It's been a little more than a year now since I started the
narrative that wrapped up last week. The two weeks that Peter Carr spent in the
Lakeland Republic in late November of 2065 ended up covering a little more
ground than I’d originally intended, and of course the vagaries of politics and
culture in the twilight years of the American century got their share of
attention on this blog. Now that the story’s told and the manuscript is getting
its final revisions before heading off to the publisher, I want to talk a bit
about exactly what I was trying to do by taking an imaginary person to an
imaginary place where things work better than they do here and now.
Part of it, of course, was an attempt to sketch out in
detail the practical implications of a point I’ve been exploring on this blog
for a good while now. Most people in today’s industrial society believe, or
think they believe, in progress: they believe, that is, that human history has
a built-in bias that infallibly moves it from worse things to better things
over time. These days, that belief in progress most often attaches itself to
the increasing complexification of technology, and you get the touching faith
in the imminence of a Star Trek future that allows so many people these
days to keep slogging through the wretchedly unsatisfactory and steadily
worsening conditions of the present.
Faith does not depend on evidence. If that statement needs
any further proof, you can get it by watching the way people respond to
technological failure. Most of us these days know perfectly well that every
software “upgrade” these days has more bugs and fewer useful features than what
it replaced, and every round of “new and improved” products hawked by the media
and shoveled onto store shelves is more shoddily made, more loaded with
unwanted side effects, and less satisfactory than the last round. Somehow,
though, a good many of the people who witness this reality, day in and day out,
still manage to insist that the future is, or at least ought to be, a paradise
propped up by perfectly functioning machines. That the rising tide of
technological failure might be something other than an accidental roadbump on
the way to utopia—that it might be trying to tell us something that, by and
large we don’t want to hear—has not yet entered our society’s darkest dream.
It so happens that in very many cases, older, simpler,
sturdier technologies work better, producing more satisfactory outcomes and
fewer negative side effects, than their modern high-tech equivalents. After
most of two years taking apart the modern mythology of progress in a series of
posts that became my book After Progress: Reason and Religion at the End of
the Industrial Age, and most of another year doing the more pragmatic posts
that are being turned into a forthcoming book tentatively titled The Retro
Future, I decided that the best way to pursue the exploration further was
to imagine a society very much like ours that had actually noticed the
declining quality of technology, and adjusted public policies accordingly. That
was the genesis of Retrotopia: the attempt to show, by means of the
toolkit of narrative fiction, that deliberate technological regression as
public policy didn’t amount to a return to the caves—quite the contrary, it
meant a return to things that actually work.
The form that this exploration took, though, was shaped in
important ways by an earlier venture of the same kind, Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia.
I don’t know how many of my readers realize just how dramatic a change in
utopian literature was marked by Callenbach’s solidly written tale. From the
days of Thomas More’s novel Utopia, which gave the genre its name,
utopian literature worked with the contrast between the world as it is and an
ideal world as imagined by the author, without any connection between the two
outside of the gimmick, however worked, that got a viewpoint character from one
to the other. More’s Utopia was a critique of the England of Henry VIII, but
there was never any suggestion on More’s part that England might be expected to
turn into Utopia one of these days, and nearly all the utopian tales that
followed his embraced the same approach.
With William Morris, things began to shift. Morris was a
socialist, and thus believed devoutly that the world could in fact turn into
something much better than it was; during the years that his commitment to
socialism was at its height, he penned a utopian tale, News from Nowhere,
which was set in a future England long after Victorian capitalism had gone gurgling
down history’s sewer pipe. (Later on, in the pages of his tremendous fantasy
novel The Well at the World’s End, he wove a subtle but pervasive
critique of the socialist views he’d championed—socialism appears there in the
stark and terrible symbolic form of the Dry Tree—but that’s a subject for a
different post entirely.)
News From Nowhere was quite the controversial book in
its day, not least because the socialist future Morris imagined was green,
agrarian, and entirely free of the mechanized regimentation of humanity that
played such a huge role in the Marxist imagination then as now. Still, the historical thread that linked
Morris’ utopia to the present was very thin.
