Buddhism as a Panacea?

In an interview for Lion’s Roar, Robinson notes that Science in the Capital was partly inspired by the Dalai Lama’s talk in Washington, DC: “There I was at the Washington Wizards basketball arena with 13,000 people, and the Dalai Lama was speaking. I put this event straight into the novel exactly as it happened. I couldn’t help it—it was so incredible” (Miller 2015). The figure of Rudra, one of the eldest Buddhist monks, is, in fact, the Dalai Lama “living under a pseudonym in the NSF building” (Robinson in Miller 2015), while frequent references to ontological interdependence and calls for the reduction of suffering and right action suggest that Buddhist modernism helps Robinson in his attempt to undo the myth of scientific purity and envision a science that is more conducive to reckoning with the climate disaster.

It is not uncommon for the people of North America and Western Europe to turn to Buddhism in hope of alleviating some of their modern ailments.¹ But what is it that makes Buddhism so captivating? And what kind of Buddhism exactly is at play? In The Making of Buddhist Modernism, David McMahan (2009, 5) traces the construction of a modern, globalized version of Buddhism that, in the North American context, has been seen as an ideal alternative to the predicaments of “epistemic uncertainty, religious pluralism, the threat of nihilism, conflicts between science and religion, war, and environmental destruction.” While the Western subject has often turned to “exotic” cultures in hope of regaining a sense of wonder at the mundane, Buddhism has been particularly convenient for bridging the gap between enchantment and disenchantment due to its alleged resonance with science. On the one hand, Buddhism is portrayed as a “rational religion” not at odds with the scientific understanding of the world, while on the other, “its emphasis on compassion, selflessness, and careful scrutiny of the mind might mitigate the destructive ends to which science has been put” (McMahan 2009, 74). With its rehumanized scientific rationalism, modern Buddhism has been defined through the negotiation of the tension between transcendence and immanence, at the same time mimicking and critiquing the notions that constitute Western modernity.

While traditionalists might think of modern Buddhism as a Western construct disparate from its “authentic” form, McMahan cautions that contemporary Buddhism is, in fact, a constellation of the European Enlightenment and Asian traditions and an inevitable product of colonial expansion foundational to the invention of the ethno-national subject across many parts of Asia. The making of globalized Buddhism was from its onset contingent upon jettisoning its localized, nationalized, and indigenized forms in favor of universalistic, egalitarian, and philosophical elements that European intellectuals who studied ancient Buddhist texts attributed to “pure” Buddhism (Masuzawa 2005, 131). Such a description of a demythologized Buddhism afforded it a special place in the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago, putting it on par with, if not surpassing, Christianity. With its rationalist outlook and empathetic concerns, Buddhism has become “the Light of Asia” (Masuzawa 2005, 46), ready to join the global playground of competing ideologies. Recent critics of Buddhist modernism such as David Forbes (2019) and Evan Thompson (2020) write that the insistence on Buddhism as a “rational religion” often faces the danger of it being fully reduced to science and can serve to rehabilitate individualism and reinstitute neoliberal politics of domination.

In her book American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity, Ann Gleig (2019, 140) brings another facet of Buddhism in North America to the fore: namely, “the lack of diversity and presence of racism and white hegemony within American convert sanghas.” She shows that American Buddhism has been shaped by structural whiteness, even as it often presents itself as universal, progressive, and post-racial. Her ethnographic work has demonstrated that convert Buddhist communities have historically marginalized Asian American Buddhists, denying them the role of authoritative religious actors. By doing so, they have universalized white, middle-class experiences as normative forms of “modern” Buddhism. Gleig argues that this racial dynamic is closely tied to Buddhist modernism’s emphasis on rationality, individual experience, and secular/scientific compatibility, which implicitly (and, sometimes, explicitly) privileges white liberal subjectivities and obscures the racialized conditions under which Buddhism has been transmitted, practiced, and authorized in the United States.

But not everything is so bleak for Buddhism beyond Asia. Gleig (2019) has also found that the idea of “modern” Buddhism as drifting away from tradition is increasingly contested among North American Buddhist communities and argues that Buddhism in the United States might be better described by “postmodern” than “modern.” From the emphasis on rationalized and demythologized Buddhism, she traces a shift towards historicity and contingency, a “cultural sensibility that celebrates diversity and difference, and a critical, ironic, and self-referential form of consciousness” (Gleig 2019, 9). People of color, especially African American convert communities, have started to gain visibility, unsettling the dominant connection of American Buddhism with whiteness, corporate classism, individualism, and scientism. Thus, the very features that once made Buddhism so attractive to Eurocentric modernity are now facing growing internal critique, bringing the questions of ritual, ethics, class, race, environment, and community to the fore.

Crucial to this discussion, postmodern Buddhism’s sphere of action goes beyond merely assisting capitalist enterprises and neoliberal forms of “personal development.” Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh coined the term “engaged Buddhism” to refer to monks’ activism aimed at ensuring peace during the Vietnam War. The term and its praxis have been maintained and expanded to encompass the combat against “militarism, racism, inequality, poverty, and environmental degradation . . . challenging not only the personal but also the systemic causes of these phenomena” (McMahan 2009, 253). While critics such as Charles Prebish (1999) have decried engaged Buddhism as being severed from “tradition,” Gleig reminds the reader that Buddhism is not a singular category, as some Buddhist traditions, such as Mahāyāna and Theravāda Buddhism, specifically emphasize compassionate action.

