“But the fate of civilization,” Bob suggested.
Slawek shrugged. “That’s your job, right? So I thought I’d mention it. Or really, Pete thought I’d mention it.”
“Thanks, Slawek,” Pete said. “You are a true glaciologist.”
“I am.”
“I think we should drink another round of Drambers to celebrate that.”
“Me too.”
23
It took a while to get a gun. Not easy. Finally he managed it by stealing a rifle and its ammunition from a Swiss man’s closet, where Swiss men so often kept their service rifles. It turned out to be absurdly easy; the country was so safe that quite a few people never locked their doors. Of course Swiss men were ordered to keep their service rifles under lock and key, and they all did that, but some were more careless with their hunting rifles, and he found one of those.
He was ready to act.
He researched his subjects of interest. One of them would be attending a conference in Dübendorf in a month.
So he carried the stolen rifle in a backpack over the Zuriberg, to a parking garage near the conference center in Dübendorf. He took the stairs up to its top floor, then climbed up onto its roof. When he got to the roof he was looking down on the main entrance to the conference center. He assembled the rifle and set it on a wooden stand he had knocked together, and looked through its sight at the entrance area.
His target walked up broad stairs to the entry and turned to say something to an assistant. Blue suit, white shirt, red tie. He looked like he was making a joke.
Frank regarded the man in the crosshairs. He swallowed, aimed again. He could feel his face heating up, also his hands and feet. Finally the man went inside.
Frank put the rifle back in the backpack and carried it down the stairs. Up in the forest, on the hill separating the city from its suburban town, he cast the rifle onto the ground under a tree. Then down the hill, back to his shed.
That had been a criminal, something like a war criminal, there in the crosshairs of that gun. A climate criminal. Few war criminals would kill as many people as that man would. And yet Frank hadn’t pulled the trigger. Hadn’t been able to. A target whose life’s work would drive thousands of species to extinction, and cause millions of people to die. And yet he hadn’t done it.
Maybe he wasn’t as crazy as he thought. Or maybe he had completely lost it. Or simply just lost his nerve. He wasn’t sure anymore. He felt sick, shaky. Like he had just missed getting hit by a bus. That made him angrier than ever. He still wanted to kill one of the people killing the world. A Child of Kali, here in the West. A fellow traveler.
He had seen people die, had been broken by that very sight. So making more death was perhaps not the right response. Hurt people hurt people, one of his therapists had said. This was no doubt true. But it was too sweeping, too easy. It didn’t have to play out like that every time. Though he did want to kill something. People like that oil executive, or that jerk he had lashed out at and knocked down, thoughtless assholes or great people as they might be, some of both, no doubt. They might get killed for their crimes someday, and deserve it too. But not by him. He didn’t care about that guy he had hit, but that was an accident. Shooting someone was not like punching an asshole. He would have to find a different way. Though he still wanted to kill something. It was hard to think of anything else.
24
Just as we are all subject to some perceptual errors due to the nature of our senses and physical reality, we are also subject to some cognitive errors, built into our brains through the period of human evolution, and unavoidable even when known to us.
The perceptual illusions are easy. There are certain patterns of black and white that when printed on a paper circle, and the circle then spun on a stick, the paper will flash with colors in the human eye. Slow the spinning down and the printed pattern is obviously just black and white; speed it up and the colors reappear in our sight. Just the way it is.
Foreshortening is another perceptual distortion we can’t correct for. When standing under a cliff in the mountains and looking up at it, the cliff always appears to be about the same height— say a thousand feet or so. Even if we are under the north wall of the Eiger and know the wall is six thousand feet tall, it still appears to be about a thousand feet tall. Only when you get miles away, like on the lakefront in Thun looking south, can you actually see the immense height of the Nordwand of the Eiger. Right under it, it’s impossible.
Everyone can accept these optical illusions when they are demonstrated; they are undeniably there. But for the cognitive errors, it takes some testing. Cognitive scientists, logicians, and behavioral economists have only recently begun to sort out and name these cognitive errors, and disputes about them are common. But unavoidable mistakes have been demonstrated in test after test, and given names like anchor bias (you want to stick to your first estimate, or to what you have been told), ease of representation (you think an explanation you can understand is more likely to be true than one you can’t). On and on it goes— online there is an excellent circular graphic display of cognitive errors— a wheel of mistakes that both lists them and organizes them into categories, including the law of small numbers, neglect of base rates, the availability heuristic, asymmetrical similarity, probability illusions, choice framing, context segregation, gain/loss asymmetry, conjunction effects, the law of typicality, misplaced causality, cause/effect asymmetry, the certainty effect, irrational prudence, the tyranny of sunk costs, illusory correlations, and unwarranted overconfidence— the graphic itself being a funny example of this last phenomenon, in that it pretends to know how we think and what would be normal.
