The paper I didn’t present at TexMoot
The theme of this year’s TexMoot was “how fictional worlds teach us to care for this one”. For once, I was not the designated curmudgeon. That honor went to Joe Ricke, who started off the first talk by expressing uncertainty that the theme of the conference was something that even existed. He was referring to an immediate connection: that a reader would read a work of speculative fiction and come away with ideas about what to do the next day (month, year…) to save the planet. And he’s certainly right.
It’s always nice to hear about an intellectual error of which I’m not guilty. That’s not at all the way I interpreted the theme. A more likely effect that speculative fiction has on the reader is to get us used to thinking on a scale of parsecs of distance and centuries of time.
Such an attitude is in direct opposition to the demands of everyday economics. Most people are trying to make a living1, which leads to a short-term focus. The value of gains and losses is time-dependent — money now is worth more than money some time in the future. If you don’t exploit all the things you have for profit right now, they’ll be taken over by someone who will. That impulse in the market economy caused most of the environmental destruction we’ve perpetrated in the modern era.
Speculative fiction can turn the reader’s relative valuation of possibilities away from the short-term, market-driven default. When we look at a tree, we’re not seeing just the fruit it produces, or its lumber value, but also Ents, and Yggdrasil, and all the other trees we know from literature. We see with different values. When I mentioned a half-baked version of this idea in class, Sørina expanded it with, “because we’re adding love to the calculation.” Which is an extraordinary thought. Apparently, among the powers of literature is to catalyze the reaction of love and mathematics.
As it turns out, the source of this idea is something I read long ago and forgot about. There’s a very similar thought from E.T. Jaynes, in his book 2 that launched Bayesian statistics to its current prominence. Jaynes is talking about the concept from decision theory of the “loss function” — a way to quantify what we stand to gain or lose from each possible choice we can make.
Failure to judge one’s own loss function correctly is one of the major dangers that humans face. Having a little intelligence, one can invent myths out of his own imagination, and come to believe them. Worse, one person may persuade thousands of others to believe his private myths, as the sordid history of religious, political, and military disasters shows.
As the near-solecism “private myth” indicates, Jaynes is using the word to mean “falsehood”. Writing in the mid twentieth century, his thoughts were naturally going to be dominated by the negative implications of acting on fictional grounds, but “myth” has more meanings than that one. We now know that our standard way of thinking about nature is leading to disaster, so now myths can also be an opportunity to improve outcomes by changing our loss function. Expanding the elements of the computation to include all the lives involved, and the billions of years it took to bring them about, and the global (at least) results of our actions, are exactly the way speculative fiction has brought about its share of the change in attitudes to the environment that we’ve seen in the past 50 years.
Writers of both science fiction and fantasy know they’re doing this. Arthur C. Clarke said (several times), “If you take me too seriously, you’ll go broke. But if your children don’t take me seriously enough, they’ll go broke.”3 Those children are whom we call Generation X; the richest of us seem to have taken Clarke very seriously indeed.
Notes
Notes
- Considering the alternative, who can blame them?
- Jaynes, E. T. (2003). Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, section 13.12.2. Now it’s from the CUP; back in the 1990s when I read it, we could download it for free.
- Clarke, A. C. (1978). The View from Serendip. United States: Ballantine Books.
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