VOTE! (Reprise)

November 1, 2026 / Rick Ellrod / 2 Comments

Representation

In America, we have midterm elections coming up November 3. I’d like to make a last-minute plea for every American to vote (largely reprising my post from 2020).

Every now and then, it’s helpful to remind ourselves of first principles. In a democratic polity—a “republic” in the sense used in American law and political theory—the people of the polity govern themselves. (Please note that these terms are “small d” democracy and “small r” republic.) The way we do this, in a representative government, is to elect representatives. Since those representatives make most decisions as to law and government, voting in elections is the primary way in which we govern ourselves. It’s kind of a big deal.

In an off-year election like this one, the stakes may seem to be lower than in a presidential election. But we must keep in mind that the American government is built on a system of checks and balances. If Congress isn’t balancing and checking the power of the executive branch, it isn’t doing its job. And even local elected officials bear responsibility for the integrity of the election process itself, which is conducted at the local level, and for other local interactions with federal agencies. It would thus be a mistake to assume that little is at stake in the current elections.

The Crucial Hero(es)

In America, voter turnouts tend to be relatively low. Why would people skip their key chance to take charge of their government? I suspect much of this failure to take part in governing ourselves stems from a combination of things: inertia (it takes some little trouble to register and vote), plus a pervasive sense that my one vote doesn’t affect the outcome. Why make the effort if it doesn’t matter?

The logical flaw in this understandable attitude is that things can matter in the aggregate, even if any one item is not the sole decisive element that changes the outcome.

Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum deliver the virus in Independence Day (the movie)

The stories that inspire us, and help form our attitudes, tend to undermine this recognition and subliminally support our reluctance to participate. A story is more dramatic if everything comes down to the actions of one, or a few, people. If James Bond doesn’t pull off this next stunt, the World Will Come To An End. Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum, alone, deliver the computer virus that takes down the mother ship in Independence Day, which conveniently disables all the rest; the entire tension of the plot is funneled through that one bottleneck, as it were. A few superheroes save the universe—well, half of it—in the Avengers movies. In Netflix’s 2020 Enola Holmes movie (mild spoiler), the heroine’s actions save the one person who casts the deciding vote on a British reform act. We love this trope.

The desire to make everything come down to a few people’s desperate actions can even warp the adaptation of a story. A number of small, but annoying, changes in the plot of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies seem to stem from a tendency to have every crucial point depend on the actions of the nine members of the Fellowship. For example, in the books, the Ents meet and decide the time has come to attack Isengard. In the movies, the Ents decide not to act—until Pippin and Merry maneuver Treebeard to where he can see Saruman’s wanton destruction of the forests (on the absurd assumption that the Shepherd of the Trees didn’t know about that already).

In the books, Denethor sensibly sends a messenger from Minas Tirith to Rohan to call for help. But the movies leave it to Gandalf and Pippin to fire up a beacon that transmits the call to Rohan. (The fact that the lighting of the beacons is one of the most terrific scenes in the whole series doesn’t entirely mitigate the plot diversion.) When the Corsair ships sailing up the Great River to Minas Tirith turn out to contain relief for the city rather than further invaders, the movie makes this just Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli, along with the faceless army of the Dead—rather than a whole array of human reinforcements from South Gondor, as in the books.

Aggregates and Bottlenecks

But when we return to the mundane world, we have to put aside this tempting way of telling a story. We don’t often see this pattern of single world-saving heroic acts. We find instead that crucial changes depend on the combined actions of innumerable people, all doing the right (or wrong) things.

Peter Jackson’s Gandalf gets the underlying point right in one of the Hobbit movies:

I have found it is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk, that keeps [sic] the darkness at bay. Simple acts of kindness and love. (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012), at about 1:42)

We must all be heroes now.

Of course, going in and making some marks on a piece of paper doesn’t feel much like heroism. But in this kind of case, the only way to achieve anything is by small actions, each of which contributes to a whole. The entire set makes a difference; but there can’t be an entire set unless there are individual acts. In voting, as in picking up one’s trash, or in the innumerable actions that make up a free market, we must carry out the individual actions to produce the aggregate effect.

Turning the Tide in Real Life

If we need further encouragement, we can look to the additional fact that even one vote, or a few, can sometimes make the crucial difference.

Virginia Board of Elections draws lots to decide tied election

In Virginia, there was an election in 2017 that resulted in a literal tie: an equal number of votes for each candidate. A purely random action had to be used to break the tie. “Each candidate’s name was placed in a film canister; those were then placed into a bowl and one name was drawn.” (NPR, 1/4/2018)

Even a few votes, even one, can make the critical difference, as recounted here and here—notably including “the year 2000 U.S. presidential election, decided by a few hundred votes in the state of Florida” (Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), “Further Readings” for ch. 16, p. 556) Over and above my contribution to the whole, I cannot know in advance whether my vote might not be, in fact, the deciding factor in a hotly contested election.

