Aengus Anderson: You’re lis­ten­ing to the con­ver­sa­tion. I’m Aengus Anderson.

Micah Saul: I’m Micah Saul.

Neil Prendergast: And I’m Neil Prendergast. And if you’re just tun­ing into the series you may want to check out an ear­li­er episode where we lay out the whole premise of The Conversation.

Saul: Yeah, these are our final episodes. They were all record­ed in 2013, and we’ve just been hor­rif­i­cal­ly lazy about get­ting them pack­aged up for you. But, they are now ready and here they are. 

Anderson: So, if you’re a fan of sci­ence fic­tion, an intro­duc­tion to Kim Stanley Robinson is prob­a­bly unnec­es­sary. But if you’re not, we’ll keep things short, and let’s just say that he’s one of the biggest names in cur­rent sci­ence fic­tion. We were real­ly excit­ed to get a chance to talk to him. I mean, he sells lots and lots of books. And he wins lots and lots of awards. Because in addi­tion to writ­ing books that are nar­ra­tive­ly engag­ing, he does a tremen­dous­ly good job of explor­ing ideas about alter­nate polit­i­cal, envi­ron­men­tal, and eco­nom­ic sce­nar­ios in the rel­a­tive­ly near future. 

Saul: Yeah. If you haven’t read Robinson before, I would sug­gest check­ing out the Mars Trilogy. The first book is called Red Mars. It’s a near-future sce­nario, and it’s the first…really…plausible inves­ti­ga­tion of what it might be like if we were to attempt to col­o­nize Mars.

Additionally, the Three Californias Trilogy is fan­tas­tic. It’s three dif­fer­ent near-future ver­sions of the same small town in Orange County. Three dif­fer­ent poten­tial worlds after three dif­fer­ent poten­tial crises. They’re both fan­tas­tic trilo­gies, high­ly rec­om­mend check­ing them out.

Prendergast: And I think one thing that’s impor­tant to men­tion before lis­ten­ing to the inter­view is that his work touch­es on near­ly every ele­ment that we’ve incor­po­rat­ed into the project. Because of that, we ref­er­ence through­out a great vari­ety of pre­vi­ous inter­views as well. And the inter­view was very long, near­ly three hours. But of course, as always we’ve edit­ed down to a size that well, we’d want to lis­ten to.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, okay the prob­lem is a…can be described as eco­log­i­cal. That we are now sev­en bil­lion peo­ple on the plan­et, and that pure num­ber is already a ques­tion. It looks like we’re ask­ing for more than the plan­et can give on a steady basis so we’re draw­ing down as with say, the aquifers of fos­sil water, using fos­sil fuels. And then also we’re cre­at­ing wastes of var­i­ous kind faster than the plan­et can recy­cle them. So there’s two prob­lems of input and out­put, both over­tax­ing the sys­tem in eco­log­i­cal terms. 

Some of these prob­lems are becom­ing acute. And peo­ple are focus­ing in on the car­bon prob­lem, and I think that may be a good way to look at it. But it’s always I think impor­tant to remem­ber that that’s just a kind of metonymy stand­ing for all the rest of the prob­lems that we’re cre­at­ing. Because A, it seems the biggest, and B it also looks like it could be amenable to cor­rec­tion, as in a ther­mo­stat in a room. Like we could turn down the tem­per­a­ture again, hav­ing turned it up. So there’s this per­haps false idea that not only is this a real­ly big and imme­di­ate prob­lem, but we also could do some­thing about it.

I still think that Paul Ehrlich’s for­mu­la­tion of impact on the envi­ron­ment is a mul­ti­plica­tive thing, with pop­u­la­tion times our desires as indi­vid­u­als, our appetites (he called that A), mul­ti­plied by tech­nol­o­gy. So that there are dirt­i­er or clean­er tech­nolo­gies. And one could pos­tu­late it might be pos­si­ble to cre­ate a tech­nol­o­gy so clean that a rather high pop­u­la­tion with a mod­er­ate set of desires could live in a sus­tain­able bal­ance with the biosphere.

So we’ve got the imme­di­ate prob­lem, and then we’ve got the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a solu­tion. And they sit there togeth­er. And dif­fer­ent people—I’m sure you’re find­ing this in who you talk to—have dif­fer­ent assess­ments of how big and imme­di­ate the dan­gers are, and how pow­er­ful we might become in solv­ing them. And I vary in both these assess­ments as I do my read­ing, as I lis­ten to oth­er peo­ple. I’m in a some­what sim­i­lar posi­tion to your­self in that I do a lot of lis­ten­ing and pro­cess­ing, and then write my books based on what I hear from oth­ers and try to judge as clean­ly as I can. And since my judg­ment changes from time to time, I write dif­fer­ent nov­els based on how I feel at the moment.

And there are some things that are so scary that you think well, the worst poll is almost inevitable. Then, look­ing at oth­er sources, lis­ten­ing to oth­er peo­ple, I began to think that the rapid shift to clean ener­gy pro­duc­tion and trans­port fuel­ing is not at all impos­si­ble, it is just a eco­nom­ic problem—a prob­lem with cap­i­tal­ism and its own badly-formatted algo­rithms that are imposed upon us.

And so I vac­il­late there, between think­ing that we’re doomed because we have giv­en our­selves over to a stu­pid sys­tem that’s now backed up by guns. And then a much more utopi­an view that we’ve always lived in stu­pid sys­tems and that we’re always mak­ing them bet­ter. And that in this case, the pow­er that the sci­ence, tech­nol­o­gy, engi­neer­ing, math­e­mat­i­cal com­plex is giv­ing us— And then you have to add the social tech­nolo­gies, or the social sciences—the human­i­ties and the arts, the increas­ing ana­lyt­i­cal pow­er that we have and increas­ing philo­soph­i­cal power…might com­bine togeth­er to sim­ply force a rapid change and get things going in a bet­ter direc­tion, a clean­er tech­nol­o­gy, insti­tut­ed faster than ordi­nary neo­clas­si­cal eco­nom­ics would allow it to happen.

Anderson: So I kind of want to explore both of those scenarios,—

Robinson: Yes.

Anderson: —kind our worst-case and our…very con­ser­v­a­tive­ly best-case sce­nario. In the worst-case one, where the train is already off the rails eco­log­i­cal­ly?, is that sort of what we’re look­ing at? Like, so there’d be no way to turn the ther­mo­stat back down regard­less of what changes you made, regard­less of how clean your tech­nol­o­gy got? 

Robinson: I don’t think we’re there yet. I don’t think that’s right. I think we have legit­i­mate rea­sons to hope that we can avoid that kind of eco­log­i­cal crash. Life is robust. We’re going to have extinc­tions, there’s no doubt about it. But with some major atten­tion giv­en to avoid­ing extinc­tions, espe­cial­ly of the mam­mals, and then also the amphib­ians, we could go through a cou­ple cen­turies of kind of res­cue work, sav­ing every­thing we can, and delib­er­ate­ly and on pur­pose like zookeep­ers, acknowl­edg­ing that we’re now man­agers of a sys­tem big­ger than we tru­ly under­stand and yet we still have to man­age. And we could go for­ward on that basis.

So I guess what I’m say­ing is the things that would mean that we were already irrev­o­ca­bly cast into a dif­fer­ent plan­et would be the ocean acid­i­fi­ca­tion being sharply high­er than it was. Or the parts per mil­lion CO₂ in the atmos­phere being already up about 500, now. If those two things were worse than they are, I think it’ll be tru­ly fright­en­ing. It’d be inter­est­ing at that point to see if peo­ple will then try to react. It’ll be hard­er. Have to do things even more quick­ly. But I don’t think peo­ple will just throw up their hands and say, ​“Oh we’re doomed.” I think there will be a civilization-wide effort to recover.

