jameswharris

Future History and Science Fiction

We generally live in the now, washing dishes, typing emails, talking to friends, staring at the television. Looking backwards at history does fill our minds on occasions. Education seems all about looking backwards, and much of fiction is about the past, and even during football games or golf playoffs on TV, commentators will spend time talking about past games and legendary players. Many hobbies dwell on the past including collecting coins, guns and stamps, genealogy, airplane modeling, refinishing antique furniture, learning to play music, art collecting, woodworking, rebuilding old cars, and so on.

Of the past, present and future, we mainly live in the present, and look backwards, but some people like to think about the future. When you buy a lotto ticket you are hoping to change the future. A political election is all about the years to come. But there are little ways to think about the future too. Like waiting for an anticipated job change, or looking forward to your favorite TV show coming back next week, or just thinking about cake after dinner. Overall though, we don’t spend a lot of time on the future. People are notoriously bad about preparing for what’s to come, such as saving money for retirement, eating right for getting old, teeth care to avoid large dental bills, and so on. The future is there and we know it, but we only deal with it in a cursory fashion, like planning your day during a shower, or studying Consumer Reports to pick the best TV to buy.

The past has a sweep of 13.7 billion years to the big bang. K-12 and college years are when we cram in thousands upon thousands of facts about the past. We don’t however dwell on the next 13.7 billion years, that is unless we read science fiction. I’ve always felt that reading science fiction was studying future history. Robert A. Heinlein even called some of his SF stories his future history series. Now science fiction isn’t meant to predict the future, but its alternate name is sometimes speculative fiction. We could also call science fiction, tales of future histories. Science fiction may come true, but that’s accidental, what science fiction tries to do is show what happens if this goes on, regarding a single point of speculation.

I’m not particularly old at 56, but I can remember the Mercury space program and how TV commentators talked of the future Gemini and Apollo programs. I waited a few years and those missions came to pass. Then NASA talked about orbiting labs, space shuttles, robotic missions to the planets, and a giant space telescope called Hubble. I waited and they too came to be. Stuff NASA has been doing since 1958 was vaguely suggested by science fiction going back hundreds of years.

It is possible to change the future through imagination. Take for instance T. Boone Pickens and his Pickens Plan? Pickens, an oil billionaire gets an idea, and now he’s trying to create a future in which his vision unfolds. It helps to be a billionaire if you want a big idea implemented fast, but it also takes a practical idea that millions will support. Whether Pickens’ plan plays out according to his intent still remains to be seen, but I think it’s pretty obvious that energy windmills will start sprouting all across the U.S. midsection like giant dandelions. You don’t have to be a science fiction visionary to spot a money making idea.

There’s a new nonfiction book out called 10 Books That Screwed Up the World by Benjamin Wiker. Wiker is a Christian moralist worried that ideas can be unleashed that adversely affects our culture. I don’t agree with his conclusions, but I do think ideas can be like seeds that blossom into cultural change. Over the years I think science fiction, and it’s earlier incarnations, have planted many of these seeds. Some have taken a very long time to come to fruit, and others won’t blossom until far into the future, and many still, will never germinate at all.

Space Travel

Science fiction’s biggest claim to fame is space travel. Stories of fantastic voyages to the moon, planets and stars go back centuries, but many people give Jules Verne and H. G. Wells credit for popularizing the ideas for the 20th century, which led to modern science fiction, rocket experimenters, and eventually the Russian and American space programs. I won’t dwell too much on this idea because it’s so obvious, but I will say it’s been over speculated. Although the word “science” is part of the label “science fiction” the field has always been weak on the science aspect and heavier on the fiction component. Many readers can’t tell fantasy from speculative fiction. The potential for mankind traveling across the galaxy is there, but it probably won’t look like Star Wars or Star Trek.

The human race is about three years away from its 50th anniversary of manned space flight. Long dormant, manned space exploration has gotten renewed interest with the take-off of the Chinese space program. I think the odds are good for humans returning to the Moon, and slight for making it to Mars during the next 50 years of exploration. For imagining further we need to study both space science and science fiction, and reconcile the two visions.

Robots

Almost as old as space travel are dreams of creating mechanical men. If you watch the science shows on television you will know that the science of robotics is taking off like a Atlas V. Most people are familiar with toy and movie robots, and some even know about industrial robots, but will intelligent, free moving humanoid robots ever appear in the next 50 years? Guessing that involves following a number of scientific breakthroughs.

