Most of the arts blogs I read, including those run by The Economist, trend “very liberal” to use a facebook categorization. Although the BLDGBLOG is superb from top to bottom, it is no exception to that trend. However, if you are interested in spaces or human design, it is a blog you should read — and I recently wrote about it on my arts blog, which will soon be subsumed by rarin.org.
In any case, BLDGBLOG recently had a lengthy, interesting interview with acclaimed scifi author Kim Stanley Robinson (KSR), author of the Mars trilogy. I have all of the Mars books but found them difficult to read on the first try. Perhaps I will try again soon, but you can always find them at the Alachua County Friends of the Library booksales. Anyway, KSR is one of those scifi who wants to reflect contemporary issues in his fiction. Here’s one telling exchange between BLDGBLOG and KSR in the interview:
BLDGBLOG: In other words, your lifestyle may now be carbon neutral – but was it really any good in the first place?
Robinson: Right. Especially if it’s been encoding, or essentially legitimizing, a grotesque hierarchy of social injustice of the most damaging kind. And the tendency for capitalism to want to overlook that – to wave its hands and say: well, it’s a system in which eventually everyone gets to prosper, you know, the rising tide floats all boats, blah blah – well, this is just not true.
I don’t know how KSR defines social justice and injustice, but something tells me it has to do with the duties that we have to protect the earth, the people of the earth, and to be fair and equal to everyone. But don’t you find it just a little bit interesting that it’s always the people decrying social injustice who see capitalism as some simplistic hierarchy? As a zero sum game? Sometimes things take time and there’s no doubt that there may be a few complete losers in capitalism, and perhaps more in the short-run, but the net benefit from having the freedom to organize my relations, run my life, and contract with whom I wish how I wish vastly outweigh the costs.
Robinson: We should take the political and aesthetic baggage out of the term utopia. I’ve been working all my career to try to redefine utopia in more positive terms – in more dynamic terms. People tend to think of utopia as a perfect end-stage, which is, by definition, impossible and maybe even bad for us. And so maybe it’s better to use a word like permaculture, which not only includes permanent but also permutation. Permaculture suggests a certain kind of obvious human goal, which is that future generations will have at least as good a place to live as what we have now.
If KSR doesn’t like the term utopia, then that is fine by me. But the problem with the utopia is in part that it is static. It’s a theoretical end-stage, as KSR said. That is, in itself, a very large part of the problem. I have no idea why he would then extol virtue in having something permanent at the end of history at all. Surely he would recognize that some liberal socialist fantasy land is doomed without change as well. Frank Herbert, another legendary scifi writer, counseled strongly against the seduction of utopias or permacultures in his Dune series. The series, now perverted by his heirs, has been hailed as one of the inspirations for the Green movement, though I don’t quite understand why. The series makes several moving arguments against permanency in environment, as well as against state power or, most importantly according to Herbert for Dune itself, trusting in any messiah — be they Ron Paul, Hugo Chavez, Ronald Reagan, or Mao Zedong. Muad’Dib, the Messianic character of Dune and its protagonist, once says:
There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace—those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move toward death.
This clash between visions of prominent scifi authors may say a lot about the times. KSR will never ever have the resonance in society that Herbert did, but as far as scifi goes, he’s got influence. Where Herbert counseled against trusting power, KSR whispers that power is fine, so long as it is used for good! Nevermind who determines what is good. Nevermind the flaws of humanity. KSR continues his answer to BLDGBLOG’s question:
Robinson: It’s almost as if a science fiction writer’s job is to represent the unborn humanity that will inherit this place – you’re speaking from the future and for the future. And you try to speak for them by envisioning scenarios that show them either doing things better or doing things worse – but you’re also alerting the generations alive right now that these people have a voice in history. The future needs to be taken into account by the current system, which regularly steals from it in order to pad our ridiculous current lifestyle.
KSR is free to summon the future and to twist his visions for his agenda. I agree that the generations alive right now should consider the voices of those in the future, but only to the extent foreseeable and then only in proportion to the amount of damages that can be incurred by our actions. Environmental scaremongering is in vogue, but it is far from clear that the dryness of my property or the survival of all of humanity is at stake yet. And it is an extraordinary thing to claim that “the current system” does not take into account the future.
Unregulated and undistorted prices do a far better job at taking into account the future than any human being alone may do. This includes KSR and the preferences he would like to impose by force upon all of us. It is only when such imposition occurs that the system steals from the future in order to pad current lifestyles. When will our water run out due to government interference? How much more pollution can rivers take while being owned by the government? How many more people were brought into subsistence living in China, or starved in misery, as a result of the Great Leap Forward?
Perhaps KSR would do well to listen to another outstanding writer of the day, Neal Stephenson, whose Cryptonomicon is one of my favorite books (in small part due to the most realistic characterization of General Douglas MacArthur that I have ever read):
These I avoid for the simple reason that artists often make fools of themselves, and begin to produce bad art, when they decide to get political. A novelist needs to be able to see the world through the eyes of just about anyone, including people who have this or that set of views on religion, politics, etc. By espousing one strong political view a novelist loses the power to do this.
I would take a weaker stance than this, but I wonder if KSR’s writing would be more powerful if it acknowledged the many complexities and paradoxes of human nature as opposed to his myopic view. For in the end, the price of utopia and its lesser siblings (permaculture) is the survival of humanity. In spite of all its shortcomings, humanity also possesses the drive to overcome them and build. Capitalism, tempered by strong property rights, is the best system to simultaneously harness and unleash these forces so as to move into a better future.
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