Scientific American [June 2010] lays out 12 events that are somewhere on the scientific horizon and estimates their chances of happening by the year 2050 - that is, affecting the teenagers of today as they go into retirement. In rough order of likelihood, they are:

• Classed as Almost Certain
  The synthetic creation of life
  A Pacific earthquake
• Classed as Likely
  The cloning of a human - seen as extremely difficult but also probably inevitable.
  Machine self-awareness
  Polar meltdown
• Classed as 50:50
  The discovery of new dimensions as research develops out of the cutting edge of particle physics
  Room temperature super-conductors
  A deadly pandemic
• Regarded as Unlikely or Very Unlikely
  The discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence
  Nuclear holocaust
  An asteroid collision
  Fusion energy

Of course, future research is rarely reliable as anyone who has studied the predictions of, say, the 1960s will know but it is not a bad starting point. The most exciting on the list for popular culture are those that are probably the least likely. We can quickly dismiss these.

The Blockbuster Events

It is fair to think that the sheer scale of space makes the alien visit hypothesis unreasonable (at least on the timescale of any reader of this posting) while international institutional structures are probably now robust enough to deter the use of nuclear arsenals by superpowers.

If scientists tell me that limitless fusion energy is unlikely in the next forty years or even a century, I am not inclined to disbelieve them but the small print on the asteroid collision is not exactly comforting.

No extinction event perhaps but an expectation that at least one asteroid hit could devastate the equivalent of a small city within the next 200 years.

This leaves us with eight scientifically-related changes that could reasonably affect our children's futures with five of those as probable. What would the world look like if they all came to pass?

Bear in mind that we are not including here what may be called changes in social reality - shifts caused in philosophical or spiritual perspective, by economic reorganisation or scarcity or through the cultural effect of earlier era technologies that are only now being fully implemented, such as the internet.

One of the few insights of Marx that has stood the test of time is that culture and politics are based on the economic organisation of society and that the economic organisation of society is fundamentally material in nature.

This is an over-simplification of the situation but science is about the understanding of matter and so scientific discovery or observation really does flow back into society and politics over the long term.

The type case is Darwinism which became Social Darwinism and was then perverted into racial politics. The scientists, in fact, were right about evolution but the extension of the idea was untenable. This did not stop its exploitation by non-scientists in disastrous ways.

Missing Jigsaw Pieces

Looking forward forty years, the message of Scientific American is that perhaps things may not change quite so dramatically as we think but the rational and sceptical mind-set of the Editors may fail to take into account how humans actually use information in their petty struggles for power.

Unaccountably missing from the list is the slow-burn effect of the discoveries in neuro-science and the cognitive sciences which could go in either one of two ways - towards authoritarian attempts to nudge us into social compliance or into radical libertarian reform as the cutting edge between brain science and philosophy confirms the insights of the phenomenologists and the existentialists.

Nor is there any mention of nanotechnology which strikes this writer as potentially as revolutionary as the internet on how we conduct our lives. To be fair, this is not an 'event' as such but the implementation of technology (like robotics) that is established already in its basics.

Similarly, the internet may seem as if it is now in its mature state of implementation rather than of innovation but the social and cultural effects of easy mass communications still look set to effect a cultural revolution as powerful and as uncertain as that instigated by printing.

Finally, there is the attempt at the application of the soft sciences (from psychology through to anthropology and political science) to problems of war, peace, policing and order.

The arms race in this area between authority and the street may lead to many new social and cultural forms and compromises. If the Editors of SciAm are sceptical of the status of the 'soft sciences', then so are we but warriors may still believe in their pretensions despite the rest of us.

Material Progress

But let's stick to Scientific American's hard science agenda. What will 2050 look like? This is our expectation based on their assessments of the science.

1. The security industry will have long since passed the stage where they manufactured threats out of synthetic biology to build budgets. Biological engineering of safer and less polluting household products and environmental services will be entering its mature, productive phase.
2. Human cloning is not going to be tolerated in the developed world even if cases will emerge in in permissive jurisdictions because the first 'experiments' are likely to horrify as cruel and unnnatural but the drive to clone will be part of a much broader range of discoveries in human healthcare. These will improve life chances and longevity in the West but increase emotional pain at those who die young or in pain at home and abroad.
3. Self-replicating intelligent robotic agents (AI) are going to present interesting 'human' rights and philosophical challenges that are likely to become political by the end of the period - less because they 'walk among us' but because we will be getting to the point where they may soon do so.
4. Even if room temperature superconductors are unproven as tools, the technology of energy production, distribution and conservation is already being driven by political as much as by free market conditions towards major innovation. The mature fruits of this will be well in place by 2050 and will probably have reduced much of the energy-driven instabilities in international affairs - at least in the West.

