Hope for Humanity
The Ministry for the Future & Humankind
With the continued havoc of COVID-19, the insanity of what passes for politics in America, and the Ukraine-Russia War, 2022 is yet another year we all wish good riddance. But there are two works I read this year, one at the beginning and the other at the end, that give me hope—honest to goodness hope. On this Christmas Eve, and as we approach the New Year, I wish to leave you, my faithful readers, on such a note. Many of you I know. Some of you I do not. But whoever you are, wherever you find yourself this Christmas season, know of my gratitude for reading this newsletter and growing our audience. May 2023 bring joy, peace, and blessing to your house and household.
I. The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
I confess I’ve never been much of a science fiction reader. I dabbled in Ray Bradbury in middle school and went through a Kurt Vonnegut phase in adolescence. But with the exception of Nineteen Eighty-four, which I recently listened to again as an audio book, the genre makes for a gaping hole in my library. So it was out of character for me when I grabbed Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future in a bookstore last year before going on vacation. The book seemed to pick me, in that way they often can, and I’d heard of the buzz surrounding the novel. Reading any fiction is a labor of love for me. I read slowly, my mind more suited to the immediate information dump of non-fiction or the embodied, visual quality of plays. But I devoured Robinson’s book in a matter of days, swept away by its vision and knocked out by its cognitive cornucopia.
KSM had a moment during the pandemic. Everyone seemed to be reading him. Barack Obama named The Ministry for the Future one of his favorite books of 2021 and the author was given a glowing profile in The New Yorker. Ezra Klein interviewed him on his podcast, calling the novel the most important book he’d read that year. Robinson is a living Renaissance man. He holds a doctorate in English from UC San Diego (he wrote his dissertation on Philip K. Dick), where he studied under the great Marxist literary critic Frederic Jameson. He’s an avid hiker and naturalist, by his calculations having spent two years of his life in aggregate in the Sierra Nevadas. And he’s a political activist and philosopher, a leading democratic socialist, whom Jacobin has held a conversation with each of the last three years.
The Ministry for the Future takes place in a near future in which global warming has reached its apocalyptic stages (much sooner than anticipated). It opens with a “wet-bulb” heat wave in India, a nightmarish weather event in which sweat ceases to evaporate despite high temperatures. In this scenario, human beings are literally cooked to death; the Indian disaster kills twenty million souls. Robinson depicts the catastrophe through the eyes of Frank, an American aid worker, who miraculously survives but is traumatized to the point of madness by the scenes he witnesses: children turning red, scores of bodies floating in a lake. The chapter reads like a horror story, and it is. Except this horror could really happen (and in some places already has).
The catastrophe catalyzes a series of events in the short- and long-term that propel the world to reverse climate change before it leads to the extinction of the human race. But the agents of change aren’t the leaders of nations, or at least not the ones you’d expect. Robinson works at the macro and micro level, imagining dozens of actors and groups attacking climate change from a hundred different angles, in asymmetric warfare. One chapter’s narrated through the point of view of an atomic particle, another personifies the free market. These characters operate independently of each other and with dim awareness of how their collective efforts will all add up. Indians launch a massive eco-terrorist campaign (which Robinson rightly construes as a just war) that brings down a hundred commercial flights on a single day and assassinates fossil fuel executives in their beds like ninjas. Drilling companies are repurposed to pump sea water back onto the surface of glaciers to refreeze. Military jets blanket the skies with chemicals to block out solar radiation.
As you can see, the science in the book isn’t, in fact, fictive. The technologies are ones we already possess; flying saucers and hyperdrives are nowhere to be found (but airship travel returns in glorious comfort). The imaginary aspect of the book lies with the policy responses the characters make, not the world they inhabit. Robinson paints on an immense canvas, dealing in decades. His heroine is Mary Murphy, a former foreign minister of Ireland who helms the titular agency—a U.N. created office whose mandate is to advocate and operate on behalf of future generations. Her signature policy is to convince the central monetary authorities of wealthy nations to create a carbon coin, a new currency that will be paid to countries and companies for leaving their fossil fuel reserves underground. In other words, it reverses the incentive structure of energy economics, and rewards countries for targeted inaction. This literally buys humanity time not only to slow global warming but lower it. The world, ironically, is saved by bankers. Joshua Rothman captures the novel’s clarifying perspective in his New Yorker piece:
The map on the inside of your hotel-room door becomes suddenly riveting once the alarm goes off. This is one reason The Ministry for the Future can wring suspense out of financial negotiations. But the novel’s concreteness is also compelling because it puts into relief the strangeness of our outlook. Whenever we stare directly at the mess we’re in, the solutions we think of seem implausible. (A carbon coin? Backed by the world’s central banks?) And yet, because the stakes are so high, our skepticism threatens to become nihilism—an acceptance of the inevitability of civilizational disaster. Ultimately, this nihilism is a kind of sin against the future—a “betrayal,” as Greta Thunberg puts it—and so reading The Ministry for the Future is a charged experience. It’s normal, when taking in a science-fiction story, to wonder whether the future it depicts is plausible. It’s unusual for the future we wonder about to be our own.
