I. Thou shalt not lie to your children, for any reason, ever. Remember this and hold it dear to your heart. You child will believe everything you say in a way that we cannot even begin to imagine as adults, and their trust in you, and therefore their sense of security about the world, will be based entirely on how honest and reliable a source of information you are about the world. So never, ever lie to them. Not because you are afraid the truth will upset them, not because you are trying to preserve their innocence, and certainly not because it’s simpler or you don’t know the answer and don’t want to admit it. Trust me, they will sense that you are not being honest with them, even if they are not old enough to consciously recognize it, and the moment they realize you have lied to them, their universe splits into two halves, and they will never entirely trust either of them again. This doesn’t mean you have to know everything or always be right, it just means that you never say to them that which you know is untrue.

II. Thou shalt not punish in anger. There has been much debate over the years about corporal punishment and the form of parental discipline, but I think that entirely misses the point. The form does not matter, what matters, what is most crucial, is whether or not the child feels you are punishing them for doing something wrong, or punishing them simply because you are angry and can make them suffer and they can’t do anything about it. They may not be able to articulate the difference, and they certainly are not going to thank you for punishing them, but deep down, your restraint or lack thereof will have a profound effect on how they see the world and whether they think the world is fair and safe for them, or whether they think the only safety is being bigger and more powerful than others… in being the punisher and not the punished. Needless to say, this is a very important distinction, especially if, like any good parent, you are concerned with what kind of a person you raise : a good person, or a clever brute. A time-out given in anger to punish the child for upsetting you, with no sense that an important rule (apart from “don’t make Mommy/Daddy mad or they will hurt you) has been broken, will do far, far more damage than a firm and painful spanking which is just and fair ever could.

III. Thou shalt not confuse a gratified child with a happy child. But discipline you must. The mistake overly permissive parents make when raising children is confusing what the child wants with what the child needs. It is an especially tragic mistake, because while the overly permissive parent wants to make their child happy, the sad truth is that an undisciplined child is not a happy child. They tend, in fact, to be very angry and bitter children, because their urge to discover the limits of their world has met no resistance, and so they continue to act out, seeking some kind of structure or rules that do not bend to their will and therefore can form the solid walls of their lives. And this irony is all the crueler because the child could not possible articulate why they are so unhappy. After all, they get everything they want, which is something other children would love to be able to say. So what’s the problem? That is why it is so vitally important for you to be the adult and take the responsibility for setting the rules and enforcing them fairly and reliably, and knowing that this means struggling with your child, enduring their anger and tears and recriminations and holding firm… for your child’s sake.

IV. Thou shalt not confuse doing for you child with doing with your child. It has become a truism, but only because it’s true : there is nothing more precious to your child than your time. Children inherently and instinctively want to be with their parents. Time spent with you, and not just with you but with you paying attention to them, validates them in a way absolutely nothing else can. There is no substitute for time with your kids. This is especially true in the years between toddler and Grade 1. The sense of your presence, that you are there for them when they need you and that you value them and what they have to say and what they do, will be a vitally important pillar of the self worth of the person they become. If you find yourself spending less time with your kids in order to earn something for your kids, ask yourself which they would prefer, if they were being honest.

V. Thou shalt not transfer responsibility for their lives to your children prematurely. Part of modern parenting philosophy states that it is good to consult your child about what they want and what they like because it gives them a sense of autonomy and power. This is absolutely true, and letting your child make some of their own choices is absolutely a good thing. But like all good things, taken to excess it can become a bad thing again. Give your child choice in small things which do not matter and will not have much of an impact on their lives. Let them pick their toys, their ice cream flavour, even their clothes when they are old enough. But you will not be doing them any favours by giving them larger decisions before they are old enough to understand and handle them. Taken too far, what you are doing is abandoning your parental responsibility to look out for your little ones when they are too small to look out for themselves, and that is one of the worst forms of child abandonment.

To be continued. Probably. Depends on if I can think of five more of these.

I consider myself to be an environmentalist, by my own definition.

My definition is simple : I firmly believe that humans beings, at our current level of technology, are powerful enough to completely destroy or ruin the ecological system(s) in which we live, making human life drastically more difficult to sustain and causing civilization as a whole to suffer in terms of quality of life, cultural development, and potentially even rendering the whole globe unsuitable for human life at all.

Believing, as I do, that this is a distinct possibility, then I have no choice but to therefore believe that reasonable measures of law restraining individuals and corporations from doing harm to the very Earth that sustains our lives are quite justified, and no measure of profits, jobs, corporate interest, or individual desire can possibly outweigh the right of the billions of human beings on Earth today, not to mention those yet unborn stretching off into the millennia, to live in a world as least as good as the one we inherited when we were lucky enough to be born.

In short, I am an environmentalist because I am a realist and a humanist. Being a pragmatic realist, I am incapable of accepting any convenient but unrealistic delusion that might let us, as a species, go on thinking that we can do whatever we like to our biosphere and somehow it will have no consequences. That is the thinking of irresponsible children who burn down the family home because they were bored and decided it would be fun to play with matches. It is not how a grownup thinks.

