Fundraser Day Four: If This Goes On —

...is the name of a very famous science fiction novel, serialized in 1940 by the late Robert Anson Heinlein. The plot is as follows:

The story is set in a future theocratic American society, ruled by the latest in a series of “Prophets.” The First Prophet was Nehemiah Scudder, a backwoods preacher turned President (elected in 2012), then dictator (no elections were held in 2016 or later).

You know, if I had to choose one world to describe Heinlein's novel, it wouldn't be "utopian".

So why bring it up?

Because this week, Our Mr. Brooks decided he knew something Important and Cultural about Science Fiction.

Oh boy!

Needless to say, Mr. Brooks brings to this arena the same sort of drab, perfunctory, hidebound, cut-and-paste meh-ness --

Recently, a number of writers have grappled with this innovation slowdown. Michael Mandel wrote a BusinessWeek piece in 2009. Tyler Cowen wrote an influential book called “The Great Stagnation” in 2010. The science-Fiction writer Neal Stephenson has just published a piece called “Innovation Starvation” in World Policy Journal and Peter Thiel, who helped create PayPal and finance Facebook, had an essay called “The End of the Future” in National Review.

with which he tackles every topic except for:

• Paeans to various minor Conservative luminaries who take his momentary fancy and;


• His own dastardly betrayal at the hands of the President Who Shall Not Be Named.

For example, while Mr. Brooks correctly clocks the period of "Innovation Starvation" in at around four decades --

Let’s imagine that someone from the year 1970 miraculously traveled forward in time to today. You could show her one of the iPhones that Steve Jobs helped create, and she’d be thunderstruck. People back then imagined wireless communication (Dick Tracy, Star Trek), but they never imagined you could funnel an entire world’s worth of information through a pocket-sized device.

The time traveler would be vibrating with excitement. She’d want to know what other technological marvels had been invented in the past 41 years.
...

-- he conspicuously fails to mention that the decline in American Innovation exactly parallels the rise of Mr. Brooks' Modern Conservative Movement: a Movement that puts rabid anti-science fundamentalism in harness with a deep contempt for government of any kind and a pathological bias in favor of that "Fuck you, I've Got Mine" species of capitalism that cannot think past the next quarterly report.

Hard as it is to leave aside Our Mr. Brooks' gales-of-laughter-inducing invocation of "Dick Tracy" and "Star Trek" as his lone examples of what "people back then" were imagining, let's instead focus on the conspicuous fact that Our Mr. Brooks cannot bring himself to focus on the time frame when this Epic Fail was starting to avalanche. Which is weird, because further on down the very article by Neal Stephenson that Mr. Brooks cites, Mr. Stephenson notes a perfect example of this Conservative cultural-suicide in the fucking over Jimmy Carter took for trying to get America off of its addiction to foreign oil:

The OPEC oil shock was in 1973—almost 40 years ago. It was obvious then that it was crazy for the United States to let itself be held economic hostage to the kinds of countries where oil was being produced. It led to Jimmy Carter’s proposal for the development of an enormous synthetic fuels industry on American soil. Whatever one might think of the merits of the Carter presidency or of this particular proposal, it was, at least, a serious effort to come to grips with the problem.

As I have written before, it is nothing if not amusing as hell to see one Conservative expatriate after another adopt the rhetoric and share the broad vision of History's Greatest Villain -- James Earl Carter --

30 years after they shit all over him, and their beloved St. Ronald Reagan both literally and figuratively ripped the solar panels off the White House and sold our collective futures down the river to OPEC.

