The computer salesman knows nothing about computers, any more than the bookseller reads—they were both selling shoes last week, next week they’ll be selling timeshares. Whatever.
The company is totally controlled by stockholders who will never pass through the town the factory is located in and have not the vaguest idea of what product the factory makes. For that matter, few of the people at the factory care whether the product they’re making is any damn good; they’re thinking ahead to their next job, because they know their real employers are a pack of passing looters they’ll never meet. Whatever.
Call your insurance company and the phone will be answered by someone in Atlanta; call the same number the next day, and you’ll speak to someone in Seattle who has no record of, or interest in, your previous call. The Minister of Health will be the Minister of Forestry next year, and Minister of Defense the year after that; nobody even thinks this is weird. The marketing department could care less what the product is. Whatever.
All the cars look identical to one another, probably because they’re all identical to one another. “You want to go where anybody knows your name.” Before you know it, you’re in a mind space where you start to get a warm fuzzy feeling from dialing up Amazon.com because, no matter how long you’ve been away, the Amazon robot will always remember your tastes in music and can remind you. Whatever.
Disconnect.
We all crave freedom, avoid entanglement, strive to evade definition—and thus know less and less about what we’re doing. Nobody would be caught dead actually caring about something. We’re coming to be like bits in a computer chip: not much caring whether we’re zeroes or ones—much less whether the pattern of zeroes and ones we’re part of represents a spreadsheet or a love letter. There is more beauty, and dignity, in a hoe. Even a chamber pot has a purpose.
My former brother-in-law Clark Spangler designs synthesizers. The first time he went to Japan, to inspect the Yamaha factory that was producing his famous CS model, he was considerably startled by how incredibly proud everybody he met there was—proud of their job, their product and their company. On the assembly line he met a man who, he still maintains, was unmistakably the happiest man on the face of the planet.
“This little guy’s entire job consisted of standing beside a conveyor belt and, as widgets came endlessly by, picking them up and tightening the third screw from the top,” he told me. “He did this all day long, every day, had done this all his life—and he was just so serenely, self-evidently, transcendently happy that when other workers had problems they used to like to stand around near him, just to take a hit.”
Fascinated, Clark spent time with the man, curious to understand the source of this unfailing joy. “It turned out to be so simple,” he says. “This fellow knew—knew for a fact, right down to his soles—that he was the very best third-screw-from-the-top-of-a-widget tightener there was.”
How many of us sophisticates can even comprehend that kind of pride? What do we have to be proud of? “Not much is needed to destroy a man; merely persuade him that his labors are useless.” How many of us do anything actually useful anymore? And what of those who do?
The nurses are useful and deserve to be proud. But they must spend a large and growing portion of every day explaining to helpless people in pain that they will not be getting what they deserve, because it simply isn’t there to be gotten, because the tax money intended to pay for it was stolen. Hard to be proud of that, even though they know it’s not their fault.
The same with the teachers: they’re past masters at making bricks without straw, and nonetheless every day they must shortchange the students they love, because they’ve been given no choice; donating massively of their own time and money isn’t always enough to restore the pride they deserve to enjoy.
The police have every right to be proud…but along with all the good they do, they’re also required to help force prostitutes into the control of pimps, enforce hideously absurd drug laws that generate most of the crime in the first place, wave drunken drivers through the system and back out onto the highway and sometimes mace crowds of protesting citizens at the behest of creeps in expensive suits. Such things erode pride.
The social workers ought to be proudest of all, the proudest people in our whole society—for they do the work of nurses, teachers and police combined, and more, for wages an assistant manager at MacDonald’s would scorn. Nobody is more overworked or underpaid. Everybody else’s failures—the mistakes and omissions of parents, schools, churches, cops, mental health professionals, lawmakers, politicians—all end up on the social workers’ plates. All they see all day are the terrified and the doomed, whom they can’t help—and nobody ever sees them at all. Until, inevitably, they drop one of the fifty eggs we’ve demanded they juggle at a time, whereupon we flay them alive on the front page and cut their budget a little further.
No wonder each new generation disconnects just a little more. They’re getting smarter, that’s all. They see how our society treats those who do give a damn. Pretty soon a day will come when we’re all too smart to care, and everyone is tragically hip. Shortly after that, we’ll join the auk, the passenger pigeon and the dodo in the evolutionary Trash Folder.
Or, we could start learning to value and reward those who care.
Environmental Floss
Loathe Yourself, Fine—But Leave Me Out of It.
FIRST PRINTED JUNE 2001
THE FIRST STORY I EVER WROTE, “The Dreaming Dervish,” concerned a beautiful dancer in a trance, endlessly spinning in a transport of ecstasy, whose concentration is disturbed when she notices she has contracted fleas. She takes steps to change her blood chemistry; the fleas are exterminated; the dance goes on. Tomato surprise: the dancer is Mother Gaea; the blood is her fresh water, the fleas were us. Ta-dom!
In my defense, I was twenty. The year was 1969. The story was written for free…and worth every cent.