And as a humanist, I care deeply about the fate of humanity and the future our grandchildren will inherit. I want the human race to continue its evolution towards a saner, safer, more just, more enjoyable, more pleasant future and eventually reach outside this home planet to live on other worlds. We can’t do that if we foul our nest before we even have the wings to fly out of it.

So as a humanist environmentalism, I share many of the same goals as mainstream environmentalism, and I have been pleased to see the tenets of environmentalism accepted into mainstream political thinking within my lifetime. Very few people, in this day and age, would remove all environmental legislation and make it legal to dump toxic waste in playgrounds, for instance.

But sadly, the clock is ticking on many environmental issues, and progress towards a sustainable future erratic, half-hearted, and ponderously slow, and we have to start asking ourselves why this is.

Many of the problems are obvious, of course. Powerful vested interests in the corporate industrial word use their vastly superior power and access to legislators and the media to delay, confuse, distract, and prevent having to behave like actual citizens, with responsibilities towards other citizens, not just the privileges.

But I also think that mainstream environmentalism shares some of the blame. Despite the best of intentions and many worthy noble goals, environmentalism is plagued by some attitudes and influences which run counter to the goal of generating the necessary democratic political will to save humanity from its own shortsightedness and stupidity.

Some of them are :

Earth Mother/ Gaia Mysticism. This is a tricky problem to address, because the line between “useful metaphor for discussing the global ecosystem” and “whacked out hippy crazy talk” can be mighty fine sometimes. But in general, going on about Mother Earth, life force, and other Wicca-inspired mystical and poetic talk is simply not going to gain your ideas any traction in mainstream culture. Sure, your fellow greenies will love it, but they are a tiny fraction of the population, and if you truly believe in helping save humanity, you have to leave your cloistered world and talk to people who are not like you at all.

Open and spiteful misanthropy. It is unsurprising that part of the fallout of the realization of the damage we human beings blithely and ignorantly perpetrate upon the very systems which keep us alive is a bitterness and anger towards such a blinkered and shortsighted species. One only has to look at how many of the old-school environmentalists like Doctor David Suzuki have become intensely bitter, angry, and unpleasant people in order to see this effect in action. But misanthropy never sells and it never will. Nobody is going to be led into common cause with their fellow humans beings by a hate filled, bile spewing grump who shrieks and shrills and tells them they are scum for just being human beings. If you truly care about the cause, choke back that bile, put a smile on your face, and make friends with people.

Unrealistic methods. Environmentalists, and left-leaning advocates in general, tend to put a lot of stock in “raising awareness”, and similar concepts. The unspoken assumption is that the only thing between the average citizen and being a greenie just like them is a few pertinent pieces of information, and that somehow, all people who know the right things will come to the right conclusions. And the best way to get that information to the public at large is to do what liberals like to do anyhow, like go to concerts and rallies and protests, and talk to and hang out with and deal with only other greenies, and somehow that will make it all come true, right?

Unrealistic goals. Give up on trying to convince the world to radically change their lifestyle. Yes, it’s possible to change your life and become carbon neutral. All it costs is a lot of money, time, personal upheaval, effort, energy, and willingness to change your whole life. Sure, when you are a twentysomething college student, this seems reasonable and even fun. But most people have lives, problems, bills, kids, jobs, stress, and no room for big changes. Most people are juggling too many balls at once to try to handle changing them all at once. It’s simply not going to happen. You can encourage gradual, easy changes, but those are never going to solve the big problems. The solutions will come from science and government, not pamphlets and blue bins.

Anti-science and anti-techlogy bias. Regardless of whether you believe that science got us into this mess (it did), the truth is that science and technology remain the most effective way to solve any real-world problems, so it is vastly irresponsible to ignore solutions based on science and technology simply because you are angry with them and/or uncomfortable with them. Science and technology got us into this miss, true. But they are also the only things which can get us out again.

Anti-capitalism and anti-business bias. If your world saving plan starts “First, we overthrow capitalism… ” then brother, you are never going to change anything but your Facebook status and you are honestly doing your cause more harm than good. Like it or loathe it, consumer capitalism is the best system we have ever come up with and it is not going anywhere. All you are doing is associating environmentalism with communism in the public mind, and that is pure political death.

Lack of prioritization of goals and/or understanding of the public’s concerns. Most people, when you get down to the nitty gritty of it, don’t care about disappearing species. Tell them the candy striped skunk moth is on the verge of extinction, and they will agree that sounds like a bad thing, but they really don’t see it as a vital issue. Same with disappearing rain forests, the plight of the piping plover, and (in North America and Europe especially) the fate of the world’s drinking water. All of these are problems, but in terms of the future of humanity, they are not as high a priority as, say, ending the global warming trend, and only serve to cement the public’s impression of environmentalism as solely belonging to the freaky hippie greenie types who get all strident about things which don’t matter to people. All environmental arguments need to be put in viserally humanist terms in order to get people to care. This isn’t about some bug they have never heard of. This is about whether their grandchildren will eat.

This is, of course, an incomplete list, and not meant to be exhaustive or fully descriptive. It’s just a place fr me to point out some of the problems that I think face environmentalism due to the lingering aftereffects of having been born (necessarily) out of far-left liberal sources who lack the ability to understand and connect with the middle class mainstream of society.

