A Novel Idea: Idealizing Society

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on May 14, 2009.

A Novel Idea: Idealizing Society

For the past couple of years, I've been working on a novel for middle school students. Right now, the novel is in the hands of an agent, whom I hope will agree to represent my work to publishers.

The novel, which follows a group of four girls, takes place in Williston. The Williston of my characters, however, is not our Williston, not exactly.

When deciding where to set the novel, the oft-used phrase "write what you know" came to mind. However, our town has many quirks that could take a lot of explanation to get across to a visitor, especially a visitor by literary means. For just one example, in the literary Williston, we have a Williston Elementary School and a Williston Middle School.

To have taken Williston's schools as a model, and have to explain why there are elementary schoolers in the middle school, would take more words than I could afford to spend pages on — so I idealized our school system.

Is there a lesson to be learned in such idealizations?

After working on the Williston Conceptual Frameworks Committee since last summer, I am keenly aware that there are divisions in our town about how our schools are structured. If our schools were structured like my idealized Williston schools, could the controversies have been avoided? As I wrote, as I edited, as I attended Committee meetings, I gave this question a lot of thought.

The reason that I idealized our schools, though, was not to teach us Willistonians a lesson of any kind. The reason is actually quite pedestrian: simple literary license.

As I thought about all this, I realized that there are actually very few novels that I've read in my lifetime that idealize society. More common, by far, are the novels that exaggerate problems with society, magnify them. These novels are typically categorized as "dystopian," a genre I've written about before.

Almost anyone could name a dystopian novel: Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, The Giver, A Clockwork Orange. Some of the characters in these novels might consider that they live in utopias; but they are written for us, and we can recognize that the cost of the utopia is something we hold dear — liberty, security, democracy, or even individuality.

I'm a big fan of science fiction, and I've often heard Star Trek described as a look at a utopian future. That may be true for the people of Earth, done with war and poverty, even with greed and money, with our attention focused on the stars. But I dispute this characterization. Any Trekker knows that war, poverty, greed, and money play a big role in the Star Trek universe.

Closer to home, a good example of a true utopian novel (one that describes a society that its author wishes us to aspire to, rather than one the author wishes us to avoid), is called "Looking Backward", by Edward Bellamy.

(You can read "Looking Backward" online by going to Project Gutenberg, where Bellamy's book is available for free. Go to gutenberg.org to find out more.)

In Bellamy's work, a citizen of Boston from 1887 is put into a hypnotic trance from which he does not awake until the year 2000. Some of the advances of Boston in Bellamy's year 2000 might seem laughable to us today, but some were strangely prescient.

Bellamy did not foresee television, but he did foresee a "music room" into which music could be piped in from any one of a number of live performances, via the telephone wires. Bellamy foresaw a store with only one sample of each item on the shelves; shoppers put in their orders for goods, which were made on demand and delivered to their doorstep. All workers started out at the bottom, in the "industrial army", and worked their way up according to desire and ability; but in any case, retirement was at the ripe old age of 45.

In my case, I idealized Williston to avoid having to explain too much, to make my job easier, to make the reader's job easier.

Bellamy idealized all of the United States, and, indeed, the world, to illustrate a place we could land, something to aspire to. As I read "Looking Backward," there was much fault I found in his year 2000, a little I recognized, and also a few things to look forward to.

Do you have a favorite utopian novel? Let me know, I'd love to read it.

Tempering Faction

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on April 16, 2009.

Tempering Faction

I was recently asked a question about the Constitution that comes through my email box every so often in one of two forms. The first is "Where are political parties mentioned in the Constitution?" The second is "How does the Constitution support the two-party system?"

The first question is the easier one to answer. The Constitution does not mention political parties at all. Political parties evolved in our system after the ratification of the Constitution, so it would have been great foresight for the Constitution to have included them.

However, even in the later amendments, right up to those proposed and ratified in the 20th century, we managed to keep any mention of parties out of the Constitution.

The harder question is the second one, and it is a good question. Since the Civil War, the Republicans and Democrats have traded the presidency and control of the Congress. Rarely has a third party had a lasting effect.

Third parties have had a role to play in our political history, even if it was a fleeting role. Free Soil, Anti-Mason, Prohibition, Socialist, Reform, Green - these parties raised issues that the major parties eventually had to deal with.

The second question usually has a masked underlying question: Is the two-party system something positive, something worth retaining?

While there is something to be said for third parties, I think that we have a good thing with our two-party system, something worth retaining.

However, we also have something that some of our most influential founding fathers found to be a real issue in politics. The faction, better known today as "special interests."

Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, writing in the Federalist Papers as Publius, warned against special interests tearing at the fabric of society. Madison saw two ways of controlling factions: "The one, by removing its causes; the other by controlling its effects."

Madison knew it was pointless to remove the cause of faction, dangerous even. Only by removing liberty or by making all persons the same could the cause of faction disappear.

Better, then, to control the effect of faction. The federal system, with representative democracy, was his solution for the nation, the solution offered by the Constitution. In such a system, majority opinion is important, but minority rights are just as important, and protected.

Of course, factions still emerge. We see the divisions starkly, at the national, state, and local levels.

Pro-life versus pro-choice; for and against gay marriage; Option B versus Option C for our schools.

When factions are truly destructive is when the two sides cannot find common ground. On the most polarizing issues, common ground can be hard to find, especially when there are some on the fringes who will not budge. But there is almost always common ground to be found.

This is where discussion, compromise, and agreement come into play. The fringes can sabotage agreement, but only if they're allowed to. The larger part of any faction will be willing to compromise. Take the gay marriage debate as just one example.

When the state Supreme Court forced the issue in 1999, the state legislature heard from both sides - those who were adamantly opposed to gay marriage and those just as adamantly for it. By April of 2000, a compromise was reached, and civil unions became the law of this state.

Today, after nine years under that law, Vermonters decided that the advent of civil unions did not cause the downfall of society, and, in fact, enhanced it by granting similar rights to committed same-sex couples. In September, we will take the final step, and make marriage an institution available to any committed couple.

Through compromise and patience, the factions came together enough so that equal rights could be guaranteed.

It is a model for all factional disagreements that we face. The solution might not be perfect, but if found by compromise, it can at least be a shared victory, and when the opportunity arises again to reexamine the issue, lessons learned from the past can be applied.

This nation, this state, this community, all have had to deal with the passions of faction in the past. We deal with them now. We will deal with them in the future. The one thing I'm certain of is that through compromise, and patience, a suitable solution can always be found.