The value of pessimists… the necessity of optimists

I have long maintained that the greatest blessing and curse of humanity has been our near infinite capacity for delusion.  To firmly believe things that are illogical or improbable, or even decisively disproved by blatant facts.  This gift is what empowers great art -- and we fiction authors have learned to weave ornate incantations, catering to a public need to believe (temporarily) in imaginary events. 

Alas, the downside of this talent is obvious.  We are terrible at perceiving and appraising our own delusional mistakes – witness the almost unalloyed litany of horrid statecraft perpetrated by kings, lords and priests, when their delusions could go unquestioned and unaccountable.

We’ve found a partial solution.  Criticism is the only known antidote to error. If you are blind to some mistakes, others may not be, and they will often be delighted to point out those errors of yours, without charge! (Will you listen: even gritting your teeth?)

The greatest advantage of a free and open society is not the pleasure of liberty (though that’s great). It is the high proportion of disastrous blunders that we manage to catch, in time, that led to our unprecedented ratio of success to failure. Science fiction plays a role, through “self-preventing prophecies,” like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which girded millions to fight against the worst possible failure modes. But other professions do their bit, as well.  

Especially Journalism. Yes, much-maligned (sometimes deservedly) journalism.  One of the 'expert castes' currently under attack in the War-Aganst-All-Spartypants. Individually they are as flawed as any of us. But a profession that lives by asking questions... are you sure you want to dismiss them, across the board?)

== Do warnings bring action? ==

In his book “Lights Out,” Ted Koppel reveals that a major cyberattack on America’s power grid is not only possible but likely, that it would be devastating, and that the United States is shockingly unprepared. Imagine a continental blackout lasting not days, but weeks or months. Koppel maintains that a well-designed attack on just one of the nation’s three electric power grids could cripple much of our infrastructure. 

Let me add that terrorism isn’t the only way it can happen. A “Carrington Event” – a massive solar flare like one that fried telegraph systems in the 1850s – could have devastating effects upon our grid and unlinked electronics in the home, (possibly even zapping the rooftop solar systems that are our last bulwark against darkness, unless we learn how to buffer them well). 

Moreover, the 1850s event was apparently not as bad as they come. Studies of carbon isotope anomalies in tree rings suggest that the Sun occasionally belches prodigiously, giving our planet truly major electrical shocks. And note that I have not even discussed another threat – EMP or electromagnetic pulse – that some enemy might use to accomplish the same end.

Surely more attention should be paid to these dangers.  And I regularly consult about such threats with “agencies” who have come to appreciate the unfettered darkside imaginings of science fiction authors.  You want potential failure modes?  Ones not yet on anyone’s horizon? I got ‘em.

And yet, how to reconcile that with the rampant accusations that “Brin is an optimist”?  Easy.  Unlike the certifiably insane cynical grouches all around us, I am able to notice the clear fact that things are (still tentatively) very very good for us, right now.  That our ancestors – including the Greatest Generation so extolled by the Right – would have laughed in the faces of today’s dolor-merchants and their dismal mewlings.  Nor is the mad-right the only locus of grumpy ingrates. Civil libertarians who decry the rising surveillance state are justified (!) and useful… until they neglect to ask – “So, how did we get the present day peak of freedom that I so-worry we’re about to lose?”

Asking that one, simple question empowers us to see a simple truth.  That we did not get here by cowering and hiding.

In fact when we open our eyes to positive trends, we discover they are easily as big as any list of negatives.  From Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined to Peter Diamandis’s Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think to Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near, some of the smartest people alive are pointing out the good news… and how much more there may be, if just a few game-changing breakthroughs line up.

Even in the blogosphere, where the cynical curled lip and playground bully sneer assail any hint of positivity, a few have spoken up, as in this piece listing “11 Reasons Why 2015 Was a Great Year For Humanity.” Wherein the writer, Angus Hervey, opines that: “We are living through the most astonishing period of human progress in history. And nobody’s telling us about it.”   

Indeed, he could have made it a clean dozen reasons, by mentioning something I’ve been saying for the last month or so… that 2015 was by far humanity’s best year in the exploration and understanding of space, the cosmos and our place in the universe.

And the ease of self-deception...

Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind, by Ajit Varki and Danny Brower asserts an answer to one of the great questions of biology; why so many species, ranging from dolphins and chimps to corvids (ravens) and parrots, sea lions and elephants, and prairie dogs, all cluster close to each other under what I’ve called theglass ceiling of sapience,” displaying similar, basic capabilities at tool-use, proto-language and self-awareness. Varki and Brower propose that there is a lethal zone, just a little higher, wherein creatures become fully aware of their inevitable death. Any species who rise into this zone lose fitness because individuals become obsessed with their own mortality, to the detriment of all other considerations, like reproduction.

Under this hypothesis — clearly influenced by the mid-20th Century Freudian “thanatos” complex — humanity burst beyond the glass ceiling by counter-balancing any thanatos obsession with another exceptional skill, that of denial.  Self-distraction, using various mental tricks to ignore — for the most part — the glaring prospect of personal doom.

Alas, my response (admittedly without yet reading the book) is that Freudian and meta-Freudian  models are artifacts of a time when we had a much less clear understanding of the workings of evolution.   In this case, we have a just-so story of creatures becoming so terminally obsessed with mortality that they neglect their offspring. Tasty... but...

Refutation is simple.  Those who find a way to prioritize their progeny higher than scrabbling for an extra few months… those are the ones who will pass on genes, including for the trait of such prioritization.  Indeed, nature is filled with examples of courageous mothers and dads who do exactly that. All that is needed is for parenthood to be an addictive high — and those channels are already present in every species that abides near the glass ceiling. Oxytocin, endorphins, dopamine levels, all reward parental care with overwhelming ferocity. At which point the thanatos distraction will have a potent rival, one far more correlated with fitness and success at the game of genetic procreation.  In other words, sorry. I’m not buying it.

There are other, more plausible, hypotheses for why humanity shattered the glass ceiling by orders of magnitude.  In nature, whenever a trait experiences rapid runaway, the first culprit to appraise would be sexual selection.  In my neoteny paper I posit a rare two-way cycle of sexual selection, in which female and male humans engaged in fierce judgementalism toward each other, demanding ever-inflating sets of exaggerated traits, foremost of which was intelligence.

Jumping to the other end… In Rationality: From AI to Zombies, Eliezer Yudkowsky explains the science underlying human irrationality with a mix of fables, argumentative essays, and personal vignettes.  A decision theorist and researcher at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Yudkowsky is also author of the popular amateur novel Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. 

== And Alack ==

Word arrives here about the recent or imminent passing of the great science fiction editor, David Hartwell.  I am bummed and will have more to say about this soon.

What big-unexpected problem we will face in coming decades? (Contest winners)

My latest novel Existence shows humanity confronting many challenges forty years in the future -- some expected and some unforeseen. Indeed, finding, revealing and exploring unexpected threats... this might be considered one of the most valuable services of good, thoughtful science fiction.

I recently crowd-sourced a question to my Facebook followers: What do you view as the biggest unexpected problem we will face in the next few decades? Many insightful and thought-provoking responses poured in, from profound to comedic, ranging from political instability to economic collapse, civil unrest to over-reliance on machines, social disruption to psychological plagues. Others dealt with problems of over-population and life extension, shortages of water and biodiversity, severe climate change, collapse of our information systems, growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, even meteor impacts.

Here I'm posting the most intriguing responses that got the most fan votes (the top two won fee copies of the brand new paperback edition of EXISTENCE! Note that I do not necessarily agree with all of the cited entries and will respond to a few of them in comments. But all of them show verve and a willingness to peer ahead:

1. What form of government will replace capitalism? This system is devolving at FTL speed, and the world is still unaware of a viable solution to it, while world situation is becoming more erratic and explosive daily. We will find ourselves in need of new ethno-national definitions very soon. Also, what will replace religion, for the same reasons. However, I feel that space exploration and the focus towards space will, at least partially, contribute to the latter. --Margie Lazou

2. Political and economic pressures from spacefaring nations to keep others from having the ability to access the almost infinite resources off-planet; extremely low cost for resources - material and energy - for the space-capable, and artificially high prices for everyone else. --David Christensen

3. Longevity due to augmentation and medical advances will create a need to migrate off planet for resources but those left behind must deal with massive social strain and change along with the burdensome question of what it means to be human. --John Berry Gosnell

4. A plastic-eating bacterium with resistance to all known antibiotics. --Martha Dunham

5. The unexpected loss of a sense of humor in people of European extraction, leading to mass suicide and the end of sit com laugh tracks. --Rhonda Palmer

