Given this simple law of rhetoric, it seems to me absurd when commentators lambast politicians for “going negative.”  It is equally absurd when a candidate like Newt Gingrich (is his first name really Newton?) cry foul when his ex-wife exposes his non-traditional family values and some might say polygamous view of marriage.  “How dare the media get personal!”  Yet, the GOP has been getting personal with all citizens of our vast nation.  In the face of increasing diversity of cultures and religions withing the U.S.A., the Grand Old Party wages “culture warfare” to keep the nation Christian and uniform.   They are like the Tory’s of the nineteenth century: defending the rich and privileged “nobility” and the Established Church.

Not that there is anything wrong with that, as a political ideology.  Defending the way things used to be is a time-honored stance in politics.  It is a large part of what “Conservative” means.  Only fairly recently has conservativism had anything to do with balancing the Federal budget and reducing the national debt.  However, such rhetoric has long been a part of Populism — the appeal to the “common sense” and downhome values of the country folk.  The rhetorical turn that equates the running of a vast nation-state with running a family home is a key example.  Possibly there is some similarity — enough to make the metaphor hold up instinctively.  In other words, it appeals to a very simple kind of common sense:  Common sense that is founded on ignorance of the complexity of the world and our govermental system.  Yet, when you think about it more deepy, the metaphor is really nothing more than populist rhetoric.  A similar metaphor would be to claim that running the International Space Station is like running a rural or middle-class urban household.  With the possible exception of Bill and Linda Gates’s house, most houses and most families bear very little resemblance to the complex and vast structure that is the International Space Station and its administration.

The same thing is true with the Federal government.  To say that the United States Federal Government has to balance its budget just like every good American balances his or her household budget is a false analogy.  It appeals to the ignorant (which, admittedly is most of us) because it makes “sense” out of something incomprehensible.  The rhetoric is also disingenuous because very few of the people at the center of the GOP are simple country folk.  They take money from simple country folk (and simple city folk), but most of the party’s operation revolves around giant corporations, their owners, and stockholders.  For that core audience, the analogy that would be more appropriate to their understanding of the world is the analogy that the Federal Government is like a giant corporation.  It must turn a profit.

Oh, but wait.  Hmmmm.  We are talking about capitalism, of course.  That is the only idea of economics and corporate culture thinkable to the GOP.  And capitalism is founded on borrowing capital to start and to expand one’s business.

The Corporation Analogy and the Bloated Giant Metaphor

The free-market capitalist-competition economic system has driven practically all of the industries we associate with civilization.  It has been a successful model on the whole for the United States.  But running a corporation is also not much like running a government.  The analogy of “balancing the budget” gives over to that of “CEO=LEADERSHIP” but, again, it is false, however appealing.  There is some similarity between a CEO and a President of the United States: both have to have skill as leaders and the ability to pick their middle managers to make sure they are trustworthy and competent.  Both have to delegate their power.  Both have to take responsibility for any unforseen negative consequences of their actions.

But again, as with the “government=household” analogy, the difference in scale makes the comparison pretty much empty rhetoric.  GOP pundits and candidates scoff at President Obama, saying the only thing he ever ran was a non-profit organization.  Small potatoes compared to a big corporation.  Maybe, but both of them are small potatoes compared to the government of the United States.  Small business, non-profit organization, corporation making millions — these are all an order of magnitude below governing a country so vast as the United States.  And too, the job skills of a CEO are not going to apply to the job skills required of a President.  The job is far bigger and more complex.

There is also the “bloated government” image. This plays on people’s emotions and fears of things that are too much bigger than themselves to understand.  Some voters wish that they could understand the Federal goverment, and so want to cut it down to size.  The “bloated” image conjures up some gigantic glutton, or a dead whale on a beach. It is a rather vague metaphor, but nobody will respond to the word “bloated” with a positive emotional response.  There may be some appeal to childhood memories of being small and at the mercy of adults in the phrase “Big Government.”  Even in a culture where under every other circumstance Bigger is Better, for some reason the GOP can use bigness in a negative way when connected to “government.”   The logic comes from an implied enmity.  The “government” is somebody foreign, a big, scary Other.  It is trying to control you and take away your hard earned money to feed its gluttony.  It is like the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk, and our good old political candidate is like Jack the Giant Killer.  He’s going to save you from the big bloated giant.

The reality is that there is no other job on Earth like being President of the United States.  I suppose the only remotely reasonable claim a candidate could make to having demonstrated the necessary leadership skills would be if he had been president of another country.   A successful president.  That is constitutionally forbidden.  The next best thing, in most cultures is if a candidate was a high-ranking general.  Surprisingly few generals (and even fewer admirals) get involved in American politics.  Strange.  Or maybe it is the same reason professors usually avoid politics — they are too wise and too wary.

I doubt that anyone knows what it is like to be the American President until they get into the oval office.  Some past presidents clearly did not understand what they were getting themselves into and could not hold the reigns of a team of horses so large and powerful.  No, even the team of horses metaphor doesn’t wash.  The government of the richest nation on Earth and the one whose every move is scrutinized by the rest of the world and by watchdog organizations within our own country, is a quantum level of complexity beyond any corporation.

You Get What You Pay For

Governments, like giant corporations can borrow capital to make their ventures work.  But that is the end of the similarity with capatalist enterprise, for a government is in control of many aspects of the economy itself; its revenue comes from taxation, not from customers buying products in a free market.  People born in the United States, or who are made citizens take on the obligation to pay taxes, to share part of their own revenue with the Federal government, so that it can do what it does.  The same citizens are given the power to vote for elected representatives who, in theory, will convey their desires to the government.  Put another way, citizen-customers are required to donate part of their revenue to the corporation that provides the products which the citizen-customers are then given.  It is as if each citizen is buying services from the government.

We pay for the services of a justice system, a vast  complex of armed forces, regulation and policing of all manner of crimes, and many types of behavior that have been deemed destructive to the nation as a whole (polluting water, air, and land for instance, or exterminating species of plants and animals). We pay for the services of a commerce department and interior department that help encourage and foster the rational growth of commerce, industry, and wise use of land resources.   We pay for the services of an education department that is supposed to help maintain and improve our system of public schools, a profoundly important right of American citizens.  And, we pay for the services of a legal system that makes the laws under which we are governed and by which we are to govern ourselves as citizens.  Legislation by the people, for the people is the very cor of the American Experiment.  It was a new idea in 1776  and it is still an evolving idea.  It has been competing with the idea of dictators since it was conceived.

So, the Federal government is not like a giant corporation.  It produces a far more diverse menu of services and no “goods.”  If one were to compare it to a corporation (and the President to a CEO of a corporation), it would have to be one that produced services — like a law firm, an insurance agency, a security company, a printing office, a library, a shipping service.  I know that some within the GOP would like to see the Federal government stop providing some of its services.  Since the whole thing began in the time of Washington and Jefferson, American citizens have been arguing over whether the Federal government should provide any services other than maintaining a national standing army and navy (air force wasn’t an option then).  We have debated passionately for every one of the services we buy from the Federal government, from a central bank to a justice system that protects civil and human rights.

The fact is that the Federal government is the United States of America.  Without it, we would be a collection of separate states, or more likely part of someone else’s empire.  The structure of States as we know it would have never existed beyond the Mississippi, and maybe not even that far.  Indeed, if it were not for our  Federal Government under Jefferson, we could not have made the “Louisiana Purchase” or seized  imperial properties of the Spanish Empire, such as California.  Nor would we have railroads and most of the great works of American industry, which were supported and subsidized by Federal grants of land and tariffs.  Without the Federal government and its power, America would not be  No. 1 in anyone’s list of great powers.

The rhetoric of the political “right” in our country mainly works to support the idea of free enterprise and the rights of corporations to carry on making things, providing services, create jobs, and turn a profit.  We need that, and those services of the Federal government that support commerce and industry.  But that is not all we need.  The “left” in this country has, at least since the 1960′s lobbied for the Federal government to provide some of the services that were previously left up to religious institutions, such as providing food for the poor and making sure no American citizen is left behind on the roadside to suffer and die from negligence.  The GOP sometimes suggests this is too much, that charity should not be the job of the Federal government.  Yet, in a nation with freedom of religion, it is hardly logical to expect every citizen to be able to call upon the help of a church.  Moreover, churches are not rich.  They lack the resources to help all who are in need.  Indeed, they cannot help in the most fundamental way — that of providing housing for the old and jobs for the unemployed.  If the Federal government is not going to help the poor, then logically American corporations should do so, not churches and non-profit groups.

Moral Evolution, Anyone?

Apart from the possibility of a Scroogelike transformation of corporate culture, the outlook for such a revolution in the behavior of our barons of industry seems bleak.  We do see corporations developing programs to connect them better to the community in which they operate their business, so it isn’t impossible.  What needs to happen is that capitalist commercial entities will have to start behaving like good neighbors.  In the early days of capitalism, the owners of mills occupied a paternalistic role in relation to their workers and even built towns to house them.  Unfortunately, the profit motive made the lives of the children of such paters very bleak.  They were bad fathers, primarily interested in their own comfort at the expense of their children, and would not hesitate to throw their children out into the snow bank if papa did not need them anymore.

Yet, we do evolve morally as a people.  Slowly across the generations attitudes have changed.  The Paternalism of corporations did not work in the past, but that does not mean it could not work in the future.  However, that wasn’t how the United States was built.  It has evolved over the past century that government agencies provide the services of a good father (or try to do so).  Some American citizens, for some reason I cannot fathom, do not want their money to go to help the poor, to educate them, or to train them to join the Workforce, as we call it. We evolve morally as a people, seeking those great virtues of brotherly love, generosity to the poor, forgiveness, and service to others.  We evolve as a people, but that does not every individual among us is equally evolved.

Perhaps it is not surprising that those with the narrowest and most pinched sense of generosity to their fellow citizens, those least evolved spiritually, deny the reality of the theory of evolution.  I am not sure how we become more evolved unless it is by parents educating their children into new ideas, new knowledge, and encouraging them morally and spiritually to inculcate in themselves those virtues cherished in our society.  Does an enlightened attitude of virtue have any survival value?  Not much, perhaps.  Physical strength and violence still rule our moral world.  But in the long view of time, we can see that this has changed.  Perhaps there is more violence now than one hundred years ago.  I do not know.  But there is also more generosity, caring for others, imagining far beyond one’s own family and immediate friends, for the practice of relief.  Indeed, even beyond our own species.

We might as well ask whether the ability to understand rhetoric has any survival value.  It is hard to imagine it does on the level of individuals.  On the level of groups, however, we might be able to see that being able to see through the silly rhetorical turns of politicians (or anyone else) can prevent us from losing our freedoms.  Whenever you let someone pull the wool over your eyes with the rhetoric of politics and self-interest, you give away your freedom:  your freedom to know the truth.

Truth or Bloviation?

Mitch Romney in his campaign has been tossing out criticism of the president. He says that President Obama’s polities have made our economic woes worse over the past four years.  This is not a metaphor, but an emotional appeal to those unsophisticated enough to understand what is going on; an emotional appeal masquerading as a statement of fact.  It is an unsupported claim that implicitly makes a causal link between the policies of President Obama and the economic situation over the past four years.  It pains me to think there are really American citizens who believe such unwarranted claims.  Not only unwarranted, but impossible to prove. How does Mr. Romney imagine he would explain the details supporting his statement?  How will he (or anyone) show that the economic crisis that has gripped the Western World would have been handled better by a laissez-faire capitalist president?  It is purely hypothetical and does not even pass the “common sense” test.

The current unemployment levels and recession were caused by the near collapse of our banking system.  It was for different reasons, but it bears some similarity to the Wall Street collapse that set off the Great Depression which lasted for over a decade in the first part of the Twentieth Century.  There was fear among economists that another Great Depression was about to happen, and the leaders of the world followed modern economic theory using the power of the government purse to give the dying economy a transfusion of life-giving cash.  The move has been criticized, and is very probably flawed, but if the patient has stabilized and is still conscious, that is a fairly good outcome.  Recovery in our economy is a matter of healing.  The body economic will take time to heal from the heart attack given to it by a few greedy, immoral, and ultimately foolish men.

