Have you noticed that very few teenagers actually “date” any more? Instead, they just “hang-out” with their friends. From what I can tell, the “consensus” is that this is more “natural.” Well… it’s more in line with the patterns of our simian relations and ancestors, but “natural,” contrary to current pop culture, isn’t always better. Dating, as practiced by previous generations, required the male to request that a particular female accompany him to a predetermined event, such as a movie or a dance or dinner, for a limited period of time. This required advance planning, preparation by both parties, conversation between both, or an attempt by both, and an expenditure of time by both parties, as well as resources on the part of the male. While some women contend that the expenditure of resources by the male was an attempt to gain sexual favors, that attempt did cost the male resources. “Hanging out” achieves the same results, perhaps even more easily for males, from what I can see, without any commitment of anything on the part of the male. It also dispenses with advance thought, planning, and similar other activities required of adults in society.

Along a similar line, the “consensus” appears to be, in general, that the single-sex college dorms of the past are outmoded, and that college students are better prepared for life by co-ed dorms. While this view has not been universally adopted by all universities, most appear to have given in to providing at least some co-ed dorms. Yet a study published last week indicates that co-ed dorms result in nearly twice the rate of binge drinking among their inhabitants.

Then, there’s clothing. The teen-aged consensus, in recent years, appears to have been to minimize personal appeal and maximize bad features. Low-slung pants too tight above exposed midsections create an impression of corpulence for all but the anorexic woman. Baggy trousers drooping to the back of the knees give even the most trim of young men the impression of bad personal sanitation and slovenliness. Backwards baseball caps not only don’t shade the face, but they also heighten the vacantness of expression in the eyes of all too many young men. Watching the results of teen-aged girls’ consensus decisions on what to wear is frightening, because so very few of them ever choose clothing that is either attractive and tasteful or maximizes their attributes and features. Yet… they talk about what “looks good” when they really mean that they want to wear what everyone else is wearing, no matter how awful it appears on them. It reminds me of an ancient SF story where the men come out of the latest “fashion show” green and nauseated, unable to even approach the women wearing the latest “high fashion” — later revealed to have been designed by aliens to stop human reproduction.

Bad consensus-driven decisions aren’t limited to teenagers, by any means. Wall Street exemplified that with its thoughtless consensus agreements to leverage capital to the hilt through excessive reliance on financial derivatives and similar Ponzi-like devices, and the heads of all too many firms embraced devices they didn’t understand because everyone else on Wall Street was doing the same thing, another form of consensus.

Another consensus is the American idea that every teenager should get a college education. The problem is that possibly as many as half of those young adults either aren’t capable of doing true college level work or aren’t interested enough to do so. Rather than debunk this “consensus” idea, American society has pressured public institutions to water down higher education, although they don’t call it that. The terms that are used include making education “more accessible” or “more relevant” or “more appealing” or “adapted to individual learning styles,” etc. The result is that something like half of entering college freshmen cannot write a coherent and logical essay totally on their own and that to obtain a true higher education now requires additional years of post-graduate study. The other result is that society wastes an incredible amount of resources on individuals who benefit little — except in getting a paper credential that has become increasingly devalued.

The consensus problem isn’t new to society, although it’s more pervasive in the U.S. today. There is a famous line in Handel’s Messiah — “we, like sheep, are gone astray.” Those words were penned in 1741, but they’re even truer today because consensus is based on comfort and agreement, just as in a herd of sheep, and in difficult times, the best decisions are seldom developed through consensus. There’s a tremendous difference between forging consensus and deciding through consensus. The consensus of the British people in 1938 was that appeasement was the best way to handle Hitler and that Winston Churchill was a warmongering firebrand. The consensus of the American people in 1940 was that the United States could avoid war. The consensus in the U.S. in 2006 was that prosperity would continue indefinitely.

In these cases, consensus was wrong, with disastrous results.

Obviously, every society needs to reach consensus on its laws, customs, and political practices and decisions, but that doesn’t mean that sheep-like group-think is the way to reach that consensus. In the past, hard issues were debated, legislated, modified, to a large degree by those who had some considerable knowledge of the subject. Today, in all too many groups and organizations, for all the talk of innovation, ideas that are unpopular are too often dismissed as unworkable.

The problem here is a failure to distinguish between workable ideas, which are unpopular because they have a cost to those of the group, and popular ideas that are technically unworkable. “Taxing the rich” is always popular because few in any society or group are rich; it’s also generally less effective in practice because the truly rich have enough resources to avoid taxation or leave the society, and the practice is almost always detrimental to society because the tax burden falls most heavily on the productive upper middle class or lower upper class [depending on definition] who are the group that determines the course and success of a society. Taxing everyone at a lower rate works better in raising revenue and in allocating resources, and is actually “fairer” because taxes fund general services used more intensively by the non-rich. Unfortunately, flatter tax rates are highly unpopular, and so the general compromise consensus is to keep tax rates at a point where the upper middle class doesn’t scream too much, while not taxing the majority of the populace enough to adequately support the services that they demand. The result is that government barely squeaks by in times of prosperity and faces either ruinous deficits or drastically reduced services, if not both, in economically hard times.

