The Plot-Driven Society

The new season of 24 is under way. 24 is an odd phenomenon: although it is simplistic, nonsensical, and frequently riddled with notions that anybody outside of the Bush White House and Fox News would reject (torture: fine and good as long as the good guys do it; nuclear blasts: not really a threat if they don't happen in town), it is addictive.

It's the ticking clock. It pops up at commercial breaks and assorted other intervals. And the quick cuts between various story lines. Everything moves plenty fast so there's no time or incentive to stop and think about it.

Same is true of John Grisham's novels (or at least the two I managed to read): cardboard characters and plot holes big enough to fly a 747 through whizz past in a frenzy of page-turning.

This is what writer types call plot-driven fiction: events so fast and furious that mere niceties like character development, theme, or even reason and sense may be left by the wayside. The best authors of plot-driven fiction don't neglect those other aspects, but it seems that those things must slow them down just enough, because the 24s and The Firms of this world tend to be more popular. It's popcorn for the mind, and it races right through you without wasting any time being digested.

Fine if that's what entertains you. The problem is when it infects more critical aspects of our lives.

Someone (I've forgotten who, or where) said that the candidacies of John Kerry and Al Gore were both doomed by their use of subordinate clauses. (Both campaigns had other problems than their sentence structure, IMO, but that's beside the point for this discussion.) Why follow a complex sentence--a complex thought--when it is so much easier to grasp a simple declarative sentence, especially one that expresses a simple, unnuanced, black-and-white concept?

Keep throwing new images at people, new sound bytes or new threats, and they will tend to follow along with them like a 24 plotline. No time to stop and go back and reexamine the foundation of the notion, the background of the story, the meaning of it all, whether an argument holds together under close examination.

Some people can handle large quantities of stimuli and critically assess them all (I think first of my friend and Clarion classmate Cory Doctorow), but most people are sufficiently wrapped up in the minutiae of daily living--that ticking clock is the limited number of hours in the day to accomplish work, family, household, and personal responsibilities--that it just flows through them without stopping for analysis. And so we have become the plot-driven society.

Notice too that in 24 you get a lot of ineffectual and/or corrupt leaders? Probably not a coincidence. For 24 the plots depend on it; while here in the plot-driven society it's just a side effect. When candidates' cases are made in snippets and 30-second ads, and analysis of their positions and arguments is left to talking heads whose ratings depend on being just as catchy and concise, the niceties of substance can easily slip past unexamined. A plot-driven culture will select for the candidate who can survive best in that environment--who keeps his arguments concise and easy to grab onto, and doesn't slow us down or overcomplicate our already overfull lives.

If that's the society we want to be, then so be it.

But I am one of those dinosaurs who, while enjoying a page-turner now and again as a sweet treat, prefers substance. I enjoy a book or film or TV show I can sink my teeth into, with some substance and subtext, the kind of thing you get something new from on repeated reading or watching. (Rob is currently reading Finnegans Wake in one of his classes, which is just about the pinnacle of substantial reading, and may well exceed my ability to stick with it. More power to those who do.) And I would like to be able to vote for candidates whose entire worldviews are not summarizable in a sentence, who understand that issues are complex and demonstrate their willingness to grapple with those complexities. But in a plot-driven society, even the candidates who may fit that bill are compelled to hide their substance behind repetition of easily digestible metaphors and catch phrases in order to compete.

And we as a nation are the poorer for it.

Unconscionable

I received mail the other day from Planned Parenthood asking me to sign petitions/letters to the CEOs of Target, Winn-Dixie, and Safeway about their policies about filling prescriptions for contraceptives. (Plan B, the so-called morning-after pill is the hot button here, but that's not the way Planned Parenthood discusses it, nor is it the way the initiators of this action--those who don't want pharmacists to fill certain prescriptions--have framed it. They both know it's a slippery slope, and the latter like it that way.) Specifically, policies that may permit a pharmacist to decide he or she doesn't approve of a prescription and decline to fill it.

Everyone is entitled to an opinion. Everyone is entitled to act upon their views. If one has a moral objection to contraception, one shouldn't have to fill the prescription.

But one shouldn't be working as a pharmacist, where filling prescriptions is one's job, and judging prescriptions is not.

Do the companies that permit pharmacists to decline to fill prescriptions for contraceptives have similar policies for other viewpoints pharmacists might hold? A Scientologist pharmacist might then decline to fill prescriptions for medications prescribed by a psychiatrist. A Christian Scientist might be hired, and then decline to fill all prescriptions, directing customers to trust in God. Wildly implausible, sure, but just as reasonable as permitting a pharmacist to decide that a woman should not receive a physician-prescribed contraceptive.

The only reason for a person to take a job as a pharmacist if he or she is unwilling to dispense medications as prescribed is with the goal of wielding a moral hammer against some person, group, or issue. A vegetarian/animal-rights activist doesn't sign on to be a butcher except to exercise his or her views in opposition to butchering, and a pharmacist who takes a job and then decides his (or her, but mostly his) conscience doesn't permit filling certain prescriptions is no different; s/he didn't have this crisis of conscience suddenly last night. The butcher shop isn't going to keep the animal rights activist on the payroll; they're going to replace that person with someone who does the job of butchering. Pharmacies should be no different.

The only reason that pharmacies and the companies that own them aren't operating in accord with that basic bit of common sense is the cudgel wielded by those intent on enforcing their version of morality on everyone. They can't win the day through reason; instead they threaten corporations that they will be seen as un-Christian or anti-religious if they don't yield to one view of religion.

