In a recent non-fiction book, In the Garden of Beasts, author Erik Larson recounts the story of William E. Dodd, the U.S. ambassador to Germany from June of 1933 until December of 1937.  What is so surprising about the story is that it has not been told before, at least to my knowledge.  Within months of his posting to Berlin, Dodd was reporting on the beatings and detentions of American tourists by the Nazis, the beatings and torture of Germans who failed to salute storm troopers or who dated Jewish people, and other clear signs of a police state deteriorating into a world menace.  Yet, Dodd’s reports were mocked and derided by colleagues and superiors in the State Department in Washington, D.C., and he was chastised when he finally refused to meet with German officials because such meetings were a total charade.  In late 1937, he was forced to resign and was replaced by Hugh Wilson, who described Hitler as the “man who has pulled his people form moral and economic despair into the state of pride and evident prosperity.”  Dodd returned to the U.S. and toured widely, reporting on what he had witnessed in Germany.  Then his wife died, and he died in February 1940, well before Pearl Harbor.

It’s clear that the U.S. government knew for years of the atrocities of the Nazis, long before the attack on Poland and the outbreak of war and more than a decade before U.S. soldiers uncovered the horrors of the concentration camps. It’s also clear that they didn’t really want to know what was happening in Germany.

What’s most discouraging about this is that, almost 75 years after Dodd’s death, we still have a government – and a great number of citizens – who “don’t want to know.”  No one really wanted to know about genocide in Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, or Ruanda, or Darfur.  No one really wanted to know about the financial disaster lurking in sub-prime mortgages.  No one really wants to know about the dangers of global warming… the list of denials and deniers is almost endless… and all of them had what they believed to be good reasons… and all of them were wrong.

You can’t fix a problem you don’t recognize or one whose existence you deny.  It may make you feel more comfortable… until it can’t be denied, until hundreds of thousands or millions have died, or the bombs are falling around you, or the storms get worse and worse…

So… what’s exactly so good about our not wanting to know, both individually and as a society?  That we don’t have to do anything… and we can secretly hope that it will miraculously go away or that someone else will deal with it?

The other day, as I was trying to extricate my vehicle and myself from one of the few traffic snarls in my town of some 30,000 odd people, I couldn’t help but ask why we had a traffic jam at all around the sole shopping center in more than sixty miles in one direction and two hundred in the other, especially in a town with more than enough open space. There have already been a number of accidents at the intersections adjoining the shopping center, where multiple streets converge all too closely within less than a block, including an interstate highway off ramp, and that’s before all the retail spaces have been filled. 

So how did we end up with such a dangerous situation, and one which now requires a multi-million dollar relocation and rebuilding of the interstate access ramps and roads? The answer boils down to a free-market failure. The shopping center developers designed the shopping center to maximize the amount of retail usage for the amount of land involved. The town was happy with this because that also maximized the property tax revenues.

One of the defenses mounted by those who complain about government regulation of business is that businesses cannot stay in business if they create too many dissatisfied customers. While this is dubious at times, if not more often, it’s definitely untrue in several sets of circumstance that have become more and more common in modern society. The first case is where the “customer” has no way to track and no way of knowing who or what business has created the problem.  The second is where a customer deals with the business only once or twice in a lifetime.  The financial meltdown created by the housing/mortgage collapse embodied both of these circumstances

The dangers around my shopping center embody just the second, because the shopping center developers developed the only shopping center in my town and likely the only one, given demographics, for at least a generation.  Once the land is planned, subdivided, and built, they’ve made their bundle, and because they can’t do it soon or perhaps ever again in this town, free-market economics press them toward making as much as they can, regardless of the consequences. Under the threat of having a badly designed shopping center or none at all, the town caves in… and the citizens are left with the mess, and the taxpayers (including those in cities hundreds of miles away, since the interstate ramp rebuilding will be partly funded by the state) will fund all the remedial measures.

Economists call those costs external diseconomies or negative externalities or the equivalent, but what it amounts to is that unchecked free markets, or those not scrutinized enough, have a disturbing tendency to foist way too many costs off on others, not to mention deaths at times – and certainly in the case of the financial meltdown, all those billion dollar profits and high bonuses were never recovered while the taxpayers picked up the tab, and no one compensated those whose lives were ruined.

