But we invited them to go time traveling with us. See you in 20 years.

Originally published in 2000, this article contains timeless guidance.

Writing is a worthy calling—one that can, at times, achieve great heights that ennoble the human race.

Actually, I believe writing was the first truly verifiable and effective form of magic. Think of how it must have impressed people in ancient times! To look at marks, pressed into fired clay, and know that they convey the words of scribes and kings long dead—it must have seemed fantastic. Knowledge, wisdom and art could finally accumulate, and death was cheated one part of its sting.

Still, let me admit and avow that writing was not my own first choice of a career. True, I came from a family of writers. It was in my blood. But I wanted something else—to be a scientist. And by the fates, I became one.

I also had this hobby though—writing stories—and it provided a lot of satisfaction. I always figured that I’d scribble a few stories a year… maybe a novel now and then… while striving to become the best researcher and teacher I could be.

Don’t mistake this for modesty! It’s just that I perceive science—the disciplined pursuit of truth—to be a higher calling than spinning imaginative tales, no matter how vivid, innovative, or even deeply moving those tales may turn out to be.

I know this seems an unconventional view—certainly my fellow scientists tell me so, as they often express envy—an envy that I find bemusing. As for the artists and writers I know, they seem almost universally convinced that they stand at the pinnacle of human undertakings. Doesn’t society put out endless propaganda proclaiming that entertainers are beings close to gods?

Ever notice how this propaganda is feverishly spread by the very people who benefit from the image?

Don’t you believe it. They are getting the whole thing backwards.

Oh, don’t get me wrong; art is a core element to being human. We need it, from our brains all the way down to the heart and gut. Art is the original “magic.” Even when we’re starving—especially when we’re starving—we can find nourishment at the level of the subjective, just by using our imaginations. As author Tom Robbins aptly put it:

Science gives man what he needs,
But magic gives him what he wants.

I’ll grant all that. But don’t listen when they tell you the other half—that art and artists are rare.

Have you ever noticed that no human civilization ever suffered from a deficit of artistic expression? Art fizzes from our very pores! How many people do you know who lavish time and money on an artistic hobby? Some of them quite good, yet stuck way down the pyramid that treats the top figures like deities.

Imagine this. If all of the professional actors and entertainers died tomorrow, how many days before they were all replaced? Whether high or low, empathic or vile—art seems to pour from Homo Sapiens, almost as if it were a product of our metabolism, a natural part of ingesting and excreting. No, sorry. Art may be essential and deeply human, but it ain’t rare.

What’s rare is honesty. A willingness to look past all the fancy things we want to believe, peering instead at what may actually be true. And while every civilization had subjective arts, in copious supply, only one culture ever had the guts to seek objective truth through science.

As a child, despite my talents and background, it was science that struck me as truly grand and romantically noble—a team effort in which egotism took a second seat to the main goal. The goal of getting around all the pretty lies we tell ourselves. I strove hard to be part of it.

But what can you do? Choose your talents? No way. Eventually, as my beloved hobby burgeoned, threatening to take over, I found myself forced to admit that science is hard! I am much better at art—making up vivid stories—than I ever was at laboring honestly to discover new truths.

At least, that’s what civilization seems to be saying. My fellow citizens pay me better to write novels than they ever did to work in a lab.

Oh, I still like to do occasional forays into science. Some of my articles are posted here.

Still, the jury came back to say I do something else much better. It’s silly to complain that your gifts are different than you’d like. Putting stylish cynicism aside, these two elements enrich each other. The rigor of science combines with the “what-if” freedom of imagination.

Anyway, I believe a person is behooved to help pass success on to those who follow. So, after writing the same answers, over and over, to many letters I received from would-be writers, I decided to put it all together here. Call it a small trove of advice. Mine it for whatever wisdom you may find here…

...bearing in mind that no profession is more idiosyncratic than writing! In other words, don’t just take my word for anything. Collect every piece of wisdom you can find, then do it your own way!

Despite all of the raging ego trips, writing is much like any other profession. There’s a lot to learn—dialogue, setting, characterization, plus all the arty nuances that critics consider so much more important than plot. The process can be grueling. Still, there is a bit of luck; you can have fun creating amateur stuff along the way! Later, you may even find some of that early stuff is worth taking out of the drawer again, and hacking into presentable shape.

If I spoke dismissively of critics, that doesn’t mean I put down criticism! At its core, criticism is the only antidote that human beings have discovered against error. It is the chief method that a skilled person can use to become “even better.” The key to discovering correctable errors before you commit a work to press.

But criticism hurts! A deep and pervasive flaw in human character makes all of us resistant to the one thing that can help us to do better.

The only solution? Learn to grow up. To hold your head high, develop a thick skin, and take it.

If a reader didn’t like your work, that may be a matter of taste. But if she did not understand the work… or was bored… that’s your fault as a writer, pure and simple.

Oh, you must learn to take feedback with many grains of salt. Many of the people you ask for feedback will be foolish or distracted or simply mistaken. Be very wary of taking advice HOW to solve a problem. You are the creator; finding solutions is your business. Still, other people will be very helpful in pointing out that there is a problem in a passage.

The fundamental rule: if more than one reader is bored or confused by a given passage, you did not do your job right. Find ways to tighten and improve that scene.

Make the book hard to put down—in order to feed the cat, go to work, go to bed. Your aim is to make the reader appear at work or school tomorrow disheveled and groggy from sleep deprivation, with all of their loved ones angry over book-induced neglect! If you induce this condition in your customers, they will buy your next book. That is the sadomasochistic truth.

Back to criticism. Look at the acknowledgments page at the back of every book I publish. There are at least thirty names listed, sometimes more—names of people to whom I circulated early drafts.

Yes, this is at the extreme end among writers. Many circulate manuscripts early in their careers, then stop doing so, telling themselves—“I am a professional now, so I don’t need feedback.”

Baloney! If you are a daring writer, you will always be poking away at new things, and exploring new ground. Testing your limits. That means making both wonderful discoveries and awful mistakes. So? Refine the discoveries and solve the mistakes! It helps to have more eyes—the outsider perspective—to notice thing that your own eyes will miss.

Anyway, it works for me.

Writing is about half skills that you can learn. The remaining half—as in all the arts—can only arise from something ineffable called talent. For example, it helps to have an ear for human dialogue. Or to perceive the quirky variations in human personality and to empathize with other types of people—including both victims and villains—well enough to portray their thoughts and motives. (See my note below about “point of view”). Sure, a lot of hard work and practice can compensate for areas of deficient talent, but only up to a point.

In other words, no matter how dedicated and hard-working you are, success at writing may not be in the cards. Talents are gifts that we in this generation cannot yet manipulate or artificially expand. So don’t beat yourself up if you discover that part lacking. Keep searching till you find your gift.

But, assuming you do have at least the minimum mix of talent, ambition and will, let me now offer a few tidbits of advice—pragmatic steps that might improve your chances of success.

