It was cold last week. The abscessed gums remained swollen and painful despite antibiotics. Death by Tooth alternated between being a fear and a hope. I couldn't think;  constant, on-going pain takes too much energy to deal with anything else. So I spent most of the week under a duvet with faithful little dogs as foot warmers, alternating re-reading stuff and sleeping.

I did manage to watch Jon Stewart every night and saw Slumdog Millionaire on tellie. It's a very good movie, strongly recommended. The framework of the movie is a tv quiz show, "Do You Want to Be a Millionaire?". A chaiwallah, tea server, gets on the show and answers all the questions but the last one - the show ends at that point. The show's host is sure that a chaiwallah must be cheating - he couldn't know the answers, so is taken by the Police and tortured (torture-lite, beaten and suspended by his wrists off the ground) to force him to confess how he did it.

During the long night in the police station, each question is reviewed and we see a flashback to the slum child. Anything bad that could happen to a slum child growing up in Mumbai happened to him - and that's the only unrealistic thing in the movie. (Aside from getting on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in the first place.) The policeman decides he was not cheating. He returns to the show and answers the final question - one he should have known but didn't. He guesses and wins. It was Fate, he says, for him to win. It's a complicated movie, a very good one, brilliantly done and this outline really isn't a spoiler. It's a bare bones.

The movie intersected with some of the stuff I'd been re-reading, namely L.E. Modesitt, Jr. I like most of his stuff - especially the Recluse saga. He writes science fiction and fantasy. Whichever it is, it's got the same hero: young person, usually male, too independent to be trusted by the establishment, great gifts. He must develop his skills on his own and conceal them, hide what he is until he's powerful enough to take on the establishment. He is a man not like others, part of an elite. But there's noblesse oblige acting as well. The great mass of people are just that, masses, to be taken care of. It's a very undemocratic vision, quite explicitly so in some of the books. In Flash, for example. The lumpen proletariat will vote for anyone that will promise them bread and circuses, thus opening the way to evil men and women controlling the state. Our hero resists this and because he is more clever, more capable and completely ruthless succeeds. (He really dislikes having to kill so many, but if they're trying to kill you... at one point, he blows up and kills a gangster trying to kill him. The gangster's innocent sister is in the car with him. He feels bad, but They made him do it. While the hero has a personal code of conduct, ethics is completely relative. Power is the ultimate reality.) 

Very different than our chaiwallah. He was intelligent, but no genius. By chance, those questions were ones he could answer. There were, however, so many questions, so many possibilities; he won, not by chance, but because it was Fate. The chaiwallah was good; he was a sweet, gentle kind young man. Another however: by chance, sooner or later, the dice have to roll to reward the good rather than the wicked. So maybe it was chance after all.

Modesitt's heros join an elite of merit with an underlying hereditary base: they are biologically superior in intelligence and physical skill but have to work at developing these gifts. There's a kind o;f social darwinism here: survival of the fittest. This ignores one of the most important factors in natural selection - it's selection within a context.  Brute strength may or may not be a deciding factor in a confrontation. The ability to think abstractly, to use symbolic manipulation in solving problems, may or may not be to a species' advantage in the long term. (It's allowed us to ruin a planet. I doubt that's to the species advantage.)

Elites: people have different abilities, but they are much more similar than they are different. I think it's probably more useful as well as more accurate to think of different abilities and skills than different kinds of people. Some people grow food, and some are better than others at it.  Cooking tasty dishes from the produce, preserving the crop through winter, distributing the crop, all enter into keeping us fed. Some do these things better than others.

Is this more, or less, valuable than the ability to genetically modify a plant or evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of genetically modified crops? What about the ecologists that looked at the use of DDT and pointed out that its widespread use was dangerous to the environment?

The usefulness of the skills is relative to a time and place. Hunters and gatherers didn't need to garden. Prior to urbanization, transportation of food was not crucial.  As population increased, additional skills developed. Social life became more complex; but the basic model of the species remains, I think: mutual dependency. Among hunters and gatherers, skills were distributed based on age and sex. Men hunted, women gathered.  Even among the simplest of social groupings, there is a shade of Durkheim's organic solidarity, something wider than kinship. Even in the most complex of societies, kinship, the basis of mechanical solidarity, is still crucial. An individual's options are determined to a large extent by their kin's place in society. In 2010, kinship as a determining factor in life options seems to be increasing, not decreasing. With decreasing resources, we take care of our own; ties of affection are stronger than ties based on mechanical solidarity.

Let's imagine a band of wolves chasing a sled full of people. They're gaining on us. We've got to distract them; a sacrifice of someone on the sled to save the rest. The best option: a volunteer. Let's assume we have no volunteers, or not enough. What if there's a nasty dope dealer scum on board, responsible for the death of many for money? The undeserving: we could let the wolves have them. Next the useless. We could throw off the old granny or make her feel guilty enough to jump.

On Modesitt's sled, there would be no scum, just a hero to save the fore-lock tugging deserving. The undeserving would be left back at the depot. Or the scum would serve as a distraction while one of Modesitt's heroes jumped off and killed the wolves, one two three. But that's fiction.  The chaiwallah slumdog would be on a sled of scum andone of the first thrown off. With luck, he'd bounce off into a snowdrift and be ignored as wolves and sleds disappeared over the hill. Good people on a safe sled would pick him up and give him a comfy cozy cape made of wolf skins.  But that's fiction as well.

I'm glad I'm not on such a sled. There are moral choices I'd rather not make; much better Death by Tooth.