Robinson’s Murphy is a savvy operator and steady hand at the tiller. Deeply ethical, she struggles with the ambiguous moral parameters that distinguish “legitimate” and “illegitimate” climate action. At some point, she realizes that despite her best efforts, the timetable is still against her agency, and she entertains the advice of colleagues to engage in covert ops to even the odds. It’s a chance encounter with Frank in Switzerland, where her headquarters are located, that galvanizes her. Their relationship, which she keeps quiet, gives her a face to what’s at stake in all this. So too do shadowy attempts on her life, which forces her to flee to an undisclosed location in the Alps. The scene in which she scales a glacier to reach the hideout forms the centerpiece of the novel. Robinson describes how the interaction between this small person and the immense natural wonder shapes Mary’s consciousness as she navigates the crag. It’s this immersive sensory contact with the planet that breaks down the false subject-object division in the psyche, reshaping her cognitive patterns and plumbing the depths of her soul even as she becomes a spelunker.
As you read, you feel your head expanding. Robinson grounds his policy prescriptions in human relationships, and you come to hold deep affection for his characters. The novel discloses how the environmental crisis is stied inextricably to political economy. Humanity can overcome climate change only by pushing beyond capitalism, and The Ministry for the Future imagines how the road to a habitable planet and global democratic socialism is the same:
Could anyone kill King Capital? Mary doubted it, but if anyone could do it, surely it was these insiders, the people running the system. These thirteen people were close enough to the royal body to get the knives in before anyone could stop them. Et tu, Brute? Yes, Caesar, me too. Die. Into the ash can of history.
The Empire always strikes back, of course, and Caesar exacts a price from Murphy and her allies for their regicide. But the novel, like Moses, gives you a vision of a land flowing with milk and honey. All we need is a Joshua to lead us—or rather, to become a thousand Joshuas ourselves. Kim Stanley Robinson has my vote to be Minister for the Future.
II. Humankind by Rutger Bregman
One of the nostrums you hear about why the vision of socialists like Robinson is impossible is that it defies human nature. This pronouncement is uttered with a kind of “game-set-match” finality, a teaching handed down by God on high. It’s the voice of the “practical” parent, the experienced elder wagging his finger at the hopeless idealism of the young and foolish. But is it true? Like much conventional wisdom, this is pessimism masquerading as realism, and lacks an actual intellectual foundation. So, what is human nature? Can we even know? And if so, what kind of social arrangement does it demand?
One of the greatest courses I’ve ever taken was “Human Nature, Ethics, & Society,” with Prof. Mark Freeman of the Holy Cross psychology department. A wet-behind-the-ears freshman, I immediately responded to this humanistic and scientific exploration of the fundamental questions of our existence. Are we good or bad? What accounts for evils, like the Holocaust, and goodness, like Denmark’s mass rescue of Jews during that same Holocaust? How can we live together to achieve justice, beauty, and happiness? Mark weaved together philosophy and psychology, art and literature to take us on our journey, aided by his dramatic lectures and socratic questions. From Plato’s Republic to Augustine’s Confessions, Primo Levi to Iris Murdoch, the class was an earnest, impassioned investigation of matters that seemed as urgent as never before.
That semester, the United States launched its invasion of Iraq. Like many a young conservative (and to my everlasting shame), I supported the war at the outset. Mark’s course was the first intellectual experience that challenged my rigid thinking and launched me on an adventure of the mind that’s never ceased. In my senior year, I became a TA for the class. The change in my views by that point was extraordinary. Over the course of three years, I’d learned of the lies, propaganda, and torture that the Bush Administration was perpetrating as it prosecuted the “War on Terror” (a title worthy of Orwell). Combined with my liberal arts education and embrace of the radical dimension of the Gospel, this confrontation with American war crimes and atrocities woke me up from my naive jingoism. I’ve never looked back.
