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Inspired by the discussion on science and scientists below, I want to bring up a series of books that I read as a teenager, and recently revisited this year: the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson.
1. Red Mars
Out of all the books in my childhood, this looms the largest. This book is almost the entire reason for me wanting to go to MIT (become an astronaut so I could bring life to dead planet like Sax), and my interest in political philosophy (so I could figure out who was right between John, Arkady, and Frank). Just as KSR shows Mars here as a canvas that people use to paint their idealized image of society, society that will really truly be constructed by ideology, rather than history, I used this book as a template for my own life trajectory: a way of prescribing meaning to another-wise empty scientific materialism by coopting some elements of ecoism (which I should have always known I liked, but anyway). I also recently discovered that one of my favorite board games, Terraforming Mars is heavily inspired by this book, which was also cool.
It's funny coming back to this and seeing what worked and what didn't. The science fiction elements are very obviously unbelievable. We can barely launch people into space these days, much less send millions of times more mass than we've ever sent to space far out of Earth's gravity well to Mars (I know that most of the delta G is from the surface to LEO but still). Aging won't be cured by simply repairing damaged DNA, and terraforming is likely to be a much slower process than as depicted in the book, if it's even physically possible at all.
The geopolitics is a little bit better. The overpopulation crisis on Earth that drives much of the plot is solving itself right now, but the hegemony of transnational corporations (a big element of the board game too) is happening before our eyes. Knowing a bit more about the other cultures (Arabs and Swiss mainly) depicted in this book also allowed their adaptions to the planet to carry more weight for me.
And of course the personal is still fantastic. The love triangle between John, Frank, and Maya. The enigma of what Frank actually wants out of Mars (even though we get two POV sections from him). The solid dependency of Nadia, the fiery revolutionary fervor of Arkady, and the conflict between desire for death (Ann CLAYbourne) and life (Saxifrage Russel), all were much more interesting to me this time around. And how each of these characters reflects their own emotions on the landscape of Mars (which I know much better because of the game). And perhaps that this reflects my philosophical shift too: away from materialism and towards something more interested in life itself.
2. Green Mars
If Red Mars was the book that made me want to be an astronaut, Green Mars is what made me want to become a biologist. There is just something so magical about turning a dead planet alive (not only through the introduction of plants, but also culture). Maybe what really will follow in the death-throes of rationality is a kind of Viriditas, or worshipping of life, that we see come to life in the green movement in this book.
In terms of plot, this book follows our protagonists from Red Mars (the first hundred) after they have fled underground following the failed revolution of 2061, as well as some of their children: the first natives of Mars. The plot spans the course of 60 years, and is all over the place. One part focuses on Terraforming, another on a political conference to decide the fate of Mars, and still another on the quiet semi-retirement of one of the expedition leaders around the shore of the expanding Hellas Sea.
The characters were hit or miss for me. I really connected with Sax Russell, who is a scientist like myself. Sax is pretty autistically interested in science and the natural world, until a traumatic brain injury causes a radical shift in his personality and he grows interested in other humans. Nirgal, one of the native martians, and Art, a diplomat sent by one of the "good" transnational corporations I also liked reading about, but the female characters (Maya and Ann) were a huge miss for me. I found Maya to be a horrible, self-absorbed person, and found it hard to relate to Ann's obsession with maintaining Mars in a pristine, but dead state.
In terms of themes, a couple things stuck out to me. Firstly, science is political. This is very obvious in the novel, as the terraforming efforts are a scientific endeavor, but also a thorny political problem whose resolution very much depends on scientific feasibility. This is no less true in our world: the debates about global warming, pollution, veganism, etc. are all political as well as scientific questions. By refusing to engage on the level of the political, as if it is somehow
beneaththem (or worse, like we see below with Terrance Tao, considering social issues "solved") scientists are shooting themselves and their interests in the foot.Secondly, Robinson wants to highlight the effect that geography has on culture. We get extremely long (and often boring) descriptions of Martian geography to help us place the adaptions that various immigrant cultures are making as they come to Mars. No culture is unchanged, and this is at least partially because of the unique geographical (and other physical) quirks of the planet.
Finally, as some of our characters enter their ~15th decade, Green Mars brings into question the continuity of our identity and its dependence on memory. Are we still the same person that we were 20, 30, 100 years ago? At what point do memories become indistinguishable from facts we could have read in a textbook?
3. Blue Mars
This was my favorite book growing up as a kid, but I found this entry on re-read in the series to be hopelessly fragmented and meandering in its focus. Much of the plot of the book is concerned with the formation of a new government for Mars (a vaguely socialist federation with strict limits on immigration from earth). There's some exploration of colonization of the outer solar system, but it is also hopelessly myopic and bohemian: there's no true political or cultural diversity in any of the colonies that are visited. On a personal level, very few of the first hundred have survived, and the ones that have have basically completed their character arcs. There's some interesting stuff with dealing with memory but other than that I found this book rather forgettable on a personal level.
Conclusions
So why is this culture war? We live in a society that is, for better or worse, driven in large part by scientific progress and research. Many of the big questions of our time: climate change, artificial intelligence, the obesity crisis, the fertility crisis, etc. are not only political, but also scientific questions. To ignore the input of scientists on these issues, like many on this forum want to do, seems incredibly myopic. At the same time, the training that we get as scientists (or at least the training that I have received) does not create people who are really able to participate in the political process. Gell-Mann amnesia is very real in academia: not just about the hot-button topics like race and gender, but also made-up shit like "learning styles", the efficiency of renewable energy, and a general understanding of politics and human psychology. Combine this with a massive ego because of success in one specific area, and you have the idiot savants that Nassim Taleb likes to harp on who cannot compromise or think outside the box. What Robinson is highlighting with his trilogy about colonizing Mars, perhaps the ultimate scientific endeavor, is that unless this changes, the science is not going to get done properly in the real world. As Miguel Unamuno once said, perhaps apocryphally, vencer no es convencer (to defeat is not to convince). The strain of liberal (and perhaps now woke) thought that currently dominates universities is not going to be able to beat the world into submission to its ideas, it has to learn how to participate in the political process and convince people (and perhaps be convinced in turn). Perhaps too this is a lesson that the rationalist community could learn as well, although I think most of you here at TheMotte have absorbed it plenty well.