Moreover, even if the outcome of an election might be clear without my vote, adding to the total is not pointless. In today’s atmosphere of distrust and suspicion, the clearer and more decisive the result, the less opportunity there will be to cast doubt on the results. Every vote added to the total reduces the number of people who will be convinced that the results are false, and thus directly supports the rule of law.

This concern also bears on the notion of voting for a third-party candidate. In the upcoming election, many people may be sufficiently dissatisfied with both major parties to be motivated to cast their ballots for a third-party contender. It might feel virtuous to spurn both parties and “vote one’s conscience” in favor of a candidate who cannot win. But in practice, that action will only serve to make the results less clear, at a time when clarity is vitally needed.

L’Envoi

I urge every eligible voter to take part in this crucial action of self-government. (I cast my ballot early, last week.) Unless you’re actually in the hospital in a coma (or the like), there’s no excuse not to participate.

Noblesse Oblige

August 25, 2026 / Rick Ellrod / 4 Comments

Introduction

One of the advantages of introducing my wife Geraldine to Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga – as well as her Sharing Knife series (both in audiobook form) – has been the opportunity to think further about everything these stories bring up. Revisiting these favorite fictional haunts may be particularly illuminating when we do it in an alternate format, with an audio narrator contributing to our perception of the story along with the text. It’s often said that authors should read their own writings aloud, because we catch different things that way than by simply reading them in print; and the same may be true of another author’s works.

One of the continuing themes of the Vorkosigan series is the role of personal connections in government. Our principal protagonist, Miles Vorkosigan, is the son of a Count in the Barrayaran interplanetary empire, limited in extent (three planets) but headed by an Emperor. In a quasi-feudal setup of this sort, even one that’s gradually developing in a more democratic direction as on Barrayar, aristocrats have certain privileges, and the Emperor has quite extensive powers. The system is held together by essentially personal relationships. The Counts have their authority through oaths to the Emperor, and some members of their households, such as “armsmen,” swear similar individual oaths to the Counts.

Cutting Through the Red Tape

At one point in Miles’s rather irregular career, Emperor Gregor appoints him an “Imperial Auditor.” These Auditors are the Emperor’s elite troubleshooters: their activities reach far beyond financial audits, although Bujold does trace the term back to financial roles (and indeed tells us that the “Counts” were originally the Emperor’s accountants, deputized to ensure taxes were properly paid). At the time of the stories, an Imperial Auditor speaks with the Emperor’s Voice and thus has almost unlimited authority – although one summary notes that “most subjects endowed with their superior’s Voice tended to be circumspect about its power.”

Miles’s actions bear this out. He doesn’t use his Auditorial authority for his own benefit; he uses it to carry out necessary investigations and organize the empire’s officials and staff for necessary actions. The overriding delegated authority of the Emperor allows things to move faster than normal bureaucratic procedures would allow.

In addition, Miles uses his authority to override the usual procedures in the name of mercy or decency. In a notable example, one Madame Radovas, the widow of a scientist who had just resigned from government service, asks whether she will receive the normal survivor’s benefits. The rules say that she isn’t eligible, since her late husband had resigned before his death. Miles, however, makes an exception. “Gregor does not approve of widows being left destitute. Trust me on this one. Vorsoisson, go ahead and run the benefits through for her anyway.” Komarr (1998), (ch. 6, pp. 117-118)

Our sympathies are all with Miles in this case. Even though Madame Radovas actually turns out to be one of the bad guys eventually, the reader enjoys the way Miles has cut through the red tape to achieve a more merciful result than the regular rules would allow. He’s using his peculiar power for a good purpose.

An even more dramatic example occurs in the following volume. In one of my favorite scenes, the Emperor himself intervenes at the request of a young boy, who (with his mother) is trying to resist being taken away and placed under the care of a well-meaning but misguided relative. The law might arguably be on the relative’s side, at least for the moment, but Emperor Gregor can suspend this transfer of custody until things work themselves out. We are delighted by the consternation and embarrassment of the misguided relatives because we, the readers, have the privileged position of knowing that Gregor is in fact making things right. (A Civil Campaign (1999), ch. 18-19, pp. 462, 476)

Most of us get a kick out of seeing some sympathetic character bypass the rules to get the right thing done, whether it’s the “maverick cop who doesn’t play by the rules” (as my children learned to recite the cliché) or the super-hero who operates outside the usual constraints. But this only works because we agree with the end result. If the characters with special privileges or abilities were using them to make things worse, our reaction would be exactly the opposite: outrage that someone was bending the rules for personal gain or for evil ends.