Electronic and mechanical bodies that are roughly shaped like people, and are as mobile as our species, should be ready within 50 years, and probably much earlier. We have humanoid robots now, but they are slow and limited. Like futuristic cars, battery technology will limit the range of android life. Robots will always be hungry for energy and an AI companion that can go where you go, and for as long as you go, will require some very good batteries.

Next in limitation is intelligence. There will be two levels of intelligence involved. What scientists are working on now is what we might call mammalian intelligence. They need to create a machine with the hardwired wits to survive in the real world like an animal. Currently the progress seems to hover around the development of insects, but I’ve seen one robot that reminded me of a dog in its behavior. Of course the real goal of our robotic dreams is artificial intelligence. We want our mechanical pals to be as smart as Data on Star Trek.

What we’re waiting for is an AI breakthrough, the singularity, like that promoted by Vernor Vinge. Personally I don’t see any laws of science stopping us there, not like Einstein’s laws putting the kibosh on FTL interstellar travel. Like the kid in 1961 waiting for the moon landing in 1969, I feel like seeing intelligent robots is merely a matter of waiting. This is going to have a big impact on society. For a period robots will be like serfs and slaves, but at some point the civil rights of AIs will come up. At what point does your faithful Rosie the Robot maid become too close to a manmade Hazel?

I’m hoping personal robots will be ready by the time I get old and need a caretaker. I’ve watched a lot of people age and lose their independence, so I think the most obvious purpose for a personal robot is as a companion and helper for when we get frail. Interestingly, this overlaps perfectly with another science fiction prediction, life extension.

Life Extension

Science predicts that I should die around age 79. Those are my odds. I might beat them by a bit, or I might cash in early. In other words, on average I can plan to live another 22 years. With the direction my body and mind has taken during the past decade I worry that even those 22 years will not all be good ones. However, I’d like to think that medical technology could fix me up and keep me going. If I had decent health, especially if my mind holds out, I could picture wanting to live to 100 or 110. There’s plenty of science fiction predicting people will live hundreds, if not thousands of years, but for the next fifty years I think those stories are in the realm of the fantastic. My personal fantasy is to double those 22 expected years and live a bit past 2051, and enjoy a 100th birthday.

The odds are against me, but medical science is moving fast. I really don’t want to live to be 100 so much as I want to see what life will be like a 100 years after my birth. Will we make it to Mars. Will intelligent robots be common. Will we make SETI contact. Will space telescopes detect Earth like planets with artificial chemicals in their atmospheres?

With a little bit of life extension, baby boomers might get to see another decade called The Sixties. What will life be like then? Well, we all know what science is predicting for those years, the weather.

Global Warming

Science is usually not in the business of predicting the future, except for the limited time frames of controlled experiments, but climate scientists are now oracles prognosticating quite far into our futures and it isn’t good. Despite the beliefs of climate change deniers, thousands, if not millions of scientists, engineers and technicians are working on the assumption that human activity is changing the climate of planet Earth and they are working hard to engineer ways to stop it. In relation to science fiction, global warming is not an idea that came out of left field, because science fiction has often explored the end of the world through environmental catastrophes.

Global warming, overpopulation and the limits of resources will really determine the true nature of the next fifty years, and those forces could drastically effect what happens with space travel, robots and life extension. If you want to get an idea how bad things could get, and why we should avoid any possible chance that we’re damaging the environment, then take up reading after-the-collapse stories written by some of the more gloomier science fiction writers.

For science fiction to be truly speculative fiction it must consider the laws of science carefully. Will it be practical for 10 billion people to own a robot and live longer? We know we can apply alternative technologies to solve the problems and answer the question in the affirmative, but science isn’t very good at predicting human nature, and that’s the real factor in how our future unfolds.

The reason why I’ve taken side tracks into exploring polarized attitudes and speculating on twin human species is because I’m not sure we can change our habits even with the aid of better technology. If you read Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded, you’ll see with some changes in the laws we could dramatically transform society. That transformation will be like the major societal shifts we’ve seen in the last few hundred years. Examples include converting to an industrial economy, the migrations to urban environments, the move from horse power to horsepower, learning to fly, and supplementing our neural brains with silicon thinking. Climate change deniers may have no more impact on slowing change than Luddites or lovers of the horse and buggy did in the past.

If this is true, science fiction has a lot of room left in writing future histories. Despite what conservatives want, and fundamentalists dream, we won’t stay the same or move backwards in social development. Fossil fuels will run out, but new technologies will replace them. The future can be as bright as we want, the question is will we dial darkness or light. If we can unintentionally change the world, can we intentionally change it back?

