Solution Unsatisfactory, Part 2
And what of the real world?
What should people do when the world itself is against them and every solution is unsatisfactory? When it turns out that the world allows for "existential risk," and the risk becomes frighteningly plausible?
Last week, I looked at Robert Heinlein's short story "Solution Unsatisfactory" and David Brin's short story "Thor vs. Captain America." Heinlein has his protagonist give into the less-unsatisfactory risk of global dictatorship to stave off a more-unsatisfactory civilization-destroying war, and Brin has his protagonist die fighting a losing battle against both dictatorship and war. Neither of them in the end, see any better outcome possible.
In the real world, what lessons should we take from this - both from the characters' actions and from the setting constructed around them?
This sort of scenario isn't just a fictional premise.
Heinlein wrote his story in 1941, looking ahead to nuclear research, and positing a radioactive "Dust" where one airplane could kill everyone in a whole city.
But even before Heinlein started his writing career, people in the 1920's and '30's were terrified of aerial bombing with conventional bombs. At the time, there was no way to detect incoming bombers except by people scanning the sky; and no way to intercept them in time. As a popular saying put it, "The bomber will always get through." So, people were terrified that the next war would mean cities being utterly destroyed (maybe even by poison gas) without warning.
What stopped this from happening was radar. Just before World War II, a secret British program developed workable radar and installed it in secret all along the coast. That was what gave the RAF time to launch and intercept German bombers - not always before they reached London or other cities, but in time to make them pay a cost. By the time Heinlein wrote "Solution Unsatisfactory," radar was secretly already in place.
When nuclear bombs were invented in the real world, they caused even more fear in the public - at first in the Imperial Japanese government, and then in the public around the world. But, in fact, they weren't actually as much of a threat. The actual atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki destroyed them no more than other cities had been by (legions of) conventional bombs. Later-1940's American planners, drawing up plans for a potential war with the Soviet Union (at the same time Heinlein was writing Space Cadet), planned they would need hundreds of nuclear bombs. And, they didn't even expect them to be decisive, in part because of radar but in part because the Soviet Union was just so big.
Later nuclear bombs, and ICBM's which fly far faster than any response, are in fact just as threatening as Heinlein's Dust is in its own setting. (Or, at least, they were - recent successful tests of interceptor missiles shows promise of a technological response like radar.) A city could, in fact, be destroyed essentially without warning - just like was feared in the 1930's, and Heinlein and Brin's stories show coming true. Just like Heinlein's Dust and Brin's necromantic summoning, this gives a fearsome advantage to people who fight immorally.
But, our world has not been destroyed. What we got was an unstable detente and Cold War between two nuclear powers. It was dangerously unstable. While Heinlein was living through it, he kept being sure it would soon break out into hot nuclear war... and without the benefit of hindsight, I can see where he was coming from. Even with hindsight, it feels frighteningly unstable.
But, the world has in fact escaped nuclear war.
I think we've escaped it because of the political shifts since 1941 (when Heinlein wrote "Solution Unsatisfactory"), and because of the scare around the initial nuclear bombs. By the time ICBM's were invented, a public taboo had developed around atomic bombs, and both the US and USSR had put in place safeguards to ensure atomic bombs would be used only as ordered. Meanwhile, politically, the world had settled into a US-Soviet duopoly with all ICBM's effectively under one or the other command. In that duopoly, ICBM's still made things dangerously unstable. But, they were only unstable - we did not get a disaster.
Unfortunately, the duopoly that restrained ICBM's isn't around anymore after the fall of the Soviet Union. In addition, there're now new sorts of existential risk such as AI, which could prove at least as damaging as Manning's dictatorship even if not worse. But as of yet, they're still merely risk. Hopefully they'll remain that way.
Heinlein and Brin both write about worlds where this taboo has broken down, and existential risk has become fact. They write about perilous discoveries easier to make than ICBM's.
For Heinlein, in part, this's because he wrote too early, before the multipolar world had broken down into the Cold War duopoly. If ICBM's had been discovered in the 1930's, let alone earlier, they would have given that level of advantage to the aggressor. Without radar, bombers might have had a similar advantage. The world might have been as dangerous as what Heinlein wrote.
But in part, Heinlein consciously designed a world to give this message. Brin, writing much later and setting his story in an earlier era, absolutely did. This isn't a fault! They're exploring the question: given this setup (which absolutely was believed to be possible), how should people respond?
As I mentioned last week, Brin does give glimpses of hope through new technologies - similar to how in the real world radar protected against bombers, and interceptor missiles may be able to stymy ICBM's. But Heinlein doesn't.
Brin might respond to Heinlein with the message he gave in other books, such as his novel Earth and his nonfiction The Transparent Society, advocating that human ingenuity would allow the masses of ordinary people to rein in the few - such as, inside "Solution Unsatisfactory," people who might use Dust or airplanes. It definitely poses a premise worth exploring. It reminds me of the masses of people in Britain who manned the radar and other observer networks to detect bombers. It's possible the least bad solution is something in this direction. At least, we can imagine it working in some worlds and some stories.