And so, as he does every week, instead of asking an obvious question like, "I wonder what went so badly wrong 40 years ago?" which comes pre-loaded with a very uncomfortable answer for America's Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual, our David Broder 2.0

does what he always does when inconvenient realities threaten his paycheck: he piles on the nostalgia for a non-existent Good Old Days of cellulose collars and high-button shoes when everything was up-to-date in Kansas City and everyone was just steaming with hope:

If you go back and think about America’s big World’s Fairs or if you read about Bell Labs in its heyday or Silicon Vally in the 1980s or 1990s, you see people in the grip of utopian visions. They imagine absurdly perfect worlds. They feel as though they have the power to begin the world anew. These were delusions, but inspiring delusions.

and then contrasts that golden age with our Parlous Modern Times, this time through the lens of a genre which Mr. Brooks asserts has only recently and in the face of Innovation Starvation become all ominous and unpleasant:

This utopianism is almost nowhere to be found today. Stephenson and Thiel point out that science fiction is moribund; the new work is dystopian, not inspiring. Thiel argues that the environmentalist ethos has undermined the faith in gee-whiz technological wizardry. Legal institutions and the cable TV culture dampen enthusiasm by punishing failure so remorselessly. NASA’s early failures were seen as steps along the way to a glorious future.

Deepwater Horizon’s failure demoralized the whole nation.
...

This is, of course, sheer nonsense on a whole bunch of levels.

For example, far from being free from critics, NASA was beset by all kind of doubters and budget-cutters almost from the beginning. Also:

• NASA was Evil Big Gummint, writ large: Deepwater Horizon was private enterprise doing whatever the fuck it wanted.
  
• NASA was reaching quite literally for the stars while feefing our aspirations; Deepwater Horizon was plunging into the guts of the planet to feed our addictions.
  
• NASA's failures were the result of piling one brand-new technology on top of another; Deepwater Horizon was using 30-year-old technology carelessly in the reckless pursuit of profit.
  
• NASA risked the lives of test pilots who fought for the right to sit on top of a rocket headed for the High Frontier; Deepwater Horizon risked the lives of blue collar workers in a completely avoidable disaster that nearly murdered the Gulf of Mexico.

It's a dishonest and ridiculous comparison, made by a creative typist who specializes in making the dishonest and ridiculous comparisons his idiotic political agenda demands.

I can take you right now to a high school in one of the toughest neighborhoods in Chicago where the faculty, staff and students are "vibrating" with every bit as much excitement about the future -- the real future -- as Mr. Brooks' imaginary time traveler.

I can take you right now to rambunctious conclaves of business, labor, education and government leaders who are working with each other to do the hard work of saving the future.

I can point you right back to the comment section of Mr. Brooks' own column at observations like this from Shannon in Boston:

I frankly have no idea what you're talking about, innovation is humming right along and this is an exciting time in science.

To name a few in biology and physics:
Genome sequencing (becoming very cheap and rapid)
Epigenetics
Cellular reprogramming
Oncogenes/targeted chemotherapy
MicroRNA/non-coding RNA
Apparent violations of QED (proton size measurements)
Apparent violations of relativity (neutrino velocity measurements)
Apparent violations of the standard model
Large Hadron Collider (we'll soon know if there's a Higgs Boson)

And I can take you right now to any decent public library and bury you under canonical works of dark and dystopian science fiction that were created by the grand masters in the field at the exact moment that Our Mr. Brooks insists that the literature was shitting out moonbeams and sunshine.

In other words, Mr. Brooks is talking out of his ass once again.

Why?

Because in science fiction, the synonym for "dystopian" is not "hopeless" but "cautionary" and always has been.

Don't believe me?

Isaac Asimov's very first major short story -- "Nightfall" -- published in 1941, is about a human civilization which wipes itself out every 2,000 years because the overwhelming vastness of the universe drives it mad.

The aforementioned Robert Heinlein built much of his writing around the rise of a human civilization that would colonize the solar system and then sweep outward to stars....on the bones of an America which variously loses its mind, destroys itself, falls into a century-long theocratic dictatorship, and (like much of the rest of the Earth) is bombed into surrender by a revolution on the Moon (Heinlein's Hell, by the way, is run by banks and global corporations.)

Arthur Clarkes' bright future of "Imperial Earth" looks back on a 20th and 21st centuries of pollution, environmental catastrophe and mass famine and, like "The Day the Earth Stood Still", in Clarke's "Childhood's End" human salvation requires the intervention of an alien culture which boots us in our collective ass.