I evolved. My first novel Telempath, a few years later, involved a genius who found a way to make nasty industrial civilization vanish overnight—by simply enhancing everyone’s sense of smell a thousand fold. He soon learned that civilization at its worst never smelled as bad as 6 billion rotting corpses…and that when the few starving survivors redefine you as “dinner,” industry—at least the part that used to produce .44 caliber firesticks—can come to have retroactive charms.
I’d decided by then, in other words, that for me, if it ever comes down to a choice between noble Mother Gaea and my filthy quarrelsome fellow monkeys—and it does, all the time—I vote for us. We can get more planets, build ’em from scratch if we must—but the universe can never get another human race.
And would be poorer for the loss. That’s the key, right there. The single most important question we have to face if we’re to survive this new millennium is: do we deserve to? Or are we, when you come right down to it, just too disgusting to live?
I don’t care how healthy Gaea is if there are no humans left aboard to appreciate her splendor. I have difficulty believing any rational person could feel otherwise. But over the years since I wrote Telempath, I’ve watched with astonished dismay as more and more of my contemporaries—not ignorant peasants but expensively educated aristocrats—have come to feel this planet would be a far nicer place if only there weren’t any damn people on it. God forbid we go to space and despoil Mars too.
I believe this attitude to be insane, profoundly sick, a brain-virus that may turn out to be the most deadly of all the psychic cancers we’ve created for ourselves. It bespeaks a deep species-wide self-loathing which I suspect may result from deep personal self-loathing given too much free time to fester. Perhaps it made a kind of sense during the period when two loud-mouthed governments deemed it in their own best interest to repeatedly warn the world that the End of Everything was, in Mr. Jagger’s words, just a shot away. If you believed total doom was inevitable, then loathing your own species was a way of saying hey, those grapes were sour anyway. But that period ended.<
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And still we have endless articles like Alanna Mitchell’s recent four-part series, “Are we on the road to extinction?,” whose clear subtext is that we deserve to be. Or conferences like the one held at UBC a few years ago, “Remaining Human in the Face of Our Growing Dependence on Technology,” in which 250 visibly well-nourished philosophers, psychologists, spiritual seekers, alternative health practitioners, entertainers and even a slumming scientist or two came by jet plane from around the planet to agree with each other that technology is toxic, consumerism is unnatural, computers cause alienation and loneliness, civilization pollutes and we’re stressing the ecosystem to the point of collapse. Oddly, none of them volunteered to kill or sterilize themselves.
“Consume” means “eat.” There is a technical term for lifeforms which do not consume: we call them “dead.” Consumerism is utterly natural; everything alive is a consumer. Only humans have learned (or ever tried) to occasionally accomplish it without bloodshed. Everything alive pollutes: excretion is part of the definition of life. Only humans make any effort to regulate or recycle their wastes. Every life-form grows until it stresses its environment and is slapped back down again. Humans are the only ones who even attempt to live in harmony with their environment. For damn sure they’re the only ones who think they should be better at it and keep trying to learn how.
Computers cause alienation and loneliness? Only in those too afraid to use them. Everyone else is busily forming an astonishing multitude of new planet-wide communities based on shared interests—communities stronger and more tolerant and generous than any ever seen before in history.
Technology is toxic? But for technology I’d have died at fifteen when I had my first lung collapse. Without trifocal technology I’d be too blind to read, write or drive safely. In my twenties I spent several years in the woods, deliberately trying to live without technology, in order to minimize the “footprint” I was leaving on the ecology. Finally I realized I was enlarging it. A woodstove is more polluting and energy-wasteful than electric heat—and offers constant risk of serious injury, from saw to chopping block to firebox. Kerosene is more polluting, dangerous and energy-expensive than electric light—and stinks. I never did learn how to make my own axe-head, knife, stove, horseshoes, plow or even typewriter.
Even with such aids, I spent every waking minute trying to survive. Today I fritter away most of my time thinking deep thoughts, writing trenchant essays, reading good books and writing better ones—on a computer nobody even dreamed of back when I wrote “The Dreaming Dervish” in longhand. If you want to believe my life in the woods was somehow nobler, purer, I urge you to try it yourself. People without technology tend to bury most of their children and to die before thirty themselves…often with relief.
The problem with technology is the large number of people who haven’t got it yet. There’s nothing wrong with this planet that couldn’t be cured by making everyone on it rich. We may never conquer envy, but we can unquestionably abolish need if we put our minds to it. The way to do that is the method that’s been working steadily for the last three centuries now: more, better, more efficient, cleaner, smarter, more humane technology.
Some Cats Know
FIRST PRINTED JUNE 2001
LET ME EXPLAIN WHY I grind my teeth hard enough to generate sparks whenever someone—invariably a person with something to sell—speaks sonorously of “what science now knows about global warming.”
I have a deep and abiding respect for science. It earned that respect, with several trillion man-hours of tedious, painstaking work. Science is basically The Facts. The Anti-Crap. For millennia, the only definitive way to settle any argument was with force. Most beliefs were religious beliefs, matters of opinion, subject to error, endless debate or monarch’s whim. Finally came science, which simply means knowing. (Latin scio=“to know”) Really knowing, for certain—even if someone bigger and stronger disagrees.
