Climate change, ideology and a frustratingly terrible book: The Ministry For The Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson

 Climate change is the issue of our time.  I have no interest in debating this point.  Offer me a "hard science fiction" novel centering on the politics of addressing it, and you don't have to twist my arm.  And of course, there will be a blog post.  Which... nobody will read.  What else am I going to do with my Saturday morning?  Are cartoons still a thing?

Anyway, I'm going to preface this post by noting that when I start a book, I finish the book.  It's a thing I do.  A quirk.  No matter how much I detest the book, I finish the book.  I get frustrated, annoyed, irritated, I rant, I harangue anyone within lecturin'-range, which is a limited number of people in the COVID era, but I finish the book.  Amid these diatribes, I am interrupted with the observation, "you know, you don't have to finish the book."  And, I don't, but I do.  You know?  Like, I'm not a student.  I'm the professor.  I only read what I want to read, and yes, I know that students, shall we say, don't always do the readings they are assigned, but damn it, I finish the book.  I can't help myself.  But sometimes, a book comes along that annoys me so intensely that I actually stop reading it.  It is a rare thing.  When I find a book that irritates the living fuck out of me, so much that I stop reading it, then in a way, I have found something special.  Like, you have to rubberneck when you see a car crash, but there are horrors from which you turn away or go mad.  An eldritch horror of a bad book.  It's like that.

I indicated recently that I started Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry For The Future, and that a post was forthcoming.  Here's the post.  I did not finish the book.  This was one of the very rare books that was so atrociously bad that I could not finish it.  I'm going to explain why, in political science terms, and that's kind of the point.  The few books that are so bad I don't finish them are the ones that try to lecture me about politics, and get things so horribly, horribly wrong, with such arrogance that... fuck you.  No.  Stop writing.  Just stop it.  Put down the pen/computer/whatever, and let me give you a syllabus.  Oh my flying fucking spaghetti monster, this book was bad.

So let's get into this.  With many political science lessons.  I give you the caveat that I got about half-way through the book before metaphorically flinging the book across the room, but I am confident that my observations hold anyway.  You'll see why, assuming you follow me down this rabbit hole of rage-writin'.

I so much wanted The Ministry For The Future to be good.  Climate change matters, and as we see the light at the end of the tunnel on COVID, nothing else comes close.  Lives and civilization at stake.  I do not care about your petty, little issues.  I care about big things.  Climate change is a big thing.

And Kim Stanley Robinson tried to write a "hard science fiction" novel about the political and economic efforts in the near future to address it.  The premise is as follows.  A devastating heat wave hits India.  By "devastating," I mean "beyond anything we have ever seen."  Cut off power in a wet bulb heat wave in a place like India, and a lot of people can die.  The book starts from the perspective of an aid worker, Frank, as the heat wave takes place.  Frank somehow survives.  Barely, while 20 million die because of the combination of heat, humidity, and the loss of power and water in an unprecedented heat wave.  This is the kind of thing that may, eventually, happen.  How many people will die?  That will depend.  Robinson starts the novel with a kind of worst-case scenario to scare the fuck out of you.

And to motivate the creation of an agency under the Paris Accords.  The titular Ministry For The Future.  The Ministry is charged with coordinating climate action across countries, with the interesting twist being that it has a legal/political charge to act on behalf of future generations.  The idea is that future generations should have legal standing, and that someone should represent them, and act on their behalf.  There is actually a lot to unpack here, and one of the most frustrating parts of the book is Robinson's failure to do so, because he (yes, "Kim" is he) just has such a blinkered view of politics and ideology.  And that's what this post is about.

So why did I stop reading?  If I have this weird compulsion to finish nearly every book I start, what does an author have to do to get me to stop reading?  Basically, be arrogantly blinkered about politics.  The book is divided between three components.  There is a) the "story," which follows a set of characters (primarily the head of the Ministry, and the aid worker who survived the heat wave in India), b) vignettes of people suffering, sometimes from climate disasters, and sometimes from unrelated political bailiwicks about which Robinson wanted to rant (more on that to come), and c) political and economic lectures, often completely unrelated to climate change (more on that to come).  The best of the writing comes from the vignettes, even when they are written from political perspectives with which I disagree.  You need to learn to appreciate disagreement.