While I’d be the last person to endorse government planned and directed economic development, because that’s just another road to ruin, I’d also be one of the last to endorse unchecked free markets. We need a balance between the two – and that’s something that none of the politicians or the multibillion dollar corporations seem to want, whether it’s in the planning and regulating of the design and operation of local shopping centers or the nation’s financial structure.

Lately, there have been a number of scientific articles raising the concept that individual free will does not exist, based on, among other things, the scientifically established fact that the body actually begins to react micro or milliseconds before a person “decides” to take an action.  I have some considerable difficulty with this concept, as I suspect is the case among the majority of individuals who regard themselves as thinking individuals, if not among almost all people, not just out of sheer egotism, but out of a few practical considerations, the first of which is that absolute “determinism” or even biological programming doesn’t take into account that, in a myriad of ways, we do not control our environment.

Just take last week in Joplin, Missouri, when killer tornadoes ripped through the town.  The individuals caught in that situation had no control over that situation, nor could they have forecast where and when that tornado would hit.  Nor do we realistically know what events created by other theoretically thinking entities will impact us, or if they will, and when. Computer studies have suggested that the variables involved in directing/predicting events in our universe would require an entity/computer/whatever several magnitudes larger than the universe itself.  To my mind, at least, this suggests that the concept that we’re all directed by an outside force isn’t either practical or workable. 

Yet the scientific evidence remains, and continues to grow, suggesting we act before we’re conscious of deciding.  Is this a lack of free will? 

Or do we act intuitively/emotionally and then rationalize the action/decision?  Even if this is so, and some neuroscientists suggest that such is the case, exactly on what are our “intuitive” or emotional reactions based?

The simplest answer is that they’re based on a combination of nature and nurture, of genetically determined predilections and learned behaviors and reactions. But since societies and cultures have changed, often drastically, over the generations, and since modern societies do exist and function, if imperfectly, and since we have made great scientific strides over the past 10,000 years… something has to allow us the flexibility to change and to make decisions in unforeseen situations and under newer circumstances.

What if it’s as simple as… through our families, our background, our education, and our interactions, we actually pre-program ourselves and then rationalize that pre-programming?

Then… our choices, our free-will [if you will] are not based on the moment, but upon what we have learned and experienced when we were not actively “deciding.”  Yes, I know every action is in fact a decision, but every decision is based in part if not in whole on what we’ve previously experienced.

But then… I’d be the first to say I haven’t the faintest idea where one draws the line, except to observe that, when I’m writing a book, often there are many different ways where I could take the work… and, in looking back on my life, who and what I am now is in so many ways not what I was years ago, while I can see others who’ve changed not at all over the years… and that, at least to me, suggests that perhaps our free will lies not in the decisions of the moment, but in what we do to learn and “pre-program” ourselves.

Just a thought…

The other day I ran across an article in the business section of the newspaper that described the marketing behind Lady Gaga’s newest album as revolutionary… the first campaign to fully utilize all aspects of the social media revolution to promote the album.

This approach is revolutionary in terms of the technology, but not exactly so in terms total self-promotion. That was pioneered, again in music, more than a century ago by Richard Wagner, who, in addition to being a musical genius, was also a marketing genius who was the first artist to make himself inseparable from the product in all dimensions, from its design, creation, production, and in the end, even the very physical forum in which his works were presented, a forum which endures at Bayreuth… more than a century after his death.

Wagner was incredibly successful in creating a form of opera which was essentially self-referential, whose “truths”[although derived from other sources] existed wholly within the opera itself.  That self-referential structure, with its emphasis on what might be called Nordic mythical truths, was tailor-made for Goebbels and the Nazi propaganda machine because, first, the music was powerful and essentially nationalistic and, second, the “truths” presented in Wagner’s work required and needed no understanding outside the works themselves.

Prior to Wagner, and for many artists, even well after him, the emphasis was on the work, and at the highest levels, artists attempted to reveal what they saw as the “truth” through their work, but the majority of such works contained references well beyond the works themselves and often attempted to make sense of the “greater world” beyond the work.

