Non-violent Regeneration

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Handbook for Utopia

Here are two fairly long excerpts from Kim Stanley Robinson’s book Pacific Edge. I hope I don’t misunderstand Robinson, but I believe that after reading this book he wants people to share this message. You should read not just this book, but the series it comes from. I’m going to introduce the passages, but please:

If you’re here to figure out how to build utopia: Skip down to the excerpts below this section to find out!

Who is Mr. Robinson?

Kim Stanley Robinson is a speculative fiction writer and also just generally a great writer — which is why maybe you should just skip ahead to what he wrote. Speculative fiction is an umbrella term for science fiction, which is a genre of fiction that literary people thumb their noses at. Not me, though. I’m hooked. I think I’m hooked on thinking about the future for the same reason the character Tom Barnard is in the passages quoted below. Robinson is a great communicator, lyricist, poet and a master of prose. He’s also something of a prophet and I’ve been engrossed by every book of his that I’ve read. His books have helped me to upgrade my worldview at multiple points since his work was first introduced to me 5–6 years ago.

The following passages are excerpted from the final book of Robinson’s Three Californias Trilogy. Before picking up the first book, I hadn’t read what they were about. Being a big Robinson fan, I bought it blind… and gave up after reading the first two books. At the time, I found them morbid and depressing compared to Robinson’s other writing, which I find generally even-handed if not intelligently optimistic.

Book 1: The Wild Shore

The Wild Shore is an achingly beautiful coming of age story that takes place in a post-nuclear-war Californian coastal town. I loved the book, but it was unlike other of Robinson’s work in a way that left me unsettled. Now that I’ve finished the triptych, I understand why. It was unlike Robinson’s other work in that it focuses on speculating about negative potential outcomes whereas his other fiction seems fairly pragmatic if not optimistic. With The Wild Shore Robinson played out the worst possible scenario: What would California look like after a devastating nuclear war?

After finishing it, I was emotionally drained and kind of bummed out, but I trusted Robinson — his Mars trilogy revealed the glimmer of a possible way out of this tremendous labyrinth of greed and environmental torture we find ourselves in. So I picked up the second book.

Book 2: The Gold Coast

The Gold Coast takes place in a similar town in California. But wait — it’s not the same universe even. In this Orange County, people have technology and cars and all sorts of awesome sounding gadgets. But there are strong themes carried over from the first book. The story is also a coming of age story, but that of what I would consider the transition from post-adolescence to the terribly strange realm of full independence. The story was wonderful, as always — Robinson knows how to write nuanced love and incredibly complex relationships in an easy and empathic way… But the world Robinson dropped me into was grim, even more grim than post-nuclear war United States: Our beautiful nation was transmogrified into a hell of consumerism, where high technology puts the machines of destruction into the hands of every day people and the world is a giant strip mall.

A deeply compelling book, but also by the end I felt drained and emotionally beaten: Where was Robinson’s optimism? I felt let down: I already know that this is where we’re headed. I already know that the choice we have before us is we lose civilization or we turn into an insane consumer hell and have to live inside bubbles just to breathe.

For a while I’ve been working seriously with a few friends on this problem. Generally: How do we avoid the end of the world? How do we, as normal people at an exceptional point in time, avoid the complete destruction of our biosphere?

What ripples can we cause that might turn into waves?

We have many ideas about how to go about this and are somewhere in the early stages of designing and developing different systems to affect change and in many other ways have already been doing this for years, working in renewable energy and so on … But Robinson is so smart. Like several orders of magnitude more knowledgeable and well-read and intelligent than I am. How is he capitulating? We’re not that smart and we’re still trying. How can he give up like that considering what I know he believes — his other books make it very clear that he thinks we can change things for the better even if it will be nearly impossible and will take a lot of lucky breaks.

In the pages of that book were only warnings, no answers — no answers except that no matter what, people will go on and life will go on and even if we don’t reverse these trends of mass extinction and ocean acidification and global mean temperature rises and sea level rises and mass incarceration and incredible wealth inequality — even if none of that changes, life will still go on and be wonderful and beautiful in it’s own way.

It was comforting, but still far too grim. So after finishing The Gold Coast, I stopped reading for a while. It coincided with a period of general pessimism: Our efforts to modify aspects of this system will not be productive. The machine of enclosure and taking is too strong. It will be Donald Trump vs. Hillary.

>_<

Also not a coincidence: I was worried about money at the time. Having left the company I helped build to spread my wings as a contractor and consultant over the last year to pursue some of these ideas, money (and how to get it and by when) is constantly on my mind. I couldn’t handle more pessimism! I had to put the series down.

I wish I had persisted.

After reading about the series some time later, I read that the third book is about utopia. Robinson’s utopia.

O_O

Book 3: Pacific Edge

I immediately picked it up. It’s wonderful. Had I finished it in sequence I would have been rewarded with a sharp, reasoned optimism and one possible answer to the vexing questions:

How do we avoid destroying ourselves? What kind of world should we try to make? What would it look like?

