One Person, One Vote?

In Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, Lord Vetinari, the Patrician who rules the largest city, embraces the principle of "one man, one vote." He's the man; he has the vote.

In "Franchise," by Isaac Asimov, elections are indirectly decided by AI as follows: An algorithm operated by the government's super-computer analyzes the political and cultural traits and beliefs of every citizen in the nation. One person is selected as the archetypal representative of the entire population and becomes the Voter for that year. Not that he actually makes a choice. He's exhaustively examined and interviewed, after which the computer registers his "vote."

At the end of Robert Heinlein's essay "Who Are the Heirs of Patrick Henry?" (which seems to advance the -- to me -- peculiar notion that signing a nuclear nonproliferation treaty equals destroying our freedoms, but that's beside the point), reprinted in his collection EXPANDED UNIVERSE (1980), he defends STARSHIP TROOPERS from the mistaken charges often brought against it (e.g., advocating a "militaristic" society, as portrayed in the abomination of a movie by the same title). He then goes on to discuss the general topic of voting rights. He expands on the novel's premise that a democratic society should require citizens to earn the franchise, rather than having it automatically bestowed on everyone over the age of eighteen. In STARSHIP TROOPERS, only veterans of public service can vote. That service can be either civil or military, and if military it needn't be in a combat role. Furthermore, citizens exercise the franchise only after their service ends, so the government isn't in any sense run by the military.

Heinlein speculates on other ways the right to vote and hold office might be "earned." He says the Founding Fathers "never intended to extend the franchise to everyone." They expected voters to be "stable" members of the community, such as by property ownership, employment of others, holding a journeyman status in a trade, etc. Well, yeah, but they didn't extend the franchise to women, Blacks, or Native Americans either. If Heinlein seriously advocated material "stability" as a prerequisite for voting, he would've favored disenfranchising the poor and most of the working class, a practically guaranteed method of keeping them poor.

His essay plays around with fanciful alternative ideas for voter qualifications. (1) The sale of voting rights, with the proceeds being the main source of government revenue. Heinlein maintains that the potential for corruption by the wealthy would be minimal, because most rich people wouldn't bother to spend lavishly on multiple franchise slots. I'd be less optimistic on that point. (2) Requiring a minimum level of "intelligence and education" by making each voter solve an equation upon stepping into the booth. Variations on that method: Pay a small fee for the opportunity to try to vote; if you pass the test, you get your money back. Or, more drastically, those who fail the test are instantly euthanized to improve the gene pool. (3) Why hasn't the quality of government improved with the enfranchisement of women, as some idealists predicted it would? Maybe we didn't go far enough. In a spirit of fairness, let's bar men from voting, practicing law, and holding office for 150 years. "An all-female government could not possibly be worse than what we have been enduring."

Foreshadowing a comment that has sparked widespread outrage in the current election cycle, he suggests taking that last modest proposal even further. On the grounds that "a woman who is mother to a child knows she has a stake in the future," suppose we legally restrict voting, practicing law, and office-holding to mothers?

He also mentions Mark Twain's "The Curious Republic of Gondour," which can be read here:

The Curious Republic of Gondour and Other Whimsical Sketches

Under the law of Gondour, every citizen has one vote. However, people gain additional votes on the basis of education or wealth, with level of education more heavily weighted. People who control more votes win higher social status and more respect.

I trust Heinlein wasn't seriously proposing any of these innovations -- all of which, except the female-only franchise, would mean disadvantaged groups would become steadily more disadvantaged -- but they're entertaining to fantasize about. As for the election-booth intelligence test, I'm reminded of a short story about a dystopian future in which every child, upon reaching a certain age, undergoes a mandatory IQ exam. Those who score too HIGH don't come home. At least in our reality there's little danger that systematic dumbing down of the population will become official government policy. I hope.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Living in Alternate Realities?

In Philip Wylie's 1951 novel THE DISAPPEARANCE, an unexplained phenomenon divides Earth into two separate, parallel versions. In one reality, all human males instantaneously vanish; in the other, all women and girls vanish. The all-male world predictably devolves into a violent dystopia, while in the parallel world women have to cope with running society in an era when, compared to today, relatively few females held high public office or were educated in other professions dominated by men.

For a while it has seemed to me that the United States split into two alternate realities in November 2020. Instead of diverging into physically different planes of existence, though, the two realities exist side by side on the same planet while nobody notices what's happened. We talk at cross-purposes to inhabitants of the alternate world under the impression that the other person lives in the same universe, and therefore we can't figure out why they don't see things that look so obvious to us.