Following the tenets of engaged Buddhism, the last decades of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of an idea that Buddhism can serve as a constructive response to the ecological crisis, a movement grounded in the doctrine of interdependence (pratītyasamutpāda), emptiness (śūnyatā), and compassion (karuṇā) that Ian Harris (1971) refers to as “eco-Buddhism.” Eco-Buddhism is an amalgam of Western environmental discourses, such as deep ecology (Arne Naess), Gaia (James Lovelock and Lyn Margulis), and systems theory (Ludwig von Bertalanffy), and Buddhism. While Harris questions the compatibility of the Buddhist tradition and deep ecology, Rita Gross (1997, 334) moves beyond Harris’s skepticism and contends that “[t]he question is not what has Buddhism said about ecology and the environment, but what could Buddhism have to say about these subjects.”

So how exactly can Buddhism help in the anti-climate change struggle? In “Walking the Path of Environmental Buddhism through Compassion and Emptiness” (Ogyen Trinley Dorje 2011), the seventeenth Karmapa delineates how the aforementioned tenets can assist in recontextualizing the human role in the climate change struggle. Śūnyatā helps us understand that nothing has an essence in and of itself and that everything has meaning only in relation to everything else. Ignorance of śūnyatā, the Karmapa writes, leads to a false belief that the Self is separate from the Other, which results in the othering of Earth. Thus, only by becoming aware of the illusory nature of the Self can one deconstruct the binary between nature and culture that is the underlying condition of ecological devastation. Finally, once one ceases seeing nature from a utilitarian lens, as an object to be extracted, and sees it instead as an entity rhizomatically interwoven with culture, one can start cultivating compassion for all animate and inanimate beings.

The emphasis on interconnectedness and the agency of more-than-human worlds has been on the rise in scholarly disciplines such as posthumanism, postcolonialism, and science and technology studies. But rather than arising in a theoretical vacuum, this shift largely owes to Indigenous communities and their religious (or, for some, “spiritual”)² practices where plants and animals, but also rivers and mountains, have been recognized as invaluable subjects that sustain both the communities’ lives and the lives of larger ecosystems. For instance, the contributors to Cosmopolitical Ecologies Across Asia (2022) trace what the editors call “cosmopolitical ecologies”—practical and theoretical approaches to ecology grounded in multiplicity, historical and geographical situatedness, reflexivity, participatory knowledge, and the agency of nonhuman Others, as contrasted with top-down, Eurocentric, scientific models that seek to “manage” rather than co-create with nature.

Several of the book’s chapters note how Buddhism in particular motivates environmental activism in Asia. Astrid Hovden and Hanna Havnevik document how Tibetan Buddhist monastic authorities in the Himalayas assert environmental sustenance as a moral and karmic obligation to these sacred landscapes—a belief system that helps regulate grazing, forest use, and water access. Caroline Humphrey’s chapter likewise shows how Buddhist-inflected memorial practices and ritual engagements with soil, mountains, and ancestral sights are tightly bound to environmental responsibility. It is important to note that practicing such rituals does not mean denying scientific practice: “[T]he rites [she has] described here are not seen as antithetical to scientific and practical action but rather as their essential accompaniments” (Humphrey 2022, 119). What’s more, Tibetan studies scholar Yudru Tsomu demonstrates how in Tibet, Buddhist communities and secular formations such as scientific organizations often collaborate to ensure effective environmental action for their surroundings. Humphrey writes that at times their views dovetail, and at times they clash, while the specific enactment of environmental practices depends on political leaders, religious and political regulations, scientific funding, etc. A thread that cuts through all these examples is the communities’ long-term connection to land, which rests on personifying natural entities and on karmic doctrines that motivate care and responsibility to their landscapes.

It is important to note that, historically, Buddhism as praxis rather than a belief system was far from a tradition sensitive to environmental concerns. In his trenchant account of Asia’s environmental history, Johan Elverskog compares Buddhist expansion to the European “commodity frontier” and its extraction of land and natural goods. He contends that “in place of the popular view of Buddhism as centered on renunciation and antimaterialism, we need to substitute the recognition that Buddhism was in fact centered on wealth” (Elverskog 2020, 3). However, despite its checkered past, Buddhist practitioners have managed to not only change their relationship with the nonhuman but also recode the Dharma from within. The fourteenth Dali Lama (2023) has famously said that “[i]f science proved some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change,” although traditional beliefs such as karma or nirvāṇa, which are unverifiable by science, are still considered fundamental elements of the contemporary Buddhist practice in Asia. As such, Buddhism serves as an exemplar against the attachment to religious dogmas—whose fixity has proven untenable in the liquidity of an ever more globalizing and modernizing world—while still maintaining its legitimacy as a transnational, global religion rooted in the centuries-old Asian tradition.

As I have shown, Buddhism is not a singular category but a multiple, historically and geographically contingent set of practices—at times neglecting the elements associated with “traditional” Buddhism, such as karma and rebirth, while at others, rendering such elements essential. What has been documented as an effective strategy for Buddhism engaged in environmental action is not so much the abstract notions of emptiness, interdependence, and compassion but more so their concrete, lived enactments. Interdependence frames the nonhuman world as an active participant in ecological processes, while compassion toward it becomes a necessary condition for maintaining ecological balance. In the following sections, I examine whether Robinson’s vision reflects the forms of environmental activism already enacted within Buddhist traditions or ultimately assimilates these tenets into a progressivist ethos of American exceptionalism and scientocracy.

Unsettling the Purity of Science

In this section, I examine how Robinson employs the Buddhist notions of emptiness (śūnyatā), interdependence (pratītyasamutpāda), and compassion (karuṇā) to dispel the myth of science’s neutrality. First, emptiness posits that everything is devoid of essence and obtains meaning only when placed in relation to everything else. Robinson uses it as a conceptual framework to show that science is always already contingent upon and deeply implicated in social, economic, and political materialities. Second, from a more ecological perspective, awareness of the interdependence of all things can help instill humility before the complexity and interrelation of all natural and social systems, a complexity that science alone can never fully explain or control. Finally, Robinson imbues science with an ethical positionality, shredding the phantasmagoric desire for a value-neutral, hermetic, and lab-like dimension of science.