Utopian? "Faith in gee-whiz technological wizardry"?

Jesus, Brooks, have you even read "Fahrenheit 451"? "1984"? "Brave New World"? "A Canticle for Liebowitz"? "The Space Merchants"?

Ever read "Frankenstein"?

"The Lottery"?

Or, further on down the reading list "Solution Unsatisfactory", "With Folded Hands", "The Marching Morons" or "Button, Button"?

Trust me, I could literally do this all day, but since Mr. Brooks is clearly not much of a reader on topic, perhaps he could just go rent the entire fucking "Twilight Zone" teevee series, which consists largely of brilliant morality plays and cautionary parables dressed up as science fiction. Hell, even the universe of "Star Trek" -- the single actual science fictional reference in Mr. Brooks' essay -- is built on the idea that the human race came so close to repeatedly annihilating itself in the 20th and 21st centuries that a new, powerful global government was created (I would say it is a little like "Starship Troopers" minus the interminable libertarianism, but I don't think Mr. Brooks knows what any of those words actually mean.)

Mr. Brooks has confused and conflated the long and well-regarded "literature" side of the science fiction house with the relentlessly upbeat, gadget-centric adventure stories that took up much science fiction's shelf space during its Juvenilia Years. I love 'em, but those stories were not being composed in lazy leisure like, say, Mr. Brooks' bi-weekly New York Times column: they were cranked out on horseback by working writers who were often submitting to skin and Shocking!True!Crime! magazines at the same time. Writers who were trying to eke out a living by banging out one piece after another that had mass appeal at less than a penny a word, and at that moment in science fiction, "mass appeal" pretty much meant "13-year-old boys".

Very bright 13-year-old boys to be sure, but presence of the broad streaks of swashbucklery and cockeyed optimism that run through the genre during those years have much more to do with the fact that the few outlets for science fiction that paid decent money had strict rules for the kinds of stories they were willing to publish than any other single factor.

And, with the exception of John Campbell, much more to do with Kay Tarrant than any other single person.

Never heard of her?

Kay Tarrant's blue pen was almost singlehandedly responsible for effacing all adult and sexual references from the entire genre and keeping it artificially juvenile until the late 1960’s. She was (to save keystrokes I am lifting this from comments I left elsewhere long ago):

...the iron-fisted editrix of "Astounding" magazine back when it was the marketplace. Nothing but wholesome, juvenalia goodness made it past her, and I hear tell from The Elders of that Age that there was a long-running contest to see who could sneak a single dirty word or even mildly sexual reference past her.

(And one hears conflicting accounts of how someone snuck one past the Cerberus of Science Fiction. One hears, for example, that the binary code for "Fuck" was employed as a story title)

Anyway, it wasn't until 1961 that local boy Philip José Farmer busted out with, "The Lovers" that the genre-wide code engendered (small pun intended) by this one woman was broken, and not until several years later that the standards were generally relaxed enough to permit even a giant like Heinlein to publish the likes of "Stranger in a Strange Land."

And, as Paul Harvey would say, now you know...the rest of the story.

And yet, even under those rules, wonderfully dark little classics about the tragic consequences of technology like Cyril Kornbluth's "The Altar at Midnight"

managed to elevate the genre.

So why go through the abbreviated version of my "Science Fiction and Culture" lecture here?

Because it genuinely irritates the fuck out of me every time I see one more wildly overpaid Villager idiot making one more argument for Ye Olde Time Virtues of days gone by without some acknowledgment of exactly how we got to where we are now: without acknowledging that our wildly overpaid Villager idiots have been right out in front, driving the asphalt trucks that paved the road to Hell down which they now lament we are racing.

Because, finally, the predictive and cautionary nature of both the most astute science fiction and most astute Liberalism (I know you were wondered when I'd get around to converging them... :-) bears directly on Mr. Brook's utterly false premise that an "essential culture clash"

Third, there is no essential culture clash. Look at the Steve Jobs obituaries. Over the course of his life, he combined three asynchronous idea spaces — the counterculture of the 1960s, the culture of early computer geeks and the culture of corporate America...

no longer exists as driving force for innovation.

