From: tlentz@ior.com
Newsgroups: alt.callahans
Subject: Spider Robinson Speech posted with permission
Date: 14 Mar 1996 02:52:02 GMT
Message-ID: <4i81ki$jh5@express.ior.com>

Pandora's Last Gift
by Spider Robinson
      

This is the text of a speech Spider made to us at RadCon, in Pasco, WA 
around the weekend of February 17th-ish.  We were honored to have him and
his lovely wife Jeanne as the Author Guests of Honor.  The speech is one 
he gave at the Saturday night banquet.  All who were there agreed that it
was truly inspiring.  So much so, that when it was done, we gave him a 
minutes-long standing ovation.  Then, someone noticed that he had read 
the speech, and that meant that there was a printed copy available.  He
was asked if copies could be made.  Not only did he graciously let it be
copied, he even autographed them!  I then asked him if he would mind if I
posted it here, and he gave permission.  Any errors in spelling or 
formatting are mine.  Without further ado...
        Can anyone tell me what is the antonym for the word, "cynic"? 
After reflection I come up with "idealist, "romantic," 'Pollyanna,'' 
"Pangloss", and "flower-child," all of which are currently considered 
derogatory.  Is it really true that the only opposite of "disillusioned"
is "illusioned"? Is the opposite of "despair" "naivete," or is there 
still room for "hope" in our vocabulary?  It seems to me this is a 
cynical old world.  Perhaps it always seems so, to each generation; there
seems to be a general societal agreement that it is well to shield 
children from our own cynicism until they are old enough to get drunk.
I was a freak reading prodigy as a child, and my mother placed almost no
constraints on my reading, so I was a cynic at six -- but I recall
distinctly that in those days if you used the term "Murphy's Law" in
conversation with adults, you usually had to explain it. Most movies and
books seemed to end with the assumption that Virtue Would Triumph and 
Love Would Conquer All, even if they took satirical potshots at society
along the way.  Only the very rich entered marriage planning for the 
divorce. We did not feel a need to train our children that any adult who
smiled at them was a potential rapist.
        We understood that living in the Twentieth Century posed new and 
extraordinary ethical dilemmas,- but there seemed a general consensus 
that we were up to it, or at least intended to go down swinging.
        Then a whole generation was somehow capriciously inoculated with 
massive conflicting overdoses of cynicism and hope, just as it was 
entering puberty. The richest and most favored generation in the history
of the world looked about at the best of all possible worlds to date, and
found it so vile and despicable that it must be made over, at once. The 
recommended tools were prayer, sex, new drugs, rock and roll, and public
rioting -- anything at all except rational thought plus learning followed
by reasoned manipulation of the world as it was. There was, it must be 
noted, an undercurrent of hope in the notion that the world could be 
changed for the better, by any means at all.  But that hope could not be 
sustained without intelligence, and intelligence was somehow made to seem
inferior to intuition--a poor problem-solver. The Sixties flowered and 
died in a single great convulsion. The Beatles as a phenomenon lasted 
less than ten  years. We all got the message that protest led you to jail
or hospital, new drugs led to the Manson Family or the Funny Farm, sex 
led to herpes and trichomoniasis and AIDS, prayer led to Jonestown, and 
rock and roll stopped leading anything and blundered off into disco. And 
what did it matter, when any moment ICBMs and nuclear winter would fall?
        I think the problem may come down to this: that we are the 
children of the Great Age of The Media, consumers of more news, and more 
detailed news, than our ancestors would have believed possible--and that
bad news outsells good, time and again, reinforcing every panic, 
complicating every tragedy. I wish I knew why.  There have been attempts
to start Good-News papers, Good-News radio broadcasts-- and they always
fold within a few years. For some reason the modern news consumer insists
on being either bummed out or distracted with glitter and bullshit, as 
from ET and Hard Copy and their ilk.  No popular news medium in all the 
world ran with the lead story: SMALLPOX ERADICATED: MANKIND'S SINGLE 
DEADLIEST ENEMY DEFEATED! and so, astonishingly, there has never been 
anything like the worldwide celebration and victory party that this 
exhilarating achievement merited. Polio too is dead in this hemisphere, 
did you know? I found the news on page B14 of my local paper.  It wasn't 
on the TV news.
        But if we are getting more and better Bad News than any 
generation in history, is it any wonder that we are stunned goofy? Robert
Heinlein had his character Jubal Harshaw wonder aloud about the
pernicious psychic effects of "wallowing daily in the troubles of six 
billion strangers"--and sometime later Theodore Sturgeon addressed 
Harshaw's question, in a bone-chilling story called, "And Now The 
News..." The hero, driven mad by news, quotes John Dunne's line about 
every man's death diminishing him...and decides to go out there and
diminish mankind right back. The last line is, "He got eight people 
before they brought him down." Sturgeon wrote this decades before serial 
killers became a commonplace.