Adaptability

Humans show a talent for adapting, just look how fast DVDs, cell phones and iPods were adopted. I think integrating robots into society will happen just as fast. Reading science fiction will give us a range of future histories to study on how to handle that problem, from Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics stories, to City by Clifford Simak, and Blade Runner‘s demand for empathy for androids. Space travel is harder to accept because most of us will be paying for a few people to have all the fun. And how many will reject life extension if offered?

Humans are very quick to accept change if it’s cheap and easy. Dealing with Global Warming is more like not smoking, eating healthy, exercising and flossing your teeth. Being disciplined on a world-wide level will require laws because on average we’re not a particularly disciplined species.

I read science fiction to think about all those centuries that I won’t get to see, all those billions of years of evolution I won’t get to study. If you’ve explored the past you know great upheavals are common. It would not be all that hard to write science fiction novels about futures where the number of carbon molecules in the atmosphere doubled and tripled, and the population halved and then halved again, and then again and again. Humans have the adaptability and survivability of cockroaches and eventually we’ll make a comeback.

People do not like change. Overall, we’re all like gamblers who go to casinos every single night hoping to break even. What are the odds on that? We don’t like change, but we certainly have the training for it.

JWH 9/28/8

Faith

My friend Carl and I were talking about words that can be shared by religion and science. Carl commented to my last post,

From a Christian perspective what I think many people need to hear is an acknowledgment that science itself is filled with leaps of faith and is founded on faith. Now that faith may not seem to be defined the same way for both groups but I think that is wrong. I think it is the same word. It is trust and belief in things that cannot be seen. Science takes leaps of faith all the time. It is the hard line view of a need for religion and science to be seen separately that scares off religious people and makes them want to reject scientific speculation, proof, etc.

When I first read this I wanted to protest that the word faith has no place in science, but I let Carl’s comment ride around in my head for awhile. I’m glad I did, because many ideas grew from letting my thoughts lie fallow for awhile.

The pursuit of science does not involve faith, that is the testing of a hypothesis. Scientific experiments have to stand alone and be reproducible and not be influenced by the beliefs of the experimenters. However, faith plays a big role in the dissemination of scientific knowledge. We are all taught that the Earth orbits the Sun, but how many of us could actually prove it? I have read about many experiments that are meant to prove that the Earth orbits the Sun, but I have not replicated any of them.

And I think this is what Carl is talking about. We have a kind of faith in science. We accept the consensus that the Earth orbits the Sun. But is acceptance the same as faith? Christians have faith that life exists after death, but that belief does not come from experiments and testing. Religious people have faith in untested hypotheses. So can one word apply to both situations?

My faith in science comes from reading a lot of books and in the acceptance of consensus. I assume every scientific idea has been tested over and over again, and that all of science if built on billions of experiments that are constantly being retested. I also live on the assumption that any technology derived from scientific laws will behave in a way that connects it to all other scientific laws. Since I am not a scientist, I have to trust, accept, believe or have faith in science, but I depend on it to be consistent.

Religious people use the word faith in an inconsistent manner. The object of their faith varies from person to person, and from religion to religion. To the skeptic the faithful appear to be validating their wishes with determination and belief. However, to the faithful, faith is about commitment to the unknowable. Spiritual knowledge is handed down from the past, much like how scientific knowledge is passed down, and the worshipful are asked to accept this knowledge on faith.

This is where religion and science are different. Science says to students, trust me, the experiments have been done, and I’ll show you how to reproduce any of them yourself. Religion says, trust me, this knowledge comes from a higher being, one who was not of this world. Religious people are followers of mystic knowledge. Mystics are those people claiming direct experience with other worldly knowledge. Religious people accept mystic knowledge on faith. I am not religious, but that doesn’t mean I can disprove their hypothesis in which they base their faith. Nor can science.

For decades there have been those who want to unite science and religion, and there have been Popes that have tried to solve the problem by allowing science to have providence back to the big bang, but declaring anything earlier belonging to God. Religious people need for the realm of the supernatural to exist beyond our physical reality for their faith to exist. Faith in the supernatural is very different from faith in the foundations of science. Carl has his faith, and I have mine, so what’s the problem?

What bothers Carl and I are the competition of faiths that we see in the news and in the people around us. Most people would like to be left along to pursue their own beliefs, but a few believers from every belief system want to legislate their faith into law for all to follow. Some people have faith in areas other than religion and science, such as concepts like justice, goodness, evil, economics, ethics, etc. There are all these competing ideas and ideologies. It’s enough to drive one to watching sitcoms.