This impression hit me afresh during a recent conversation with a person who holds political beliefs opposite from mine. The bishop of our diocese had published a message that, among other topics related to the upcoming election, warned of the possibility of violence. The person with whom I was talking dismissed the warning on the grounds that my party would have no reason to resort to violence locally because they're likely to win the majority of electoral contests in this state, as usual (which is true). And members of his party, he said, "don't riot." I inwardly gasped in disbelief. I wouldn't have said anything anyway, to avoid useless argument, but in that moment I literally could not think of a coherent answer. It seemed we were living in two distinctly different versions of this country, which somehow overlap without coinciding.

The internet and social media, of course, go a long way toward explaining how citizens can inhabit the same physical world but totally disconnected mental universes. Before the internet and cable TV, we all got our news from much the same sources. Fringe beliefs stayed on the fringe; if my memory is more or less accurate, there was a consensus about the general nature of political, historical, and social reality, regardless of vehement conflicts about details. Now, as has often been pointed out, people can stay in their own "bubbles" without ever getting undistorted exposure to opposing beliefs and concepts.

I don't have the skill to write it, but I think it would be interesting to read a science-fiction novel about a world that contains two overlapping dimensions without the inhabitants of those dimensions realizing they're not even in the same universe.

Anyway, on a brighter note, as a former co-worker of mine used to say, "Vote early, vote often."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

The Future of Elections

Earlier this week, we voted in the primary election in this state. Thinking about voting reminded me of a story I read many years ago (and don't remember its title or author). This speculative piece on how elections might work in the distant future proposed a unique procedure that could function only with a near-omniscient AI accumulating immense amounts of data.

After analyzing the demographics of the country in depth, the central computer picks a designated voter. This person, chosen as most effectively combining the typical characteristics of all citizens, votes in the national election on behalf of the entire population. The really unsettling twist in the tale is that the "voter" doesn't even literally vote. He (in the story, the chosen representative is a man) answers a battery of questions, if I recall the method correctly. The computer, having collated his responses, determines which candidates and positions he would support.

This method of settling political issues would certainly make things simpler. No more waiting days or potentially weeks for all the ballots to be counted. No contesting of results, since the single aggregate "vote" would settle everything on the spot with no appeal to the AI's decision.

The story's premise seems to have an insurmountable problem, however, regardless of the superhuman intelligence, vast factual knowledge, and fine discrimination of the computer. Given the manifold racial, political, economic, ethnic, and religious diversity of the American people, how could one "typical" citizen stand in for all? An attempt to combine everybody's traits would inevitably involve many direct, irreconcilable contradictions. The AI might be able to come up with one person who satisfactorily represents the majority. When that person's "vote" became official, though, the political rights of minorities (religious, racial, gender, or whatever) would be erased.

A benevolent dictatorship by an all-knowing, perfectly unbiased computer (if we could get around the GIGO principle of its reflecting the biases of its programmers) does sound temptingly efficient at first glance. But I've never read or viewed a story, beyond a speculative snippet such as the one described above, about such a society that ultimately turned out well. Whenever the Enterprise came across a computer-ruled world in the original STAR TREK, Kirk and Spock hastened to overthrow the AI "god" in the name of human free will.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Casting Our Vote(s)

Let us give thanks that this election cycle has ended, and we'll have a short rest from the acrimonious politicking. (Maybe. It seems that nowadays we hardly get a moment's peace before campaigning for the next election starts.) The political barrage reminds me of an entertaining article on that topic by Robert Heinlein.

Heinlein's essay and story collection EXPANDED UNIVERSE includes a short section defending his controversial novel STARSHIP TROOPERS and proposing, with varying degrees of apparent seriousness, alternative methods of determining who gets the right to vote. (You won't find this piece by scanning the table of contents; it's the Afterword to "Who Are the Heirs of Patrick Henry?") He suspects that one major objection to STARSHIP TROOPERS is that it portrays a political structure in which the franchise must be earned—a policy Heinlein seems to approve of. He asks us to stipulate that "some stabilizing qualification is needed (in addition to the body being warm) for a voter to vote responsibly with proper consideration for the future of his children and grandchildren—and yours." He points out that the "Founding Fathers never intended to extend the franchise to everyone"; a citizen had to be "a stable figure in the community" as evidenced by owning property, employing others, or the like. Heinlein skips over the part where the Founding Fathers didn't grant the vote to the Founding Mothers, much less people of whatever gender who belonged to the wrong race.

