22 July 2022
Dear Interested Readers,
Changing Perspectives
I have never been a reader of science fiction. I guess as close to being a science fiction enthusiast as I ever got was that as a preadolescent I enjoyed reading the Tom Swift books by Victor Appleton II. The one that I can still name is Tom Swift and His Atomic Earthblaster. When I saw that Ezra Klein was interviewing the science fiction writer, Kim Stanley Robinson, I almost skipped the podcast because of my lack of interest in science fiction. I couldn’t imagine their conversation would be of much interest to me, but I decided to listen to Klein’s intro and I was hooked.
Klein began by saying:
There is no way around it. This has been a heavy show lately. So it’s nice today to be able to have had, and to be able to give you, a conversation that’s a little bit more joyful, that makes you remember, this is a dazzling world to get to live in, that we’re lucky to have a chance to experience it, and that there is a politics that can be built around that kind of awe and that kind of gratitude. Kim Stanley Robinson is one of our great living science fiction writers…
In my head, I thought, “He’s right. Things are heavy. I am bummed out by the heat, the Supreme Court, the attacks on Joe Biden, inflation, the state of disarray within healthcare, and the likelihood that despite having no positive agenda Republicans could win back the House and the Senate this year, continuing concerns about COVID, and the pain of the war of attrition that seems to have no good outcome ahead in Ukraine.” I said to myself, “Maybe this conversation will be an interesting diversion on a long walk.”
To my surprise, Klein and Robinson spent very little time discussing missions to Mars or time travel. They did spend some time discussing William James, literature, and storytelling mechanisms like cognitive estrangement, geography as a character in fiction, and “Actor-Network Theory.” Robinson has a passion for hiking in the mountains, especially the Sierras of California. His most recent book, and a major focus in their conversation, is an autobiographical work of non-fiction, The High Sierra: A Love Story. The New York Times review of his book begins by describing what Robinson has become and where his passions and purpose are now centered. The author of the review, Alexandra Alter, begins her piece with a statement that quickly turns us away from the more than twenty sci-fi novels that Robinson has published since 1984. She begins:
Kim Stanley Robinson, one of the most acclaimed living science fiction writers, is done with deep space narratives. His focus now is on solving real problems — like climate change.
In the early lines of her article she writes:
Last fall, the science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson was asked to predict what the world will look like in 2050. He was speaking at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, and the atmosphere at the summit — billed as the “last, best hope” to save the planet — was bleak.
But Robinson, whose novel, “The Ministry for the Future,” lays out a path for humanity that narrowly averts a biosphere collapse, sounded a note of cautious optimism. Overcome with emotion at times, he raised the possibility of a near future marked by “human accomplishment and solidarity.”
That same cautious hope, not unfounded optimism, was easy to appreciate in Robinson’s conversation with Klein. At times he sounded to me like he had been significantly influenced by Steven Picker’s controversial ideas in his 2018 book, Enlightenment Now. Robinson is more cautious than Pinker is in general, but like Pinker, he is not giving up and thinks that maybe around the next turn we will begin to see some light in the tunnel. He believes there are some reasons to hope that we will find some way to avoid total disaster and meet the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement. He knows that there is still time to avoid a 2 C increase in temperature and find a way to limit the rise in temperature to less than 1.5 C. As her review continues, Alter focuses on the basis of Robinson’s utopian orientation:
At 70, Robinson — who is widely acclaimed as one of the most influential speculative fiction writers of his generation — stands as perhaps the last of the great utopians. It can be lonely work, he said. But lately, his writing has been having an impact in the real world, as biologists and climate scientists, tech entrepreneurs and CEOs of green technology start-ups have looked to his fiction as a possible road map for avoiding the worst outcomes of climate change…
…Robinson’s ability to marshal dense scientific and technical detail, economic and political theory and wonkish policy proposals into his fiction has made him a prominent public thinker outside of the sci-fi sphere.