        So we all changed...in response to relentless, useless alarm 
signals. Cynical despair suddenly became the very hallmark of 
intelligence, and if anyone heaped more scorn on the hopeful hippies of
the sixties than the ex-hippies themselves, it was those of their 
contemporaries who had been too timid or nerdy to benefit from the Age of
Aquarius. Hair got shorter and became layered, beards were domesticated
or exterminated.  Bras and pantyhose reappeared, or rather returned. It 
became impossible to find anyone who would publicly admit to having
existed in the sixties, much less participated in its grand experiments.
It had been conclusively proven after exhaustive testing-- whole weeks
of it--that you could not change the system from outside the system, and
the notion of changing the system from inside the system produced such
gales of cynical mirth that it could not even be proposed, much less
tried. Every commentator in the land became determined to remind you that
all the hippies have either blown their minds, or sold out. A famous New
Yorker cartoon depicting a 20th Anniversary Reunion at Woodstock--
attended exclusively by people in expensive business attire holding 
martinis--ran five years after Woodstock.
        When you get afraid enough, you start to get selfish: it's human 
nature. Cynicism is a clever way of justifying that selfishness, so that
you can live with yourself. Just strike the word "cop-out," and 
substitute the more palatable PostModern term "burn-out." (Be wary, by 
the way, of any school of thought whose very name is an oxymoron. They're
telling you up front that they intend to travel on square wheels.)
        As for myself, I was already a cynic when the Sixties began. I'd 
been reading 50s and 60s science fiction. Hope came slowly to me; I 
didn't actually join a commune until the early 70s. I married Jeanne 
there; we birthed our daughter there; an astonishing succession of Good
Things have come into my life since then. Hope has been good to me; so 
I've written cheery, basically optimistic science fiction stories in 
which responsible individuals solve great problems by applying their 
attention and intelligence to them.
        About twelve years ago I found myself backsliding. I was writing
about problems whose solutions utterly escaped me. I began to lose faith
in mankind's ability to get itself out of the messes it has made. I ran
out of optimistic guesses about the future.. Despair, like heroin, 
relieves you of all responsibility. If you truly believe the saw that 
"No good deed goes unpunished," life is simpler. I told myself that I 
could take despair or leave it alone, that I'd only do it on weekends 
. . . well, on alternate days . . . okay, only on days ending in "y"...
There was a crazed genius around at that time who had made it his holy 
mission to create a computer for normal human beings, a computer that 
spoke Human, a supertool a child could use. He achieved his dream--but 
along the way, his enterprise grew too huge for him to manage.  So he 
went to a manager, and said, "Do you want to spend the rest of your life
selling sugared water, or do you want to change the world?"  Note the 
Sixties word choice. The manager took the plunge...and soon took 
undisputed control of that enterprise; the founder, Steven Jobs, was 
"promoted to Global Visionary," lost his parking space in the Apple lot.
The news depressed me.
	And just then, Theodore Sturgeon died on me.
        Everyone dies, but somehow I had expected that some sort of 
exception would be made for Theodore. He was one of the finest writers
who ever worked, in any genre, and everything he wrote was about need,
one way or another. He may have known more about need than anyone who 
ever lived, and he shared it all with us for over forty years. He was
also a gentle and loving man, who when I was 35 years old taught me how
to hug. His death hit me very hard.
        And then Summer came, and synchronicity struck. (A fine old 60s
word). Chance brought Jeanne and me near Chatham, Massachusetts, on 
July 19. Ten years earlier to the day, Jeanne and I had been married in
Nova Scotia, in a triple wedding with two other couples from our commune.
The bride of one couple was sister to the groom of the other (Jeanne's 
ex-husband, incidentally), and they were originally from Chatham. So we
stopped in to see how their parents were doing, and to pump them for news
of our wedding-mates, whom we had not seen in over eight years.
        We found both couples there; their father was dying. He died 
later that night.
        It was a strange, unplanned 10th anniversary reunion. These were 
people with whom we had weeded soybeans and chanted Om, shared outhouses
and thrown yarrow stalks. A lot of time had passed. Someone nervously 
suggested that we all go down to the beach and acquire an illegal smile,
and after five minutes chatting under the moonlight someone said, 
diffidently, "Did anybody see that movie, The Big Chill?"--and we all 
laughed too long and too loud.
	But do you know? It wasn't a bit like The Big Chill!
        All six of us were still happily married--after ten years. Unlike 
Lawrence Kasdan's characters, we all had children, nice kids who weren't
on crack.  Each of us was doing what we had always wanted to do, enjoying
it and surviving if not prospering at it. We had preserved most of our 
ideals, and found ways to pursue them in the real world. One couple had 
been teaching sanitation and erosion control and such in the country of
Lesotho, which is the size of a picnic table and entirely surrounded by
South Africa. The other couple had helped build the Ontario branch of a 
worldwide disaster-relief agency called Plenty, which has measurably 
reduced the amount of agony on this planet. I had managed to earn a 
precarious living by dreaming happy futures; Jeanne had kept one of the
finest modern dance companies in Canada, Nova Dance Theatre, alive in 
Halifax for eight years, without federal subsidy. None of us had sold out
to People magazine, or gone Hollywood; none of us had become a burnout or
drug addict. We all happened to use the same computer --the one that
global visionary created, the Mac. We were not brought together by the 
inexplicable suicide of one of the best of us, but by something more like
white magic. Our being there helped them to help their father die, to 
help their mother through her time of sorrow.