For me on a personal level this series of books has helped to clarify what a future spiritual belief system might look like for me and the world. I’ve always struggled with the anthropocentrism of Christianity: perhaps something like Viriditas combined with Nietzchian vitalism could expand on the weak points I see in the Christian system.
(Bolding mine) I don't think anyone ever in any side of politics is particularly good at the part I bolded, but certainly the last 10 or so years have been transformative for me in learning of how unimportant this was to self-described liberals. Of course, liberalism doesn't necessarily imply free exchange of ideas and discourse, but it's certainly something I used to associate with them, and too many times I'd hear from a friend about how he went into or wanted to go into an argument with someone with [wrongthink] ideas, with or looking for some tactic to cut through that person's defenses in order to convince them without also looking for tactics by which to allow that person to convince him that [wrongthink] is actually correct.
Going into a conversation or argument looking to convince someone else without allowing for the possibility of oneself being convinced in reverse is just not a winning strategy unless your goal isn't the truth and you have overwhelming force on your side to enforce what you believe is right anyway. Because people can tell when they're being lectured to instead of being engaged with, especially in the long run.
Which reminds me of 2 separate but related phenomena that I keep seeing over and over among the woke left. One is that of "wokeness didn't fail, it was failed by the bigoted populace that was just too bigoted to accept it." This is just a continuation of the "feminism didn't fail, it was failed by the misogynistic populace that was just too misogynistic to accept it," a common sentiment among feminists before "woke" as we understand it today was a common term. I see this commonly enough among both the left and the right and in non-political contexts as well. People love avoiding accountability and blaming others, everywhere and in all contexts.
However, it is entirely and only the responsibility of the ideologues who support an ideology that requires mass buy-in from large swathes of society due to the severe societal changes it pushes to make a convincing case for their ideology, and any failure of the ideology to take hold is entirely the ideologues' fault, and you'd think that these ideologues would be motivated to realize this, in order to more effectively push their ideological changes in society (that they don't seem to realize this indicates either they care more about feeling righteous than about accomplishing meaningful political change or they genuinely believe that they have overwhelming force, or both). It's like how it's always and only the movie studio/marketer/etc.'s fault when a movie bombs, even presuming that it bombed due to society being so filled with bigots who were bigoted against the movie's message/actors/directors/marketers/etc., since no one has an obligation to give money to movie studios.
The other phenomenon is that of ideologues gutting out credible organizations and wearing them as a skin suit in order to launder their ideas through the inertial credibility of the organization while the rest of the world catches up to notice. Academia is the obvious one that people are talking about right now here, but also mainstream journalism and also even fictional media, with stuff like the Hugo awards for science fiction or the Star Wars film franchise or game companies like Bioware or Bungie, where these organizations huff and puff as if people still respect them like before the more recent ideological takeovers without seeming to recognize that you can only wear the skin suit for so long before people notice that the underlying thing isn't delivering on the promise of the label and adjusts their credibility rating accordingly.
In both of these, there's this implicit idea of getting to do whatever one wants and then being apparently confused by the obvious consequence imposed on one by uncontrollable external forces. You can choose your message, but you have no vote on how other people respond to it. If you want other people to respond to your message in a certain way, it is only and entirely your responsibility to sculpt your message to get the results you want.
As much as I hate this analogy, it reminds me of the "nice guy" phenomenon that was all the rage on feminist think pieces about a decade ago, referring to men who appear to believe they're entitled to sex for following all the instructions they were given for attracting a woman, and then lashing out at women when the sex isn't delivered. Instead of taking responsibility for his own failures (i.e. believing the instructions he was given, instead of understanding that part of the test is correctly interpreting these instructions) and fixing it, he just blames women for not filling their role. The opposite gender counterpart would be a woman in her 30s or 40s who had her sexual fun with a large set of male partners while also building her career blaming high value men in their age range for not fulfilling their role of finding them attractive and instead going for younger, less successful, less sexually experienced women. In neither case, does blaming others actually help the person in question, not without overwhelming force to enforce it (which has arguably been the case over the last few decades for the latter case), and in both cases, taking accountability for one's own failure and learning from it seems to be - to me, anyway - the most likely method to bear fruit. But people hate taking accountability more than they love their ideology winning.
This was a really great comment and I think highlights to me why it is so frustrating that science has backed itself into this particular failure mode. Science is supposed to be this system that helps you actually discover truth, and although it doesn't always do so in the most direct fashion (see Kuhn) the truth usually wins out. Scientists with the proper training should be able to apply this epistemic openness to their lives outside of the laboratory, but it seems like the opposite actually occurs. But instead I find many scientists to be incredibly dogmatic and close-minded. Which is what I suppose the system rewards.
Planck's Principle -- that "Science progresses one funeral at a time" -- has reigned for a long time.
I fear that in certain fields, the opposite might even be the case - that the science regresses one funeral at a time. It's not that the older scientists have no biases whatsoever, but it really isn't rare that younger academics (can't really call them scientists in good conscience, tbf) are much more strictly dogmatic and don't even pretend to be interested in the pursuit of truth if it goes against their beliefs.
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