Then, add in our modern communications technology, as I’ve previously discussed, with niche marketing and self-identification, and we’re getting massive societal polarization as various group consensuses harden into total intractability, in effect creating social and political group anarchy without even the benefit of individual creativity.

All those for “natural” consensus…?

Recently, I was asked, as part of a profile article that will appear in a “genre” magazine in February, to name my five favorite F&SF books. Usually, I resist the “top five” syndrome, but the article writer and her editor insisted that they weren’t asking for my rating as to the “best” five books, but my favorite five books. So I gave them a list, but when I looked at the list a day later, I discovered that the “newest” book was something like ten years old. However, in my defense, I must add that I didn’t read it until three years ago. So it’s not just that I’m stuck in the past, or not entirely. And no, I’m not going to reveal the list, at least not until the article is published, out of courtesy to the publication, but I will discuss the entire business of favorites.

Are “favorites” something that strike us when we’re younger and more impressionable and never let go? That’s a simple and easy answer… and like all simple and easy answers, I don’t think it’s accurate, although there may be a tiny grain of partial truth buried there. Why do I think that? Well… first off, I’m not one of the younger readers or writers in this field. Without totally giving away my age, I will point out that I read my first “real” SF book, at least the first I remember reading, in 1955 [and for those who want to know, the book was A.E. Van Vogt’s Slan and it wasn’t one of my listed “favorites” because it has too many impossibilities and improbabilities]. After that, I read science fiction and then fantasy fairly voraciously for the next 20-25 years, not that I didn’t also read mysteries, history, poetry, and other works avidly as well. Now, while three of my F&SF favorites were published in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I didn’t read them then, because I happened to be occupied in other endeavors in Southeast Asia, until a good ten years later, when I was a political staffer in Washington. D.C., already cynical, and anything but an impressionable young reader.

Still… I don’t find that many books published in recent years resonate the way those favorites do. Occasionally, one does, as did the “newest” one on my list, and as do others that I find good and enjoyable, but not quite in the top five. Part of that is clearly that I’m a curmudgeon of sorts who doesn’t much care for action for the sake of action, shock for the sake of shock, newness for the sake of newness, but part of it is that, in my personal opinion, for too many current writers in the field story-telling trumps writing. By that, I mean, for me, a truly memorable book is one where the style and the story-telling are both good — and seamless. That’s certainly what I strive for as a writer, and what I look for as a reader. But it’s also clear to me, particularly in reading the reader reviews thrown up [and I use that term advisedly] by many younger people, anything that resembles grace, style, and depth is unwanted if it slows down the action or the sex or the bloodshed. This viewpoint reflects a society that values degrees, credentials, prestige, and money over education, actual accomplishment, and understanding, and while I certainly can’t change a changing society, except perhaps through my writing, which reaches only a comparatively limited number of readers, and generally the more educated ones at that, I don’t find the superficial values rewarding, and there are comparatively fewer books written that exemplify the values I do find rewarding.

So… I’m left to conclude that favorites reflect values, and that’s often why the favorite books, movies, and the like of older people are reflected in a disproportionate weighting of older works, and not merely because they read or saw them when they were young and “impressionable.”

The divisive debate over the health care bill reveals a certain culturally inherited and continually propagated commonality that most Americans refuse to acknowledge.

What exactly is that “commonality”? Nothing other than a burning desire for “more.”

To begin with, in the current American culture, “better health care” really translates into “more health care,” but the way in which the partisans on both sides of the debate are arguing sheds an unpleasant light on a certain aspect of our “national character,” in so far as any country has a “national character.”

From what I can discern, those who might be characterized as “haves” are attacking the recently unveiled versions of the health care bill as adding to the national deficit, reducing individual choice of doctors, penalizing those who don’t buy adequate insurance, failing to rein in the depredations of the ambulance-chasing trial lawyers, raising taxes on those who already pay the vast majority of federal and state income taxes, and in general penalizing those who’ve been successful through hard work. All this amounts to a statement that government is going to “take” from them, or, if you will, reduce their share of “more.”

On the other hand, those who would not generally consider themselves as “haves,” and their supporters, are insisting that health insurance is essentially a “right” for all Americans, that every American should have affordable [i.e., cheap] health insurance, that the insurance companies have padded their profits by practices that disenfranchise tens of millions of working Americans from health care through denial of care and coverage by every legal [and sometimes not so legal] means possible, that the cost of health insurance and medical procedures should not drive people into bankruptcy, and that doctors and health care providers reap enormous profits while failing to improve the overall health care systems.