        Two days later--in the presence of our own families, who had 
missed the last one--Jeanne and I got married again on Cape Cod.
        All this took place ten years ago, and at last report all three
couples are still married, still doing just fine. One of those folks is
running for office! I'm still creating futures I'd like to live in, 
Jeanne is a lay-ordained Zen student, choreographer and part-time Hugo-
winning novelist. Through my marriage to her I have come to learn that 
"faith" is not a dirty word after all. I "keep faith" with her. So I've 
been trying to make my life a kind of ongoing act of faith, to keep 
looking for reasons to hope, and to keep hoping anyway while I search.
        It hasn't been easy lately. It's been a brutal year, hasn't it?
Bombs flying, people dying, cresting waves of witch-hunt hysteria 
producing cults of mass self-hypnosis (Facilitated Communication, 
Recovered Memory Syndrome, etc.).  Even the Right-to-Life extremists seem
to have decided abortion is okay--if the fetus is in its 200th trimester.
Personally, Jeanne and I have had some severe financial and artistic and
personal setbacks, excellent temptations to gloom. 
        But we're still married, after twenty years, more in love than 
when we started. We just finished our third novel and thus our trilogy.
I've had a miraculous, medically, inexplicable total remission of seven
years of devastating chronic belly-troubIe: my guts have literally 
stopped churning.
        We're hanging on to hope--by our fingers and toes, sometimes, by
reflex or habit, sometimes, but hanging on. It is not merely desirable to
keep morale up-- it seems to me it is necessary.  If anyone had told you,
ten years ago, that shortly the Berlin Wall would come down, Mr. Mandela
would walk free, the Soviet Union would come apart, nuclear apocalypse
would recede, perfect music reproduction would become trivially cheap and
simple, and Geraldo Rivera would have his nose broken on camera ...would
you have believed them?
        Neils Bohr, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, once said,
"The opposite of an ordinary truth is a non-truth; but the opposite of a
profound truth is another profound truth." Yes: sometimes Life sucks--
that's a profound truth. The flip side is: sometimes it sucks rather 
well...
        Belief in the possibility of change is what's at the center of 
this. If you lose belief in the possibility of change for the better, you
stop trying, and become part of the problem, part of humanity's dead 
weight. We'll solve the problems anyway--we always do, eventually--but 
right now people are dying while the wealthiest and luckiest of us piss
and moan about existential angst.
        Anything is possible. I once saw a man ski through a revolving 
door. There is going to be a future: let's chase it until it kills us.
        I know a man named Keith Henson. He assumes (believes) he will
probably live forever and become infinitely rich. Don't laugh: he's one
of the co-founders of cryogenics, so he has a better shot than you do.
Therefore the urgent question on his mind is, assuming lightspeed is an
absolute limit, will there be time to closely inspect the entire 
universe, before it burns out? Careful calculation persuades him the
trick is possible: an army of tourists (perhaps .01% of humanity) setting
out in all directions at once at lightspeed within the next few centuries
should have time to see everything, and still meet at the far end for a
Grand Memory-Merge download, before the cosmic candle gutters. So Henson
has already struck the Party Committee, and is busy planning the Party at
the End of Space and Time. After all, you wouldn't want to get there and
find no one remembered the beer, right? Using nanotechnological 
transmutation (less than a hundred years away, he says; maybe less than
fifty), he intends to convert an entire solar system into beer cans alone
--and several more into beer. Which will, of course, be recycled many 
times.
        He's a bit stressed; he describes it as a "nontrivial problem."
Hope costs. Once you concede that problems can be solved, you have to get
up off your ass. Despair, by contrast, is cheap, self-powering, 
eliminates unwanted guilt, and requires--permits! --no effort. But you
die young, and you're no fun to be around in the meantime. Keith Henson
is fun to be around. Pay your money; take your choice.
        Me, I think we are on the verge of cascading breakthroughs that 
will make everything we've seen in our lifetimes seem prosaic. Nearly
unimaginable wonders and marvels are just around the corner; if half of
the things on the drawing-boards pan out, war, hunger, disease and 
loneliness really could all be eliminated within a century or less. Even
fear (and its cover identity, hate) might conceivably be brought under
control within our children's lifetimes--ours, if we get lucky.
        You may well think I'm crazy. I remember when I was six years 
old, a seasoned sf reader, trying to explain to my father that one day
there would be rockets to the Moon and computers in peoples' houses and
robots and so forth. Sure, kid. A few years ago I bought Dad a robot;
answers to voice commands, navigates, fetches your drink, US$48. They've
just started selling a Mac that obeys voice commands, reads text aloud,
doubles as a hands-free phone, answering machine, rolodex, fax, CD player
and recorder, and VCR/video editor...and costs exactly what a 128K Mac
did in 1984: US$2,500. The new one can be expanded to 128 megabytes of 
RAM. Ten years of progress.
	I think human beings can do anything they damn well want to. 
Remember what Robert Heinlein said: the last item to come fluttering from
Pandora's Box was Hope...