And when I say recov­ery, what do I mean by that? What I’m think­ing is that you can draw CO₂ down from the atmos­phere, turn it into frozen dry ice, and sequester it on the sea floor or under­ground. And this is a huge indus­tri­al project but it’s no huger than the civ­i­liza­tion we’ve already put in place. So if it became a neces­si­ty, in oth­er words, we could say that every wind­mill as it gen­er­ates elec­tric­i­ty would also con­tain a lit­tle vac­u­um clean­er that was vac­u­um­ing CO₂ out of the atmos­phere and drain­ing it into a stor­age sys­tem that then would have to be tak­en to anoth­er place and it would be part of a huge indus­tri­al civ­i­liza­tion that was suck­ing CO₂ out of the atmosphere.

This is a geo­engi­neer­ing pro­pos­al that is tech­no­log­i­cal­ly pos­si­ble, and there’s no par­tic­u­lar side-effect dam­age involved in it. It’s just that it’s mas­sive. So that becomes inter­est­ing, I think.

Anderson: In your esti­ma­tion, we have agency. Do you think that we can pre­emp­tive­ly act? Or do you think we have to react?

Robinson: I think we’re at that gal­va­niz­ing moment. Really this is a multi-decade project either way, but now we’re talk­ing about it in a way that we’ve nev­er talked about it before. And I’ve noticed a cou­ple of shifts along the way, because I’ve been talk­ing about it now for about fif­teen years, fol­low­ing the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty that was inter­est­ed in cli­mate. And my work on Mars, my work in Antarctica, they all were mak­ing me aware this ear­ly on. And I’ve seen a big shift in how much this has become a major top­ic of our civ­i­liza­tion’s con­ver­sa­tion in these last ten years.

And then I’ve also seen a major shift in peo­ple’s atti­tudes towards cap­i­tal­ism since 2008. Which was kind of an ​“emper­or has no clothes” moment, where sud­den­ly gov­ern­ment stepped in and had to ​“estab­lish val­ue,” as the econ­o­mists put it, so that this free mar­ket mentality—which was a kind of reli­gious sen­si­bil­i­ty, a fun­da­men­tal­ism, and what I’ve been call­ing mono­cau­so­tax­ophil­ia, which is a Karl Popper word, ​“love of sin­gle caus­es that explain every­thing.” And that we all have this love. But when we give into it, we become fun­da­men­tal­ists. And there was this one idea that sup­pos­ed­ly explained every­thing, which is the free mar­ket, which is like a ver­sion of God, an invis­i­ble hand, and things were going to be alright. 

Well that all shat­tered in 2008, and there’s hard­ly any­body that seri­ous­ly believes it or tries to defend it any­more. So now cap­i­tal­ism itself is up for ques­tion­ing in a way that was not true before 2008. And I know this because I have been ques­tion­ing it since the late 80s. And I’m not alone in that, but the push for a post-capitalist eco­nom­ics that is more eco­log­i­cal has been in exis­tence for a few decades now. 

But it’s nev­er been as strong as it is now because of these var­i­ous forces bear­ing down on us that’re say­ing A, cap­i­tal­ism is a kind of multi-generational Ponzi scheme that will even­tu­al­ly crash. And B, the crash we may be in the begin­ning with, because we’re not pay­ing the true costs of burn­ing car­bon. Part of the Ponzi scheme is that we’re con­sis­tent­ly sell­ing car­bon for less than it costs to pro­duce it in the first place, and that under­pric­ing is that we don’t pay the cost for the wastage. We’re not putting the CO₂ cap­ture devices on our pro­duc­tion plants, which peo­ple just imme­di­ate­ly freak and say, ​“Oh, that would make ener­gy twice as expen­sive.” Well, ener­gy should be twice as expensive.

So, you can use eco­nom­ic terms to describe what we’re doing, but we don’t yet have a sys­tem of laws that would enforce the true costs of things being charged.

Anderson: So I’m think­ing about that in kind of the pop­u­lar mind­set. It takes an open­ness to a cer­tain type of knowl­edge to acknowl­edge that there is that waste that we’re going to have to deal with lat­er. And because we’re part of a demo­c­ra­t­ic elec­torate, we have to have a con­ver­sa­tion with a lot of peo­ple who don’t believe in the sci­ence at all. So in that case, how do we begin to address the eco­nom­ic side of that?

Robinson: I don’t believe that these peo­ple don’t believe it. I think they are pre­tend­ing. I think they’re lying. I think they know, but they don’t want to admit that they know because that would mean more gov­ern­ment. That would mean that peo­ple they’ve been polit­i­cal­ly against were right and they were wrong, and nobody likes that. Nobody likes to admit they were wrong. So I think they ignore the data and pre­tend to be against sci­ence, but here’s where I think they’re pre­tend­ing. When they are sick they run to a doc­tor, and hope that that doc­tor will cure them. 

That doc­tor is a sci­en­tist. And that doc­tor could say to them, ​“Well, you’re asymp­to­matic now; you don’t feel a thing. But I’m gonna have to poi­son you with­in an inch of your life or else you’re going to be dead with­in five years.” And they believe it and take the poisons. 

So these are peo­ple who believe pro­found­ly in sci­ence. When their life’s on the line, when they’re scared for their life—for their kids’ lives—they believe in sci­en­tists and in sci­ence. They might be lying to them­selves, too, and not quite real­ize the inco­heren­cy of their thought. Because they don’t real­ize all the sci­ences are con­silient with each oth­er. And there are areas where they get very prob­lem­at­ic, like study­ing human beings, but they are still sci­ences that are con­silient that every­body in the mod­ern world believes in.

Anderson: Though I think of…if there’s one thing sci­ence seems to be reveal­ing more and more it’s that we’re not…rational—

Robinson: Right. 

Anderson: —…nec­es­sar­i­ly, right, so we might not see that.

Robinson: Sure. Well, we often hold two ideas—contradictory ideas—in our head at once. And we’re not ratio­nal. But, even in the emo­tion­al part of our­selves, when we’re scared, we run to a sci­en­tist. There were very few peo­ple who don’t go to the doc­tor, and a lot of peo­ple who go to the doc­tor right­ly think this is a scary thing to do, because we know that we’re more com­pli­cat­ed than sci­ence has ful­ly man­aged to under­stand but it’s a bet­ter bet than any­thing else. 

So, I think the anal­o­gy is impor­tant and this is what I’m doing in my pub­lic speak­ing. I’m often talk­ing about how med­i­cine is a sci­ence, and tells us often things that are invis­i­ble to us that we nev­er­the­less act on. So I think the fig­ure is this, that we can burn 500 more giga­tons of car­bon before we’ve real­ly cooked our­selves and cast our­selves over the edge into what James Hansen calls ​“game over.” Although he’s a very politi­cized char­ac­ter at this point, he still is hard to refute. And yet we’ve iden­ti­fied 2,500 giga­tons of car­bon already acces­si­ble to us—

Anderson: Well, actu­al­ly that jumps right to mind with the con­ver­sa­tion I had with a guy named John Fullerton who was the head of JP Morgan. The con­ver­sa­tion we had was…very dis­turb­ing because you know, he comes to this from a high finance per­spec­tive. And he was say­ing that if you look at the amount of car­bon that’s in the ground and think well, all of that has val­ue to a lot of com­pa­nies on Wall Street. And that if you say, pre­emp­tive­ly we’re just not gonna burn that because the cost of burn­ing that is pos­si­bly the envi­ron­ment. Then you right off that val­ue, and you end up with…a mar­ket catastrophe. 

And if you don’t write off that val­ue you do end up with an envi­ron­men­tal prob­lem which down the road leads to a dif­fer­ent type of mar­ket cat­a­stro­phe. You know, the ques­tion is of course, how do you write off that amount of val­ue from the mar­ket with­out implod­ing this real­ly tan­gled eco­nom­ic sys­tem now?