If we are serious about saving the world, we have to meet people in the middle, not just yell at them from the comfort of the sidelines.

One of the most profound natural gifts that a person can be blessed with is a high degree of native intelligence. Being born intelligent opens up a lot of doors to the individual which are inaccessible to the average person, and pays off in countless personal and transpersonal ways for the individual’s entire lifetime. The gift of intellect is so profound and deep that it puts other people in awe of the truly bright. In many ways, being born intelligent is like being born rich or beautiful, but with the added benefit of it being a fortune that is impossible to lose and unlike beauty, does not fade with age.

But like all profound gifts, intelligence does not come without its own problems and pitfalls, and these start at a very early age for the gifted individual.

The one I wish to talk about in this article is what I call the “Prodigy Trap”. The basic outline of the problem is that the experience of being a child prodigy has the potential problem of creating in the child an entirely unrealistic and maladaptive idea of how the world worlds and what life will be like for them, and if left unaddressed, this can cause problems for the individual their entire lives.

To understand how this happens, we need to take a look at the world from the gifted child’s point of view. At quite an early age, they discovered that things which were to them quite easy and natural gained them a highly disproportionate amount of praise and positive attention from adults. Things which other children struggled hard a long to master came to them easily, even effortlessly. Being so young, you have no idea why this is, what it means, or what it is like to be any different. You can’t imagine why other people find these things so hard when they are so easy for you. And it shows.

Already, this separates you from the other children. Even if you are otherwise well socialized and have a supportive and stable home environment, this places consider stress on your social relationships. You lack the common experience of life skills and academic struggle that binds your fellow children together like a common enemy. This alone makes you stand apart.

Potentially compounding this is a lack of common interests with other children your age. The age-appropriate activities they enjoy simply don’t appeal to you, because intellectually (but not emotionally) you are well in advance of your peers and so, understandably, what they enjoy and what you enjoy are not likely to overlap by very much. Imagine a six year old trying to play and enjoy games with three year olds. It is not a matter of snobbishness or elitism. They are just not into the same things.

A third aspect of this dilemma stems from the different approaches modern society takes towards academic education versus social education. When it comes to the traditional academic skills, we teach, we test, we grade, we monitor, we pay very close attention. A child who does poorly gets extra help. A child who does well gets extra praise. It is a well honed system that has stood the test of time.

But when it comes to socialization and social skills, we do practically nothing. We just put the kids in a group and assume it will all sort itself out somehow. This, when we know full well that when they grow up, social skills will be at least as useful to them as history or chemistry.

The average kids, having no particular pressures pushing them towards developing either side of the social versus academic skills equation, develop, by default, with a decent balance of both.

But the gifted kids live in a far more polarized world. The academic part is so easy for them that even assuming the social skills are no more difficult for them to acquire than for other kids, the difference will naturally lead to the gifted children favoring academic and intellectual development over social.

When you fold into that the problems posed by the previously mentioned barriers of lack of shared experience or interests with their peers, and the constant specter of the bullying their innocent nonconformity tends to attract, it is no wonder that so many gifted children grow up to be so, well…. different.

It is my hope that if we search beneath the dazzle of their intellects and take a good look at the problems gifted children face, we can develop educational strategies to compensate for this problems and hopefully nip them in the bud before they take root.

For some time now, I have been keeping an eye on the growing storms within the American Right. The philosophical split between the moderates and the Sarah Palin extremists has been growing for a long time, and the recent ascent to party of so many of the Tea Party’s best and brightest into actual power, where their crazy ideas and violently vehement visions have to face the cold clear light of public scrutiny as real actual policies that will affect their lives, has proven far more of a disaster than a boon.

All of this, I feel, should be seen against the backdrop of history. It is clear to any student of the current events of decades previous to our own that what defines being a conservative changes quite a lot from era to era. The conservatives of our parents’ generation fought for the Establishment, the Government, and the status quo. Modern conservatives say government is the problem. And so on.

So what we are seeing, right now, with the Madness of the Right in the United States, and to a lesser extent all over the democratic world (with things like anti-Sharia Law legislation, for example) is the process one generation’s conservatives go through as the last gasps of their power and relevance are played out in the public arena. It is not pretty, and considerable damage can be done by these panicked, angry, unthinking, blind beasts as they stampede over the horizon, but luckily, history assures us that they soon will be gone into that big sunset and no longer a worry to the rest of us.

And as this happens, there will be the few among them who, cognizant of this, or perhaps merely cognizant of just how bitter, mean, and frankly evil their kind seems to have become, will open the door to the next generation, show that the old guard has at least some flexibility and maybe actually enjoy a little approval from the younger conservatives before they shuffle off this mortal coil.

They, of course, will be set upon by their cohorts like a pack of wild dogs as the worst kind of traitorous backstabbing coward for daring to get out of ideological lockstep with the rest of the baying hounds.

And that is what is happening to Pastor Rob Bell. Here’s the skinny on him :

Mr. Bell, 40, whose Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., has 10,000 members, is a Christian celebrity and something of a hipster in the pulpit, with engaging videos that sell by the hundreds of thousands and appearances to rapt, youthful crowds in rock-music arenas.