My conservative friends are riled up by Michael Moore and Al Gore. My liberal friends are outraged by Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin. These folks are a kind of prophets of various faiths. They campaign to gather believers in their ideas. Just like the current presidential election, with each candidate wanting voters to embrace their beliefs, and thus have faith in them.

It makes me wonder if “faith” is a bad word. If I express my faith in the concept of global warming, it presses the button on some people that raises their hackles. But if someone around me starts talking about “intelligent design” my own hackle button gets pushed. If I’m willing to accept Christianity as a belief, why not intelligent design? This is getting to the heart of things, I think.

Faith requires betting the farm, committing the entire soul. As long as Christianity is separate from science I can ignore it. Intelligent design is religion’s way of attacking the belief in science. Ouch, time to fight back. The theory of evolution overlaps faith in the old testament. Ouch, let’s start a crusade against science.

Faith has to be 100% pure, and any conflict is a threat. Many people like to believe that reality is completely objective and can only handle one truth. Nobody assumes their faith is one of the many that’s not part of reality. I happen to wonder since most people lead highly delusional lives, does it really matter which faith is validated by objective reality?

But this head-in-the-sand approach won’t work. My faith in science does conflict with other people’s faith in the systems they need to believe in with 100% certainty. Strangely, this comes down to politics. You’d think we could keep metaphysics out of decisions on road building, taxation, maintaining armies, building schools and libraries, and all the other mundane activities that go into running cities and states. Take for instance the Wall Street buy out under discussion in congress. Why are things lining up along party lines?

Everyone has many faiths, and for some reason of psychology, these collection of faiths line up along the two political parties like iron filings in a magnetic field, polarized by two opposing charges that we don’t understand. Actual science is not a faith. Believing in any idea is a faith. Backing unproven scientific assertions is still a kind of faith. We can’t prove our faiths with scientific like experiments, although some people believe rhetoric is a science, which it’s not.

I don’t know if the two species of humans I talked about in my last post are different because of their beliefs, or they are physically different in some way that make them believe along opposing lines. I wonder if anyone has done studies of political parties around the world, and explored whether or not they had common traits and how they might be related to personality types.

JWH 9/25/8

Two Species of Human Beings

One of my all time favorite experiments dealt with visual perception. I’m recalling this from memory of a book I read long ago, but maybe someone can let me know the original source. In this experiment scientists raised two batches of kittens in different controlled environments. Half the kittens were raised in a room with no vertical lines and the other half brought up in a place with no horizontal lines. After six months they let the kittens out into the normal world. The kittens who were raised without horizontal lines would not jump up onto a flat chair seat or shelves, and kittens raised without vertical lines would walk into chair legs.

When I read this I wondered what was missing from my vision because of my limited upbringing. This current election makes me think of that experiment, because the Republicans are shouting at the Democrats, “Hey, Liberals, can’t you see the vertical lines, they’re right in front of your face!” And the Democrats are yelling back, “Dudes, can’t you see those horizontal surfaces, they’re right there!”

Global warming deniers are making me wonder if there’s two different species of human beings living side by side. Their absolute refusal to see the problem is so adamant that I have to wonder if it’s a matter of failed perception. I don’t know what to say to them. They clutch their false out-of-date data like it was handed down from God on stone tablets and they refuse to look at any new data because they think it’s from false prophets. No matter how much information I’m willing to provide, they deny that it’s valid or that it really exists. They are like the kittens raised without vertical lines that can’t see chair legs.

But the implications are far greater than this. The division of the two species divide other issues like politics and religion. How can we as a nation solve our problems, especially big problems, if we’re always polarized? I wonder if the deniers have an innate sense of the cat in the quantum box, knowing at an unconscious level that as long as they don’t look inside the box the cat will be okay? Will a global warming denier even understand what I just said?

To me the issue has gone beyond global warming. I’m starting to worry that there is an even more dangerous problem than climate change, and that’s this division of perception that polarizes the population. Is it like a law-of-nature barrier that keeps anything from going faster than light. What if the average intelligence of the human race limits how far we can progress as a species? We’re seeing more and more big problems that will require us to work cooperatively if civilization is to survive, but we’ve reach a total impasse on communication, refusing to do anything because we can’t agree.

Let’s avoid the global warming issue for the moment since it’s such a touchy issue. Many of the climate change deniers scoff at climate predictions because various scientists have made predictions in the past that have apparently turned out not to be true. Or appeared that way for awhile. Two books, The Population Bomb (1968) and The Limits of Growth (1972) are often used as examples of failed predictions. The trouble is, these deniers didn’t wait long enough to give the forecasts time to unfold.