6. The consequences of a universal lie detector machine. Politics and virtually every other field of human endeavor will be changed by everyone having to tell the truth. The rules that will evolve to deal with social and business situations will rapidly change society. --Kevin Settle

7. The biggest unexpected problem we'll face will be psychological. A depression plague is going to begin to eat away at modern society. We lose a sense of personal control over the modern world (i.e. external locus of control), where people believe that things happen to us, rather than "we make things happen". Apathy and self destructive behavior will no longer be the domain of emo-kids. It will threaten the viability of all societies worldwide, fueled by environmental impacts (historically, we rarely see them coming) and a growing disparity in wealth, power, and liberties. Long term ramifications will include economic collapse, famine, civil unrest and finally social atavism. --Richard Carter

8. Fresh water supplies. --David Caune

9. Biggest unexpected problems? Aren't the expected problems enough?  Biodiversity depletion, climate change, class warfare, outright warfare, the depletion of basically every resource: food, energy, fresh water, a whole whack of strategic minerals including helium, orbital debris. Hell, the only thing "unexpected" capable of killing us more quickly than we're killing ourselves would be a meteor impact or giant-ass solar flare. --Gabriel Emilio Zárate

10. The replacement of skilled and unskilled labor by automation combined with an ever-increasing population could have drastic effects on unemployment levels and civil unrest. --Eric Berman

11. Clinical near immortality will create beyond Malthusian population growth, further stressing Earth's resources. The moral question of when life "ends" will arise, for while they are able to keep the body alive, the mind still fails within 90-120 years. Discussion begins around planned obsolescence being introduced as part of gerontological treatments. --Wes Edmunds

12. The social (A movement away from sexism and tribalism. Along with an exponential expansion of global leisure and tourism.) and economic (Explosive demand and shifting of manufacturing, agriculture, and service industries.) ramifications of the children of 1/5th of the world’s population growing up as a ‘spoiled generation’ with two living parents and four living grandparents focusing all of their energy, hopes and dreams for the future, and their own personal life choices and mistakes on a ‘state mandated’ single child. --Richard Praser

13. A growing number of disruptive technologies and culture's difficulties in adapting. The biggest problem here will be the growing rift(s) between the people who use the technologies and those who don't. (Either by choice or access.) We may find that our culture is not the quickest to adapt, and the United States may be left in the wake of the world, wondering where it went without us. --Luna Rebecca Flesher

14. Collapse of our information systems due to overwhelming amounts of information from untrustworthy sources and the inability to verify sources and filter information effectively. --Eli Roth

15. Fresh-Water Scarcity and the many consequences thereof! Including massive dust-storms that will cause air-quality problems and which will contribute to erratic weather patterns in some of the most populated areas of the World ( especially in China, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Middle East, North Africa and the US South-West ). And this will lead to food scarcity and pest-control problems; hence a massive increase in the risk of life-threatening/lethal disease epidemics! Hence social instability in countries that have nuclear and/or chemical weapons! ( OK: all this is actually expected...BUT...). 

But what is unexpected about this: failed states with nuclear/chemical arsenals and the dire need for the Super-Powers to cooperate on direct military interventions: so as to limit overall harm to general populations and mitigate the risk that those very same Super-Powers from going to war with one-another! Hence: a dangerous trend of ever-reduced civil liberties, freedoms and personal security! Hence: an ever-more dangerous, further erosion of trust between the general public and their respective governments! Which will lead to a massive increase in psychological breakdowns and the social disorder and related violence that will further harm our very need for social cohesion based on warranted trust: hence a whole new phenomena: psychological profiling and related witch-hunts! Hence the risk of a new dark ages. And given the kinds of dangerous technologies now in existence: a very real risk of total social meltdown and the subsequent high risk of a final, near-total, if not total, civilization collapse! --Jean-Pierre A. Fenyo

16. The development of mind-machine connections. While they will remain primitive in 30 years time, they will create a rift between those with the resources to afford their implantation and those who cannot. --Bradley Brown

17. I think the next crisis of truly global proportions will come from technologies that prolong life or even eliminate natural death. These technologies will inevitably and necessarily be restricted to a few. Not doing so would result in overpopulation, which would lead to forced birth control or mass starvation. Those who have these technologies will not want their enemies or those of whom they disapprove to live forever (would you allow a Hitler or a Stalin or even just a Castro to live forever?). Nations would want the balance of power that this brings to shift in their favor. But even in the unlikely case where none of this would happen, such technology would have to be deployed gradually and even if the intent were to make it available to everyone, those who are not at the front of the line would perceive it as hoarding and a denial of what they will surely claim is a "god given right".