“Look,” said one early scientist, “there are countless things I don’t know and never will. But this thing I know: if you drop a coin and a cannonball from the same height at the same time, they’ll hit the ground together. Look: I can prove it.” And by golly he did—and anyone else who tried got the same result unless they cheated.
How’d you figure that out? one bystander asked. “Well,” he said, “there’s this method I use. I wonder why something is so, and I think up a theory, and then I test the theory.” By the sword? “By experiment. I make a prediction based on my theory, and test it. A test so clear that even someone with a different theory has to admit I’m right.” That’s it? “Well, I keep really good records, so I don’t have to keep repeating the test every time a skeptic shows up.” That basically is science. Clever folks frowning at each other and saying, “Oh yeah? Prove it,” until finally they know a few things for sure.
Well, once you actually know a few things, you can finally start getting somewhere, and after awhile people were living past thirty, and more than half their babies lived to grow up, and a lot of them had cable and high speed Internet access and time to worry about the fate of Mother Gaia or even read a Spider Robinson novel. Pretty cool. So I have great respect, not only for the traditional sciences, but even for those newer fields, like psychology or sociology or nutrition, that are still striving earnestly to achieve that noble status—and there are a lot these days.
Planetary ecology is one of the feeblest.
It has only just begun the long difficult process that elevates an area of intellectual interest to the level of a science—not surprising when you reflect that only fifty years ago, nobody had ever heard of it. Today it is—at its best, when it isn’t just a way to be heroic without actually doing anything brave—largely good intentions, wishful thinking and pious hopes in search of significant data and meaningful experiments. Acupuncture has a far better-established claim to be called science.
Here is what ecologists know, so far, that they didn’t basically cop from some preexisting science: the whole biosphere is interconnected, such that a butterfly flapping its wings in Borneo may cause a tornado in Calgary. An admirable insight. But as to exactly how the butterfly does this, or what Calgary might one day do to locate and dissuade it, we are nearly as clueless today as we were in 1950, or in the Stone Age.
Theories we got. Boy, have ecologists got theories. So do handicappers and other theologians. Predictions they have aplenty, too. It sometimes seems they produce little else—all, interestingly, long-term: the predictors will be safely dead before the results come in.
And isn’t it a funny coincidence that not one single ecoprediction ever seems to be a cheerful one? Almost as if they’d noticed that “We’re doomed!” is a grabbier headline than “We’re hangin’ in there…”
What they don’t have, and won’t anytime soon, are many experiments. We only have the one planet. (So far.) To make perceptible changes to something so vast requires forces as powerful, and hard to control, as a meteorite or an industrial civilization. No matter what scale you work on, results take decades or centuries to show up. And the people who live on the planet may object to your tinkering.
So what do ecologists actually study and base most of their apocalyptic predictions on? What is the fundamental basis of their “science,” as presently constituted?
Computer models.
Computer models are caca. Forget facts, or even theories: they don’t deserve the status of a guess. Computer models are games one plays with oneself, as meaningful as throwing knucklebones or fashioning a voodoo doll—oracles only slightly more sophisticated than a magic eight-ball. The greatest programmer who ever lived cannot construct a computer model that accurately and fully describes a single cell…much less a stem cell. The most powerful computer ever constructed cannot reliably predict the behavior of a single five-year-old…let alone an electorate of adults. Nortel’s model of the telecommunications business—a single industry—turned out to have major predictive shortcomings. Nineteen billions worth.
Al
l computer models fail to factor in the (inevitable) invention of newer, better technologies, changing social customs and the discovery of new resources. The notion that a system as complex as a single storm can be meaningfully modeled with a Pentium chip, or even a bank of Crays, is absurd; to claim to have modeled the biosphere is to declare oneself a fool, one short step above someone who thinks Myst is a real world.
A great many such fools currently claim—demand, actually—the moral right to direct and constrain the actions of every government, industry and society on earth, to micromanage the entire atmosphere, on the basis of their computer-game scenarios. Fair enough; everybody has a right to his hustle. They may even turn out to be right in the end, for all I—or they, or anybody—know. It just makes me crazy when they or their fans call them “scientists,” that’s all. That ain’t right. It’s a term that shouldn’t be debased, like “veteran.” In the immortal words of Leiber and Stoller, “If a cat don’t know…he just don’t know.”
Voluntary Poverty Threatens Real Poor People
FIRST PRINTED JUNE 2001
Others say the human population level is okay and can continue to increase because science will meet our needs with new sources of energy and things like that. But even if we can sustain 10 billion people, then as time goes it will become 15 billion then 20 billion. Impossible!
—THE DALAI LAMA
SHOCKINGLY SLOPPY THINKING for one both so educated and so wise. It’s very simple, Your Holiness:
Every society that ever got rich promptly lowered its birthrate toward Zero Population Growth level. (And started to fill with starving immigrants.) Without exception in recorded history. No society that was not rich ever did so.
Every society that ever got rich stopped having civil wars, and then wars period. No society that was not rich ever has.
The Crazy Years Page 15