My conclusion after two rounds in Mark’s course was, I thought, realistic. Human beings are a mixed bag of altruism and selfishness, averse to killing and prone to compassion, yet easily capable of cruelty. Often our Jekyll and Hyde nature is on display in one and the same event: in the wake of a terrorist attack, for instance, people rush to help perfect strangers, even when it’s not their job. At the same time, our inhibitions to commit violence are learned manners that sit on top of aggressive impulses, inherited from our animal past. Like a cage that houses a beast, our civilized culture is an artificial bulwark against our savage instincts.
These defenses are weak, though, and modern social engineers have become adept at breaking them down and unleashing the monster within. Deep down, we take pleasure in wickedness, delight in inflicting pain, and savor the taste of blood. All it takes is a little conditioning, and we become death machines. We can achieve collective good, but this takes so much more effort. And outside of an ethical system encouraging us on the right path, we succumb to our baser impulses.
I thought this was a prudent view of human behavior, until I read Humankind: A Hopeful History by the Dutch thinker Rutger Bregman a few weeks ago. The book came out in 2020, and I’m kicking myself for not getting to it sooner. I’d been suspicious of the text and its premise—that human beings are fundamentally friendly, sociable, and highly averse to violence—when I’d heard it, dismissing Bregman as a lightweight (even though I’d found his previous book, Utopia for Realists, highly convincing).
Well, another lesson for me in not making assumptions, and also not being a cynic! Humankind is a rigorous, substantive, mind blowing work that uses hard evidence from the social and natural sciences to dismantle the accepted, jaundiced view of the status quo. It should be required reading for one and all, especially in schools (and replace the noxious myths taught by standard texts like Lord of the Flies). I burned through the book (in part thanks to Bergman’s breezy style) as one dark belief after another was demolished:
That human beings are naturally aggressive and violent animals.
That underneath the veneer of manners, there’s a killer inside us all.
That the prehistoric past was one of constant war and violence between competing tribes.
That people easily obey authority figures to carry out atrocities.
That we’re all self-interested and self-absorbed, never lifting a helping hand when others suffer, in need of extrinsic rewards and punishments to motivate good behavior.
The truth, as Bregman demonstrates with ample evidence, is that we evolved—literally through natural selection—to be friendly and social. Humans instinctively prefer to cooperate and resolve differences in an amicable manner. We seek nourishing relationships and comradeship; share what we have with each other according to need; and treat people with dignity, justice, and care. In moments of crisis we rush to help others on impulse, and we possess powerful intrinsic motivations to work, create, and build fulfilling lives and flourishing communities. Not only do we dislike antisocial, selfish, and mean people, but systems built on self-interest and surveillance turn out to be inefficient, destroy individual happiness, and ruin the common life of all.
If all that sounds hopelessly naive and too good to be true, I can only say that I was resistant to these claims myself—until I heard the facts. Bregman opens his account with the real “Lord of the Flies” case: the story of a group of boys from the Pacific island of Tonga who got stranded on a rocky, deserted atoll for fifteen months in the 1960s. Instead of descending into a fascist dystopia, as William Golding imagined, they built a democratic society that resolved conflicts peacefully and allowed them to work together not only to survive, but thrive. They forged an ineradicable bond that remains to this day. Turns out that when we’re freed of the manacles of “civilization" and its discontents, we revert to the egalitarian behavior that typified our species during the tens of thousands of years in which we lived as hunter-gatherers. This anecdote is backed up by research showing how infants instinctually prefer compassionate people and cooperative behavior.
Ok, you might say, that’s quaint. But what about data like the infamous Stanford Prison study or Milgram experiment? Don’t those cases—and the evidence of the genocides of the 20th century—prove that, however nice we are by birth, those traits are easily overwhelmed by our obedience to authority? Doesn’t our tribalism pressure us to follow the herd and succumb to the mentality of the mob? I’d studied these experiments closely in Mark’s class; at the time, their findings were taken as gospel. Turns out, though, they were false prophets. Bregman deconstructs their findings to the reader’s astonishment, detailing how investigations years later revealed how the psychologists running these experiments, like Philip Zimbardo, manipulated the actions of the participants to get the desired results. They wanted to prove that man is evil, and they poisoned the proceedings to produce that outcome.