In his interview with Klein, Robinson made statements that corroborate the idea that progress will be made despite the political pushback from climate deniers. He never mentioned Joe Manchin by name, but given Manchin’s recent refusal to support the president’s environmental efforts, Manchin has become for me the most obvious example of those who put short-term profits ahead of the planet’s survival and the health of all people. Alter focuses on the evolution of Robinson from deep space to the issues that confront us in the near future.
In his more recent novels — works like “New York 2140,” an oddly uplifting climate change novel that takes place after New York City is partly submerged by rising tides, and “Red Moon,” set in a lunar city in 2047 — he has traveled back in time, toward the present. Two years ago, he published “The Ministry for the Future,” which opens in 2025 and unfolds over the next few decades, as the world reels from floods, heat waves, and mounting ecological disasters, and an international ministry is created to save the planet.
Alter, like Klein, has spent a lot of time trying to explain and understand Robinson. Sometime, not long ago, perhaps between Robinson’s appearance at a recent conference on global warming with the Dali Lama and a trip that he took in May to speak to the world’s rich and famous in Davos, Switzerland, Alter interviewed Robinson and ends her article with his vision of a “utopian” outcome.
“As a utopia, it’s [The world in Ministry for the Future] a very low bar,” Robinson said. “I mean, if we avoid the mass extinction event, we avoid everything dying, great, that’s utopia, given where we are now.”
When Robinson is asked to forecast the future, as he often is, he usually hedges. He has argued that “we live in a big science fiction novel we are all writing together” — but he’s not sure if it’s going to be a utopian or dystopian one.
“Nobody makes a successful prediction of the future,” he said. “Except for maybe by accident.”
Now that I have given you some introduction to Robinson, if you like me needed one, I want to return to the conversation between Klein and Robinson. Much of the time they discussed Robinson’s experiences in the Sierras, but for me, the most important part of their conversation circled issues related to the social determinants of health: global warming for sure, and how the world has changed with the continuing presence of COVID, but also the need to control capitalism, the need for greater equity, and the unstated but obvious impact these issues have on public health.
I hope that you will read the transcript or listen to the interview. I’ve listened to the interview twice and spent a long time with the transcript. The link to both is back in the first paragraph. The interview is long–a little over an hour and a half, but it is well worth your time. It is a conversation between two men who explore important ideas and discuss experiences that they both share and are of great interest to me. What follows will be some of the ideas they expressed that resonated with me. Robinson resonates with me. I am currently listening to Robinson on my walks as he reads his new book, The High Sierra: A Love Story, on Audible. I expect my paperback copy of Ministry For the Future to arrive tomorrow.
The High Sierra: A Love Story is very autobiographical. Early in the conversation with Klein, Robinson describes his first trip to the Sierras with his college friends in 1973. The trip was also the first time Robinson used LSD. He gave up psychedelics a long time ago, but unlike many, his experience was positive and perhaps the drug is some part of the reason the mountains mean so much to him now. Klein probes the experience:
Klein: I want to go back to the way you described that first [LSD] experience, because it reminds me of this quote from William James on the noetic qualities of mystical experiences where he writes, “Mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain. And as a rule, they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after time.”
And I thought of that last line when I read the way that moment imbued the Sierras with deep meaning for you. It seems forever.
Robinson agrees with Klein about James’ insights and then tells another story that suggests a mystical experience that I believe helps set the stage for the remainder of the conversation:
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON: That’s a great quote. Now I’ll just tell you a story, because it happened last week. I was walking in a Swiss village. I had had a tremendous day hike high above the village on a north slope in the Alps. It was like a temperate rainforest, very unlike the Sierra, very beautiful, extremely beautiful, and came down into this village.
And there was an old barn or tool shed and an old bicycle had been tacked to it. And to the left and right of it were two words that were in wrought iron on this side of this barn, “einmal” and then “immer.” So that means, I think, once and then always.