He goes on to suggest some possible alternatives to universal "warm body" franchise, in addition to the STARSHIP TROOPERS requirement for earning citizenship through public service. (1) The government's sole source of revenue comes from the sale of franchises. In other words, legalize the buying of votes. Heinlein believes if the price per vote were set high enough, few rich people would want to impoverish themselves to control an election. (2) Solve a math problem in the election booth before being allowed to cast a vote. As a variation on that plan, deposit a non-trivial sum of money first, which you get back if you qualify but lose if you fail the test. Under that rule, only citizens seriously interested in the political process would bother to participate. Considering that he thinks his idea of requiring people to solve a quadratic equation might be "too easy," I'm dubious of this notion. Having never really grokked math and having forgotten whatever I once knew about quadratic equations, I would surely find myself disenfranchised.

His final suggestion arises from the fact that female suffrage hasn't changed society and politics as much as suffragists predicted. Maybe the change didn't go far enough. Suppose, in a spirit of fairness, we don't allow men to vote for the next hundred and fifty years? Voting, office-holding, and the profession of law would be reserved for women. He goes even further with this modest proposal by pondering whether those rights should be restricted to mothers, who have an inescapable stake in society.

Like Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal" for eating babies, Heinlein's hypothetical ideas for reforming our political system sneak up on the reader so smoothly that, for a few seconds, one feels they almost make sense. He also mentions Mark Twain's "The Curious Republic of Gondour," which can be read here:

The Curious Republic of Gondour

Under the system of this imaginary nation, every citizen automatically has one vote. They acquire additional votes, however, according to their education and wealth. A poor man or woman with a "common-school" education has two votes, someone with a high-school diploma gets four, and a university education bestows nine votes, a coveted and highly respected honor. The number of votes one is entitled to also rises in increments based on wealth, but those can be lost if the individual's wealth decreases. As a result, in the government of Gondour "ignorance and incompetence had no place. . . . A candidate for office must have marked ability, education, and high character, or he stood no sort of chance of election."

Imagine living under a government where we could count on those qualifications!

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Following a Script?

In an article in our Tuesday morning newspaper about local citizens' reactions to the first presidential debate, one person charges the opposition candidate with a habit of giving "a scripted answer." I'm not going to tackle the pros and cons of the candidates; rather, I'm struck by the implications of that person's apparently unquestioning belief that "scripted" equals "bad." I suspect many people might agree with that assumption, because our contemporary culture values spontaneity. The general attitude seems to be that a spontaneous reaction is more "authentic," more "honest," than a pre-prepared one. The more I think about it, the odder it seems to me that an off-the-cuff emotional answer would be valued higher than a product of careful thought and planning.

In my opinion, spontaneity is overrated. How many people actually enjoy surprise birthday parties? If you had a meal ready to put on the table, would you really be thrilled to be whisked out to an expensive restaurant on the spur of the moment? Erma Bombeck wrote a column about her husband's impulsive suggestion that they instantly drop everything and go on a spontaneous family trip. An hour of frantic arrangements for dog-sitting, car pools, etc., later.... In general, I think most pleasures are enhanced by preliminary expectation. (If my experience of fifty years of marriage is typical, "spontaneous" sex can't hold a candle to anticipation of a planned romantic evening.)

The difference between "scripted" and "unscripted" reactions speaks to the purpose of literature as well as the patterns of real life. In the major rites of passage in our lives, a script gives us a framework for expressing the emotions of the occasion in a way most of us would find hard to articulate on our own. A funeral service bestows a shape on the messy process of grieving; a wedding gives shape and weight to the couple's commitment. (How many "write one's own vows" ceremonies scale the poetic heights of the traditional marriage service? And even when a couple writes their own ceremony, they're still following a script thought out beforehand.) As for literature, good fiction portrays the joys and sufferings of individual characters in a way that all readers can immerse themselves in and identify with. In A PREFACE TO PARADISE LOST, C. S. Lewis devotes a chapter to defending poetry that embodies what some of his contemporaries disparaged as "stock responses." Lewis values "a deliberately organized attitude" over what one of his fellow-critics praised as "the free play of experience." To Lewis, this imposition of shape on "the free play of experience" is precisely what we want from ritual and literature.

As he puts it, "In my opinion such deliberate organization is one of the first necessities of human life, and one of the main functions of art is to assist it. All that we describe as constancy in love or friendship, as loyalty in political life, or, in general, as perseverance—all solid virtue and stable pleasure—depends on organizing chosen attitudes and maintaining them against the eternal flux (or 'direct free play') of mere immediate experience."

