Throughout recorded history runs a thread whereupon an older and often distinguished figure rants about the failures of the young and how they fail to learn the lessons of their forebears and how this will lead to the downfall of society.  While many cite Plato and his words about the coming failure of Greek youth because they fail to learn music and poetry and thus cannot distinguish between the values of the ancient levels of wisdom ascribed to gold, silver, and bronze, such warnings precede the Greeks and follow them through Cicero and others.  They also occur in other cultures than in western European descended societies.

Generally, at the time of such warnings, as with the case of Alcibiades with Socrates, there are generally two reactions, one usually from the young and one usually from the older members of society.  One is: “We’re still here; what’s the problem; you don’t understand that we’re different.”  The other is: “The young never understand until it’s too late.”

I’ve heard my share of speeches and talks that debunk the words of warning, and generally, these “debunkers” point out that Socrates and Cicero and all the others warned everyone, but today we live at the peak of human civilization and technology.  And we do… but that’s not the point.

Within a generation of the time of Plato’s reports of Socrates’ warnings, Greece was spiraling down into internecine warfare from which it, as a civilization, never fully recovered.  The same was true of Cicero, but the process was far more prolonged in the case of the Roman Empire, although the Roman Republic, which laid the foundation of the empire, was essentially dead at the time of Cicero’s execution/murder.

The patterns of rise and fall, rise and fall, of cultures and civilizations permeate human history, and so far, no civilization has escaped such a fate, although some have lasted far longer than others.

There’s an American saying that was popular a generation or so ago – “From shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves in four generations.”  What it meant was that a man [because it was a society even more male-dominated then] worked hard to build up the foundation for his children, and then the next generation turned that foundation into wealth and success, and the third generation spent the wealth, and those of the fourth generation were impoverished and back in shirt-sleeves.

To build anything requires effort, and concentrated effort requires dedication and expertise in something, which requires concentration and knowledge.  Building also requires saving in some form or another, and that means forgoing consumption and immediate satisfaction.  In societal terms, that requires the “old virtues.”  When consumption and pleasure outweigh those virtues, a society declines, either gradually or precipitously.  Now… some societies, such as that of Great Britain, for years pulled themselves back from the total loss of “virtues.”

But, in the end, the lure of pleasure and consumption has felled, directly or indirectly, every civilization.  The only question appears to be not whether this will happen, but when.

So… don’t be cavalier about those doddering old fogies who predict that the excess of pleasure-seeking and self-interest will doom society.  They’ll be right… sooner or later.

Once, many, many years ago, I was the legislative director for a U.S. Congressman who served on the Appropriations subcommittee overseeing the U.S. Postal Service.  Trying to make sense out of the Postal Service budget – and their twisted economic rationalizations for their pricing structure – led to two long and frustrating years, and the only reason I didn’t lose my hair earlier than I eventually did was that the USPS comprised only part of my legislative duties.

The latest cry for cuts and service reductions may look economically reasonable, but it’s not, because the USPS has been employing the wrong costing model for over forty years. The model is based on structuring costs, first and primarily, on first class mail, and then treating bulk mail and publications as marginal costs, and setting the rates, especially for bulk mail, based on the marginal costs.

Why is this the wrong model?

First, because it wasn’t what the founding fathers had in mind, and second, because it’s lousy economics.

Let’s go back to the beginning.  Article I, section 8, clause 7 of the U.S. Constitution specifically grants Congress the power “to establish Post Offices and Post roads.”  The idea behind the original Post Office was to further communications and the dissemination of ideas.  There was a debate over whether the Post Office should be allowed to carry newspapers, and a number of later Supreme Court decisions dealt with the limits on postal power, especially with regard to free expression, with the Court declaring, in effect, that the First Amendment trumped the Post Office power to restrict what could be mailed.  During the entire first century after the establishment of the Post Office and even for decades after, the idea behind the Post Office was open communications, particularly of ideas.

The idea of bulk mail wasn’t even something the founding fathers considered and could be said to have begun with the Montgomery Ward’s catalogue in the 1870s, although the Post Office didn’t establish lower bulk mail rates until 1928.  As a result, effectively until after World War II, massive direct bulk mailings were comparatively limited, and the majority of Post Office revenues came from first class mail. Today, that is no longer true.  Bulk mail makes up the vast majority of the U.S. Postal Service’s deliveries, and yet it’s largely still charged as if it were a marginal cost – and thus, the government and first class mail users are, in effect, subsidizing advertising mail sent to all Americans.  Yet, rather than charging advertisers what it truly costs to ship their products, the USPS is proposing cutting mail deliveries – and the reason why they’re talking about cutting Saturday delivery is because – guess what? – it’s the lightest delivery day for bulk mail.

I don’t know about any of you, but every day we get catalogues from companies we’ve never patronized and never will.  We must throw away close to twenty pounds of unwanted bulk mail paper every week – and we’re paying higher postage costs and sending tax dollars to the USPS to subsidize even more of what we don’t want.