1. The first ten pages of any work are crucial. They are what busy editors see when they rip open your envelope—snatched irritably from a huge pile that came in that morning. Editors must decide in minutes, perhaps moments, whether you deserve closer attention than all the other aspiring authors in the day’s slush pile. If your first few pages sing out professionalism and skill—grabbing the reader with a vivid story right away—the editor may get excited. Even if the next chapter disappoints, she’ll at least write you a nice letter.
Alas, she won’t even read those first ten pages if the first page isn’t great! And that means the first paragraph has to be better still. And the opening line must be the best of all.
2. Don’t put a plot summary at the beginning. Plunge right into the story! Hook ‘em with your characters. Then follow chapter one with a good outline.
3. There are at least a dozen elements needed in a good novel, from characterization to plot to ideas to empathy to snappy dialogue and rapid scene setting, all the way to riveting action… and so on. I’ve seen writers who were great at half of these things, but horrid at the rest. Editors call these writers ‘tragic.’ Sometimes they mutter about wishing to construct a Frankenstein author, out of bits and pieces of several who just missed the cut, because of one or two glaring deficits.
Only rarely will an editor actually tell you these lacks or faults. It’s up to you to find them. You can only do this by workshopping.
4. Have you workshopped your creative efforts? Find a group of bright neo-writers who are at about your level of accomplishment and learn from the tough give-and-take that arises! Local workshops can be hard to find, but try asking at a bookstore that caters to the local writing crowd. Or take the ‘writing course’ at your local community college. Teachers of such courses often know only a little. But there you will at least get to meet other local writers. If you ‘click’ with a few, you can exchange numbers and form your own workshop, after class ends. Another advantage of taking a course—the weekly assignment. Say it’s ten pages. That weekly quota may provide an extra impetus, the discipline you need to keep producing. Ten pages a week for ten weeks? That’s a hundred pages, partner. Think about that.
5. Avoid over-using flowery language. Especially adjectives! This is a common snare for young writers, who fool themselves into thinking that more is better, or that obscurity is proof of intelligence. I used to tell my students they should justify every adjective they put in their works. Write spare descriptions, erring in favor of tight, terse prose, especially in first draft. Your aim is to tell a story that people can’t put down! Later, when you’ve earned the right, you can add a few adjectival descriptions, like sprinkles on a cake. Make each one a deliberate professional choice, not a crutch.
6. Learn control over Point Of View, or POV. This is one of the hardest aspects of writing to teach or to grasp. Some students never get it at all. Through which set of eyes does the reader view the story? Is your POV omniscient? (The reader knows everything, including stuff the main character doesn’t.) Does the POV ride your character’s shoulder? (The reader sees what the character sees, but doesn’t share character’s inner thoughts.) Or is it somewhere in between? In most modern stories we tend to ride inside the character’s head, sharing his/her knowledge and surface thoughts, without either delving too deeply or learning things that the protagonist doesn’t know. Decide which it will be. Then stick with your choice. Oh, and it’s generally best to limit point of view to one character at a time. Choose one person to be the POV character of each chapter—or the entire book.
7. Think people! As Kingsley Amis said:

   These cardboard spacemen aren’t enough
   Nor alien monsters sketched in rough
   Character’s the essential stuff.

8. Here’s a nifty little trick. When puzzled over how to do something—dialogue for example—RETYPE a favorite conversation that was written by a writer you admire. The same can hold for other elements of style, like setting, characterization and point of view. Find a truly great example and retype it. Don’t shortcut by simply re-reading the scene! You will notice more by retyping than by looking. This is because a skilled writer is performing a “magical incantation” using words to create feelings and sensations and impressions in the reader’s mind. If you simply re-read a passage, especially one written by an expert, the incantation will take effect! You’ll feel, know, empathize, cry… and you will NOT pay close attention to how the author did it! So don’t cheat. Actually retype the scene, letter by letter. The words will pass through a different part of your brain. You’ll say—“Oh! That’s why he put a comma there!”
9. Don’t be a ‘creative writing major’ in school! That educational specialization offers no correlation with success or sales! A ‘minor’ in writing is fine, but you are better off studying some subject that has to do with civilization and the world. Moreover, by gaining experience in some worthy profession you’ll actually have something worth writing about.
10. If you really are a writer, you will write! Nothing can stop you.

A final piece of advice:

Beware the dangers of ego! For some, this manifests as a frantic need to see one’s self as great.

Oh, it’s fine to believe in yourself. It takes some impudent gall to claim that other people ought to pay you to read your scribblings! By all means, stoke yourself enough to believe that.

But if you listen too much to the voice saying “Be great, BE GREAT!,” it’ll just get in your way. Worse, it can raise expectations that will turn any moderate degree of success into something bitter. I’ve seen this happen, too many times. A pity, when any success at all should bring you joy.

Others have the opposite problem… egos that too readily let themselves be quashed by all the fire-snorting fellows stomping around. These people tend (understandably) to keep their creativity more private. That makes it hard for them to seek critical feedback, the grist for self-improvement. At either extreme, ego can be more curse than blessing.

But if you keep it under control, you’ll be able to say: “I have some talents that I can develop. If I apply myself, I should be able to write stories that others may want to read! So give me a little room now. I’m closing the door and sitting down to write. Don’t anyone bother me for an hour!”

Whatever you do, keep writing. Put passion into it!

If you do all these things, will success follow?

For a majority, a fine hobby may result. In the internet-age, as hobbies thrive and self-publication becomes increasingly respectable, that may be a noteworthy level of accomplishment in its own right. Many amateur creators are gathering readers and fans out there, numbering in hundreds or thousands.

In a few cases, some combination of talent, skill and hard work will lift you higher on the pyramid of your chosen art-form. An occasional professional short story sale? A first novel? One per decade? Per year?

A series of luscious and wonderful surprises may come as success drags you (kicking and screaming?) away from your day job. It can be a great feeling, especially if you keep your ambition and effort high and expectations low.

Enjoying craftsmanship is what it’s really all about. So have fun writing. Take your time. Be a useful person along the way—and it may all come true, in time.

Good luck!

This is a re-posting of an article from 2008 that offers additional perspective on questions being pondered in our current IEET reader poll.

We live our lives, dealing with everyday issues and minor problems. Changes rarely shock; more often, they startle or titillate, and very quickly get folded into the existing cultural momentum. Even when big events happen, even in the worst of moments, we cope, and adapt. This is, in many ways, a quiet strength of the human mind, and a reason for hope when facing the dismal prospects ahead of us.

But futurism, at least as it’s currently presented, is rarely about the everyday. More often, futurists tell stories about how some new technology (or political event, or environmental/resource crisis, etc.) will Change Your Life Forever. From the telescopic perspective of looking at the future in the distance, they’re right. There’s no doubt that if you were to jump from 2008 to 2028, your experience of the future would be jarring and disruptive.

But we don’t jump into the future—what we think of now as the Future is just an incipient present, very soon to become the past. We have the time to cope and adapt. If you go from 2008 to 2028 by living every minute, the changes around you would not be jarring; instead, they’d largely be incremental, and the occasional surprises would quickly blend into the flow of inevitability.

There is a tendency in futurism to treat the discipline as a form of science fiction (and I don’t leave myself out of that criticism). We construct a scenario of tomorrow, with people wearing web-connected contact lenses, driving semi-autonomous electric cars to their jobs at the cultured meat factories, and imagine how cool and odd and dislocating it must be to live in such a world.