The Obligations of Power

The old French expression noblesse oblige (literally, “nobility obliges”) captures an idea that has been in play throughout human history: as the Wikipedia page puts it, “nobility extends beyond mere entitlement, requiring people who hold such status to fulfill social responsibilities.”

Even in the traditional feudal system, obligations actually run both ways: lords have obligations to their vassals, reciprocating the vassals’ obligations to their lord. We see this in the Vorkosigan saga: for example, early in the series Miles takes a man’s oath as an armsman to protect the man in question, rather than to reduce him to servitude. (The Warrior’s Apprentice (1986), ch. 5)

But noblesse oblige extends beyond this. It carries the sense that the more powerful are especially required to use their powers rightly, even dutifully. It stands in opposition to the notion that might makes right – that it’s okay to do whatever you can get away with or force others to accept.

The concept ties in with the Biblical notion that the purpose of a ruler is to serve, not to dominate (Matt. 20:25-28). Or, as it’s put in another quasi-feudal science fiction setting, David Weber’s Dahak series: the protagonist’s children are to gain “[t]he knowledge that power is a responsibility. The belief that who they are and what they do is as important as what they’re born to. A tradition of – well, of service.” (Heirs of Empire (1996), ch. 5, p. 60)

With great power comes great responsibility

This formulation reminds us that the concept isn’t limited to an aristocracy. It applies to anyone with power of any sort. The modern version (for us commoners) is the tagline we associate today with Spider-Man: “with great power comes great responsibility.” Or, in more traditional language: “Much will be required of the person entrusted with much.” (Luke 12:48)

Virtue and Power

We trust someone to cut across the rules, then, when we’re confident they will do the right thing. For an aristocrat, we want them to have that sense of noblesse oblige. If we’re going to have aristocrats, we need virtuous aristocrats.

The Bujold examples above work because we trust Miles and his circle to do the right things with their power. This isn’t a given. Even on Barrayar, those in charge haven’t always been virtuous. “Mad Emperor Yuri,” a generation earlier, is frequently cited in the stories. And Gregor’s father, Prince Serg, is shown in the early stories as a sadist willing to violate the rules on treatment of prisoners for his own enjoyment. Even Emperor Ezar Vorbarra, who overthrew Yuri, behaves high-handedly (for example, inserting an experimental memory chip in a lieutenant more or less to see what would happen). The admirable practice of governance currently in effect is quite recent.

History, as well as fiction, teach us that aristocrats are likely to abuse their privileges. It may take exceptional people to turn that natural tendency in the right direction. In the Vorkosigan history, the relatively benign situation we encounter in most of the series owes a great deal to the positive influence of Miles’s parents, Aral and Cordelia Vorkosigan. In particular, Aral was the regent for Emperor Gregor during his formative years. But we can also see such influence, direct or indirect, on others, such as Ivan Vorpatril and Simon Illyan. (If I’m drowning you in obscure references to a series you haven’t yet read, please accept my apologies – then go ahead and read the stories, they’re worth it.)

To take the case of a different interstellar empire, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye (1974) gives us starship captain Rod Blaine, who is frequently annoyed by his irreverent sailing master Kevin Renner. Like Miles, Rod is dedicated to doing the right thing. Renner is happy to indulge in digs at the Empire’s aristocracy, but when push comes to shove, he admits that even he depends on the governing class to be the kind of people who can be trusted: “Hell, Captain, it’s because of guys like you that I can accept the aristocracy—” (ch. 40, p. 341)

Of course, it’s easier to ensure this in fiction than in real life. An author can arrange for good people to be in charge, people who understand their responsibilities. In actual practice, it’s harder to distinguish the responsible from the irresponsible, or to prevent the latter from gaining power. We can choose whether to write a utopia, a dystopia, or something in between; but more is needed to stave off the real-life drift toward dystopia.

Virtue and Wisdom

Even the best of intentions are not enough. Rules, even those we stigmatize as “red tape,” are generally made for a reason; thus ignoring them will often lead to unfortunate consequences. It takes unusual perceptiveness and wisdom to recognize the exceptional cases when the rules should be ignored. We trust Miles not only because he’s a good man, but also because he’s incredibly smart – which is why we enjoy watching him get himself into untenable situations and then frantically improvise his way out of them.

What is true of an aristocracy – hereditary leaders – is more broadly true of any leaders. We need them to be people of both good will and good judgment. Thus, for example, an article last year by Fareed Zakaria notes the need, in a non-aristocratic society, for “expanding access to education and networks so that mobility is real, while cultivating leaders who can see beyond their class and credentials. The problem is not that elites exist but that they have grown detached.” (emphasis added) We want anyone with power to have learned Spidey’s lesson about acting responsibly.