Forty years later, many people think the world is just fine with 6.7 billion people and figure we can grow much larger, and they don’t think our rich lifestyles show any limits. Perception is everything, but we’re on a roller coaster that’s climbing to the peak of the Kingka Ka, because we haven’t started the blazing ride down yet. Now that China and India have taken up our American consumer habits, and resources are starting to be fought over, and hundreds of little stories tell me that The Limits of Growth is about to come online, I’m getting the feeling that we’ll arrive at the peak of the climb soon. Hold on for the ride down.

The people with rose colored corneas, obviously don’t watch a lot of documentaries, or keep up with diverse science magazines. Conservative news shows tend to focus on the same old tired issues while ignoring the little stories that shows a whole lot of different barometers are all falling. It’s funny that millions welcome the Christian apocalypse, but can’t see the world possibly ending in some other way. The trouble is, the world doesn’t end, we just end up in a big mess that we’ve got to clean up.

It worries me that so many people enjoy the end-of-days stories that are so popular. Why is it so easy to believe that an imaginary superior being will destroy us, but so hard to believe that we can destroy ourselves through pursuing those same old seven deadly sins that that same superior being warned us against? You can not drive a SUV through the eye of a needle to get to your destination.

Maybe it’s a matter of language, and science is not the language to use to communicate across the gap that divides us. I’ve been listening to the Bible this past year, on my iPod. I know it’s an odd thing for an atheist to do, but I consider it learning a language. I find it fascinating that all the things that the New Testament teaches are the things we need to do to change ourselves to avoid problems like global warming, over population and dwindling resources.

I have been thinking for days on how to reply to global warming deniers, and it is now occurring to me that I can’t recommend studying science. That isn’t their language. My reply to them is to buy an iPod and get a good audio edition of the Bible and really listen to it. Listening is far superior to reading, and start at the beginning. Pay attention to what’s happening chapter by chapter. I know you conservatives don’t like the word “evolution” but the Bible shows an evolution of spirit. Pay particular attention to the transition between the Old and New Testament. Fundamental thinking is based in Old Testament philosophy. It teaches about nation building. The New Testament teaches about soul building. For the people of the Earth to survive climate change will require a lot of soul building.

It is my belief that climate change deniers are worried that changing the world requires changing themselves, and they just don’t want to change.

JWH 9/22/8

Anatomy of an Internet Joke

In the old days people would tell you jokes and anecdotes in person, but in these modern times they send them around in emails. I got one the other day that sparked my interest,

A stunning senior moment

Apparently, a self-important college freshman attending a recent football game took it upon himself to explain to a senior citizen sitting next to him why it was impossible for the older generation to understand his generation. “You grew up in a different world, actually an almost primitive one,” the student said, loud enough for many of those nearby to hear.

“The young people of today grew up with television, jet planes, space travel, man walking on the moon. Our space probes have visited Mars. We have nuclear energy, ships and electric and hydrogen cars, cell phones, computers with light-speed processing …and more.”

After a brief silence, the senior citizen responded as follows:

“You’re right, son. We didn’t have those things when we were young …….. so we invented them. Now, you arrogant little shit, what are you doing for the next generation?”

The applause was amazing ……

Since I’m slightly old, at 56, a big smile came to my face at the end, and I thought “Yea, for the old guy.” But after I closed the email and went back to work I started thinking about this little anecdote. The freshman wasn’t wrong, so why should he be the butt of the joke? Kids today are different, and they grow up in a much different world than us baby-boomers, and much more different than my parent’s generation. The difference between any two or three generations is always going to be startling.

My grandmother, who was born in 1881 and died in 1972 saw a lot of changes, having been born before the car, electric grid or airplane. My mother was born in 1916, and my father in 1920. I assume the senior citizen of the story was maybe from the 1930s or 1940s, older than my generation, but younger than my parents.

So why was the senior so angry at the freshman? As I get older I hear more resentment of the young. I wouldn’t mind being young again myself, but I don’t hold it against them that I’m not. I think this story is popular, because I searched on “Now, you arrogant little shit, what are you doing for the next generation?” at Google and got 34,600 hits. A lot of people are quoting it and thinking it funny, but I’m not finding many people commenting on it. I think we need to examine the story more closely.

First off, why the anger? Are older people, boomers and older generations, threatened by the current generation? I see old people all the time that have adapted to computers, cell phones, iPods and the Internet, but for those that haven’t, are they angry at the young for leaving them behind? Don’t we expect the young to surpass us, and go out and discover new stuff?