But futurism isn’t science fiction, it’s history turned on its head. The folks in that scenario don’t just wake up one day to find their lives transformed; they live their lives to that point. They hear about new developments long before they encounter them, and know somebody who bought an Apple iLens or package of NuBacon before doing so themselves. The future creeps up on them, and infiltrates their lives; it becomes, for the people living there, the banal present.

William Gibson’s widely-quoted saying, “the future is here, it’s just not well-distributed yet” is suggestive of this. The future spreads, almost like an infection. The distribution of the future is less an endeavor of conscious advancement than it is an epidemiological process—a pandemic of tomorrows, if you will.

If futurism is more history inverted than science fiction, perhaps it can learn from the changes that the study of history has seen. One of the cornerstone revolutions in the academic discipline of history was the rejection of the “Great Men” model, where history was the study of the acts of larger-than-life people, the wars fought by more-powerful-than-most nations, and the ideas of the brilliant shapers of culture.

Historians have come to recognize that history includes the lives of regular people. Some of the most meaningful and powerful historical studies of the past few decades, from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States to Ken Burns’ popular documentary, The Civil War, focused as much or more on the everyday citizens as they did the “Great Men,” and as much on everyday moments as on the “turning points” and revolutionary events.

What might a “people’s history of the future” look like?

Last year in June, a 17 year-old girl, seven months pregnant, was told by her boyfriend, the baby’s father, that he would leave her if she didn’t get rid of the unborn child.  So, the girl gives 21 year-old Aaron Harrison $150 to beat her up and induce a miscarriage; it didn’t work – the baby survived, was born in August and, fortunately, adopted. The girl pled no contest to a second-degree felony count of criminal solicitation to commit murder, but the charges were later dropped as a judge ruled that under state law, she could not be held criminally liable.  Harrison is serving a sentence for up to five years for the “attempted killing of an unborn child.”

Utah’s legislative response:  Pass a bill that charges pregnant women and girls with murder for having miscarriages caused by “intentional or knowing” acts; so that if this happens again, the 17 year-old mother could face a prison sentence of 15 years to life. (The text of the bill can be accessed here.)

But no one is addressing the underlying problem. Sure, there is plenty of blame to go around – the pregnant minor, the baby’s father, the guy who agreed to beat her up – but there also lots of questions that need to be asked, such as “How could this have been prevented?”

Did the 17 year-old or her boyfriend have sex education?  Did either of them have access to birth control?  Was the 17 year-old aware that she had the right to a legal abortion?  Did her parents or the boy’s parents discuss alternatives with her?  Did ANYONE in the community discuss her options or offer her support?  Or did they figure that every 17 year-old was as mature as Ellen Page’s character in Juno and everything would be hunky dory? (They obviously haven’t watched Revolutionary Road.)

As Lynn M. Paltrow, the executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, commented, how this happened is being obscured because of the sole focus on the baby; she asks “Why would a young woman get to a point of such desperation that she would invite violence against herself?”

According to the Guttmacher Institute, which advocates for sexual and reproductive health in the United States, 93 percent of all Utah counties have no abortion provider. And I would venture to guess that sex education and access to birth control is fairly limited where this happened. (Somebody, please correct me if I’m wrong.)

Planned Parenthood’s Melissa Bird is concerned that the language of “intentional or knowing” is still problematic, leaving suspicion open to any miscarriage: “What happens to women who are in abusive relationships?” she asks. “What happens if a woman threatens to leave the abuser, falls down the stairs and loses the baby? What if the abuser beats the woman and causes a miscarriage? Could he turn her in? Who would the prosecutor believe? What happens if a drug addict who’s trying to get clean loses her baby? Will she be brought up on murder charges?” (full text accessible here)

If there is anything that approaches a consensus in the US on this topic, it is that is prevention of unwanted pregnancy is much better than abortion.  This law doesn’t consider that or address the underlying problem – it doesn’t help women have control over their reproductive systems or help the unborn; it penalizes the mother for being desperate.

I received a call earlier this week from a freelance reporter who writes for a health care blog, and we had a long conversation about the ills of medical insurance in America.

One thing I emphasized to her is the fallacy of conservatives repeatedly claiming that “the U.S. health care system is the best in the world!”

Yes, the care that is provided here is quite good. Expensive but good. Very good, but really expensive.

By now, anyone who’s been paying attention (or paying insurance premiums) knows that health care costs in the United States are out of control.

Costs keep going up and up and up—and yet our results, overall, are comparatively mediocre.

It should be obvious and beyond dispute that something needs to change. And we can put that argument into terms that not only are morally compelling but also make good sound business sense.

Three reasons why the U.S. system of employer-provided, for-profit health insurance should be replaced with something better:

1. It places American companies at a competitive disadvantage.

In virtually every other major industrialized nation, the cost of providing medical insurance to individuals is borne by the state rather than by employers.

What this means is that U.S.-based companies, faced with paying for most if not all of their employees’ health insurance premiums (which includes both active and retired employees) are at a severe disadvantage. They are on an uneven playing field when it comes to competing for market share with companies from other nations.

It is a testament to American business that our trade deficits are not worse than they already are. If that burden of covering employees health care costs were to be removed, it could provide a huge boost to the U.S. economy and potentially make a big difference in reducing unemployment.

2. It forces insurance companies to make no-win ethical choices.

By its very nature, any for-profit business will try to maximize its bottom line. Nothing wrong with that. A company’s first responsibility is to its owners and/or shareholders. That’s how capitalism works, and in most cases, for most kinds of business, it works just fine.

If a company doesn’t focus effectively on making a profit, it will go out of business. The profit motive is generally a positive aspect of a capitalist society. It makes companies compete, work harder, try to please their customers, and excel at what they do. So far, so good.

But when it comes to medical insurance, that goal of maintaining and increasing profits—an ethical responsibility that every company owes to its stakeholders—can run smack up against other ethical priorities related to the well-being of the company’s customers, its insured.

To make more money, an insurance company may need to reduce costs. That might require dropping customers who are costing too much—taking too much out of the system—in favor of those who are healthier and don’t need the benefits. It could mean deliberately denying service for people who are in need. Sometimes it results in misleading if not outright dishonest practices: misinformation, obfuscation, delay, complexity; anything to slow down payouts and cut down on claims.

I’m not justifying such tactics on the part of insurance companies, but I also think it’s not fair to blame them entirely for doing what for-profit entities have to do. Here in the United States, we have put those businesses into the untenable position of making decisions about ethical matters that are in conflict with one another. Either way, they can’t win.

3. It causes the greatest harm to the weakest among us (and ends up costing more in the long run).

The whole theory behind medical insurance (or, indeed, insurance of any kind) is to reduce costs by sharing risks. By spreading out the burden of paying for insurance roughly equally over everyone, we can guarantee—we can insure—that no single individual is met with catastrophic costs in the event of a major misfortune. This works fine, as long as everyone contributes and everyone is covered.

In our present system, however, many people aren’t covered and some people don’t contribute.

The way it works now, those who face the least risk—the healthiest and the richest—are the ones most desired for coverage by for-profit insurance companies. That just makes sense: healthy, successful people can afford to pay higher premiums and, at the same time, are less likely to require large payouts. They are the ideal customers for profit-based insurance enterprises.

And what that also means, of course, is that those who can least afford good insurance and those who are most likely to require significant coverage—the poorest and the least healthy—are the last people that for-profit insurance companies want to take on as customers. They get weeded out and end up either uninsured or, at best, inadequately insured.