Robinson: Well but that’s future val­ue, because that’s not a val­ue until they’ve got it out of the ground and sold it and burned it. If that future val­ue can be account­ed, then you also ought to be able to cal­cu­late the future val­ue of func­tion­ing foods. And then you would have much more than $160 tril­lion. Nature pub­lished a paper, Constanza, et al., about the $33 tril­lion a year of val­ue out of the envi­ron­ment that isn’t usu­al­ly cost­ed or priced or val­ued, and yet it gives us that as just nat­ur­al processes.

And what I’m say­ing is there’s no eco­nom­ics that does a decent job at this point because cap­i­tal­ist eco­nom­ics is used to hav­ing its exter­nal­i­ties. And when you begin to count the exter­nal­i­ties as costs…well yes, it crush­es all of their val­ue. But that does­n’t mean that that’s not still true. It means that they’re just that far out of whack.

The cru­cial miss­ing piece in this is an active­ly eco­log­i­cal eco­nom­ics, a post-capitalist eco­nom­ics, or a reformed cap­i­tal­ism. I believe in cap­i­tal, which is you know, the use­ful residue of human labor and we need it bad; it’s anoth­er name for tech­nol­o­gy and com­fort. Capital in oth­er words is great. And the mar­ket is prob­a­bly some­thing that we can­not escape in a mod­ern, com­pli­cat­ed civ­i­liza­tion where every­body’s doing dif­fer­ent things and there needs to be some way to trade and share the work that we do. 

So when I speak against cap­i­tal­ism, I’m not speak­ing against cap­i­tal, or even against the mar­ket, as a large thing. What I’m say­ing is that the rules that’re manip­u­lat­ing mar­ket and cap­i­tal right now are hier­ar­chi­cal, unjust, inefficient…

Anderson: So think­ing about the mas­sive com­plex­i­ty of the eco­log­i­cal sys­tem and how we need a mar­ket sys­tem that can sort of start to deal with that—

Robinson: Mm hm.

Anderson: And it’s mak­ing me think of my con­ver­sa­tion with George Lakoff last week. And some­thing Lakoff talk­ing about was, metaphor orig­i­nates in the body. When it comes to sys­temic things, whether it’s eco­nom­ic or eco­log­i­cal, we don’t have the metaphor­i­cal lan­guage to deal with that. Like, the brain does­n’t have metaphors to work with abstrac­tions in the same way that we work with sim­ple tasks.

Robinson: Well…Lakoff is fan­tas­tic, and he’s taught all of us a lot. I’ve used his books my whole career, or his con­cepts to under­stand the world bet­ter. So I’m in total agree­ment with him on all but this final state­ment, because I think we have the metaphor sets, which are again as he said, the body, but also the for­est. Everything is metaphor­i­cal to nat­ur­al things around us. So it’s not just your body but also you’re com­par­ing things to trees, to ver­ti­cal­i­ty, to land­scapes. Then you can begin to use metaphors out of the for­est and the body. Capitalism is like some inva­sive biol­o­gy, like kudzu, that is a neat lit­tle plant until it takes over every­thing and stran­gles it.

So, I think he’s right in gen­er­al but wrong in this par­tic­u­lar. And what would be inter­est­ing is to start play­ing the game of mak­ing metaphors, of describ­ing our civ­i­liza­tion as some­thing that can be com­pre­hend­ed by us by way of metaphor, and then worked on effec­tive­ly after that. It would be a grand chal­lenge for all sto­ry­tellers. I think of it as part of what I do as a sci­ence fic­tion writer. We need every­body doing it, real­ly. I mean, Fritjof Capra has been talk­ing about this for a long time, say­ing we’ve got to go from the world as a machine to the world as an organism. 

So I think all that’s right, but I would like to also get spe­cif­ic about eco­nom­ics. I’d like there to be a sto­ry that is math­e­mati­cized and quan­tized and turned into a set of prospec­tive laws that would rec­ti­fy eco­nom­ics as we’re run­ning it right now. And what I’m see­ing is that eco­nom­ics as a field of dis­ci­pline is bereft of that, and is very chicken-hearted about doing pro­jec­tive eco­nom­ics, spec­u­la­tive eco­nom­ics, utopi­an eco­nom­ics. They mere­ly describe what is. They ana­lyze what is, and then say, ​“things can’t be oth­er,” as if what is were the rules of nature rather than laws. So they do legal analy­sis and claim they’re doing physics, in a way.

When I do these spec­u­la­tions as a sci­ence fic­tion writer, I’m think­ing why isn’t there some­body out there doing quan­ti­ta­tive work on this and propos­ing the actu­al laws so that you can get from here to there. Because very often the weak­ness of utopi­an think­ing is you set up a system—it looks grand. Well that’s fine. But we live in this world that we’re in right now, and it’s mas­sive­ly entrenched. A lot of laws, a lot of trade orga­ni­za­tions, a lot of treaties, a lot of guns back­ing it all up. And so you need to reform it by way of per­sua­sive sto­ries, legal reforms, and then demo­c­ra­t­ic action. Maybe the sto­ry­telling becomes cru­cial to this but it would be real­ly nice to then be able to back it up with a com­plete legal pack­age. And that’s I think a miss­ing ele­ment right now.

One sto­ry that I try to tell, and when you talk about his­to­ry it comes to my mind imme­di­ate­ly, is that sci­ence and cap­i­tal­ism began togeth­er as kind of con­joined twins that’ve been sup­port­ive of each oth­er through­out, but that they are actu­al­ly very very dif­fer­ent in their goals and their meth­ods. And that sci­ence has been a under­ground or proto-utopian force all along, try­ing to make things bet­ter but always under the con­trol of cap­i­tal­ist mon­ey and guns. So that it’s only been par­tial­ly effec­tive and yet it’s the most effec­tive coun­ter­force to cap­i­tal­ism in world history. 

So what I’ve been say­ing in this sto­ry of the giant like, Hindu myth­ic bat­tle between sci­ence and cap­i­tal­ism, that every time sci­ence gets a lit­tle clear­age to do its own thing and pur­sue how nature real­ly works and then also find out what we can do to manip­u­late nature (which are two slight­ly dif­fer­ent ques­tions), it has been work­ing for human good. 

And what’s inter­est­ing is to take a sci­en­tif­ic view of well, what do humans real­ly want. So then you get soci­ol­o­gy, psy­chol­o­gy, socio­bi­ol­o­gy. Science says, ​“Well, look. Everybody seems to be hap­pi­est when they make about $80,000 a year.” And you say well, oh, there’s a lev­el beyond which wealth equals obe­si­ty and wor­ry and ill health and unhap­pi­ness. Whereas if you stay at the mean, the kind of Goldilocks—not too lit­tle, not too much—you end up being hap­pi­er, and health and hap­pi­ness begin to look like syn­onyms. When you study the two sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly, togeth­er, they’re almost just two ways of talk­ing about the same thing in human terms. 

Well at that point, eco­nom­ics, espe­cial­ly cap­i­tal­ist eco­nom­ics where more is always bet­ter and growth is always good, is actu­al­ly sim­ply wrong. In human terms. And it’s wrong in eco­log­i­cal terms, too, because the sys­tem can’t actu­al­ly pro­vide goods.

So then you look at human civ­i­liza­tion, you say well look, what about if every­body had a suf­fi­cien­cy? Adequate food, water, shel­ter, cloth­ing, health­care and education…and employ­ment, that work as a right, also—to to have some kind of work—

Anderson: And mean­ing, through work, right?

Robinson: Well, exact­ly. Because that’s what I’m think­ing, is that mean­ing comes out of your project, and you need mean­ing as much as the rest of these things. So this is the utopi­an vision that I see that seems to me to be sort of sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly based. And there, my dichoto­my between cap­i­tal­ism and sci­ence is some­what rein­forced, say­ing if we just stud­ied our­selves sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly as pri­mates that would like to live as long and as healthy and as hap­py a life­time as pos­si­ble, how would that look? Then it begins to look like this vision that I’ve been constructing.