So, from a basic lifestyle perspective, scientific progress continues and the developed world is likely to be a better place to live in for most people - in terms of the environment, pollutants, waste, healthcare, automation and energy management.

New Philosophies

Where problems arise is where you would expect them - in the ability of people to find meaning as new discoveries cause the ground to shift from under their feet and in the debate over how much to 'give' in order to 'get' security from local under-classes and from less well served emerging populations.

This latter is at the heart of decisions about welfare provision and international aid.

Discoveries in particle physics that defy common sense, especially if matched by neuro-scientific investigation into 'spirit', may create new and paradoxical shifts in culture. Although by definition unpredictable, the logic is one of 'more spirit, less religion'.

This, in itself, may help to end the fruitless nineteenth century war between science and religion to replace it with a new tension between advanced thought and those wedded to both institutional authority and a scientific positivism that has become surplus to requirements philosophically.

The danger is of a major disconnect between the world views of the well-educated and the less well-educated that may create serious cultural and political tensions within the developed world and between it and the emerging world.

One suspects that Eastern culture is more adaptable than Western in this respect.

Aid as Insurance

Periodic natural disasters (not necessarily the 'big one' in California) such as earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions are not going to destroy civilisation but they will encourage increased global co-operation, equivalent to welfare insurance, to deal with the effects.

The real beneficiary here should be the poorer countries in the world with a concomitant positive effect on mass production and improved organisation of cheap sustainable urban infrastructures and new development models.

However nothing will be achieved without a root-and-branch reform of the shamefully corrupted and mismanaged 'aid business' - UN organisations and NGOs have moved in recent decades from being well-meaning bumblers into inefficient sanctuaries for the over-paid global middle classes.

There is a similar issue arising with pandemic. H1N1 taught us two things - these things can come out of the blue and they incubate (assuming they are not a lab creation) in messy urban poverty.

The world is now in no state to deal with these issues because of the credit crunch but as recovery returns, the developed world is going to have to decide between globalisation and healthcare security.

The logic of the situation is that Western Governments will start finding the money to keep people at home in the emerging world and to start treating disease at source by treating the vectors of disease - poverty, overcrowding and insanitary conditions.

The contentious issue of climate change also has to be put in the pot. We are not quite sceptics but we are cautious given the hysterical claims of political activists. Still, the ice caps are melting and this means major adjustments in some countries and, awkwardly, improvements for others.

We already have issues of mass economic migration arising from dislocations caused by globalisation and (regionally) by war - to add dislocation caused by environmental degradation, both man-made and natural, suggests a time of troubles ahead.

2050 In The Round

Whether the planet as a whole will be cleaner and less polluted may be doubted simply because so many people in the world will still be working their way through development phases that involve large-scale traditional manufacturing requiring raw materials that will be harder to mine or extract.

However, assuming that there is no disaster involving a natural or engineered organism, the West and the advanced East (and the pockets of prosperity in the South) will be set to be less polluted and less wasteful.

A reasonable prediction is that the world, pandemics, localised disasters and asteroids notwithstanding, will be, on balance, a better balanced and more prosperous place in 2050 than in 2010.

But we should be under no illusions - the poor will still be with us at home and abroad and the capacity of the global community to deal with this will be only a little less limited than it is today.

From the tension between scientific advance within a culturally volatile developed world and a vast wider population beginning to taste the prospect if not the actuality of material progress will arise many of the insurgencies, violence and petty wars of the mid-twenty-first century.

It is probable that most people in the developed world respect scientific method, especially in modern Europe where few are impressed with creationist nonsense. And yet there is growing scepticism - not so much about science as scientists.

An analogy might be with traditional catholicism where a catholic can be faithful to the entire belief system and yet be anti-clerical in private, cynical about a particular priest yet never the Church.