In the meantime, they threaten the health and the freedom of everyone else. And that I find unconscionable.

Superhero

I always liked Batman better than Superman (not least because Superman was stuck on the irksome Lois Lane--how could someone so clueless that a mere pair of glasses would form an adequate disguise actually be a reporter? Please. Give me Rosalind Russell as Hildy Johnson in His Girl Friday any day). Superman had super powers, but Batman was just a regular guy who decided to do the right thing using the tools at his disposal.

And when a regular guy with no tools at his disposal risks his own life to do something heroic, well, that's even more super in my book. Like this guy, Wesley Autrey, a construction worker on the subway platform with his two small kids:

Nearby, a man collapsed, his body convulsing. Mr. Autrey and two women rushed to help, he said. The man, Cameron Hollopeter, 20, managed to get up, but then stumbled to the platform edge and fell to the tracks, between the two rails.

The headlights of the No. 1 train appeared. “I had to make a split[-second] decision,” Mr. Autrey said.

So he made one, and leapt.

Read the whole story: if it were fiction, it would be predictable, right down to the (happy) ending. But the reason certain formulas become formulas in fiction is that they are satisfying.

They are more satisfying when they aren't made up. When there are regular people acting like superheroes. Thanks, Mr. Autrey, for saving that stranger's life. Thanks for making my day.

Update: Everyone is taking note of Mr. Autrey's heroism; he's a media celebrity. And he's even using that for good--here's what he said in closing a press conference:

“Maybe I was in the right place at the right time, and good things happen for good people,” Mr. Autrey said. Then he hopped into his brother-in-law’s tan Toyota Corolla. As the car pulled away, Mr. Autrey had some final words: “All New Yorkers! If you see somebody in distress, go for it!”

Hear, hear.

Big Picture

It's raining here today. We haven't had any snow, and only one really cold day. This microscopic-level, anecdotal observation is insufficient to draw conclusions about global warming (you need more than anecdotes to prove a thing; in the case of global warming, there are more than anecdotes to support the not-too-surprising conclusion that the climate is being affected by our increasing interventions), but it's enough to remind me to think about it.

It will take more than anecdotal actions, too, to change the trend toward destruction of the environment. Sure, if every person does something, that helps, but what we're more in need of is large actions. The New York Times has an article about the relative value of various actions (they've had a significant number of articles lately; global warming is flavor-of-the-month right now, not least thanks to Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth and his proselytizing on the issue, but how long will that last?):

The Environmental Protection Agency kicked off Energy Awareness Month in October with the slogan “change a light, change the world,” and encouraged Americans to buy compact fluorescent lights instead of conventional incandescent bulbs. Useful as that may be, picking a large sport utility vehicle that goes two miles farther on a gallon of gasoline than the least-efficient S.U.V.’s would have an impact on emissions of global warming gases about five times larger than replacing five 60-watt incandescent bulbs. The dollar savings would be about 10 times larger. And the more-efficient light bulbs would have a negligible effect on oil consumption.

But the bigger issue is changing an entire economic and societal culture that is based on activities that consume large quantities of fossil fuels.

There are two points to consider as we look at this: One is that we must find a replacement for fossil fuel to power our lifestyle and our continued development of technology and industry. (By "our" I mean humanity's--when it comes to the global climate, we are most certainly all in this together, and the fact that the United States has chosen to deny that by not signing on to the Kyoto Accords is just blind--or willful--ignorance.) But the question is, what do we replace it with? And what if the thing we replace it with, faced with continuing increase in demand as more of the world becomes industrialized and the already-industrialized parts of the world continue to create more technologies that use energy, eventually becomes insufficient for the demand? Or turns out to have its own problems? It has to come from somewhere, somebody will probably have to create or control it, etc.--what if it becomes another thing to war over? Or has unforeseen hazards associated with it? What's our backup plan?

The other is to rethink what constitutes our lifestyle. We are going to create more technology to make our lives easier and more pleasant--that's what we have done throughout human history, and there's not much wrong with it. The more we are removed from mundane manual tasks, the freer we are to create. Technology has also opened the door to emancipation: when large quantities of cheap manual labor are no longer required to provide food or make things, it's easier for a culture to move away from slavery. When the preparation and maintenance of food and shelter are no longer full-time jobs, women are no longer chained to the house. And so forth. Technology is good.

But when it becomes a conduit for feeding us information and entertainment, when it interacts with the environment so we don't have to--when people stop thinking because there is no incentive to do so--that's less a good thing. I'm reminded of the short story "With Folded Hands" by the late,great Jack Williamson. (You may be more familiar with the novel he developed from the story, The Humanoids, but the short story is eerier and better.) We can cede our unpleasant chores to machines, but we should be aware what we give up for convenience (one experiences the world very differently on foot than by car, for example; and imagining is work, too--Rob can tell you from his experience teaching that imagination is all but gone from teens raised on TV and videos), and be aware of our dependence. I'm not in favor of limiting technology, by any means--you don't want to know how many computers there are in this house relative to number of people--but it is worthwhile, I think, at the same time that we make changes in our consumption by changing our lightbulbs and driving more efficient cars if we make similar small changes in our relationship with technology so that not every aspect of our lives is technology-driven and technology-dependent.

You know, so that when the oil runs out before we have an alternative, or catastrophic climate change wreaks havoc, or we just have rolling brownouts, we have a clue what to do with ourselves. Otherwise, all of us in the (over)developed world will find ourselves helpless compared to our neighbors in the undeveloped parts of the world.