Well, I had that same kind of James-ian mystical moment of, this is, I take to be a religious statement that everything that happens is somehow also caught in an eternity. And I like the fact the German seems to give it a poetical quality or a romantic quality, like Schiller or Novalis. Einmal, immer.
And I walked back down to where my wife was on a Zoom that she had to be on or else she would have been with me, and I described it to her and she was laughing at me again, but in an affectionate way. It had a reminder, and it was similar to that early Sierra experience. And I think the mountains are a space where you are taken outside of your ordinary urban mind and are thinking a little deeper — or, no, that might not be the right way to put it. Things are coming together in your head in a different way.
I can have that quasi-spiritual experience on my much less dramatic hikes and walks in the hills and woods in my part of New Hampshire, and during my kayaking on the lake at sunset near my home. I also have always loved the mountains. I cut my mountain teeth on the Smokies and lower Appalachians in North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and South Carolina during summer camping trips and picnics with my family as a child. I have had a glimmer of Robinson’s experience in the Sierras, the Alps, the Cascades, and near Denali in Alaska as an adult. Being in nature can often bring me closer to a spiritual experience than going to church.
After the literary discussion, the confessions and comments about short and long-term results of LSD with reference to its growing legitimate uses in mental health and hospice care as suggested by Michael Pollan, and a review of evolving attitudes about COVID, the remainder of the conversion was about pending disasters from global warming and the crippling inequality created by unrestrained capitalism. In my opinion, these two subjects represent the greatest long-term public health challenges we face. Many other issues like increased risks from pandemics may well be derivative of global warming, and as we all know the impact of both global warming and pandemics on minorities is substantially greater than on more affluent populations. But, the gap or disadvantage of the poor over the wealthy may soon narrow. As the current heat waves and violent weather have demonstrated, global warming is a threat to everyone, to our previous sense of normal, and ultimately, to all life on the planet.
Klein and Robinson have an interesting conversation about time and how people respond to impending disasters like global warming. On one hand, there is usually a slow progression of the problem on a day-to-day, month-to-month basis that has a tendency to decrease our concern that action is needed now. Maybe that’s Joe Manchin’s excuse. At other times, the war in Ukraine is an example, the threats are developing so fast that it is hard to know what to do other than to try to survive the moment. Robinson summarizes the idea:
…there’s a disruption ecology has a notion of speed of crisis that if it’s happening too fast, like, say, Russia’s war on Ukraine — so brutal and crazy — the Ukrainians are not worrying about climate change right now because they’re being blown up. And so when things are happening, like maybe mid-storm, even, a natural event, you don’t have time to do anything but try to survive.
On the other hand, if it’s happening too slowly, then you don’t think you have to deal with it because it’s happening on a scale of thousands of years and you have more present concerns.
Robinson continues in a surprising way. He is looking for the sweet spot between too fast and too slow. He thinks that the rate of change may have increased to the point that big businesses are beginning to be concerned about future profits, but change is not occurring at a pace that overwhelms attempts to respond. I hope that he is right.
…and you see this across the board of governments and then private capital wanting to invest greenly because they would like the world to survive so they can continue to stay in business. And on it goes like that. So we might have fallen into a good pace of change, which partly means the emergency has begun, but it hasn’t yet overwhelmed us, and so we could still do something about it.
He goes on to expand an idea that he picked up from an expert at a climate conference that has made him hopeful.
…you know, you don’t have to be in a plane crash to know that it would be bad to be in a plane crash. And that’s so obviously true. And so we make sure to try to make sure that planes don’t crash. And they rarely do because of our intense attention to that, because the ramifications of it would be so bad, like fatal.
So now climate change, we know that a rise in temperatures high enough would be a kind of a civilizational plane crash. We don’t want it to happen. We have some time to try to avoid it.