The story was set far off in the future, and Morris skimmed lightly over
the process that led from the dark Satanic mills of Victorian England to the
green and pleasant land of his imagined socialist England.
That was where Callenbach took hold of the utopian
narrative, and hammered it into a completely new shape. Ecotopia was set
barely a quarter century in Callenbach’s own future. In his vision, the states
of Washington, Oregon, and the northern two-thirds of California had broken
away from the United States in 1980, and the usual visitor—journalist William
Weston, from what’s left of the United States—came to pay the usual visit in
1999. Over the nineteen years between independence and Weston’s visit, the new
nation of Ecotopia had entirely reshaped itself in the image of the Whole
Earth Catalog, adopting the technologies, customs, and worldview that San
Francisco-area eco-radicals of the 1970s dreamed of establishing, and here and
there actually adopted in their own lives.
It really is a tour de force. One measure of its impact is
that to this day, when you ask people on the leftward end of things to imagine
an ideal future that isn’t just a lightly scrubbed version of the present,
dollars will get you organic free range doughnuts that what you’ll hear is some
version or other of the Ecotopian future: wind turbines and solar panels,
organic farms everywhere, and everyone voluntarily embracing the social customs
and attitudes of the San Francisco-area avant-garde circa 1975 in perfect
lockstep. While I was writing Retrotopia, until some of my readers got
the hang of the fact that I don’t crowdsource my fiction, I fielded any number
of comments and emails insisting that I really ought to incorporate this or
that or the other aspect of the Ecotopian future into my narrative. I didn’t
take offense at that; it was pretty clear to me that for a lot of people
nowadays, Ecotopia is literally the only alternative to the status quo
that they can imagine.
We’ll get to the broader implications of that last point in
a moment. Just now, I want to talk about why I didn’t write a mildly retro version
of Ecotopia. I could have; it would have been easy and, frankly, quite
entertaining to do that. I’ve imagined more than once writing a tale about
somebody from our world who, via some bit of science-fictionish handwaving, is
transported to an alternate America in which Ronald Reagan lost the 1980
election, the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant underwent a full-scale
Fukushima Daiichi meltdown with tens of thousands of casualties, and the United
States had accordingly gone careening ahead toward the sustainable future we
almost adopted. I may still write that story someday, but that wasn’t what I
chose to do this time around.
Partly, of course, that was because Ernest Callenbach was
there already forty years ago. Partly, though, it’s because not all the
assumptions that undergirded Ecotopia have worn well in the decades
since he wrote. It’s become painfully clear that renewable energy sources,
valuable and necessary though they are, can’t simply be dropped into place as a
replacement for fossil fuels; huge changes in energy use, embracing issues of
energy concentration and accessibility as well as sheer quantity, will have to
be made as fossil fuels run out and we have to make do with the enduring power
sources of sun, wind, water, and muscle. It’s also become clear, painfully or
amusingly as the case may be, that the notions that Sausalito intellectuals
thought would save the world back in the 1970s—communal living, casual
pansexuality, and the like—had downsides and drawbacks that nobody had gotten
around to noticing yet, and weren’t necessarily as liberating and
transformative as they seemed at the time.
Ecotopia also fell headlong into both of the standard
pitfalls of the contemporary liberal imagination. The first of these is the
belief that a perfect society can be attained if we can just abolish diversity
of ideas and opinions, and get everyone to believe what the affluent liberal
intelligentsia think they ought to believe. That’s why I put ongoing
controversies between conservative and restorationist blocs into the
story. It’s also, on another level, why
I put in repeated references to religious diversity—thus there are people
running for public office in the Lakeland Republic who end an oath of office with
“So help me Jesus my Lord and Savior,” just as there are military officers
there who spend every Sunday at the Greek Orthodox cathedral in Toledo, and
politicians who attend the Atheist Assembly.
The second pitfall, which follows from the first, is the
belief that since you can’t get “those people” to have the ideas and opinions
you think they ought to have, the proper response is to hole up in a
self-referential echo chamber from which all unacceptable views are excluded. Ecotopia
assumes implicitly that the United States, and by inference the rest of the
world’s nations as well, are utterly irredeemable; the nation of Ecotopia thus
barricades itself inside its borders and goes its green and merry way, and the
climax of the story comes when William Weston decides to stay in Ecotopia and become
one of the good people. (He had a significant other back home in the USA, by
the way; what she thought of his decision to dump her for a San Francisco
hippie chick is nowhere mentioned.)