Before I move to the close reading of the novel, I will first reflect on how I situate the notoriously ambiguous term “science.” Like language and images, the semiotics of science consist of a constellation of symbols that serve to illustrate the ontological processes one can observe. Scientific models such as formulas, equations, or graphs are not tangible things in and of themselves but are always-already representations removed from materiality. However, some scientists, such as E. O. Wilson, confuse “the map for the territory; only the map seems to him fully real,” says Sideris (2017, 80). Mediations between ontological reality and their abstract rendition are effects of social and historical contexts that produce such symbolic representations, while the hegemony over what representations are deemed more “universal” than others is necessarily a product of uneven power relations. Here, I am interested in deterministic, universalizing, and absolutist approaches to science that deny the modes of knowledge production that do not adhere to the predetermined parameters of hegemonic science. While the problem of universality and abstraction has permeated science studies for a long time, with Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn some of its pioneers, I find Sideris’s work particularly conducive to critiquing Robinson’s attempt to divorce science from any religious implications. As Sideris argues, scientific practice often parallels teleology and displays a kind of logic that parallels the rigidity of religious dogmas. Deleuze and Guattari (1994), for instance, call such modes of knowledge production “Royal Science,” marked by a hierarchical structure in which the academic institution sets the normative standards for and is invested in preserving the stability of the status quo of what counts as legitimate knowledge. It approaches experimentation from an axiomatic filter of what is already established as “universal,” a kind of solipsistic self-referentiality that significantly limits the kinds of results that can be obtained. Moreover, it tends to create the conditions for its own necessity and, mimicking the Christian paradigm, represents itself as an inevitable instrument for redemption.

Thus, instead of a critique of the ambiguous term “science,” my analysis can likely be classified under what is commonly known as “scientism”—an axiomatic view that science, due to its purported objectivity, should be the cornerstone of all normative and epistemological values. In Scientism: The New Orthodoxy, Richard Williams (2015, 3) writes that “scientism entails a metaphysical commitment to naturalist, reductive, or emergent materialism and tries to define science in a way that includes not only a commitment to empirical methods, but also to this particular metaphysics.” There are four assumptions that underpin the infrastructure of this ideology, he finds. First, only the knowledge acquired by the scientific method can occupy the category of “real knowledge,” however flimsy this phrase might seem. Second, all phenomena are reducible to the laws of physics, marginalizing the relevance of humanities, arts, and religion but also negating the role of subjectivity in constructing reality. Third, science has the power to solve all social and environmental problems, or, the “global problematique”—“poverty-hungerhabitat-energy-trade-population-atmosphere-waste-resource problem” (Barney 1993). And last, its inflexibility in accepting other forms of knowledge makes it a kind of metaphysics virtually isomorphic with religious fundamentalism, as Sideris cautions. She maintains that mythopoeic science is a “grand anthropocentric tale” rooted in the yet-unproven and perhaps unprovable hypothesis of the Big Bang (Sideris 2917, 37). It contends that humans are hardwired to think in terms of origin narratives and that the widespread adherence to the scientific myth—the only viable cosmology—is the optimal solution to the looming eco-disaster. “Celebrity scientists” (Principe 2015), such as Richard Dawkins and E. O. Wilson are compared to preachers who demonstrate a strong emotional investment in defending the superior hierarchical position of science amidst the pool of other, non-physicalist epistemological stances. They are certain that the scientific method will eventually help humanity reach a “nirvana of knowledge” (Sideris 2017, 34), obviating any possibility of ambiguity and doubt.

Moving away from metaphysics closer to the material conditions of the scientific practice, it is important to note that “science” is not a monolithic category. There is an ever-growing multiplicity of scientific disciplines; some are more exacting, such as mathematics and theoretical physics, and some are less so, such as genetics and evolutionary biology. However, in terms of contextual applicability, there is rarely only one scientific discipline at play, especially when it comes to responding to ecological disasters. For example, in the case of wildfires, it is not only the department of forestry that will have to react but also those of ecology, climate modeling, remote sensing, emergency management, public health, various kinds of engineering, etc. Science, then, is a convergence, a rhizomic event as Deleuze and Guattari would have it, that stands at the intersection of not only a variety of sciences but also interdependent subjectivities, socioeconomic milieus, geographies, and temporalities, all of which fold into one another to produce the response required by a particular situation.

Bruno Latour (1997), for example, saw the scientific practice not as an objective, abstract, and clearly demarcated mode of knowledge production but rather in terms of Actor-Network-Theory, which assumes an operative symmetry between the materiality of human and nonhuman actors, or “actants,” in constructing scientific knowledge. While his emphasis on the animate and inanimate nonhuman agents has been an urgent intervention in science studies, some authors object to the perils of his “flat ontology,” i.e., the equal and horizontal distribution of agency, as such a view tends to obscure the dynamics of power relations and lends limited attention to cultural and historical contexts.³ Fredric Neyrat (2021, 118) insists that “[h]is problem is knowing “how to bring the sciences into democracy—this is the subtitle of Politics of Nature—rather than how to get democracy into the sciences!” In this regard, I suggest that what breathes air into the congregations that constitute scientific practice is more often than not shaped by scientism as an ideology, a knot that carries a heavier weight and often directs the shape of the event, or the way science realizes itself in a particular moment in space and time.