 And then, of course, religions would get in the mix, calling this an evil and in opposition to the "clear" will of their god. However it happens, there will be two camps: those fervently in favor of it and those furiously opposed to it. This will lead to social unrest, widespread acts of sabotage, probably a few small wars, wildly disrupted economies, famines, plagues, rains of toads, cats sleeping with dogs, and Republicans and Democrats agreeing on something that has yet to be identified. --Claudio Puviani

18. A combination of events, which will result in over-population, lack of natural resources, an under-abundance of food stock, supply and sources culminating in a ridiciulously strained attempt to reach the stars, taking up more time, effort and money than it is really worth. --Stephen Ormsby

19. I see two upcoming problems, actually:

--The need to overhaul the global economic system. In an increasingly globalized world, "capitalism" tends to become associated solely with the U.S. model of industrialized society, while technological progress accelerates, along with obsolescence and resource depletion. This leads to disruptions due to environmental, cultural and legal differences between various countries/blocs; we will also see the need to overhaul the patent system and property rights, as well as redefine individual/collective responsibilities.

--A global religious crisis. With two of the three main Abrahamic religions in full recession - mainly in the highly-industrialized West - relegating proselytism as a secondary (less important) goal, fringe groups and extremist movements are likely to increase their public presence. The crisis of faith experienced mainly in the West will expand across the globe as more people under moderate regimes in developing nations will follow similar paths of questioning, enabled by technological progress and more discoveries in fields such as of bio logy (genetics) and astrophysics. While a truly global jihad seems unlikely, the tensions between believers and agnostics/nonbelievers will continue to grow, and this is bound to lead to cultural upheaval, with hard-to-foresee consequences. --Alex Savulescu

20. Shortages of critical materials for technology, pharmaceuticals, etc. Every environmental and problematic issue boils down to human population, however. We're trading quantity for quality, and there is nothing to stop it. You can't even bring the subject up without a volley of insipid, formulaic, unthinking responses, one of the first of which will be "Why do you want to murder people, you monster?" Given that every path to a survivable future involves some sort of conscious, deliberate action on population, like NOW, I don't see any path that saves us.  --Hank Fox

21. The biggest problem? There are two, I think, and they are intertwined. Climate change and the death of the oceans. --Michelle Connor

Thank you to my many bright readers for their wisdom and insight! We will need a generation of creative, ambitious, and far-seeing problem-solvers to face the unexpected over the next few decades. While not every suggestion was exactly "unexpected," all conveyed the passion of people who think seriously about our path ahead.  The kind of folks who read the literature of tomorrow.

My best-known aphorism is CITOKATE: Criticism Is The Only Known Antidote To Error. Here, we have attempted to shine light into possible (potentially dark) scenarios for the future, foreseeing various obstacles and stumbling blocks we may encounter along our path to creating a brighter future.

Questions I am frequently asked about… Writing and Science Fiction

I’ve been working with Cheryl and Beverly to thoroughly revise my web site. If you haven’t browsed davidbrin.com in a while, have a look! It’s now fleshed out and filled with even more fabulousness! 

As part of this, we’ve thrown together a FAQ of sorts -- a compilation of questions that I’m asked most often by interviewers. We’ll post them here by category, starting with… 

== ON WRITING == 

-- Being an author wasn’t your first career choice; you earned a Ph.D. in astrophysics.  How did your multi-track career evolve? 

I came from a family of writers and always figured that storytelling would be my artistic side-line… most scientists have one. I knew science would be harder that storytelling and I respected it more, drawn to the Enlightenment’s greatest project. After all, every culture has had storytellers, but only one ever invested heavily in training a myriad brave investigators to find out what’s actually true, despite our preconceptions.

And indeed, I managed to contribute a few new bits of knowledge…. while maintaining passion for my art. (And I incorporate my science into my art, as in Heart of the Comet.)