Wouldn’t it just be better to charge the advertisers what it really costs to maintain an establishment that’s to their benefit?  Or has the direct mail industry so captured the Postal Service and the Congress that the rest of us will suffer rather than let this industry pay the true costs of the bulk mail designed to increase their bottom line at our expense?

Every so often, I come head-to-head with an unsettling fact – being a “realistic” novelist hurts my sales and sometimes even upsets my editors.  What do I mean?   Well… after nearly twenty years as an economist, analyst, administrator, and political appointee in Washington, I know that all too many of the novelistic twists and events, such as those portrayed by Dan Brown, are not only absurd, but often physically and or politically impossible.  That’s one of the reasons why I don’t write political “thrillers,” my one attempt at such proving dramatically that the vast majority of readers definitely don’t want their realism close to home.

Unfortunately, a greater number don’t want realism to get in the way, or not too much in the way, in science fiction or fantasy, and my editors are most sensitive to this.  This can lead to “discussions” in which they want more direct action, while I’m trying to find a way to make the more realistic indirect events more action-oriented without compromising totally what I have learned about human nature, institutions, and human political motivations.  For example, there are reasons why high-tech societies tend to be lower-violence societies, but the principal one is very simple.  High-tech weaponry is very destructive, and societies where it is used widely almost invariably don’t stay high-tech.  In addition, violence is expensive, and successful societies find ways to satisfy majority requirements without extensive violence [selective and targeted violence is another question].

Another factor is that people seeking power and fortune wish to be able to enjoy both after they obtain them – and you can’t enjoy either for long if you’ve destroyed the society in order to be in control. This does not apply to fanatics, no matter what such people claim, but the vast majority of fanatics don’t wish to preserve society, but to destroy – or “simplify” – it because it represents values antithetical to theirs.

Now… this sort of understanding means that there’s a lot less “action” and destruction in my books than in most other books dealing with roughly similar situations and societies, and that people actually consider factors like costs and how to pay for things.  There are also more meals and meetings – as I’m often reminded, and not always in a positive manner – but meals and meetings are where most policies and actions are decided in human society.  But, I’m reminded by my editors, they slow things down.

Yes… and no…

In my work, there’s almost always plenty of action at the end, and some have even claimed that there’s too much at the end, and not enough along the way.  But… that’s life.  World War II, in all its combat phases, lasted slightly less than six years.  The economics, politics, meetings, meals, treaties, elections, usurpations of elections, and all the factors leading up to the conflict lasted more than twenty years, and the days of actual fighting, for any given soldier, were far less than that. My flight instructors offered a simple observation on being a naval aviator:  “Flying is 99 percent boredom, and one percent sheer terror.”  Or maybe it was 98% boredom, one percent exhilaration, and one percent terror.

On a smaller and political scale, the final version of Obama’s health care bill was passed in days – after a year of ongoing politicking, meetings, non-meetings, posturing, special elections, etc.   The same is true in athletics – the amount of time spent in training, pre-season, practices, etc, dwarfs the time of the actual contest, and in football, for example, where a theoretical hour of playing time takes closer to three hours, there’s actually less than fifteen minutes of actual playing time where players are in contact or potential contact.

Obviously, fiction is to entertain, not to replicate reality directly, because few read to get what amounts to a rehash of what is now a very stressful life for many, but the question every writer faces is how close he or she hews to the underlying realities of how human beings interact with others and with their societies.  For better or worse, I like my books to present at least somewhat plausible situations facing the characters, given, of course, the underlying technical or magical assumptions.

Often my editors press for less realism, or at least a greater minimization of the presentation of that realism.  I press back.  Sometimes, it’s not pretty. So far, at least, we’re still talking to each other.

So far…

When a science fiction writer starts pondering the basics of science, especially outside the confines of a story or novel, the results can be ugly.  But…there’s this question, and a lot of them that arise from it, or cluster around it… or something.

Does light really maintain a constant speed in a vacuum and away from massive gravitational forces?

Most people, I’m afraid, would respond by asking, “Does it matter?”  or “Who cares?”

Physicists generally insist that it does, and most physics discussions deal with the issue by saying that photons behave as if they have zero mass at rest [and if I’m oversimplifying grossly, I’m certain some physicist will correct me], which allows photons to travel universally and generally invariably [again in a vacuum, etc.] at the speed of light, which is a tautology, if one thinks about it.  Of course, this is also theoretical, because so far as I can determine, no one has ever been able to observe a photon “at rest.”

BUT… here’s the rub, as far as I’m concerned.  Photons are/carry energy.  There’s no doubt about that.  The earth is warmed by the photonic flow we call sunlight.  Lasers produce coherent photonic flow strong enough to cut metal or perform delicate eye surgery.