The stakes of such a rigid epistemological stance are manifold. The pernicious insistence on the supremacy of human reason, which is very often reserved for Man—white, Western, male, bourgeoisie subject—over all other forms of knowledge has resulted in Anthropocentrism that attempts to exert an ever-greater control over the mischievous, “disobedient” planet. It disavows ethics and, making the weight of such ideology ever heavier, it continues to suppress the self-determination of the nonhuman world on which the very existence of humanity depends. However, the continued investment of some humans (read: Man) in othering “nature” is already showing that the weight of its force will make it collapse in on itself. As an antidote to the scientific hubris that assumes humans can know and master “nature,” Sideris suggests a humble openness to doubt, an acceptance that the knowledge of the totality of our cosmic existence can never be obtained by reason alone, if at all.

Evidently well aware of the critiques of scientism and the futility of trying to control the vastness of nonhuman environments, Robinson is set on envisioning a new kind of science that will respond to ontological transformations from a more down-to-earth perspective. He mobilizes his creative capacities to imagine solutions to the ramifications of climate change, effects that even the most advanced scientific modeling is unable to safely predict. The trilogy recognizes the stakes of the interdependence of all things in regard to the development of climate change, as the succession of unpredictable catastrophic events in the novel marks the inevitable failure of attaining scientific certainty. The novels skillfully illuminate the ontological relationality of human and nonhuman agents, the complexity of feedback mechanisms, and the fallibility of scientific predictions: “The interactions were so complex . . . the unforeseen consequences so potentially vast, that no one could say what would happen next to the global climate” (Robinson 2005, 193).⁴ After the predicted rise in temperature occurs, a huge chunk of the Arctic ice melts, but its consequences are far from imaginable. The weather is marked by anomalies: “A tornado in Halifax, Nova Scotia; the third and catastrophic year of drought in Ireland; major floods on the Los Angeles River” (Robinson 2005, 191). The tipping points have become nonlinear, hurricanes and tornadoes erratic, floods random, and algorithmic modeling has predicted the temperature increase ranging from two to eleven degrees Celsius—hardly a prediction at all: “Again, because of the complexity of the various feedback mechanisms, and the importance of water vapor both in blocking incoming light and holding in outgoing heat, it was hard to predict what the result of any given action would be. No one had a good sense of how clouds might change in any given scenario” (Robinson 2005, 208). Having no choice, humanity in Science in the Capital has to recognize humility before the vastness of mutually interwoven social and natural systems and accept that it cannot encompass the planet’s totality.

Next, the Buddhist notion of emptiness (śūnyatā) is particularly fruitful in dislodging the insidious fictions of science’s hermetic closure and a mirage of its objectivity. While the scientific method itself may indeed be value neutral, so is everything else according to śūnyatā. Things obtain obtains value only when placed in a context. Science studies have also taken up the question of “emptiness,” albeit in a different register. Karen Barad (2007), for instance, is interested in the question of “the void,” or “vacuum,” in quantum physics, which they describe as a place not of nothingness but of “no-thingness.” The vacuum is a low-energy state with no detectable particles; however, it is a “state in which everything that can possibly exist exists in some potential form” whose possibilities are realized only in relation to an observer (Barad 2007, 92). Thus, we cannot talk of things “in and of themselves” but only relationally.

Comparatively, Robinson (2004, 124) shows that “[n]o agency operates in a vacuum” and that conducting scientific research is never an impartial practice unaffected by a nexus of personal, political, and economic interests. Zooming into the realities of peer-review processes and grant proposal decision-making, he strips naked the attempted abstraction of power that directs scientific practice. First, he underlines that the peer-review committee consists of a variety of scientists, whose choices are necessarily contingent upon subjective preferences. He is surprised that the committee has rejected the very proposal he has found most innovative and intriguing. Although he, as the committee’s overseer, has the power to subvert their decision and allow the project to be funded, he refuses to do so in order to lobby the young scientists to work for a biotech startup where he owns shares. It turns out that another member of the committee has rejected the proposal for the same reason and outpaced Frank, offering the job to the scientist in her company. Robinson’s disavowal of the scientist’s agency in choosing the conditions of his research indicates that lab work cannot be disentangled from the materialities of the neoliberal, capitalist context. He compares the lab to “just another place of production. Management tells production what to produce, and the place of production produces it. Input from the agency of production would be wrong” (Robinson 2004, 93). He decries the fact that many labs try to conceal their findings for fear of other businesses profiting from their data: “But, A secret scientific method? Was that not a contradiction in terms?” (Robinson 2004, 39). The trilogy’s protagonist Frank wonders what it would be like if science was genuinely dedicated to the betterment of humanity, if it was not so influenced by the free market, and if they could fund all the proposals they receive. How much faster would science progress? The problem with such a naive utopianism is that it still views science as uniform and potentially self-determining, denying the role of cultural and subjective preferences and needs, even if it diminishes the power of the economy on scientific decision-making. For who determines what is better or worse for “humanity”? What does he even mean by “humanity?” I will leave the responses to this problematic monolithization of the concept for the following section.

Alongside this critique of meta-science, Robinson problematizes the dogmatic attachment to reason. Anna Quibler is one of the chief NSF scientists who stands at the very end of the science/religion, rational/irrational binary—“A kind of Puritan of science, rational to an extreme” (Robinson 2004, 18). As a hyperrational individual dedicated to always quantifying reality, she refuses to engage with ideas that cannot be proven with utmost certainty. Although she is the first character to welcome the Khembalis to their new embassy in Washington, DC, she never puts genuine effort into trying to comprehend the logic behind their Buddhist philosophy. Appalled by a website that promotes the hybridity of medicinal and religious studies—“whatever those were, she didn’t want to know” (Robinson 2004, 119)—she quickly closes it and moves on to her usual hard-science laboratory work without showing an open curiosity about how these two seemingly opposite disciplines might intersect. Anna is thus already devoted to a systemic denial of epistemologies that might threaten her symbolic survival as an eminent scientist. “Metaphors bounced off of her like spears off bulletproof glass” (Robinson 2007, 81), and just like her mind, “[h]er door was closed, the drapes (installed for her) were drawn” (Robinson 2004, 117). What Robinson is trying to critique here is not the notion of scientist per se but rather an obstinate attachment to a particular metaphysics without ever recognizing the porous boundaries of both one’s identity and the ideologies one is invested in defending.

