26th February 2021 | Sci-fi | Decisions

Octavia Butler’s visionary fiction; Don’t blame people for misfortune

Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.

#1: Octavia Butler’s visionary fiction

”All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you.”

(Octavia Butler at a book signing in 2005. Photo: Nikolas Coukouma • CC BY-SA 2.5)

The US radio network NPR ran a terrific programme on the writer Octavia Butler as part of its coverage for Black History Month (1h 08). As people will know, Butler was in some ways the godmother of Afrofuturism, using fiction and genre forms to reimagine the Black experience of America and beyond.

Butler grew up poor in California, and became the first Black woman to win the Hugo and Nebula wards, and the first sci-fi writer to be given a MacArthur Award. She died in 2006, at the age of 58, but her work is suddenly more visible than it has ever been. There are film adaptations of her work being produced, and during 2020 made the New York Times bestseller list for the first time.

One of the reasons for this is that her most influential book, The Parable of the Sower, is set in 2024, and has a deep narrative understanding of the long range of American politics. As the programme puts it:

Parable Of The Sower is your the-apocalypse-is-right-now, coming-of-age story. And this time, there were no aliens. There was no time travel. There were no women turning into dolphins. There was merely a teenage girl in the year 2024 watching society crumble before her very eyes and desperate to find a way to survive. And what was Octavia's inspiration for the story? The news.

The programme, includes archive material of Butler being interviewed. For example, here she is on the human paradox at the heart of The Parable of the Sower:

That human beings are intelligent, but also that they are hierarchical. And that their hierarchical tendencies are a lot older than their intelligence, and the hierarchical tendencies are sometimes in charge. We do seem sometimes much more interested in one-upping each other, one-upping one country over the other, than in doing ourselves some long-term good.

An interviewee, Adrienne Maree Brown, who also co-hosts a podcast exploring The Sower’s Parable, puts part of the appeal of Butler’s writing like this:

Visionary fiction-writing is a practice we can use to imagine and prepare for the future together, to generate the ideas that we want to see more of in the world…The approach that she used of looking at the world around her and projecting into the future, what happens if this state continues? What happens if we don't address the things that matter? What happens if we don't turn our attention to the climate crisis? What happens if we don't really, really contend with our comfort with inequality, with hierarchy? What happens? 

If you don’t have time to listen, there’s a transcript as well—which reads a bit disjointedly because this is properly produced radio programme.

#2: Don’t blame people for bad decisions

We blame people for bad decisions. But we shouldn’t. David Kinney is a mathematician who works at the Santa Fe Institute, and his argument is rooted in complexity:

[I]nsights from complexity science – specifically, computational complexity theory – show mathematically that there are hard limits on our capacity to make accurate and precise calculations of risk. Since it’s often impossible to get a reasonable sense of what will happen in the future, it’s unfair to blame people with good intentions who end up worse off as a result of unforeseen circumstances. This leads to the conclusion that compassion, not blame, is the appropriate attitude towards those who act in good faith but whose bets in life don’t pay off.

Kinney uses a worked example in the article of Kenny Chow, who raised enough money to buy a New York taxi medallion—cost, $750,000–only to be see its value plummet as Uber and Lyft came into the market. He struggled to make his repayments and killed himself in 2018.

The starting point is to note that, for people to be held responsible for their actions, they have to know about certain features of the world. In many cases, even this minimal condition for blameworthiness isn’t satisfied. For example, Chow would have struggled to predict that the rise of ridesharing apps would crater the market for taxi medallions in New York City… The bar for blameworthiness can be made more precise by saying that, in order to be blamed for a gamble, people must possess an accurate causal model of the system in which they act.

And, of course, none of us do. The article broadens out after that, but the core story here is that to a significant extent there’s no such thing as the “undeserving poor”. People are rarely, in David Kinney’s framework, the authors of their own misfortune.

He connects this to Deaton and Case’s argument about ‘deaths of despair’—the epidemic of early deaths that has plagued Americans of a certain class over the past 15 years. As he concludes:

No matter how smart we think we are, there’s a hard limit on what we can know, and we could easily end up on the losing end of a big bet. We owe it to ourselves, and others, to build a more compassionate world.

j2t#040

If you are enjoying Just Two Things, please do send it on to a friend or colleague.