The young Freshman was right, the world of 2008 is extremely different from anything before 1990, and especially before 1980. Is it his fault that the older generations don’t stay current. Kids are all the time talking to me about fantastic music groups and movie stars that are unknown to me, but on the other hand, I can mention William Powell and Kay Francis, and their faces will go blank. It evens out in the long run.

And can the senior at the game really take credit for inventing all that stuff? I never invented anything. And a lot of that tech was invented by people before the baby boomers. Would that senior feel that my generation didn’t do anything either?

We don’t know the full context of the story. Was the freshman being rude to the senior? Was his tone really arrogant? Or did the senior just read that into the situation?

I bring this up because there’s a lot of humor going around the net at the expense of various groups, much of it political. Conservatives make fun of liberals, and liberals make fun of conservatives. If you ask the people making the jokes they will say it’s all in fun, but if you’re on the receiving end, it feels like hostility. I wonder how Sarah Palin feels about the jokes about her. Or how Obama feels about jokes about him?

This senior moment story is pretty minor, but at the core of it is anger, and I think a lot of people think it’s funny because of resentment towards the young. Later the same day after reading this humorous anecdote I read about a 12-year-old boy inventing a 3D solar cell. The point of the senior moment anecdote is patently false, the young are always inventing new stuff. Every generation has its slackers and heroes. So why the, “my generation is better than yours,” routine?

One reason could be because the older generations don’t like all the tech stuff and hate having to deal with it. They might prefer the good ole days of vacuum tube radios and vinyl LPs. They might prefer mail with stamps over email. They might prefer Ed Sullivan to Chris Rock. Life might have been nicer with 3 channels of television as opposed to hundreds.

Maybe the old are just envious of the young. The freshman was the same age as the football players the senior was paying to watch. Maybe the freshman was with a beautiful young girlfriend, and the senior felt jealous at not being young himself. Even at 56 I would feel envy for their youth. Could the attitude of the freshmen have made the senior, and all the people who enjoyed this joke, feel they were over the hill, and the angry retort made them feel better?

Now, if you are from my generation and older, and you meet a kid that points out how backward you are and how you’re out of touch with modern times, are you going to use the same line as this senior did? Or will you say something different?

The senior could have wisely said, “So, kid, how are you going to feel in a few years when a younger person tells you what you told me? And you maybe surprised how quick you’re find yourself in my place.”

Or he could have smiled and said, “It’s easy to be 19, let’s see how you do at 75.”

Or maybe the senior could have done what my Uncle Jack did to me. I was 13 at the time, but the same trick will probably work with someone 19. I had arrogantly told my Uncle Jack something, this was around 1965, and the generation gap was starting to widen, and he replied, “Ok, smarty, I’ll tell you what. Write down everything you just said and put it in an envelope, and in five years we’ll open it up and I’ll give you five dollars for everything you list you still believe.”

I refused to do it because I was so confident in my beliefs that I didn’t think it worth my time. Later on, when I was 18, I remember that incident and realized that my uncle wouldn’t have lost any money on the deal.

Wisdom is not calling the younger generation arrogant little shits.

Jim

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

I started reading Edith Wharton this summer with Ethan Frome. Then I read her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Age of Innocence. And now, I’ve finished The House of Mirth, which I’ve decided is one of my all time favorite books. I’ve elevated Wharton into that crowd of writers that I love to study because their real lives are as interesting as their fictional creations. My major favorites over the years have been Robert A. Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Samuel Clemens, Jack Kerouac, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Charles Dickens.

Wharton will be next when I start reading her biography. By studying the works of these writers, their lives, and the history of their times, I’ve been able to build a rough mental map of the changes in English and American society. This 4th dimensional guide chronicles the battles of the sexes from a hazy beginning in 1840 with the novel Pamela by Samuel Richardson, then with clearer focus using Jane Austen, and after that, with ever sharper focus with Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott and others moving forward in time.

I wish I had read Wharton as a teenager, but I’m not sure if I could have understood her then. So I’ll change that wish. I wish I could have understood Wharton as a teenager. In high school all I knew was I wanted a girlfriend, but never entertained the idea of why a girl would want me as a boyfriend. It was physical craving. At the time, girls appeared to want boyfriends just as much as us guys wanted them, and we falsely assumed they craved us in the same way. Of the girls I did get to date, they kept their true desires well hidden from me. I think few teen males recognized the torture teen girls go through in judging their worthiness, and fewer still understood what girls wanted. Even the most toady of young men automatically assume a pretty girl will want them. If I had understood Edith Wharton as a teenager I would have understood why I wasn’t that appealing to the opposite sex in high school even though I wasn’t bad looking, had decent manners, a job and pocket money. All boys want is a female body to play with, what girls want is illustrated in The House of Mirth.