According to this article on the New York Times website, Pastor Bell has been a controversial figure amongst evangelical Christians in the USA for some time, but what has gotten him doused the boiling brimstone of the devout’s disapproval lately has been news that his upcoming book endorses the radical and hatefully blasphemous idea that Gandhi is not currently rotting in Hell next to Hitler.

In short, he challenges the idea that everyone but a very small, narrowly defined group of evangelical Christians are going to Heaven after this life, and absolutely everybody else is going to suffer the most possible pain for the longest possible time possible in Hell.

This idea, that our little sect going to Heaven and everyone else is doomed, is a great recruiting tool for small splinter religions who are recruiting amongst the disaffected and disgruntled who might have a great deal of reason to feel that the secular world doesn’t find them special at all, and hence a religion that tells them that, despite what society tells them, they are actually super special and the only ones God likes enough to let into his private after-death club really appeals.

But to young, thoughtful people with a conscience, the idea that God would hand out the ultimate punishment conceivable to a great person like Gandhi or Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King just because they did not belong to the exact right tiny little splinter of humanity simply does not jibe at all with the notion of a loving, just, and fair God.

It is like saying someone is a wonderful parent because if their kids misbehave, they shoot them dead.

So while in the moment all the madness loose in the USA is depressing, people like Pastor Bell show that this too shall pass and greater enlightenment comes even to the church going traditionalists.

Let’s just hope that the old guard doesn’t torch the palace out of spite on the way out.

There needs to a term for the sense in every member of society for how normal something (an idea, a fashion choice, a behaviour) is. This N-factor has a very powerful effect on people’s behaviour, and yet I have never seen or heard of it being directly acknowledged. And different people definitely have different N-variance tolerances. One person might be highly cautious and conformist, so that anything outside say one N-point of their exact situation would seem too strange, too risky, too “weird” or “crazy” for them and they would shun it, and quite possibly condemn it in others. Another might have quite a wide tolerance band, but only for themselves, and a narrower one for others.

Or, like a lot of nerds like me, you might be relatively N-insensitive. You follow your mind and your ideas and intellectual interests and largely ignore or completely fail to even sense the potential N-value of anything. This leads to people who are quite tolerant of a lot of N-variance within the very loose parameters of their subculture. But it also leads to a people who seem extremely strange and even crazy to people outside the group, and as many of us nerds know, the culture as a whole has many ways to punish people for blithely wandering far from the herd.

Another interesting aspect of this N-value concept would be how relatively… well, relative it would be. A person’s N-variance tolerance does not have any definable relationship with their own N-value in society as a whole. A person might be incapable of relating to someone outside a very small subgroup and find anyone outside that subgroup to be strange or crazy, and yet their own N-value and that of their subgroup is far, far off the mean. To people outside said subgroup, they are quite weird people and not the sort of people you want to mix with socially. But within the subgroup, that their N = 0, their “normal”.

On the other hand, you might have a person who seems quite normal, and yet their own N-variance tolerance is extremely wide. This would be the sort of person who has friends and associates at all levels of society, and is often the “most normal one in the room” at quite surprising social events.

N-value would also be useful in tracking how someone fits into the rough “herd” model of society I have been slowly developing over time. Imagine a set of concentric circles. In the middle is the “center of the herd”, the place of highest conformity and safety. Despite being the smallest in terms of general N-variance tolerance, it is the circle with the highest population. The “center of the herd” sheep take comfort in this, because they are motivated by the desire to be with the largest population and hence have the greatest safety in numbers. They are also the safest because, being the dead center of the herd, they have the maximum possible number of other layers of sheep between them and exposure to the outside world, and hence share a common unspoken and sometimes illusory feeling that this fact alone protects them from a great deal of the potential harm of the world. Hence the understandable but logically unsupportable statements of “we never thought that sort of thing could happen here” after some terrible crime is occurred in a sleepy suburb or backwoods old fashioned small town.

What did these people think kept those things at bay? Answer : being at the center of the herd.

On the outside layer of society, you have the edge of the herd types. They might have chosen the edge because of a natural inclination towards exploration and discovery that is simply impossible to truly satisfy from deeper within the herd, or they might have been driven their either because their own natures caused the others of the herd to push them their, or because their inclination is the exact opposite of that of the center of the herders, and they feel safest with the fewest feasible number of sheep around them. They see their fellow sheep as more of a threat than exposure to the outside world.

And being on the edge of the herd might lack the protection of layers of other sheep around you, but it also allows greater autonomy of action because the other sheep are not always pressing around you.

And, despite their sometimes antisocial natures, the edge of the herd sheep are the only ones with the unobstructed view of the outside world necessary to see danger coming for the herd. They are, therefore, naturally the scouts and explorers and, in some senses, leaders of the herd. They act as the herd’s external senses, and in this role, they might well find themselves turning back to the herd which rejected them and trying desperately to convince them to change course before heading over the cliff.