Frank initially thought of Anna as a female version of himself, but after attending the Khembalis’s speech at the NSF, he begins to question both his role as a scientist as well as the sciences’ role in society. The Khembalis have shaken the ground on which Frank was standing, causing him to experience an excruciating and terrifying, but ultimately rewarding, paradigmatic shift. The monks’ assertion that “[a]n excess of reason is itself a form of madness” (Robinson 2004, 268) eventually makes him realize how much of a madman he is, desperately trying to exert control over his thoughts and emotions in order to, as Anna, maintain an image of himself as an infallible scientist. Insisting on rationality had been preventing him not only from comprehending his emotional life but also from observing that such an insistence is itself an emotional investment. He finally recognizes that algorithms and the mathematization of human logic can never explain or predict the totality of human behavior and that reason is a far cry from explaining the mystery of life and the cosmos. From an absolute faith in the scientific method, Frank finally begins to understand that science only “wants to understand the phenomena of the world in ways that everyone can agree on and share; it wants to make assertions from a position that is not any particular subject’s position,” it “wants to be beyond all dispute” (Robinson 2004, 89; emphasis added). But “[w]hat if the numbers don’t correspond to real life?” (Robinson 2004, 255). The purported objectivity and unerring accuracy of science is a wishful fantasy continuously refuted by the unpredictability of the ontological reactions of the natural world. Likewise, the proponents of scientism fail to understand that their disavowal of ethics is itself an ethical position.

As an alternative to hyperrationality, Robinson (2004, 275) turns to “passionate reason,” influenced by the Dalai Lama’s (quoted in Highland 2018) notion of “secular ethics”—“an approach to ethics which makes no recourse to religion and can be equally acceptable to those with faith and those without.” Rudra, the oldest of the Khembalis, tells Frank a story about Milarepa, a murderer turned tantric yogi, that testifies to the inability of reason to always make the best choices. He says, “Milarepa say that because his guru beat him all the time, and always a good reason for it. So Milarepa never think much of reason. But that is an easy thing to notice. And hardly anyone ever reason anyway” (Robinson 2004, 476), suggesting that if reason justifies beating, it can also justify the sacrifice of human and nonhuman subjects in order to perpetuate the neoliberal capitalist system that has no ethical concern for the value of life. Frank acknowledges the need for a “new model or paradigm, in which emotion and feeling were finally understood to be indispensable in the process of proper reasoning” (Robinson 2004, 477). As a result, Frank and his NSF technocrats decide to mobilize their passion for saving the world and found an organization that will systematically make decisions by bringing together politicians and scientists from a variety of disciplines—Social Science Experiment in Elective Politics (SSEEP). As I show in the following section, Robinson’s vision of such a “paradigm shift” remains cemented within the same sociopolitical parameters of uneven, top-down distribution of power.

Selective Ethics, Rogue Politics

The first section of this article mentioned the insurgence of “engaged Buddhism.” Buddhist monks from Thailand, South Korea, and Cambodia, inter alia, have successfully organized to protect their environment from further extraction.⁵ They reflect the bodhisattva vow to save all beings, a tenet of Mahāyāna Buddhism that underlines the role of a continuous effort to reduce planetary suffering. While ignorance can be an obstacle to positive action, meditation, contemplation, and active acquisition of knowledge can assist in understanding how implicated one is in contributing to their own as well as others’ suffering. Having obtained the necessary knowledge, “[w]e should avoid causing harm by doing something we are not supposed to do and by not doing something we should,” the Dalai Lama (2018, 173) cautions. In this section, I examine how Robinson throws the previously discussed realizations out the window with a highly selective version of “right action” that reinstitutes the ideological configurations that initiated the eco-disaster, pointing to the structural limitations of his imaginary capacities. Robinson not only remains faithful to scientific techno-optimism, but he also reaffirms the dream of American and hu-Man exceptionality, pushing Buddhism to the margins of global environmental action.

Robinson’s Science in the Capital, however, is a work that sits in contradiction, while its ultimate inability to deliver science from the shackles of hegemonic logic raises further questions about the intricate relationship between the scientific mode of relating to the world, Eurocentrism, and ethics. If science has long tried to immunize itself from having to explicitly make value judgments, can it redirect itself toward a more conscious ethical practice while also discarding its Eurocentric, colonial roots that deem “Western” civilization as one the most adequate forms of being in the world? Can it renounce its fiction of singularity and act from more dispersed, embedded positions that are closely intertwined with the needs of specific local human and nonhuman communities?

Robinson’s well-intentioned endeavor to come up with the “right action” is essentially an ethical question, a cumbersome problem that underpins much of the conversations about environmental justice. In “Ethics and the Environment: Dialogue with His Holiness the Dalai Lama,” Clare Palmer (2018), a scholar of environmental ethics, points to the conundrums behind the field and says that there is a fundamental divide between those who prioritize human wellbeing and those who are concerned primarily with the survival of the nonhuman world, although, of course, they can also coincide. The proponents of the nonhuman world argue for the moral significance of ecosystems and stress the value not only of individual species but also inanimate entities such as land and water. Even within human-centered ethics, there are significant internal disagreements, such as whether one should act towards the immediate interest of the current population or the long-term benefit of future generations. Advocates of the former base their claims on the argument that “to have rights you must exist, and since future people do not exist they are not able to claim rights” (Palmer 2018, 115). Thus, deciding how to act is always complicated by a clash of different subjective conceptualizations of what is best and for whom. The Dalai Lama responds to such dilemmas by resorting to the “rule of the majority,” and asks the unsettling question, “But when we consider society as a whole, how do we determine which group’s interests to sacrifice for the benefit of the majority?” (Palmer 2018, 127).