The point is that the priesthood is sacred but a man in office may be accepted as flawed - an attitude that permits a believer to be resilient in the face of allegations of (say) child abuse in Ireland. The men in the Irish case were weak but their weakness has no effect whatsoever on the message of St. Peter.

Modern science is slipping into the same situation as it matures into our shared social consensus. If few doubt scientific method, many now doubt, thanks to increased knowledge of psychology, sociology and even anthropology, that scientists are anything other than as flawed as the rest of us.

The Roots of Scepticism

Scepticism comes from a variety of sources. The first source of scepticism is our contemporary awareness that paradigms change and supplant one another much as Thomas Kuhn initially proposed in 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' (1962).

The Social Darwinist, racist and eugenicist nonsense of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was scientifically valid in its time but vicious and ultimately proven to be wrong. Naturally, an intelligent sceptic asks: "if such models were so flawed then, why not current models equally so ..."

The partial answer, of course, is that we know more now than we did then to which the reply will be - " ... and we will know more in the future so let us be cautious in accepting any theory while a single anomaly continues to exist".  An attitude about which we will have more to say later ...

The second source of the sceptical caste of mind is everyday human experience. People have 'interests' and will 'talk their book' - and they are quite capable of deluding themselves in order to maintain their livelihoods and status. This is true in business, politics and the churches so why not in the sciences?

Any biography of a scientist of note will show the reader that science is very social - who you know and what you belong to will often dictate success and patterns of behaviour.

Scientists are also quite capable of inordinate ambition, negativity towards others, competitiveness and even downright malice. They can also be surprisingly cunning, selfish and stupid - just like the rest of us. Though great scientists often are great men or women, the scientific community can be small-minded.

If scientists are no better than priests, civil servants or local newsagents in terms of their moral worth and scientific communities are as 'human' as Parliament or the Institute of Directors, then it is no surprise that the public are wary of trusting to their authority more than anyone else's.

Interest and Climate Change

Alongside suspicion that no paradigm is certain and that scientists are flawed even where their methods are not, we have patronage. In a system where a patron (now generally a State which has a political agenda) makes it known what it wants, scientists will gear research to meet that expectation.

A proposal on (say) monkeys in the Amazon becomes a proposal on the effects of climate change on monkeys in the Amazon because funding bodies are more interested in climate change than monkeys and the monkey scientists need funds to study their monkeys. Ergo, they study climate change.

The leak by Wikileaks of e-mails between scientists at the University of East Anglia was a reminder of all these 'softer' aspects of scepticism - climate change just might be a questionable paradigm constructed by experts with an interest in the subject. For example, an observer might wonder ...

• why the climate change movement was taking experts on trust in ways that were closer to a faith-based movement than rational discourse: most people in the street are arguing from faith in scientists (authority) or from political interest as ideological environmentalists;
• whether the merging of scientific evidence and the ideological movement behind action on climate change should create concerns about what was not being discussed - the silences as well as the assertions;
• whether those with a dissident view were being deliberately excluded and why the ideological claque committed to a deal at Copenhagen were descending to insult and ridicule, terming opponents 'deniers' (in an analogy with Holocaust revisionism) or as little better than creationists?

Faith-based arguments from authority, a single line that excluded debate and insult and vilification of heretics, positioning scientific critics as little better than creationists, suggest something closer to the worst excesses of the early Church rather than rational scientific debate.

What was not being discussed with the same fervour were the costs of action for developed countries, the historical injustices to developing countries and whether adaptation might be a more sensible strategy than political fixes designed to get a global commitment to a policy at Copenhagen.

What we had here was a movement in which the primary driver was not rational investigation of facts and anomalies or an objective debate about costs and solutions but a coalition where politics was dictating posture and language. Politics is, as we will see, not science.

Cold Fusion - A Case Study

We are not arguing against the propositions of the climate change lobby. We do not know who is right or wrong but we retain our right to a degree of scepticism about the assertion of claims from 'experts' that go beyond their own area of competence or are taken up by faith-based movements.

Our own working model is that there may well be global warming taking place but that the best way forward is not to spend vast resources trying to resist change or get a unified global response but that we should, as a nation, begin to invest in a necessary adaptation to change.

But rather than argue though what is only a belief based on concern that the scientific community has been pushing their luck in allying with particular political interests, I think we might usefully look at another case where science has shown itself unreliable in its political reactions - cold fusion.

