I'd meant to go straight on from last week’s post about
völkerwanderung
and the dissolution and birth of ethnic identities in dark age societies, and
start talking about the mechanisms by which societies destroy themselves—with
an eye, of course, to the present example. Still, as I’ve noted here more than
once, there are certain complexities involved in the project of discussing the
decline and fall of civilizations in a civilization that’s hard at work on its
own decline and fall, and one of those complexities is the way that tempting
examples of the process keep popping up as we go.
The last week or so has been unusually full of those. The
Ebola epidemic in West Africa has continued to spread at an exponential rate as
hopelessly underfunded attempts to contain it crumple, while the leaders of the
world’s industrial nations distract themselves playing geopolitics in blithe
disregard of the very real possibility that their inattention may be helping to
launch the next great global pandemic.
In other news—tip of the archdruidical hat here to The Daily
Impact—companies and investors who have been involved in the fracking
bubble are
quietly bailing out. If things continue on their current trajectory,
as I’ve noted before, this autumn could very well see the fracking boom go
bust; it’s anyone’s guess how heavily that will hit the global economy, but
fracking-related loans and investments have accounted for a sufficiently large
fraction of Wall Street profits in recent years that the crater left by a
fracking bust will likely be large and deep.
Regular readers of this blog already know, though, that it’s
most often the little things that catch my attention, and the subject of this
week’s post is no exception. Thus I’m pleased to announce that a coterie of
scientists and science fiction writers has figured out what’s wrong with the
world today: there are, ahem, too many negative portrayals of the future in
popular media. To counter this deluge of unwarranted pessimism, they’ve
organized a group called Project Hieroglyph, and published an anthology of
new, cheery, upbeat SF stories about marvelous new technologies that
could become realities within the next fifty years. That certainly ought to do
the trick!
Now of course I’m hardly in a position to discourage anyone
from putting together a science fiction anthology around an unpopular theme.
After
Oil: SF Visions of a Post-Petroleum Future, the anthology that
resulted from the
first Space Bats challenge here in 2011, is exactly that, and two
similar anthologies from this blog’s second
Space Bats challenge are going through the editing and publishing
process as I write these words. That said, I’d question the claim that those
three anthologies will somehow cause the planet’s oil reserves to run dry any
faster than they otherwise will.
The same sort of skepticism, I suggest, may be worth
applying to Project Hieroglyph and its anthology. The contemporary crisis of industrial society isn’t being
caused by a lack of optimism; its roots go deep into the tough subsoil of
geological and thermodynamic reality, to the lethal mismatch between fantasies
of endless economic growth and the hard limits of a finite planet, and to the
less immediately deadly but even more pervasive mismatch between fantasies of
perpetual technological progress and that nemesis of all linear thinking, the
law of diminishing returns. The failure
of optimism that these writers are bemoaning is a symptom rather than a cause,
and insisting that the way to solve our problems is to push optimistic notions
about the future at people is more than a little like deciding that the best
way to deal with flashing red warning lights on the control panel of an
airplane is to put little pieces of opaque green tape over them so everything
looks fine again.
It’s not as though there’s been a shortage of giddily
optimistic visions of a gizmocentric future in recent years, after all. I grant
that the most colorful works of imaginative fiction we’ve seen of late have
come from those economists and politicians who keep insisting that the only way
out of our current economic and social malaise is to do even more of the same
things that got us into it. That said, any of my readers who step into a
bookstore or a video store and look for something that features interstellar
travel or any of the other shibboleths of the contemporary cult of progress
won’t have to work hard to find one. What’s happened, rather, is that such
things are no longer as popular as they once were, because people find that
stories about bleaker futures hedged in with harsh limits are more to their
taste.
The question that needs to be asked, then, is why this
should be the case. As I see it, there are at least three very good reasons.
First, those bleaker futures and harsh limits reflect the
realities of life in contemporary America. Set aside the top twenty per cent of
the population by income, and Americans have on average seen their standard of
living slide steadily downhill for more than four decades. In 1970, to note
just one measure of how far things have gone, an American family with one
working class salary could afford to buy a house, pay all their bills on time,
put three square meals on the table every day, and still have enough left over
for the occasional vacation or high-ticket luxury item. Now? In much of today’s
America, a single working class salary isn’t enough to keep a family off the
streets.
That history of relentless economic decline has had a
massive impact on attitudes toward the future, toward science, and toward
technological progress. In 1969, it was only in the ghettos where America
confined its urban poor that any significant number of people responded to the
Apollo moon landing with the sort of disgusted alienation that Gil Scott-Heron
expressed memorably in his furious ballad “Whitey on the Moon.” Nowadays, a much greater number of
Americans—quite possibly a majority—see the latest ballyhooed achievements of
science and technology as just one more round of pointless stunts from which
they won’t benefit in the least.