One problem with this question, and the pitfall Robinson fails to circumvent, is the presupposition of a singular humanity, a singular “we,” fiercely critiqued by scholars such as Sylvia Wynter, Katherine Yusoff, and Rosi Braidotti, among others. First, framing climate change as a product of human actions rather than those of Man—a white, male, Western, bourgeoisie subject—not only removes the accountability of the subject responsible for climate change but also allows Man to present himself as someone best suitable to reckon with the complexity of the climate change problem. Even if the “we” somehow extended to all humans, it still removes the importance of nonhuman lives from the equation. A more dire implication of the Dalai Lama’s question, however, is the argument that someone or something must be sacrificed for the “majority.” However, as Yusoff (2018, 51) suggests, such concerns obliterate the histories of sacrificial apocalypses that have already taken place: “the Anthropocene is configured in a future tense rather than in recognition of the extinctions already undergone by black and indigenous peoples. Following in the wake of humanism, the production of the Anthropocene is predicated on Whiteness as the color of universality.”

It must be admitted that it would indeed be naïve to think that an immense toll on human and nonhuman lives can be avoided, but having the notion of the “sacrifice” of some and “salvation” of others as the starting point for discussion reinforces the religious sentiment behind engagement with environmental issues and imposes a need to choose who can best “calculate” what kind of sacrifices must be made. It maintains a top-down logic of an “objective knower” and disregards a politics of immanence that makes decisions from the collaborative nexus of human and nonhuman agents specific to each locality. In the trilogy, Robinson resorts to techno-fixes grounded in geo-engineering projects, a form of a solution that is not problematic in and of itself but becomes so when such solutions are implemented on a global scale and their consequences to particular local ecosystems cannot be predicted. Therefore, the trilogy seems to reinforce the fantasies of ontological symmetry even when it is clear from Robinson’s writing that the weight of global geoengineering reactions spreads across the threads of local spaces exponentially and uncontrollably.

After an attempt to restore the Gulf Stream by resalinating the oceans, SSEEP moves on to terraforming the Earth and building artificial lakes that will alter the climate in the world’s driest areas. To what extent and with what consequences, they are uncertain. Such a radical terraforming proposal not only disregards the chain of potential detrimental effects on ecosystems beyond the terraformed areas but also ignores the risks for the local communities, who might be sacrificed as guinea pigs to test new technologies, rendering the sciences’ ethical positionality highly selective:

Dry and poor. I can imagine, if they were offered compensation to take the water and make new lakes, some of them might decide to roll the dice and take the environmental risk, because net effects might end up being positive . . . There’s not much going on in the Takla Makan these days, that I know of. (Neyrat 2017, 137–38)

The rhetoric is reminiscent of colonial narratives of progress in which the white Man’s genius transforms the squalor of faraway wastelands and brings prosperity to its people, who seem to have no choice but to passively wait to be salvaged by Western progressive brilliance, even if such promises of salvation are highly contingent, reiterating the ostensibly superior role of Man’s agency. In the case of “unintended consequences,” SSEEP suggests some form of compensation to the devastated communities who are, anyway, “statistically insignificant populations to displace” (Robinson 2007, 170). Robinson’s (2007, 170) politics assigns the life of the Global South the role of a new currency for the “carbon market,” a residual population that is to be “sacrificed” for the perpetuation of science as the dominant mode of knowledge production that Robinson has been trying to destabilize. “But, you know,” says Frank, “since the climate is going haywire anyway, it’s kind of like, so what? In the context of everything else, will we even be able to distinguish what this would do from all the rest?” (Robinson 2007, 137). Frank’s assertion conjures up another vision of a “flat ontology,” a phantasmagoric symmetry between human and nonhuman agents that legitimizes continued attempts at managing both human populations deemed less-than-human (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) and nonhuman ecosystems. Neyrat (2017), for instance, is particularly critical of the tendency to mathematize life and consciously take action that might put some communities at risk:

If there is something to be criticized in the principle of precaution, it is not that it has paralyzed action, but that it has wrongly considered risks to be calculable . . . To this precaution, we must oppose . . . a prevention, that is, a preventive action which accepts its inability to calculate risks. This is to say that the problem does not really lie in knowing that there will be unwanted consequences (this is obvious), but in knowing that one can not want some of these unwanted consequences, at any cost. (Robinson 2007, 137)

For Neyrat, the task of democratizing science should consist of moving away from precaution and the naïve belief that we can calculate risks towards prevention—to obviate the possibilities for risky business and the allegedly “unintended consequences.”

The aforementioned example indicates that Robinson’s “scientocracy” might succumb to what Jennifer Wenzel (2020, 31) calls “the imaginative inertia of [the empire’s] utopias,” as it primarily consists of white American men, while women, one of whom is Asian American, are similarly loyal to male notions of scientific rationality. The new president, Phil Chase, characterizes the United States as “a country that had explicitly renounced any imperial ambitions or world police responsibilities” (Robinson 2007, 135) and proclaims that “We have to become the stewards of the Earth” (Robinson 2007, 367; emphasis added). The “we” in question are the American scientists and politicians who “steward” the Earth with their large-scale terraforming projects, the effects of which far surpass the federal boundaries undetectable by natural environments. Ursula K. Heise argues that the trilogy “remains for the most part stuck in Washington and American government perspectives” (Heise 2008, 207) and fails to address the demands of other planetary communities. Heise, however, still advocates for a “global,” cosmopolitan response that would ensue as an emergent property of all local communities. I am wary that having the “global” as a starting position can ever will away the dominance of a single population and embrace instead what Donna Haraway (1988) calls “situated knowledges”—an embodied knowledge of individuals and cultures shaped by their historical, ecological, and linguistic milieus. Failing not to incorporate but rather center situated knowledges in the struggle against ecological degradation, Robinson reproduces the mythical status of Eurocentric normative standards as the most appropriate “steward” of the global epistemological framework.