The themes we’re investigating here thus converge with those of some earlier posts. They generalize the concept of “the Good King” and further articulate the notion of the rule of law. As the latter post pointed out, we need good people as well as sound laws. “Good men can make poor laws workable; poor men will wreak havoc with good laws” (James M. Landis, 1960; see this article at 432 & n.107).

The lead character in a Harry Turtledove novel used to ask herself when in difficulties: what would Miles Vorkosigan do? If we are in a position to exercise any power or authority, we can certainly imitate Miles in one respect – in cultivating a sense of noblesse oblige. Any of us may be called upon to be a leader at times; we should be prepared to be the right kind of leader.

The Purpose of AI

January 6, 2025 / Rick Ellrod / 2 Comments

I recently read an excellent cautionary tale (and with a romance to boot), David Walton’s Three Laws Lethal (2019). The subject of “artificial intelligence” or AI (it isn’t really intelligence, but that’s another story) is hot. To take only one rather specialized example, the Federal Communications Commission’s Consumer Advisory Committee last year carried out a brief survey of the roles of AI, both harmful and helpful, in dealing with robocalls and robotexts. So it seems like an appropriate moment to take a look at Walton’s insights.

Frankenstein and the Three Laws

It’s well known that the early history of SF—starting with what’s considered by some to be the first modern SF story, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)—is replete with tales of constructed creatures that turn on their creators and destroy them. Almost as well known is how Isaac Asimov, as he explains in the introduction to his anthology The Rest of the Robots (1964), “quickly grew tired of this dull hundred-times-told tale.” Like other tools, Asimov suggested, robots would be made with built-in safeguards. Knives have hilts, stairs have banisters, electric wiring is insulated. The safeguards Asimov devised, around 1942, gradually and through conversations with SF editor John W. Campbell, were his celebrated Three Laws of Robotics:

1—A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2—A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3—A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

The “positronic” or “Asenion” robots in many of Asimov’s stories were thus unable to attack their human creators (First Law). They could not run wild and disobey orders (Second Law). Asimov’s robot could not become yet another Frankenstein’s monster.

That still left plenty of room for fascinating stories—many of them logic puzzles built around the Three Laws themselves. A number of the loopholes and ramifications of the Three Laws are described in the Wikipedia article linked above. It even turned out to be possible to use robots to commit murder, albeit unwittingly, as in Asimov’s novel The Naked Sun (1956). When he eventually integrated his robot stories with his Foundation series, he expanded the Three Laws construct considerably—but that’s beyond our scope here.

Autonomous Vehicles

To discuss Three Laws Lethal, I must of course issue a

Walton’s book does cite Asimov’s laws just before Chapter One, but his characters don’t start out by trying to create Asenion-type humanoid robots. They’re just trying to start a company to design and sell self-driving cars.

The book starts with a vignette in which a family riding in a “fully automated Mercedes” runs into an accident. To save the passengers from a falling tree, the car swerves out of the way, in the process hitting a motorcyclist in the next lane. The motorcyclist is killed. The resulting lawsuit by the cyclist’s wife turns up at various points in the story that follows.

Tyler Daniels and Brandon Kincannon are friends, contemporary Silicon Valley types trying to get funding for a startup. Computer genius Naomi Sumner comes up with a unique way to make their automated taxi service a success: she sets up a machine learning process by creating a virtual world with independent AIs that compete for resources to “live” on (ch. 2 and 5). She names them “Mikes” after a famous science-fictional self-aware computer. The Mikes win resources by driving real-world cars successfully. In a kind of natural selection, the Mikes that succeed in driving get more resources and live longer: the desired behavior is “reinforced.”

Things start to go wrong almost at once, though. The learning or reinforcement methods programmed into the AIs don’t include anything like the Three Laws. A human being who’s been testing the first set of autonomous (Mike-guided) vehicles by trying to crash into them is killed by the cars themselves—since they perceive that human being as a threat. Two competing fleets of self-guided vehicles see each other as adversaries and can be turned against their controllers’ enemies. The story is both convincing—the AI development method sounds quite plausible and up-to-the-minute (at least to this layman)—and unnerving.

But the hypothetical AI system in the novel, it seems to me, casts some light on an aspect of AI that is not highlighted in Three Laws-type stories.

Having a Goal

The Mikes in Three Laws Lethal are implicitly given a purpose by being set up to fight for survival. That purpose is survival itself. We recall that a robot’s survival is also included as the third of the Three Laws—but in that context survival is subordinated to protecting humans and obeying orders. Asimov’s robots are conceived as basically passive. They would resist being destroyed (unless given orders to the contrary), but they don’t take positive action to seek the preservation or extension of their own existence. The Mikes, however, like living beings, are motivated to affirmatively seek and maintain themselves.