Whenever our Federal or State governments have turned a blind eye to racketeering of any sort, the country has suffered.  The Bernard Madoffs among us are nothing but racketeers, stealing other people’s money and, in this case, risking the collapse of the whole banking industry.  The crisis and the panicked attempts to bail out the ship happened under President G.W. Bush, not under President Obama.  Our president for the past nearly four years has been dealing with crisis after crisis — all because of policies of the Bush administration and the GOP.  And then the GOP has the gall to turn around and blame President Obama.  “The country has just gotten worse” says Mr. Romney.  Yes, unemployment increased after the crisis, but it was not caused by the current president’s policies.  If Mr. Romney can demonstrate how he would have done things differently to have created more jobs in a market that had closed in on itself like a hermit crab into its shell, then he could make such statements.  But he cannot.  Why?  Because the policies of lassez faire capitalism and free trade are no good in a crisis.  They have often caused crises, bubbles, boom and bust — but they work slowly and fending off unemployment when corporations and businesses are retreating and retrenching is not something good old capitalism can do.

The fact has been demonstrated again and again through the Twentieth Century, as governments have struggled to figure out how to make the system work without chewing up its own citizens and treating them like dirt.  The moral premises of capitalism do not include treating workers as human beings.  The fundamental guiding virtue of Western business is making more money for its owners.  There is no economic theory that would encourage justice, freedom, kindness, or temperance.  This is why we so commonly find powerful men (and women) in the news for having violated our culture’s code of common decency.  They take bribes, they steal, they commit marital infidelity and become addicted to sex, drugs, money, and power.  I don’t blame them.  They are only men, after all.  My point is that free market capitalism has no interest in such virtues as might have prevented those vices.  Put simply, it has no use for the Ten Commandments.

Viciousness and Masculinity in Business

So, in the United States and in many of the countries of Europe, attempts have been made to reduce the viciousness of free-market culture.  Everyone can appreciate its beneficent effects. Everyone dreams of being rich.  But democratic governments have sought a higher moral ground.  The Conservatives give that high moral code lip service, but they do everything they can to disguise the fundamental conflict between the profit motive and other virtues.  Our economic system promotes one of the seven holy virtues:  Industry or Dilligence (the opposite of the vice of Sloth or Acedia).

The others?  Let’s see.  Does our economic model encourage Chastity?  In its broader sense, Chastity is interpreted as more than just sexual restraint; it means dedication to the life of the mind and spirit rather than carnal desires.  One source also says Chastity includes the “ability to refrain from being distracted and influenced by hostility, temptation or corruption.”(1)  Does our system promote the opposite vice: Lust and Luxury?  Yes.

What about Temperance (self-control, restraint) versus Gluttony (taking more than your share and more than you need)?  Well, being a business man might required some delayed gratification, but the more succeessful you are within the system, the more instant and excessive self-gratification becomes a temptation.

I won’t even comment on Charity versus Greed.  Far from promoting Charity, our economic system promotes its opposite: the love of money.

Let’s try Kindness versus Envy.  Hmmm.  No, seems to be on the vice side of that one too.

Humility versus Pride?  No, definitely not Humility.

Patience versus  Wrath?.  Every businessman must exercise patience to succeed.  Unfortunately, exercising wrath often is more common.  Yelling at your workers, firing people for mistakes, getting even with your enemies.  The concept of competition in which two businesses try to kill each other off, metaphorically speaking, implicitly tell us that wrath is OK.  Our cultural ideas of masculinity are also at fault here, where being patient and taking any sort of abuse is seen as unmanly.  Our icons of maleness pretty much all can fight with their fists and know how to use a gun.  Look at any Western.  (A good recent example of the image is Daniel Craig in Cowboys versus Aliens)

And that image of the tough (indestructible) macho man is also a rhetorical device.  Oh, no doubt it has its biological roots in testosterone but it is endlessly elaborated in fantasies on television and in movies, and in popular literature.  Intellectual literature usually tears apart this image of male power, but popular culture is in love with it.  Pop psychologist of sex and dating gurus will tell you that girls love “bad boys.”  Meaning men who are tough and good with their fists — dominant alpha male types in the world of primates.  All of which is part of the culture of competition.  Does our economy create the images of masculinity?  Or has the machismo created capitalist competition.  Can you have capitalism without the machismo?

The one thing you can say about Newt Gingrich is that he forthrightly stands for all the vices of capitalist culture.  Lust, greed, corruption, intemperance, excess, rhetorical control of his fellow citizens who become for him only an audience.  He would be more convincing if he was less bloated.  But when Newt says that the number one job of the Republican Party is “defeating Barack Obama,” he is at least being honest.  Political parties, and for some reason especially conservative-thinking parties, only want to defeat their opposition.  Whoever is out villifies whoever is in.  The Democrats accused George Bush of turning the presidency into a dictatorship.  The Republicans accuse Barack Obama of being a socialist (veiled code for Commie Pinko).  There is another subtext, of course: the hatred on the part of many U. S. citizens towards a man of African-American descent living in the White House.  We should not underestimate this unspoken subtext.  It is a mark of our evolution as a society that Mr. Obama was elected, and it is a further sign of evolution that the White Opposition no longer feels safe coming out and saying what they think: that Black Men are trying to take over and get revenge against White Men.  Probably plotting to steal our women too.  Underlying all this empty rhetoric and all the manipulative emotional appeals, is American machismo, feeling inadequate and threatened, needing to puff itself up with sexual escapades and trumped-up fears that “Black Men” have more sexual prowess than they do.

For, we will find that those who use rhetoric to inspire fear and animosity in their followers are motivated at the deepest levels by their own fears.  And if there is one thing I do not want in a President of the United States it is a person motivated by fears of male inadequacy.  I understand those fears and am quite convinced that they make a very bad basis for action and will never be a power that will lead a man to virtuous strength.

OWL

Works cited

(1)  “Seven Virtues” Wikipedia article. Accessed 1/23/2012.

The upper 1% does not constitute a “class” in anyone’s definition of the term.  The Marxist idea of “class warfare” was that the workers should rise up and demand control of the means of production from their bourgeois employers and that the Serfs and other service workers in a society be considered citizens, not slaves.  Leninism was about overthrowing the Tsar and his corrupt and cruel aristocracy.  America is a progressive country.  It changes itself as the world and human ideas change.  In fact, we often lead the way where the world needs to change.  Witness the Woman’s Movement and the worldwide struggle for equal civil rights for women.  Indeed we were also world leaders in the rights of workers to make a wage in proportion to the contribution they make to their company.  That is, workers of any pay grade.  Indeed witness our own Revolution.

The “Class System” that Marx and other 19th-century thinkers were rebelling against was a social structure in which people were defined by birth, education, and privilede according to clear-cut social classes.  Kings, Nobles, Aristocrats, the Gentry, Burgesses, and the Commons.  The Commons included a range of occupations and some commoners could, through owning factories and investing their money become member of the Burger class — essentially affluent men of business and their families.  The poor at the bottom were not really counted as any sort of “class.”  When the United States rebelled against the British Monarchy and their status as mere “colonies,” they challenged the whole idea of Class Society.  Our constitution did away with titles of nobility and proclaimed everyone to be equally  citizens.

Or, at any rate, the white men of property.  There were still slaves, indentured servants, apprentices, and workers who comprised a kind of American “Commons” but they were not defined as a “class.”  Over time, men without land, people of color, and women achieved full citizen’s rights and priviledges.  But no “class” of persons was privileged by law because of their birth or family.  The wealth that has accumulated over the last 233 years in the United States has made certain families very very rich, but they are not by law accorded any special priviledges.  They may be able to live high on the hog and wield political influence by contributing to the campaigns of those politicians who they believe will protect their private property.  They may even be able to find sharp ways to evade their taxes or make money in unethical and immoral ways.  But in America there are no classes — not “Rich vs. Poor” or “Management vs. Labor.”  Those are structural aspects of our society and economic system, which ought not have any special sanction by anyone.  The rhetoric of the stump seems to want us to believe that Democrats are all Maxists, a claim that can only demonstrate the ignorance of whoever makes it.

The fact that there are owners of corporations and that they hire workers who sell their labor, is a systemic fact of free market capitalism.  Nobody gets assigned to work for someone else by a Central Politburo or by a social system of classes such as existed in the United Kingdom and Ancién Régime Europe.  Each individual searches for a job in a free-for-all market of jobs.  America accords its citizens the freedom to do so.

We might talk about “affluent people” as some sort of vague group, but really, in America “affluent people” can be anything from corporate CEO’s to schoolteachers and factory workers.  The problem is that we go through periods when the markets contract, including the jobs market.  When that happens, as at present, loads of unemployed people are at risk of falling below the poverty line.  In America in the 21st Century, it is embarrassing to me that we even still have a “poverty line.”  If the Republican Party really was a Grand Old Party of Patriots, they might take more pride in their country and take steps to eliminate that poverty line altogether.  Surely American Ingenuity could make it so.  We have no shortage of resources.  Nor do we have a shortage of social institutions through which such a change could be effected.  But the GOP seems to be so stuck in its own gloopy rhetoric of “No New Taxes,”  “Fiscal Conservatism,” “Anti-Socialism,” and “Culture War,” that it has become nothing but a drag on our country.  They do not behave as if we are all equal, as if we are a “Christian Nation,” nor do they seem to even think we are One Nation Under God.  If they do, I am at a loss to explain what god they are worshipping.

The United States of America was created, and exists as a continuous creation, moving always towards the improvement of the quality of life and the scope of freedom its people want.  Nobody is supposed to be privileged.  Everyone has the same rights and privileges unless they violate the law, and then they lose their freedom and many other rights.  It may be true that by criminalizing so many human failings we have created a “criminal class” but it still isn’t an intentional part of our social organization.  It is just a stupid muddle.  We have, through our ideas of law and justice, created such a vast number of incarcerated criminals that they could almost start their own political party.  Indeed, if one were to count all those persons on parole or otherwise under “correctional supervision” they constitute what must be the lowest 3% of our citizens. (take a look at the graph in the linked article and see if you don’t find it disturbing).

Beyond even our poor brothers and sisters, who constitute now around 15% of the U.S. population, the incarcerated “class” (if it were a class) is three times as big as the “class” of citizens that the President suggests should pay a higher tax rate.  Now, of course, some of the residents of our prisons are not technically poor because they got in by making money in illegal ways.  So, even losing their ill-gotten gains, they may still have full bank accounts waiting for them on the outside.

If I were to make a modest proposal, I might suggest that we eliminate poverty and bring home the realities of the seven million adults in prisons by closing the prisons entirely, along with the homeless shelters and have all those millions of  Americans move in with the top 1% in their mansions.  If these top tier Americans, the people we all look up to and admire (for their wealth if not for their creativity or business acumen), came home every day to have destitute, unemployed Americans in their guest rooms, and some others of their fellow citizens who failed to make it in the market without resorting to illegal means, then they would really be stepping up and doing their job as this country’s leaders.  They would be exemplifying the teachings of Jesus and all of the other great men of the past, all of whom advocated for those whose lives are a product of misfortune.

If I have my figures correct, this means that the 1% who control nearly half of America’s wealth number some 3 million citizens, while the bottom 15% below the “poverty line” constitute around  47 million citizens.  That would mean that the Ultras (if I may call them that without intending to imply they constitute a “class”) would each take  15 of their fellow Americans into their homes.  As most of them presumably have more than one house, this does not seem an unreasonable burden.  Each would additinally take in three of their fellow citizens under “correctional supervision” and do their best to correct them.

I suppose that every on of the 3 million Ultras could assign members of their staff to give these 18 or so of their fellow Americans room and board and help them find a job.  Heavens, each of the Ultras could probably hire 18 people into their own offices and factories.  But by housing these unfortunate people, each one could also get to know them, care about them as individuals, and take responsibility for helping them.  It would be of immeasurable benefit to the Ultras themselves, extending their moral scope and feeling the good feelings of helping one’s fellow citizens.

The GOP seems to believe that all of the 3 million Ultras in America are Christians.  So, taking that as a given, they would be practicing their religious faith in a beautiful way.  Of course, the government is not going to do it for them.  Each Ultra has to go out and find his or her 18 citizens in need — 15 in poverty, and 3 in need of “correction.”   There is no better form of “correction” than extending love and goodwill to a person.  And not a relative or friend.  No indeed.  A person who was hitherto a stranger.  Therein lies the joy in the heart of the Good Samaritan.

I think it is a good idea.  It would be nice if one of the GOP presidential candidates took it up as a New Deal.  Instead of Big Government offering handouts, the 3 million Ultras could voluntarily show the rest of us just where the moral center is in the United States.  Then they might be not merely Ultra-Rich, but also Ultra-Popular.  An what fun they could have competing with each other to see who could raise up more of their fellow Americans.  Then we could all stand proud before the world and before God — proud that we had no more prisons and no such thing as a poverty line.  We CAN do it.  That’s why we call ourselve’s Americans and not American’ts.