Second, if current evidence is being interpreted correctly, black holes are massive enough to stop the flow of light.  Now… if photons have no mass, how could that happen, since the current interpretation is that the massive gravitational force stops the emission of light, suggesting that photons do have mass, if only an infinitesimal and currently unmeasurable mass.

These lead to another disturbing [at least for me] question.  Why isn’t the universe “running down”?  Don’t jump on me yet.  A great number of noted astronomers have asserted that such is indeed happening – but they’re talking about that on the macro level, that is, the entropy of energy and matter that will eventually lead to a universe where matter and energy are all at the same level everywhere, without all those nice gradients that make up comparative vacuum and stars and planets and hot and cold.  I’m thinking about winding down on the level of quarks and leptons, so to speak.

Current quantum mechanics seems to indicate that what we think of as “matter” is really a form of structured energy, and those various structures determine the physical and chemical properties of elements and more complex forms of matter.  And that leads to my problem.  Every form of energy that human beings use and operate “runs down” unless it is replenished with more energy from an outside source.

Yet the universe has been in existence for something like fifteen billion years, and current scientific theory is tacitly assuming that all these quarks and leptons – and photons – have the same innate internal energy levels today as they did fifteen billion years ago.

The scientific quest for a “theory of everything” tacitly assumes, as several noted scientists have already observed, unchanging universal scientific principles, such as an unvarying weak force on the leptonic level and a constant speed of light over time.  On a practical basis, I have to question that.  Nothing seems to stay exactly the same in the small part of the universe which I inhabit, but am I merely generalizing on the basis of my observations and anecdotal experience?

All that leads to the last question.  If those internal energies of quarks and leptons and photons are all declining at the same rate, how would we even know?  Could it be that those “incredible speeds” at which distant galaxies appear to be moving are more an artifact of changes in the speed of light?  Or in the infinitesimal decline of the very energy levels of all quarks, etc., in our universe?

Could our universe be running down from the inside out without our even knowing it?

A few weeks so ago, I watched two college teams play for the right to go to the NCAA tournament.  One team, down twenty points at halftime, rallied behind the sensational play of a single star and pulled out the victory by one point in the last seconds.  That was the way television commentators and the print media reported it.  I saw it very differently. One of the starting guards for the losing team missed seven out of twelve free throws, two of them in the last fifteen seconds.  This wasn’t a fluke, a bad day for that player – he had a year-long 40% free throw success percentage.  And just how many games in the NCAA tournament have been lost by “bad” free throw shooting?  Or won by good free throw shooting?  More than just a handful.

Good free-throw shooting is clearly important to basketball success.  Just look at the NBA.  While the free-throw shooting average for NCAA players is 69%, this year’s NBA average is 77%, and 98% of NBA starters have free throw percentages above 60%, with 75% of those starters making more than three-quarters of their free throws.

To my mind, this is a good example of what lies behind excellence – the ability to master even the most boring aspect of one’s profession. Another point associated with this is that simply knowing what a free throw is and when it is employed isn’t the same as being able to do it.  It requires practice – lots of practice. Shooting free throws day after day and improving technique is not exciting; it’s boring.  But the fact that there are very, very few poor free-throw shooters in the NBA is a good indication that mastery of the boring pays off.

The same is true in writing.  Learning grammar and even spelling [because spell-checkers don’t catch everything, by any means] is also boring and time consuming, and there are some writers who are, shall I say, slightly grammatically challenged, but most writers know their grammar.  They have to, because editors usually don’t have the time or the interest in cleaning up bad writing.  It also gets boring to proofread page after page of what you’ve written, from the original manuscript, the copy-edited manuscript, the hardcover galleys, the paperback galleys, and so on… but it’s necessary.

Learning how to fly, which most people believe is exciting, consists of a great deal of boredom, from learning to follow checklists to the absolute letter, to practicing and practicing landings, take-offs, and emergency procedures hour after hour, day after day until they’re second nature.  All that practice is tedious… and absolutely necessary.

My opera director wife is having greater difficulty with each year in getting students to memorize their lines and music – because it’s boring – but you can’t sing opera or musical theatre if you don’t know your music and lines.

I could go on and on, detailing the necessary “boring” requirements of occupation after occupation, but the point behind all this is that our media, our educational system, and all too many parents have instilled a message that learning needs to be interesting and fun, and that there’s something wrong with the learning climate if the students lose interest.  Students have always lost interest.  We’re genetically primed to react to the “new” because it was once a survival requirement.  But the problem today is that the skills required to succeed in any even moderately complex society require mastery of the basics, i.e., boring skills, or sub-skills, before one can get into the really interesting aspects of work.  Again, merely being able to look something up isn’t the same as knowing it, understanding what it means, and being able to do it, time after time without thinking about it and without having to look it up repeatedly.

And the emphasis on fun and making it interesting is obscuring the need for fundamental mastery of skills, and shortchanging all too many young people.