Ah, but sometimes life takes a turn. Your pastime can take over and become the central profession. I was a pretty good scientist and I still keep my hand in the game. But civilization seems more eager for my art, for tales that shed a different kind of light on the transformations we’re all going through. And who am I to argue with civilization? 

-- What is special about writing? What drew you from seeking scientific facts to literary truths?

Literature was the first truly verifiable, repeatable and effective form of magic. Picture how it must have impressed ancient people to look at marks – on papyrus or clay – and know they conveyed the words of scribes and kings long dead. Knowledge, wisdom and art could finally accumulate. Death was robbed some of its sting. 

Writing still is magical. To create strings of black squiggles that millions of others skillfully de-code with just their eyes – into emotions and thoughts, or the struggles of believable characters – or spectacle beyond Hollywood’s wildest dreams. 

Still, despite all of that, science and the honesty that it engenders have been our true accomplishments. I believe in a literature that explores this revolution, that presents alternatives and hard choices and that might help us to be wise about the onrushing process of change. One that helps to remind science and progress that it needs a heart. I reject the dichotomy, the notion that these things oppose each other. 

When a chance came along to combine the two? Who wouldn’t grab the opportunity? 

--Was Science Fiction always your chosen genre? 

Though SF offers me the freedom I need to explore a world undergoing drama and change, I often tell writing students that their first work of fiction should be a murder mystery. 

Oh, it can be an sci fi mystery, like my first novel, Sundiver. Or you might give it romance or set it in the wild west, or ancient Rome. What matters is that it should follow the plot patterns and revelatory structure of a mystery yarn. 

Why? Because only mysteries demand total story-telling discipline. No distractions or arty styling or array of gimmicks can mask or make up for bad plotting. This all becomes apparent when the reader finds out who-dunnit in a mystery. In the end, the reader knows whether or not you cheated.  And once you’ve had that lesson, you will never neglect it again. 

--Do you develop the world of a novel fully in your mind before beginning to write? 

I like to be surprised. Fresh implications and plot twists erupt as a story unfolds. Characters develop backgrounds, adding depth and feeling. Writing feels like exploring. 

Oh, I sometimes plot an outline in advance.  That works well.  Still, not too much detail! I like to be surprised. 

--Do you have any advice for up and coming writers? 

Write. Love writing. Love stories. Love the sound of language, the vividness of description and ironies of the heart. The marvelous web of misunderstanding that is conversation. The astonishing, non-linear gyrations of cause and effect and surprise. 

Ray Bradbury said that – deep in the heart of the writer’s relationship with story and reader, there has to be love! Love the words. Love the tension that propels your plot and characters like a steam boiler. Love a civilization that gives you plenty to read and the food and shelter and safety to do it in comfort. Love to poke hard at that civilization’s flaws. Love the fact that you have enough conceit to think others might like to read your drivel! 

Only then, amid that love... be competitive! Aim to do it better than anybody else.  Have patience to refine your craft… but never stop burning. Burn like a flame. An inferno. 

Art is like any other exercise in skill: a combination of talent, hard work and learning from criticism. And luck. Any three of those things can make up for a deficit in the fourth one. But those three had better be really strong. 

The core point? CITOKATE: Criticism Is The Only Known Antidote To Error! 

Seek and relish criticism, because that is how to get even better. If you put your work out there and look upon criticism as your friend -- (not easy, but worthwhile) -- you will improve. And having that attitude will gain you real advantages, leveraging your talent, however great or small it may be. 

Good luck. There are lots of ideas out there waiting to be mined. It's not an endangered resource. 

That's only a very small summary of a long list. There's lots more. After typing countless answers to requests for advice from would-be writers, I finally put it all together in a handy place. It's available on my website: A Long, Lonely Road: Advice to New Writers, as well as a YouTube presentation: How do you succeed at writing fiction?

=================

Continue to 

Part II: Questions I'm Frequently Asked: About Science Fiction and Fantasy

Part III: Questions about Brin books, Uplift and The Postman

Part IV: Questions about...Prediction and the Future

Part V: Questions about...Transparency, Privacy and the Information Age

David Brin

http://www.davidbrin.com

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American Exceptionalism... versus what has made America exceptional

At their convention, the Republicans chose their theme. The coordinated message from two-thirds of their speakers would be American Exceptionalism.

Unable to gain leverage by using the economy - which is slowly but clearly recovering from their own train wreck depression - and with the GOP suffering from devastating credibility gaps on everything from the deficit to medicare to taxes to women's rights to skyrocketing wealth disparity, they decided to fall back upon...