Solstice blessings to the 1%.  May they find the goodwill and courage to live up to their position of leadership, and become truly admirable, to reach out directly to those who need a hand, and take them into their own homes, and give them the benefit of the knowledge and skill that got them where they are — at the top.  Then, they might even volunteer to pay a higher tax rate or at least chip in to buy the Pentagon a new aircraft carrier.

OWL

My own session on Jules Verne also included Professor Reid (pardon me if I am remembering the name wrong), but I am afraid I gassed on for most of the time.  I don’t know why, but clocks seem to speed up when I am talking in front of an audience.  In any event, I enjoyed the chance to talk about Verne and was pleased this morning when a book arrived in the mail dealing with Jules Verne films in the 1950s.  Right up my alley, I thought, and then I looked in the index and saw that I had been sited numerous times. Ha!  I wrote that article on the Disney Jules Verne 16 years ago for Science Fiction Studies, back when I was still playing in the academic game.  It is very gratifying to see that anyone is quoting me!

It seems to me that Lord Bobbins and his crew could simply run all the same panels and sessions again next year because I know that I’m not the only one who was sorry to miss panels that were offered in the same time slot.  Some were indeed offered twice, which was helpful.  One always has to choose between going to the sessions to learn something and larking about socializing.  I especially would recommend that next year a lunch break be given.  Maybe they did not do so because the hotel restaurant would not have been able to handle everyone descending at once, but it is a necessary thing for genteel life and a lunch break and a tea break at 4 pm. would be a good addition to the convention.

Perhaps we could have a larger tea room as well, to accommodate.  Near the vendor’s hall would be nice.  This year’s tea room, while delightful, was tucked away in a fairly small room at the end of one of the corridors.  This past weekend I was in Iowa City and happened to have lunch at the Marriot there.  It is a lovely hotel and has a library!  Beautifully appointed room dedicated to Iowa authors and authors who have been involved in the Iowa Writers Workshop.  Wish they all had a library…  The hotel we stayed in was full of televisions in the lounge area, which is very tiresome when one is trying to read, write, or think.  Television: the new invention that thinks for you!  What a time-saver!

I think that avoiding television is one of the attractions to retreating to a Victorianesque world.  No phones, no radio, no TV, barely any cinema.  A world of live theater, live music, and hand-written letters.  One can accept the telegram for brief notes (it is really just like e-mail).  Hotels have stopped providing hotel stationery and envelopes in the desk drawers.  Pooh, I say!  Pooh!

OWL

For example, the captain of the ship was played by an actor who channeled Gert Frobe in his portrayal of Captain Krieger of the H.M.S. Trident, a submarine capable of also flying above the waves.  Though young and handsome with elaborately waxed moustaches, the captain had the voice of Gert Frobe as Baron Bomburst in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.  Announcements from the bridge came over speakers set up in the hallways of the hotel where the panels were presented.  All done with a great sense of humor, for example when the captain announced that he was missing his strawberry ice cream.

Kapitan Krieger and a Turk

I had dinner with the Captain at the Captain’s table, set off in a special room and attended by the very efficient staff of the Sheraton (and perhaps also of the convention).  I enjoyed staying in my character most of the time, as Dr. Nautilus Cholmondeley, the inventor and airship builder.  At the captain’s table not only did the guests stay in their characters, but they carried on a lively dinner conversation that ranged from discussing the (fictional) war going on between the English-German Alliance and an Eastern European alliance under the direction of the evil Dr. Proctocus and his Tick-tock men.  He was rumored to not only be using robots as soldiers but also reanimating dead soldiers to fight again.  The pros and cons of the morality of such an act was debated at the table among Lord and Lady Bobbins, Kapitan Krieger, and about 20 guests of varying natioalities.  I had the pleasure of sitting across from a Russian Princess and next to a time-traveler and his wife.

Now, if you enjoy developing a character and playing it ad lib, this is a wonderful chance to do so.  If you love the steampunk aesthetic doubly good.  The lobby of the Sheraton Madision was awash in top hats and pith helmets, vast flowered ladies hats, and tiaras, and a host of wonderfully imaginative costumes combining the Victorian world with clockwork robotics and aether guns.  There were many men and women dressed for war in some army, navy, or air corps.  As theater, Teslacon is fascinating because the world and the history in which all these  characters live and breathe is entirely made up by the committee of the whole.  Lord Bobbins and his creative team make up a core story, but his lordship himself celebrates the fact that in steampunk it is the fans who create the story and the setting and the costumes.  Steampunk is a fan movement of sorts that does not stem from any single author or any single book, movie, or television show.  If one attends a Star Wars convention, one enters into a world that is largely shaped by the films in that series and the novels that were written from it.  If one attends a Star Trek convention, same thing.

Steampunk is in some ways a spin off from the Goth counterculture in as much as many Goths also enjoy steampunk’s darker side.  And that is another aspect that makes it very different from ordinary Sci Fi conventions.  The world is more consistent, and yet all over the place within its parameters.  And a considerable number of people in the convention are what you might call professional conventioneers.  I sat at dinner one night next to a group of young men (perhaps in their 30s) who were talking the business of conventions, but they were all dressed in top hats and the togs of Victorian gentlemen.  They had dropped out of their characters in their conversation, but it is the sort of talk one might easily have heard in a group of young Victorian men.

I overheard bits and pieces of conversation from the vendors and those who I presumed were performers, that told me these people made a living traveling about the country to steampunk conventions (and perhaps other kinds).  Just as the vendors and performers at a Renaissance Festival travel around on the road to make their livings, so some number of the participants in Teslacon appear to do.  There were, however, many people who had come as couples or in groups to attend the panels, parties, and to shop the vendor’s bazaar.  I felt as if I was the only passenger traveling alone, which was a little lonely in the crowd, but at the same time allowed me to observe freely.

There is a lot good to say about Teslacon.  Too many things to put into a blog entry.  So, let me just mention a few of my favorites.  The opening ceremonies were actually quite exciting because here was I in a ballroom filled to the edges with top hats and corsets and goggles.  All those people who share  my passion for the genre.  I felt like a newcomer, though, and really wanted to overcome my shyness to talk to people and not have to take my meals alone.  If I failed to do that, it was my own fault for not asking.  I am not adept at inserting myself into a group of freinds.  The funny thing is too that when you approach a group of people attending a convention and you are in character, even thought they are also playing parts, they react to you as a stranger and a little suspect.  Or perhaps that was my imagination.

As an inveterate introvert, I was keenly aware that this was a convention in which the extroverts dominated.  I was not, however, the only middle-aged steamer there.  I met many others who were my age and older — mostly attending as couples.  I had thought too that I might get to talk to the people attending my panel on Jules Verne.  One of the reasons I proposed the panel was because I figured that way a few people would at least know my name.  However, it didn’t work very well.  The panel discussion went fine (except that my bit went on too long, as always happens); however, there were not many people there.  About a dozen, I should say.  Which isn’t bad but when you are in half a ballroom it seems thin.  The rest of the weekend I spent listening to people tell me how much they wished they had not missed my panel.

Perhaps I’ll reprise it next year.

The mummy unwrapping was also great fun.  Not a real mummy of course, but it looked pretty real, and Lord Bobbins was very entertaining as he raffled off the Egyptian artifacts he discovered in the bandages as he unwrapped Amentep Seti.  It was very very well done and fun.  The ship was supposed to be stopping in Egypt in its course from England west to China.

The Naturalists

The other sessions devoted to parts of the story written by the crew of the con were scheduled at times when I wanted to go to other talks, and this, I think, is a mistake.  If the total immersion experience including a story is going to be offered, then it would be helpful not to schedule other events at the same time.  One should not have to sacrifice an interesting panel on airship combat to attend those parts of the convention experience.  But what I found was that the sessions that formed the core storyline of the voyage were not described as such in the schedule of events, and a day had passed before I realized what they were.

I must mention the Tea Room also.  Completely low-key, the tea room was a refuge with dozens of teas to select and many treats.  Pay $10 one time and you can stop into the Tea Room as often as you like.  Lovely!  I only wish I had spent more time there!

As always, there was room for improvement. I mentioned to Lord Bobbins that there should have been a larg map in the lobby plotting the ship’s course so we had a sense of where we were in the journey we were all pretending to be on.  He agreed and told me that one was planned but time ran out.  His creative team had their work cut out for them!

In addition to a map, a plan or picture of the ship too would have been fun.  There were many small posters in the hallways of the conference rooms to add to the setting, and HMS Trident emblems had even been put on the doors of our rooms in the hotel.  More of this kind of decoration would be fun.  Poster-sized posters, for example, instead of just 8.5 x 11 inch paper.

It would also be nice in the future to have dinner seatings as in a real ship, and grouped tables so that no one had to dine alone.  This would encourage mixing, especially if the purpose was explained to the attendees at the start.  Of course, it was not possible for the convention to take over the whole restaurant — there were other guests (and weren’t they baffled!).  I am sure that if I had asked one of the other parties of diners whether I could join them, I would have received a welcome, but my own reserved nature and the ordinary manners of hotel dining rooms inhibited my doing so.

Accommodating single travelers is perhaps too much to ask, considering that there may have been no others besides me.  However, I think even the newbies in couples or groups would benefit from some sort of cocktail or tea party at which it was expected they would mix and make friends.   There were parties at night and I’ll admit that I did not go to any of them, except for the gala ball, and that for only half an hour.  The bar in the ballroom did not have champagne, so I went in search of some.  I know there were room parties but somehow did not get invited to them.  However, there were a few that were generally advertised that I could — in theory — have attended except for the fact that I was so tired by ten p.m.

This may be a silly idea, but it occurred to me because one of the panels on steampunk as a culture identified the “party animals” and the “bookworms” as two parts of the community.  Could Lord Bobbins include a Library as a quiet room for us bookworms?  I don’t know if this would facilitate introverts making new friends, but a quiet place to read besides one’s own room would be nice.  I tried to read in the comfortable chairs of the hotel lobby, but always there were so many conversations going on around me and so much fabulous eye-candy, that it was difficult to read.  Yet, I did not want to retreat to my private stateroom.

On balance, these are very trivial suggestions, and I would mainly say to Lord Bobbins, carry one doing more of what you are doing! I look forward to next year (when I will be traveling with friends) and to the year after that, when Lord Bobbins says he wants to hold an “International Steampunk Exposition” drawing in groups from abroad.  As for me, I am just happy that there is such a great convention in the midwest, because otherwise, I would have to travel to the east or west coast for conventions, entailing airplane tickets.  Unless I get my zeppelin built….

OWL

It is understandable why historians are angered by both of these sins.  Nobody likes to be fooled.  And, after all, historical sources either exist or they don’t.  Of course, there are some classical Greek and Roman sources that claim to be based on works that are no longer extant.  Did they really exist?  No one can say.  But historians evaluate the reliability of classical historians.  If they seem to be reliable in citing their sources and noting when they are repeating folklore or mere hearsay, then we can say they are likely reliable and the lost sources were probably once real.  In Iolo’s case, his claim to be bringing forth ancient Bardic doctrines did fool some people at the time. How can the average reader know whether a writer’s sources are real or made up?  The only way to know is to examine the actual manuscripts of the sources.  If the manuscripts are lost or destroyed, then one has to make a judgement on internal evidence.

In the case of Iolo’s triads and his Druid religion, it seems reasonable to conclude that some of the material came from the author’s own creative genius.  When J. R. R. Tolkien wrote his novels as if they had come from ancient manuscripts, he did not attempt to connect those manuscripts with the history of our world.  There were only hints that Middle Earth and her kingdoms might have been our ancient ancestors.  Everyone can agree that Tolkien was writing his own myths and legends.  So, that does not constitute forgery.  It is merely a literary device.  Yet, one writer on Iolo’s Coelbren alphabet made the comparison to Tolkien’s elvish alphabets and runes, saying that Iolo’s were no more “genuine” than Tolkien’s.

That word “genuine” is very loaded with bias.  What makes a text “genuine?”  The word comes from Latin in an interesting way.  The Latin word “genuinus” came from the word for “knee” and refered to the custom among the ancient Romans for fathers to recognize the legitimacy of a child by putting the wee tot on his knee.  So, when you use the word “genuine” think about paternity.  If an author writes as if someone else is the author of the book, then the book, or at any rate the act, is not genuine.  Morally speaking, it’s just lying.  It may or may not do others harm.  Usually literary forgeries do no more harm that misleading their readers and embarrassing scholars who make the mistake of falling for the joke.

