Many years ago, when all my grown children were still minors, one of them wanted to know why I seldom said that anything they did was good. My answer was approximately, “You’re intelligent and talented, and you’ve had many advantages. I expect the merely good from you as a matter of course. If you do better than that, then I’ll be the first to let you know.” Perhaps I was too hard on them, but that was the answer I’d gotten from my father. But my answer clearly didn’t crush them, or they survived the devastation of not having a father who praised everything, because they’ve all turned out to be successful and productive, and they seem to be reasonably happy in life.

As some of my readers know, I’m married to a professional singer who is also a university professor and opera director. She has made the observation that these days almost any musical or stage play, whether a Broadway production in New York, a touring Broadway production, a Shakespeare festival play, or a college production, seems to get a standing ovation… unless it is so terrible as to be abysmal, in which case the production merely gets enthusiastic applause. The one exception to this appears to be opera, which seldom gets more than moderately enthusiastic applause, even though the singers in opera are almost invariably far better performers than those in any stage musical, and they don’t need body mikes, either. Maybe the fact that excellence still has a place in opera is why I’ve come to appreciate it more as I’ve become older and more and more of a curmudgeon.

My wife has also noted that the vast majority of students she gets coming out of high school these days have almost all been told through their entire lives that they’re “wonderful.” This is bolstered, of course, by a grade inflation that shows that at least a third of some high school senior classes have averages in excess of 3.8.

In a way, I see the same trend in writing, even while I observe a loosening of standards of grammar, diction, and the growth of improbable inconsistencies in all too many stories. I’ve even had copy-editors who failed to understand what the subjunctive happens to be and who believed that the adverb “then” was a conjunction [which it is most emphatically not]. Matt Cheney notwithstanding “alright” is not proper English and shouldn’t be used, except in the dialogue of someone who has less than an adequate command of the language, but today that means many, many characters could use it.

At the same time, I can’t help but continue to reflect on the change in the meaning of the word “discrimination.” When I was growing up, to discriminate meant to choose wisely and well between alternatives. A person of discrimination was one of culture and taste, not one who was prejudiced or bigoted, but then, maybe they were, in the sense that they were prejudiced against those aspects of society that did not reflect superiority and excellence.

But really, does everything merit the equivalent of a standing ovation? Is excellence measured by accomplishment, or have we come to the point of awarding standing ovations for the equivalent of showing up for work? Can “The Marching Morons” of Cyril M. Kornbluth be all that far in our future?

To begin with, I have to confess I’m as guilty as anyone. About what? About writing about writing, of course. Now… for some background.

When I began to consider being a writer, I thought I was going to be a poet, and I did get some poems published in various small poetry and literary magazines. And then, there was this escalating altercation in Southeast Asia, and I ended up piloting helicopters for the U.S. Navy and didn’t write very much. When I got out of the Navy, I started writing market research reports dealing with the demand for industrial pneumatic accessories by large factories. Then I wrote a very bad mystery novel, awful enough that I later burned it so that it could never be resurrected. Only after all that did I attempt to write science fiction, and after close to ten years of hit or miss short-story submissions, with only about half a dozen sales while I was working full-time at my various “day jobs,” I finally got a rejection letter from Ben Bova which told me to lay off the stories and write a novel. And I did, and I sold it, and I’ve sold, so far, every one I’ve written since. Now… all this history is not bragging, or not too much, but to point out that virtually all the writing I did for almost forty years was either occupational-subject-related or poetry or fiction that I hoped to see published — and even more hopefully, sold for real money and not copies of magazines and publications.

All that changed a year ago, when I started blogging… or more specifically, writing about writing or about subjects that bear on writing, if sometimes tangentially. Instead of writing fiction for publication, I’m writing close to the equivalent of a book a year… about writing. I’m certainly not the only one out there doing this. In fact, I’m probably one of the later arrivals in this area.

But I can’t help wondering, no matter how my publicist has said that it’s a good idea, if there’s something just a bit wrong about writing about writing, instead of just writing. What’s happened to our culture and our society when readers seem to be as interested, or more interested, in writing about writing than in the writing itself. And why are so many younger writers going to such lengths in their blogs to attract attention?

At least one well-known publisher has noted that no publicity is all bad, but is this sort of thing all that good? Or is it not all that good, but necessary in a society that seems to reward shameless self-promotion as vital for success?

Who could say… except here I am, along with hundreds of others, writing about writing.

Some twenty years ago, when I was a consultant in Washington, D.C. [i.e., beltway bandit], a chemicals, paint, and coatings company came up with an environmentally safe way to get rid of their hydrocarbon leavings [still bottoms]. They wanted to transport and sell them to a steel company, which would then use them in its smelting process. This had the advantage of first, destroying the semi-toxic waste in a safe fashion that did not harm the environment, and second, providing a cheaper source of usable carbon for carbon steel. Not only that, but the steel furnaces were far hotter than commercial hazardous waste incinerators. To me, it seemed perfectly reasonable. Needless to say, this environmentally beneficial trade-off never occurred.