In Science in the Capital, it is a mix of experts of various scientific backgrounds who, in their hermetically insulated offices, deliberate on the next course of action. SSEEP becomes a governmental agency behind the newly elected president Philip Chase that decides on future anti-climate-change action in a very “measured and scientific manner” (Robinson 2005, 548). It is a “perfect storm of statistics, chaos theory, sociology, econometrics, mass psychology, ecology, cascade mathematics, poll theory, historiography, and climate modeling” (Robinson 2005, 548). It is a “synergy of disciplines” (Robinson 2004, 248; 2005, 320) that assumes that scientists, academics, and researchers, those who make decisions from a safe distance and are rarely immersed in the materialities of ecological transformations, should create responses to the ongoing changes, writing yet another chapter of the Anthropocentric story that subsumes marginal characters into a vehicle for the seeming interruption of its storyline. Such a “synergy of disciplines” invokes what Sideris (2017, 55) refers to as “conciliatory knowledge”—“a grand unification of all knowledge that will tell us the story of our universe in an integrated fashion.” Rather than a non-dialectical, noncompetitive convergence between science and other forms of knowledge, a conciliatory narrative tends to “colonize” religious and social discourses by claiming that science offers the most accurate representation of reality. It commends the omnipotence of scientific adaptation to the changing material environments and nourishes the belief that, in the words of E. O. Wilson, science can “save the planet” (quoted in Sideris 2017, 78). Sideris (2017, 81) asks, “Why, as scholars, as environmentalists, or as human beings, should we accept this imposition of science as the final arbiter and purveyor of meaning?” She concludes that due to the detachment of science from its “object” of inspection, science alone cannot instill the moral values necessary to galvanize the public to properly care for our planet, putting forth a need for a more radical form of participatory re-enchantment.

Robinson seems to be aware of the caveat that scientists should directly experience and regenerate their wonder for the natural world, remember that they are not Other to nature, and ultimately blur the nature–culture dichotomy. After leaving NSF, Frank moves back to San Diego but eventually returns to Washington, DC to serve as one of the major representatives of SSEEP. However, as he is unable to find a suitable apartment to rent, he decides to build a tree house in one of DC’s city parks and make it a new home. Such a decision is influenced both by his engagement with Buddhism and a daily reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s thought. He infers, “Really the important thing was to be out in the world, to feel the wind and see the full spaciousness of being on a planet whirling through space. A feeling of beatitude; was that the right word?” (Robinson 2007, 334). He embodies the long-lost ideal of a “Paleolithic man” and re-embeds himself in the world of the nonhuman, becoming spellbound by the renewed sense of enchantment. “Thus the joy of running in the forest, giving him little glimpses of the great unconscious Mind” (Robinson 2005, 143). Thomas Nail (2020, 5), however, classifies the aesthetic appreciation of nature as “humanist anthropocentrism,” a view still founded on the othering of nature as an object utilized for the pleasure of the human subject. After all, Frank is a white, privileged, middle-class, American man whose makeshift paleolithism is a conscious choice he can make and unmake at his own convenience. On the other hand, lower-class urban citizens rarely have the luxury of reconnecting with the spirit of the nonhuman world due to the immediate needs of having to ensure their economic survival. Many Indigenous peoples, who are increasingly fetishized for their direct and participatory knowledge of nature, have been forcefully relocated to urban places and displaced from their ways of life that do not recognize the fallacious binary between nature and culture.⁶ Moreover, when the devastating weather ravages the cages of the city zoo, Frank uses his newly developed Paleolithic perceptiveness and the knowledge he has learned about animals from scholarly readings to capture the lost animals and manage their lives in a way he and the zoo managers deem best. Even if the dilution of the lab-like, hermetic bubble where scientists often reside and their re-embeddedness in the world of earthly matter is a necessary step towards constructing a non-extractive relationship to the nonhuman world, it is certainly not sufficient. Centering the agency of the peoples who already have the knowledge specific to their habitats must be the vantage point from which to respond to ecological problems. Such an approach will obviate the pitfall of what Haraway (1988) calls “the God trick”—a view that one subject can have access to the knowledge of all disparate localities.

But did Frank not listen to and learn from the Khembalis, a community that lost their land due to the sudden sea rise? It turns out that the Khembalis played their role in “[s]aving the world so science can proceed. The Frank principle” (Robinson 2007, 3) and, having reconciled with China, went back to Tibet, from where they were exiled long ago. Invested in rebuilding a secluded life in Tibetan tranquility, their voice in global climate action starts to abruptly fade away. And guess who helped the monks and China arrive at an agreement? Phil Chase, of course, assisted the negotiations, while the treaty was signed nowhere other than in Washington, DC, the “Capital of the world” (Robinson 2007, 230), making America the oracle of peace and a disseminator of world democracy and drowning Tibet in the shadow of all-American scientocracy. As another ironic twist to the denouement of the Buddhist struggle for self-determination, their long-lost city of Shambhala is freshly excavated by the Chinese, only to “clean it up for visitors, and call it Shangri-La, and hope many tourists will come to see it” (Robinson 2007, 300). Drepung—Robinson’s fictional Buddhist authority figure, identified in the trilogy as a reincarnation of the Panchen Lama⁷—wholeheartedly encourages the idea and agrees to Frank’s observation that “Shambhala is the Buddhist idea of utopia. So, the more this idea is alive in the world, the more people will think about why they are not living in some version of such a place. It stands for a different way of life” (Robinson 2007, 300). Shambhala thus becomes a commodity and a co-opted symbol that devoids the sacred place from what it is supposed to represent—a place of tranquility and remote sanctuary for monks to practice their devotion to an ascetic way of life. Robinson ultimately envisions the Khembalis not as a people interested in maintaining the ascetic tradition of recluse monks but instead as entrepreneurs who will invest in Frank’s new company (Robinson 2007, 279).