Iolo Morganwg is compared to two other contemporary poets. One is Robert Burns, whose poetry everyone accepts as genuine.  The other is James Macpherson whose Ossian poems are called forgeries.  Macpherson’s Ossian however, had a tremendous impact on culture in the Romantic period.  It was wildly popular and was used as inspiration for music and opera.  It appealed to the romantic spirit of the time that looked back on earlier ages as times of great love and loss, tragedy, and emotion.  The story of Fingal was dramatic and its “primitive” setting before Christianity appealed to people of the time when the churches seemed so very disappointing.  Corruption and schisms, dishonesty, and new ideas about the reliability of the Bible as history, led many to a radical desire to reform religion and society.  Christianity, the religion based on the Prince of Peace who preached forgiveness and charity, had turned out to be nothing but the accomplice of kings and tyrants making constant war with each other, at the expense of ordinary people.  It was comforting to think of the age of the Druids and Bards as an enlightened time when individuals were free to live and be inspired by a peaceful worship of nature and poetry.

The ancient Gauls, Gaels, and Britons probably had as much warfare and strife as any other tribal culture.  Judging from the legends, the warrior class loved to do nothing better than get painted up and steal someone else’s cattle.  The Celts might have surrendered to Roman military might; and they might have sceded their own religion of nature spirits to the sword of the Roman Catholic Church; but the Celts did not go away, nor did they give up and simply become Romans.  The history of Britain matters when we think of Iolo and the Welshmen of his time.  Between Roman conquest and Christian “conversion” the Celts saw their lands invaged by Germans (Angles, Saxons, Franks, Goths etc.).  The Germanic tribes and their cousins, the Vandals and Goths, effectively took over the Roman Empire and wrecked it.  At the same time, the former provinces of the empire recovered and became the powerful imperial nations of Europe.  By the 17th century imperialism was alive and well in the former Roman provinces.  The process of civilization that the Roman legions had enforced, the coersion of the Church finished.  Unfortunately for the Church, their control of the new empires did not last very long.  The Portuguese, French, and Spanish Empires, which were Catholic lasted only about two centuries.  Remnants remain today, but as a great power the Catholic Empires collapsed.

Catholicism was exported successfully, however, so from the Pope’s point of view it wasn’t a total loss.  You could always find another tyrant to support your missionary efforts.  The Pope inherited the Roman emperor’s mission to convert the heathen and barbarian peoples of the world to the civilized Roman way of life, and to the Christian religion.  The Age of Empire in the 17th-19th centuries made European nations extremely rich and this in turn fostered the Industrial Revolution.  The new inventions, however, undermined the authority of the Church.  The Protestant Reformation owes its success to the printing press and the growth of Biblical scholarship that translated the old Latin Vulgate (which nobody understood anymore) into the new European modern languages.  Protestanism created the Church of England, but the same impulse caused it to be disestablished in the 19th century.  Protestantism became a part of the radical desire for personal freedom — liberty, brotherhood, and equality!  These were the ideas fueling the French revolution and to some extend also the American Revolution.

Iolo’s time — along with Macpherson and William Blake, another poet of Druidism — was the time of Napoleon and the Napoleonic Wars.  It was very much like the Communist Revolution in the 20th century for upsetting the old world.  Communism, in theory also was driven by the desire for economic equality, a classless society, and brotherhood.  Unfortunately, it was implemented by tyrants who felt they had to use tyrannical methods to drive out the old tyrants — the Tsar and the empires of the “Capitalist” nations of the West.

What does this all have to do with literary forgery?  Well, it seems to me that the ethos of the age was one of radical skepticism.  Daring thinkers were pointing to the apparent truth that the Bible itself was a literary forgery, a lot of myths being passed off as history.  Moreover, the religion that was based on it had become inimical to the ideas of Jesus.  If Salvation lay anywhere it lay in those original teachings of peace and brotherhood, of equality rather than a class system, and of pacifism against war.  So, what Iolo did in creating his modern Druid religious texts was the same thing that had been done by the writers of the Bible.  He used some genuine medieval poetry that fit his ideas and intentions for the religion.  He created more material to make a new sort of Bible — one that presented the radical ideas of the Revolutionaries as being ideas carried by the ancient ancestors of the modern Welshmen, indeed of the whole Celtic world.  Even Julius Caesar, who conquered the Gauls, represented the druids as what we should today call “freedom fighters.”  Well, we would probably call them “terrorists,” but no matter.  They fought against the invading conquerors who wished to wipe out their way of life and replace it with Roman culture.  Sound familiar?

Yes, pretty much every empire since then has tried to do the same thing to tribal cultures living at a different level of technology.  The tribal cultures, and even the great kingdoms and empires of Asia and South America were overrun by guns (and germs and steel, as we know).  The possession of war machines is what made the European empires possible.  The American empire was driven by vastly superior arms and also by McDonald’s and Coke.  It has been just as destructive of the culture of those it conquered, even when no military occupation was established.  The power of a culture to change another culture is a matter of propaganda, but it also appeals to a human vice:  the vice of wanting to be like the cool kids.  What happened in Iolo’s work that makes it so fascinating is that it changed the dominant culture.  Not completely, perhaps, but in some deep ways.

As Ronald Hutton traces in Blood and Mistletoe, the figure of the druid as freedom fighter and wise ancient philosopher destroyed by brutal invaders worked its way into the English consciousness.  The Gorsedd and the Ancient Order of Druids took their place alongside Freemasonry, and today when the numbers of Freemasons are declining the number of druids is increasing steadily.  Two hundred years after Iolo, the Druid’s Prayer is still spoken by druids who wish to express the unity of all druids, no matter which order, lodge, or grove they belong to.  The fundamental respect for nature, the ancient Celts, the modern Celts, brotherhood of humankind, equality without social rank, charity, and peace — these are shared by all druids today, I would venture to say.  And those same values are deeply established in both American and European culture today, and indeed worldwide.

Does it matter then that this system was partly based on historical misconceptions and creative writing masquerading as ancient wisdom?  Freemasonry can be accused likewise of claiming for itself a lineage back to the ancient stonemasons building Solomon’s Temple.  But the fact that such claims are the legends of the organization and not documented history do not matter.  Indeed, that fact might be essential to the effectiveness of the myths themselves.  I would argue that “forgery” of the kind perpetrated by poets is exempt from moral opprobrium if it is used for good.  The best poets are tricksters and fools.  They are almost the opposite to historians, creating myths and legends that force us to look at ourselves differently; myths and legends that give the impetus of Story to our deep longings to change our behavior and the behavior of the dominant institutions of our culture.  The great philosopher of the Scottish Rite, Albert Pike, was a similar sort of great soul whose writings may not satisfy academic critics, but his use of myth and legend — of ritual combined with Story — is brilliant and effective.  It is a different way of teaching and knowing than the orthodox ways of academia.

We wonder what is wrong with our educational system today?  Why, for all our skeptical scientific reverence for facts, does it not seem to actually educate people?  I would suggest that it is because Story has been abandoned in favor of a soulless memorization of facts and orthodox interpretations of theories that might as well be myths.  The belief that all knowledge is only legitimite, genuine, if it is measured and proven — this is an idea that appeals to only one small corner of the human mind.  It is Story that excites the soul; Story that inspires children to remember lessons; Story that inspires all of us to reach for spiritual heights, for something beyond the miseries and luxuries of mortal life.  It is Story that we remember, not facts and formulas.  The more we try to turn our children into scientists and engineers, the less intelligent and less effective will we be as humans.  By revering machines, we turn our goal away from being more human to being less human — indeed to being not human at all.

Believing in the stories of the bards of our culture requires a mind far more nimble than the minds our “civilization” has produced.  The Romans were bad poets and worse philosophers.  Their culture was made up of things they borrowed from the Greeks.  And quite honestly, I don’t know if the Romans understood myths.  The nimble mind accustomed to stories knows the difference between storytelling and lived life experiences.  Nobody with a true understanding of myths would kill someone else for denying that a story was “true.”   But it seems that something odd happened when humans went from having oral cultures to having cultures based on widespread literacy and books.  When stories get written down, it becomes possible to mistake them for factual accounts of actual experiences.  I hardly think anyone thought about relating their experiences “factually” until the idea of History was developed by the Greeks.  The idea that narratives might relay true or factual accounts of the events of the past, led to a whole new way of thinking.  Suddenly we had “fiction” and “non fiction” made-up or not made-up.  And these two categories of writing were radically separated.   Greek philosphers had that one fault — the desire to divide everthing into either-or categories.  It is worth noting that this same either-or logic is the bases of computers.  But it turns out that it is not the way human minds work, and it is not the way they should be encouraged to work.  In humans, either-or thinking has the really bad side effect of causing murder and war.

I am speculating, but I like to think that the bards of old and their audiences understood a story when they heard it and did not expect “truth” in the scientific sense.  They expected a good story and a good lesson.  Iolo Morganwg, trickster that he was, claimed to be one of three remaining True Bards representing the ancient tradition (the other two were friends of his).  This was not an act of charlatanry — or if it was it was not only that — this was an act of symbolism and Iolo was saying to his world that he did understand that stories were just stories.  The genuine triads and myths of Wales were things that were made up by his ancestors, by earlier generations of poets.  For him to take that material and integrate it into his own poetry and rituals demonstrates exactly what I think the genuine druidry taught.  That is, creativity is the virtue above all others.  Druidry was not a religion of laws and commandments.  It was a religion of Awen — poetic inspiration.  And without a literalism and the mistaken belief that some texts were fiction and some non-fiction, it was a religion free of bigotry, hatred, and the either-or mentality of conquest.    That’s what I like to believe.  The old druids wanted to keep their culture an oral culture not out of silly notions of secrecy and initiation.  They rather knew (or intuited) that cultures of the book became insane.  When written words were fetishized and believed to be “true” rather than created by the human imagination, cultures became destructive and inhuman.

I like books.  I may even fetishize them in my own way.  But I have learned the lesson:  there is no non-fiction.  Striving, as academics do, to nail down language and pin down facts is the result of having mistaken a story for fact.  Which story?  The made-up story that told them that there was such a thing as “non-fiction.”  The religion of the book tells that story.  It says, some books are not made-up.  Some stories have been handed down directly from the Mind of God, and are therefore not made-up.  Step back a moment and tell me if you notice that my last sentence sounds like a made-up story.  Humans who began to realize that the Bible was made-up by human creators panicked.  They had to have some other source of non-fiction.  If they did not replace God with some other source of non-fiction then the logic of their whole world view would explode because it was based on old Aristotle’s “true-false” dichotomy.  So, scientists in the time of Iolo Morganwg were very busy creating the scientific method, a set of careful rituals in which they could invest their faith.  The laboratory experiment could save the great Idol Eitheror.  It couldn’t save the Bible, of course, and in that respect unfortunately pitted religion against science in a battle of culture that is still going on.

Our bookstore shelves are filled with fiction and non-fiction.  That is one of the most fundamental beliefs we have.  One that lies at the foundation of the scientist’s naturalism just as surely as it does at the root of the religious fundamentalist’s theological certainty.  Logic — the tool — has become the master.  The result?  The masters have been going slowly insane for centuries.  They have been trying to repress half of their souls, maybe more than half because it is the better half.  In the struggle to believe in the story of materialism and the logic of true-false, our mastery has slipped.  Indeed, the most intelligent among us are noticing that our whole story of mastery over the world, over ourselves, over vice — the whole myth has slipped and underneath the mask is a trickster — the Creator.  The Creator is us.  And if we create while denying that what we create is actually a story — what does that make us?  Ahh… wait… Wasn’t that the definition of forgery?

On the radio this morning I heard about a court case over “issue ads” that were broadcast before the 2010 elections in Minnesota.  The issue was “gay marriage” or as the opponents like to say, “protection of marriage.”  These ads escaped the campaign finance laws by not using the words “vote for” in their promotion of Tom Emmer over his adversaries in the election.  They merely said that the other candidates were planning to make gay marriage legal without allowing the people to have a voice — that is without a ballot referendum.

Did it have any effect?  Who knows, but I imagine there are plenty of otherwise lazy citizens who might heft themselves out of the indented cushions of their couch to vote for the “defense of marriage” candidate.  The Republicans gained control of the Minnesota House of Representatives, but thankfully not the governor’s office.  After Tim Pawlenty, Minnesotans had really had enough of Republican fiscal irresponsibility.

Political ads are rhetoric, they are not factual reporting.  They are laden with innuendo, scary music, and hints of diabolical conspiracies. Ads on the side of the Democratic Party tend not to be quite so alarmist and reactionary.  Yes, they might use scare tactics to alert the voters to such facts as global climate change and the need to do something about it, but more often they are talking about funding schools and creating jobs.  The Democratic Party is not called “the People’s Party” for nothing.