All of which leads to the poor and the unemployed in America making excessive use of public hospital emergency rooms for all their medical needs. And this, unfortunately, is both the most expensive and the least effective form of health coverage that we could provide for them. But it is what our present system has driven them to.

The poor and the weak get sicker, and taxpayers end up paying far more than we should to help get them well again. It’s not right, ethically, and it’s also quite foolish economically.

The point of this article is not to offer or promote any specific solution, although I will say it seems clear to me that some sort of single-payer plan, e.g., expansion of Medicare, makes the most sense in the long run. But what I want to convey today is that our current way of doing things here in the United States is not only morally dubious, but also downright bad business. We can do better, and we should.

The main point made by Edis is this:

Secularism, particularly when it extends to public criticism of religion and policies that inconvenience religious communities, is a source of social division. Secularists keeping quiet is, in fact, in the interest of peace and public order in many present circumstances.

So, he argues, if secularists want social peace we will actually abandon secularism and shut up. Or, at any rate, we will cease to advocate the key idea of secularism in the sense under discussion: the separation of church and state.

Needless to say, I disagree.

Democracy and disagreement

Let me make one concession at the outset. If I express any controversial idea, there is a trivial sense in which it causes social division. I.e., there will be people who’ll oppose me, and we’ll be divided by our disagreement. I will fall into one camp, they into another.

Some others may side with me, and still others with my opponents, so there will be, in a trivial sense, division over the issue under discussion. My original controversial idea might have been about the superiority of the Collingwood football team to its rivals (or the superiority of Arsenal, or New Orleans, or whatever choices might be suggested to you by your preferred football code). Or it might be about the rights and wrongs of criminalising homosexual conduct, or about the morality and prudence of embarking on a foreign war (against Iran, let’s say, but there always seem to be proposals for foreign wars). So I concede that social division in this trivial sense is caused by any opinion, publicly expressed, on any controversial topic. In this trivial sense, social division is caused by a proposal that the government of my local jurisdiction ignore traditional Christian morality and apply the harm principle when considering such topics as the legality of homosexual conduct.

If this is what Gary Bouma meant when he accused secularists of creating social division, he is correct. We can’t express any opinion on anything at all controversial without encountering disagreement, and, so, in a trivial sense, causing division.

Democracies, however, thrive on disagreement. The usual assumption is that disagreements about government policies can ultimately, if not entirely satisfactorily, be resolved at the ballot box. I say “not entirely satisfactorily” because the various political platforms on offer are package deals, and no one may be entirely pleased by the platform of whatever party or coalition obtains power. Democracy is an imperfect system, but it’s often been observed that the alternatives are even worse. Thus, we persevere with it, and it does at least have the advantage of tending to weed out the most tyrannical, corrupt, idiosyncratic, or just plain incompetent governments. Parties that are serious contenders for political office will be pushed towards the centre, to fielding candidates with at least some claim to competence, and to acceptance of a certain degree of individual liberty.

Even this can have its downside: while individual liberty is a good thing, centrism sometimes stifles creativity. Still, democratic processes eliminate many opportunities for tyranny, while creating pressures for honesty and competence. Many politicians in democratic states may be corrupt, but corruption is at least frowned upon, and the level of corruption is insignificant by historical standards or those of more authoritarian systems. The point is that democracy is imperfect, yet supportable - and, most importantly for my purpose, that it assumes a measure of robust disagreement within society, at least about political issues.

When secularists argue for freedom of speech, the harm principle, separation of church and state, and so on, we merely do what democracy requires. Our opponents can reply with arguments that the state should be more theocratic, more responsive to distinctively religious morals, and so on. They can, for example, argue that homosexual conduct should be banned on the ground that it is condemned in the Bible. If they say such things, they will meet with disagreement, perhaps even with disagreement expressed as satire or mockery, but that is part of what democracy is all about.

So yes, when secularists argue that the state should not impose religion or religious morality we do, in a trivial sense, create division. That is, we provoke disagreement and argument. Does that mean we should shut up, or at least adopt a unilateral code of niceness that excludes mockery and satire? Of course not. The alternative is that we acquiesce in the contrary view, that religion or religious morality should be imposed by state power - either we don’t oppose that view at all or we do so with one hand tied behind our backs. But once that view is accepted and acted upon by the state, social division will be taken to a new level.

Instead of the state permitting a vast range of religious (and moral) positions to exist side by side without their adherents suffering persecution, the state becomes a site for realistic contests to determine just which controversial religio-moral views will be imposed by force, even on those who disagree. Once the state brings force against those who disagree, the stakes are upped enormously. Those who lose out in the political struggle no longer have the choice of living side by side, and openly, with those who disagree with them. Instead, they must either go underground or stand up and resist.

Social division with a vengeance

We don’t need to go back to the wars of religion in Europe to see how this happens, though the bloody wars and persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries should not be dismissed as irrelevant. If Western countries have had few religious wars, persecutions, insurrections, and so on, for some hundreds of years, that has been because the state has exercised restraint. In a small number of cases, religious sects have, indeed, been overpowered by the state, as when mainstream Mormons in the US were forced, in the nineteenth century to abandon the doctrine of plural marriage. Generally speaking, however, the state apparatus in Western nations has not aimed at imposing a religious orthodoxy, and any persecutions have been directed at easy and unpopular targets such as the Mormons. A revived policy of demanding orthodoxy would lead to evasion of the law, police corruption, estrangement of huge numbers of people, and (very likely) large-scale violence.

Although the state has been reluctant to impose strict religious orthodoxy, it has often adopted large-scale experiments with moralistic laws backed by the prevalence of traditional religious attitudes to bodily pleasure. One relatively recent example was Prohibition in the US, which led to corruption, gangsterism, and other harms on a scale far greater than anything that might have been caused by the legal consumption of alcohol. A current example is the disastrous “war on drugs”, which has led to huge numbers of people being locked up in cells and/or having their property confiscated. The number of Americans currently in prison, mainly because of crimes connected in some ways to drugs, is shameful - it looks like a war by the government on its own citizenry.

As long as the war on drugs continues, peaceful drug users must live their lifestyles covertly, rather than openly, and are to that extent excluded from society. Meanwhile, we have seen massive adverse effects in the form of police corruption, organised crime, and acts of violence. All of this is social division with a vengeance!

Consider a paradigm case where religious morality is imposed by force - criminalisation of homosexual conduct. The effect of this is that homosexuals must appear to conform or else face punishment (executions, canings, being locked up, or whatever the local barbaric treatment may be). This compels people to live false lives, drives homosexuality underground, and estranges homosexuals from the mainstream society. This is not merely division in the trivial sense of open disagreement, which is healthy, but in the far more profound sense that we have one group of people, the majority, who are included in society, while another group is excluded and has every reason to feel alienated. If homosexuals are unable to reverse such a situation through democratic processes (and they will be enormously disadvantaged if they try to speak up), then their most obvious option is to live one of the most important parts of their lives covertly.