There is a lot of "hard science fiction" within the storyline-- descriptions of technological developments to address climate issues.  Nice, but not quite as compelling as the best in the genre.

Where that the entirety of the book, I'd have finished.  The problems came from the lectures and the political storylines.  Here's the storyline that was so badly done that I just stopped.  No more.  Done now.

The Ministry starts pushing a plan to have member states establish a cryptocurrency (because of course Robinson would buy into the cryptocurrency bullshit) to pay out to companies that sequester carbon.  Why not just tax emissions and pay regular currency for sequestration?  Because cryptocurrency!  D'uh!  Actually, the economist in the Ministry basically tells the head of the Ministry this, and then there's a bunch of hand-waving about the magic of cryptocurrency, which Robinson clearly does not understand.  He basically just says that a bunch of people worked out the math and said that it needs to be done with cryptocurrency, 'cuz.  I'm not joking.  Robinson actually fails to listen to the wisdom of his own character.  The character gets it right.

And that's the pattern here.  Robinson is more blinkered than the characters he writes.

So here's how this idiocy plays out.  Mary, the head of the Ministry, starts going around to the various heads of the central banks to ask them to create this idiotic cryptocurrency, because yay, blockchain.  It's, like, magic, or something.  She starts with, fuck, I'll just call her "Janet Yellen," because her name is clearly a play on Yellen.  Chair of the Fed.

"Yellen" tells Mary, no, I can't, that's not what we do.  Robinson gets it almost right!  Here's what "Yellen" says.  She says that the only thing the Fed does is stabilize currency, meaning, manage inflation.  OK, now that's wrong, and it is importantly wrong.  The Fed actually has what's called a "dual mandate."  Its job is to manage both inflation and unemployment.  Why?  The two are related inversely according to the Philips Curve.  The Fed's job, according to the dual mandate, is to target the "NAIRU," or, the non-accelerating inflationary rate of unemployment.  Basically, get unemployment as low as possible until inflation accelerates.  And in fact, for long stretches of time recently, that has meant pissing off the inflation alarmists by keeping interest rates lower than they want, ostensibly risking inflation in order to manage the labor market.  Right now, the Fed is targeting a long-term average inflation rate of 2%, rather than a short-term rate, which was a recent change, which also pissed off the inflation alarmists because it means running inflation rates above 2% for a long time!  Why?  Because we were so far below the 2% target for so long.

Robinson portrayed the Fed as caring only about inflation.  Why?  He wanted to make them look cold-hearted.  It's an ideology thing.  Generally speaking, these days, the left cares more about unemployment, and the right cares more about inflation, in broad strokes, and by portraying the Fed as unconcerned with anything but inflation, Robinson not only does severe damage to empirical reality, Robinson gets to portray "bankers" as evil-- unconcerned with, like, the workers, or something, while conflating central bankers with private bankers, which is also stupid and wrong.  The Fed is not a private, commercial bank, and neither Yellen, nor "Yellen" was acting as a private, commercial banker.  The willful failure to understand the difference between a private, commercial "banker," and a central "banker" was just... seriously, Kim?!

But let's let that stuff slide.  For now.  What "Yellen" tells Mary, when Mary asks "Yellen" to create this cryptocurrency, is no, that's not in my mandate.  And ignoring the whole, "dual mandate," issue for the moment, "Yellen" is right!  "Yellen" literally cannot just say, sure, fuck it, let's distribute your carbon emissions cryptocurrency, 'cuz I like the idea.  You want to do that?  Go to Congress, and have them change my mandate.  That's exactly what "Yellen" tells Mary to do.