Finally, Robinson seems to succumb to the pitfall of reducing Buddhism to science and denying its status as a world religion. Robinson (2007, 279) contends:

I think [Buddhism is] more a way of life or a practice than a religion per se. Lots of buddhists don’t speak about an afterlife. Some do, because they talk about reincarnation and an eternal soul. If you’re a materialist, which I am, and you don’t believe in eternal souls, then that part of Buddhism is kind of useless.

One of the characters, Charlie, seems like he does not conform to Robinson’s materialism. He is afraid that his son Joe has been possessed by an incarnation of a lama and requests that the Khembalis exorcise the spirit, but then again, he “didn’t really believe that the real Joe had gone away as a result of the Khembalis ceremony for him” (Robinson 2007, 66). Similarly, the ceremonies around Rudra’s death to prepare him for a peaceful afterlife and their emotional reconciliation with the impermanence of life made Frank suddenly realize “he was living with aliens. They didn’t even look human” (Robinson 2007, 201). Even Drepung says, “I myself think that [incarnation] is a heuristic device only,” a metaphor for the many emotional and intellectual cycles of birth and rebirth one undergoes in their lifetime. However, Donald Lopez (2014, 69) argues that modern science is fundamentally at odds with the majority of Buddhist schools, whose followers are “strict dualists . . . on the question of the relation of mind and matter.” In order for Buddhism to be compatible with science, it would have to jettison “the dichotomy between mind and matter so central to all Buddhist thought” (Lopez 2014, 77). By envisioning Buddhist monks who renounce this dichotomy, Robinson is painting a distorted image of Buddhism that fits his materialist agenda, while Panchen Lama’s framing of incarnation as a “heuristic device” suggests Robinson’s inability to accept that Buddhists might not quite fit into the filter isomorphic with his own cognitive matrix and implies a subconscious desire to make Buddhists in the image of his fellow Westerners.

Ultimately, Robinson’s (2022) claim that “Buddhism wants to be useful in this world” is a double-edged sword. What kind of world is Buddhism useful for in Robinson’s trilogy? Although Buddhist modernist discourse seems to play a key role in his recalibrated science, it appears to do so only to reposition it at the very top of the global epistemological hierarchy and resuscitate the myth of scientific omnipotence. By repositioning white, male American scientists as the key arbiters of climate change action, Robinson marginalizes the agency of local communities, people of color, and animate and inanimate nonhuman entities. Crucially, by not recognizing that anthropocentrism and racism are the building blocks of “science in the capital,” he ends up reproducing the very logic he is invested in critiquing.

Conclusion

Science in the Capital provides a nuanced critique of the economy of science by emphasizing its complicity in capitalist reproduction and political inertia and its disavowal of ethics, almost succeeding in deconstructing the mythopoeic scientific narrative. Relying on the Buddhist notion of interdependence and emptiness, Robinson shows how science is never a self-enclosed discipline but inherently contingent upon various social and natural matrices. Since the purpose of science is never value neutral, he suggests an ethical approach to doing science whose end goal should always be to reduce human and nonhuman suffering. However, its vision of a reconfigured science does little to diminish scientism’s dominant position. While replacing the players—American science instead of its military and economy—the trilogy still replicates the infrastructure of the global social and political landscapes and affords science with a renewed mythical status. He reproduces anthropocentrism and the redemptive telos of white subjectivity while also replicating the global dominion of scientific innovation. In his attempt to hybridize religious and scientific discourses, he ultimately succumbs to “conciliatory science.”

Robinson’s scientocracy, then, exemplifies a broader tendency among white, American, upper-class converts to appropriate Asian traditions in order to shore up their own cultural authority, a dynamic Gleig has meticulously documented. It is precisely from the vantage point of such communities—white, neoliberal, “rational,” California subjects—that Robinson articulates his vision of engaged Buddhism.⁸ But, as Gleig notes, Buddhism in the United States is multiple, and converts have increasingly begun to incorporate its traditional elements and direct them towards resisting racial, class, and gender injustice. In Science in the Capital, Robinson shows little interest in such forms of injustice and instead focuses on fighting capitalism, scientism, and environmental degradation. However, I contend that climate change cannot be conceived of independent of the histories of racism and colonialism, and that climate action must simultaneously address such entanglements if it is to unsettle the very pillars that support the destruction of natural environments.

One way this has been done is through what Riamsara Kuyakanon and colleagues (2022) describe as “cosmopolitical ecologies,” which emphasize context, history, reflexivity, and connection to land. As Astrid Hovden and Hanna Havnevik (2022), Caroline Humphrey (2022), and Yudru Tsomu (2022) have shown, Buddhist communities across Asia have developed forms of environmental engagement that are grounded in both tradition and political activism. While such communities often collaborate with scientists, their stewardship to land remains rooted in Buddhist tenets such as karma and the personification of nonhuman beings—elements largely discarded in the forms of American Buddhist modernism exemplified by Robinson. Finally, Robinson’s trilogy raises a central question for religious and environmental studies: Can Buddhist traditions, once translated into an American idiom, truly be an important agent in climate change response—one that resists scientism and American exceptionalism—or does its very Americanization limit its transformative potential?

Acknowledgments

A previous version of this response was presented at a panel on Science Fiction and Religion of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) at the AAR Annual Meeting 2023, Denver, CO, November 21, 2022.

Competing Interests

The author declares that they have no competing interests.