Impudent Thoughts about (The Ministry for the) Future
Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future is a great book, but I didn’t like it.
SPOILER ALERT: Thar be spoilers ‘ere.
Robinson’s latest novel is a sprawling, messy, and fascinating book. Robinson doesn’t seem to like to write small stories, and this is no exception: over 100 meticulously detailed but relatively short chapters following several plots in parallel, with a whole bunch of sidebar chapters filling in background as needed.
The Ministry for the Future is an easy read; the only words I had to look up were geological terms. It’s engaging and the main characters are written with great respect. Robinson is particularly attentive to PTSD and the life-long suffering that it can produce.
The novel describes humanity’s fight to overcome climate change by confronting its own stupidity and shortsightedness. The story starts in the very near future, with a heat wave in India that kills two million people. It ends decades later with a global block-chained economy, whole new industries for transportation, vast human migrations to ensure sufficient surface area of the Earth is “re-wilded”, and a market based on sequestering rather than using carbon. The effort is spearheaded by a new UN agency nicknamed the Ministry for the Future. While Robinson is very specific, towards the end of the novel, of all the problems yet to be solved, there is an unquestionably upbeat conclusion: if humans can reverse climate change, there is reason for hope.
It’s a book I urge everyone to read, if for no other reason than to understand the severity of the climate crisis we face, and that we do have the technical and economic means to address it.
Unfortunately, I just don’t see humanity getting its shit together as quickly and simply as Robinson wrote it. I believe we lack the one thing that Robinson assumed in his fictional version of humanity: the social cohesiveness to work together toward a common goal that defies universal and instinctive in-group favouritism.
In Robinson’s version of the future, that single massively disastrous heat wave in India is the trigger that starts the ball rolling. Very quickly, the Indian people begin to take positive actions to address climate change. After what appears to be a kind of Velvet Revolution, India becomes a global leader on that front. They are the thin edge of the wedge, leveraged by the leadership of the Ministry, to change the rest of the world.
I’m not trying to disparage Indians or their culture. I just don’t think humans are capable of that kind of about-face, certainly not in the time-frame Robinson presents.
And time is critical. The Earth’s climate is a complex system; it’s also huge by human standards. It can take decades or centuries for it to adjust to global changes. The effects that we measure to assess climate change are *lagging indicators*: we measure them after — long after — the system has changed. In other words, by the time we notice a problem, it’s waytoo late. Of course, now we have the tools to model the climate much better. But it’s already too late. For too long, we’ve done too much harm to the biosphere.
Robinson’s global revolution takes place over just a few decades. And this is reasonable, based on current science: if we can change ourselves and our societies fast enough, then we can avoid the climatic shitstorm that is coming. So insofar as scientific accuracy goes, Robinson is spot on. Indeed, one might easily treat the novel as more of a manual: How to save the biosphere from climate disaster in 10 easy steps.
What he ignores, though, are all the forces that are working hard to prevent change. These are, for the most part, the 1%ers who are more interested in their net worth than in the quality of their great-grandchildren’s lives, the politicians who can’t see past the next election, and the trolls and amoral sociopaths who gain wealth and power by undermining rationality generally. These people are written about by Robinson only in passing; they don’t actually appear as characters, and whatever actions they take are the actions of cowards: retreat, abdication, and abandonment.
That’s not what I see when I look at the world today. Profit-driven media pump viewers full of misinformation and primethem to make poor decisions; advertisers use cheap psychology to urge consumers to keep consuming more and more; multi-billionaires refuse to pay their employees living wages, denying them the time and money to become better informed and contribute to real environmental initiatives; various “agents” (Yes, Vlad, I’m looking at you) revel in their ability to destabilize the world and create division and hatred; …the list goes on and on.
These are not the actions of cowards. These are the actions of active malignant forces with the power and financial resources to affect every person on Earth. And, yes, there are groups within the world of the novel that literally kill rich people who have been identified as particularly malignant. But, again, they’re written about passively, after the fact, and without any examination of the people who are killed or the people doing the killing. They are so far away from the action of the novel that they seem almost alien, as much myth as reality.
Robinson’s revolution is really one of class: the nameless, faceless, few who would control the world, versus the many named, described, and justified who fight the good fight for everyone. It’s an interesting turnabout on the usual depiction; indeed, some chapters are written from the point of view of various totally anonymous narrators. “The People” end up in control of their personal information, financial transactions are made publicly verifiable via blockchain, and virtually every remediation and revitalization program described in the book starts as a grass-roots project. It’s “the people”, and not the “powerful”, who end up running the world, not by taking over the government, but simply by creating a system from which the powerful cannot hide.
But those aren’t “the people” that I see around me. Every single day, I have to deal with short-sighted, woefully uninformed, trustless, and pathetically self-absorbed people. The apathy, lack of compassion, of presence, and of simple consideration for others makes me ashamed to be a human being.
Sure, these are just the people I’ve had to interact with, the most minuscule fraction of the human population. But just as right- and left-wing extremists seem more populous that they are because they scream so loudly and capture so much media attention, I think the apathetic, self-absorbed ignoramuses are more populous than they seem because they’ve simply checked out of society; their silence hides their multitudes.
I’d much rather be wrong about this, but barring evidence to the contrary — which I have searched for, for years, unsuccessfully — I cannot accept that people can change as quickly as Robinson things they will.
And that means we’re fucked.
I do remain hopeful that humanity will not make itself extinct, but I think getting from here to there will be far more painful for far more people than Robinson suggests in The Ministry for the Future.