It’s easy but inaccurate to insist that they’re mistaken in
that assessment. Outside the narrowing circle of the well-to-do, many Americans
these days spend more time coping with the problems caused by technologies than
they do enjoying the benefits thereof. Most of the jobs eliminated by
automation, after all, used to provide gainful employment for the poor; most of
the localities that are dumping grounds for toxic waste, similarly, are
inhabited by people toward the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid, and so on
down the list of unintended consequences and technological blowback. By and
large, the benefits of new technology trickle up the social ladder, while the
costs and burdens trickle down; this has a lot to do with the fact that the
grandchildren of people who enjoyed The Jetsons now find
The Hunger Games more to their taste.
That’s the first reason. The second is that for decades now,
the great majority of the claims made about wonderful new technologies that
would inevitably become part of our lives in the next few decades have turned
out to be dead wrong. From jetpacks and flying cars to domed cities and
vacations on the Moon, from the nuclear power plants that would make
electricity too cheap to meter to the conquest of poverty, disease, and death
itself, most of the promises offered by the propagandists and publicists of
technological progress haven’t happened. That has understandably made people
noticeably less impressed by further rounds of promises that likely won’t come
true either.
When I was a child, if I may insert a personal reflection
here, one of my favorite books was titled You Will Go To The
Moon. I suspect most American of my generation remember that book,
however dimly, with its glossy portrayal of what space travel would be like in
the near future: the great conical rocket with its winged upper stage, the
white doughnut-shaped space station turning in orbit, and the rest of it. I
honestly expected to make that trip someday, and I was encouraged in that
belief by a chorus of authoritative voices for whom permanent space stations,
bases on the Moon, and a manned landing on Mars were a done deal by the year
2000.
Now of course in those days the United States still had a
manned space program capable of putting bootprints on the Moon. We
don’t have one of those any more. It’s worth talking about why that
is, because the same logic applies equally well to most of the other grand
technological projects that were proclaimed not so long ago as the inescapable
path to a shiny new future.
We don’t have a manned space program any more, to begin
with, because the United States is effectively bankrupt, having committed
itself in the usual manner to the sort of imperial overstretch chronicled by
Paul Kennedy in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, and
cashed in its future for a temporary supremacy over most of the planet. That’s
the unmentionable subtext behind the disintegration of America’s infrastructure
and built environment, the gutting of its once-mighty industrial plant, and a
good deal of the steady decline in standards of living mentioned earlier in
this post. Britain dreamed about expansion into space when it still had an
empire—the British Interplanetary Society was a major presence in space-travel
advocacy in the first half of the twentieth century—and shelved those dreams
when its empire went away; the United States is in the process of the same
retreat. Still, there’s more going on here than this.
Another reason we don’t have a manned space program any more
is that all those decades of giddy rhetoric about New Worlds For Man never got
around to discussing the difference between technical feasibility and economic
viability. The promoters of space travel fell into the common trap of believing
their own hype, and convinced themselves that orbital factories, mines on the
Moon, and the like would surely turn out to be paying propositions. What they
forgot, of course, is what I’ve called the biosphere dividend: the vast array of goods and services that the
Earth’s natural cycles provide for human beings free of charge, which have to
be paid for anywhere else. The best current estimate for the value of that
dividend, from a 1997 paper in Science written by a team
headed by Richard Constanza, is that it’s something like three times the total
value of all goods and services produced by human beings.
As a very rough estimate, in other words, economic activity
anywhere in the solar system other than Earth will cost around four times what
it costs on Earth, even apart from transportation costs, because the services
provided here for free by the biosphere have to be paid for in space or on the
solar system’s other worlds. That’s why all the talk about space as a new
economic frontier went nowhere; orbital manufacturing was tried—the Skylab
program of the 1970s, the Space Shuttle, and the International Space Station in
its early days all featured experiments along those lines—and the modest
advantages of freefall and ready access to hard vacuum didn’t make enough of a
difference to offset the costs. Thus manned space travel, like commercial
supersonic aircraft, nuclear power plants, and plenty of other erstwhile waves
of the future, turned into a gargantuan white elephant that could only be
supported so long as massive and continuing government subsidies were
forthcoming.
Those are two of the reasons why we don’t have a manned
space program any more. The third is less tangible but, I suspect, far and away
the most important. It can be tracked by picking up any illustrated book about
the solar system that was written before we got there, and comparing what outer
space and other worlds were supposed to look like with what was actually waiting
for our landers and probes.
I have in front of me right now, for example, a painting of
a scene on the Moon in a book published the year I was born. It’s a gorgeous,
romantic view. Blue earthlight splashes over a crater in the foreground;
further off, needle-sharp mountains catch the sunlight; the sky is full of
brilliant stars. Too bad that’s not what the Apollo astronauts found when they
got there. Nobody told the Moon it was supposed to cater to human notions of
scenic grandeur, and so it presented its visitors with vistas of dull gray
hillocks and empty plains beneath a flat black sky. To anybody but a
selenologist, the one thing worth attention in that dreary scene was the
glowing blue sphere of Earth 240,000 miles away.