We’ll be discussing both those pitfalls at length in future
posts, not least because they bid fair to exert a massive influence on
contemporary politics, especially but not only in the United States. The point
I’d like to make here, though, is just how deep the latter habit runs through
the liberal end of our collective imagination. I’m thinking here of another
powerful and morally problematic work of fiction to come out of the same era,
Ursula K. LeGuin’s haunting story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” The
core of the story is that there’s a splendid city, Omelas; its splendor depends
on the infliction of suffering on one helpless person; now and again, people
get upset by this, and leave the city. It’s stunningly well written but evades
a crucial question: does walking away do anything to change the situation, or
does it just let the ones who walk away from Omelas feel morally superior?
That was one of the reasons why the conclusion of Retrotopia
didn’t feature Peter Carr chucking his Atlantic Republic passport and moving in
with Melanie Berger. Instead, he caught the train back home, having committed
himself to the challenge of trying to move his own country in the direction
that the Lakeland Republic has already taken, in the full knowledge that he
might not succeed. I had the entire last scene in mind from the beginning of
the project, partly as a deliberate challenge to that aspect of Ecotopia,
partly because that sort of leap into uncertainty seems much more relevant to
our present predicament. We don’t know, any more than Carr did, what lies
behind the clouds that hide the future.
Of course the primary difference between Ecotopia and
Retrotopia was that my narrative was meant to explore a very different
approach from Callenbach’s. He was trying to propose a new, avant-garde,
cutting-edge future—it’s often forgotten that the kind of thing Callenbach was
talking about really was seen as the next great wave of progress in the 1970s,
before the current fad for schizoid withdrawal into a cybernetic Neverland took
that title away from it in the 1980s. I’m trying to explore the possibility
that going back to what worked is a better idea than plunging forward along a
trajectory that leads to no place any sane human being would want to go. He was
talking about innovation, while I’m talking about retrovation: the strategy
of using the past as a resource for problem-solving in the present.
Retrovation used to be utterly unthinkable in modern
industrial societies. At the moment, it’s making the transition from utterly
unthinkable to unspeakably heretical—thus another term for it I introduced in a
post a while back, the
heresy of technological choice—but a lot of people still can’t get
their minds around it at all. When I’ve proposed steampunk technology as one
model for the future, I’ve inevitably fielded a flurry of comments insisting
that you can’t possibly have Victorian technology without child labor and
oppressive gender politics—and of course while I was writing Retrotopia,
quite a few readers assumed as a matter of course that the tier system in the
Lakeland Republic governed every detail of daily life, so that you weren’t
allowed to have anything belonging to a post-1830 technological suite if you
lived in a tier one county.
Not so. The word I’ve coined for the strategy under
discussion, retrovation, is obviously backformed from “retro” + “innovation,”
but it’s also “re-trove-ation,” re-finding, rediscovery: an active process of
searching through the many options the past provides, not a passive acceptance
of some bygone time as a package deal. That’s the strategy the Lakeland
Republic puts to use in my narrative, and those of my readers who know their
way around the backwaters and odd corners of history may find it entertaining
to figure out the sources from which I lifted this or that detail of
Retrotopian daily life. The rhetoric of progress, by contrast, rejects that
possibility, relies on a very dubious logic that lumps “the past” together as a
single thing, and insists that wanting any of it amounts to wanting all of it,
with the worst features inevitably highlighted.
I’ve long since lost track of the number of times I’ve been
told that rejecting the latest new, shiny, and dysfunctional technology, in
favor of an older technology that works, is tantamount to cheerleading for
infant mortality, or slavery, or living in caves, or what have you. I’ve
sometimes thought that it might be entertaining to turn that around—“if you
won’t use a cell phone, you must be in favor of bringing back a balanced global
climate!”—or simply taking it in directions a little more absurd than it’s gone
already—“if you prefer rail travel to air travel, why, you might as well just
restart the Punic Wars!” In either case,
the point that might be made is the silliness of the progress-worshippers’
insistence that the past, or the present, or for that matter the future, is an
all-or-nothing deal.
