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.