Anderson: That’s also real­ly inter­est­ing because it runs into anoth­er enor­mous myth, right, which is I think our sense of the indi­vid­ual. And I think here we’re talk­ing about two very dif­fer­ent types of free­dom. One in that utopi­an myth, and one in this myth of indi­vid­u­al­ism in which when you say, have a wealth cap or a wealth floor, you’re denied the free­dom to achieve above and beyond, pre­sum­ably to reach your full poten­tial. And you’re also denied the risk of falling low. In a way, in that myth your agency is reduced by being con­strained into this band of what some­one else has told you is kind of the ide­al. And in this case there’s a huge author­i­ty ques­tion in that well, sci­ence may say this, sci­ence may have empir­i­cal data, but should­n’t I ulti­mate­ly make this choice for myself.

Robinson: Well, I’ve thought about that, and that is a good ques­tion. And I’m just won­der­ing if we demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly decid­ed that this was the kind of sit­u­a­tion that we’ve set. If that isn’t in fact the human band, and below that you get a kind of sub­hu­man mis­ery that not many peo­ple are going to vol­un­tar­i­ly choose. But if they do, they prob­a­bly could because that’s going downward. 

And then what if there was the pos­si­bil­i­ty for a kind of spike of peo­ple for whom their self-actualization just requires mak­ing bil­lions? This part of free­dom, of indulging the indi­vid­ual at the expense of every­body else and of the plan­et actu­al­ly ends up with a lot of sick, crazy peo­ple as an end result, not with hap­py, ful­filled super­men who we look at and think, oh god I wish I could be like that.

Anderson: Right.

Robinson: They’re actu­al­ly dys­func­tion­als, and not any­where near as self-actualized as your ordi­nary work­ing sci­en­tist. There you see the hap­pi­est peo­ple on this plan­et, not amongst the rich and famous. Relatively undra­mat­ic activ­i­ties are more sat­is­fy­ing than these big mys­ter­ies that we tell each oth­er of what would be sat­is­fy­ing. And that’s the prob­lem with addic­tions. You do some­thing that’s sup­posed to be sat­is­fy­ing. It does­n’t sat­is­fy you. Then you do more of it, because maybe more of it will actu­al­ly make it work. And in a way, Western con­sumer soci­ety is addict­ed to con­sump­tion. Because it’s not actu­al­ly sat­is­fy­ing, and so what we’re try­ing right now—some of us—is doing more of it, because then maybe that would be satisfying.

Anderson: And is that ulti­mate­ly what sci­ence is doing, as an insti­tu­tion? Is it not an addic­tion itself?

Robinson: Well that’s a good ques­tion, but sci­ence is such a pow­er­ful tool that we can kind of aim it in what direc­tion we want. And I think where sci­ence as it plunges for­ward under its own momen­tum is most impres­sive is in health, in med­i­cine. And part of that is under­stand­ing what we are. So you get into behav­iors, you get into these ques­tions, you even get into eco­nom­ics as just sim­ply a health question.

So the project is uncom­plete, and it will maybe nev­er be com­plet­ed, but what sci­ence does is what it’s paid to do, in part. And then it’s a very pow­er­ful instru­ment. So if you say to sci­ence well, ​“You know, we need to go to Mars. That’s absolute­ly the sal­va­tion of human­i­ty.” Well, we could pay for that. We could do that. And then we would find oh, oops, it’s like Antarctica. It’s not the sal­va­tion of human­i­ty at all. 

But if you said to sci­ence, ​“Let’s make up a viable eco­nom­ic sys­tem that we’ll all agree to live by that will max­i­mize the health and hap­pi­ness of the entire pop­u­la­tion,” and sci­ence went after that with its same inten­si­ty of study and of innovation…its pow­ers are real­ly quite fan­tas­ti­cal at this point, as I think we all know. Then that too could be accom­plished, I think. I don’t think we’ve ful­ly explored this ques­tion of what we do in a tru­ly civ­i­lized civ­i­liza­tion, in a true high-tech that’s in bal­ance with the plan­et and actu­al­ly makes the human ani­mal hap­py? We’re not real­ly close yet. 

So, I stab around in my guess­work on this. But I think I’m on to some­thing here. I real­ly think that the sci­ences are telling us that we are pri­mates that evolved to do cer­tain activ­i­ties. And when we do them we’re healthy and hap­py. And when we don’t do them, think­ing we’ve found some­thing bet­ter, we fall away from health and happiness.

Anderson: In a way, there is a… You build this mas­sive sci­en­tif­ic insti­tu­tion that gets you to the point of hav­ing a sci­en­tif­ic under­stand­ing of what you were before you built the institution.

Robinson: Yes, and then onward to longevi­ty, onward to kind of the glob­al vil­lage. I have to admit that it would be very cool to jump in a com­plete­ly clean tech, maybe some­thing like a diri­gi­ble that kind of floats across to go see Venice, with­out feel­ing like you’re burn­ing an inap­pro­pri­ate amount of car­bon and pol­lut­ing the plan­et to do so. I’d love to talk with peo­ple all around the world. So the high-tech includes a lot of stuff that would neces­si­tate min­ing, and stu­pen­dous mate­r­i­al base. So there­fore fac­to­ries and pro­duc­tion plants. Now, how that com­bines with the dai­ly life of the sort of pale­olith­ic is to me an open ques­tion. And maybe they don’t match up very well, but maybe they do.

Anderson: What if you just can’t have it with­out that pol­lu­tion? I mean, what if the price of cre­at­ing some of that new tech­nol­o­gy is always hav­ing a mine? What if you just can’t get it clean beyond a cer­tain point? It’s always doing some sort of envi­ron­men­tal damage…

Robinson: Well…

Anderson: Is it worth it?

Robinson: Some things would be and some things would­n’t. You know, an extra decade of life on aver­age for the human pop­u­la­tion would be worth it. Extra amount of fideli­ty in your iPod head­phones would not be worth it. And so you go on like that mak­ing these kinds of dis­tinc­tions, I think. 

But also I’m won­der­ing, if the tech is clean enough that the plan­et can recy­cle the waste prod­ucts. That you get a full-cycle, birth to grave, and then back-into-the-Earth type cycles for these things. There’s always going to be room for improve­ments. And so the whole project of civ­i­liza­tion could be clean­er and clean­er tech, bet­ter and bet­ter pri­or­i­ties, which is a phi­los­o­phy ques­tion as you’re point­ing out. What do we want out of ourselves? 

But then also bal­anc­ing with the bios­phere. Because I real­ly think that the bulk of the sto­ry will always be here on Earth. That the rest of the solar sys­tem is all that’s with­in human reach. And the rest of the solar sys­tem is a lit­tle bit pal­try in terms of resources that we’re going to need. So it keeps com­ing back to Earth.

Anderson: Is that tak­ing into account oth­er crea­tures as… Like, what is their philo­soph­i­cal place in this? What rights do they have? One of the most provoca­tive con­ver­sa­tions in the series was with Gary Francione, who’s a law pro­fes­sor at Rutgers and a real­ly elo­quent spokesman of veg­an­ism. For him that’s part of a much larg­er plat­form of non-violence towards oth­er liv­ing things. One of his cri­tiques of cap­i­tal­ism is that there’s just real­ly no way to have this much growth and devel­op­ment. And even if you make it clean­er, you still have a big envi­ron­men­tal foot­print. You’re still destroy­ing habi­tat. Your forms of tran­sit still kill birds and ani­mals on the roads. And that they mat­ter, and that you need to not do that.

Robinson: Well, I think there should be no extinc­tions. That this is what we don’t have the right to do, is to take up so much of the plan­et that the oth­er ani­mals, our fel­low crea­tures on the plan­et, go extinct because of us. That this is the moral wrong that I would object to. That we need to run the plan­et such that there is a cap on the num­ber of humans and their impact on the plan­et so that we’re shar­ing it with all the rest of the bios­phere. And that actu­al­ly is for our own good. It’s not clear that we can live suc­cess­ful­ly with­out the rest of the bios­phere. But the way the mam­mals are going, the way they amphib­ians are going, it’s a sign that we’re doing things wrong, and that we should not have extinctions.