...patriotism.  Waving the flag and hoping that the left wing of liberals would react with sneers.  (Post convention note: the dems did not fall for the trap.) 

Was this a case of using patriotism as a "last refuge"?

Let me surprise you by saying that, when it comes to many of the surface statements, I side with the Republicans!

The United States of America has been the most exceptional thing ever to happen to humanity. I say this not out of reflex triumphalism or chauvinism, but as a simple matter of outcomes appraisal. Indeed, I bet that in the grand context of time, the American Experiment will turn out to have been one of the major reasons, if we wind up succeeding as a species and even reaching for the stars.

Alas, in a supreme irony, those who most fervently push this overall viewpoint in fevered generalities have also been the same folks responsible for severely damaging the American republic, far more than any enemy has in 150 years.

== First - the case for exceptionalism ==

Most moderns have no idea how stunning the American Revolution seemed, to onlookers around the world.  Especially the example of "Cincinnatus" George Washington, who turned his back on power not once but three times.  Or Abraham Lincoln, whose legend penetrated all the way to tribes deep in the Caucuses, as told by none other than Leo Tolstoy.

If Britain and France had listened to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson in 1919, and imposed a gentle peace on Germany, there would have been no Weimar Depression, no seething resentment leading to Hitler.

Later, in 1945, when America stood as the world's behemoth, men like George Marshall, Dean Acheson, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower had their chance to impose structure on the world, an imperial peace or "pax," as had Rome, China, Babylon and Britain in their day.  The long (comparative) peace that ensued - Pax Americana - was deeply flawed in many ways. But compared to all other "pax" eras -- and especially to the lawless times in between -- it was the gentlest ever known.

Certainly it was beloved by those we defeated in war. Today the U.S. has no better friends than those former foes who benefited from the plan of the 20th Century's greatest man.

Marshall aimed to avoid a core mistake of every previous pax empire.  All the others - even Britain - set up mercantilist trade patterns that sucked fortune out of distant satrapies and fed gold back to the central kingdom, fostering poverty and resentment everywhere else, making inevitable a later collapse.

In contrast, the counter-mercantilist pattern imposed by Marshall's unusual Pax Americana favored transferring low level, labor intensive industries (e.g. textiles) en masse to poor regions around the globe in a cascade sequence that uplifted, successively, Germany and Japan, then Korea and Taiwan, then Malaysia and Singapore and so on, until right now this program of "foreign aid via WalMart" is raising up more than a billion people in China and India at the same time.

The core of modern development, this innovation is the number one reason that two thirds of children on this planet live in clean homes with electricity and sanitation, never hungry, and go to school every day. A program fueled in large measure by the American consumer, thanks to wise patterns enacted a lifetime ago. Patterns unique in the long and lamentable history of human empires.

(An aside: How did we manage for seventy years to pay for such a program - shipping low level jobs overseas in return for cheap products? It was financed by the rapid advance of new technologies, from jets to rockets, satellites, transistors, computers, telecom, pharmaceuticals and so on, created largely by American engineering and science. A joint effort of government, companies and individuals, that none could have accomplished alone... but that's another story.)

== Have I made you angry? ==

Do I have the liberals out there shaking their heads and the leftists seething with purple wrath, by now? Stammering with eagerness to remind us of Pax Americana's crimes?

Hey, I said I was aware of how many times this century's "empire" lapsed in its ideals, was hijacked to ill ends or just did bad things, from banana republic invasions to Vietnam to realpolitik nasties committed during the long slog to achieve another part of Marshall's plan -- "containing" the crazy Soviet empire till its fever finally broke. I never denied the flawed fallibility that emerges whenever barely-uplifted cavemen get their hands on tremendous power.

What I ask you liberals out there to notice (the lefties are hopeless) is that your reaction -- shared by millions of fellow citizens -- is unique in the history of nations on Earth.  You grew up in a place where most people are brought up never to be satisfied with things as they are, even when the situation is far better than our ancestors ever knew. Pax Americana clearly committed a higher ratio of good deeds to crimes than any ten other top nations in the history of the world. Just look at how little-hated it is! But you focus on the mistakes, the faults...