As with perceptual illusions, knowing that cognitive errors exist doesn’t help us to avoid them when presented with a new problem. On the contrary, these errors stay very consistent, in that they are committed by everyone tested, tend toward the same direction of error, are independent of personal factors of the test takers, and are incorrigible, in that knowing about them doesn’t help us avoid them, nor to distrust our reasoning in other situations. We are always more confident of our reasoning than we should be. Indeed overconfidence, not just expert overconfidence but general overconfidence, is one of the most common illusions we experience. No doubt this analysis is yet another example: do we really know any of this?
Oh dear! What do these recent discoveries in cognitive science mean? Some say they just mean humans are poor at statistics. Others assert they are as important a discovery as the discovery of the subconscious.
Consider again the nature of ideology, that necessary thing, which allows us to sort out the massive influx of information we experience. Could ideology also be a cognitive illusion, a kind of necessary fiction?
Yes. Of course. We have to create and employ an ideology to be able to function; and we do that work by way of thinking that is prone to any number of systemic and one might even say factual errors. We have never been rational. Maybe science itself is the attempt to be rational. Maybe philosophy too. And of course philosophy is very often proving we can’t think to the bottom of things, can’t get logic to work as a closed system, and so on.
And remember also that in all of this discussion so far, we are referring to the normal mind, the sane mind. What happens when, starting as we do from such a shaky original position, sanity is lost, we defer to another discussion. Enough now to say just this: it can get very bad.
25
Zurich in winter is often smothered in fog and low clouds for months on end. Prevailing winds from the north ram the clouds coming in from the Atlantic against the wall of the Alps, and there they stick. Gray day after gray day, in a gray city by a gray lake, split by a gray river. On many of these days a train ride or drive of less than a hundred kilometers will lift one out of the fog into alpine sunlight. Then again, it’s the time of year to get down to work.
So Mary worked. She read reports, she took meetings, she talked to people all over the world about projects, she w
rote legislative proposals for stronger national laws governing legal standing for those future people and creatures and things without standing. Every day was full. In the evenings she often went out with Badim and others of the team. They would usually walk down to the Niederdorf, and either cross a bridge and eat at the Zeughauskeller, or stay on their side in the dark alleys around the Grossmünster, and gather around the long table at the back of the Casa Bar.
On this day the sun had broken through the clouds, so they took the tram down to Bürkliplatz and then another one toward Tiefenbrunnen, and ate at Tres Kilos, which they usually did only for birthday parties or other big occasions. But this was a day to celebrate. First sun of the year, February 19; by no means a Zurich record, as Jurgen noted lugubriously. The Swiss like to keep records for these kinds of weather phenomena.
A short day, so that by the time they got to the restaurant, night had long since fallen. The string of chili-shaped lights draping the entryway glowed like spots of fire. Inside someone else was celebrating too, and just as they walked in all the lights went off and a waitress carrying a cake with sparklers sparking off it walked in from the kitchen to the sounds of Stevie Wonder’s “Happy Birthday.” They cheered and sang with the rest, and sat back near the kitchen where they always did if they could. Mary sat next to Estevan and Imeni, and listened to them flirt by bickering. This was getting to be an old routine, but they seemed stuck in it.
“We are the Ministry for the Future,” Estevan insisted to her, “not the ministry to solve all possible problems that can be solved now. We have to pick our battles or else it becomes just an everything.”
“But everything is going to be a problem in the future,” Imeni said. “I don’t see how you can deny that. So if you pick and choose, you’re just dodging our brief. And end up in a shitty future too by the way.”
“Still we have to prioritize. We’ve only got so much time.”
“This is a priority! Besides we’re a group, we have time.”
“Maybe you do.”
Imeni elbowed him, then poured them both another margarita from the pitcher, which had just arrived. They shifted to a discussion of the day’s news from Mauna Kea: carbon dioxide had registered at 447 parts per million, the highest ever recorded for wintertime. This despite all the reports from individual countries showing significant drops in emissions, even the US, even China, even India. Even Brazil and Russia. No: all the big emitters were reporting reductions, and yet the global total still grew. There had to be some unreported sources; or people were lying. Opinions as to which it was were divided around the table. Probably it was a bit of both.
“If people are lying, it means they know they are in the wrong. But if there are secondary emissions no one knows about, maybe stimulated by the heat already baked in, that would be worse. So we have to hope people are lying.”
“Easy to hope for that, you always get it!”
“Come on, don’t be cynical.”
“Just realistic. When have people ever told the truth about this particular question?”
“People? Do you mean scientists or politicians?”
“Politicians of course! Scientists aren’t people.”
“I thought it was the reverse!”
“Neither scientists nor politicians are people.”
“Careful now. Mary here is a politician, and I’m a scientist.”
“No. You are both technocrats.”
“So, that means we are scientific politicians?”
“Or political scientists. Which is to say, politicized scientists. Given that political science is a different thing entirely.”
“Political science is a fake thing, if you ask me. Or at least it has a fake name. I mean, where’s the science in it?”
“Statistics, maybe?”