Thus, the relationship between the center of the herd and its extremities is often paradoxical. From the center of the herd, it is easy to remain completely ignorant of the role the people at the edge of the herd perform and think they are simply ill sheep who have been consigned to the outer darkness for being defective. From the edge of the herd, it is easy to think the same thing if you did not go there by choice, or to develop a similar arrogance about those soft, flabby conformists in the center.

But the truth is, all the layers have their functions. The layers in between the center and the edge represent different balance points between the desire for safety from the outside and the desire for individual autonomy. The layer right outside the center, for instance, would be filled with people who are largely conformist and safety-seeking, but because they define themselves relative to the center and not relative to the edge, they take comfort that they are better than those oh so comfortable sorts in the center.

Similarly, the layer just inside the actual edge would be filled with people who desire a great deal of autonomy and individuality, but not quite enough to go all the way to the edge. They might well define themselves as well by their distance from the center, saying “look at how far from the center I am. Look at all those sheep between me and it. I am pretty brave, relative to them. ”

Of course, most people fall somewhere in between. The center has the largest population, but not the majority, despite what the center herd sheep might themselves think. Hence, in a free society, the forces of conformity can never truly get the upper hard. Too many of us outside the center have common cause to fight them if they get out of control.

And in a democracy, the majority wins.

Lots of people have been making cracks about our sadly flying-car free future, or wondering how soon we will all be driving emissions free electric vehicles. But few people have been asking when we will all be driving our future cars… WITH OUR MINDS!

I love how god damned smug our technician/driver looks. He knows that at this moment, he is the Lord of all the Nerd. He’s driving a car with his THOUGHTS. He is experiencing a level of smugness normally reserved only for stage magicians and movie psychics.

Can’t you just picture Mentok the Mind-taker getting all sullen and jealous? “Oh please, I’ve been doing that for YEARS. Sure, you can crudely control a car with your computer whatzits…. but can you do THIS? WeeeeOOOOooooEEEee… *ZAP*!” Car turns into a fixed wing jump plane and takes off into the sky. “Hah! Nobody beats the Kid! MIND TAKER!”

Of course, it’s still a highly experimental technology and anyone with a pinch of imagination can easily imagine all kinds of things going wrong with a brain controlled car. The most likely users for this technology in the future will be people with serious health issues that would prevent them from controlling a car by any of the currently existing means.

And besides, who wants to control their car with their mind, when the car can just use its own?

Check out this video of what Google’s entry into the self-driving car race can do on a closed course.

Not freaking bad! That rig pulls off all kinds of fancy turns and sharp maneuvers just like a real stunt driver. And you can tell the nerds are very pleased with themselves. Think about it, they have made a computer that can drive. That is like the ultimate remote controlled car project. I bet the guys at Mythbusters would love to be able to program their doomed vehicles as deftly as Google’s.

Of course, then a lot of presumably very expensive software and hardware would go kerblooey along with the cars, so… maybe not. At least, not YET.

All that fancy driving is only tangentially relevant to the real world task of driving on the real roads, streets, and highways of the world, filled with pedestrians, weather, other vehicles with “meat” drivers, and all the inherent unpredictability that anything involving us crazy naked beach apes necessarily involves. The challenge of driving exactly like a human being would (or, mostly likely, far better, as computers have light speed reflexes and don’t drink, talk on cell phones, or put on makeup while driving) is a staggeringly complex one, and I am extremely pleased at the progress being made in that direction. It’s a field I am quite interested in, and yet… ever since I was old enough to really grasp what a complicated problem the autonomous vehicle represents, I assumed that it would simply not be something that got solved in my lifetime. The problem seemed intractably complex.

What I suspect has happened is that processor speed has covered a lot the problem and made more sophisticated solutions superfluous. You don’t need to program in something analogous to the way a human being anticipates and fluidly adjusts to situations if your computer can correct the car’s course millions of times per second. It’s one of those situations where it takes a great deal of digital granularity to begin to approach the smoothness and precision of analog. Like with mp3s. It takes a lot of samples per second in order to produce music that sounds as good as a CD, let alone a live performer.

But what if, no matter if you are using your own meat brain to drive the car or letting a cooler and more precise computer brain do the job, the unthinkable happens, you get in a horrible accident, and it takes out several of your very important and dearly beloved internal organs. What then?

No problem, just print out a new one!

The worlds of tissue engineering and 3D printing/rapid prototyping are merging, and the progress that has been made in the last year along is mind-blowing. Already, he is printing models which replicate the entire exterior structure of an organ. This, just two years after he figured out that you could put human cells into an inkjet printer and print out something vaguely like actual tissue.

Imagine the future where there are absolutely no organ shortages because anything can be printed on demand. A bladder. A kidney. A heart.

Or for that matter, a steak. Once we can print off something as complex and precise and mission-critical as a human organ, printing off animal tissue will be child’s play. Kobe beef, Beluga caviar, you name it, fresh off the printer, already cooked to perfection.

The future is such a trip!

Critics, by and large, get a bad rap in the media. They are often portrayed as bitter, hateful people who take out their own frustrations at being creatively infertile and devoid of real talent by viciously and joyously soiling the works of people more worthy and genuine than themselves. In addition, they are often portrayed as pretentious parasites, pathetic poseurs, and corrupt to the gills to boot.