If an AI population is given a goal of survival or expansion, then we’re all set up for Frankensteinian violations of the First Law. That’s what the book depicts, although in a far more sophisticated and thoughtful way than the old-style SF potboilers Asimov so disliked.

At one point in Walton’s story, Naomi decides to “change the objective. She didn’t want them to learn to drive anymore. She wanted them to learn to speak” (ch. 23, p. 248)—in order to show they are sapient. Changing the goal would change the behavior. As another character puts it later on, “[i]t’s not a matter of preventing them from doing that they want” (as if a Law of Robotics were constraining them from pursuing a purpose, like a commandment telling humans what not to do). Rather, “[w]e teach them what to want in the first place.” (ch. 27, p. 288)

Goals and Ethics

The Three Laws approach assumes that the robot or AI has been given a purpose—in Asimov’s conception, by being given orders—and the Laws set limits to the actions it can take in pursuing that purpose. If the Laws can be considered a set of ethical principles, then they correspond to what’s called “deontological” ethics, a set of rules that constrain how a being is allowed to act. What defines right action is based on these rules, rather than on consequences or outcomes. In the terms used by philosopher Immanuel Kant, the categorical imperative, the basic moral law, determines whether we can lawfully act in accordance with our inclinations. The inclinations, which are impulses directing us toward some goal or desired end, are taken for granted; restraining them is the job of ethics.

Some other forms of ethics focus primarily on the end to be achieved, rather than on the guardrails to be observed in getting there. The classic formulation is that of Aristotle: “Every art and every investigation, and similarly every action and pursuit, is considered to aim at some good.” (Nicomachean Ethics, I.i, 1094a1) Some forms of good-based or axiological ethics focus mostly on the results, as in utilitarianism; others focus more on the actions of the good or virtuous person. When Naomi, in Walton’s story, talks about changing the objective of the AI(s), she’s implicitly dealing with an axiological or good-based ethic.

As we’ve seen above, Asimov’s robots are essentially servants; they don’t have purposes of their own. There is a possible exception: the proviso in the First Law that a robot may not through inaction allow harm to come to humans does suggest an implicit purpose of protecting humans. In the original Three Laws stories, however, that proviso did not tend to stimulate the robots to affirmative action to protect or promote humans. Later on, Asimov did use something like this pro-human interest to expand the robot storyline and connect it with the Foundation stories. So my description of Three Laws robots as non-purposive is not absolutely precise. But it does, I think, capture something significant about the Asenion conception of AI.

Selecting a Purpose

There has been some discussion, factual and fictional, about an AI’s possible purposes. I see, for example, that there’s a Wikipedia page on “instrumental convergence,” which talks about the kinds of goals that might be given to an AI—and how an oversimplified goal might go wrong. A classic example is that of the “paperclip maximizer.” An AI whose only goal was to make as many paper clips as possible might end by turning the entire universe into paper clips, consistent with its sole purpose. In the process, it might decide, as the Wikipedia article notes, “that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off,” which would diminish the number of paper clips. (Apparently there’s actually a game built on this thought-experiment. Available at office-supply stores near you, no doubt . . .)

A widget-producing machine like the paperclip maximizer has a simple and concrete purpose. But the purpose need not be so mundane. Three Laws Lethal has one character instilling the goal of learning to speak, as noted above. A recent article by Lydia Denworth describes a real-life robot named Torso that’s being programmed to “pursue curiosity.” (Scientific American, Dec. 2024, at 64, 68)

It should be possible in principle to program multiple purposes into an AI. A robot might have the goal of producing paper clips, but also the goal of protecting human life, say. But it would then also be necessary to include in the program some way of balancing or prioritizing the goals, since they would often conflict or compete with each other. There’s precedent for this, too, in ethical theory, such as the traditional “principle of double effect” to evaluate actions that have both good and bad results.

Note that we’ve been speaking of goals give to or programmed into the AI by a human designer. Could an AI choose its own goals? The question that immediately arises is, how or by what criteria would the AI make that choice? That methodological or procedural question arises even before the more interesting and disturbing question of whether an AI might choose bad goals or good ones. There’s an analogy here to the uncertainty faced by parents in raising children: how does one (try to) ensure that the child will embrace the right ethics or value system? I seem to recall that David Brin has suggested somewhere that the best way to develop beneficent AIs is actually to give them a childhood of a sort, though I can’t recall the reference at the moment.

Conclusions, Highly Tentative

The above ruminations suggest that if we want AIs that behave ethically, it may be necessary to give them both purposes and rules. We want an autonomous vehicle that gets us to our destination speedily, but we want it to respect Asimov’s First Law about protecting humans in the process. The more we consider the problem, the more it seems that what we want for our AI offspring is something like a full-blown ethical system, more complex and nuanced than the Three Laws, more qualified and guarded than Naomi’s survival-seeking Mikes.