Again, we have no idea if cold fusion will bring us unlimited safe energy in the future. Somehow we doubt it. But it is not absurd to consider the idea that chemical reactions at 'room temperature' might generate the same conditions for fusion that high temperatures can create as a hypothesis, no more.

In 1989, two scientists, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, announced that they had achieved cold fusion. The 'achievement' was recognised as limited by themselves but, as so often, they were bamboozled by university PRs into endorsing a news release that claimed more than they had a right to.

Cold Fusion - Fifteen Year Pariah

These were not young graduate students but serious scientists with a track record and what happened next is a lesson in how science really works - remember, the two scientists had merely undertaken an interesting experiment. It was an ambitious university that had over-promoted it.

The claim was tested by the US Department of Energy and they were negative. Pons and Fleischmann, the most experienced in the field, were treated as pariahs, no funding was forthcoming - and no bright young graduates dared to go into the field, certainly not ask for funds on their own account.

From an initial blunder, the entire machinery of the scientific community moved against these two scientists and their careers were ruined. Cold fusion was widely regarded as a joke. And yet ...

A rare moment of praise for the military-industrial complex and an argument for diversity in science ... the US Navy continued to explore cold fusion on the quiet, renamed as 'anomalous effects on deuterated systems', and, sure enough, another scientist Melvin Miles reproduced Pons' and Fleischmann's result.

Unfortunately, reproduction of these results proved a hit and miss affair and, when naval money dried up in 1996, Miles became, according to Michael Brooks, effectively unemployable - because of his association with 'cold fusion'.

Another very prominent scientist Julian Schwinger became a figure of near contempt because of his scientific interest in the theory of 'cold fusion'. In 1991, three years before he died, Schwinger wrote:

The pressure for conformity is enormous. I have experienced it in editors' rejection of submitted papers, based on venomous criticism of anonymous referees. The replacement of impartial reviewing by censorship will be the death of science.

More Than Meets The Eye

So far so unfortunate, but so what - maybe Pons, Fleischmann and Miles were not quite so good as they thought they were and Schwinger had gone a bit weak in the head in his latter years. Maybe the ruling scientific 'paradigm' was so strongly established that these people were no better than creationists.

But Schwinger was simply thinking like a scientist should. He did not say that there was or was not something called 'cold fusion'. All he said was that there was an anomaly and that the anomaly should be investigated. Could nuclear energy be produced through chemical (atomic) manipulation?

He tried eight theories and none quite made the grade but still he tried. Oh, by the way, Schwinger had co-shared a Nobel Prize for the development of Quantum Electrodynamics but, well, let's just put that to one side, shall we?

Finally, in 2004, a decade after Schwinger's death, the Department of Energy changed its mind - there might be something in this anomaly, an awkward fact on the ground, after all!

Things had changed. The naval research was now available in full and it turned out that one of the original and most damning reports on which the original Department of Energy had made its funding assessment had been ... flawed.

Interestingly, a blunder in 1989 that led to the resignation in protest of MIT's then chief science writer meant that an MIT report of the anomaly did not appear in the original report until after it had been presented to Congress. So that was that then ... the politicians had decided. End of story until 2004.

Lessons For Science and Politics

With subsequent research showing that the anomaly is real - that some kind of nuclear reactions are going on - we find ourselves wondering what had been happening here. Science was not happening. Politics was happening. Cold fusion was pariah. The consensus had decided.

We can be pleased that, in the end, the facts on the ground eventually led to opportunities for research being reopened some fifteen years after the first misreported experiment and Americans can be gratified that American bureaucracy permits multiple agencies to compete on establishing the truth.

But careers were ruined or placed into doubt and scientists were deprived of funding not because these were bad scientists or cranks but because the weight of community opinion had witch-hunted some into a corner on the basis of surmise and a misreading or distrust of what few facts were available.

It is not that cold fusion will solve our energy needs (it probably will not) but it is a fact on the ground that needs explaining. Science is not served by ignoring anomalies or forcing scientists into some paradigmatic, conceptual or ideological straightjacket - in the liberal West any more than Stalin's Russia.

Currently, research is just interested in the anomaly, that is all. Current thinking is that a nuclear reaction does take place under certain conditions and that this has yet to be explained - it is not by any means necessarily a sign of extra energy, heat production or nuclear fusion.