Of course, they have other options. Some may respond with sufficient violence to make the oppressive laws that they face largely unenforceable in certain districts. Before getting to that point, they may try campaigns of peaceful civil disobedience, and such campaigns are sometimes effective. If, however, the state insists on enforcing laws against essentially harmless conduct that is very important to the people concerned, one outcome will eventually be violent riots. Meanwhile, morally good, otherwise law-abiding people will find themselves not only being disagreed with, or even satirised (something that gays have to put up with in our society), but actually executed, or locked up, or subjected to other outrages. Once again, social division with a vengeance!

Surely it would be better if the state reasoned that its essential goals are worldly, e.g. keeping of the peace, protecting citizens from violence, providing a system of property and a social safety net. Surely it would be better if the state did not operate with any concept of sin. In that case, it would know better than to ban essentially harmless conduct - or even conduct with more-or-less manageable and largely self-inflicted harms, such as drinking alcohol. It would, surely, be smarter if the state followed the harm principle, rather than a principle of enforcing religion or a religion-endorsed morality.

That outcome is more likely to be obtained if it becomes a widely expressed and accepted sentiment that the state ought not to enforce religious and “traditional” views of morality, but ought merely to protect worldly things such as life, liberty, health, and property. This can become part of a political culture, as has happened to some considerable extent in the West. Where attempts are made to undermine that sort of secular liberal political culture, we ought to oppose them unambiguously, rather than risk losing what has been won over hundreds of years.

There may still be debate about how best and how far to protect those worldly things that I mentioned, and there will still be strong disagreements and political rivalries, but at least no one will be harmed and stigmatised for essentially harmless (or mainly self-regarding) conduct. Moreover, if the government’s policies are set on the basis of how best to protect worldly things, then the different sides of politics will all have some chance of obtaining real influence (and of gaining power). These are areas where changes can be made and compromise is possible, indeed frequently obtained. On this approach, no one is persecuted or driven underground, except for truly anti-social behaviour (violence, property crimes, and so on). The worst you can suffer from the state, if you are generally honest and non-violent, is taxation to provide funds for the social safety net ... and even the level of taxation will be limited by what the voting public as a whole will accept.

Free speech even for theocrats

I’m not suggesting that those who want the state to be more moralistic or theocratic should themselves be silenced by force (by fines, confiscations, imprisonment, and so on). They have freedom of speech, and attempts to suppress their speech would be just as divisive as attempts to criminalise homosexual conduct. If their speech were censored they would be driven underground and estranged from the larger society. They might ultimately riot if they found they had no other choice to regain their freedom of speech. The speech of moralists and theocrats is not directly harmful, and it is important to them. Even if their policies have no foreseeable prospect of being implemented within a healthy political culture, self-expression is too precious to people for the state to attempt suppress it. Indeed, we all have an interest in the continued expression of ideas that dissent from our own - otherwise, how can be sure that we are right?

Let the theocrats have their say, but let us continue to criticise their views and try to convince the state not to act on them.

In short, theocratic or moralistic speech should be permitted. But it does not follow that the policy prescriptions of theocrats and moralists should be implemented. Quite the contrary, they should not be. Nor should those of us who wish to criticise such policy prescriptions be silenced. If we are criticised, we should not call for the silencing of our opponents (notice that I have not suggested anywhere that Gary Bouma’s speech should be banned), but we certainly have every right to defend our position, to criticise the criticisms, and to respond sharply to people who accuse us of being “divisive”. Such accusations cheapen the concept of divisiveness, and we ought to say so.

Old-fashioned secularism?

Edis thinks that my views are old-fashioned. Well, it’s true that views much like this were expressed as far back as the seventeenth century, notably in the writings of John Locke. Full-blooded versions of them needed John Stuart Mill’s writings in the mid-nineteenth century, and they first became commonplace as recently as the 1960s, when governments became serious - at least some of the time - about the harm principle. Issues relating to separation of church and state, and to the harm principle, are still being worked through in Western parliaments and courts.

However, even if I am old-fashioned in my secularism, that does not make me wrong. Plenty of ideas that date back three or four hundred years, or more, have considerable truth attached to them, and we should not adopt some different view just because time has passed. Galileo staunchly defended the Copernican view of the solar system four hundred years ago; that does not mean that it is time for us to return, in a post-modernist spirit, to a geocentric theory. Of course, the views of Copernicus and Galileo needed much refinement, but they were on the right track. So was Locke, even though he knew nothing of the complications that would be caused by mass public education, the welfare state, technological change, and the sexual revolution.

For example, Locke thought that it was okay, or even necessary, to persecute atheists. He was wrong about that, although he provided a secular argument for his opinion, and his ideas need to be updated accordingly. (Briefly, the secular argument was that atheists cannot be trusted to honour their oaths. As it turns out, atheists are as likely to tell the truth in court or elsewhere as anyone else). Locke probably would have approved of laws against homosexual conduct, as he appears to have thought that heterosexual monogamy was crucial to the functioning of society. He was wrong about that, too - it turns out that modern societies can function just fine with a great diversity of sexual choices, especially in an era with highly effective methods of contraception.

By all means, let’s update Locke’s thinking, but none of that requires us to throw out his key insight, that the state exists to protect the things of this world, not to make us morally good by some religious standard or to promote our spiritual salvation. If anything, Locke did not go far enough. In any event, in a democracy people can disagree robustly about all sorts of things, including about whether Locke was right. But if we go down the path of theocratic or moralistic social policy we will have more than robust disagreements. Apart from all the other reasons for not persecuting people who’ve done nothing terribly wrong, we’ll get social division with a vengeance.

Ironically enough, Edis turns to a much more old-fashioned model for the operation of society than anything imagined by John Locke or John Stuart Mill. That doesn’t, in itself, prove that he’s wrong, but perhaps we really have learned a thing or two since medieval times. Perhaps the struggle for liberal freedoms has not been in vain. More about that tomorrow, when I examine the proposal from Edis for what strikes me as a multi-cultural dystopia.

Part Two

In the first part of my response I developed the theme that any criticism of religion creates division only in the trivial sense that it creates (often healthy) disagreement. By contrast, real social division - social division with a vengeance - is caused when the theocratically inclined offer their controversial theological claims (or moral claims that are grounded in theological thinking) as a basis for coercive measures by the state.

For many reasons, it is better to avoid the concept of a Christian (or Muslim, or Jewish, or whatever it may be) state, in which political power is to be used to further God’s eschatological plan and lead citizens to spiritual salvation. Rather, the state is best regarded as an institution, or set of institutions, that protects purely worldly things. Thus, the state provides a framework for public order, economic welfare, and the like. It establishes a scheme of property and commerce (which must be reasonably fair by ordinary secular standards, such as rewarding efforts and contributions), protects us from external violence, restrains us from using violence in social competition, and (increasingly) provides a social and economic safety net.

Once the state is regarded as a “secular”, in the sense of “worldly”, institution, the main source of conflict between rival theocrats is defused. Secular states will not have religious reasons to go to war against each other or to persecute their citizens, and they can concentrate on worldly issues where there is at least some prospect of success (including by way of political compromises). The various sects need not fear persecution with fire and sword (or with pistols and prison bars), and are likely to soften their attitudes in response.