But even so, implementing Brin's proposal would be difficult. Heinlein's heroes (such as in The Puppet Masters and Cat Who Walked Through Walls) consider it an unthinkable privacy violation for the government to even trace people's travel; they'd certainly balk at the much more invasive surveillance Brin advocates for things less visible than bombers. We can imagine monitoring facilities that could assemble nuclear bombs (to some extent we do it), but other possible risks (like monitoring suitcase-sized bombs already constructed, let alone AI) require far more invasive monitoring. It would require a world government at least as invasive as Manning's to force it on everyone in the world.
Heinlein might respond with the themes he references in other books: disasters are inevitable. Countries or planets are unstable; sometimes (as the protagonist muses in Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and as the protagonist's friend predicts to him in Farmer in the Sky) they decay into tyranny or erupt in war. Heinlein doesn't suggest any way to solve that. The only thing he shows to be done - absent those "psychodynamics" that appear offstage elsewhere - is to postpone the disasters as long as possible and keep somewhere else safe to rebuild afterwards.
So, Heinlein offers a pessimistic view on one scale - but optimistic on another. In the longer term, most of his stories say, humanity will rebuild.
Brin does seem to agree that societies are unstable and threaten to decay into tyranny, but I don't recall his ever laying out a theory of societal cycles on this scale. His heroes each simply try to rescue their own society.
Heinlein's solution does run into problems in "Solution Unsatisfactory", where there might not be anyone left to rebuild afterwards. The disaster might well cover all the world, and there's no one off the world (yet) to rebuild. Similarly, in "Thor v. Captain America," the Aesir are apparently on track to conquer the whole world. In those two stories, the rules of the universe are set up so that we have no more than hope of a way out.
But, sometimes - like in the backstory to Heinlein's Space Cadet or the present-day of Brin's Uplift saga - that hope unexpectedly becomes real.
In light of this, what should individual people do?
Heinlein shows us someone who doesn't do anything. Our narrator merely stands around while Senator Manning rises to be world dictator. As the title tells us, this's an unsatisfactory solution. The narrator himself admits it. Most everyone else in the world of the story would agree. But Heinlen, and his narrator, challenge us to find any other solution. As Heinlein wrote his editor John Campbell, his characters "deal with it, as best they could, according to the circumstances and their several characters."
Brin's protagonist, on the other hand, goes on "a hopeless attempt" to try to fix things. It goes wrong, of course, and doesn't come out as he planned. We see brief side-references to people like this in Heinlein's story too, who rebel against Manning's dictatorship. Heinlein portrays them as "unfortunate" naive fools who don't accomplish anything.
But in Brin's story - though he doesn't say how - the strong implication is that our protagonist does accomplish something meaningful. This's because Brin does offer hope even amid his unsatisfactory world: the thought that there might be some better solution, even if he doesn't more than hint what it might be.
It's possible there is a better way in Heinlein's universe too, even if it's not mentioned in his story. Perhaps there could be a detente, even if an unstable one, sort of like the real-world Cold War that did not break out into nuclear war? Even if not with the present leaders, perhaps with some other leaders? No way out presents itself, but there still could be hope of some unseen way.
It might seem like this's rejecting the premise of Heinlein's story, but I think it's valid both inside the story and looking on it as a story.
As a story, our emotions demand a truly sympathetic protagonist to have some better idea in mind, to be working for a better world. What Heinlein gives us is one who seems to be trying: every step of the way, Manning is at least claiming to work for the sake of peace, and it's quite possible he's sincere. But, in the end, we reach a "solution unsatisfactory." In other words, Heinlein has shown us something of a tragedy.
Neither our protagonist's tragic flaw, nor Manning's, has been explicitly pointed out - but it's at least close to a tragedy. And, neither of them were actually trying to avoid it.
And, inside the world of the story, I think that's a good way for people to be acting. History shows that (even before World War II when both stories are set) the world has survived aerial bombing, machine guns, and other things prophesied to bring doom to the world - through ways not predicted ahead of time. As Brin hints in his story, perhaps it could happen again through some way not seen.
It certainly could happen again. Personally, as a Christian, I believe it will happen again, because I believe God can and will arrange coincidences to accomplish His purposes in the world. But even if you don't believe it will, it's clear it could.
And that hope should prevent the despairing cynicism that Heinlein's protagonist falls into at the end of his tragedy.
I can't help thinking about the question so vividly presented in these stories, where it looks like the world is set up to tilt the odds against good moral societies, and no solution is truly satisfactory.
And that presents larger questions about what we do when it might appear that way. The real world has not yet collapsed under the weight of these dilemmas — not because of a single grand solution, but through a series of imperfect choices, shifting balances, and evolving technologies. But as we consider how the world around us sometimes looks irredeemably subjected to futility, the stories considering these questions become deeper and more powerful.
It’s significant that Heinlein wasn’t just playing with ideas. After The Bomb was a known threat he published polemics at his own expense advocating the end of large cities and the relocation of our population as nearly uniformly as could be managed.