The picture of the future world is also, almost always, a picture of an alternative present: a state of things in terms of which, from the standpoint of which, it is possible to critique daily reality, or to find it more bearable, or to justify it. Which are three very different psychological uses for the counterfactual, rolled together and made available together, even when, as in the Soviet case, the future in question is a compulsory one, an organising destination which everyone is supposed to apply to make narrative sense of present events. The Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s seems to me to have been a society haunted by its hopes in a peculiarly powerful, equivocal way. It was a place that, in its very recent past, had granted a hopeful goal an unlimited precedence over actual human lives, and then stepped back from mass murder without ever fully acknowledging what had happened, leaving hope tethered in private experience to a layer of sorrow and suffering; and it was a place that ceaselessly mobilised hope as self-deception, ‘psychoprophylaxis’, compulsory pretending, applied to push you into ignoring all the defects of reality; and yet it was also a place that admitted louder and louder, the harder it lent on hope as anaesthetic, the need for the present to be redeemed or transcended. Hope revealed and concealed the nature of the times. The USSR was haunted by horror and utopia at the same time. I wanted, by picking the most sympathetically geeky and cybernetic version of hope, to make us feel the force of the haunting. (Us now; us outside the experience chronologically, or geographically, or politically.)
Meanwhile the fairy-tale framing of events is supposed to bring the magical interpretation of the counterfactual to the surface. But not, I hope, to estranging effect: not by banishing a particularly Russian story into the realm of local folklore. The book’s insistence that the dream of planned plenty is twentieth-century magic, a cultural script or spell (grammar, grimoire) with connections stretching back to the hunger-dreams of the ancestors, is intended to suggest the effect that enchantment of this kind is normal, universal. That the entwined sense of possibility/failure is threaded through times of change or choice in all sorts of societies at all sorts of times. Its presence is not to be taken as confirmation of the absurdity of any particular hope it gets attached to. History is made with refractory, recursively patterned material, always. There is always available, in the human repertoire, the move of laying the imaginary against the real, and taking it as the standard by which the real is judged, and found wanting.
And surely this is right, as well as dangerous. Surely we have to grant imagination the power to keep interrogating what happens to exist, and to keep asking if it couldn’t be better. The ‘otherwise’ at the end of the book is supposed to be open enough to gather into it our general suspicion that some kind of less wasteful and destructive composition of the human pattern is possible, as well the specific longing of the socialist tradition for some kinder measure to dance to than the zombie-hop of the commodities. It isn’t in there just as an all-purpose rhetorical dreamcatcher, or as an exercise in the novelist’s impersonal sympathy. That’s my yearning you hear in the Akademgorodok wind, too. But it seems to me that to keep faith with the power of the imaginary requires you also to keep the most honest tally you can of its costs. Which is notoriously hard to do, of course, without reliable prices.
5. History and comedy
Praise for the novelty or innovativeness of the book’s form has been overplayed. The overall patterning of it is fiddly, but the pieces of which the pattern is made are as straightforward as I could make them, and not just because, as I get older, I increasingly think that simple is more interesting (and difficult to achieve) than complicated. It’s also that I had lots of very well-established precedents to draw on. On the historical-novel side, the whole Tolstoy-does-Napoleon recipe for dramatising the viewpoints of the grand historical figures, and the equally available rule of thumb that tells you how to mix the documented and the imagined to create the illusion of comprehensiveness. And, drawing on SF, I had the scientist-fictions of Ursula Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson to follow. My Kantorovich very clearly has the DNA of Le Guin’s Shevek and Robinson’s Sax Russell in him. Not to mention – as I’ve carefully confessed in the notes – that the whole alternation of character-driven scenes with italicised authorial narration is lifted straight out of Robinson’s Red Mars. And collections of linked short stories that fill in different vertebrae of a narrative spine are not exactly unheard-of, either, from Kipling to Alice Munro. I am proud of the two ‘machine’ sections, set in Lebedev’s logic and Lebedev’s lungs, one in which determinacy produces indeterminacy, the other in which the arrow goes the other way; but it’s not like Don DeLillo doesn’t already exist, and Pynchon, and for that matter Nicholson Baker. It’s not as though there isn’t a blazed trail for paying imaginative attention to system.
But Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate occupies a special place for me, as an object of admiration and source for borrowable techniques. For one thing, it is a masterclass in how the toolkit of socialist realism can be turned to heterodox purposes. For another, to be more frivolous, the novel is a monument of imaginative and moral witness – I can’t read Sofya Levinton’s journey to the gas chamber without weeping helplessly – but line by line the prose is not so fabulous that it forces you the way reading Tolstoy does into endless Wayne’s World-ish cries of ‘I’m not worthy!’ Grossman seems to be a more assimilable master from whom to learn.