For an even stronger contrast, consider the pictures beamed
back by the first Viking probe from the surface of Mars in 1976, and compare
that to the gaudy images of the Sun’s fourth planet that were in circulation in
popular culture up to that time. I remember the event tolerably well, and one
of the things I remember most clearly is the pervasive sense of
disappointment—of “is that all?”—shared by everyone in the room. The images from the lander didn’t look like
Barsoom, or the arid but gorgeous setting of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian
Chronicles, or any of the other visions of Mars everyone in 1970s
America had tucked away in their brains; they looked for all of either world
like an unusually dull corner of Nevada that had somehow been denuded of air,
water, and life.
Here again, the proponents of space travel fell into the
trap of believing their own hype, and forgot that science fiction is no more
about real futures than romance novels are about real relationships. That isn’t
a criticism of science fiction, by the way, though I suspect the members of
Project Hieroglyph will take it as one. Science fiction is a literature of
ideas, not of crass realities, and it evokes the sense of wonder that is its
distinctive literary effect by dissolving the barrier between the realistic and
the fantastic. What too often got forgotten, though, is that literary effects
don’t guarantee the validity of prophecies—they’re far more likely to hide the
flaws of improbable claims behind a haze of emotion.
Romance writers don’t seem to have much trouble recognizing
that their novels are not about the real world. Science fiction, by contrast,
has suffered from an overdeveloped sense of its own importance for many years
now. I’m thinking just now of a typical essay by Isaac Asimov that described
science fiction writers as scouts for the onward march of humanity. (Note the
presuppositions that humanity is going somewhere, that all of it’s going in a
single direction, and that this direction just happens to be defined by the
literary tastes of an eccentric subcategory of 20th century popular fiction.)
That sort of thinking led too many people in the midst of the postwar boom to
forget that the universe is under no obligation to conform to our wholly
anthropocentric notions of human destiny and provide us with New Worlds for Man
just because we happen to want some.
Mutatis mutandis, that’s what happened to
most of the other grand visions of transformative technological progress that
were proclaimed so enthusiastically over the last century or so. Most of them
never happened, and those that did turned out to be far less thrilling and far
more problematic than the advance billing insisted they would be. Faced with
that repeated realization, a great many Americans decided—and not without
reason—that more of the same gosh-wow claims were not of interest. That shifted
public taste away from cozy optimism toward a harsher take on our future.
The third factor driving that shift in taste, though, may be
the most important of all, and it’s also one of the most comprehensively
tabooed subjects in contemporary life. Most human phenomena are subject to the
law of diminishing returns; the lesson that contemporary industrial societies
are trying their level best not to learn just now is that technological progress
is one of the phenomena to which this law applies. Thus there can be such a
thing as too much technology, and a very strong case can be made that in the
world’s industrial nations, we’ve already gotten well past that point.
In a
typically cogent article, economist Herman Daly sorts our the law of
diminishing returns into three interacting processes. The first is
diminishing marginal utility—that is, the more of anything
you have, the less any additional increment of that thing contributes to your
wellbeing. If you’re hungry, one sandwich is a very good thing; two is
pleasant; three is a luxury; and somewhere beyond that, when you’ve given
sandwiches to all your coworkers, the local street people, and anyone else you
can find, more sandwiches stop being any use to you. When more of anything no longers bring any additional benefit,
you’ve reached the point of futility, at which further increments are a waste
of time and resources.
Well before that happens, though, two other factors come
into play. First, it costs you almost nothing to cope with one sandwich, and
very little more to cope with two or three. After that you start having to
invest time, and quite possibly resources, in dealing with all those
sandwiches, and each additional sandwich adds to the total burden. Economists
call that increasing marginal disutility—that is, the more
of anything you have, the more any additional increment of that thing is going
to cost you, in one way or another. Somewhere in there, too, there’s the impact
that dealing with those sandwiches has on your ability to deal with other
things you need to do; that’s increasing risk of whole-system
disruption—the more of anything you have, the more likely it is that
an additional increment of that thing is going to disrupt the wider system in
which you exist.
Next to nobody wants to talk about the way that
technological progress has already passed the point of diminishing returns:
that the marginal utility of each new round of technology is dropping fast, the
marginal disutility is rising at least as fast, and whole-system disruptions
driven by technology are becoming an inescapable presence in everyday life.
Still, I’ve come to think that an uncomfortable awareness of that fact is
becoming increasingly common these days, however subliminal that awareness may
be, and beginning to have an popular culture among many other things. If you’re
in a hole, as the saying goes, the first thing to do is stop digging; if a
large and growing fraction of your society’s problems are being caused by too
much technology applied with too little caution, similarly, it’s not exactly
helpful to insist that applying even more technology with even less skepticism
about its consequences is the only possible answer to those problems.