Now, I would dis­agree with this per­son although I admire the impuls­es behind it. I think that humans have been omni­vores. That we kill things and eat them. That this has been part of our species from its very begin­ning. You don’t have an either/or ques­tion, you have part of our self-actualization is the hap­pi­ness of the rest of the mam­mals. I feel this very strongly.

At the same time if you had cer­tain ani­mals being treat­ed as kind of crop that we killed as pain­less­ly as pos­si­ble then ate, I per­son­al­ly don’t see that as much of a prob­lem as oth­er prob­lems we’re fac­ing. It’s almost step­wise, a mat­ter of scaf­fold­ing. If we got our­selves to a cer­tain lev­el of pros­per­i­ty and health, then we could think again about these things and maybe many peo­ple would then say, ​“Look, we might soon have vat-grown meat, where there was nev­er any ani­mal grown, suf­fered, and killed.” And then you know, what’s the prob­lem? At that point you have reduced a moral prob­lem, and by way of technology. 

Anderson: Which is a real­ly fas­ci­nat­ing thing.

Robinson: I don’t believe we have had many chances to think about that philo­soph­i­cal­ly, what that means.

Anderson: There’s a guy want to bring in here who I think is inter­est­ing­ly ger­mane. His name’s John Zerzan. He’s a neo­prim­i­tivist, he’s an antitech­nol­o­gist. He threw out a cou­ple of things that have stayed with me through­out this project, one of which is, is there a bias towards tech­nol­o­gy itself? Does it essen­tial­ly lead you down this rat race where with every tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment you are one step behind, try­ing to ame­lio­rate for its ram­i­fi­ca­tions or reper­cus­sions? Each new tech­nol­o­gy, each atom bomb, each genet­ic engi­neer­ing, each thing that heats the atmos­phere. And you’re always try­ing to catch up to fix that. And his feel­ing is, why are you doing that?

Robinson: Mm hm. Well, I have a lot of sym­pa­thy for that view, except in the end I don’t agree. I think it’s a mat­ter of indi­vid­ual choic­es as to what’s appro­pri­ate tech­nol­o­gy. So I think the word appro­pri­ate tech­nol­o­gy is impor­tant here as well as clean tech. There is this Jevons para­dox, the idea that the bet­ter that we get at things, the more effi­cient our tech­nolo­gies get, the more bad we do with them. And so there’s nev­er been an improve­ment in tech­nol­o­gy that has­n’t actu­al­ly cre­at­ed more harm in the end. Does that mean that we don’t do med­i­cine? Do we not do pub­lic health? Because those are tech­nolo­gies, too. And yet, I don’t think we would want to be in a world where an infec­tious dis­ease could catch your six-year-old and then he’s dead two weeks later. 

Anderson: And do you think there’s any going back, for some­one like him who’s says you know, what’s real­ly essen­tial here is just an unmedi­at­ed expe­ri­ence of the world, and all of the tech­nol­o­gy is a distraction?

Robinson: Well, that’s not right for human­i­ty. That would be say­ing can I live like a chim­panzee? Because human­i­ty has been high-tech from the very begin­ning. We’ve coe­volved with our tech. Take this. This piece of tech­nol­o­gy was sta­ble for about a half-million years. This is an Acheulean hand-axe that I’m hold­ing here. Well, this is a rock, an oval rock, it’s been knocked in places until it’s sharp on one end and maybe sharp­er on the edges. There’s lit­er­al­ly hun­dreds of thou­sands of them scat­tered around the Old World. And they know that they were pret­ty much like this from 500 thou­sand years ago to about 150 thou­sand years ago when they began to sharp­en up and change and get more sym­met­ri­cal and dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed. It’s a mys­tery. But it’s also a piece of tech­nol­o­gy. And it was exact­ly when we’re evolv­ing from them pre-human to homo sapi­ens that we were using techs. And as the techs got bet­ter we got more human.

So, what I think, though, is that it’s pos­si­ble to say there are techs that real­ly help me become more human, and there are oth­er techs that dis­tract me by being this pseudo-superhuman.

Anderson: And how do we dif­fer­en­ti­ate those things? 

Robinson: I guess you try them out, and see how they feel. It’s an emo­tion­al reac­tion. And you have to live them for awhile. 

Anderson: Many peo­ple in this project have questioned…what are we going to unlock? And one of the ways that peo­ple have looked at that are between the proac­tionary prin­ci­ple and the pre­cau­tion­ary prin­ci­ple. Should there be a bias on demon­strat­ing safe­ty before­hand, in terms of pre­serv­ing the sta­tus quo? Or should there be a bias towards always the explo­ration because it will get us somewhere…better?

Robinson: I think that we need to have close col­lab­o­ra­tion between the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ties that are work­ing on some of these trans­for­ma­tive tech­nolo­gies (par­tic­u­lar­ly I’m think­ing of genet­ic engi­neer­ing), and with the legal bod­ies that are estab­lish­ing the rules so that we know ful­ly, as a civ­i­liza­tion, what the risks real­ly are, not as sen­sa­tion­al­ism, but as true risk assess­ment as to how these things can spread, or go wrong, and then try to guard against that. So I believe in the pre­cau­tion­ary prin­ci­ple, that there ought to be test­ed tri­als that are very lim­it­ed and con­trolled before we do any­thing that we might lat­er regret. But I’m also won­der­ing if there is any­thing we can do in those regards that we are going to regret later.

I also think it’s real­ly impor­tant to de-strand our wor­ries about the tech­nol­o­gy with our wor­ries about the own­er­ship of the tech­nol­o­gy. And here again—

Anderson: That’s huge.

Robinson: —I’m think­ing of genet­ic engineering. 

Anderson: Mm hm.

Robinson: Because all of these objec­tions to say, Monsanto’s seeds, these seeds often­times rep­re­sent exact­ly what human beings have been doing all along with hybridiza­tion and mak­ing of new and more effec­tive food seeds for our­selves. But what has­n’t been hap­pen­ing is for some com­pa­ny to claim that they own them and won’t give them to the rest of the pop­u­lace with­out tak­ing a mas­sive cut of them. In oth­er words, ordi­nary cap­i­tal­ist prof­it motive. Then that’s ugly. That’s Wells’ Eloi and Morlocks. That’s the begin­ning of spe­ci­a­tion, where a cer­tain part of the pop­u­la­tion gets to become a dif­fer­ent species, more tech­no­log­i­cal­ly boost­ed into cer­tain abil­i­ties that might indeed be use­ful, like longevi­ty or robust­ness or bet­ter health, where­as the rest are being con­signed to some less­er fate. And this is not a sci­en­tif­ic dis­tinc­tion being made. This is an eco­nom­ic distinction.

Anderson: Though what’s inter­est­ing there, and I think for a lot of peo­ple as they maybe con­flate sci­ence and capitalism…

Robinson: Sure.

Anderson: …there’s a ques­tion of the inevitabil­i­ty of human nature. I mean, if you look at the his­tor­i­cal record there’ve always been peo­ple who’ve grabbed pow­er and have used tech, but at no point have we had the tech to split the species? And so maybe that’s part of where it becomes a fear of sci­ence, because they assume that there’s always going to be that human force for bad­ness in the world, and that as progress goes for­ward that is ampli­fied in a way that’s greater than the force for goodness.

Robinson: Well, but here’s where you have to have some kind of belief in democ­ra­cy, and the sense that the self-management of the species by itself. If we gov­ern our­selves of the peo­ple, by the peo­ple, and for the peo­ple, you put a damper on that kind of self­ish profit-taking and exclu­siv­i­ty of the [good­ness?] that we’re mak­ing for our­selves. And also the choice of which direc­tions to go in terms of what gets researched and what gets worked on. 