This is one of those cases where contemporary science is actually beginning to implement something science fiction has long discussed. (Just the other day, I read an article by Geoffrey Fowler (11/30/2024) about how Waymo robotaxis don’t always stop for a human at a crosswalk.) Clearly, it’s time to get serious about how we grapple with the problem Walton so admirably sets up in his book.

Self-Spoofing

December 15, 2024December 15, 2024 / Rick Ellrod / 3 Comments

Visions of Sugarplums

Among the Hallmark Channel’s Christmas season offerings this year is a comedy called Sugarplummed, which has the distinction of being a spoof of the Hallmark Channel itself.

Satirizing the recurring tropes of the innumerable Hallmark Christmas movies isn’t a new game. As noted in my 2019 post, takeoffs on this subgenre are legion. Just today, a “Sally Forth” newspaper cartoon rang yet another change on the meta-tradition of Hallmark spoofery.

Sugarplummed movie poster (from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt33900751/mediaviewer/rm361928706/?ref_=tt_ov_i)

But it’s particularly entertaining to watch someone make fun of themselves. In Sugarplummed, Emily, the harried mother in a family of four, is devoted to a schmaltzy series of TV movies featuring a woman named “Sugarplum.” She’s thrown off the rails when the Sugarplum character magically materializes in the real world, determined to fulfill Emily’s wish for a perfect Christmas. Sugarplum carries around a thick book that contains The Rules. The Rules are a collection of mandates that embody all the Hallmark clichés we know so well. Sugarplum’s world, in her home town of (naturally) “Perfection,” lives by these rules. Why shouldn’t they work in Emily’s life as well?

For a while, they do, and we’re treated to a series of implausible “Christmas miracles” where everything works out perfectly. Then, as the Hallmark plot summary puts it, “when Sugarplum’s magical fixes start to backfire one by one, Emily begins to question what an ideal holiday really is.” The moral of the story is not to pursue perfection to the detriment of our ordinary relationships and joys—or, to put it another way, the familiar adage that “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” That’s an apt reminder.

Enchantment and Reality

The Disney canon is another inviting target for satire. The long history of Disney movies and shows contains plenty of well-worn recurring tropes and themes. And, since much of Disney’s original focus was on children, those motifs tend to be on the sentimental or upbeat side, making the repetition even more attractive for satire. (For some reason, the repetition of ugly or grimdark tropes, as in the plethora of dystopian fantasies now flooding the market, doesn’t attract as much jeering.)

Shrek (2001) did a pretty good job of spoofing Disney, the theme parks as well as the movies—not just in the details, but in the overall plot. Instead of having the prince or princess turned into a monster or critter and restored in the end, Beauty and the Beast-style, Shrek’s inamorata Fiona turns out to be an ogre who’s been turned into a princess, and the happy ending ensues once she’s been restored to her natural homely form.

Of course, there’s a certain sniggering almost-hostility in making fun of somebody else’s clichés. We can undermine that attitude when we make fun of ourselves. Disney one-upped Shrek when it released the movie Enchanted in 2007. Here, an animated character named Giselle, a perfect exaggeration of a Disney fairy tale heroine, is sent by a wicked witch to a terrible foreign land that works by entirely different rules: New York City. Now in live-action, we see Giselle try to cope with the grittier world we live in, where her set of Rules don’t apply. (In one classic inversion, the climax sees Giselle attacking the monster to save the man she loves, rather than the other way around.) We do get a happy ending, but it’s much more along the lines of learning to be a grown-up and living with (while improving on) imperfection.

The Science Fiction Version

The self-spoof approach isn’t limited to fantasy, or to the big screen. Consider E.E. Smith’s Lensman series, the very model of classic space opera. Satires of the space opera genre are also common, from Harry Harrison’s Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers to the 1980 Flash Gordon movie. But in one case, Smith did it to himself.

In the last Lensman book, Children of the Lens (1947), Smith’s redoubtable hero Kimball Kinnison goes undercover as—of all things—a science fiction writer, Sybly White (see chapter 3). We see a couple of excerpts from the SF novel Kinnison writes, which (of course) “was later acclaimed of one of Sybly White’s best.” The excerpts parody, not just space opera generally, but Smith’s own ebullient, melodramatic style. It’s charming to see Smith good-naturedly bringing onstage a caricature of himself.

Taking Ourselves Lightly

As I’ve noted elsewhere, humor can often involve a kind of meanness toward the target of the humor. The charm of the self-satire is that the temptation toward meanness or hostility is absent. Spoofing oneself is almost bound to be an affectionate parody, the kind where the humorist really likes the subject of the humor. These often make for the best satires, untainted by any sourness or smugness and genuinely understanding how the satirized thing works.