“No. They just want to sound solid. They’re history at best, economics at worst.”
“I sense a poli sci major here, still living the trauma.”
“It’s true!”
Laughter around the table. Another round of margaritas. The bill was going to be stupendous— Tres Kilos, like all Zurich restaurants, maybe all restaurants, made most of its money by way of outrageous liquor prices. But probably her team thought the ministry would be paying for it tonight. Which was true. Mary sighed and let them refill her glass.
She looked at the table, listened to Estevan and Imeni flirt. Feeling each other out, but subtly, as they were with the group. In-house romances were never a good idea, and yet they always happened. No one was going to be doing this job for life; and that was true of all jobs. So why not? Where else were you going to meet people? So it happened. It had happened to her, long ago. She could recall this very kind of banter between her and Martin, long ago in London. Mary and Marty! Two Irish in London, a Prot and a Catholic, trying to find some way to get their claws into the system. Now he had been dead for over twenty years.
Quickly and firmly she refocused on the present. Estevan and Imeni were very much alive. And Mary could see why they might take to each other, despite their obvious differences. Well, who knew. Their banter was a little brittle, a little forced. And what drew people to each other was fundamentally unknowable. For all she knew they had already become lovers and then broken up, and were now negotiating a settlement. No way to be sure, not from the boss’s angle.
At the end of the long meal she hauled herself to her feet and calculated her level of inebriation— mild as always these days, she was careful, she was with her colleagues, her employees, and it wouldn’t do to be unseemly; and her youth had taught her some hard lessons, as well as given her a pretty high tolerance for alcohol. All was well there, she could glide along in her crowd to the nearest tram stop and get on one of the blue trams, transfer at Bürkliplatz and catch one going up the hill, saying goodbye to Bob and Badim and traveling on with Estevan and Imeni. Then she got off at Kirche Fluntern, waving goodbye to her two young companions as they headed onward, curious about them, but already thinking about other things: tea, bed, whether she would be able to sleep.
She was walking down Hochstrasse when a man walking the other way turned abruptly and began walking by her side. She looked at him, startled; he was staring at her with wild eyes.
“Keep going,” he commanded her in a low choked voice. “I’m taking you into custody here.”
“What?” she exclaimed, and stopped in her tracks.
He reached out and snapped some kind of clasp around her wrist. In his other hand he showed her a small snub-nosed pistol. The clasp now locked around her wrist was one half of some kind of clear plastic handcuffs, it appeared, with the other clasp locked around his wrist. “Come on,” he said, starting to walk and pulling her along with him. “I want to talk with you. Come with me and I won’t hurt you. If you don’t come with me now, I’ll shoot you.”
“You won’t,” she said faintly, but she found herself walking by his side, tugged along by the wrist.
“I will,” he said with a blazing glare at her. “I don’t care about anything.”
She gulped and kept her mouth shut. Her heart was racing. The drink she thought hadn’t affected her was rushing through her body like fire, such that she almost staggered.
He walked her right to her building’s door, surprising her.
“In we go,” he said. “Come on, do it.”
She punched in her code and opened the outer door. Up the flights of stairs to her apartment. Unlocked and opened the door. Inside. Her place looked strange now that she was a prisoner in it.
“Phone,” he said. “Turn it off and put it down here.” He indicated the table by the door where she indeed often left her stuff. She took it from her purse, turned it off, dropped it on the table.
“Do you have any other GPS on you?” he asked.
“What?”
“Are you chipped? Do you have any other GPS stuck to you?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t think so,” she added.
He gave her a wondering look, inc
redulous and disapproving. From the same pocket that held the gun, he took out a small black box, flicked a tab on it, moved it around her body. He checked its screen, nodded. “Okay, let’s go.”
“But I don’t—”
“Let’s go! I have a place right around the corner.”
“I thought you said you just wanted to talk to me!”
“That’s right.”
“Then do it here! Unhook me and I’ll talk to you. If you drag me out of here, I’ll fall down as soon as someone is looking at us and scream for help. If you only want to talk, it will go better here. I’ll feel safer. I’ll listen more.”
He glared at her for a while. “All right,” he said at last. “Why not.”
He shook his head, looking baffled and confused. She saw that and thought to herself, This man is sick in the head. That was even more frightening. He reached down with his free hand, unlocked the clasp around her wrist. She kneaded that wrist with her other hand, stared at him, thinking furiously. “I need to go to the bathroom.”
He glared. “I want to check it first.”
They went in the bathroom, and he looked in the cabinet, and then behind the shower screen. She supposed she might have had some kind of lifeline system in there, or another phone or an alarm system. No such luck. When he was satisfied he walked out the door, leaving it open. She went in and stood there for a second. Then the door swung almost shut— he had given it a push. Propriety. A polite madman. Well, it was something. She sat on the toilet and peed, trying to think the situation through. Nothing came to her. She stood, flushed, went back out to him.
“Do you want some tea?” she asked.
“No.”
The Ministry for the Future Page 9