Klein sums up the idea:
I think your insight there, that maybe we’re entering a pace of crisis that is actually more aligned to human action, not so fast that it feels like you can’t act, but not so slow that it feels like you can’t see it, I think it’s really interesting. I’ll have to sit with that, but I think it’s a very, very interesting insight.
I am less convinced sitting in the aftermath of violent storms in the Northeast yesterday with hail the size of golf balls in some places, thunder and lightning, and the I-95 corridor looking forward to several more days of humidity and heat in the high nineties and in places over a hundred while the temps in the South and Southwest have exceeded one hundred degrees for many days.
On the evening news yesterday before the January 6th hearings, I saw pictures of Lake Mead, our largest reservoir that makes Southern California possible when it should be a desert. The lake is now down to 27% of its capacity and falling fast. It is also the source of water for many of the farms that produce our vegetables while it provides water to Arizona and Southern California. I wonder if they are still watering golf courses. Is this the sort of signal that should change Joe Manchin’s point of view? Is this drought evidence that global warming is a threat to anyone’s health?
Klein did slip in a question about COVID which Robinson had caught on his trip to meet with the Dali Lama.
How do you think about the experience we continue to go through — and I know you just got Covid — with the pandemic? And there’s still both a lot of death happening, but also a lot of risk, right? Another variant could come anytime. We know there’s a seasonality and a cyclicality. There’s many things we could do that we’re not doing.
And it’s just amazing to me how quickly we move from a period where it’s like we would stop everything to a period where we will kind of stop nothing, right?
I have been thinking the same way. It seems to me that we have collectively decided to get back to normal and treat COVID with the same casual concern that we give to the flu. Robinson is thinking the same way.
Yeah. Well, I’m still stunned. I never got over being stunned by how quickly things changed in spring of 2020. And since then, I’ve never felt caught up. But I think it is explicable that right at the start of the pandemic, it looked like it could kill many, many millions. And also for ordinary citizens, it looked like they, themselves, could die.
On the other hand, a lot of people followed instructions because, I think, out of fear, and but a sense of solidarity. OK, everybody’s responding. Let’s respond together. That’s what we do. But we’re such social primates that the order to stop socializing is impossible to hold to for long.
And then some risk assessment is going on. OK, how likely am I to get Covid? Pretty likely. How bad will it be? Well, I probably will just get sick and survive. And that explains, I think, the slacking off on everybody’s part.
After those philosophical thoughts about how most people processed COVID, the conversation drifted toward economic inequality by way of a discussion of the power of the advertising that gets wannabe backpackers to buy more gear than they need. What Robinson focused on was a comparison of the Navy to corporate America. He pointed out that the highest paid Admirals earned only eight times what the lowest paid seaman makes. He thought that was appropriate compared to many businesses where the CEO earns 350 times more than a line worker. That’s about as much in a day as the worker makes in a year. It was his sense that our nation will be dysfunctional unless everyone earns “enough.” “Enough” is like a universal basic income. It’s enough for an acceptable standard of living. In the Navy, there are eight multiples of “enough.” In many companies, there are 350 multiples of “enough” which he considers to be too much of “enough.” He references the French economist Thomas Piketty’s recent work, A Brief History of Equality, calling for the tax structure to close this wide variation in income. [That sounds like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.] Robinson pushed back hard on the idea that the desire for fabulous wealth drives innovation and advances knowledge.
There was much much more from Robinson about how inequality undermines progress and damages the lives and health of billions of people on the planet. It is amazing to me that Robinson’s outlook is hopeful and not dystopian. Global warming, pandemics, and economic inequality threaten everyone’s health, and we do have the ability to manage all three, but so far we have passed on the opportunities to do better. Both Piketty and Robinson are hoping that we will get our act together before it is too late to act.