Brooks' quotes the Economist of 1989 with approval - whether right or wrong, Pons and Fleischmann's experiment was 'exactly what science should be about'. But what does all this have to do with the climate change debate?

The Politics of Science

A consensus in science only expresses a probability until all anomalies have been explained. While there are legitimate scientific critics of the prevailing consensus, who are independent of special interests and with insights from their field, we should assume nothing. Crushing dissent is bad science.

At the moment, a sort of existential panic has set in - especially on the centre-left. The fear is that if we do not do anything now about 'climate change', we will all end up on the film set of 2012. History tells us that such hysteria usually leads to serious and often irrecoverable and expensive policy mistakes.

But this is about politics, not science. It is about a centre-left that has lost its way and is desperate for a universal cause (and why not the 'planet' as substitute for humanity!) and about Western governments trying to retain their influence in the world while their populations grow restless.

[The facts of the cold fusion story were culled from '13 Things That Don't Make Sense: The Most Intriguing Scientific Mysteries of Our Times' (2009) by Michael Brooks but the opinions are entirely those of TPPR]

One of our bugbears is excessive narrative. What do we mean by this? The tendency for our species to construct stories, myths and tales that cease to explain our situation and start to displace and eventually overwhelm reality.

This happens at every level - the personal, the family, the community, within political parties, movements and religions. We touched on this last week in considering whether nations could be said to have minds.

This is not to argue against story-telling as a way of honing and creating our identities and giving cohesion to a community that gives functional benefits to its members. There are too many facts out there, many of them inconvenient, that tend to chaos - ordering them is how we humans survive.

Using Propp's analysis of motifs in Russian folk tales, Misia Landau (in Narratives of Human Evolution, Yale, 1991) showed how the great nineteenth and early twentieth century thinkers in evolutionary studies, from Darwin onwards, wrote our 'human story' along folk story lines.

Scientists tell stories (though they try to deny it). Religious figures tell stories. Historians tell stories. Politicians tell stories. Hitler and Stalin told stories - and stories are told about Hitler and Stalin. But, like young children, we can listen too much in awe, accept too much authority.

Sometimes the way the story is told, the repetitions and exact wording, become more important than the content. It is not only that we forget to question the facts behind the story but we demand that the facts are set in a context that is also unquestioned. We like cohesion and cohesion is constructed.

We are talking here about ideology and these thoughts were triggered by a recent use in a modern business context of a story about Stalin. The story is an old chestnut. During the Yezhovschina, so Solzhenitsyn relates, a party meeting is held and the Great Tyrant is applauded but no-one dare stop.

The applause goes on and on until, eventually, the independent local paper factory manager stops and everyone else does. The factory manager is subsequently purged for showing too much independence of thought.

There is some truth behind the hysterical culture of clapping in Soviet Russia and certainly much truth surrounding the climate of fear. By 1944, a bell had been instituted to stop audiences clapping and it is said that Stalin was becoming increasingly irritated by the custom.

But we have to ask whether what really happened is becoming dangerously confused with exaggerations of single incidents for effect in order to make a narrative point.

By the time we reach Martin Amis' Koba the Dread, there are rumours of an eight disc recording of a Stalin speech that contains one disc entirely of applause. True or false? No-one has yet replied to the enquirer on the internet forum who asked for evidence.

Solzhenitsyn's story is brilliantly written. But it fails to mention the name of the hapless factory manager, the district in Moscow Province or the secretary of the local party.

And then he closes with a punch-line, "But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him: “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!”" So, either the factory manager or the interrogator survived to tell the tale? Or did they?

And that's the point - the events may have happened precisely as Solzhenitsyn stated but this is not history, it is narrative, no, it is a parable with the deliberate structure of a joke with a punch-line. It is as analytical of real circumstances as a satirical routine at the Comedy Club.

It is certainly neat for the moral of the tale. The tragic hero is a practical man. The politician is a coward. The story is simple. The complexities of life in the Soviet Union in the 1930s are swept away by an angry man with a different vision of Russia and many friends in the West.

Clapping must have been frequent under Stalin. Clapping must have stopped equally frequently eventually. We have seen no evidence yet that, like some dark game of musical chairs, factory managers across the Soviet Union were automatically removed every time Stalin visited.