Critics will point out that the politicians of the Democratic Party end up pandering to giant corporations and trade unions, which is (in theory) just as bad as what the Republican politicians do: cater to giant corporations.  Those who whine about politicians lining their own pockets and giving their friends and relations cushy sinecures, are barking into the wind.  Those things can only be changed by scandalizing them on moral grounds.  Otherwise, they are a natural part of government, whether democracy or monarchy or communist-socialist.

What voters should be worried about is the fact that they are listening to Rhetoric.  Step back.  Do you know what the word “rhetoric” means?  I don’t suppose many Americans really do.  It is the science and art of persuasive speaking.  These days, images and music are added to the rhetoricians arsenal, but the art is the art of weaving words to persuade.  It is what lawyers do, only without any restrictions as to facts.  It is the manipulation of audiences using emotions.  Sometimes, the emotional appeals are coated in something that looks like reason, but is always predicated on emotional premises.

Now, there is certainly good rhetoric and bad rhetoric, both in terms of quality and in terms of intention.  Many people, for example, admire the rhetorical power of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  who used the rhetorical techniques of the Baptist preachers to arouse excitement and hope in his audience.  But compare that to the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler.  Because we Americans only see old film of Hitler speaking in German, the rhetoric is lost, but from his emotional deliver and gestures, we can guess at the power he wielded through words.

American political ads are nothing but rhetoric, and if they are taken as such, may be analyzed for their quality.  I cannot remember ever seeing a TV political advertisment that was very good.  Their appeals are usually utterly transparent and banal.  Candidate X is a family man, just like you.  He is concerned about his country.  A patriot.  Thinks we are all paying too much in taxes and that’s bad for business, but mainly it is taking your money away from you.  Subtext: the government is your adversary, trying to steal your hard-earned cash.  Premise: You are not part of the government and are a victim.

What does this cover up and distort?

Rhetoric that aims only to persuade without regard to a balanced examination of issues always distorts and ignores something.  The taxes appeal goes to people’s emotions by suggesting they are victims of injustice.  Some Other is taking your money and spending it on things you would never want to spend it on.  For some, the first half of this statement is enough: I’m being robbed!  For others, who might concede that governments have a right to collect taxes, the second half is the clincher:  I don’t want my money going to those dirty welfare mothers and poor people who just freeload off the system. Whether or not citizens should pay their taxes is a topic for another article.

Xenophobia and Fear of the Unknown

Some citizens are happy to pay taxes to fund police and the military.  Those institutions protect the middle class and upper class from their two most dreaded Others: the poor and foreigners.  Fear of foreigners is called xenophobia, and it is a longstanding rhetorical appeal.  Essentially, you can make people do anything you want if they are afraid of some unknown, and what is more Unknown that people who speak a different language and have a different culture or religion?  Everyone is a little xenophobic, just like everyone is a little racist: because we genuinely fact unknowns when we face people different from ourselves, and our little brains are wired to be afraid and even aggressive when faced with a member of another tribe.  Like Chimpanzees confronted with a member of another group — they might just kill the Other rather than give him a chance to show what he’s like.

For many Americans, not surprisingly, gay and lesbian Americans are frightening for this reason.  They are an Other, and one that is defined by sex, which is still largely a taboo subject among Christians, and is still closely censored by the government when it is alluded to in the mass media.  On television — the main source of culture for the average American — sex only approaches the surface in cartoons like “Family Guy” and comedies like “Two and a Half Men.”  It is treated without realism, either romanticized, or made tantalizing by virtue of its absence.  So, that’s what we get in the mass media, and then on the other side we get pornography, which also depicts sex in a completely stylized and fantanstical manner.

And gay sex?  I would venture to say that for many Americans, imagining anal sex between two men produced powerful revulsion.  Why?  Just because it is “unnatural” and “perverse.”  Right?  Well, nature has nothing to say on the matter.  Sexual intercourse can be anything that is pleasureable. The pleasure is designed to encourage copulation that reproduces the species and passes on DNA, but it is entirely fallacious to suppose that any sexual intercourse that does not produce offspring is “perverse.”  it is just sexual intercourse that does not produce offspring.  Sexuality as a human activity and desire is one thing; reproduction is another.

Yet, this statement would perhaps be a bizarre revelation to many people.  The three big Abrahamic religions officially argue that sex was invented by God for the purposes of reproduction and all the pleasure and fun is some sort of mistake, or perhaps something Satan added in.  But, hmmmm, Satan can’t really create things can he?  Well for a long couple of milennia, we’ve had to endure this sort of thinking.  Only it is really just rhetoric, not exactly thinking.  The rhetorician starts with a desired conclusion and then builds an argument to lead his audience toward that conclusion.  It isn’t about trying to figure out and explain what is observed in nature; it’s about supporting particular conclusions that are based on particular premises.

If we take the premise that God created everything in his infinite wisdom, and that he did so by making a bunch of laws to keep people pure, then anything that violates God’s laws is taboo and perverse and should be punished and excluded from society.   Approaching sexual pleasure, this becomes a problem.  Because, clearly people can have pleasure in sex without having any enduring relationship at all.  Pair-bonding is the tendency in humans, as it is in some animals.  Yet, humans also exhibit a more bovine kind of sexual desire: the bull desires to copulate with as many cows as possible.  Many species are like that.  Strong males have “harems.”

The institutialization of marriage happened at some point in ancient history or even prehistory.  Societies identified a particular lawful sexual relationship that was designed to permit men to pass on their property to their offspring.  For a long time, people had so little property that it didn’t matter, but as soon as the alpah males started collecting stuff and land and social status that could be passed on to a son, then whose baby was whose was an issue. Since, for some reason, women would still have sex with other men than their husbands and masters, it emerged in the ancient world that woman had to be closely watched and controlled.  That’s when human harems became prisons. But most men couldn’t afford a harem. Keeping one wife was hard enough.  So human laws were made and enforced to try to keep women to God’s law.

Our culture derives mostly from that of the Hebrews and the Romans, both of them patriarchal cultures where women were (in theory) controlled by men. Whatever social power women wielded had to be through the giving and withholding of sexual favors, and using their beauty to inspire jealousy or envy.  Aside from that, they could nag their husbands and make their lives miserable.  Nagging is sort of the stick to the carrot of sex.  And men were pretty similar to donkeys.  Extra-marital sex became illegal and policed so that men could be sure that their wives’ children were not the children of some other man.

Now, we might stop and wonder for a moment why anyone cared about this?  Even if a couple was pair-bonded, why did they care if one or the other partner had other lovers?  I suppose it was because other lovers represented the potential for breaking the bonded pair.  After investing a lot of money and social status into getting a wife, a man did not want her to be stolen.  And that is really the thing in patriarchal societies: women were thought of as a sort of property.  Very valuable property because of the sexual and emotional ties of intimacy developed over time.  The more monogamous men became, the more this was true.  A wife could be a confidant, a partner, a best friend.

The Protection of Marriage

Protection of marriage is protection of the pair-bond, and protection of the system of inheritance that we have constructed in our society.  Since inheritance of property is based on legitimate birth, you have to have legitimate marriage (“legitimate” from Latin “lex”  law, legal).  Is there some sort of illegal marriage?  No, not really.  Marriage has been treated as a part of law for scores of generations.  If it isn’t religion sanctioned by the laws of the land, then it isn’t marriage at all.  It is an informal, extra-legal, but not illegal living arrangement. Now, only a few generations ago, it was virtually illegal for a man and a woman to live together without being married.  If you did that in the middle class, you would be ostracized and often forced to live in another country.  In the lower classes something was acknowledged as a “common law marriage” which was simply a man and a woman who considered themselves married but had not the official sanction of a license.

So, why do we need to “protect” marriage as a legal institution?  The citizens who are so in a lather about letting gay and lesbian couples get a marriage license, usually seem to argue their case on the basis of Biblical or Papal authority.  It is forbidden by God.  Powerful rhetorical appeal to anyone who believes in the God of Abraham and Isaac.  But it is predicated on an assumption:  That all laws in our society must be in accordance with God’s laws.  There was a time when that statement was what they call today a “no-brainer.”  But then there was a period in the Early Modern era, following the Protestant Reformation, in which people started to ask each other what exactly it meant to be a “Christian Society” or a “Christian Nation.”

The founders of the United States were very revolutionary in their idea that church and state should be separated.  By this they meant that the USA should not adopt the sort of state church they had in England.  The Church of England was actually part of the government.  Bishops were political appointments, and the training of clergymen was preparation for a job in a branch of the great civil service, only with the gloss of holiness about it.  Clergymen dressed differently and were held to higher standards of morality perhaps, but apart from that they worked for the Queen as the head of the Church.

So, when the Founders rejected a State Church or Established Religion, they meant that any sort of Protestants or Catholics should be able to worship and none of the various brands of Christianity should be run by the government or given its sanction.  That sort of screwed up the whole premise that the laws of the land should be in accord with the laws of God.  For laws need to be interpreted and cases of violation need to be judged.  That was another thing the Founding Fathers realized:  that the legal systems of the day did not always produce justice.  Innocent men and women were condemned on the basis of poor evidence and unreliable testimony.  Take the witch trials for example.

The Witch Craze of the 17th century and the American Revolution of the 18th century, raised questions about religion.  Was it a reliable source of truth?  Who decided?  And who decided what exactly God’s laws meant?  The dominant religion of the time was, after all, operating on a set of Ten Commandments, and Jewish laws about ritual cleanliness, that were nearly four thousand years old.  The teachings of Christ Jesus (which you might think would be the main focus of Christianity) did not lend themselves to legal decisions.  Christ said absurd things like “give everything you own to the poor and follow me.”  That would hardly do as the basis for a legal system.

“Thou shalt not murder” and “Thou shalt not commit adultery” and “Thou shalt not steal” : these were things that legislators could interpret more easily.  Adultery was extra-marital sex, period.  And that conveniently takes in homosexuality while also attempting to control women’s sexuality and preserving the pair-bond.  Men’s extra-marital sex, was not an issue, unless a man was trying to steal another man’s wife, in which case, he had permission to shoot both of them as adulterers.

Today, we do not condone those ideas, though some of our citizens seem to think that we should.  The good old days before the welfare state, when men were men and women were women.  That’s code for men were in control and women submissive to their second-class position.  I have friends who joke about all our problems being due to giving women the vote.  Jokes are often ways of expressing opinions that are considered improper in polite society.  Once women started ruling “polite society” men’s misogynistic opinions were relagated to the rhetoric of joking.

There have long been jokes about homosexuality.  A taboo among self-defined heterosexual men, it could only be discussed in the form of jokes.  Either that or hate-speech, the rhetoric of hate.  When our fellow Americans speak out against gay marriage, they use the rhetoric of xenophobia and fear.  There is a belief among some Americans, that homosexuals are going to turn their children into homosexuals.  I suppose this fear comes from the unacknowledged fact that most humans have some homosexual desires.  That is why boys are so brutally indoctrinated to not have certain behaviors or thoughts.  In our still patriarchal society, boys are forbidden to e homosexuals because according to Divine Law, that sort of sex is a kind of adultery.  It is extra-marital sex, and it is not the sort of sexuality that supports the system of men marrying women and creating children to inherit their property and status.

Because it is tabooed, homosexuality brings down on the parents of such a child, all the opprobrium of the community, just as surely as if their child became a murderer or a thief.  This belief that homosexuals can be converted into heterosexuals and vice versa, accounts for the rhetoric of fear dosed out by Republican advertising.  It comes down to an emotional appeal:  If you vote for a Democrat, your children will become gay and you will be ostracized from society.

Perfectly logical, if you accept all those premises I have outlined.

The Right to Vote

The right of gay and lesbian couples to get marriage licenses from the state will never be fully understood until the undercurrents of our culture are understood.  Christians need to face the fact that America is not a Christian Nation.  It is a nation with Christians in it.  No longer enjoying its past dominance, Christianity has become a minor factor in the establishment of the laws of the land.  The majority of thinking Americans concede that science and reasoned debate ought to be the basis of our laws.  The problem is that there are so many Americans who are not thinking men and women.

One of the old arguments against giving women the vote was that women were not able to think rationally like men.  They were not educate to do so, and they were also thought to be biologically led by their emotions.  It is not true, of course.  But the argument might be good to resurrect because it has some sense to it.  There are both men and women in our country who are led by their emotions.  They respond to political rhetoric and issue ads that appeal to emotions that are not only entirely inappropriate for good decision-making, but also shut down any hope of reasoned public debate.  So long as people keep the rhetoric on the level of fear and hate, or squeemishness, we have no rational debate of issues.  All we have is rhetoric.