Why not? Because the U.S. EPA wanted to make sure that the process was 100% regulated, and that meant that the steel company would have had to apply for a hazardous waste disposal permit and submit itself to another layer of extremely burdensome federal regulation. Even then, U.S. steelmakers were having trouble competing, and more federal regulation would have compounded the problem. So, instead of having a cheaper source of carbon and a cleaner environment, the steelmaker paid more for conventional carbon sources, while the chemical company had to pay money to have its still bottoms incinerated in an approved hazardous waste incinerator. This didn’t help the American economy or the environment very much.

Unfortunately, I can now understand the combination of reasons as to why this happened… and why it continues. Most industrial companies haven’t historically acted, frankly, in the best interests of the population and the environment as a whole. That’s understandable. Their charter is to make money for the corporation and its shareholders, and one of the underlying and unspoken assumptions has historically been that corporations will do so in any way that is legal and will not besmirch their reputations. Likewise, because most corporations haven’t exactly been trustworthy or all that responsible for the larger issues, government bureaucrats haven’t been all that willing to trust them without imposing restrictions.

And exactly how did we get to this point?

First is the fact that, no matter what most people in the United States say, they essentially believe in a world of limitless resources. Somehow in some way, they believe, ingenuity and technology will keep things going, and there’s no real shortage, and if there is, it’s caused by government regulations or business greed. Second, we believe that competition is the way to ensure efficiency and lower prices. Third, we don’t trust government.

The problem is that all these beliefs are partial truths. There are great resources, but not unlimited ones. Competition indeed spurs lower prices, but it also encourages cut-throat competition and continued attempts by those who produce goods and provide services to transfer costs to others. Pollution transfers costs to the public, as does deforestation, strip mining, and a host of other activities. And government is certainly an institution to be wary of… but it’s the only institution that has the power to rein in out-of-control giant corporations, or on the local level, lawbreakers.

So… we have a society that is basically adversarial. Even our legal system is designed more like a stylized trial by combat than a means of finding truth or justice. How often does the better attorney transcend the “truth?” We’ve just seen a case where a pair of attorneys kept silent for years even when they had evidence that an innocent man was unfairly convicted. Why? Because our adversarial system would have disbarred them because revealing that evidence would have meant they were not fully representing the interests of their client.

So long as there are “excess” resources, an adversarial society can continue, but how long will a United States, with 5% of the world’s population, be able to continue to consume 26% of world resources? The Wall Street Journal just reported that literally billions of dollars worth of fuel is being wasted at U.S. corporations because cooperative waste reduction and energy efficiency initiatives keep falling afoul of adversarial attitudes between different divisions, differing regulatory agencies, and differing executives. At the same time, over the past five years, the price of energy has tripled…and that doesn’t count the costs of the energy-related war in Iraq, or the recent Russian announcement that Russian oil production has peaked and is declining.

Yet… are we seeing any changes? If anything, it appears as though our society is becoming even more adversarial, and that leads to a last question.

At what point does an adversarial society self-destruct?

The other day, as I was considering the origins of war, some observations came to me. When I thought over history and what I know, I realized — again — that most wars have economic origins, regardless of their widely identified or proximate causes. Helen didn’t have the face that launched a thousand ships, regardless of what Homer sang and others later inscribed. The Mycenaeans were after the lucrative Black Sea and Asia Minor trade dominated by Troy.

But that led to a second observation — that very little science fiction or fantasy actually deals with the hand-maiden of economics, that is, business itself, or even delves into the business rationales that explain why so many business tycoons cultivate political connections. Charles Stross’s The Clan Corporate deals with alternate world mafia-style types who mix special abilities, alternate worlds, murder and mayhem with business, and more than a few books cast corporate types as various types of villains. While I know I haven’t read everything out there, it does seem that books that deal with business itself are rare. One of the classics is Pohl and Kornbuth’s The Space Merchants, and two of my own books — Flash and The Octagonal Raven — deal heavily with business, but I can’t recall any others offhand.

Considering just how involved businesses have been in the disasters and wars of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it’s rather amusing that so few SF authors have taken on the challenge of dealing with business directly. Is it so impossible? Or is business just dull? Let’s see. One of the strongest factors in contributing to the Civil War wasn’t slavery, but the desire of indebted southern planters to repudiate their debts to New York bankers. Because of the influence of U.S. business types in Hawaii, a U.S. warship in Honolulu effectively supported the pseudo-revolution that overthrew the independent Hawaiian monarchy and turned Hawaii into a U.S. territory. The need for a shorter route for U.S. shipping prompted the U.S. to foment and encourage, and then support militarily, an independent Panama… and made U.S. construction and domination of the Panama Canal possible. Most of the industrialized world collaborated to put down the Boxer Revolt in China because they didn’t want existing trade agreements — and profits, including those from the opium trade — destroyed. Japan effectively started its part of WWII in order to gain resources for Japanese business, and Hitler was successful not just because of popular support, but because his acts restored German business. And, of course, despite knowledge of what was going on in Germany, during the early part of WWII, a number of U.S. companies were still in communications with their German counterparts and subsidiaries. More than a few industrial firms in the U.S. were opposed to an early pullout in Vietnam, and interestingly enough, the Texas-based firms prospered greatly, especially after Kennedy’s assassination. Now we have a war in Iraq, which occurred as oil demand continued to grow in the U.S. and after Iraq had given indications that it wanted to base its oil sales on the euro and not on the dollar. And those examples are barely the tip of the iceberg.