If we argue that the state should be secular in this sense, we thereby argue that would-be theocrats are wrong - but not that their speech should be suppressed. We also attempt to create a norm of the political culture that the functions of the state (the worldly ones mentioned above) and those of the various churches and sects (spiritual salvation, rightness with God, etc.) will be kept separate. This functional separation of church and state also enhances the liberty of individual citizens: while we will be required by the secular law to act within certain constraints (not resorting to violence, honouring our formal contracts, paying taxes, taking care in situations where the welfare of others requires it and they are reasonable to rely on us), we are left with a potentially infinite range of choices and plans of life.

As Locke envisaged this regime, nothing would be illegal inside of a church unless it were also illegal outside. Thus, a church could not be singled out by hostile state officials by being forbidden to do something allowed to others. However, by itself, this might still allow some things to be made illegal (both in church and out) to the great inconvenience of a particular sect. Locke overcame this problem by emphasising a version of the harm principle, later developed in more detail (and more restrictively) by John Stuart Mill: the state should not ban anything except for a good secular reason relating to the protection of worldly things. That, of course, follows from his conception of the state’s fundamental role.

Locke gave a good example: the state cannot forbid the religious sacrifice of cattle unless it also forbids killing cattle outside of church. And it cannot do that unless it has a good secular reason. However, a dramatic plague of some cattle disease may provide the state with a good secular reason to ban all killing of cattle for a time, while stocks replenish. In the latter case, the state is acting within its proper role and cannot be criticised.

Taner Edis observes, “Old-fashioned secular liberals such as Blackford have, perhaps, not adequately adjusted to new political and social realities. There are good reasons that secular liberalism is out of fashion these days.”

Well, perhaps. But as I said yesterday, “Ironically enough, Edis turns to a much more old-fashioned model for the operation of society than anything imagined by John Locke or John Stuart Mill.”

I see that Lisa Bauer has now made this point for me in a thread over at RichardDawkins.net. Her views, which I generally endorse, are worth quoting at some length. Here is her impression of what Edis proposes (responding to discussion on the thread, to a contribution by Ophelia Benson that forms the thread’s subject, and, if I’m following the twists and turns, to the further post by Edis that will force me to write Part III of all this):

That quote pretty much sums up the old Ottoman millet system, in which each religious community (Jews, Armenians, Orthodox Greeks, Syriac Orthodox, and so on) was allowed to govern their affairs according to their own religious law…under the umbrella of Muslim supremacy, admittedly, and non-Muslim communities suffered under a lot of legal disadvantages at least until the Tanzimat reforms in the 19th century when the empire was trying to modernize and more fully integrate all its citizens into the state (allowing non-Muslims to become soldiers, for instance, and granting them legal equality with Muslims).

[...]

This system was swept away with the Ottoman Empire back in the 1920s, so why somebody would think this is somehow less “outdated” than liberal democracy is beyond me. Traces of it still exist in places like Lebanon, where religious communities (Shi’ite, Sunni, Maronite, etc.) are still clearly marked and marriage is completely under the control of the religious authorities, and you know how well that has worked out! Israel and many other ex-Ottoman countries like Egypt and Jordan also divide up their religious communities along these lines, where each one has their own family law courts based on religious law and so on, and we might note how friendly most of them are to atheists and the nonreligious (not very!). And this autonomy certainly doesn’t prevent the majority from treating minorities poorly, as Copts in Egypt or even Palestinian Muslims under Israeli rule might tell you.

In fact, it’s quite medieval—European Jews had a not dissimilar relation with medieval European governments, in which the Jewish community had the same kind of quasi-autonomous status within itself, and the elders and rabbis controlled the affairs of the community. If you fell foul of the authorities, like Baruch/Benedict Spinoza did, you fell under the cherem ban, which meant you were totally excommunicated from the Jewish community, and during the period being cut off from a community meant you were basically defenseless and at the mercy of the cruel world. This is another matter that comes up in all such communitarian schemes—what of the individual who does NOT fit into one or another group?

This setup was stifling to many Jews, who broke free from the ghetto and shtetl with their stultifying Jewish religious law codes (halakha) during the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, in the 19th century, and it’s no coincidence that Jews were often at the forefront of efforts to convince governments to adopt liberal human rights. (This is where studying the history of Judaism can be helpful, I must say!) Jewish liberation in the late 18th and 19th centuries in Western European nations like France was predicated on granting rights to Jews as individuals, the same as everybody else, but not to the Jewish community as an autonomous entity, and I doubt that Jews in Western nations outside of Orthodox or Haredi enclaves would be pleased at the prospect of returning to live under rabbinical authority.

The biggest problem with all of this should be pretty obvious—why should all members of a religion be bound by their religious law, usually as conceived by the most traditionalist, conservative clerics? Keep in mind who fought the hardest AGAINST shari’ah courts for family law in Canada—liberal Muslim women who knew just what kind of injustices that would lead to! Many misguided whites were under the illusion that Muslims as a group “wanted” shari’ah law, since this is what the male “community leaders” might have led them to believe, but this turned out to be far from the truth. WHO would be the leaders of these religious communities, and how would this NOT ride roughshod over the rights of minorities within the group, such as women, gays, liberals, apostates, etc.?

So…why is it that so many notions of multiculturalism turn out to look an awful lot like medieval ways of organizing societies? Give me individualism any day!

Just so. I may be an “old-fashioned secular liberal”, but that is not a reason for me to transform into an even more old-fashioned supporter of the Ottoman millet system or some post-modernist variant. Someone who adopts the picture of the universe developed by Copernicus and Galileo might also be old-fahioned, but Copernicus and Galileo were on the right track. Better to update their thinking than to adopt a super-sophisticated version of the Ptolemaic system, even if it has all sorts of lovely computer-generated epicycles to pretty it up.

Since the 1680s, many things have happened to put the classical liberal model of secularism under pressure, but that does not mean it was on the wrong track. Most notably, modern governments have developed functions going far beyond those imagined by Locke or even by the US founding fathers a century later.

Since about the 1870s, Western governments have been extremely active in carving out new functions in response to the success of industrial capitalism ... and its harshness if it is not regulated. Thus, we see the state doing many things that still bear close relationships to this-worldly goods, but also have scope to cut across the spiritual aims of the churches. This is seen no more strongly than in the area of public education, which was not merely a response to the worldly need for knowledge and the ability of the state to provide a safety net for the poor. It was also intended to provide a common moral grounding for growing citizens, who would be expected to play an active political role in democratic societies on reaching adulthood. That concept, of course, has the potential to cut across religious notions of morality, and even across theological doctrine.

A case in point was the introduction of moral education, based on supposedly non-sectarian Bible reading, in the first wave of public schools in the US. This was unacceptable to Catholics, who saw it (with much justification) as an imposition of the Protestant practice of individual reading and interpretation of the holy book. Catholic theology insisted that the priesthood must mediate between the Bible, as God’s word, and individual religious adherents. In effect, the state was imposing Protestantism, admittedly of a generic kind, on its Catholic citizens.

I am not so naive as to be unaware that many complex problems of this kind have developed as the state - often with the best of secular intentions, but also with its share of biases - has turned into an octopus with tentacles in many areas of everyday life. For that reason, I have never claimed that there is no room at all for religious voices in politics. I have, however, insisted that those voices should become marginalised to the extent that they are theocratic. I make no apology for that. Sure, our political philosophy needs to be updated to reflect modern developments, such as the changing role of the state in response to the harshness of nineteenth-century laissez faire. Nonetheless, I see nothing divisive, except in a trivial sense, in defending the functional separation of church and state, while of course acknowledging the grey areas and practical difficulties.