That’s also why, to return to my narrative for a moment, I
made a point of showing that the sexual mores of people in the Lakeland
Republic didn’t correspond to how people behaved at some point in the past—or,
more to the point, the mythical notion of how people behaved in the past that’s
been circulated by certain pseudoconservatives in recent decades. Thus
industrial magnate Janice Mikkelson is a lesbian with a lovely wife, Peter Carr
happens to see two young men who’ve just gotten married on their way to their
honeymoon, and when Peter and Melanie go out for dinner and an opera, the
evening ends in her bedroom. I know that was uncomfortable for the social and
religious conservatives among my readers, but it had to be there, for two
reasons.
On the one hand, as a moderate Burkean conservative, I see
absolutely no justification for imposing legal restraints on what consenting
adults do in the privacy of their own bedrooms, or for that matter in that
dimension of the public sphere that pertains to marriage licenses—and, after
all, this is my utopia and I’ll permit what I want to. On the other hand, just as I put devoutly
religious people into the story to discomfit the sort of doctrinaire liberals
who believe that nobody should follow traditional religious teachings, I put
married gay and lesbian people into the story to discomfit the sort of doctrinaire
conservatives who believe that nobody should follow contemporary sexual mores.
In both cases, the point I hoped to make is that the Lakeland Republic, with
its policy of retrovation and its relative comfort with a diversity of ideas
and lifestyles, hasn’t gone “backward,” or for that matter “forward,” but off
in a direction all its own—a direction that can’t be defined in terms of the
monomaniacally linear fixations of the worshippers of progress.
And of course that’s the crucial point, the most important
thing that I hope my readers got out of the narrative. At the heart of most of
the modern world’s insoluble problems is the faith-based claim that human
history is a straight line with no branches or meanders, leading onward and
upward from the caves to the stars, and that
every software upgrade, every new and improved product on the shelves,
every lurch “forward”—however that conveniently floppy word happens to be
defined from day to day by marketing flacks and politicians—therefore must lead
toward that imaginary destination.
That blind and increasingly untenable faith, I’ve come to
think, is the central reason why the only future different from the present
that most people can imagine these days, if it’s not Ecotopia, is either a
rehash of the past in every detail or some kind of nightmare dystopia. These
days, as often as not, that even extends to science fiction, once our society’s
most effervescent cauldron of novel futures. While writing an essay on the
genre for a new magazine of science fiction and fantasy, Mythic, it occurred to
me—and not for the first time—how few recent works of science fiction seem to
be able to portray a future society that isn’t either a straight-line extrapolation
from the present, complete with all its most parochial features, a carbon-copy
rehash of some specific society of the past, or a smoking wasteland.
Not all that many decades ago, SF authors routinely spun
future societies as radically different from ours as ours is from, say, the
ancient Maya, but such visions are rare now. I don’t think that’s
accidental. To borrow a metaphor from Retrotopia,
when you’ve driven down a blind alley and are sitting there with your bumper
pressed against a brick wall, the only way forward starts by backing up—but if
you’ve been convinced by your society’s core ideological commitments that
“backing up” can only mean returning whole hog to the imaginary, awful past
from which the ersatz messiah of progress is supposed to save us, you’re stuck.
There you sit, pushing uselessly on the pedal, hearing the engine labor and
rattle, and watching the gas gauge move steadily toward that unwelcome letter
E; it’s no surprise that after a while, the idea of a street leading somewhere
else starts to seem distinctly unreal.
Other futures are possible. Retrotopia isn’t the only
option, though I have to say it strikes me as a much more pleasant choice than
what we’ve got now, and retrovation isn’t the only tool we need to get us out
of that blind alley, though I suspect it’s more useful than a good many of the
more popular items in our contemporary toolkit. Still, time will tell—and if my
narrative irritates some of my readers enough to get them working on their own,
radically different visions of a future that breaks free of the blind alley of
linear progress, all the better.