Of course, all these media portrayals are created by the very artists who are subject to the critics’ scrutiny and analysis, so it’s not exactly like they are unbiased.

Nevertheless, the public tends not to view critics in a particularly favorable light, and of course, the artistic community has, at all levels, heaped scorn and abuse on particular critics and on the entire profession as a whole. Why do we even need these terrible people, ask the writers and the filmmakers and the musicians? All they do is say bad things about other people’s work. We would be better off if they all disappeared forever!

Note, people rarely say this after getting good reviews.

This view, while perfectly understandable, is nevertheless unsophisticated and immature. Critics play a very important role in the world of art as intercessionaries between the artists and their audience, and as much as the artists might resent it, without the critics, people would be a less willing audience for all forms of art.

In order to understand why the role of the critic is so vital to the world of art, you first to understand the experience of art for its audience.

Let’s start this off with a quote :

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
Kurt Vonnegut

With all due respect to one of my favorite authors of all time, that is simply not the case. A novel, or any other form of art, might look, on the surface, like just a harmless collection of paper and ink (or canvas and paint, or light and celluloid, etc etc), but that is mistaking the medium for the content in a very serious way. After all, a needle full of cyanide is just glass and chemicals… until you inject it into your bloodstream.

And that is what we, as the audience, do with art. We take it right into our minds. We let it in, we give it access to our minds, our emotions, our thoughts and ideas. We let the art, and through it the artist, put their thoughts and images into our mind, implicitly trusting them not to hurt us. Art is, in fact, the closest thing we have to telepathy, and the more sensitive and sophisticated your audience, the more damage bad art can do to them.

And bad art hurts, despite what Vonnegut said. Consuming art is remarkably like consuming food or drink, and the more intelligent and deep your audience is, the deeper the art will go. Bad art does more than simply leave a bad taste in the mouth. If it’s truly bad, it will upset the digestive processes of the mind and leave a permanent memory of something terrible. In fact, bad art can have the same sort of powerful effect on the mind that bad food can have. Someone can form a very powerful negative association with a genre, a style, or an artist simply from one particularly bad experience, much as someone can go permanently off a certain food from one experience with some that was past its due.

So as a consumer of art, you are vulnerable and lost before the myriads of possible dishes available to the public. You want more of the kind of art you had before, but where do you find it? You can’t possibly sample every dish on this vast buffet in order to find the ones you like. And even if you could, how many truly terrible flavours would you have to experience before you found anything you liked? And once you found something you liked, how eager would you be to go blindly looking again once you had your fill of your first find? How excited would you be about this whole buffet thing in the first place?

Enter the critic. Far from being a knight attacking a sundae, a critic is a brave soul whose very job description is to try all these dishes before anyone else does and give the public some kind of idea what is in store for them should they decide to try them for themselves. Critics take that risk for us, letting any old artist into their heads to do what they will, with only their own developed tastes and intellectual toughness as protection from art’s worst.

Seen in this light, it is easy to see how the critic, far from being a parasite, is actually a very brave soul who is willing to be the king’s taster and try all his dishes before he eats them.

Except in this case, the king is… well us.

So enough with the critic-bashing, my fellow workers in art. Sure, there are terrible critics and terrible reviews. Critics are artists too, and no more perfect than the rest of us. Sturgeon’s Law is immutable and applies to critics as well. So feel free to lambaste this review as thoughtless and crude, or that critic as a blinkered Philistine who wouldn’t know good art if it violently sodomized them.

But enough with the wondering why critics exist, or why someone might well get angry at a piece of bad art.

The audience is letting you into their very minds. You expect them to do that without someone looking out for them first?

Make friends with the other people in your generation, because you are stuck with them for life.

This is not a conclusion I came to lightly, because I am a total Generation X guy, and so this would mean I would have to try to like my fellow Generation X members, and frankly, what’s to like? We are a bunch of sullen, resentful, moody, depressive, touchy loners who refuse responsibility for our own problems, are filled with a completely unrealistic unfocused resentment, and try to replace warmth and cooperation with post-modern context bashing and bitter, sarcastic irony.

Of course, that’s mostly out parents’ fault.

But the thing is, you don’t get to pick your generation. As much as I (like millions of other Generation X types) have thought I would have made an awesome hippie, and as much as I admire and support all those crazy Millennial kids with their idealism and hipsterism and indie worship, I can’t ever be one of them.

I am Generation X I am stuck with it. Might as well try to make peace with it.

No matter how I might feel about my generation, they will still be the only people who understand my references, who share the same television memories (NORM!) and pivotal historical moments (Shuttle…uh, yeah. ) and sense of style. They will still be the generation who maps to my idea of “normal” no matter how open minded I might try to be. They are the people who had the same stickers on their binders in school, the ones who know we were “indie” back when it was called “alternative”, and who are the last generation to have Saturday Morning mean cartoons and sugary cereals and pajamas.

And, quite frankly, these are the people who will always be roughly as old as I am, and hence will represent the most stable and appropriate dating pool even when we are all cranky, bitter senior citizens still blaming our Baby Boom parents for everything even when they are long dead.