People can get very cyn­i­cal about that, but at that point they are screw­ing us in terms of his­tor­i­cal pos­si­bil­i­ty. Because the more you say well, peo­ple will always be bad and that self­ish­ness is inher­ent to the human char­ac­ter and there’s no way of stop­ping the pow­er­ful from being pow­er­ful, the more you enable that to be true. The less you believe in democ­ra­cy and equal­i­ty as being a thing that has risen over time, if you want­ed things to go right you would do a Gramscian ​“pes­simism of the intel­lect but opti­mism of the will” and you would will that peo­ple be better. 

And you would also look to sci­ence again to say what are human beings? We evolved in a sit­u­a­tion that was rel­a­tive­ly egal­i­tar­i­an, and we suc­ceed­ed in the world by being quite coop­er­a­tive. I mean, there’s sev­en bil­lion of us on this plan­et and very often I’m in crowds of thou­sands of peo­ple with­out a sin­gle police­man in sight. And not only is there no vio­lence but there’s real­ly very lit­tle in the way of pub­lic drunk­en­ness or dis­or­der­li­ness of any kind. I mean, it’s quite an achieve­ment what a peace­ful and coop­er­a­tive species we are. 

Anderson: Do we risk run­ning into the lim­its of what we are at some point? A lot of peo­ple will say in this project, ​“Don’t wor­ry about the bio­log­i­cal lim­its, we can solve this stuff as what we are.” Other peo­ple have said, ​“No, there are bio­log­i­cal lim­its to what we can know and that’s part of the chal­lenge that we have. Now, we need to sim­pli­fy.” There are oth­er peo­ple who’ve said, ​“The prob­lems we face are so big we have to reengi­neer our­selves bio­log­i­cal­ly to move forward. 

So there’s sort of three cours­es of action that I’ve seen through­out the series in terms of mov­ing for­ward and kind of the lim­its of the mind. What do you think about issues like that?

Robinson: Well, I think that it is hubris and actu­al­ly a bad mis­take to think that we can engi­neer the mind. We don’t under­stand the mind well enough to describe it, much less engi­neer it. So this is a ter­ri­ble sci­ence fic­tion sto­ry; it’s basi­cal­ly a fan­ta­sy. And here’s why. The brain can be stud­ied when it’s dead, with elec­tron micro­scopes, right down to the cel­lu­lar lev­el. That’s fine. But it only does its thing in liv­ing bod­ies. And when the brain is liv­ing and act­ing, we can only study it indi­rect­ly by way of scans that show blood lev­els or elec­tri­cal activ­i­ties. Or maybe in cer­tain brains a probe in there that is find­ing things a a lit­tle more local level. 

The action of our thought is hap­pen­ing at a lev­el that is mag­ni­tudes tinier than what we can study, than what we can ever study as a liv­ing sys­tem. And this is what all the brain engi­neers, tran­shu­man­ists, [Singularitarians], etc. etc. are ignor­ing. The idea that we’re going to be able to study the brain at a more and more detailed lev­el just because we have been mak­ing progress so far ignores asymp­tot­ic lim­its and phys­i­cal lim­its of all kinds. 

We don’t under­stand how the brain works on lev­els that are so pro­found. We don’t know what con­scious­ness is. We don’t know what will is. We know a lot more than we used to?, but we’re going to run into cer­tain lim­its that means that we’re nev­er going to engi­neer it to be bet­ter. So that’s a kind of fan­ta­sy that is told, and a part of the sci­ence fic­tion field that I’m not sym­pa­thet­ic to because they are doing futur­ol­o­gy. They’re claim­ing, ​“This will come,” and so it becomes like Scientology or sci­en­tism more gen­er­al­ly. It’s some­what of a scam. They’re either delud­ed or they’re active­ly scam­ming people.

Anderson: If we make an anal­o­gy there, and if we can’t under­stand the brain, if there’s some things that we can’t get to, why is there any hope that we can under­stand the envi­ron­ment with some­thing like clean tech, you know, which is some­thing that must be just as com­pli­cat­ed, with so many vari­ables. There’s been a big argu­ment in this project about what we can know in an envi­ron­men­tal sense, you know, with some peo­ple assert­ing…Robert Zubrin?…assert­ing that human cre­ativ­i­ty is lim­it­less, and there­fore there’s a lot of stuff that we can do envi­ron­men­tal­ly because we can know it.

And kind of the inter­view imme­di­ate­ly fol­low­ing upon the heels of his was with Wes Jackson from the Land Institute, who said ​“This is absurd. There’s no way you can know any of this,” you know. Recognize the lim­its and work with­in them. 

Robinson: Yeah.

Anderson: But those two episodes were like this…distilled point/counterpoint of what’s been hap­pen­ing in the whole series.

Robinson: I don’t mean to make any per­son­al asper­sions here, but I real­ly think it’s Jackson who is right. We’re not lim­it­less at all; that’s absurd. And yet the brain is much more com­pli­cat­ed than many an envi­ron­ment on Earth. But the brain is also secret­ed away, so that it can’t be ripped apart and stud­ied while it’s still work­ing. Whereas an envi­ron­ment can be jumped into you know, with your Wellingtons on, and you can begin to take mea­sure­ments and you can bend to study it. And you can also begin to go into the lab and look at what these bac­te­ria do with­out, under­stand­ing every­thing at all about such com­plex sys­tems. You might be able to get good enough to kind of coex­ist with it in a clean way, which I… 

You know, this is kind of a Wes Jackson project. He’s doing high tech. He’s doing clean tech. But he’s say­ing, in such a com­plex sys­tem we need to pay clos­er atten­tion and we need to think about us as expres­sions of the land. That we human beings are bub­bles of Earth, and that the ecol­o­gy throws us up and there’s this brain, which is evolved to the point where we can have abstract con­ver­sa­tions like we’re hav­ing right now. But that it belongs to a mam­mal that has rela­tion­ships with the rest of the bios­phere and coex­ists with the 80% of DNA in our bod­ies that is bac­te­r­i­al. And that this ecol­o­gy, this bio­me that we are as indi­vid­u­als, is com­pli­cat­ed enough that all you can do is hope to get along and maybe extend your life a lit­tle bit fur­ther. So you’re not going to be immortal. 

So I guess what I’d like to do is kind of be the per­son that bridges the gap between these views and speaks for high tech, clean tech, the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a sophis­ti­cat­ed utopi­an civ­i­liza­tion that is still work­ing with­in phys­i­cal real­i­ty and lim­its, and nev­er goes tran­scen­dent. And maybe has no need to want to go to tran­scen­dence, because we’re already in such a good space, you know. We have this ani­mal real­i­ty that when you’re in good health, when you’re not in pain, it’s all you real­ly need.

Anderson: And that kind of brings us to the good. You know, there’ve been lots of dif­fer­ent goods advanced in this project, and it feels like if there’s any­thing you see from them you see the role of emo­tion in decid­ing how to apply reason. 

Robinson: The two are just ways of nam­ing parts of brain func­tions that coa­lesce into a whole being, a whole con­scious­ness. It’s real­ly whole thought that in the end we need to be con­cerned with. And that has aspects of rea­son­abil­i­ty and aspects of emo­tion. And so sci­en­tif­ic study of emo­tion is great. We’re learn­ing all kinds of good things, and things that will help us and will con­tribute to the human good.

I was think­ing about what you were say­ing there about how var­i­ous peo­ple define the good, and I was won­der­ing if I…if being a utopi­an sci­ence fic­tion writer, that my work has been an attempt to define a good state. Individually, you’re not in a good state if you’re in a pock­et utopia. In oth­er words if it’s good for you, but oth­er peo­ple are suf­fer­ing, it’s not good any­more. And so then you have to get to this notion of every­body. And that’s why you come back to utopia, from my way of think­ing. You say look, if every­body alive, and all the species, are doing a well, then you can enjoy your doing well in a way that you could­n’t if there’s suf­fer­ing to cre­ate your doing well.