All of these points on both sides have some degree of validity, and I’m not about to assess the comparative merits of each point. I will note, however, that almost all of them bear on the issue of who gets “more.”

Now… whether Americans like it or not, the current nation is based on immigrants who traveled here in order to get more, whether they were failed aristocrats or second or third sons of old world nobility, crafters who saw no hope of advancement, Irish and other ethnic immigrants fleeing starvation or worse, debtors, or those leaving behind a myriad of other problems, the vast majority came seeking “more,” whether it was more freedom, greater prosperity, more land, better opportunities for children…

The endless and continual striving for more has its good and its not-so-good sides. The good that has resulted from this drive for “more” is considerable, including a political system that over time has managed to offer a wide range of political freedoms and to transfer power with less disruption than most advanced nations, a level of technology and prosperity for the majority of Americans that is unprecedented in world history, an openness to social and technological change, and a culture that allows those with great abilities to prosper, usually without regard to their social and economic position at birth.

Unfortunately, the evil is also significant, if less obvious, and less talked about, even by so-called liberals. We have spawned a culture of consumption that equates well-being with possession and use of an ever-higher level of goods, possessions, services, and personal space in housing. We have come to measure success almost entirely in terms of the material. We have increasingly come to devalue those who are less able or less fortunate, to the point where we have the greatest discrepancy in income between the poor and the wealthy of any industrialized and technically advanced nation on the planet. We have increased the debt that must be paid by our children and their children to unbelievable levels. We have equated excellence with popularity and material prosperity.

But… the furor over the current health legislation underscores what might be called a sea change for the culture of “more.” In the past, the culture of “more” was based largely on “undeveloped” and cheap land, advances in technology, in means of production, and in the greater and greater use of energy, almost exclusively of fossil fuels. All of these are now running into the inexorable law of diminishing returns. For example, we communicate instantly; and there’s nothing faster than instantly. The energy and technology costs of traveling faster seem to preclude much improvement in current speed of transport. Production efficiencies result in fewer jobs required for reach unit of output, and this has certainly contributed to an economy that economists claim is recovering, even as unemployment increases.

As for the health care issue, we now possess the technology and knowledge to allow “more” in terms of health — more procedures to extend and improve life, but what we lack is the resources, under our current socio-political customs and procedures, to apply those procedures to a population of over 300 million people.

For the first time in U.S. history, it appears that we have reached a point where we can’t have “more” of everything, where technology and energy cannot meet all the needs and wants we as a society demand be fulfilled — and the health care legislation represents the first political presentation of this conflict… or the first one that clearly impacts every single American in some way… and almost none of us like the options.

So… which “more” will prevail — that of better health care and life-style or that of bigger and better consumerism? Will we find some sort of compromise? Or will the struggle deteriorate into an undeclared conflict between the haves and have-nots? Or will the result be a stand-off that amounts to a collective burying of heads in the sand?

Where exactly is the human species headed? How will we get there? Is any great improvement in human culture and technology really possible… or are we close to the end of the line? Throughout history, various authorities and pundits have suggested such, most recently at the end of the nineteenth century, when some suggested closing the U.S. patent office because significant new discoveries would be impossible. We all know how accurate that prediction was. And yet… are there limits to what we as a species can do?

A perhaps apocryphal statement attributed variously to either General Hoyt Vandenberg or Senator Arthur Vandenberg supposedly doubted the feasibility of developing the atomic bomb because such a project would require doubling the electrical power generation capacity of the United States in wartime. In fact, such a doubling was required and did take place, largely based on the TVA Project. Whether or not either man did make such a statement, the underlying truth is that large advances in technology have always resulted in or required, if not both, an increase in the use of power. The industrial revolution was effectively supported by the widespread coal mining; the technological developments of the twentieth century by massive use of oil and natural gas.

Currently, the United States with roughly five percent of the world’s population, employs/consumes/uses more than a quarter of all the world’s energy and resources, yet most experts in the fossil fuels field believe that any significant increases in oil and gas production are not possible and that sustaining current production levels for more than a century at the outside is highly unlikely. Given the fact that world population shows no signs of rapid decreases and that major powers such as China and India are becoming increasingly industrialized and technology-driven, with increasing demand for energy and goods, it doesn’t take much intelligence to realize that the human species either has to become far more efficient in energy usage and production or face increasing conflicts over energy supplies… OR develop new science and technology to utilize far vaster energy sources. The problem here is that renewable sources, such as wind and solar power, do not provide energy that is easily concentrated — and concentrated energy is necessary for high technology and our current society — not to mention mass and long distance transport.