My original post, which Edis objected to, criticised Gary Bouma for his attack on secularists who, supposedly, “want to drive religious voices out of the public policy area”. But most of us do not seek to do anything that can be described so simplistically as that, and what we actually do is completely defensible. We seek to reinforce a political norm against state power being used to impose theologically-based requirements on those who do not believe. I am not repentant about defending that political norm, or about criticising Bouma’s misplaced objection to it. Whatever the complexities - and I’m sure some more of them will emerge in the comments and in my next post - we have every reason to struggle against the contrary model of a Christian (or Muslim, or Jewish, or Hindu, etc.) state.

And amidst the undoubted complexities, we have no reason to aspire to a stifling multi-cultural dystopia where freedom of speech is suppressed and people are trapped in authoritarian communities. Better an updated liberal secularism than what Taner Edis seems to recommend.

Blame it on reading about too many fictional futures where post-apocalyptic dystopias dominate, but I do worry about how to ensure a secure future that depends on highly complex and specialized technologies.

Here’s my problem. Technologies—or rather, the understanding and skills to use specific technologies—can just as easily be lost as gained. Just because we as a global society can do something clever now, doesn’t mean that people 10, 20, 50 years down the line will still be able to do it.

Securing and maintaining technological advances requires effort—take our eyes off the ball, and the technology innovation-equivalent of entropy begins to eat away at progress. And the more dependent we become on complex technologies, the more effort it seems we need to expend to support this dependency.

Which all makes me wonder: Are we are destined to hit a point where our global intellectual capacity is so taken up with maintaining the technological status quo that we will loose the capacity for further technological innovation? Or, even worse, are we heading for a technology innovation impasse that ends up degenerating into an uncertain and unenlightened future?

I have to say, I’m not an optimist here—that is, unless we learn how to build effective technology ratchets.

A mechanical ratchet, as everyone knows, is a device that allows movement in one direction only. By comparison, a technology ratchet can be considered as something that allows technology development to move forward, but prevents or inhibits it from moving backward. The idea is to find ways to hold onto ground gained through technology innovation, without having to constantly expend huge amounts of effort in doing so.

This is a significant challenge. Up until the point that we started using our heads and creating our own destiny, the progress of humans—and our evolutionary precursors—was underpinned by a rather robust biological ratchet: evolution.

Evolution is a well-honed ratchet mechanisms that ensures the successes of one generation are passed on to the next though random mutation and natural selection. In effect, progress is hard-wired into an organism’s genetic code, meaning that each subsequent generation is spared the hassle of learning the rules of survival from scratch. But when we humans started to think for ourselves, we left this biological ratchet behind, leaving us dependent on “soft-wired” technologies that each new generation needs to be taught.

Fortunately, we’ve managed to develop some technology ratchets that have made the process of transferring knowledge from one generation to the next a little easier. Skills like making fire, using wheels and growing crops have propagated successfully from generation to generation for thousands of years, so we must be doing something right.

But how effective are these ratchets, and are they up to the task of sustaining technology innovation in the 21st century? The history of technology development has been “lumpy” to say the least—as civilizations have come and gone, technological ground has been lost as well as gained—suggesting that the technology ratchets of the past might be a little creaky, to say the least.

Living in what is probably the most technologically advanced and technology-dependent age of humanity to date, I’m not sure we can rely fully on old and worn technology ratchets—if we are to prevent a precarious technology-dependent society collapsing like a pack of cards at the slightest provocation, we need to proactively develop effective technology ratchets that underpin sustainable and resilient progress.

So, what sort of technology ratchets should we be building? Here are four ideas for starters:

Open-access knowledge-repositories. These used to be called libraries! Whether stored on paper, digitally, or within cultural and social memories, widespread access to resilient and durable knowledge-bases is an important technology ratchet. Where knowledge is privileged, easily corrupted, or temporal, it becomes increasingly hard to ensure its endurance across generations. Ironically, while we now have access to more information than ever before, the resilience and accessibility of the “knowledge” associated within this information is by no means certain.

Skills transfer mechanisms. I was tempted to say “education” here, but what most people consider as education is part of a broader technology ratchet that ensures the skills of one generation are passed on to successive ones. This includes knowledge transfer. But it also includes the ability to use this knowledge. Skills transfer mechanisms will depend on formal education—including “book-learning” and-on-the job training. But they will also depend on learning in less formal situations—skills passed on by parents and peers, or through social interactions. I suspect sustainable technology innovation will require more people to acquire and pass on more skills than ever before in order to succeed—and we are going to have to find new ways to achieve this.

Redundancy. Biology works so well because it has built-in redundancy. The same information is carried by billions of cells, and there are often multiple pathways to achieving the same end. The result is incredible resilience—throw a curveball at biology, and it adjusts and adapts. It’s something that we could learn from in ensuring resilient technology innovation—redundancy as another technology ratchet. It’s somewhat counter-intuitive, but developing multiple technology approaches to the same end lessens the chances of loosing critical knowledge and skills. The way technology innovation currently works, redundancy often falls by the wayside (think technology monopolies for instance). I suspect we will need to find ways to overcome this in developing resilient and sustainable technology solutions in the future.

Cultural integration of science and technology. How can technologies be sustained in a society where those dependent on the technology haven’t the first idea of how it works—or what to do if it goes wrong? When everything is going okay, the current model is one that works well. But it’s a model with very little resilience—meaning that when things go wrong (as they are sure to do), things quickly degenerate into a mess. The alternative is to embed an understanding and appreciation of technology—and the underlying science—within society itself. Cultural integration of science and technology provides an effective technology ratchet for preventing slippage in the face of new challenges. As well as facilitating the passing-on of knowledge and skills across generations, it disperses understanding throughout society and enables informed decision-making in the face of emerging issues. Unfortunately, many of today’s cultures do not respect science and technology to the degree that is necessary for this technology ratchet to be effective.

Astute readers might spot that these are not new ideas. But framing them in the context of technology ratchets possibly is. And maybe—just maybe—by framing them in this way, new light will be shed on how to use them to underpin sustainable and resilient technological progress.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that all this talk of technology ratchets is the product of chronic insomnia, and I ought to stick to safer ground in the early hours—like teeth, for instance.

But I suspect that there’s mileage in the concept. It seems painfully inefficient to have to support each advance in technology with a sustained and long-term effort to maintain the advance—not to say precarious. Wouldn’t it be better to develop more effective ways for each generation to lay a solid technological foundation for the following generation to build on—one that isn’t high maintenance?

That, to me, sounds like a technology ratchet.

Here’s why: methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, significantly more powerful than carbon dioxide. There are billions of tons of methane trapped under the permafrost, and if that methane starts leaking quickly, it would have a strong feedback effect—warming the atmosphere and oceans, causing more methane to leak, and on and on. The melting of methane ice (aka “methane hydrates” and “methane clathrates”) is probably the most significant global warming tipping point event out there.

If we see runaway methane from underneath the Siberian permafrost, we could see temperatures increasing far faster than even the most pessimistic CO2-driven scenarios—perhaps as much as 8-10° C, very much into the global catastrophe realm. To put it in context: rapid methane releases have been implicated in extinction events in Earth’s geologic past.