So, does Mary do that?  Fuck no.  Instead, Mary rants about how evil bankers are, as they secretly run the world with no conscience.  And I just love those plots about how "bankers" with... ethnic names like, "Yablonsky" secretly run the world, you fucking, shitbag, asshole, Robinson.  (Oh, and real-world Janet?  Yup.  Exactly the... family background you're thinking.)

So let's think about this.  "Yellen" correctly tells Mary, no, I can't do that, that would violate my congressional mandate.  Mary, rather than going to Congress to seek legislation for a new/revised mandate, rants about how an evil banker like "Yellen" secretly controls the world, but won't do the right thing 'cuz she's evil.  "Yellen" is smarter, more politically astute, and more aware of basic civics, than Kim Fucking Stanley Robinson.  How does Robinson manage this?  Again?  How does he write characters who are smarter than he is?  He doesn't even have "Yellen" make a straw man argument against his bullshit cryptocurrency plan for him or Mary to knock down.  "Yellen" makes the correct argument.  She can't do it.  Go to fucking Congress, because it would violate her mandate.  And all Mary can do is rant about evil bankers.  Failing, even, to understand the difference between a central banker and a private, commercial banker, because Mary, as the voice of the author, is a fool.

Anyway, rather than go to Congress, what does Mary do?  She goes to the next central banker from the next country, and so on down the line!  And they all tell her the same thing, and they're all correct!

At this point, I'm getting to the "why am I still reading" level of annoyance.  I am also being prompted with, "you know, you don't have to keep reading," as I attempt to provide futile justifications and self-justifications for my weird compulsions... but I keep reading.  And I keep reading.  Eventually, we come to the scene at which I grow so annoyed with Robinson that I can take no more of his political/economic foolishness.  Mary calls a meeting of all the heads of the major central banks, several years later.  She's still on about this cryptocurrency bullshit, because cryptocurrency is magic that will solve everything, or some fucking nonsense.  Basic fiscal policy?  N'ah.  We need blockchain!

Y'all know anyone selling blockchain this hard is full of shit, right?

Anyway, as this is happening, emissions are still being emitted, the catastrophes are increasing, and so forth.  But it doesn't count if you don't do it with cryptocurrency!  Anyway, cue meeting.  Mary gives the bankers a speech.  There's more shit happening, and it has to do with blockchain, and idiots intentionally causing a run on the banks, but that's another matter.  Not gettin' into it.  There's too much stupidity in this book, driven by Robinson's religious devotion to blockchain and all associated silliness.  So Mary tells the central bankers... go for my cryptocurrency plan... or else!

What's the "or else?"  Or else, I'll talk to my allies in your legislatures... and they'll write legislation to change your mandates!

GAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Holy flying fucking spaghetti monster.  And this is the point at which I stopped reading.  If you have read the book, or choose to read it at some point, you can find the chapter and page at which I said, no.  No more.  Done now.  Fuck you, Kim, you suck.  You suck as a novelist, you suck as a political writer, you suck as a civics teacher... you just suck.

So let's step back for a moment and do the suspension of disbelief thing.  Let's say, for a moment, that we accept the premise that blockchain is the magical solution to getting the fossil fuel industry to pull back and shift to sequestration.  I read books with faster-than-light travel, magic, and all sorts of other shit, so let's just suspend disbelief for a moment.  Yeah, as a political scientist with pseudopods in economics, this one hurts me, personally, a bit more, but whatever.  Fuck it.  If physicists can watch Star Trek, I can do this.

Fuck.

Anyway, moving on, let's say we accept the premise that... [gulp]... block... chain... is the policy solution to climate change.

Hang on, I'm gonna go wash my hands.  It's a thing we do a lot anyway these days, right?

OK, I'm back.  Let's say Mary is right on policy.  So the central bankers all tell her to go fuck herself.  Or... not.  They tell her that the cryptocurrency thing isn't in their mandate.  OK, so the actual, serious, proper response is to go to the fucking legislatures and have them change the mandates.  That's just basic civics.  Not even Political Science 101.  High School Civics, if any of the damned teachers knew how to do their jobs.  One of the sci-fi novels I like assigning is Fredric Brown's The Lights In The Sky Are Stars, and if you can get past the 1950's retrograde attitudes on race and sex (it was, actually, published in 1953), the characters actually do respond to the structure of the political system by walking through the civics.