So even though, in a very Gen X way, I sullenly resent the rest of my generation, and am more than willing to bitch and whine about what a bunch of whiny bitches we are, it appears we are stuck with one another, and maybe, just maybe, once we fully realize that, we will summon up the verve to finally get the fuck over ourselves a little and learn to get along.

At least we can get all misty-eyed about cartoons from the eighties together.

And that is part of the problem, from my point of view. Mostly, what we share, besides a tendency towards apathy, is nostalgia, and I frankly don’t like nostalgia.

I am not claiming to be immune to it, mind you. I get all gooey inside when I listen to the Hong Kong Phooey theme (stupid show but AWESOME theme) or when something reminds me of a favorite Muppet Show moment like anyone else with memories.

I just don’t like it.

See, the problem is, nostalgia just plain isn’t objective. There is no logical reason why I should enjoy remembering something any more than I enjoyed the thing I am remembering. If the thing being remembered hasn’t changed (and how could it? It’s in the past and the past is cast in stone, fixed forever) than why should how I feel about it change?

It makes no sense. It’s not objective. And I am a person who puts a great deal of stock in my ability to see things objectively, as they really are, without illusion, delusion, or prejudice. It is what makes me, in the deepest sense, a philosopher, a seeker of truth, and that is something that runs down to the very core of my being. I absolutely depend on my sense of inner perception and insight to provide the framework of my existence, the foundation of my whole psyche, and therefore anything which interferes with my objectivity will be something I resent and try to eliminate from my mind by whatever means are necessary.

But, being a pragmatist, I must reluctantly recognize that nostalgia is not something I can simply wish away in my mind, as much as it offends my sense of myself as an objective and future-oriented person. It is simply a part of the human mind’s natural progression as a memory storing device, rewarding us with pleasure for retrieving a long-lost memory and hence refreshing it.

So what the hell. I guess we Generation X types can at least get together on that.

Making we can bond over how much we resent each other and the label Generation X.

But I can’t. I just… can’t.

When I was a teenager in the 1980’s, developing my first tentative notions of the world of politics, democracy and ideology, I fancied myself a conservative. Conservatism sounded like what I wanted. And the realization that the conservatism that exists today (and has existed all my life) is nothing like the conservatism I imagined as a teenager was the first big brutal disillusionment of my young life, and its scars formed the foundation of all the political thinking that came after it.

What I wanted was a group of sober, rational, cautious, careful people who took the job of government seriously and wanted it carried out efficiently and effectively for the security and safety and well being of all. People who pushed for well thought out and practical government policies designed to insure that citizens had a solid foundation of peace, prosperity, and order upon which to build their hopes, their dreams, their families, and their daily lives. People who believed in law and order in the service of the public good and government in the service of the governed. People who carefully combed through the froth of new ideas that washed ashore from society’s innovators in order to pick only the best to keep, and who always, ALWAYS checked the bathwater very carefully for babies before throwing any of it out. People who were willing to change things for the betterment of society but unwilling to change things just to change them, or just to reap a temporary and/or illusory benefit at the cost of great future liabilities. People with a sharp eye and a shrewd mind who are not easily fooled into thinking whatever feels good must be okay, or thinking that whatever is frightening or disturbing or unpleasant must be bad. People who can remain tough and fair while bargaining with corporations, unions, special interest groups, industry representative, lobbyists, and other nations as well. People capable of shouldering the responsibilities of government without becoming either ideologically naive or cynically corrupt.

In a word, adults. Grownups. Good, solid citizens.

Sadly, that is not what I found when I really looked around at the people who had the nerve to call themselves conservatives, and in a way, I am still looking for those people.

Instead, what I found was a collection of the reprehensible, the repulsive, and the frankly retarded. At the time of my political awakening and disillusionment, the people calling themselves conservatives here in Canada were the Progressive Conservative Party as headed by the now nearly universally reviled Brian Mulroney. For my non Canadian readers, Mulroney was like a cross between Reagan and Thatcher, with a cheap actor’s dramatic rambling rumbling diction and a smarmy contempt for anyone who thought Canada was there for any other reason than to make businessmen rich…. provided they voted Conservative, of course.

Under his leadership, the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, one of the two founding parties of the nation (in fact, at one point, in colonial days, identical to the British Tories), became a party of smug corporate apologists and blatant worshipers of the USA, willing to sell out Canadian interests for a song if it got them a pat on the head from their rich and powerful masters, especially if those masters were Americans.

And it was their blatant eagerness to fellate American interests that, thank goodness, led to their downfall. Being too friendly with the Americans is the kiss of death in Canadian politics. We are the mouse in bed with the USA’s elephant, and we are all, deep down, keenly aware of how easily that elephant could roll over and crush us and not even wake up. So we mice are very sensitive to anyone seeming a little too pro-elephant.

So he took the Progressive Conservatives from being one of the two major parties in Canada to losing every single seat except for two belonging to MP too beloved to dislodge without dynamite.