Zimbardo and his colleague, for example, pit the “guards” and “prisoners” against each other, in defiance of the express wishes of the students playing the roles. Milgram, for his part, failed to disclose data from his experiment that mitigated against its worst interpretation. Turns out most people who took part really thought they were helping the “scientist” by administering the electric shock. A high percentage resisted the invitations of the instructor as they became aware of the harm involved, and as soon as the instructor turned truly autocratic—explicitly commanding them, for the first time, to turn the dial—every volunteer refused. Far from obeying tyrannical authority, we subvert it. Yes, we have strong inclinations to follow the group, but those normally lead to cooperative outcomes unless perverted by malicious influencers (who are aberrant individuals we’d have banished from the community in our hunter-gatherer days).
But what about all that evidence from prehistoric times of violence, assembled by “geniuses” like Steven Pinker? Bregman dismantles it and brings the receipts. In reality, warfare did not start to plague Homo sapiens until after the development of permanent settlement and, crucially, private property. What about all the killing done in modern war? Data strongly indicate that most casualties are inflicted at a physical or psychological distance—75% or more of the deaths in World War II were caused by bombs, grenades, and artillery shells. Intimate violence in combat is rare, so averse are even soldiers to murdering their fellow man. Our Achilles heel is our inbred aversion to what we (initially) find “strange” or “other,” from food to sounds to smells. This can lead to xenophobia when encouraged and exploited by duplicitous leaders. But that tendency is mitigated the closer we live to the supposed “other,” and is easily overcome by personal experience with cultures and people we don’t know. Within a short amount of time, the unfamiliar becomes normal.
In other words, in the heavyweight fight between Hobbes and Rousseau, we can declare a winner: Hobbes was wrong and Rousseau (for the most part) right. The state of nature isn’t a war of all against all, but a peaceful one ruined by superimposed hierarchical power structures. (Rousseau was inaccurate, though, in his vision of a solitary state of nature—in fact, we’re naturally social creatures). When the BBC duplicated the Stanford Prison experiment decades later and filmed it for a planned reality TV show (this time without influencing the volunteers) they watched in disbelief as the men all played games together and created a communist utopia. This was bad for ratings—which gives us a clue as to why news media, crime authors, and movie makers don’t depict normal human behavior: it’s so insufferably nice as to bore us to tears. We’re entertained by what’s abnormal—that’s why we flock to sensational material like Making of a Murderer.
As Bregman puts it in interviews, science now proves that anarchists are correct about human nature, not conservatives. Our “wise” elders live in a fantasy, not reality. The kids aren’t just alright—they’re right, period. The problem is that anarchists struggle to build institutions that reflect this reality. But armed with what social studies and experiments have verified to be true, Bregman believes we can reform systems to allow our innate cooperative instincts to flourish and lead to a better world. Essential to this effort is guarding us from the machinations of those (few) power-hungry sociopaths who consistently get ahead and dominate the rest of us in the current competitive culture. The Dutchman lays the philosophical foundation, in other words, for things like democracy-by-lottery. He explores the policy ramifications for schools, prisons, and businesses, using real-world examples already taking place. The implications are vast, including for Christian theology, something I’m working through.
He concludes the text with a moving account of the Christmas Truce that spontaneously broke out in 1914 between the trenches of World War I. I’d heard of this event, but hadn’t studied it closely. Bregman’s description brought tears to my eyes. The Nativity of the Lord prompted privates and corporals to make friendly overtures on their own accord. They soon saw that, contrary to the propaganda of politicians and newspapers back home, the “enemy” were just like them—scared, cold, homesick boys who’d joined the army just to experience some comradeship and adventure, not kill their neighbors. Left to their own devices, the soldiers would’ve ended that war after five months. For weeks they resisted orders to fight, their collective singing of “O Come Let Us Adore Him” and other carols ringing out across no man’s land. They cooked meals together, played soccer, and even warned each other of impending attacks. As they discovered their common brotherhood—and their shared family in Christ—all fell quiet on the Western Front.
Humankind follows up this story with similar astonishing tales from Columbia and South Africa, which beggar belief. But believe we can and should. This Christmas, if you want to experience true gratitude for humanity and life itself, do yourself a favor and read this book. You’ll feel so much better about our beautiful species and hopeful about what we can achieve if we are allowed to do what we naturally do: come together in freedom, solidarity, and trust. God bless us, everyone.
Thanks for the reviews. We need to hope as humans, and we need the specific hope of a humane future.
Too good a review. I'll be reading those books soon.