Imagination is an important and useful thing. Where would science fiction be without it? Where would science be without it? Or politics, or Christmas morning, or late night commercials promising buxom women waiting to talk to you on the end of a 900 number? But the imagination can get the better of a person, can lead one to thinking or doing silly things—caving in to false fears, getting over-extended on credit, actually calling that 900 number thinking he’s really going to talk to those girls in the commercial.
It’s fun to let the imagination run free, but in real life you have to get real, not carried away.
My wife and I enjoy visiting garage sales (“garage sailing” as she calls it). The allure is the same one that drives people to hunt for buried treasure or search for lost gold mines. The imagination conjures up, for me anyway, a rare book priced at a dollar, or a ’30s-era floor model radio available for ten bucks (or eight, if I promise to take it away immediately). But then I get real and limit my imagination to the junk radios I’m actually looking for, destined for disassembly and parts harvesting. Sometimes a find proves too valuable to take apart, and this keeps my imagination working (like the ’70s-era JVC stereo receiver I’m listening to right now).
So why don’t I just visit a Hamfest if I want vintage electronics? Because with a judicious application of imagination, I can see what I need for now, what I can store for a while and then use, and what I don’t need now and probably never will. The rate at which I accumulate electronics by visiting a few garage sales each week suits the activity level I actually have with my hobby as opposed the level I imagine I’d like to have some day. Turn me loose at a Hamfest and my imagination will outrun my budget in no time.
My wife’s imagination works differently than mine. She’s real good at finding toys and things that will brighten the eyes of the children when she brings them home. She sees those happy faces in her mind’s eye the second her real ones alight on a trash treasure. But what she can’t imagine is how rapidly the novelty will wear off and how soon that treasure will end up in the basement along with thousands of other transient delights stuffed into anonymous boxes and long forgotten.
This column originates from my ongoing irritation with what I perceive as the general inability or refusal on the part of people who should have a quality imagination to learn how to use that imagination correctly. That is, to not get carried away. What specifically set me off this time were some current events (or rather, recurrent events) happening in July of 2006, and points raised in the fact piece in the May, 2005 Analog.
Perhaps some of you recall back around last July the concern there was over the long-range missile that the North Koreans were planning to test. Since history happens faster in real life than it does in fiction, I’ll recap.
For several days prior to the launch, a great deal of speculation was voiced about what, if anything, the U.S. should do about it. Do nothing? Shoot it down in flight? Destroy it on the pad? Get another country to destroy it on the pad? The North Koreans did launch the missile on the 4th of July (just in time to take away coverage of the first space shuttle launch in a year). It failed very early into the flight and that was that.
During the discussion surrounding the launch—on the TV news, in print journalism, and even in the Analog Forum—once again the question arose about whether or not missile defenses should be built and deployed. Again, the ridiculous argument was advanced that defenses should not be built because terrorist leaders with nuclear bombs could just sneak them into the country in shipping containers.
This is a good example of an inadequate application of imagination. I’ve heard this idea put forth by physicists, congressmen, paid political hacks, SF writers, think-tankers, and average Joes. They’re all able to imagine Hiroshima USA in the San Francisco Bay, but they never push their imaginations that one inch farther into the mind of the terrorist to understand why it is that so many countries or terrorist organizations insist on building or acquiring missiles anyway. They also forget that the prime reason you build a missile defense is because there are already missiles pointed at you.
Does one not lock the door because a thief could come through the window?
Suppose you’re a terrorist and you want to ship a bomb. You have to worry about it being discovered before it’s delivered—it’s not going to get where you want it to go in 20 minutes. It could be damaged in shipping—it isn’t sitting on the pad where it can be maintained right up to zero hour. And those shippers you’ve entrusted your bomb to—what’s to keep them from selling it to another country or group for a hundred million dollars or so?
I’m not advocating we ignore threats via shipments. I have locks on the doors and the windows. But the missile defense question is a lot more complicated than the simple “they could just” argument makes out.
Indeed, the North Korean leadership has thought this matter through—that’s why they’re building missiles.
The fact article in the May ’05 Analog is “Big Brother Inc: Surveillance, Security, and the U.S. Citizen,” by Laura M. Kelley. I’m only going after this article because it happens to be in Analog and so most of you have already read it and likely have access to it. I could have found another suitable piece in almost any newspaper or newsmagazine. Kelley’s article isn’t exceptionally guilty of egregious sins—it’s typical in this regard.
