving world-hunger problems in my lifetime. Though we are fallen, we aspire to be better.

Graph life expectancy over the last century. Look at standards of living over that time. Can we make these improvements long-term sustainable--and build upon them? Or will we fall back into a dark age of "bad luck?"

I think that's up to us to make happen. Each of us can contribute in our own way (or give up in our own way). And if you're a writer, I think that means writing stories that will inspire the reader to get up and invent a jetpack or a flying car. I've written about that here.

And I hope you'll decide that I've written that sort of science fiction here.

p.s.
Here is Robert Heinlein's "bad luck" quote is in full:

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded- here and there, now and then- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.This is known as "bad luck.".”

Finding Time Is Human Wave

When I was a tender lad, there was a hue and cry in some circles about this thing called "Secular Humanism." Humanism goes back to the ancient Greeks and it had had a Christian expression with intellectuals like Erasmus of Rotterdam. So, this isn't a Christian versus Pagan thing. In the intervening decades, Secular Humanism has been replaced by something much less Humanistic.

As a tender lad, there were not a lot of dystopian novels out there. The few that were were political tracts, like 1984 (life in totalitarianism sucks), Atlas Shrugged (life in socialism sucks), or On The Beach (life after nuclear weapons sucks--then everyone dies).

But now, they're mainstream like Hunger Games. (Here's a review.)

I didn't like dystopian then, and I don't like dystopian now. Recently, someone asked me if I thought dystopian novels are a sign of the times. I think they are not. My flip answer was that they betoken cruddy editorial policies. A less flip answer is that Secular Humanism has been replaced by something much less Humanistic. (I expand on this here.)

To which I say, "screw that. Let's have some more Humanism."

"What would something like that look?" you may ask. This is answered in part here and here.

You might also ask, "Is Finding Time part of this New Human Wave in Science Fiction?"

I believe the answer is either, "Yes," or "Hell, Yes!"

I expressed Human Wave (perhaps too) succinctly as: life doesn't suck, humans win, we're not all doomed. I promise that in each of Finding Time's stories:

• Someone wins
• Nobody's a villain simply by virtue of belonging to some collective
• Nobody's a hero simply by virtue of belonging to some collective
• When I want to send a message, I call Western Union
• None of my stories are metaphorical political or religious polemics
• All the stories are intended to appeal to the buying public
• You paid good money for these stories and I aim to deliver value
• I never tell you what you should like for your own good

It's up to you. I'm not going to tell you how to spend your time & money. If you prefer More Dystopian Blah stories, stay away from Finding Time.

But if those promises sound good to you, I do my damnedest to keep them, and I hope you'll consider Finding Time.