I give Hallmark credit for Sugarplummed, then, especially because it shows the showrunners are not taking themselves too seriously. That genial attitude is in tune with the Christmas season Hallmark is celebrating. As Chesterton put it in Orthodoxy (ch. 8): “Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.”

Civilization and the Rule of Law (reprise)

October 27, 2024 / Rick Ellrod / 3 Comments

Another rerun, adapted from a post from seven years ago.

We’ve talked about how the Star Trek-Star Wars divide reflects preferences for a more lawful or more chaotic world; how F&SF stories often show us a defense of civilization against chaos; and how civilization makes science possible and rests in turn on human technology. But both order and technology can be oppressive. The missing element is the rule of law.

Universal Laws

It’s a crucial element of right governance that there are rules applying to everyone, as opposed to the arbitrary wishes of a dictator, who can make decisions based on favoritism, political preferences, or personal relationships. The Wikipedia article describes rule of law as “the legal principle that law should govern a nation, as opposed to being governed by decisions of individual government officials.”

Rule of Law pyramid — (Rule of Law Institute of Australia)

As we saw in the recently updated post The Good King (reprise), the concept of the rule of law goes back at least to Aristotle. It became a central principle of the American founders via the English tradition of John Locke. “Rule of law implies that every citizen is subject to the law, including lawmakers themselves” (Wikipedia again). It is thus in tension with kingship, where rule is almost by definition arbitrary and personal. But one can have mixed cases—kings who are bound by certain laws, as in the British constitutional monarchy.

Without the rule of law, we depend on the good behavior of those who have power of some sort—physical, military, economic. We slide toward the “war of each against all,” where might makes right and the vulnerable are the pawns of the strong. Autocracy soon follows, as people look for any means to find safety from those who are powerful but unscrupulous. Hence the quotation from John Christian Falkenberg, which I’ve used before: “The rule of law is the essence of freedom.” (Jerry Pournelle, Prince of Mercenaries (New York: Baen 1989), ch. 21, p. 254.) Strength itself, a good thing, is only safe under laws.

Test Cases

It’s easy to miss the importance of the rule of law. We’re typically born into a society with better or worse laws, and criticize them from the inside. It’s less common to find ourselves in straits where lawfulness as such has collapsed. Regrettably, sizable numbers of people are exposed to such conditions in the world today. But many of us are fortunate enough not to see them ourselves. As always, fantasy and science fiction provide useful “virtual laboratories” for examining the possibilities.

A classic SF case is where a group thrown into a “state of nature” attempts to set up a lawful society. For example, in Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky (1955), students from a high-school class on survival techniques are given a final exam in which they are dropped onto an unspecified planet to survive for up to ten days. When an astronomical accident leaves them stranded, they need to organize for the long term. Rod Walker, the hero, becomes the leader-by-default of a growing group of young people. The tension between this informal leadership and the question of forming an actual constitution—complete with committees, regulations, and power politics—makes up a central theme of the story.

David Brin’s post-apocalyptic novel The Postman (1985), later made into a 1997 movie with Kevin Costner, illustrates the power of civil order, the unstated practices of a culture, as recalling—and perhaps fostering—the rule of law. The hero, a wanderer who happens to have appropriated a dead postman’s uniform and mail sack, presents himself as a mail carrier for the “Restored United States of America” to gain shelter in one of the isolated fortress-towns, ruled by petty tyrants, that remain. His desperate imposture snowballs into a spreading movement in which people begin to believe in this fiction, and this belief puts them on the road toward rebuilding civilization. The result is a sort of field-test not only of civil order and government, but of what Plato famously imagined as the “noble lie.”

In Niven & Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer (1977), a small community headed by a United States Senator hopes to serve as a nucleus for reconstructing civilization after a comet strike. We see at the end the strong pull of personal rule or kingship: as the Senator lies dying, the future of the community will be determined by which of the competing characters gains the personal trust and endorsement of the people—and the hand of the Senator’s daughter, a situation in which she herself recognizes the resurfacing of an atavistic criterion for rule. Unstated, but perhaps implicit, is the nebulous idea that deciding in favor of scientific progress may also mean an eventual movement back toward an ideal of rule by laws, not by inherited power.

Seeking a Balance

The “laboratory” of F&SF is full of subversions, variations, and elaborations on the rule of law. In particular, we should note the counter-trend previously discussed as “chaotic good.” Laws can be stifling as well as liberating.

Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress (1966) imagines how the “rational anarchy” of a lunar prison colony is mobilized to throw off autocratic rule. The healthy chaos of the libertarian Loonies is hardly utopian, but the story does make it seem appealing. Interestingly, Heinlein returned to this setting with a kind of critique twenty years later in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985), where the post-revolution lunar anarchy seems much less benign, seen from an outsider’s perspective.

While fantasy seems to concern itself with this issue much less than science fiction, consider the region called the “Free Commots” in Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain. When protagonist Taran visits this area in the fourth book (Taran Wanderer), he finds a society of independent villages, where the most prominent citizens are master-craftspeople. They neither have nor need a lord to organize them. The Commots contrast favorably to the feudal or wilderness regions through which Taran travels. A kind of anarchic democracy, as an ideal, thus sneaks into what otherwise seems to be a traditional aristocratic high fantasy.

One way of managing the tension between a government of laws and a culture of liberty is the principle of subsidiarity: the notion that matters should be governed or controlled at the lowest possible organizational level where they can be properly handled. It’s frequently illustrated in G.K. Chesterton’s ardent defenses of localism. In The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), extreme localism is played for laughs—“half fun and full earnest,” to borrow Andrew Greeley’s phrase. The more mature Tales of the Long Bow (1924), which might qualify as a sort of proto-steampunk story, treats the idea more seriously, in the form of an oddly high-tech (for 1924) revolt of local liberty against overweening and arbitrary national rule.

It remains true that we need good people as well as sound laws. “Good men can make poor laws workable; poor men will wreak havoc with good laws” (James M. Landis, 1960; see this article at 432 & n.107). The quality of a civilization can also be assessed by whether it fosters citizens who act with decency and good judgment even when there isn’t a law to constrain them (as in David Brin’s “Ritual of the Street Corner”). After all, we neither can nor should try to create laws to govern everything.

But being willing to improvise well in situations where no law applies is different from considering oneself above the law, disdaining the constraints that apply to everybody else. This is doubly and triply true of rulers, who are constantly tempted to arrogate power and dodge accountability to accomplish their ends. If a ruler is allowed to get away with law-breaking, we’re headed for trouble.

Brin has noted that the stories that fill and shape our culture—movies, books, television—encourage a broad “suspicion of authority” that tells us all institutions are corrupt or useless, and so are most other people—so that the heroes and heroines of the stories can face and overcome challenges by their heroic actions. Like most attitudes, suspicion of authority is helpful in moderation, but corrosive when it gets out of hand. If that attitude leads us to throw over laws and institutions altogether in the hope that individual heroes or autocrats will save us, we need to keep in mind that benevolent dictatorship, unconstrained by law, is just one step away from despotism.

The Fragility of Civilization

When we grow up taking for granted the rule of law, we can fail to see how vulnerable it is—along with the civilization that it reflects and makes possible.

“The Establishment,” as they used to say in the 1960s, seems vast and invulnerable. When we’re trying to make a change, it seems insuperable, so rigid that nothing can be done about it. But this is an illusion. The structure of civilization, good and bad, is fragile. It’s easier than we think to throw away the rule of law, so painfully constructed (as Rod Walker found), in favor of shortcuts or easy answers to our problems.

One thing F&SF have brought us is a better sense of this vulnerability. The spate of post-apocalyptic tales in recent years—zombie apocalypses, worldwide disasters, future dystopias like The Hunger Games, going all the way back to the nuclear-war stories of the 1950s—do help us appreciate that our civilization can go away.

But that collapse doesn’t require a disaster. Civilization, and the rule of law, can erode gradually, insidiously, as in the “Long Night” stories we’ve talked about earlier.

Historically, the Sixties counterculture fostered anarchists who felt “the Establishment” was invulnerable. Often with the best of intentions, they did more to undermine civil order than they expected. Those who now see no better aim than breaking up the structures of democratic government and civil life—whether from the side of government, or from the grass roots—also fray the fabric of civilization. The extrapolations of science fiction and fantasy illustrate why eroding the rule of law should not be taken lightly.

Near the bottom of Brin’s Web home page, he places the following:

I am a member of a civilization

It’s good that we have a rambunctious society, filled with opinionated individualists. Serenity is nice, but serenity alone never brought progress. Hermits don’t solve problems. The adversarial process helps us to improve as individuals and as a culture. Criticism is the only known antidote to error — elites shunned it and spread ruin across history. We do each other a favor (though not always appreciated) by helping find each others’ mistakes.

And yet — we’d all be happier, better off and more resilient if each of us were to now and then say:

“I am a member of a civilization.” (IAAMOAC)

Step back from anger. Study how awful our ancestors had it, yet they struggled to get you here. Repay them by appreciating the civilization you inherited.

It’s incumbent on all of us to cherish and defend the rule of law. Give up civilization lightly, and we may not have the choice again.

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