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By Root 1213 0

and its incremental successes. The wars and politicians, the police state regimes and terrorist insurgencies, the gross injustices and cruelties, the unnecessarily ongoing plagues and famines—in short, all the mass violence and rank intimidation that characterized most of what filled the history books; all that was real enough, indeed all too real, undeniable—and yet it was not the whole story. It was not really history, if you wished to include everything important that had happened to humans through time. Because along with all the violence, underneath the radar, inside the nightmare, there was always the ongoing irregular but encouraging pulse of good work, often, since the seventeenth century, created or supported by science. Ongoing increases in health and longevity, for larger and larger percentages of the population: that could be called progress. If they could hold on to what they had done, and get everyone in the world to that bettered state, it would actually be progress.

Anna was thus a progressive in that limited sense, of evolution not revolution. And for her, science was the medium of progress, progress’s mode of production, if she understood that term; science was both the method of analysis and the design for action.

The action itself—that was politics, and thus a descent back into the Bad Zone of history, with all its struggles and ultimately its wars. But those could be defined as the breakdown of the plan, the replacement of the plan by a violent counterplan. The violence was exerted against the plan; and if ever violence was justified, as being necessary to put a good plan into action, the secondary and tertiary results usually were so bad that the justification could later be proved untrue, the plan itself betrayed by the negative effects of its violent implementation.

Progress had to be made peaceably and collectively. It did not arrive violently. It had to be accomplished by positive actions. Positive ends required positive means, and never otherwise.

Except, was this true? Sometimes her disgust with the selfishness of the administration she was working for grew so intense that she would have been very happy to see the population rise up and storm the White House, tear it down and hand the furniture to the overstuffed fools who had already wrecked the rest of the government. Violent anger if not violent action.

Given these feelings, one obvious opportunity for constructive action had been getting scientists involved in the presidential campaign. Whether or not the SSEEP idea was a good one was very hard for her to judge, but in for a penny in for a pound; and she figured that as an experiment it would give some results, one way or another. Unless it didn’t because of a poor design, any results lost in the noise of everything else going on. The social sciences, she thought, must have a terrible time designing experiments that yielded anything confirmable.

So, ambiguous results, at best; but meanwhile it was still worth trying.

Her actual involvement with the election campaign was at third or fourth remove, which was just the way she liked it, and probably the only way that it remained legal. She could certainly talk to Charlie about things Phil Chase could do as a candidate, if he wanted to, that might help him win. Or even propose actions to him that Phil might initiate; after which they could respond however they wanted, and she could go back to the things she did at NSF directly. Whether they did anything or not was their concern; and so she was not actively working for a candidate.

This was partly the usual scientist’s disconnect from political action, which was itself partly a realism about doing what one could. In any case she preferred spending that kind of time working on her archeology of great lost ideas in federal science policy. She had already gotten Charlie to convince Phil to introduce a bill to the Senate that would revive FCCSET in an even stronger form, under the guise of being part of a larger “Climate Planned Response,” or CPR.

Now she was finding the fossil remnants