Life and Fate, however, is tragedy, while Red Plenty is comedy, albeit unhappy comedy. This might mean that the book is open-ended, leaving the characters (and leaving them is what it frequently does) with something more fluid than tragedy’s inevitable arcs of descent. Or it might mean a kind of airless comic closure, a sealing shut of the possibilities of the fictional strand of the book because the story all takes place under the overhang of non-fictional certainties, which suck all genuine life out of words like ‘hope’ in the story, leaving only ironic slapstick behind. Needless to say, I’d rather the former were true. But I can’t adjudicate. The way the book assembles itself in other minds, the patterns of effect that my intentions settle into there, aren’t within my competence at all. I haven’t got any interpretative authority over the thing.
What I can say is that the whole interrelation of the fictional and non-fictional elements in the book was set up as my improvised solution to the problem of allowing a story with a known end – failure – to take on some unpredictable life. I wanted to permit some space for hope, for expectancy, in a situation which would, I thought, be perceived by most people as self-evidently over, done with, a closed ledger, productive of neither interesting questions nor sympathetic human emotion. It seemed to me that if I stipulated the facts, and used them as a kind of authoritative backdrop or sounding board, I might then allow myself a cleared space next to them in which there was room for something else to expand, something looser, composed of moments of experience rather than of reasoning about outcomes. And experience isn’t teleological, even if it’s the experience of hope. Its truth as experience doesn’t depend on what happens next. But to create this zone of not-fact, free as story because of what it wasn’t, I had to create a ‘historical’ narrative which represented solidity, which was to be taken as the singular and dependable truth, even when I was being highly opinionated and questionable in my judgements, as in the italicised sections’ dismissal of the Bolsheviks before 1914 as a tiny political cult. In a conjured-up tension with a certain truth, fiction could billow out into undetermined life. (I hoped.)
But that isn’t what history is. History as practised by historians is not an invocation of unquestionable fact, at all. It’s a vast collective text, implicitly discursive, in a state not only of continual revision but of continual argument over method. Even in its most narrative, singly-authored forms, it poses continual questions about representation, and in this respect is not so very far away from fiction at all. The reason why, in Red Plenty, the two genres remain distinct, with a historical apparatus (italicised intros + footnotes)
of assertive statements, is that both strands of the book, both components, are in truth equally rhetorical. The ‘history’ does not contain anything that I know or believe to be untrue. But it is there to help fiction live, to pull open the space of not-certainty. If, instead, it has the effect of capping off and closing down the fiction, that will be – well, not the first time in my writing that I have managed to contrive the reverse of my intentions.
On the subject of comedy, though, and its not-necessarily-happy qualities, can I bring in Henri Bergson? He talks13 about the internal equivalent of the ‘mechanical inelasticity’ of the pratfall being the state of adapting ourselves ‘to a past and therefore imaginary situation, when we ought to be shaping our conduct with the reality which is present’. Hence the comedy of absent-mindedness. Bergson sticks to the past for his example: but it would work, too, as an explanation of what happens when a person (or a whole society) gives priority to the future. Comedy is one of the effects of ceaselessly pretending – or under compulsion, pretending to pretend – that the ideal society to come should shape conduct more than the disappointing present one. If you try to live in the palace that hasn’t been built yet, you’ll collide with the furniture of your actual tenement, over and over, and then be obliged to pretend not to notice. The USSR, on this account, could be seen as a society of compulsory absent-mindedness, stepping through the slapstick of the plan under pain of worse. Or maybe you don’t even need the future. The present would do, if you existed in a sufficiently imaginary relationship to it. Then ideology is comedy. But again, as the person performs their compulsory mime of surprise at the discovery that the soup plate, for the umpteenth time, has glue or ink in it, I think – I hope – that a space opens for less predictable feeling. For the person alongside the tyrannical joke, as it does for the person alongside the closed history.
6. Feasibility studies
I take it as a vindication of my whole daft project that it has prompted such a beautiful piece of intellectual path-finding to exist as Cosma Shalizi’s ‘In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You’.14 I wish the essay had existed before I wrote the book. It would have saved me months if not years of clumsy attempts to think through the underlying intellectual issue: whether, in any possible world, and not just under the hampering constraints of the Soviet environment, anything resembling the Kantorovich scheme for optimisation through prices could power a planned cornucopia. In science-fictional terms, whether Iain M. Banks’s Culture Minds, and the nanoscale Babbage engines of the Solar Union in Ken MacLeod’s Cassini Division, and the computers of the Mondragon Accord in Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312, can plausibly be imagined to be running a programme for post-scarcity consisting of millions of linear equations. The Soviet case as such doesn’t tell you this. In fact, it can’t tell you much about the ultimate feasibility of optimal planning, because for a thick array of reasons to do with power and path-dependency and the lack of foothold for the reformers’ ideas in the actual conduct of the economy, they never came close to being applied in anything but the most truncated form. (Perhaps luckily.) Instead the USSR provides only a kind of appallingly costly control study for the twentieth-century experiences of capitalist industrialisation, in which we get to see what happens when an industrial revolution is run again with some key institutions missing or different. The USSR from this point of view is something close to a real-world history experiment, a really nasty lab-test of an alternative time-stream: fascinating in an unethical way, but not directly addressed to the utopian proposition.