Yet each advance in power sources has required a greater energy input. It takes more energy to mine coal than to gather or and cut wood, more energy to drill oil wells, especially now, and refine the product than to burn coal. Fission power plants cost far more than natural gas, coal, or oil-fired power plants. The next apparent step in concentrated energy production is fusion power, but even the research into developing fusion power is hideously expensive… so expensive that there are only a comparative handful of research projects pressing forward.

The next related problem is that, without something like fusion power, and with the current world population levels, maintaining a standard of living even remotely close to the present level of industrialized nations will not be possible for longer than a few generations, if that. Over the long term, the prognosis is even less rosy.

With all our species’ eggs, so to speak, in the basket that is Earth, we’re not only vulnerable to energy depletion, but to species extinction, sooner or later. But there are no other habitable planets in our solar system, not without massive terraforming — and that also requires huge amounts of technology and energy. So… what about interstellar travel?

At the moment, with what we know now, travel to even the nearest star systems will effectively take generations, because current physics doesn’t provide any ways around the apparent limitations of the speed of light in terms of attaining speeds conducive to what one might call real-time interstellar travel. The one possible loophole might be the creation of something along the lines of a Hawking wormhole, but preliminary calculations suggest that the energy necessary to create such a tunnel through space/time would approximate that used/radiated by a black hole. And that leads us back to the energy problem once more… and to the question that no one seems to want to ask.

Given what lies before us, why aren’t we devoting more research resources to high-energy power generation possibilities?

I’ve heard or read innumerable times, including at least once in the comments to this blog, that younger Americans don’t need to learn as much as older generations did because the young folks can find information quickly on the web. I’m certain that they can find “information” quickly, but that argument ignores a number of basic points.

The first is the assumption that these younger Americans will always have instant access to the web, via their Iphones or Blackberries or whatever. Perhaps, but there are many times and places where accessing those devices is difficult, if not dangerous, or impossible. It can also be time-consuming, particularly if the young American in question doesn’t know very much, especially since, in more complex areas of learning and life, a wider knowledge base is necessary in order to know what to look up and how to apply such information. My wife has watched scores of supposedly intelligent students — they tested well — have great difficulty in “looking up” simple quotations about musical subjects. Why? Because their subject matter vocabularies didn’t contain enough synonyms and similar terms, and because computers only search for what you ask for, not everything that you should have asked for, had you known more. The more complex the subject, the greater this problem becomes.

The second problem is that trying to evaluate a mass of newly acquired information leads to greater mistakes than if the acquirer already has a knowledge base and is merely updating that knowledge.

Third is the fact that operating on an “I can look it up basis” tends to postpone dealing with problems until the last moment. In turn, planning skills atrophy, a fact to which all too many college professors and supervisors of recent graduates can testify.

Fourth, the “look it up attitude” does not distinguish between discrete bits of information and knowledge. For example, one blog commenter made the point that much of the information handed out by teachers and much of the required reading was “useless.” In the context of the comment, “useless” translated into “it wasn’t on the test.” Speaking as a former college instructor, I have to point out that only a fraction of the material that should be learned in a college-level course could ever be tested for, even if every class period were devoted solely to testing. These days, all too many college professors are either giving up or over-testing in response to a student — and societal — attitude that seems all too often to say, “It’s not important to learn anything except to pass tests.” In addition, tests that merely require regurgitation of information or the plugging of values into formulae do nothing to enhance thinking and real-life problem solving. In short, what’s overlooked by all those who rely on tests is that test results do not equate to education, nor do they build a wider professional knowledge base for the student.

Fifth, without a personal knowledge base, how can you evaluate the accuracy of the information you’re seeking? With every day the amount of information available increases, and with wider access the amount of misinformation increases — to the point where a substantial amount of erroneous information is being promulgated on subjects where the accuracy has been scientifically established without any doubt — such as in the case of vaccinations, as I noted earlier. Without a personal knowledge base, either a greater amount of cross-checking is required, which takes time, or more errors will likely result.

Sixth, as noted in earlier blogs, continual reliance on instant information access dulls memory skills, and there are many, many occupations where reliance on instant “outside” information is not feasible and could be fatal. Pilots have to remember air controller instructions and procedures. Paramedics need to know emergency medical procedures cold. While rote memorization is not usually required in such occupations, a good memory is vital if one is to learn the skills to be highly professional… and looking up everything doesn’t help develop memory or skills.

Finally, lack of a broad knowledge and information base, one firmly anchored within one’s own skull, leads to narrow-mindedness and contributes to the ongoing societal fragmentation already being accelerated by our “bias-reinforcing” electronic technology.

But… of course, you can always ignore these points and look “it” up — if you can figure out how to get the precise information you need and whether it’s accurate, if you have the time to assimilate it… and if you can remember it long enough to use it — but then, you can just plug it into the Iphone… and hope you’ve got access and sufficient battery power.