Kim Stanley Robinson

I saw Kim Stanley Robinson speak today. He gave a good talk on climate change, which was of course the subject of this most recent trilogy of SF novels. He said a few things which I thought were interesting.

He gave an interesting definition of ideology which unfortunately I don’t remember precisely. He said, quoting somebody else, that ideology is our intellectual relationship with reality. That is, our ideology is what we use to perceive the underlying reality. He intended this as a way to avoid getting into discussions about “your ideology or my correct view.” Everybody has an ideology.

This is obviously true in the Kantian sense, and it is also true in the more familiar sense that we pay attention to the things we care about. In these terms, ideology is what we use to repress cognitive dissonance. Robinson compared ideology to spectacles: the best ideology, in his mind, is the one which distorts the least.

He also mentioned one of the key problems of capitalism, which is that external costs are not accounted for in the system. His example was carbon use, though of course there are many others. Environmental costs are generally made external, and thus nobody has to pay for despoiling the environment. He described this as borrowing from our grandchildren, who will have to pay back this debt. Of course the human race has always done this. But our modern capitalism has a voracious appetite for finding things which are underpriced and turning them into cash, so the effect of not including the full price for environmental goods is to accelerate their use.

Another economic problem he mentioned is that we tend to focus on having a highly productive economy rather than on giving people a high quality of life. Of course they are related, but they are not the same. He suggested that we dislike France in part because they emphasize quality of life more highly, such as the slightly shorter work week. Of course this may be changing under Sarkozy. Although he didn’t mention it directly, this is related to the globalism straightjacket that Thomas Friendman used to talk about. Friedman suggested that there was only one possible way to run an economy—as Thatcher famously said, “There is no alternative.” But of course that is false. Even to say it is to see that it is false. Yet many people seem to believe it.

The last point I’ll mention is that he described himself as, when it comes to climate change, an intellectual pessimist but a willful optimist. That is, he wills himself to believe that things can still work out. I can sympathize with that point of view. In particular it is most likely the only way to avoid fatalism.