So, I make a motion that we do two things.  First, test our citizens on their ability to analyze the premises and emotional appeals of rhetoric. You don’t get to vote or run for office if you can’t pass the test.  Second, outlaw empty rhetoric that merely makes appeals to preposterous notions like:  “I’m being robbed!” and “My children are going to be turned into homosexuals!” and even “The President is secretly a Commie Muslim!”  In fact, exclamation points should be banned from legislative bodies.

It might also be good to pass a law that says if you do not pass the rhetorical intelligence test and demonstrate that you can think, you won’t be allowed to have a marriage license.

OWL

Sherlock Holmes was never called in by the Prime Minister to solve the problem of riots in the East End among the unemployed and hopeless youth of a country driven into economic “austerity measures.”  Nor was he ever called upon to solve the sort of crimes that the newspapers and the BBC like to call “random acts of senseless violence and looting.”  Maybe he should be.

So far, I have heard or read very little analysis of the riots that offers more than unemployment and despair as causes.  Possibly gangs are involved and persons (mostly men) who were already theives, murderers, or drug dealers.  A peaceful protest against the police shooting of a young black man.  Gangs and organized crime take advantage of that to cause chaos for the purposes of robbery and attacking the hated police.  That is one possibility,  I suppose.  Another: Out of work and hopeless young students hit the streets to emulate the protest movements in the “Arab Spring” in order to show the world and the MP’s that the same problems of tyranny exist in their own backyards.  The same poverty and lack of opportunity for youths to make the career for which they have trained.

Who is involved?  Labeling them as “criminals” dehumanizes them and rejects the causes of the violence.  Violence is rarely, if ever, “senseless.”  People acting violently are thinking and feeling something and have some purpose in mind.  The Mayor of London can reject them wholesale as greedy theives, but that is the sort of thing that the rich have always said about the poor when they riot.  But are they poor?  The part of the metropolis would suggest so — poor and black.  If they are, on the other hand, college graduates who cannot get jobs, that is a different situation. Then you may have an English Summer to go with the Arab Spring.

At the very least, it looks as if London is experiencing the same kind of protests as Athens did when the Greek government cut social programs in their “austerity measures.”  When austerity is imposed upon the poor and middle class and the rich are left to their priviledged and insulated lives, then protest seems not only justified but inevitable.  Marx warned us about those kinds of historical forces back in Victorian England.  You can push people only so far before they start to revolt against the Tsar.

Despite all the Western conservative rhetoric about the “failure of communism” and the “dangers of socialism,” I suspect that most people in England and in the U.S. would like to see the nation’s wealth distributed better.  We are the other half of the world, that embraced the doctrine of private property instead of the idea that property and wealth generated by a nation belongs to the whole nation.  I would suggest that it was not communism or socialism that failed, but political systems.  The Soviet Union collapsed in revots and riots because a ruling class had developed that was just as bad as the Tsar’s ruling class before WWI.

If socialism fails in countries like Britain, that is because you cannot educate people to believe in the sanctity of private property and also the idea of sharing the wealth of the nation among all those who contribute to it, including the poor.  Yes, including the poor.  They are surplus labor, a necessary part of capitalism; or else they are disabled or too old to work.  Unless everyone shares the wealth of the whole nation, as we have seen historically, the old and the young suffer and society devolves into a class of haves and have-nots.

The usual conservative capitalist argument against government redistribution of wealth is that workers will not have any motivation to work or do a good job if they do not have the carrot of pay rises in front of them, and the stick of potentially losing their livelihood whacking them from behind.  This psychological theory seems to equate human beings with mules.  Hmmm.  I’m guessing probably a false analogy?

If we have learned one thing since Victorian times when capitalism and industrialism were born, we have learned a lot about human psychology.  I think better models of human motivation exist.  Yes, everyone wants to be rewarded for doing a good job.  Most humans have a sense of pride that includes pride in their work.  And most will work better if they feel they have “ownership” of a project.  This is the psychological model promoted in white collar business.

It may have been the Victorians who gave us the lust for owning stuff — what we call consumerism today.  We want to surround ourselves with things we have bought with our own money as a reminder of whatever wealth we have.  Conservatives and the average economist you hear on the news think of being a “consumer” as a good thing.  It means you are buying things and buying is what drives sales and profits.  The currrent recession is attributed to a slump in “consumer confidence” — i.e., the ability to buy stuff they do not need.

Personally, I do not think that buying stuff one does not need is a good thing.  Rewarding oneself with a few luxuries, books, recordings, travel vacations — those seem healthy to me.  But we have gone past the point of such sensible luxuries.  The whole “consumer electronics” industry is built on a model of planned obsolescence masquerading as “progress.”  One who starts buying personal computers or smart phones, usually is forced to go along with these “advances” in technology because the old computer or phone they have had for five years stops working.  It’s only a bit more honest than the fashion industry, where annual changes are just changes, not “upgrades.”

All of this desire for personal property as an expression of our self-worth, does drive the economy, but is it healthy or sustainable?  For one thing, is this system turning out more people with a solid sense of self-worth, or more people who, for lack of Stuff, have a miserably low sense of self-worth?  The latter, is not good for the economy and it is the sort of thing that leads to mass riots and protests.  Beaten down long enough, people will rise up and say, “I am worth more than this!  I deserve better than this!”

They do not deserve better because they have done a good job selling their labor to rich capitalists, nor because they are good and moral people.  They deserve better simply because they are human.  They are our fellow men.  The ideal of universal brotherhood taught by Freemasonry is a good idea, a modern idea.  A lot of Masons today are among the affluent class, and subject to the complacency of their class.  If they are political conservatives, brothers are even quite likely to think that poor people are poor because they are lazy.  God helps those who help themselves, is a good old conservative aphorism.

I suppose if you think your brother is a deadbeat, you might think he does not deserve your help.  I think that deadbeats usually have a reason they are such failures.  Maybe they are novelists.  Tough-love is sometimes a good thing.  Yet, universal brotherhood based on the virtue of charity is something different.  It is based on the teachings of Jesus — that helping others goes beyond judging their attitudes.  If they have mental health problems, then a true brother needs to help with those problems.

One good thing about a socio-economic system that shares the nation’s wealth among all its members, is that such a society can support artists and writers much better than a capitalist society in which artists and writers are forced to sell their labor to someone higher in the pecking order.  More on that next time.

OWL

Fortunately for Saturn’s children, they didn’t perish but remained inside his body, to be rescued by the youngest brother, Zeus through a trick.  So, mythologically speaking there is a lot going on.  The Oedipus complex of the son who kills his father (not in this case to marry his mother, but at her bidding).  Paternal violence and filial rebellion.  Pretty dark.  And so it should be.  The Romans had a great annual festival at the time of the Winter Solstice called the Saturnalia.  Some writers consider that it was because of the popularity of the Saturnalia that mid-winter was chosen as the time for Christmas in the Christian calendar.  In any event, the winter solstice is the darkest day of the year and the longest night.  It is a time when celebrations were held in order to encourage the dwindling, apparently dying, Sun to come back to life and begin moving toward the north again.

Now, solstices cut two ways.  On the one hand it is the longest night at the winter solstice, but on the other hand, it is the moment of the Sun’s rebirth when he begins to wax larger and the days grow longer, triumphing over the night until the next summer comes.  So, in this respect, we might well associate Saturn with the Celtic Holly King, who governs the dark half of the year and fights it out with the Oak King of summer.

So much for mythology.  Now, the association of Saturn with Beech comes, I think, from Nicholas Culpeper’s Complete Herbal and English Physician, the standard medical text in the 17th century, and one still used by herbalists.  Like all medical doctors of his time, Culpeper based all this thinking on the doctrine of the four humors.  He described the humors — Sanguine (Blood), Choler, Phlegm, and Melancholy — as four characters that could govern a person’s body and personality.  We still use these words sometimes in the latter way, calling a very unruffled, calm person plegmatic, and one full of energy, optimism, and good cheer sanguine.  When speaking of Saturn, it is Melancholy that we must examine.

In medical terms, melancholy was a tendency to constriction and limitation.  Saturn’s appearance with its rings, suggests the idea of power within a circumference.  Freemasons refer to this idea as keeping one’s passions circumscribed within due bounds.   While Apollo was named the Greek god of Law, as well as art and beauty, Saturn was considered by the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to be the essence of a kind of control necessary for laws to work — that is, self-control or discipline.

Now, let us turn back to the beech tree and the use of its wood in wandmaking.  First, let me point out that any tree may have medicinal uses that have little or nothing to do with the magical character of its wood.  However, generally speaking, the character of the whole tree or plant is in a wand made from that wood. Beech has the association with books, writing, and learning in folklore.  It was said that its wood was the first used as a surface upon which runes were carved.  It provided the first books.  How is this fiery?  Well, fire being the element of will in magical symbolism, beech engages that will in the focused way needed for study, reading, and writing.  But that concentration and focus is exactly what Culpeper and his precedessors thought to be Saturnian.  Melancholy and the Saturnine character was needed to be a scholar.

The great poet Milton describes Melancholy in his poem Il Penseroso (Italian for a thoughtful man).  Melancholy is a goddess like a nun. She bore to Saturn the goddess Vesta as her daughter.  Vesta is the guardian of the home fires, famous in Rome for the Vestal virgins, her priestesses who kept her sacred fire always alight.  Keeping the home fire burning was a magical necessity without which the Roman state would collapse (See: Vesta).  Melancholy, the goddess of the poetic genius, is like a muse for the young Milton, a female figure separated from sex and marriage.  The Vestal virgins were sworn to 30 years of chastity during their service in the temple.  The point of this was to separate them from sexuality and the procreative act.  Sex is both procreative and pleasurable, making it come under the power of Venus and the sanguine humor.  Carefree jollity and carnal pleasure were considered by Milton as by his contemporaries to be distractions from the serious work of the scholar or poet.  Genius came from going deep within oneself, from walking at night in the forest, and from being alone and undisturbed.  The perennial dilemma of the college student!  Milton’s companion poem to Il Penseroso was titled l’Allegro, or the happy fellow.

In terms of the Harry Potter mythos, we might contrast Severus Snape to Gilderoy Lockheart.  In planetary terms we might think of Saturn and Jupiter.  But to Culpeper, Saturnian plants could extinguish the effects of  diseases associated with several other planets — Venus because she was the life energy of pleasure and procreation; Jupiter because he was the life energy of expansive joy and good fortune.  Fire, water, or air — Saturn was a killjoy.  He was earthy, cold, and dry.  Useful qualities if you are trying to cool off an inflammation and shrink swelling.  But is this cold and dry quality anything that can usefully be applied to a tree such as the beech?  Culpeper does so, but only in the use of the leaves as poultices.

The beech tree as a whole can only be connected to Saturn via the association of that planet with Melancholy and the further association of melancholy with studious abstenance from the pleasures of love and life.  Now, I do not think even Milton really thought that poetic genius and productive writing depended on a fellow abstaining from carnal delights.  But he certainly did seem to think that they were distractions, and any writer will probably concur.  If you start putting off thinking and writing because your buddies keep inviting you out to bars and clubs, or because you have a wife or girlfriend demanding your attention, that can pretty quickly lead to the end of your writing career.

Here is what Culpeper says (p. 212):  “Melancholy is the sediment of blood, cold and dry in quality, fortifying the retentive faculty,a nd memory; makes men sober, solid, and staid, fit for study; stays the unbridled toys of lustful blood, stays the wandering thoughts, and reduces them home to the centre…”

You might compare this to Milton:

Hence vain deluding Joys,

The brood of folly without father bred,

How little you bested,

Or fill the fixed mind with all your toyes;

Dwell in some idle brain

And fancies fond with gaudy shapes possess,

As thick and numberless

As the gay motes that people the Sun Beams,

Or likest hovering dreams

The fickle Pensioners of Morpheus train. (lines 1-10)

This is a little hard for the 21st century reader to follow.  I am not sure why folly is without a father bred (because folly is associated with women?).  The verb “bested” or “bestead” means “to set about with foes” in one of its old usages.  So, Milton is saying that the “vain deluding Joys” have little power over “the fixed mind.”  Note how, as in Culpeper, the temptation is that of “toyes” the playthings.  Dreams, motes in sunbeams, gaudy shapes, fancies fond — these are the temptations of deluding joys to be rejected by the fixed mind which is not idle.