The future of healthcare for the population will be charted more by how we manage global warming and inequality than by how we replace hips and develop better technics for aortic valve replacements. I don’t see how we could ever “cross the quality chasm” or achieve anything like the Triple Aim without treating these issues more effectively than we are now. Kim Stanley Robinson thinks that we might do better. I hope that Robinson is right and that there is reason to be hopeful. Everyone’s health and the stability of our planet depend on our acting effectively before it is too late to make a difference. That’s the same principle that I once espoused as I tried to get my patients to stop smoking, exercise, and eat less fatty food. I knew then that there was a time when actions could still make a difference before the time when it was too late to act.
Star Bright By The Billions
Like so many others, I was blown away by the first release of photographs from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). You can see the picture that most captured my imagination and interest in today’s header just because of its beauty and proximity. It is a picture of the Carina Nebula which is only 8,500 light years away from us. Putting that number into perspective, the volcano eruption that created Crater Lake in Oregon occurred about 7,700 years ago. The Code of Hammurabi, the ancient Babylonian legal text, dates to about 1750 BCE, or about 3,770 years ago. We did not have any written records until about 5000 years ago. It’s been thirty years since Ötzi the Iceman, who could be a distant relative of anyone with European heritage, was discovered in Switzerland, but he died 5,000 years ago. I hope that these little facts put into perspective just how remarkable it is to have such a clear picture that started its journey to us 8,500 years ago. It is also remarkable just how much progress we have made while this picture was being delivered.
The story behind the remarkable engineering and project management that made these pictures possible does two things for me. First, I am awed by the genius, the coordination of efforts among international partners, and the persistence in problem-solving that was necessary over more than two decades that overcame many problems to put a telescope with a sun shield the size of a tennis court one million miles into space. Second, I wonder why the same genius can’t be applied to come up with solutions to our current international challenges like global warming, inadequate food for tens of millions, and the persistence of devastating wars on our planet.
With the James Webb Space Telescope, we can “look back” 13.7 billion light years to see what distant galaxies looked like only 100 million years after the “Big Bang” which occurred 13.8 billion years ago. What is even a greater mind-blowing fact is that the universe is expanding rapidly and that an object whose light began the journey towards us from 13.7 billion light years away, is now 46 billion light years away from us. There is no way that I can comprehend the big bang, distances of 13.7 light years, or understand what, if anything, existed before 13.8 billion years ago.
Given my tendency to turn many mind-blowing realities into theological considerations, the pictures from the JWST have reopened for me some unanswerable questions that I had packed away in a dark corner of my mind. The “big bang” has always suggested to my limited understanding of the creation of a big “something” out of a hard-to-imagine “nothing.” How did that happen? Is the answer a creator? What would be the difference between a creator or a creative force? I am impressed by the courage of the astrophysicists that push the boundaries of what we know. I can easily accept that I am not intellectually equipped for anything but awe.
I do enjoy living in an environment that is within my comprehension if I accept the work of scientists who focus on understanding the history of our planet. It is remarkable enough for me to contemplate that what I see when I look out my window was created by a receding glacier 12,000 years ago about the time our ancestors in the fertile crescent were beginning to farm. The Carina Nebula is beyond my understanding, but I can understand that there was once a glacier that rose more than a mile above where I sit typing this letter to you. I can accept that I am a minuscule entity in a world that is bigger than I need, but is still not even a pinpoint in a universe that has a breadth of 93 billion light-years which I am told is 5,4674,700,000,000,000,000,000 miles across miles. I calculate that in my life I have walked or run about 70 to 75,000 miles. Averaging four to five miles a day for over fifty years adds up, but 93 billion light years is a very long hike.
I have decided to be content, happy, and grateful that some very smart people were able to work at a high level of technical expertise and cooperation to produce pictures that reveal that I will just have to accept what “is” even though I will never fully understanding what it all means. I am future-oriented and aligned with the cautiously hopeful stance of Kim Stanley Robinson. I believe that there are good reasons to be hopeful that one day those same skills that created the James Webb Space Telescope can be utilized to solve some of the problems that leave us feeling flummoxed and vulnerable now.
Be Well,
Gene