So… is business really that dull? We have expose after expose about what happens, and each year it seems to get more sordid… yet comparatively few authors seem to want to extrapolate into the future. Or is that just because none of them feel that they could possibly imagine anything wilder and more corrupt than what has already happened?

As I have listened to the various candidates for president trot out their ideas and policies, and as I see and hear the public and media responses, I’m not just disturbed, but appalled. Beyond that, I also have to wonder how long intelligent fiction will remain economically viable. As it is, from what I can see, intelligent writing, which considers and reflects on matters in more than “seven steps” or “five tools” or “the church/government/corporation/male sex is the root of all evil” or “the more violence/sex/both the better” is already fast becoming limited to a small part of F&SF or non-fiction.

We live in a complex world, and it’s not getting any simpler, but there’s an ever increasing pressure on all fronts to make it seem simpler by blaming the “bad guys.” Now, who the bad guys are varies from group to group and individual to individual, depending on personal views and biases, but these “bad guys” all have one thing in common. They aren’t us.

Gasoline prices are rising. So let’s blame the multinational corporations and the Arabs for their greed… and, of course, the U.S. government for giving tax breaks to oil producers. Along the way, everyone seems to ignore the fact that the United States remains the third largest producer of crude oil in the world, behind Saudi Arabia and Russia, and that we produce twice as much oil as does Iran and four times as much as Iraq at present. But… with five percent of the world’s population, we’re consuming something like 26% of annual world production. Why are all those tax breaks there? Because producing oil in the US is far more expensive than elsewhere, and without those tax breaks U.S. oil production would decline even more. Does anyone consider what a few million 12 mile/per/gallon SUVs represent?

We have over 41 million Americans without health insurance, and guaranteed pension plans for Americans are declining faster than the government can count. Why? Might it just have something to do with the fact that we Americans are always looking for the lowest priced goods and services, and health care insurance and guaranteed pension benefits are the principal reasons why foreign car manufacturers can produce lower-priced/higher quality vehicles than the U.S. big three?

Housing prices, despite the current collapse, are still astronomical compared to fifty years ago, but how many people really look at the fact that the average new house is twice the size of the average new post-WWII dwelling… and has more than twice the conveniences and contains a two or three-car garage?

Immigration is another case in point. Building a 700 mile fence isn’t going to stop immigration. It might detour or slow it, but Americans want too many of the services immigrants provide, and we don’t want to pay exorbitant prices for them, no matter what we say publicly. Of course, there’s also the rather hypocritical aspect that everyone in America today is either an immigrant or the descendent of one — and that includes Native Americans. The latest studies indicate that the European immigrants of the 15th and 16th century brought the diseases that killed off close to eighty percent of the continent’s then-indigenous population. So… it was all right for our so-upright ancestors to seek a better life, but these people today shouldn’t have that opportunity?

As an economist, I could go on and on, with example after example, but these examples are just illustrations of a general mind-set. The current political mood is: “We want change.” The real translation of that is: “We really don’t want to consider how we got here, but please get us out without making us think about how we got ourselves into this mess, and, by the way, don’t make us pay for it.”

Unfortunately, this also carries over into writing, and particularly into fiction. Is it any wonder that the Harry Potter books have swept the world, but particularly the English-speaking world? In a stylized way, they recall certainties of a past time and offer a dash of short-term hard work and magic to solve the problems at hand. The success of The DaVinci Code offers another example of blaming ills on a mysterious church-related conspiracy. We have conspiracy and spy and thriller books and movies, all pointing to relatively simplistic villains who aren’t us.

Yes, as I discussed previously, for a writer to be successful, he or she must entertain, but why have so many writers retreated to or succumbed to the allure of the simplistic? Novels can certainly entertain without being simplistic, and without purveying gloom, doom, and despair, but there’s always the question of how many readers will buy the more thoughtful and thought-provoking work. I’ve certainly had readers who have written to say that they just weren’t interested in my “deeper” work, and I’m certain I’m not alone. I know several best-selling writers who began by writing some very thoughtful work that I felt was thoughtful, intriguing, and entertaining, not to mention fairly well written. They don’t write such work any more, and they make a great deal more money from what they do write.

Given the pressures of society toward the simplistic, how long will those writers who have not given into the allure and rewards of the overly simplistic be able to hold out against such pressures… and even if they do, how many readers will they be able to attract?