Some still do, but with the growth of the Ipod music culture of personalized music and especially with social media, this gets harder – and such “exterior-referenced” artistic attempts at revealing greater truth become less interesting and less personally relevant to those in the social media world, because the whole concept behind social media is to tailor the online world of the participant around that participant, to create a self-referential narcissism.

The difference between the “old” approach and the, if you will, “Wagnerian/Gaga” approaches is that the old approach was based, at its best, on the affirmation and understanding of something greater than the artist or the reader/listener, while the “Wagnerian” approach is based on selling the product through its isolation from other conflicting “truths” and the cult of the composer/producer, while the “Lady Gaga” approach to selling her music is designed to go a step beyond fusing artist and work, and fuse the artist, work, and audience in a form of self-identification and self-validation, independent of “outside” truths or references.

Am I being alarmist?  I don’t think so.  Over the last few months, three major U.S. symphony orchestras have either declared bankruptcy or given indications that such is likely in the weeks ahead.  Others have either frozen or cut salaries or schedules.  Bookings and appearances for classical musicians and singers are declining rapidly.

The more simplistic and the greater the narcissistic appeal a work of music has, the greater the likelihood that it will be commercially successful.

And since music, even more than literature, reflects a culture, this trend should be disturbing… not that any narcissist would even bother to care.

Last weekend, I was at a science fiction and fantasy convention, and among the events was a panel with Robert Sawyer, the Canadian author whose books were the inspiration for the short-lived television series Flash Forward.  The panel was on the subject of the impact of the “Me Generation” on publishing and F&SF.  Several days after the panel, I came across a blog complaining that there should have been someone on the panel who belonged to the “me generation,” since neither Sawyer nor I obviously did [although I must point out that Rob is a number of years younger than I].  That got me to thinking about the premises behind the complaint.

The first premise is erroneous and has belonged to every younger generation since the time of Socrates, if not before.  It is the belief that no one older can possibly understand what the younger generation feels and believes. That is, of course, utter trash.  Every older generation was once young and felt the same way. Some in the older generation have forgotten or chosen to forget and thus do not “understand,” but many, many of us do remember and understand.  We also understand what things we then believed to be true were not as we thought.  This process is known as maturation, also thought of as ossification by many of the younger generations.

But the second premise is the one I really want to address. That is the unspoken assumption, especially among the media, that every issue has another side worth exploring and presenting.  I’d be the first to agree that every issue has another side.  Even Hitler had another side, as did Pol Pot and Osama bin Laden.  But just because there is another side doesn’t mean that such a side is either worth presenting in any depth or that it should be justified by the media or the intellectual communities.  I’m sorry, but, for example, we really don’t need, nor should we be exposed to in-depth expositions of the justification for genocide, pedophilia, serial killings, etc.

Why not?  Isn’t that a violation of freedom of information and the press?

It is if it’s mandated by government, but the press and media need to exercise some self-restraint.  Again… why?

Because, in the simplest terms, in-depth presentation of bad information, poor logic, and the like, especially without critical assessment, gives it a credibility in the eyes of a public too credulous and too accepting of what the media present, particularly whatever is the flavor de jour.  Do I think either limitation or such critical assessment is likely to happen?  Not on your life… or at least in my lifetime. The media is far too interested and far too driven by profit to risk being the first or among the first by actually taking time to read and consider the implications and whether one side or the other of a current story is little more than fluff, if that.  Above and beyond the profit considerations are the pseudo-legal ones.  They don’t want to court lawsuits by suggesting one side of a truly one-sided story has little to recommend it.  That’s how and why the tobacco industry, some of the energy industry, the climate change deniers, and even the financial industry [and its supporters] get almost a free pass.  All these people do is suggest and sow doubt with facts and theories that range from being statistical outliers to being outright wrong or totally irrelevant or by pointing out nitpicking lacks or insignificant weaknesses in data. That way they call claim that they’re true skeptics.  By the way, you can tell the true skeptics from the ideologues by watching what happens when more well-supported data appears.  The true skeptics analyze and consider it; the ideologues find yet another and different basis of support for their stance.

The problem, of course, is that all ideologues believe that the “other side” is non-existent, while those who are open-minded actually consider the other side. But the fact remains… there are some stories and some situations, some of them vital to us and our future, where the “other side” is weak or essentially non-existent… and all too often no one will claim that the emperor has no new clothes.