Taken as a complete thing, the series is breathtaking. I am intent on rereading it soon to fully appreciate it, and have already re-read long passages. I won’t write much about what the final book is about, because you deserve to read it yourself.

Below are two excerpts that contain mild spoilers. Lovingly transcribed by hand! Please pick up this series.

And to Kim Stanley Robinson: Thank you for your beautiful and inspiring words. I’d love to pick your brain about how to build systems and structures like the ones you describe across your body of work. Drop me a line if you’re ever in San Francisco and want to vent about the future!

_________________

EXCERPT 1

WHY BUILD UTOPIA?

The following is told from the perspective of Tom Barnard, about the period of time immediately after his release from a detention center.

Out.

How I hugged that lawyer. He just looked tired. Lucky, he said. Procedural irregularity.

He drove me to a restaurant. Looking out the car window, stunned, everything looked different. Fragile. Even America is fragile. I didn’t know that before.

At the restaurant we drank coffee.

What will you do? the lawyer said.

I didn’t have the faintest idea. I don’t know, I said. Go to New York and Meet my wife’s ship when it comes in. Get cross country to my kid, find some kind of work. Survive.

There was a newspaper on the next table but I couldn’t look at it. Crisis to crisis, we’re too close to the edge, you can feel the slippage in the heat of the air.

And suddenly I was telling him about it, the heat, the barbed wire, the nights in the dorm, the presence of the hospital, the fear, the courage of all those inside. It’s not fair, I said, my voice straining. They shouldn’t be able to do that to them! I seized the newspaper, shook it. They shouldn’t be able to do any of this!

I know, the lawyer said, sipping his coffee and looking at me. But people are afraid. They’re afraid of what’s happening, and they’re afraid of the changes we would have to make to stop it from happening.

But we’ve got to change! I cried.

The lawyer nodded. Do you want to help?

What do you mean?

Do you want to help change things?

Of course I do! Of course, but how? I mean, I tried, when I lived in California I tried as hard as I could . . . .

Look, Mr. Barnard, he said. Tom. It takes more than an individual effort. And more than the old institutions. We’ve started an organization here in Washington, DC, so far it’s sort of a multi-issue lobbying group, but essentially we’re trying to start a new political party, something like the Green parties in Europe.

He described what they were doing, what their program was. Change the law of the land, the economic laws, the environmental laws, the relationship between local and global, the laws of property.

Now there’re laws forbidding that kind of change, I said. That’s what they’re trying to get me on.

We know. There are people afraid of us, you see. It’s a sign we’re succeeding. But there’s a long way to go. It’s going to be a battle. And we can use all the help we can get. We know what you were doing in California. You could help us. You shouldn’t just go out there and survive, that would be a waste. You should stay here and help.

I stared at him.

Think about it, he said.

So I thought about it. And later I met with some of his colleagues, and talked about his new party, and met more people, and talked some more. And I saw that there is work here that I can do.

I’m going to stay. There’s a job and I’ll take it. Work for Pam, too. Talked to her on the ship-to-shore, and she sounded pleased. A job, after all, and her kind of work. My kind of work.

It didn’t take all that much time to convince me, really. Because I have to do something. Not just write utopia, but fight for it in the real world — I have to, I’m compelled to, and talking with one of the people here late one night I suddenly understood why: because I grew up in utopia, I did. California when I was a child was a child’s paradise, I was healthy, well fed, well clothed, well housed, I went to school and there were libraries with all the world in them and after school I played in orange groves and in Little League and in the band and down at the beach and every day was an adventure, and when I came home my mother and father created a home as solid as a rock, the world seemed solid! And it comes to this, do you understand me — I grew up in utopia.

But I didn’t. Not really. Because while I was growing up in my sunny seaside home much of the world was in misery, hungry, sick, living in cardboard shacks, killed by soldiers or their own police. I had been on an island. In a pocket utopia. It was the childhood of someone born into the aristocracy, and understanding that I understood the memory of my childhood differently; but still I know what it was like, I lived it and I know! And everyone should get to know that, not in the particulars, of course, but in the general outline, in the blessing of a happy childhood, in the lifelong sense of security and health.

So I am going to work for that. And if — if! if someday the whole world reaches utopia, then that dream California will become a precursor, a sign of things to come, and my childhood is redeemed. I may never know which it will be, it might not be clear until after we’re dead, but the future will judge us! They will look back and judge us, as aristocrats’ refuge or emerging utopia, and I want utopia, I want that redemption and so I’m going to stay here and fight for it, because I was there and I lived it and I know. It was a perfect childhood.

_________________

EXCERPT 2

HOW TO BUILD UTOPIA

The narrator describes Tom Barnard, many years later, talking to students about what it was like leading up to the great change that brought about a new way of living.