On the surface, the piece is cautionary, dealing with the potential dangers of giving up too much privacy in the hopes of gaining security. It also tries to be something of an “if this goes on” sort of essay. The article contains some useful details about such esoteric and arcane subjects as data mining and risk assessment. But Kelley also employs demagogic applications (or lack thereof) of imagination, and this needs pointing out.
For instance, after describing on page 30 how in the movie Minority Report people who might commit violent acts are rounded up on the say-so of psychics, she makes this leap: “(M)en of Middle Eastern ethnicity or Muslim faith are being rounded up to prevent future terrorist attacks. Many of the men detained are indeed guilty of overstaying their visas, but only in the hopes of making a better life for themselves and their families. They harbor no ill will to the people or institutions of the United States . . .” (Italics mine).
I’d like to know just how it is that Ms. Kelley knows the “only” reason some of them are overstaying their visas, or whether or not they harbor ill will toward the U.S. Is she a Minority Report psychic herself? If she uses some kind of trainable technique, she should teach it to law enforcement personnel. That would save them the trouble of picking up innocent people. But my guess is that she has no technique—it’s just what she imagines is the case.
Why does her imagination link the excesses depicted in the movie with what is essentially ordinary law enforcement practice? When you round up people who fit a broad profile, many won’t be the ones you actually want to keep, but it’s the nature of the beast. This is done all the time. When Mexican gangs are causing trouble in Los Angeles, young Mexican men, most of them guilty of nothing, get rounded up. When the KKK gets active and engages in cross burning, white males are the suspects. Unfortunately for innocent men of Middle Eastern ethnicity, the 9-11 villains were men of similar ethnicity.
Does Ms. Kelley imagine ethnicity can and must be ignored? On page 37 she says, “Being German, the STASI kept meticulous records . . .” She must think ethnicity can be a telling identifier, otherwise she might have said, “Being cogs in a paranoid, totalitarian machine,” or words to that effect. Indeed, she imagines the U.S. going the way of Communist East Germany during the height of the cold war.
But she doesn’t make the distinction between a totalitarian regime on guard against internal threats from its own subjugated populace, and an open society defending itself against an external terrorist threat. In her imagination, she sees neighbors informing on their neighbors as a terrible, sinister thing. However, with a more realistic application of imagination applied to the contemporary U.S., she could instead picture a nice, wholesome community watch, where neighbors e-mail each other about recent area break-ins. Or perhaps a responsible citizen calling Silent Observer to tell them that his new neighbors are apparently running a crack house, or stockpiling fuel oil and fertilizer.
She also raises this STASI-spectre: “. . . this surveillance . . . forced people to change personalities like theatrical masks and create a public self to navigate the outside world and a true or private persona shown only to their closest friends.” But that vision also describes every teenager in the world. For that matter, how many of us are the same person at home that we are when we’re away? I’m not.
Concerned about abuses that come along with databases full of personal information, she cites the following: “An investigation by the Detroit Free Press in 2001 found that police officers with access to a database for Michigan law enforcement had used it to help their friends or themselves stalk women, threaten motorists, track estranged spouses—even to intimidate political opponents.”
That’s a pretty bad thing. Imagine what would happen if we put police officers in patrol cars, let them carry guns, and gave them the authority to stop people driving down the road?
I have my own database that would help me do those things if I wanted to—it’s called a phone book. And Google is a big help—I had an old friend recently find me that way.
In September of 2001, the World Trade Center was knocked down by real terrorists in real airplanes who could have been stopped with sufficient information management of a suitable database. Objecting to the development and the means to accomplish the development of such a database on the grounds that some cop somewhere, sometime, might use that database improperly to get a date isn’t much of an argument.
The future that is upon us will feature wars with countries fighting well-armed and savvy organizations, linked by ideology and shared passions rather than borders. We may even already be, as occasional science fiction author Newt Gingrich puts it, in the opening stages of World War III. Though SF has long pictured that war to be fought with nuclear missiles between hostile, hyper-armed countries, the reality we will actually get is going to be far different. As many of our enemies will be taken down by putting two and two together as will be dispatched with a bullet to the body.
As we fight this war, indeed, we should we be on guard against potential abuses against citizens inherent in an information society. But we can’t let our imaginations get carried away by too much worrying about what might happen when we need to sharpen our imaginations to deal with what already is happening.