Lewis recognizes that the differences between his view of spontaneity versus "deliberate organization" run so deep that he's not likely to convert his opponents to his opinion. People who "think that to organize elementary passions into sentiments is simply to tell lies about them" aren't likely to change their minds when the contemporary zeitgeist mainly endorses their belief. Imagine what Lewis would think if he paid a quick visit to today's world and found how far the attitude he criticized has spread since he wrote A PREFACE TO PARADISE LOST in 1942.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Presidential Politics Alien Style

Folks:

This is a blog about Alien Romance, but a while ago someone asked about the writing technique known as Worldbuilding -- and for most of my posts since, I've been developing a long instructional piece on how to do the kind of thinking native to SF while still telling a whopping romance story.

Most people think of worldbuilding as having to do with science -- and sometimes they dare to include sociology or psychology. But the real point of all the science (how big is the world you're building, what's its gravity, what kind of sun does it have, moons?, cycles and seasons, evolutionary pressures, contact with other worlds in this galaxy or another etc. etc) the real point is to start with the physics of the star's makeup, project what kind of worlds would circle that star, start with a raw dead hunk of rock and develope an environment conducive to life.

Then you have to populate that environment with plants and animals (or some bizarre equivalent) from single protein molecules on up -- then figure what pressures that environment would put on life to force the development of intelligence -- THEN decide what sort of Divine intervention actually happened to produce people, or what sort of Divine intervention those people postulate and/or believe solemnly.

And the point of all this -- ROMANCE!

The point of thinking through each step from raw sun to rock to life to intelligence is to postulate how physiology and environment combine to generate cultures.

Yes, Alien Romance is inherently about intercultural communication -- which may often include conflict. And where there's conflict, there's STORY.

But what good is all that hard work if the people who read your story don't understand it or care to try to understand it?

Your story has to say something about today, humanity, life on earth, our cultures and their conflicts. A story has to be relevant to its times (no matter if set in the future like Star Trek or set in the past like a time-travel romance).

The whole point of writing a story at all is to arouse the reader and provide an emotional experience they couldn't get from "real" life. But they must return to "real" life with some new point of view, some new idea, (this is SF Romance or Romantic SF -- any way you slice it Alien Romance is primarily SF and thus the Literature of Ideas - so readers must return to reality with an IDEA to think about and explore.)

You want to get famous as a writer? Produce ideas your readers will TALK about to their friends, thus inducing people to read your books.

So where do writers get those kinds of ideas? SF ideas?

Just watch the evening news!

We just saw an election in France that promises to change the political course there -- toward building a more capitalistic economy and edging away from the kind of economy that failed in Japan where laws made it hard or impossible for corporations to fire people. Strangely, the inability to fire people means that unemployment goes up and up and UP and the government crashes down in revolution -- or as in Japan, things get changed on the government level.

Now the USA faces a truly important Presidential Election. No matter which side you're already on, you know that the choice we make in 2008 will change things in the whole world.

Nearly a year before the first primary we have a field of 18 candidates - 10 of them Republican.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are going into this presidential campaign. It's a spectacle to rival the Roman Circus!

What's an SF writer looking for an Alien Romance story to do if the source of ideas is the evening news? And all that's on is Presidential Debates?

Sit back, put on your alien ears, and just listen to what these people are saying. Oh, yeah, they're all politicians. Like preachers, they have learned a certain "cant" -- a chant, a tune, a manner of speaking and a set of phrases, jargon, and so on, mostly incomprehensible to someone who's not American or maybe British (though I have to admit I don't understand British politics at all.)

Well, I did this exercise the other night and I've been watching the sound-bytes and reading some articles online -- and one thing leaps out at me more starkly even than in prior campaigns.

These characters all try to distinguish themselves from each other by WHAT they will FIGHT FOR -- not about their attitude toward fighting in general.

"Elect me and I'll fight for your right to X, Y, Z."

They'll fight global warming; they'll pledge to fight whatever people don't like at the moment.

How would that sound to someone from that planet we invented above, the planet upon which a species evolved to produce a major Hunk our Earthling can fall in love with while hating or rescuing him?

How we choose the SUN around which this bare rock forms -- (yes, worldbuilding goes that far back -- how you choose the sun) -- will determine whether politicians from those civilizations FIGHT or whether they PROBLEM SOLVE instead.

Do they argue instead of negotiate? Do they keep arguing until they convince everyone -- are their elections about finding out what is right instead of who is right?

If so, then our elections and our Presidential Politics will look pretty ridiculous or incomprehensible -- "How can you settle a war by fighting? It makes no sense."

Thus our glorious Hunk looks upon the Love of His Life who is running for President of the USA on the pledge to FIGHT FOR GALACTIC PEACE, and runs for the hills!

Ooops. Back to choosing the right sun to build our world around.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/