Edith Wharton writes about communication between men and women, and the nature of women, in such a way that it could have saved me years of miscommunication. Wharton’s observations on society and sexual politics are so enlightening that I wonder why she isn’t given more credit as an early founder of feminism.

The House of Mirth is about Lily Bart, a woman who wants to capitalize on her beauty, but in the process of various negotiations realizes that closing the deal won’t give her the complete freedom she desires. Lily’s motives are unclouded by romantic notions. Marriage is a business arrangement, and a great marriage means high social status. However, as she reels in each potential groom to the point of getting a good look at them, Lily ends up deciding their price is too high and throws them back. She is sidetrack from this husband hunting by the charming, but poor, Lawrence Selden, who pollutes her mind with ethical considerations. She is attracted to Selden but she cannot consider him an appropriate catch for her matrimonial fishing.

What Lily discovers over and over again is women of her time are totally dependent on men. At the dawn of the twentieth century there were women who could make their own way, but they led miserable lives. The House of Mirth (1905) makes a great companion novel to Sister Carrie (1900) by Theodore Dreiser, a novel about a young woman moving to the big city to live on her own. Carrie and Lily even live in New York at the same time for a short overlapping period, but in different social strata. Jump ahead to The Sun Also Rises (1927) and see how Hemingway presents Lady Brett Ashley, but think of her as Lily Bart recast and sexually liberated, after having evolved through Ellen Olenska from The Age of Innocence.

The history of the development of the female mind in the twentieth century can be shown through these characters and other fictional women. Their security and happiness is dependent on men. Wharton shows through Lily Bart what happens to women when they fail to negotiate a deal with a man. Wharton holds out hope that men and women can find paths of communication and even understanding, but in the end of each novel there is always failure to communicate. I like to think The Age of Innocence is graduate work for where Wharton left off with The House of Mirth.

Both books are about men and women trying to decipher the cryptic messages thrown across the gender gap. Even during moments of honest straight talking, like the scene where Simon Rosedale offers a very practical marriage arrangement, or the one where George Trenor explains what he wants for helping Lily financially, the two sexes can understand each other’s words, but not each others needs and desires. Wharton seems to imply that men can fulfill women’s fantasies by buying them, or women can manipulate men by outsmarting them, but in either scenario one or both of the sexes must live in a fantasy.

I need to read more Wharton, and to read about her, to understand Wharton’s real position on the battle of the sexes, but I get the feeling that she is gloomy on whether or not either gender can understand the other. Women often claim men are transparent to them, and believe that men haven’t a clue in understanding women, but I think Wharton goes way beyond disproving that cliché.

These novels suggest that Wharton thinks both sexes are opaque to each other. Naturally, I assume that Wharton knows the female point of view, but I also feel she has some insight into males. She goes way past the stereotype that men only have one thing on their mind, and she doesn’t seem corrupted by the philosophy of romance.

Wharton grew up rich, married well, but probably didn’t achieve her own freedom until after her divorce in 1913, a period between these two novels. I’m hoping that reading more about Wharton’s life will reveal greater depths to her novels.

The Value of Women

Lily Bart is exceptionally beautiful and everyone expects her to marry a very rich man, one that would position her near the peak of society even though her own family has lost its fortune. Lily dwells among the upper crust, without wealth herself, by the grace of her beauty and knowledge their society. She makes herself useful to her rich women friends as a social secretary, but beyond the skill of dressing fabulously and being an attraction at parties, Lily is helpless. Simon Rosedale, a Jew trying to break into high society, wants to marry her because of her connections, but Lily is repulsed by his social climbing and personal manners. Rosedale even tells Lily that he doesn’t expect her to love him and that his ambition is to have a wife that could lord it over all the other society ladies through access to his wealth.

The more Lily tries to live up to insights inspired by Selden, the harder her life becomes. I don’t know if this was Wharton’s intention, but The House of Mirth illustrates how women are property, and their value is set by a commodity market of men, with their price rising and lowering depending on the rumors of the day. Lily’s stock takes a nosedive when she becomes a pawn in a game between a vicious woman friend and that woman’s husband.

What Do Women Want?