Holy Fuck, Brooks, how about pulling your head out of your ass just once in a while and looking out a window or reading a newspaper that is not full of the bibble of your fellow wildly overpaid Villager idiots.

The "essential culture clash" is still with us because it is always with us. It is, as always, a battle between the irrational, tribal and superstitious...and the rational, expansive and humane. And, as Harlan Ellison noted in his terrific 1997 "Heaven's Gate" essay, it is a clash which has clearly identifiable villains and heroes:

...
Traditionally, answers have been sought in philosophy or religion or mysticism of one kind or another. What's the sense of it all, in a bewildering universe that doesn't seem to know or care that we're here? But from those sources no fully integrated or fully satisfying answers have come.

And those answers may not be anywhere in the literary genre called science fiction, either, but one thing is for damned sure: they are not to be found in the cheapjack foolishness of "sci-fi."

The concepts that abound in fantastical literature have the magical capacity to inspire dreams that become enriching reality. Science fiction, like The Whole Earth Catalog, is only an implement, a tool of the mind's imagination. It employs the technique called extrapolation, allowing us to play the game of what-if?. A game of intellect and daring, of special dreaming and determination not to buy into all those boneheaded beliefs that always tell use we're too stupid and too inadequate to prevail. That we need some kind of mythical alien or supernatural babysitter to get us over the rough spots. Science fiction says otherwise. It is an idea-rich literature that is, at core, hopeful and progressive, that always says--with a nod to the reawakening of a competent human spirit--there will be a tomorrow. It may be troubling, and it may require us to get a lot smarter, but there will be a tomorrow for us to work at.

"Sci-fi," that hunchbacked, gimlet-eyed, slobbering village idiot of a bastardized genre, says only that logic is beyond us, understanding must be crushed underfoot, that the woods are full of monsters and aliens and conspiracies and dread and childish fear of the dark. The former is a literature that can open the sky to all the possibilities of change and chance; the latter is hysterical and as overripe as rotten fruit, that can turn all rational conjecture into a nightmare from which one escapes only by phenobarb-laced applesauce or a slug of grape Kool-aid straight up with cyanide. The former says responsibility for your life is the key; the latter assures you that you ain't got the chance of a hairball in a cyclotron.

And that is the dichotomy of science fiction, as opposed to the tabloid mentality of UFO abductions, triangular-headed ETs, reinterpreted biblical apocrypha, and just plain bone stick stone gullibility. It is obscurantism and illiteracy, raised to the level of dogma. It requires that you be as ignorant today as you were yesterday, that you be no brighter than the sap who keeps playing three-card monte on a street corner with a hustler who will never cut you a break.
...

For last 40 years, Mr. Brooks' Party and Movement have sprinted flat-out, full-tilt into the embrace of hucksters and demagogues who traffic in nothing more than "obscurantism and illiteracy, raised to the level of dogma". Have preached nothing but a doctrine of remaining "as ignorant today as you were yesterday" from every pulpit and husting and media megaphone, while keeping the Pig People in a constant state of terror that the woods are indeed not only just full of "monsters and aliens" but their dirty Commie Liberals with whom they are who are in league with.

For last 40 years, a group of people called "Liberals"

have been warning people like Mr. Brooks that this would end in tears and tragedy.

All along the way, Liberals have been slandered, shunned, marginalized and mocked even as virtually everything we warned against has come to pass.

All along the way, propagandists like Our Mr. Brooks have been lauded, feted, promoted and praised for punching hippies, piddling on about Fake Centrism and generally deflecting blame away from the Party of God, even as events have shown him to be dead wrong about almost everything with a consistency that is genuinely stunning.

The culture clash which people like Mr. Brooks' both helped to create and now obstinately refuses to acknowledge is right on top of us.

The only question that remains for any of us is, which side are you on?

Fundraiser is on and the dough goes here!