In such a representation, Saturnine melancholy is far from inactive.  Indeed it is the opposite of idleness.  It is not the melancholy of depression, but the fertilizing melancholy of the poet walking alone in the forest under the moonlight.  This point emphasizes the fact that when we speak of alchemical or philosophical elements, we are not speaking of matter.  The element of Earth may sound like dirt, soil, rocks, and the solid body of the planet.  But it is not.  Not literally.  In elemental Earth, solidity is an energy in itself, stability is a force held in balance, and fixed materiality are the geometry of genius and intuition.  Saturn, in this sense, is quite compatible with Mercury, the governing power of thought and knowledge.  And in this respect one can see how Beech could be associated with Saturn.

But, I am still not convinced.  For one thing, I think the characterization of the thoughtful mind as one that must reject joys and companions and the light is too extreme.  A student or scholar of that description, locked alone in his tower, is more likely to end up crazy than to produce writing of merit and wisdom.  Sure, the scholar needs a room of his or her own in which to concentrate, but he or she does not need complete isolation from peers.  Saturn is, in the end, an extreme, an imbalanced character which if unleavened by the expansiveness of Jupiter and the love of Venus, becomes deadly dull. Like Kronos, such a nature ends up consuming its own creative powers, destroying its own fecundity.  The Beech tree, with its abundant nuts used to feed pigs and other livestock, is a rich emblem of such fecundity and productivity.  It is a tree of abundance, not limitation, and like the search for knowledge, is characterized by the joy of learning, and the acquisition of the wealth of wisdom.

In the end, I do not wish to give the impression that I think the herbalists wrong about beech trees.  Rather, I would say that this discussion illustrates the complexity of the character of any tree, plant, or person.  Associating beech with he earth element would not be incorrect; it would be an association employing a different logic and symbolism than the I have employed.  As most things in magic, there can be more than one right answer.

However, reading the remarks of the esteamed Mr. Bruce Sterling, I was struck by several statements. Mr. Sterling cites K. W. Jeter’s letter to Locus (April 1987) in which Mr. Jeter introduced the term “steampunk” as a tongue-in-cheek term for the “gonzo-historical manner” of his own writing along with that of Tim Powers and James Blaylock.  This letter to the editor is cited as the inception of the word “steampunk.”  Mr. Sterling remarks flatly, “No Locus, no steampunk.  That simple.”

I hardly think that it is that simple.  Perhaps without the books the whole thing might not have happened.   But a movement stopped dead in its historical tracks because a magazine neglected to publish a letter to the editor, or the author never wrote it?

What is most interesting in this statement is that it represents a view of history that is a common aspect of the steampunk genre and also of the western world’s take on history.  It is often called the “great man” approach to history and was prevalent in the nineteenth century itself.  You know:  Great Men do things that change the world.  In Mr. Sterling’s statement the great men are Mr. Jeter, and, metaphorically speaking, Locus Magazine.

We tend to look back on history and say, “Wow!  What if Isaac Newton had stuck to Alchemy and never invented calculus or the theory of gravity?”  Or, what if Napoleon had not been defeated at Waterloo?  Or, what if the American civil war had gone on for twenty years instead of four?  These “what ifs” focusing on inventions or events tend to assume that, for example, if Newton had not invented calculus, it might not have been invented at all, or at least not until much later.  Steampunk often goes the other way, saying “What if Newton’s alchemy paid off in terms of inventing aetheric light bulbs and weapons?  Or what if dirigibles never went out of style.”

Such a take on historical changes seems logical, of course, but that is because we live within a western ideology of individualism.  Centuries of reading “great man” history books from the Romans on has led us to believe that the future would be changed completely if it were not for the actions of certain individuals.  Maybe yes, maybe no.

Great Minds Change the Times

We love that theory of history because it makes each one of us feel potentially important.  We all can read about Tesla or Edison or Brunel or Zeppelin and aspire to be someone who counts, someone who does something that changes the course of the world.   That idea of being Someone is maybe the driving desire behind all adventure fiction.  It is also the root of most religions – a Great Man.

SF time travel stories have often played with the idea that some small action taken by a time traveler in the past could change the whole future in dramatic ways.  Little men can become Great Men because of a sort of butterfly effect of the actions of ever unknown common man.  I am gendering the discussion on purpose because in the old history books and SF time travel stories it is almost always men.

No Marx, no Lenin.  No Lenin, no Communism. Presumably, No George Washington, no United States too.  It’s that simple.

Marxists theory, by contrast tends to think of history as an ocean in which currents of economic and social change drive us into the future.  If there hadn’t been a Lenin, someone else would have led the Russian Revolution.  If Newton had not published Principia Mathematica, someone else would have.  Maybe not at the same chronological moment but sometime, because the thoughts of individuals is driven by social, economic, and historical forces that made certain ideas ripe at a certain point in the development of a culture.   It is harder to say that, for instance, dirigibles would have become a worldwide transportation revolution and airplanes remained the tools of warfare if the Hindenburg had not exploded.  Can accidents occur because of historical forces?  Of course, if it was a bomb, as some think, then the bomber would have been motivated by historical forces – presumably anti-Nazi sentiments.

And when the explosion of the Hindenburg had occurred was it inevitable that the public would turn against airship travel?  That is a plausible hypothesis based on social psychology.  But we might also ask: Could a great man have stepped in and calmed people’s fears and restored the airship to its noble place?  In airship history it was to some extent the lack of a Great Man in America that prevented the United States from moving forward with an airship program of its own.  Lagging behind the Germans in that technology, the Americans found themselves unable to build airships fast enough to compete.  The military toyed with them, but no big capitalist stepped up to do what the Count von Zeppelin did in Germany – commercially develop airships as a mode of transport to compete with steamships.

Because steampunk is something like traveling back in time and changing history, the whole genre is serving as a thought experiment (often not very serious) into the way technological changes can alter the development of society.  If the French and English had calculating engines to make their artillery more precise, would they have prevented Germany from ever uniting?  That is one of the questions raised in Sterling and Gibson’s The Difference Engine.  (I wonder if the authors intended a  reference to Derrida and the idea of différance – the infinite deferral of meaning in signifiers.)

The Roots of Victorianism

As for whether steampunk started in the moment Mr. Jeter coined the work, I don’t think anyone really believes it is that simple.  Steampunk, it seems to me was nascent before the 1970s.  I was there.  I didn’t read any of the three supposed founders of the genre in my teens, but I was a retro-Victorian dressing up in very slap-dash DIY imitations of a Victorian gentleman’s costume.  I assumed the manners of a gentleman as a sophomore in high school (1976) much to the delight of the bullies at my school who spent the entire year trying to flap my unflappability.  Why?  Because I was a fan of Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle.  The Sherlockian culture was alive, well, and actually quite old by the time I discovered the Baker Street Journal.  I was also a huge fan of Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle books.  The admiration for the heroes of Victorian science fiction (and I include Sherlock Holmes in this genre), go back a long way.

It was in the 1960s that the seminal film adaptations of the novels of Jules Verne were made.  In days without the Internet — What do we call it?  The analog age? – movies in theaters were the biggest influences on popular culture.  Most of the current steampunks know hardly anything about the 1960s culturally.  They cannot imagine a world in which one had to see a movie in the theater and then watch vigilantly for its appearance in the television schedules.  No videos, no CDs, no Netflix or Hulu.  Indeed, it is far easier today to watch your favorite SF movie from the ‘60s than it was in the ‘60s.

It might seem anachronistic to call the Disney film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea “steampunk” or to say that Sherlockians dressing up and having high tea in their clubs were “steampunk.”  They didn’t evolve out of teenage Goths or punk rock, or even cyberpunk.  In the ‘60s, “punk” meant something like a young smartass, or juvenile delinquent.  Sixties “punks” were not making a post-modern social statement.  They were just shoplifting cigarettes and wearing their hair long to annoy their fathers.  It was not punks, but hippies that everyone was worried about in the ‘60s.  Free love and blue jeans and living in communes smoking pot – that sort of thing.

To the Establishment, the hippies were breaking down traditional Christian rules about pre-marital sex and the Puritan work ethic, not to mention getting high with a drug other than alcohol.  “Countercultural” sounded dangerous and was not trendy within academia.  On the contrary.  Twenty years later, post-modernism and the culture war were all over academia and professors found themselves in the position of having to take sides over issues like feminism, racism, and even the possibility of fixed meanings for words.  Subversive thought had become mainstream, and that angered a lot of conservatives outside of academia.  The war started rumbling in the sixties as American values lost their homogeneity.

Against this cultural background, the oddball kid who was a Sherlockian and dressed up in a pith helmet, tall boots, and a riding crop, or an Inverness coat and deerstalker, a kid whose fondest dream was to have a real top hat – this sort of kid was a real rebel.   Being a Victorian was practically the opposite of being a hippie, but it was also not conforming to the Modernist idiom of the man in the gray flannel suit working in a skyscraper and living in the suburbs.

A  kid who pretended to be Captain Nemo or Phileas Fogg, was traveling back in time to the world of his grandparents, or even great-grandparents.  Reactionary?  Maybe, but it is hard to call a ten-year-old boy a reactionary.  Nostalgia?   Sort of, except that the longing for the past, for “going home” (as the original Greek suggested), was not about returning to one’s own past.  It was about “going home” to a fictionalized period of history where one was sure one would fit in better.  In that respect it was non-conformist.

But more than this.  As Midwestern American kids — my friends and I in our mock frock coats and fancy dresses (yes there were ladies) — were not in fact imitating the world of our own grand and great-grandparents.  Our ancestors were all farmers and merchants in the pioneer world of nineteenth-century Minnesota.  We were imitating the British ladies and gentlemen of the world of Victorian England and her Empire.  This world we knew not through the study of history but through Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H. Rider Haggard.  And more often than not, through movie adaptations of their works and Hollywood interpretations of costumes and the ethos of an age.  Victorianism wasn’t about imitating real people of the nineteenth century.  It was about entering a fantasy world based on the literature of the nineteenth century.

Was that ethos one of post-apocalyptic nihilism and despair?  Did we think we were all doomed to be assimilated (and maybe improved) into the Machine, like cyborgs?  Not at all.  Victorianism took H.G. Wells’ Time Machine and used it to escape those looming threats of the “population bomb,” nuclear war, and Totalitarianism.   It is true that while I was watching Journey to the Center of the Earth and The Time Machine, I was also watching The Six Million Dollar Man, which suggested that bionic limbs and eyes and so forth would be nice enhancements.  But the Bionic Man and his female sequel were just a little like Frankenstein’s monster, and to get those bionic limbs you had to become quadriplegic and almost dead.  They were heroes, but they were also unique.  Everyone wasn’t becoming a cyborg, or merging their brains into the matrix, and the cyborgs weren’t taking over the world.  (Well, only in Dr. Who.)

Victorianism in the 1960s and ‘70s was optimistic and Romantic.  It valued the human individual.  It exalted the cultured, well-bred, and intellectual man and woman in a way that mainstream society did not (in the Midwestern United States especially). Elegant clothing was emphasized instead of tee shirts and nudity.  Which is not to say that anyone intended to adopt the legendary prudery of Queen Victoria and the British middle class.  We didn’t even know about that.

We were attracted to a fictional world in which exploration and science did not pollute the air and water, or lead to nuclear annihilation.  We knew that in reality the nineteenth century was the beginning of all the pollution and destruction of the natural world.  But we were after a fictional world where all of those issues were simply bracketed and did not enter into the story.   Oppression of the working classes, destruction of the old artisanal world of creation, disruption of rural life — none of this was part of that fantasy world.    The world of Sherlock Holmes, Phileas Fogg, and Prof. Aronnax, was a world of class.  As American kids, we didn’t understand the British class system as a present form of alienation.  By “class” we meant that a man was cool and a woman refined — classy.  If you were a gentleman you knew it, and you had a valet to help you keep well-dressed and clean.   There was no oppression, racism, or sexism because, the movies mostly ignored those things.  Imperialism had its bad points, to be sure, but it really didn’t enter into the story very directly.  And anyway, the British Empire was a good empire, not like some.  The old British Empire of the nineteenth century became a kind of metaphor pointing to the new 20th century American Empire, and saying “See we are like that – a superior culture spreading our goodness to sad, starving people in Asia and Africa.

The good side of the British Empire, taken up in films and books,  was that it put the British into contact with cultures all over the world – especially Asia.  There was still plenty of adventure and terra incognita then.  In the 1960’s and ‘70s, as a boy, I had the feeling that everything had been discovered.  There was no place to go as an explorer of the old school, except into space or under the sea like Jacques Cousteau.  The best you could hope for was to become a writer for National Geographic Magazine, or to become a naturalist and study wildlife.  The world was mapped. There were no more wildernesses that had not been visited and studied.  Sure, there was more studying to do, but that wasn’t the same as the romance and excitement of discovering King Solomon’s mines or even the source of the Nile.  A middle-class, midwestern teenager had little understanding of the adult business of career and earning a living.  Which is perhaps why we could identify with British aristocrats and engineering geniuses.  They just had all the money they needed in the movies and this was kind of our experience too when we were being raised and cared for by our parents.