That was what I saw when I looked around for looking for conservatives. And if anything, it has only gotten worse. Now, when I look at the people calling themselves conservatives, I see people who are anything but. I see petty ideologues running on nothing but outrage and blinkered pigheadedness, reactionary cowards without the character or courage to face the future, shortsighted business anarchists who think that somehow, the most important aspect of society (business) requires no cops, no laws, and no enforcement at all and will just magically make everything Rousseau perfect if mean ol government just gets out of the way, spoiled children posing as grown adults who think everything in society should be free and are willing to tear down the very structures of society if it might mean a few extra bucks in their pocket… and so forth and so on. Nowhere have I found the people I was looking for, the conservatives, it must be said, of my dreams.

And so while I consider myself a liberal, it is something that I feel I have been left with rather than chosen. The only people who seem to grasp anything like the full picture seem to be center-left people, people who know that capitalism has a role and government has a role, who know that taxes are not evil and that society has a significant operating costs that is neither optional nor unjust, and that regulation is simply law and order under another name, are center-left liberals these days.

That, and the fact that I am fairly socially liberal, leaves me no choice but to be a liberal.

But part of me will always be looking, wistfully and sadly, for the conservatives I never found.

Why monotheism? What did monotheism offer that the previous religions did not? What made the development of monotheism necessary in some places, but completely optional in others?

First, a quick run down on the development of religion as it parallels developments in civilization.

First, always, is animism. To the animist, all that happens is the work of spirits, ghosts, and other entities, and all things have their own spirit, their own animus. This is the base human religion, and a product of the highly develop social intelligence of our species, which relates best to that which has a social presence, in other words, has thoughts, feelings, and a personality. In short, something that is a person, even if it not necessary human at all. And so when humanity lives in small villages and lives very close to nature, and is still primarily a hunter/gatherer, the shortest route to an answer for any question about the world is, basically, “a spirit did it”. A world entirely run by socially present entities is a quite reassuring thing to our social primate minds. We can relate to it, understand it, feel we can negotiate it much like we negotiate the social world of our mundane human lives.

But this only holds true up to a certain level of development. If your tribe of animistic primitives (anywhere in the world, any time in history) comes to the point where they master agriculture and/or things like the buffalo jump and animal husbandry, they will go from being hunters and gatherers to being herdsmen and farmers, and that means a more complex society, with individual property, fences, boundaries, and the beginnings of bureaucracy and specialization.

And so it becomes harder and harder for the people to relate to a world of somewhat vaguely defined spiritual beings, and they start to see the world as still the product of the wills of individual entities, but these entities now become specialists as well, with specific roles and jobs. This one is the god of the moon. This one is the goddess of the hunt. And so forth.

Thus, animism, in time, evolves into pantheonic polytheism. Like the world it reflects, the power structure of the spiritual realm becomes the domain of one big powerful family, who bicker and fight just like your own extended family. They all have their specialties, and they all require appeasement and negotiation… again, just like dealing with your own extended family.

This works quite well between the dawn of farming and herding, and the rise of the city-state. Once the rise of the Bronze Age gives rise to true cities, with all the demands of the social fabric to withstand crowded and complex urban conditions, polytheism begins to be too complex.

Complicating the matter is the tendency of these city-states to align with one god or goddess more than the others. Usually, this is a result of a combination of the intense infighting amongst the various priests of various gods and goddesses, and the luck of the draw. We were celebrating Demeter when we won over those other assholes? DEMETER IS AWESOME!

The real problem occurs when city-states begin conquering one another. If City A that worships God A wins over City B that worships God B, the only possible explanation is that God A just defeated God B, and God B has to go. Usually, this happens via God A simply absorbing the duties and part of the aspect of God B.

This is how you get things like “God A is the god of war, herring fishermen, pottery, and erotic topiary. ”

So in the transition from animism to polytheism, the multitude of spirits become the local gods of cities, and as the city-states are conquered into consolidating, the number of gods shrinks, and their powers and responsibilities grow correspondingly.

From this, it would seem that the road to monotheism is well paved and that cultural momentum alone will take you there. After all, eventually, one city state will conquer all the others, declare that their god is not just victorious but the others are all now dead/unreal/gone poof. What else can happen, right?

But that’s where the question comes in, because monotheism sprang into existence in some places, and in other places, they instead developed an overarching religion which encompassed the previous world of polytheistic gods and animistic spirits and mysticism without the need for one single god to win over all the rest and get all the power, all the glory, and banish all the others to the darkness of being either turned into demons or simply said to have never been real in the first place.

So, why monotheism? Is it simply the result of a more warlike, winner takes all kind of culture? Is it the pressure of tightly packed cities which requires a simplification of the celestial hierarchy to parallel the simplification of the city-states into nations and empires with a single autocratic leader? Is it simply the result of the mingling of different societies over the generation under the steady agitation of trade and commerce until it all becomes one homogeneous cosmopolitan culture?

I’m not sure, but the question fascinates me. It could be nothing but random chance. But I don’t think so. There has to be a reason why all three of the major monotheisms of the world (Islam, Christianity, and Judaism) all come from the same small area of the Middle East. There has to be something about that time in that place which blazed monotheism into existence.

And perhaps even more importantly, there had to be a reason why they held on, and spread. There must be something appealing about them that gave them an edge over polytheism in some places.

In the next article in this series, I will speculate as to these reasons.