Wasteland Wrap-up #14

Oppenheimer, Artificial Inanity, Chants of Sennaar, Indian bricks, One World or None...

I continue to labor on finishing my new book (getting there, getting there), and teaching, and other projects. The semester flies by with its characteristic swiftness.

Lyndon basks in a sunbeam, a favorite location of his during the late-afternoon.

ICYMI: This week on Doomsday Machines, I wrote up some thoughts on Paolo Bacigalupi’s book The Water Knife (2015): “Not a drop to drink.” This is one of those books that I find myself thinking about quite a lot, especially when thinking about the possible futures of the United States over the next few decades, as the stress of climate change upon our political system will become more and more acute.

A bit of a digression: Some years ago I had the opportunity to go (with others) on a hike with Ulrich Beck, the late German sociologist whose book The Risk Society (1992) argued that the distribution of risk and hazard would become the foundation of a new thinking about social relations, and ultimately would culminate in an increased sense of global shared risk that would cause previous social divisions — like national identities — to dissolve in a shared effort. Bacigalupi’s vision feels more plausible than Beck’s, to me: that under stress, divisions tend to get emphasized and even spontaneously generated (“schismogenesis,” as Gregory Bateson dubbed it), not reduced.

What I’ve been quoted in

I was quoted this week in an article in the New York Times about J. Robert Oppenheimer’s ties to Communism in the 1930s: William Broad, “An Old Clash Heats Up Over Oppenheimer’s Red Ties,” New York Times (8 October 2024), D5 (gift link). The basic crux of the matter is this: there is considerable evidence (testimony of his former friends, and in the records of both the FBI and NKVD/GRU) that Oppenheimer was the member of some kind of group of far-left professors in the East Bay in the 1930s.

Of these records, I find the Soviet ones the most compelling in making sense of it: the Soviet spies regarded this as a group of people who were in sympathy with their cause, maybe even some kind of “secret cell” of the Communist Party, but not a formal organization and not all that reliable. Which is to say, the entire thing seems set up to be plausibly deniable by those professors inside of it — not some kind of formal “membership” in the Communist Party, but something that would let them play at being subversive in an elitist, overly-intellectual fashion. By the 1940s, Oppenheimer turned his back on the whole thing and pretended it was nothing at all — which, to a certain extent, it probably was. But it was also the sort of thing that the other members of the group could have regarded as “something” if they chose to. Neither Communist nor not, a superposition of states, or something.