One balmy evening Nadezhda’s class met on the foredeck, and Tom described his part in the struggle to make the international agreements curtailing corporations. It was like trust busting in Teddy Roosevelt’s time. In those days people agreed monopolies were bad because they were bad for business, basically — they cut at the possibility of free trade, of competition. But multinational corporations were a similar thing in a new format — they were big enough to make tacit agreements among themselves, and so it was a cartel world. Governments hated multinationals because they were out of government control. People hated them because they made everyone cogs in machines, making money for someone else you never saw. That was the combination needed to take them on. And even then we nearly lost.

You talk like it was war, Pravi said scornfully. She was one of the sharpest of Nadezhda’s students, well-read, quick-minded, skeptical of her teachers’ memories and biases.

It was war, Tom said, looking at her with interest. In the twilight the whites of her eyes looked phosphorescent, she seemed a dangerous young Hindu woman, a Kali. They bought people, courts, newspapers — they killed people. And we really had to put the arm on the countries who decided that becoming a corporation haven would be a good source of revenue.

Put the arm on them, Pravi said angrily. You superpowers in your arrogance, ordering the world around again — what was it but another form of imperialism. Make the world do what you decide is right! A new kind of colonialism.

Tom shrugged, trying to see her better in the dusk. People said that when the colonial powers lost sovereignty over their colonies, but kept the power by way of economic arrangements. That was called neo-colonialism, and I see the point of it. But look, the mechanisms of control and exploitation in the neo-colonialist set-up were precisely the corporations themselves. As home markets were saturated it became necessary to invest abroad to keep profits up, and so the underdeveloped world was subsumed.

Exactly.

All right, all right. But then to cut the corporations up, distribute their assets down through their systems to constituent businesses — this amounted to a massive downloading of capital, a redistribution of wealth. It was new, sure, but to call it neocolonialism is just to confuse things. It was actually the dismantling of neo-colonialism.

By fiat! By the command of the superpowers, telling the rest of the world what to do, in imperial style! Putting the arm on them, as you put it!

Well look, we haven’t always had the kind of international accords that now exist to take global action. The power of the United Nations is a fairly recent development in history. So some coercion by powerful countries working together was a political necessity. And at the time I’m speaking of capital was very mobile, it could move from country to country without restraint. If one country decided to become a haven, then the whole system would persist.

At that point third world countries would have been in power, and the superpowers would have become colonies. You couldn’t have had that.

But the haven countries wouldn’t have had the power. They might have skimmed away something in taxes, but in essence they would become functionaries of the corporations they hosted. That’s how powerful corporate capitalism was. You just have no idea nowadays.

We only know that once again you decided our fate for us.

It took everyone to do it, Tom said. A consensus of world opinion, governments, the press. A revolution of all the people, using the power of government — laws, police, armies — against the very small executive class that owned and ran the multinationals.

What do you mean, a revolution another student asked.

We changed the law so much, you see. We cut the corporate world apart. The ones that resisted and skipped to haven countries had their assets seized, and distributed to local parts. We left loose networks of association, but the actual profits of any unit company were kept within it in a collective fashion, nothing sucked away.

A quiet revolution, Nadezhda said, trying to help out.

Yes, certainly. All this took years, you understand. It was done in steps so that it didn’t look so radical — it took two working generations. But it was radical, because now there’s nothing but small businesses scattered everywhere. At least in the legal world. And that’s a radical change.

Accusing, triumphant, Pravi pointed a finger at him. So the United States went socialist!

No, not exactly. All we did was set limits on the more extreme forms of greed.

By nationalizing energy, water and land! What is that but socialism

Yeah, sure. I mean, you’re right. But we used it as a way to give everyone the opportunity to get ahead! Basic resources were made common property, but in the service of a more long distance self-interest —

Altruism for the sake of self-interest! Pravi said, disgusted. Her aggression, her hatred of America — it irritated Tom, made him sad. Enemies everywhere, still, after all these years, even among the young. What you sow you will reap, he thought. Unto the seventh generation.

Sociobiologists say it’s always that way, he said. Some doubt the existence of altruism, except as a convoluted form of self-interest.

Imperialism makes one cynical about human nature, Pravi said. And you know as well as I that the human sciences are based on philosophical beliefs.

No doubt. He shrugged. What do you want me to say The economic system was a pyramid, and money ran up to the top. We chopped the pyramid off and left only the constituent parts down at the base, and gave the functions that higher parts of the pyramid served over to government, without siphoning off money, except for public works. This was either altruism on the largest scale ever seen in modern times, or else very enlightened self-interest, in that with wealth redistributed in this way, the wars and catastrophes that would have destroyed the pyramid were averted. I suppose it is a statement of one’s philosophy to say whether it was one or the other.

Pravi waved him away. You saw the end coming and you ran. Like the British from India.

You needn’t be angry at us for saving you the necessity of violent revolution, Tom said, almost amused. It might have been dramatic, but it wouldn’t have been fun. I knew revolutionaries, and their lives were warped, they were driven people. It’s not something to get romantic about.

Insulted, Pravi walked away, down the deck. The class muttered, and Nadezhda gave them a long list of reading assignments, then called it off for the night.