And that can be pushed in all kinds of dif­fer­ent ways. Maybe that does make you a veg­e­tar­i­an or what­not, but in human terms—just stick­ing with human beings—it means that you need a just soci­ety, where every­body’s got ade­qua­cy. When you get to that space, then what you want is that for every­body to have the good and then you can enjoy your good. 

Anderson: And that’s what’s tricky, right? How do you have…like, a utopi­an vision…but still kind of acknowl­edge pluralism?

Robinson: Utopia is not an end state but a name for a par­tic­u­lar kind of his­to­ry. So that it’s a dynam­ic state. You’re nev­er going to get to per­fec­tion. That’s not human­ly, bio­log­i­cal­ly, or in this uni­verse possible.

Anderson: Does it become mean­ing­less, then, because it’s so big?

Robinson: But we’re not there. It’s just glob­al. All it is is talk­ing about sus­tain­abil­i­ty and about a civ­i­liza­tion that can get by and give on to the next gen­er­a­tion what it was giv­en, and a not trash the plan­et or cause a mass extinc­tion event. It’s big, but it’s not too big. It’s not phys­i­cal­ly impos­si­ble to cre­ate a decent life for every­body and for all the species on the plan­et, it’s just very dif­fi­cult. It’s an engi­neer­ing prob­lem and a dis­tri­b­u­tion prob­lem and a eco­nom­ic problem. 

I would be inter­est­ed to see some­body who would dis­agree to the notion that every­body ought to have an ade­qua­cy or be able to live their own life freely and max­i­mize their own abil­i­ty to be them­selves, what­ev­er that might be. I mean, what’s the objec­tion to that? And if that’s my def­i­n­i­tion of utopia, isn’t that big enough to encom­pass all these var­i­ous objections?

Anderson: And there’s a big fun­da­men­tal ques­tion beneath that, which makes me think of a con­ver­sa­tion I had with a moral philoso­pher named Lawrence Torcello. And we talked about sort of the ten­sion between plu­ral­ism, which you want; but not rel­a­tivism, because some things are still bad. To what extent can you weld all of these dif­fer­ent peo­ple and dif­fer­ent desires into some­thing that is…anything, any­thing utopi­an? And can you do that voluntarily?

Robinson: I think you can. It’s the glob­al civ­i­liza­tion. It’s democ­ra­cy in action. There are cer­tain cul­tures that are heav­i­ly unjust for cer­tain of their mem­bers. There’s old patri­archies that are wicked­ly cru­el to their women. But the inter­est­ing ques­tion is if they were demo­c­ra­t­ic, and the oppressed second-class cit­i­zens were vot­ing, and so then is democ­ra­cy then just a trans val­ue or is that just one cul­ture try­ing to impose its val­ues on oth­ers [crosstalk] and you get into those—

Anderson: Right. Does it have some sta­tus as the good?

Robinson: Yes, exact­ly. And I think to myself, is there any human being that you can jus­ti­fy hav­ing less rep­re­sen­ta­tion over their own affairs than oth­ers? And I keep think­ing no, there isn’t, so this is a trans val­ue. And maybe it goes back to the Paleolithic, where in a group every­body had their role; there was not this hier­ar­chy of pow­er of one group over another. 

Anderson: So that coul be one of your ara­tional assumptions. 

Robinson: Yes, although I would like to sci­en­tize it. I would like to say that it is more than that. But on the oth­er hand, maybe not. Maybe this is just a mat­ter of phi­los­o­phy that’s emo­tion­al. But emo­tion— Um, emo­tions are cru­cial any­way. Meaning is a result of a cer­tain feel­ing.

So this my ulti­mate gut feel­ing is that every­body is equal to me. This is a kind of nov­el­ist’s feel­ing, is that there’s not a sin­gle per­son any­where that has more or less rights than me. Well, this does go very deeply, and that’s a sort of indi­vid­u­al­ism, and yet I believe in the col­lec­tive, also. So there are bal­ances all over the place.

Anderson: Do you think that con­ver­sa­tion is pos­si­ble? You know, because we do exist in a plu­ral­is­tic world where we’re going to have peo­ple who will always say, ​“I don’t believe you.” Is there con­ver­sa­tion there, or is there sort of a bat­tle royale in pol­i­tics, and cul­ture and media, that sort of has to…hash it out?

Robinson: Well I think it’s a lit­tle more the lat­ter, espe­cial­ly at the crux points where cul­tur­al change hap­pens. I think what you do is you try to make your sto­ries plau­si­ble to the 51% or the 55% or the 60% that you need to con­vince in order to take polit­i­cal action, depend­ing on your polit­i­cal set­up. And then what hap­pens is, if you can gath­er that many peo­ple togeth­er and you make polit­i­cal deci­sions and you just a over­ride the minor­i­ty that does­n’t believe you and say, ​“Look, this is for the greater good. We’re vot­ing these into place,” to try to make a response, it also could hap­pen that quick­ly the cul­ture will change to where sud­den­ly every­body believes that to be true. 

And so, I guess the sto­ry that I tell is that we’re doing real­ly well when we pay atten­tion to sci­ence and use it, and yet keep it in its place and con­tin­ue to tell our sto­ries with more and more data to back them. And so I think of sci­ence as being the utopi­an effort. That back in the 1600s we began to try to make a bet­ter world and a more just world and a less-suffering…simply a more com­fort­able and less-suffering world for humans, and that that’s been a step­wise process with lots of set­backs and lots of suc­cess­es that cre­at­ed worse prob­lems. And moments of hubris where sci­ence tried to go too far and say, ​“What should be done?” and at that point it had to get slapped down and revise itself. And that that whole process has been so inter­est­ing and so pow­er­ful, so sug­ges­tive of fur­ther progress. 

So I tell a sci­ence fic­tion. It makes my project cohere, so that I’m not just writ­ing one book after anoth­er or telling sto­ries ran­dom­ly but try­ing to tell a big­ger sto­ry that is the sto­ry of sci­ence and soci­ety together.

Aengus Anderson: So as Neil men­tioned up front, this is an inter­view that does con­nect to every­thing. And that’s real­ly excit­ing but it’s also a lit­tle bit daunt­ing to talk about when you’re at the end of the con­ver­sa­tion. Before we record these things we always make our lit­tle bul­let point lists of like, ​“well what are the things we want to talk about here,” know­ing full well that we don’t real­ly want to take more than a few min­utes of your time. And with Kim Stanley Robinson that’s real­ly hard, because we kind of want to talk about all of this. This is a con­ver­sa­tion you could talk about all day.

Micah Saul: Because it con­nects with every­thing, this…like, I’m real­ly hap­py that this came so late in the project. You’re able to get this like amaz­ing syn­the­sis of the project as a whole through this one conversation.

I’m just going to jump in and say like, what I enjoyed most about this con­ver­sa­tion was that here’s some­body will­ing to go to bat for utopia.

Anderson: [laughs] Yeah! I think between Kim and Claire Evans, those are our peo­ple. But it’s not utopia…in the sense that oth­er peo­ple in the project have dis­missed off­hand. I mean, he’s redefin­ing what utopia is into some­thing that’s not the island off the coast of nowhere…but it’s some­thing else.

Neil Prendergast: Right, and it does­n’t have to be this per­fect world. It’s some­thing that you work toward, it seems.

Anderson: And it’s got this iter­a­tive quality. 

Actually that made me think of Jason Kelly Johnson a lit­tle bit, with his sort of…his amaz­ing archi­tec­ture. And all of these archi­tec­tur­al projects are iter­a­tive. And Kim Stanley Robinson is doing that with sci­ence fic­tion and all of soci­ety. He’s just play­ing out these sce­nar­ios and tweak­ing stuff and it’s like he runs the exper­i­ment again. And I think that’s…really cool.