I’m not competent mathematically to challenge the conclusion Shalizi arrives at – which in any case squares with my own inchoate conclusion, gained from reading Stiglitz’s Whither Socialism?, that optimised allocation of resources, even if possible, solves the wrong problem. I have a thought, though, about the desirability of the cybernetic cornucopia, independent of its feasibility. The power of the Kantorovich result, as I understand it, is that it proves that a set of prices exists for any plan which would allow it to be co-ordinated in a decentralised way, by having local actors simply maximise profits; which in turn, if the system worked, would allow a whole economy to be steered towards an agreed goal, rather than just passively following a trajectory determined piecemeal by all the aggregated decision-making going on in it. Result: emancipation, or at least greater human choice about our collective destiny. But, but, but. Not only are there the insurmountable problems of the Soviet context – for the system, to calculate the prices, would require the same impossibly complete information about capabilities which Gosplan had been failing to gather for decades – and the computational obstacles Cosma Shalizi lays out. There is then also the question of whether, by shifting from our captivity to the zombie dance of commodities to a captivity to the plan, we have really done any more than relocated our passivity, and gained any emancipating ground. If we don’t like our unplanned subservience to the second-order consequences of our collective life (market, government, family), why would we like a planned, first-order subservience to the mathematical-economic masters of the glass bead game any better, even if they were acting as instruments of our collective choices? Even granted the perfect execution of a probably impossible computational task, wouldn’t the quality we were trying to escape promptly re-enter the system under another name? The latter part of the commonwealth forgets its beginning, as a useful patsy of Shakespeare’s said on another island, long ago.
Yet, if on the contrary we decide that like all panaceas, wildly overpraised at first and then shrinking to the size of their true usefulness, Kantorovich’s insight has a future as something more modest, a tool of human emancipation good for some situations but not others – then we have a presentational problem. It’s a lot easier to build a radical movement on a story of transformation, on the idea of the plan that makes another world possible, than it is on a story of finding out the partial good and building upon it. The legitimacy of the Soviet experiment, and of the ecosystem of less barbarous ideas that turned out to tacitly depend upon it, lay in the perception of a big, bright, adjacent, obtainable, obvious, morally compelling other way of doing things. Will people march if society inscribes upon its banners, ‘Watch out for the convexity constraints’? Will we gather in crowds if a speaker offers us all the utopia that isn’t NP-complete? Good luck with that. Good luck to all of us.
(2012)
Sacred
Religious apologetics, as I discovered both by writing some of my own and by reading other people’s, is a mode of imaginative writing. It has to be. It’s not just that it draws on memoir, on the virtues of essay construction, even on travel literature, as I say in the piece about C.S. Lewis here. It’s also that it is essentially in the business of creating a bridge of experience from one mind to another, so that what the writer has felt can be recognised by the reader as something other than a distant abstraction, and conceivably even be shared.
Experience is the common ground; experience is the language that opens other languages; experience is the source for the only verification of an idea that is likely to be accepted, in a time when there is deep suspicion of (and misremembering of) the conceptual vocabulary of faith. To write towards a reader who has no reason to trust you or to be interested, and in whom the cultural inheritance of Christianity has mostly either decayed into the unrecognisable or been anonymised into the self-evident, requires you to make contact with the stories they are telling of their life, and to lay alongside them, with what self-understanding you can muster, the stories you tell of your own; and then to try to join both to the central story, told so it can be heard again, by which the immensely narrative religion of Christianity hopes to interpret all others.
I was doing this at the irritating cultural moment when the ‘New Atheist’ writers were busily dismantling a reasonably civilised détente between belief and unbelief, in favour of simple-minded oppositions between ‘faith’ and ‘reason’, with all religion on one side and all science on the other: inquisitors with thum
bscrews versus freedom, logic and enlightenment. So some of what I found myself mounting was a defence of imagination as such, understood as the category of all that is luxuriant, provisional and unfalsifiable in culture – religion very much included – against a stupid positivism.
DEAR ATHEISTS
Allow me to annoy you with the prospect of mutual respect between believers and atheists. The basis for it would be simple: that on both sides, we hold to positions for which by definition there cannot be any evidence. We believe there is a God. You believe there isn’t one. Meanwhile, nobody knows, nobody can know, whether He exists or not, it not being a matter susceptible to proof or disproof. The most science can do is to demonstrate that God is not necessary as a physical explanation for anything, which is very much not the same thing as demonstrating that He isn’t there. So the natural, neutral, temperate position here would be agnosticism: a calm, indifferent not-knowing. Yet we and you – wild romantic creatures that we all are – rush instead to positions of faith on the subject. This shared (yet oppositely polarised) extravagance should surely make us soulmates. Or lack-of-soul mates. You say tomayto, we say tomahto, yet we agree in finding the big red salad vegetable important. Atheists and believers are, in opposite modes, the people drawn out by conviction from the dull centre-ground of empiricism. Mes frères, mes soeurs, mes semblables! Let us embrace one another as fellow refugees from the tediously pragmatic!
True Stories Page 15
