Anodyne
Tuesday, January 04, 2005
 
Kim Stanley Robinson -- long detailed interview with one of my favorites

"Understand that 'capitalism' is not 'creation of capital,' which is usually a great thing, but the system of rules distributing and controlling that capital. And the system we live in now is wrong—unjust, unsustainable, against all religions and value systems. Its defenders (always privileged in the system) have to resort to bogus versions of nature 'red in tooth and claw,' or grossly distorted religious claims ('God meant us to be rich and you will be in heaven') to make it look OK, but it's guns ready for deployment that keep those lame justifications staggering along.

Say then that science is an attempt to move out of all that, a proto-politics or alternative politics in which ostensibly neutral values or methodologies are actually stabs at utopian spaces where justice rules. Rational inquiry into everything, in part to enable the reduction of suffering—it's a kind of ethics and so naturally capitalism is offended and tries to buy it, tries especially hard since science makes all the new toys. Maybe capitalism will buy science, maybe science will help the other justice movements to engineer capitalism into permaculture, as in some kind of institutional genetic engineering project (history). Anthropogenic mutation. We're in the middle of the story, part of it."
- posted by cjb @ 8:48 PM


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