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Thursday, January 19, 2012Optimism 2.0 (continued)

     An article in a recent issue of the magazine New Scientist looked at the 1972 book The Limits to Growth (updated in 2004), which famously predicted a sustainability crisis sometime in the middle of the 21st century. You want pessimism? See chart:

      The computer model from which these curves are derived, called World3, has its critics, and I’m not here to declare its reliability—I’m a speculative fiction writer, not an economist, ecologist, or computer scientist. But speculative fiction writers do get to speculate, and we can at least speculate that this scenario might be true. We do, after all, live in a world of finite resources, which we are exploiting at an unprecedented rate, and in which the problem of feeding and sheltering a population of seven billion souls is already non-trivial.
      Readers who wonder what happened to the Tomorrowland vision of unbounded prosperity are referred to the tangle of lines mid-chart, where population declines drastically, the global death rate soars, and industrial output plummets. Nowhere in that tangle do we detect evidence of The Jetsons or Roddenberry’s Star Trek. Nor is the threat remote. Children born this year will be living with it (or dying by it) by the time they reach middle age. Those of us born in the latter half of the twentieth century can count ourselves lucky: we enjoyed the last long summer of civilization and we’ll be gone by the time the worst of the winter winds sweep in.
      How then do we deal with that depressing prospect? Well, we can deny its plausibility for ideological or strategic reasons, as right-wingers and the oil cartels often do. We can view it as an inconsequential prelude to the Rapture, as some evangelical Christians do. We can welcome it as an overdue punishment for the arrogance of the West, as some radical Islamists do. We can use it to chastise our giddy and wasteful technological hubris, or frame it as a nasty comeuppance to the false verities of the Enlightenment, as some philosophers and theologians do.
      To which I say: Fuck that noise. What we're talking about are real and pressing problems, and the people who matter are the people who are working on solutions. Granted, the scope of the problem is immense. We have no governance on the global level at which some of these problems will have to be addressed. The countervailing and obstructionist forces are enormously powerful. Some of the problems may not be solved; some may be unsolvable. Some version of the predicted collapse may in fact be inevitable.
      But we gain nothing by ignoring the threat, much less by using it to denigrate or dimiss the progress civilization has already achieved. To address it we’re going to need scientific and technological savvy, we’re going to need education for as many people as possible, we’re going to need the Enlightenment virtues of democracy, rationality and humanism. We’re going to need to defend those Enlightenment virtues, and we may have to protect core concepts of human rights and human dignity at a time when scarcity and the concentration of wealth place them in jeopardy.
     Anybody sensing a possible role for science fiction here? From H.G. Wells to Isaac Asimov, sf has been a consciously humanist, progressive, secular literature. Its current eclipse may be symptomatic, and its revival would be an encouraging sign.
      And as a writer of speculative fiction, what interests me is not just the apocalyptic riot of trendlines in the middle of the chart but the calmer ones to the right of it. Who are those people, living in the aftermath of the great hemoclysm of the 21st century? They are, after all, our children’s children. There is no reason to assume they have been reduced to barbarity. If they've suffered the consequences of our errors, they may also have inherited and enlarged the great gifts of our civilization: the emancipation of women, the rejection of racism and homophobia, our uneven but encouraging attempts to provide universal education and health care. With any luck, they will consider us barbaric—a quarrelsome and short-sighted, selfish and superstitious people.
      Their scorn for us is a best-case outcome and I welcome it in advance. And that in itself constitutes a kind of optimism.