Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [206]
“Did Bao talk to you about this?” Sax asked.
“Why yes, before she left she was coming over to talk with us about plasma patterns, it wasn’t immediately helpful, this is really macro compared to what she does, but she’s so damn smart, and afterward something she said set Yananda off on how we could seal off the implosion and still leave a space for emission afterward.”
They needed their lasers to hit the pellets on all sides at once, but there also had to be a vent for charged particles to escape. Bao had apparently been interested in the problem, and now they returned to a lively discussion of it, which they thought they had solved at last; and when someone dropped into the circle and mentioned the day’s lottery results, they brushed him off. “Ka, no politics, please.”
As Sax wandered on, half listening to the conversations he passed, he was struck again by the apolitical nature of most scientists and technicians. There was something about politics they were allergic to, and he felt it as well, he had to admit it. Politics was irreducibly subjective and compromised, a process that went entirely against the grain of the scientific method. Was that true? These feelings and prejudices were subjective themselves. One could try to regard politics as a kind of science— a long series of experiments in communal living, say, with all the data consistently contaminated. Thus people hypothesized a system of governance, lived under it, examined how they felt about it, then changed the system and tried again. Certain constants or principles seemed to have emerged over the centuries, as they ran through their experiments and paradigms, trying successively closer approximations of systems that promoted qualities like physical welfare, individual freedom, equality, stewardship of the land, guided markets, rule of law, compassion to all. After repeated experiments it had become clear— on Mars at least— that all these sometimes contradictory goals could be best achieved in polyarchy, a complex system in which power was distributed out to a great number of institutions. In theory this network of distributed power, partly centralized and partly decentralized, created the greatest amount of individual freedom and collective good, by maximizing the amount of control that an individual had over his or her life.
Thus political science. And fine, in theory. But it followed that if they believed in the theory, people then had to devote a fair amount of time to the exercise of their power. That was self-government, by tautology; the self governed. And that took time. “Those who value freedom must make the effort necessary to defend it,” as Tom Paine had said, a fact which Sax knew because Bela had gotten into the bad habit of putting up signs in the halls with such inspirational sentiments printed on them. “Science Is Politics by Other Means,” another of his signs had announced, rather cryptically.
But in Da Vinci most people did not want to spend their time that way. “Socialism will never succeed,” Oscar Wilde had remarked (in handwriting on yet another sign), “it takes up too many evenings.” So it did; and the solution was to make your friends take up their evenings for you. Thus the lottery method of election, a calculated risk, for one might get stuck with the job oneself someday. But usually the risk paid off. Which accounted for