(One piece of mitigating information: it’s unclear how long this methane leak has been happening, or the degree to which the measured methane levels exceeds previous amounts. If we’re lucky, this is actually a status quo situation, and we still have time before we reach a tipping point. But basing our strategy on “if we’re lucky” is not very wise.)

Because of this tipping point/feedback process, a runaway methane melt won’t stop on its own. When I’ve written before about desperation as a driver for the rapid (and risky) implementation of geoengineering, this is precisely the scenario I had in mind.

If this news holds up, and if it can be shown that the methane leak is actually increasing, then I believe that we are certain to engage in geoengineering, and probably will do so before we have enough good models and studies to suss out any unwanted consequences. We’d be faced with a choice between guaranteed catastrophe or terrible uncertainty.

We’d probably try every geoengineering option available in the event of a methane runaway, but the one that most people would focus on would be the temperature management strategies: stratospheric sulfate injection, seawater cloud brightening, and (unlikely to happen but certain to get a lot of media attention) orbiting reflectors. But there’s one more method we should consider. Understanding its potential requires a bit of science talk.

I noted earlier that methane is a “significantly more powerful” greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. More specifically, it’s at least 21 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2; some reports (such as the first piece I linked to above) cite it as 30x stronger, and I’ve been seen as much as 72x stronger. The difference comes from how the effect is measured over time—methane and carbon dioxide leave the atmosphere at very different speeds. Although CO2 takes upwards of a century to cycle out naturally, methane takes only about ten years.

Why the difference? Chemical processes in the atmosphere break down CH4 (in combination with oxygen) into CO2+H2O—carbon dioxide and water. In addition, certain bacteria—known as methanotrophs—actually consume methane, with the same chemical results. These processes have their limits, however; an abundance of methane in the atmosphere can overwhelm the oxidation chemistry, making the methane stick around for longer than the typical 8-10 years, and the commonplace methanotrophic bacteria evolved in an environment where methane emerges gradually.

These are pretty much the only two natural methane “sinks.” There are a few small-scale human processes that can make use of methane (for the production of methanol for fuel, for example) and function as artificial sinks, but such efforts would be hard-pressed to capture methane released across two million square kilometers. So here’s where we start to think big.

Both of the natural processes are, in principle, amenable to human intervention. The oxidation of methane into CO2 and water is a well-understood phenomenon, and relies on the presence of OH (hydroxyl radical); upwards of 90% of lower atmosphere methane is oxidized through this process [PDF]. But OH is something of a problem chemical, in that it’s also a key oxidation agent for many atmospheric pollutants, such as carbon monoxide and NOx. Although we could produce OH to enhance the natural chemical oxidation process, the side-effects of pumping enough OH into the atmosphere to oxidize all of that methane would be unpredictable, but almost certainly quite bad.

What about methanotrophic bacteria? Such bacteria have long been recognized in freshwater areas and soil, and have had limited use in bioremediation efforts. Methanotrophic Archaea—similar to bacteria, but a wholly different kingdom of organism—were recently identified in the oceans; research suggests that methanotrophic Archaea may be responsible for the oxidation of up to 80% of the methane in the oceans. Methanotrophic microbes can also be temperature extremophiles, as they were among the various species found after the Larsen B ice shelf collapsed.

We recently began to learn much more about how methanotrophic bacteria function, as a team from the Institute for Genomic Research sequenced the genome of the methanotroph Methylococcus capsulatus. The scientists discovered that Methylococcus has the genomic capacity to adapt to a far wider set of environments than it is currently found in. They also looked at the possibility of enhancing the microbe’s ability to oxidize methane, although admittedly for purposes other than straight methane consumption.

So, here’s the proposal: we need to deploy methanotrophic microbes at the East Siberian Ice Shelf. Methanotrophic Archaea appears to be best-suited for this task, but we don’t know as much about them as we do about bacteria. If we need to modify the microbes (to consume methane more quickly, for example), we may need to work on Methylococcus bacteria, making them viable in extremely cold seawater. I suspect that working with the Archaea will probably be sufficient, but it’s important to think ahead about different pathways.

Either way, we should consider just how we could make use of methanotrophs to avoid a methane-melt disaster. Given the size of the region, we’ll need lots of them, but that’s one advantage of biology over straight chemistry: the methanotrophs would be reproducing themselves.

We need to be aware of possible unintended consequences, but at this point, it’s not clear how additional methanotrophs would pose a larger risk; moreover, a mass of methanotrophic organisms would undoubtedly be helpful for reducing overall atmospheric methane beyond the Siberian release. Nonetheless, there are some crucial questions we need to answer before we could consider deploying natural or GMO methanotrophs:

• Is it physically possible? Could a sufficient number of methane-eating bacteria even be produced to counter a fast release of methane from the Siberian ice shelf?
• Is it biologically possible? Would methanotrophic Archaea survive in the Siberian ocean? Could a species of methanotrophic bacteria be engineered to be able to do so (as well as consume large quantities of methane)?
• What are the unrecognized risks? What are we missing in an initial risk analysis? Saying “we don’t know the risks” doesn’t necessarily mean “we should not attempt this,” it means “we need to do more research.” Clearly, if the risks from enhancing the methane consumption and environmental adaptation capacities of a methanotroph could lead (through species-hopping genes or simple mutation) to even harder-to-manage problems than gigatons of atmospheric methane, this isn’t an option. Boosting OH levels in the region would be the fallback position, as we have more experience with managing CO and NOx pollutants.

If the frozen methane in the Siberian ocean is melting faster, our options are extremely limited. We’d no longer be in a position to stop the melting, even by ceasing all greenhouse gas production today; the temperature increases we’re seeing now are the results of greenhouse gases put into the atmosphere decades ago. And when methane melts, it appears to do so quickly—there are signs that past methane clathrate events took less than a human lifetime.

This is why I think that methane melt would inevitably mean geoengineering. But if this is the case, the pathway I suggest here may be the best option. The engineering options are enhancements of common natural processes, as opposed to something that emulates extreme conditions (such as sulfate injection). At least with current understanding, there would be few downsides to a greater-than-expected growth of the methanotroph population—it might even be helpful in mitigating atmospheric methane coming from other sources, such as cattle.

A further advantage is that this is a process that could begin after we start to see significant methane output and could still have a measurably positive result. Using microbes for bio-“scrubbing” of methane from the atmosphere would work on methane that was a decade old as readily as methane fresh from the permafrost. We’d still see some effect from the methane that makes it to the atmosphere, but eventual removal would help to reduce that effect. This means that we still have time to get more certainty about the methane situation before we would need to use the methanotroph option; we don’t necessarily have to rush past our better judgment in response. With a process of this magnitude, it’s worth taking the time to get it right.

If we are seeing the beginning of a runaway methane melt, we would be facing a problem of a scale with few precedents in human history. No society on the planet would be unaffected; if left unmitigated, it would continue to affect the lives of our children, and our children’s children, and generations beyond that. And remember, this is a fast process—simply pushing a bit harder to reduce carbon emissions will do nothing to stop it.

Our choices are few, and the risk of not acting is (potentially) immense. We may well be on the brink of a new era in planetary management. Let’s hope we’re up to the challenge.