Mary tells the central bankers that she... could have?!  She could have gone to the legislatures and changed their mandates?  She has let years go by, in book time, with the climate getting worse as emissions continue, with the blockchain thing supposedly being a critical part of the solution, and she isn't doing the thing which actually is the correct procedure?  She treats it as a threat?  No, Mary, that's not a threat.  It's the thing you were actually supposed to fucking do.  Years earlier, moron.  And the central bankers give in?  Like this is real?  No, the central bankers should be saying, yeah.  Go, do that.  Then I'll follow the fucking law, like the technocrat that I am, because central bankers are technocrats, not private, commercial bankers with curiously ethnic names, secretly controlling the world in their evil, evil schemes (go read about the real Janet if you don't get exactly what I mean, because yeah, Robinson is doing that, or he would have made Powell the Chair in the book).

This is such a disaster of writing, in every way.  Robinson gets the Fed wrong, in terms of its mandate.  They have a dual mandate, not a single mandate, and they actually target above 2% inflation for a variety of reasons.  "Yellen's" response to Mary was the correct response, as were the responses of the other central bankers, and no, central bankers are not private bankers.  Moreover, they don't rule the world.  The whole point is that they are constrained by their mandates, as they said, and I fucking hate this shit about bankers controlling the world.  There's ugly history to this kind of writing.  And even if we grant all of these other mistakes Robinson makes, it is bad plotting if Mary could have gone to the legislatures and changed their mandates because if she is concerned with getting this plan enacted, then she should have done so as expediently as possible, when plainly, she didn't.  Every single aspect of this storyline is shit, even if we ignore the other point that cryptocurrency is, as I have explained on many occasions, bullshit.  And unnecessary, as Mary's own economist correctly explained, within the fucking novel.

This storyline is the writing equivalent of the 20-million-dead heatwave at the start of Robinson's novel.  That's how bad it is, in writing terms.  What does it take to get me to stop reading a novel?  This.  This.

And I'm not done ranting yet.  This book was not good.

Let's talk about ideology.  Ideology within the novel, and ideology guiding the novel.  All of which is a disaster.  First, let's have a refresher on ideology.  Robinson actually gives several lectures within the novel on ideology, but Robinson's version of "ideology" is actually closer to what we, in political psychology, call "a schema."  A way of organizing information.  A theoretical construct.  That's not actually what an ideology is, as we generally mean it in political science.  In political science, the term is best defined by Phil Converse in "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics," his 1964 article.  Constraint.  To have an "ideology" is to be constrained to hold a set of policy positions consistent with that ideology.  To be "liberal" is to be constrained to hold liberal positions across a battery of issues, and to be "conservative" is to be constrained to hold conservative positions on a battery of issues.  While Robinson claims that people must have an "ideology," as he defines it, Converse demonstrated empirically that most people do not have an ideology as we conventionally define it in political psychology.  Regardless, it is through that lens-- that schema, if you will-- of political psychology through which I'd like to discuss Robinson next.  And in this sense, it doesn't matter that I didn't finish this terrible, terrible book.  You'll see why.

Robinson cares very much about climate change.  Um... so do I.  If you are among the very, very few readers of this obscure, pretentious, little blog, you probably already understood that I see climate change as, bar none, the most important issue of our time.  To believe this, and to believe that various policy actions must be taken to address it is to believe what else?  That's the question of ideology.

To believe that climate change is the vital issue of the day, that it must be addressed, and that it must be addressed with regulation, subsidies for research, transitionary technology etc.... is to believe what else?