Prendergast: Yeah, one thing I want to men­tion too is, fol­low­ing on Micah’s obser­va­tion there about you know, the tim­ing of this inter­view, that it’s lat­er in the project. And for me there’s kind of a turn and it hap­pens right around Charles Hugh Smith where…we’re real­ly kind of I think think­ing a lit­tle bit more about well what’s the action? What’s the next step fol­low­ing the insight from who­ev­er Aengus interviewed. 

And there’s some­thing here that dove­tails with Smith. Robinson’s not so much con­cerned with some sort of like, grass­roots like, every­body involved, every­body in agree­ment kind of change. You know, he’s real­ly talk­ing about democ­ra­cy being some­thing where it’s that major­i­ty that counts. And he has some­thing in there where he says, often­times once a major­i­ty that’s inter­est­ed in the greater good estab­lish­es some­thing, that it then becomes sort of an unques­tioned truths fol­low­ing that. And so I think there’s a real hope there? for change. Because the bar­ri­er is a lit­tle bit less high.

Anderson: Yeah, I can think of a cou­ple peo­ple ear­li­er in the project who touched on that, but it’s cool to see this com­ing up again, and it’s real­ly cool to see it com­ing up in the con­text of a sci­ence fic­tion author. I think a lot of peo­ple think oh, sci­ence fic­tion you know. He’s explor­ing sce­nar­ios that are so far beyond conception…what could be prag­mat­ic about this? But it’s deeply pragmatic.

Saul: As some­one who’s read a decent amount of Robinson that’s some­thing that’s always…really jumped out at me about his writ­ing. He’s not writ­ing space operas. He’s not writ­ing far future. In fact, his books some­times read as like…I don’t know, nar­ra­tive his­to­ries of a future that’s you know, hap­pen­ing next year. Pragmatic is exact­ly the way to to word it. His sci­ence fic­tion is prag­mat­ic, and it seems like his phi­los­o­phy is prag­mat­ic. There’s a real­ly inter­est­ing sort of…pragmatic approach to that con­flict between pes­simism and opti­mism, I found here as well. Would you agree with me on that?

Anderson: Well that’s kind of inter­est­ing because as I was think­ing about prag­ma­tism there, and I think pes­simism and opti­mism, I think, can you be prag­mat­ic and utopian?

Prendergast: I think he sug­gests you can.

Anderson: You prob­a­bly hear this in my voice in the inter­view like, this is some­thing that I went after a lot. Because instinc­tu­al­ly, I have a hard time feel­ing like…someone who’s real­ly talk­ing about utopia in a seri­ous way can real­ly be that prag­mat­ic? He is…but, I want to pull that apart more. Because I feel like maybe if we were to put it on poles—like we’ve got tech utopi­an think­ing on one end and we’ve got a belief in lim­its on the oth­er end. And like, those are both poles of Kim’s thought in this thing. And there aren’t a lot of peo­ple in this project who’ve had both of those, right. We’ve had utopi­an thinkers; we’ve had Robert Zubrin. We’ve had peo­ple who are real­ly inter­est­ed in lim­its, like imme­di­ate­ly after Robert Zubrin we get Wes Jackson, who talks about lim­its elo­quent­ly. And yet Kim has both of these things in his con­ver­sa­tion. And I think I was hav­ing a hard time squar­ing them. And I think I still am. Like, I see were he’s walk­ing a line, but I also feel like I’m not real­ly con­vinced that you can.

Prendergast: I think key to all that is a sense of humil­i­ty, as the two of you dis­cussed. And that comes right out of Wes Jackson’s fol­low­ing in the tra­di­tion of a land eth­ic. Comes out of envi­ron­men­tal think­ing, United States. But that sense of I think humil­i­ty says, ​“Yeah, I can be prag­mat­ic things. I can use sci­ence. But I under­stand that there are oth­er species that mat­ter, too.” And that’s whre the lim­its to growth come.

Anderson: If I can real­ly spell out the thing that like, did­n’t quite ring right for me, it was sort of…Kim’s descrip­tion of the ful­filled life. He talks about a lot of things that sound real­ly good to me? and might sound real­ly good to you guys and to our lis­ten­ers. You know, a life which is not nec­es­sar­i­ly full of elec­tron­ic doo­dads, but maybe is liv­ing in a world with a phe­nom­e­nal­ly advanced health­care sys­tem, and a world but also gives you time and space to go play in nature. Which lets you be the most of what you are as an ani­mal. There’s actu­al­ly a lit­tle ref­er­ence there that takes us back to Rebecca Costa.

But, I keep think­ing like, well yeah that does speak to me but I need to ask hard ques­tions. What about the peo­ple for whom that does­n’t work? What about the peo­ple who are like, ​“I want my own F‑16 and I real­ly wanna—I mean, I just want to bomb oth­er coun­tries with it? Like, that’s my utopia.” It’s hard for me to ask the ques­tion from that guy’s per­spec­tive? But I feel that that guy…is out there. In any utopia it’s like, how do you real­ly deal with that guy? And we talk a lit­tle bit about that. And we talked more about it in stuff that did­n’t make the final cut, but I don’t think it set­tled the ques­tion, you know. And so what do you guys think about some of those things?

Saul: In many ways that comes back to the same sort of ques­tions and prob­lems we had with Torcello, right? It’s what hap­pens when there’s that one per­son in the room that’s just ded­i­cat­ed to throw­ing chairs. That is of course the major…failing…? (if you want to call it a fail­ing) of talk­ing about plu­ral­ism. One has to assume there’s an answer?

Prendergast: Well maybe I’ll try to bring us a lit­tle bit full cir­cle, at least in my own thoughts. I think this is where you know, he does rely­ing on social orga­ni­za­tion of democ­ra­cy. Yeah, you’re gonna have that one guy with the F‑16s, right? Or want­i­ng the F‑16s. And what’re you going to do about that guy? 

Well, hope­ful­ly there are enough peo­ple in the democ­ra­cy who are inter­est­ed in a greater good, and they can form a major­i­ty, and they can use the pow­er of gov­ern­ment to make cer­tain that that per­son does­n’t get to have the F‑16.

Saul: I think that’s a great end­ing point? But I kind of feel like I need to just throw this out there for per­son­al rea­sons? This might be my favorite con­ver­sa­tion in the project. Because…I am a recov­er­ing tech utopi­anist. There’s a— [Aengus laughs] I mean, you guys know this. 

Anderson: [still laugh­ing] It’s like sud­den­ly we stum­bled into the AA meet­ing. [all laugh]

Saul: You know, but there our lis­ten­ers, if we have any lis­ten­ers left, years ago Aengus and I sat in my liv­ing room in San Francisco— Or actu­al­ly I guess it was our liv­ing room in San Francisco at the time. And he inter­viewed me about what I was most excit­ed about or something…I think that that was the prompt. And I start­ed talk­ing about tech, and start­ed talk­ing about the trans­for­ma­tive pow­er of tech­nol­o­gy and the Internet, in a way that now…after…growing? and after this project, I look back at and just sort of hang my head in shame. I sound…like a lot of the peo­ple that I…maybe beat up a lit­tle bit in this project. 

But still, I work in tech. I now work for the gov­ern­ment, in tech, try­ing to make things bet­ter for peo­ple. So I obvi­ous­ly still believe that tech has the pow­er to make the world a bet­ter place. And Robinson final­ly gave me some­body in the project I can point to that feels like he’s answer­ing some of the ques­tions that I have on a dai­ly basis. And he’s giv­ing me a new way to think about how to bal­ance my more recently-found dis­trust of sci­entism and tech, with my con­tin­ued belief that these tools have the pos­si­bil­i­ty of real­ly helping. 

So…yeah. Little per­son­al note aside, I real­ly real­ly appre­ci­at­ed this.

Anderson: Well, if Neil gave us a good place to end I think that’s an even bet­ter place to end, because that’s a pret­ty [crosstalk] cool anecdote. 

Prendergast: Agreed. Much agreed that’s great. 

Anderson: This is The Conversation, and that was Kim Stanley Robinson, record­ed June 17^th, 2013 in Davis, California.