At each visit, someone must have been the first to stop - or else they would have been clapping until he left the building every time, perhaps until 1953.

In fact, most factory managers (assuming basic competencies) were removed in a power struggle over industrial development policy in a climate of fear of subversion and of political collapse that may have been cruel and probably thoroughly wrong-headed but it was not irrational.

The Solzhenitsyn story pre-empts the hard work of thinking and enquiry. It allows us to avoid facing what we would have done during the Bolshevik experiment. As in any fairy story, the story is simplified into one of moral choices and horrified empathy looked at from outside.

As Whiteboard noted, this was a regime that is increasingly understood by historians to have been inconveniently popular because it delivered the goods for the many at the expense of the few. It managed, like the Nazis, to construct some very workable narratives of its own. 

There is the story of Stalin's cruel running joke with his wartime Head of Shipbuilding where he would look surprised that he thought he was still there because he thought he had sent him to the Gulag. This lasted for years, it is said. Terror through bullying black humour. The man, in fact, lived - but in fear.

Watchers of Season 7 of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' will know that Buffy says that narrative is not reality. She is right.

The 'clapping' story is often shifted today out of context to suggest that you will be harmed in conditions other than the extreme ones of Stalin's Russia if you stand out and even (like the boogy monster under the bed) that Stalinist techniques might somehow 'work'. Up to a point, Lord Copper.

The story, even if proven true (I suggest neutrality as to the truth-claim), as a parable, teaches down from on high as generality whereas life is learnt up from experience as a successions of particulars.

Is it true that 'not clapping' nowadays (which we take to mean not accepting, say, the general enthusiasm for this or that aspect of the new economy or some other unpopular stance) means exclusion from the 'system'?

Well, yes, to a degree but a modern free society permits dissidence. It is just that there is a more reasonable risk/reward ratio in compliance while the herd is hurtling in a certain direction and special interests soon emerge with a stake in defending a particular narrative against criticism.

The Kuhnian paradigm applicable to science is equally applicable to politics. The 'right' analysis is actually the one that works and forced change means the chance for a new model and new people, To take another concept from science, society changes in a process of punctuated equilibrium.

The dissident may well survive and prosper during a period of 'creative destruction' in a free society (once everything finally starts to unravel) whereas a dissenter in a closed system cannot easily survive a period of 'actual destruction'. This is why free societies are ultimately 'more effective'.

Why not just say all this more simply - if you go with the crowd in any stabilised culture or society and suspend your critical faculties and/or do not put a case for, say, caution or for another way, you may well survive, so long as the crowd and its leaders survive. The risks are actually quite calculable.

If you become a critic or show doubts about the direction that the crowd or its leaders are taking, you can expect to be sidelined - fatally in extreme circumstances.

But, in a free society, you can also marshal your resources, play a long game and come out ahead of the crowd. Indeed, as Alexandre Dugin showed, you can even do this if your timing is good when a closed system starts to break down.

The 'wisdom of crowds' and the 'wisdom of natural leaders' tends to make all those who have doubts and do not express them complicit in compounding error - whether invasion to the East, economic sclerosis, support for easy credit that results in a crash or overhyping of new media business models.

This is what we call 'group think' and its twin poles (perfectly symbolised in modern Western governments) are populism and control of patronage. Modern Western Governments create mass media narratives and then consolidate their hold through the redirection of taxed resources to allies.

The game is a gamble - can a busted system be kept going long enough to stash the cash and leave the problem to the next generation or will the point of crisis in our system of punctuated equilibrium come just when you are able to exploit it and leave the others standing or falling? It is all about timing.

In Western liberal culture, we behave no differently from Communist Party officials because it is the human condition to fear the consequences of defying convention and the crowd. The consequences are only far less brutal because of our level of economic development but the instincts are the same.

The 'game' does not suggest that one is 'right' to be brave at all times - at some times, it is honourable but very stupid to be brave. At other times, it becomes wise to exploit the 'stupidity' of others. Solzhenitsyn's story and similar narratives have little to teach us that is not sentimental.

It is about a place and a time - of its writing and not of the story's setting. By all means use narratives to find one's place in a stable system or to mobilise new forces to overturn the system but never ever confuse these with the 'truth of the matter'.