Let us return to Converse.  Converse described three types of constraints:  logical, psychological, and social.  Logical constraints are first principles.  Social constraints are basically cues.  Psychological constraints are a bit harder to explain.  I often describe them as intuitively satisfying world views, provided via social cues, but I don't feel like going on a whole, big thing about it today because that isn't my primary point.  My primary point is the fact that most constraints are not actually logical.  Try to come up with a single first-principle to explain modern-day liberalism or conservatism.  You'll fail, and despite the fact that self-identified conservatives have been trained like parrots to say, "small government," that's libertarianism, and if you think for about two microseconds, you can find all of the policy issues on which self-identified conservatives take the big government position because conservatism is not libertarianism.  The lesson?  We cannot explain modern-day ideology exclusively with logical constraint.

Empirically, among those who rank climate change first among non-equals in issue importance, and generally hold the opinions I just gave you, what else do they tend to believe?  Meaning, what pattern of constraint would we tend to observe?

Basically, my positions on climate issues are left, and generally speaking, in Bayesian terms, were you to observe a randomly selected person who holds the positions I just described on climate issues, you would guess that such a person holds other left-leaning positions on any other randomly-selected political issue.  Would you make errors?  Sure.  Lots, in my case, but that would be your Bayesian updating process, based on the social construction of ideology and the patterns of constraint that we tend to observe, which are generally not logical, even when we do observe them among the general populace.

And that brings me back to The Ministry For The Future.  What is this book?  Aside from a book about the future of the climate and an international governmental agency charged with addressing it?  It is a communist manifesto.  I am not throwing the word around lightly today.  I will occasionally use the word jokingly, although the leftward dash of the American left really is alarming.  Today, though, I mean "communist" literally.  This book is commie.  As in, there are long interludes that have no plot.  They are merely lectures on the evils of capitalism, why we should flatten the distribution of resources.  The full Karl.

Because climate, that's why?

Not exactly.  Just 'cuz we should.

I'll spare you a full rant on the evils of communism, both because I'm sick of giving it, and you shouldn't need it.  Just remember that communism has killed far more people than Hitler, and it ain't close.  Hitler is actually third on the list of historical mass murders, behind Stalin and Mao.

Rather, let's note the Converse-ian constraint, and the social/psychological nature of that constraint rather than the logical nature of it.  The communist diatribes within The Ministry For The Future are basically "flatten the distribution of resources 'cuz," which is not logically connected to climate change.  One can believe in the value of capitalism and meritocracy while still acknowledging science and reality, and recognizing the necessity of doing something about impending fucking disaster.

Hi, there!

That doesn't mean we won't observe an empirical association between belief in climate regulation and belief in socialism.  Empirically, we do see that association, but not because there is a logical connection between those beliefs, exactly.

Here's the caveat.  Climate denialism comes about from adherence to capitalism and opposition to regulation so strong that the following syllogism holds:  regulation is bad.  If climate change were real, regulation would be good.  Therefore, climate change must be a hoax.  Batshit crazy?  Well, it follows logically from the premise, if one adheres to the premise with religious fervor.

I, on the other hand, am a scientist.  In other words, a capitalist who acknowledges reality deals with climate change.  It's the blinkered capitalists who follow the syllogism above, and create the problems, along with part of the empirical correlations.  However, since that correlation is driven by fallacious reasoning, it would be specious to describe this as "logical" constraint.  And there is no logical connection between climate action and communism for communism's sake.

China doesn't exactly have a history of conservation, and while the Soviet Union is no more, they were never environmentalists.  Beijing is an unbreathable city, and has been for generations.  Why?  Think this through.

Yes, the US is the big consumer.  Why?  Because economically speaking, capitalism works.  Add in geography, and you get a better picture.  So, we built up, and we did it before the rest of the world.  Communism is an economic failure, but if it weren't a failure, the nature of the governmental system would have turned China into the biggest environmental threat, given its governmental structure.  Or... do you not want to count Mao's dead?  Or try to breathe the air in Beijing?  Yeah, fuck communism, and if you think it is a cure for the environment, take a look around.  They were wearing masks in China before COVID hit.  Why?  Because they can't breathe the fucking air.