...in hope of improving things, eliminating errors, re-charting a course that is even better!  An imperative of which I wholly approve. I believe your willingness to criticize the nation that you love is far more sane than the reflexive, blithering "exceptionalism" that we witnessed in Tampa a few weeks ago.

Yours is the true patriotism... if only you would recognize and admit it.

== The true exeptionalism ==

Those amazing accomplishments -- creating the world's longest best peace, along with the spectacular rise of billions out of poverty, plus the driving of racism and sexism and other ancient traditional obscenities into ill repute -- these weren't accomplishments of jingoist flag-waving but of relentless, day-to-day creativity, good-natured progress and lots of self-critique by every generation of new Americans.

The true exceptionalism is that habit of self-critique! And for that reason liberals (not leftists) are far more responsible for the accomplishments of America -- and Pax Americana -- than the manipulative "Yew Ess Hay!" rants of Sean Hannity and the puppet stringery of Rupert Murdoch.

But -- oh, liberals -- you do harm when you fail to take in that context. So I ask that you go over my core point, a second time.

You are critical because your society taught you to be! It is a wholesome reflex to cry out "we could be even better!"  Criticism is the only known antidote to error and you serve your nation by zeroing in on mistakes. In so doing, you are America's truest children...

... though, like teenagers, sometimes many of you forget the context. You forget to openly avow that the thing you want to make even better was already the best thing the world has ever seen.  The nation of Lincoln and both Roosevelts, that took humanity to the moon and kept the longest, greatest peace the world has ever known, allowing a higher fraction of people to live violence free lives than any other time in the history of the race.

You forget that other societies, which you hold up as deserving tolerance and understanding, would never have said the same in reverse. They did not tolerate, or even encourage, the habit of us-criticism from their subjects, that we relish from citizens like you.

You gain credibility when you admit that context.  When you admit that yours is a nation worthy of your love.  When you accept that flaws are inevitable, but that you are part of that nation's healthy immune response against those flaws! That you are a product of that nation's upbringing, a reservoir of its hope for positive change.

A symptom of its health and youthful vigor and readiness to grow.

== Don't give fools a monopoly on patriotism ==

Their version is jingoism, a dullard thing seen in all cultures.  A kind of masturbation to the clan's tribal symbols, similar to what occurred in any and every nation across time, when the Romans or Assyrians or Pax Britons cheered their flags and called themselves "exceptional" each in their turn, and then - with their aversion to criticism - proved themselves wrong.

Can I tell you a secret? By sniffing and rolling your eyes at patriotic symbolism, you are spurning real allies. The men and women of our military, for example, who may be straitlaced and ramrod-backed... but who also happen to be the third best-educated clade in American life. The officers know that democratic presidents listen to advice when it comes time for war, and democrats keep those wars tiny, surgical and professional, like Bosnia and Libya and the hunt for bin Laden.  The generals and admirals remember - in sharp contrast - what was done to our forces by George W. Bush, who plunged us into huge, garish, endless quagmires of attrition "nation-building" in Asia, a president who many of those flag officers deem the worst in living memory.

Sure, you don't like talk of war. You strive to end it altogether. Terrific. But amid your eager looking ahead, to a much desired time without conflict, stop!  Pause. Look back across 6000 years and know that it won't happen overnight.

Realize and admit that it is impressive progress that we have changed the definition and meaning of war.  Recent struggles look more like intense SWAT team action than the indiscriminate rolling thunder of times past. And it's been proved that violence on Planet Earth has plummeted each decade in the era since 1945.  The era of Pax Americana.

If we are stuck having some war for a while longer, be proud of the nation that tries, each generation, to do it with incrementally more care. A little more like rough cops -- more closely watched, each generation -- and less like barbarian hordes. Go ahead and nag for that progression to move faster; that's your job!  But also shudder over what the world would be like, if anybody else had the power that we've wielded with a (relatively/comparably) light hand.

Liberals, you must learn to do jiu jitsu. Don't spurn American Exceptionalism, and thus leave the scoundrels with their last refuge unchallenged.  Challenge them even over patriotism!

They whose warped version of a once proud conservative movement has harmed this country - more than any enemy has in 150 years - should not be left with that refuge, the refuge of a flag they relentlessly harm.

Like Washington and Lincoln and both Roosevelts and Ike, who saved the experiment and made it a beacon to the world... wear the blue of our revolution.  Wear it proudly.

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See also: Four Reflections on Patriotism