For years, in college and graduate school, I lived the gentlemanly ideal as punk rock and cyberpunk passed me by almost unnoticed.  My head was in the literature and music and culture of the past, in ancient and medieval history, in Dickens and Jane Austen, Keats and Tennyson, Mozart and Beethoven.  As a result there just isn’t any  “punk” in my steampunk.  Cyberpunk seemed simply paranoid and bizarre – founded, it seemed to me on the belief that computers actually worked.  With the Apple II and the early Macintoshes, that was hardly my experience.  Far from growing up with computers and the Internet, I grew up with books and libraries.  There wasn’t any Internet, so far as I was aware until I was quite well established in my ways.  It came as a welcome improvement over the sort of laborious library searching and photocopying I had to do in grad school, but I never have seen the Internet as something that could possibly get inside my head and occupy all of my time.  Machines were inherently unreliable.  My Dad made a career out of fixing computers that failed to work.

The love of technology attached to Victorianism (for me) did not include computers or even automobiles.  It was definitely not a love of steam-powered factories and coal mines, capitalism, empires or armies (except the cool pith helmets).  Perhaps it should not even be called Victorianism at all.  It was more like Verneism because it had nothing to do with who sat on the throne in London.  This Vernean dream was a love of trains and balloons, gaslight, horses and hansom cabs.  It was the immediacy of friendships made not on Facebook but on board a steamship, or in a gentleman’s club in London.  It was a love of fountain pens and hand-written letters instead of phone calls.     It was a love of the smell of a burning oil lamp, and the soft light it produced.  A pipe, a cigar, with male friends, the smell of tobacco.  It was the wish for a day before electric lights.  It was a love of mystery expressed in fog and manly adventure that tested one’s mettle and gave one a chance to be heroic.  The technology was in the background for the most part except in those cases when the hero of a story was an engineering genius.

Captain Nemo is the best example of such a technician-hero.  Some critics read Nemo as a mad scientist, but he is far more complicated than that.  He is a political exile who has escaped colonial tyranny and built a marvelous machine-home that provides for all his needs and the needs of his crew.  Captain and crew have a very dynamic similar to that of gentleman and valet.  The loyalty of servants is assumed and given freely in exchange for good treatment and even friendship.  Yes, it might be considered a romantic reading of the class system, but it is also an ideal in which those who serve others (the majority of humankind) do so without being mistreated, and actually have fun adventures while serving.  It is as much a romantic ideal of servitude as it is a romantic ideal of the gentleman-scientist.  And it may be more historically accurate than a lot of Marxist literary critics think.

Mr. Sterling remarks in the Locus interview that steampunk is not “inherently literary” but rather owes its existence to network cyberculture.  I understand what he means but do not entirely agree.  I do think that steampunk, so far as it evolved out of earlier Victorianism in the Verne-Wells-Haggard-Burroughs resurgence in films and comic books is born of “literature” in its broad sense.  Born of these cultural texts, as Derrida might say.   It just took another ten years for the works of Sterling, Blaylock, Powers, and Jeter to emerge as the effect of this earlier cultural cause.

I do agree that the movement  owes its present proliferation and diversity to the net.  But I do not fully agree that steampunk required the net.  Indeed, for pre-steampunk Victorians like me, sending letters written with fountain pens was much more fun.  It was the new way to “meet” people and “talk” via the new telegraph system that allowed the eccentricity of scattered individuals or groups of friends to become a movement.  Imagine my surprise when I discovered steampunk.  I had missed the cyberpunk fad and was busy writing a doctoral dissertation when the Goth scene emerged.  I was pretty isolated from pop culture because I was not that interested in TV and movies or bars and clubs.  But by 2010 steampunk had filtered through even to me, and I discovered to my wonder that it had become a fashion and trend to don top hats and emulate the explorers and inventors of the Vernean dream of my childhood.  The teenagers and twenty-somethings who have built the movement came at it when they were much more free to wear strange clothes.  Cosplay emerged as a term in the 1980s, and as a practice earlier in Japan and at science-fiction conventions.  I had been working at the local Renaissance Festival and donning my druid robes at Stonehenge without ever having heard the word cosplay.  How different to be born into that world now!  Perhaps that makes me a “born-again steampunk.”

Bruce Sterling attempts to define steampunk to be neither “about the future” nor “about the past” but rather as a “cybercultural, countercultural venture whose reason for being is to blur, subvert, erase or transcend those temporal differences. …[S]teampunk is a twenty-first century cultural space where the strictures of analog text can no longer define our relationship to the passage of time.”

Hi falutin’ talk.  Maybe some Steamers today think they are subverting something, or sit around saying to their friends “Boy, I am sooooo glad our relationship to the passage of time is no longer defined by the strictures of analog text.”  For me, steampunk is not about subversion and I never did think my relationship to the past was dictated by “analog” narrative structure.  I was trained to be a literary critic, but didn’t like the gobbledygook.  I went into literature because I liked books and stories and history and romance.  It is the sensual, aesthetic, inward, imaginative pleasure of a fictional world that is orderly, has beautiful machines, and daring men and women who can engineer such wonders.  Of course we don’t think about the awful working conditions of the lower classes or even the awful state of public sanitation.  They are not part of the fiction.  They are part of real history.  Some like their entertainment gritty and full of vice and sadness.   I like mine full of beauty, wonder, optimism, discovery, and dauntless courage.  In sum, I prefer fictions about the human spirit working through technology, not technology replacing the human spirit.

But I sure am glad my relationship to time is no longer defined by the strictures of analog text.

OWL

That said, my principal objection to social critics is that they so often sound like they are enforcing some political correctness on literature.  It is all well and good to critique specific works of art as being marred by their classist or racist or mysogynist or imperialist advocacy.  Literature that is written as propaganda is certainly lacking as literature (though it might be effective as propaganda).  But if an author writes a book or an artist creates a work of art that merely reflects his own point of view as a member of a class, I question whether that is quite the same thing as, for example racisim or sexism.  For example, Jane Austen writes about the English gentry.  Servants are seldom mentioned and so far as I recall, never developed as three-dimensional characters.  Is Jane Austen to be scolded and her work degraded because she neglects the working classes?  Ladies will take baskets to the poor.  Gentlemen will try to do things to help their tennants. But they still do live in their giant country houses, their family homes.  Is the author to be condemned for the life of her characters?  Surely not.  Such criticism is not literary criticism.  It is social criticism that treats literature as nothing but a cultural artifact of a particular time, and as such if it demonstrates the blinkered life of the gentry, then it is bad to read.

Take Anthony Trollope.  He was a very marginal member of the middle class.  His father owned land but lost it and the family fortune was lost in crazy schemes to start a business in America that was wholly unrealistic.  Trollope’s mother saved the family from debtor’s prison by writing travel books.  She became a prolific writer and successfully got her family out of England before the authorities could imprison them for debt.  Anthony Trollope himself was saved from destitution by a series of opportunities offered to him by freinds.  He worked as a minor official in the post office.  But when he started, it was pretty grim.  One might think that Trollope writes about aristocrats and the privileged. He does.  But he also frequently examines the ways that people from moneyed families can end up with nothing and despertately must turn to the only alternative open for them — marrying money.

That theme is one of Jane Austen’s recurrent themes too. Readers may like Austen because of the love stories, but there is a quiet bit of social commentary going on too.  No strident marxism or condemnation of the ruling class, but rather, the precarious position of those in the gentry, especially women, who are left without money and must marry to find safety from destitution.  A lady who considers herself a member of the gentry does not want to see her daughter have to become a governess in order to survive.  Austen shows realistic lives with humor and sensitivity, and they are no less valuable stories for not being about the proletariat.

Dickens, George Elliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell are examples of writers who delve further into the gritty underworld of the working class, factories, and lack of human rights upon which the British gentry depended.  I find this makes good literature too.  I don’t say it is better literature, though.  It seems untenable to make aesthetic judgments about art on the basis of whether or not it acknowledges the existence and plight of the poor and the working class.  Maybe it is because I am an American from the middle class, the bourgeoisie, but I don’t see any good reason to make such an argument.  Certainly a great deal of popular literature now as well as in the 19th century may be categorized as Romance.  Not the erotic stories that now form the genre called “Romance” but the older, more general meaning of the word.  A romance was originally a tale of knights and ladies, villains and quests, and unconsummated love (or not) written for the ruling class.  The troubadors started it with their heroic and romantic songs and stories created to intertain nobes at court.

Such stories were (and are) entertaining to people who are not themselves nobles.  The whole idea of nobility may be considered as a trope, a fantasy.  At best it is a sort of ideal, as in chivalric romances where knights rescue damsels rather than raping them.  It is entertainment.  Well, as more and more people became literate, such stories began to e written down and after the advent of the printing press, they were mass-produced as books. When did romances fall in the estimation of readers or literary critics?  By some, they were considered too silly.  Fantasy itself was condemned as putting a lot of crazy ideas into the head of (especially) young women.  Men who read romances might encur some social critique from their peers, as wasting their time. In the 18th century, when reading books really became the thing, people (men at any rate) were being schooled to think that reasons and practical knowledge was what men should think about.

Reading romances might be all right for light entertainment, but they weren’t expected to make you think about the plight of the workers.  That was what tracts were for.  As the novel evolved as a distinct art form writers increasingly wanted to represent real life and as they themselves were often in that nebulous rift between classes, they were well positioned to bring the evils of a class system to the minds of the middle and upper classes — the moneyed classes, as we might say.  A writer like Trollope was no aristocrat, nor a clergyman, but he wrote about them.  He wrote about the nouveaux riches and the speculators too.  He wrote about the real people he knew and put them into situations that were not at all fantastic, but nevertheless entertaining.

The Marxist critique thinks it is bad for people to read about themselves.  White bourgeois people reading books with white bourgeois characters, or full of stereotypes of other ethnic groups or workers are considered to simply perpetuate evil ideas.  The steampunk tendency to make characters people of rank — either noble rank or military rank — might look like the ruling class reading about itself.  Or, worse, the bourgeoisie romanticizing the ruling elite to which they wish they could belong.  Happy servants, or for that matter happy crewmen in ships, are romanticized — that is, they are not emulating the complexities of real life.  They are presenting those under-classes as content to be in thier place, serving their masters.  Jules Verne does this a lot in his books.  The engineer or sceintist hero always has his man, his loyal valet.  Impossible?  Fantasy?  Or merely a trope used in romance, the descendant of the knight and his squire?

Today we love stories like those in the TV series Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey, or the film Gosford Park.  We often like police procedural mysteries too that delve into the spaces between upper and lower classes of people.  Marxism thinks in terms of classes.  Reactionaries think in terms of classes too.  But a truly liberal approach will find a writer who grew up privileged creating fictional worlds that do represent the real world, and not just the world of romance.  The genres that grew out of the old chivalric romances are the gothic horror novel, fantasy, science fiction (mostly), and fantasy (mostly), and of course  the erotic love story sort of romance we have today which may or may not cross class lines but does not care about realisic representation of the evils of the class system. The realistic novel has come to be considered “real” literature.  Literary fantasy is judged by its lack of romanticism.  Which makes most of the work that appeals to critics very dark and dreary and depressing.  If you read novels to learn about the evils of society, all well and good.  But if you read novels to escape from the evils of society and the constant impending doom we live under today; if you wish to escape from nihilism and a society that seems to far from our ideal of an egalitarian world of prosperity for all; then you will want romance.

Which brings me at last to steampunk as a genre.  It is yet a small genre, but it is clearly and emphatically a genre of romance.  It is the younger brother of gothic horror, mysteries, fantasy, science fiction, and love stories.  The purpose it serves is escape from the mundane, more or less unpleasant realities of life.  The professional critic might prefer novels that show the gritty real world and all its problems, but to ask steampunk to do that is to ask it to step outside the genre of romance.  And it often does.  Gibson and Sterling’s The Difference Engine is seamy enough, even though most of its main characters are of the privileged classes.  One might say the whole novel is about oppression and the technology of oppression.  It is also about the emergence of a new ruling class — the technological elite.

The question steampunk has inherited from science fiction (of which it might be considered a type) is that question raised by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein:  what responsibility do scientists, physicians, and engineers have for the consequences of their inventions or creations?  What moral responsibility does the scientific worldview demand, if any?  One of the things steampunk stories do is to point out that this moral dilemma of secular science began in the 19th century with the advent of the steam engine.