All of this makes the book a little annoying for a capitalist to read, but of course, if you only read things with which you agree, you wind up driving your head farther and farther up your own lower digestive tract.  As your Ph(ony) Doctor, I advise against that.  It's National Colon Cancer Awareness Month, and like I said in a recent post, I'm sick of commemoration days/weeks/months, but this is not how you do a screening.  So read things with which you disagree, or you risk poor taste in haberdashery.

But this is only part of my point today.  Let's return to the hook for the novel.  What is the legal/policy justification under which the Ministry operates in Robinson's novel?  It is the notion that future generations must have legal standing, legal and political representation.  They are the ones most affected by climate change, so the Ministry stands for them.

OK, interesting hook, right?

Now, put your thinkin' cap on, rather than the other kind of haberdashery, and think about modern politics.  Like, big issues in modern politics.  Ringin' any bells there?  How about abortion?

The central argument of the pro-life side is that a fetus is a person, with the same "right to life" as an already born person.  If you write a novel in which the legal/political device is the argument that the yet-to-be-born have rights to be protected, don't you need to consider this?

In fact, Robinson goes on an economic digression about discount factors.  To what degree do we discount the utility of future generations?  The premise of the Ministry, and the climate change argument at the heart of what they do is that we should not, although they grapple with some mathematical paradoxes posed by the problem.  My point about ideology, though, is that unlike communism, this does put us into the realm of logical constraint.

If the premise of your protagonist's political argument is the rights of the yet-to-be-born, applying that principle to abortion gets you to banning all abortion, including in cases of rape.  Life of the mother, you can make an exception, but no rape exception.  This, not misogyny, is why the pro-life side takes the position that it does.  Yes, really.  It isn't misogyny, so fuck off with that shit.

So here's Kim Stanley Robinson, commie leftist, using the structure of their argument, but not following through.  If he did, he'd have to grapple with abortion.  At no point in the novel does he.  (I was reading on an e-reader, so even though I stopped half-way through, I could do a search for the word, "abortion."  Came up nada.)

Why not?  Uncomfortable.  Nor does he address the philosophy of antinatalism!  Seriously, think this through.  A bunch of commie rants, with no logical connection to climate change, but no discussion of the actual political and philosophical issues directly connected to the political hook?  Why not?  Because they would be uncomfortable.

And that's perhaps the biggest failure of the book.  Laziness.  I don't know if Robinson thought of these issues and chose not to include them, or didn't see what should have been blindingly obvious because his blinders protected him subconsciously, but either way, how do you write this as your legal/philosophical hook, and not so much as mention abortion?

So I'll pose the following question.  If you care about the climate, there is a high likelihood, given the construction of ideology, that you oppose restrictions on abortion.  Is there a logical constraint that constructs ideology in that manner?  Nope.  Just the way it happens to be, now.  Lefty-ism.  Perhaps Robinson didn't want to acknowledge that his central premise is the fodder for one of the core conservative arguments on a core policy issue.  Now, if it would get you real action on climate change, would you cut that deal?  Would you take the principle that future generations have legal standing, knowing what it implies about abortion?  It would give you a coalition with the "pro-life" side.  Get you action on climate change, in exchange for restrictions on abortion, in the hypothetical that I pose to you.  I'm assuming, here, that you are a standard-issue lefty.  Would you take the deal?

What I suspect is that Robinson didn't want to confront the tradeoff.  He couldn't wrap his brain around the nature of the relationship between the principle he posed, and what it would mean for abortion, so he stuck his fingers in his ears, and said LALALALALALALALALALALALALALA.  Me?  I like asking hard questions.  So think about it.  Always think about the hard questions.  Don't be like Kim Stanley Robinson.

Anyway, my conclusion?  This book sucked.

And now, music.  Sonny Landreth, "Bad Weather," from Outward Bound.  One of the greatest slide guitarists ever.  Cajun blues.