g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
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Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

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Monday, January 10, 2005
18:05 - It need not be so
http://home.clara.net/andywrobertson/wolfemountains.html

(top) link
Here's a 2001 essay by author Gene Wolfe, on the subject of J.R.R. Tolkien and the world he created—and the lessons it has for us, regardless of Tolkien's repeated insistence that his stories had no allegorical significance. Maybe none that he intended, sure. But that doesn't mean he didn't have passion for a vision that is all but lost today, now that everything must be viewed through the frosted lens of liability and assurance, comfort and convenience, political correctness and irony and the satiric deconstruction of everything that has come before.

It is said with some truth that there is no progress without loss; and it is always said, by those who wish to destroy good things, that progress requires it. No great insight or experience of the world is necessary to see that such people really care nothing for progress. They wish to destroy for their profit, and they, being clever, try to persuade us that progress and change are synonymous.

They are not; and it is not just my own belief but a well-established scientific fact that most change is for the worse: any change increases entropy (unavailable energy). Therefore, any change that produces no net positive good is invariably harmful. Progress, then, does not consist of destroying good things in the mere hope that the things that will replace them will be better (they will not be) but in retaining good things while adding more. Here is a practical illustration. This paper is good and the forest is good as well. If the manufacture of this paper results in the destruction of the forest, the result will be a net loss. That is mere change; we have changed the forest into paper, a change that may benefit some clever men who own a paper mill but hurts the mass of Earth's people. If, on the other hand, we manufacture the paper without destroying the forest (harvesting mature trees and planting new ones) we all benefit. We engineers will tell you that there has been an increase in entropy just the same; but it is an increase that would take place anyway, and so does us no added harm. It is also a much smaller increase than would result from the destruction of the forest.

And, as Wolfe fails to point out (surprisingly), the value of that paper is increased well beyond what Nature or industry could have produced if we write an essay on it like Wolfe did. We create value through our own human genius; we add to the collective wealth of humanity with each creative act, even if it sacrifices something that we couldn't ourselves create in the process. Nature fills a niche we cannot; it's a counterpoint to us, a complementary force, and while it's crucial to our survival, it's not our salvation. Our Golden Age is not in the past, nor can we reclaim it by cheering the tsunamis.

It's possible, though, to envision a world in which "progress" isn't merely a word associated with androgynous social policy, Soviet space vehicles, restrictions on words we're permitted to use, an empowered babysitter state, or a genre of music defined by banshee-wailing, cacophonic Canadian rock bands—where, instead, it means an embrace of commonly understood folk values, where mutual respect derives from a shared community interest rather than centrally-mandated codes of conduct.

There may be a way to make that our goal, to evolve toward fewer high-level rules governing our actions and more individual rewards and consequences for them. If there is, one can start looking for it in many worse places than Tolkien.

(Via Chris M.)


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