I think The House of Mirth makes an excellent sequel to Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen set the standard for novels about women looking for a rich husband. Lily Bart wants her own Mr. Darcy, but Edith Wharton goes deeper into examining the bargain women make when selling themselves into money. Romantic writers like to suggest its all for love, but really it’s about freedom. Just another retelling of Cinderella – escape from floor scrubbing. When do we get a new story where Cinderella gives her step-sisters the finger while shouting over her shoulder, “I’m out of here, I’m going to make my own damn fortune, and buy me my own castle.” Is it any wonder why Scarlett O’Hara became a towering heroine to women in 1936?

From 1905 to 2008 women make fantastic advancements. Many, if not most, can live on their own in the developed western world, although often poorly. Times have changed too, in the marketing of women. In 1905 a woman is valued as a merger of family assets, for running a house, raising kids, cooking, and having social skills. Today it seems women are valued for their bodies and sexual talents, at least in common fiction, although that depends on which gender creates the fiction. Strangely enough, what women want hasn’t changed much since 1905, they still want freedom, protection, and wealth, but what they are advertising for sale has changed. I wonder if Wharton would be shocked by the blatant sexual bargaining of today?

Wharton never suggests that Lily might study stock investing with George Trenor, so she could make her own riches. Lily refuses to trade sex and become a well-to-do mistress. She only considers work when all her other options are gone, and she’s a failure at that. Wharton could have written a novel about Lily starting a fashionable business and succeeding on her own, but she didn’t. Happiness always comes down to finding the right man, and Lily, literally worth her weight in gold and diamonds, loses at negotiating because of miscommunications and failures to close deals.

Lily’s beauty is powerful enough to attract armies of average men, with average incomes, but she doesn’t consider lowering her asking price. She could have easily gotten a reasonable wealthy man, an up-and-comer, but she doesn’t. I assume Wharton wants us to see the corrupting influence of the idle rich. At one point Lily is dining with a roomful of society’s best and she realizes they are all twits and not a single Mr. Darcy among them.

I have to wonder if the frantic desire by modern women to be thin and beautiful is just compulsive perfecting of their product. Is looking great the feminine form of ambition? It’s surprising that the winners at Miss America pageants aren’t decided by bids, like at art auctions. Lily Bart could have been married several times but she always takes herself off the block when she learns too much about who is going to buy her.

And I have to wonder what Wharton is telling her lady readers. Settle before it’s too late? Don’t be greedy? Learn a trade? Wharton had been married twenty years to her wealthy husband by the time this novel came out. She’d be divorced in another eight. Edith is no Jane Austen, her eyes were not clouded by thoughts of love. Lily wasn’t even expecting friendship. She wanted to be free and rich. She was an alpha female believing she deserved the alpha male. So what was Wharton telling us? I don’t think I’ll know until I read books about her and then reread The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, but here is something to think about now.

As a male I can fantasize about living in the world of The House of Mirth and meeting Lily Bart. If I was realistic, I’d picture myself middle class, having to work like Lawrence Selden, and I do identify with him and what she says to Lily. I can easily imagine being very attracted to Lily and wanting her, but if I was having a realistic historical daydream, I’d realize that owning Lily would be like winning a yacht on a bet but not be able to afford a slip in a marina, or afford to hire a crew, or even have the money to take it out on a trip. Selden lived in a modest apartment and I can’t imagine him marrying Lily and parking her there for a new life after the world traveling and luxury that Lily considered basic needs. It’s easy to have a sexual fantasy about a beautiful woman, but it’s much harder to create a fantasy that will make her happy too.

Women reading The House of Mirth will learn different lessons than men who read it. Like men in Wharton novels, I can only guess at what women will think. Most women are inflicted by the romance gene and I assume many will rationalize marrying Selden. Most women do not marry rich men, so they settle for the Lawrence Seldens of the world. There are plenty of women who’d accept boredom and marry Percy for his immense wealth. And I imagine that there are lots of women who would have jumped at Simon Rosedale’s offer, or even George Trenor’s proposition. And many women would consider it perfectly fine to exposed Judy for what she was and take her rich husband. The real question is how many women would find another way out? One that doesn’t involve men?

I think that’s the difference between now and then. I’ve often wondered why so many modern women over fifty prefer to live single. Some of my single women friends joke they would give in and marry again if the man was very rich, but anything less, and a man is too much trouble. I guess many of my lady friends would be like Lily, and reject those rich guys too. The difference between 1905 and 2008 is millions of woman can afford to be picky, whereas Lily did not. That’s what the core of women’s liberation is about – being able to live without a man.

Jim