How to Talk with the Mundanes

February 2nd, 2009

So, over in science blogger/skeptic land, there’s been a discussion about how to talk to the believers.   This comes up for well-educated, rational people all the time.   Most of my friends have advanced degrees, talk about things they know well, and don’t have totally wacky beliefs.   The ones that do have wacky beliefs wear them well and are open to criticism about them…mostly.

There’s no real consensus about this, by the way.   We all tend to go through phases.   We have times when we’re silent and don’t want to upset the apple cart.   I once sat, silently, and listened to an ignoramus at a campfire go on about how evolution didn’t make sense and that people being born of monkeys was ridiculous.   At other times we’re fed up with hearing the nonsense and tend to react with anger, impatience.   I’ve had my late nights on fark or slashdot seeing red with some idiot or other and saying things not too politely.   Usually we end up losing the silence, losing the anger, gaining patience, and wanting to see some learning going on.   I’m evolving toward establishing common ground and trying to help these people figure out how to figure out which point of view is more likely correct based on the principles of science.

It ain’t easy, but it beats the alternatives.

Now, there are a lot of parallels between what science people deal with and what science fiction fans deal with.   Unfortunately.

I’m a member of both groups.   I can pass for “normal,” whatever that means, but I refuse to do so most of the time.   I like what I like, know what I know, and I’m more proud than embarrassed.   If I only liked what everyone else liked, and only knew as little as the majority of people in the world, I’d be more embarrassed than proud.   I’d be an uneducated member of the herd, happy with what Miss Cleo told me about who I was dating and thinking that Friends* was high art.

Non fans are called a lot of things.   Normal people.   Non magic folk in the Harry Potter world are Muggles.   The term I’ve heard a few times at cons is “Mundanes.”   I’ll use that one, even though an older meaning of the word “mundane” is “worldly” with a lot better connotations than the word gets now.

So, what do you do when someone at a party starts going off on the Star Trek nerd they have at work, or says that comic books are stupid things for kids?

Well, let’s reject silence and anger out of hand.   They don’t do much good, don’t make you feel better in the end, and open no one’s eyes.

Seek some common ground and educate.   Some common ground we share with the mundanes includes money, fame, space babes/hunks, and coolness factor.

Star Trek is a billion dollar franchise.   Who hasn’t seen it, fan or not?   What ideas have generated dollars in the billions?   Star Trek had shirtless Kirk jumping every hot alien in sight and Jeri Ryan in that tight jumpsuit.   From here you can slip in something good, like how the first interracial (species?) kiss on TV was between Spock and Uhuru, or how the ideals of the show are good to aspire to.   Only a real asshole is going to keep digging at the nerd.

Star Wars is as big or bigger, and Leia in the gold bikini is timeless, if you grew up in that time as I did.   James Earl Jones’s voice is magic.   Yoda was wise beyond his years.   I mean, only a total dork didn’t love Star Wars.   Who wants to be a dork bigger than the science fiction fan?

How about with those conservative dicks who think that money is the be all and end all.   Point out the box office draw, how most of the biggest films were science fiction.   If that doesn’t work as they think Hollywood is a liberal trick, hit them where it hurts: Arnold.   Science fiction and fantasy movies made him and his career.   From Conan and the Terminator on, it was a wild roller coaster ride, and with Arnold being one of the few bright points for the G.O.P., use it.

For the high-brow intellectual, maybe a literary type who looks down on genre, use Frankenstein for starters.   It’s an icon of literature, and totally science fiction.   Important issues, with themes important today, too.   Don’t let them slip out.   It’s making artificial persons from body parts, just like Blade Runner, full of questions about what it means to be alive and to be human.   Important shit.

And how about the comic book curmudgeon?   Heath Ledger as the Joker.   Awesome, and Ledger is dead and they’ll look like an asshole talking crap about him.   I hope he wins an Oscar.   I loved Nicholson back in 1988 as the Joker, but only because I didn’t know any better.   Ledger showed me the way.   I’m also hoping for critical success for The Watchmen.   We’ll see.

Don’t be silent.   Don’t get mad and contradict.   Find something that they can’t disagree with and co-opt them.   There’s so much to love about what we love that there’s something for everyone, and no one is truly a Mundane all the way through.

Remind them of that.

*Note, I liked Friends just fine, but let’s be real.

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