Taking anarchism seriously

I read The Conquest of Bread, the classic 1892 work by the anarchist thinker Peter Kropotkin, as part of a reading group organized by Rochester Red and Black.   Kropotkin was a revolutionary communist anarchist.  He was dead serious about eliminating government, laws, money and corporations, as well as private property over and above what an individual could personally use.

How can you be both a communist and an anarchist?  The one thing that libertarians, socialists, conservatives and liberals agree on nowadays is that equality and liberty are tradeoffs—that to get more equality, you have to sacrifice liberty, and vice versa.

Kropotkin pointed out that this hasn’t always been true.  Many traditional cultures, including Russian villages of his day, had both more sharing and more freedom than most of us enjoy today.  People helped each other out of neighborliness and offered hospitality to strangers out of kindness.  Life did not center on earning money.  There are still places like this, such as the Virginia mountain town described by Barbara Holland in Bingo Night at the Fire Hall, where people she didn’t know helped her in emergencies and acted insulted when she offered payment.

Kropotkin pointed out that even the existing capitalistic and authoritarian system of Kropotkin’s day, many important things were accomplished through voluntary cooperation.  The international scientific community functioned without any particular individual in charge.  Voluntary organizations such as the Red Cross and lighthouse networks performed important public functions.  Capitalistic businesses themselves were able to integrate railroads and canals without a central planning organization to give orders.

And many public services, such as highways, street lighting and public libraries, were provided free—following the principle of to each according to their needs.  Surely, Kropotkin argued, if so much has been accomplished under a system devoted to personal profit, how much more can be accomplished under the rule of the people in a system devoted to the public good!

He thought the progress of science had brought abundance for all within reach.  And he said to the capitalists of his day, “You didn’t build that.”  Since this progress was achieved by previous generations, he said, all of the present generation have the right to share in its fruits and none of us, in his view, had the right to appropriate the fruits for their exclusive benefit.

Since Kropotkin’s day, the role of voluntary associations has contracted, and the provision of universal services is under attack.  Most of the world’s governments, big corporations and international organizations adhere to the so-called “neo-liberal” ideology, which says that all of human society should be organized on the model of the for-profit corporation. Kropotkin’s philosophy provides a basis for pushing back in defense of the individual and the commons.

His anarchism is the opposite of Leninism or even Fabian socialism, in which decision-making is delegated to a tiny circle of masterminds and the mass of the people are bystanders.   Kropotkin said revolutionary reigns of terror created new systems of oppression that were worse than the old.  He lived to see the Bolshevik Revolution, and foresaw all the evils that would flow from it.

Now I doubt a full-blown anarchist society is feasible, and I’m not sure how I would fit into one if it were.  Governments, laws, money and the operation of supply and demand, however distorted they are in practice, do serve a function that a future anarchist society would have to duplicate.  I’m too much of an egoist to be part of a collective.   I’m too distrustful of human nature to give up the Constitution and Bill of Rights and trust to public opinion to safeguard my rights.   When I think about a society wiping the slate clean and starting over fresh, I think of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.   Perhaps some of these questions will be resolved as I read and study more about anarchism.

In any case I don’t think that living under anarchism is something I’m going to have to deal with in my lifetime (I’m 76).  Kropotkin’s ideas for me represent a direction, not a blueprint.  The direction is toward a society without hierarchy, or at least with a minimum of hierarchy.  I like Kropotkin’s sunny optimism, his humane spirit, his questioning of fundamental assumptions and especially his belief that a better world is possible.   I refuse to accept what we have in the USA today as the best that we can hope for.

Click on The Conquest of Bread for the full text of Peter Kropotkin’s work in The Anarchist Library.  [Added 5/15/13]

Click on In Praise of Anarchy, Part One, Part Two and Part Three for a discussion of Peter Kropotkin’s thought by Dmitri Orlov.

Click on Rochester Red and Black for that group’s home page.

A little bit more anarchism would do us good

Anarchism is the political credo that rejects all forms of compulsory authority and believes society can be organized on the basis of individual freedom and voluntary cooperation.  Yale professor James C. Scott is not a full-blown anarchist, but in his short and highly readable book, TWO CHEERS FOR ANARCHISM: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity and Meaningful Work and Play, he makes the case that a bit more anarchism in American life would do us good.

We are so used to obeying authority that many of us have lost the habit of acting for ourselves, Scott wrote.  Once he shocked a friend of his, a Dutch college professor who considered himself a Maoist revolutionary, by crossing the street against the traffic light when there was no traffic on the street.  Scott advocates “anarchist calisthenics”—occasionally violating a rule or law that makes no sense just to break the habit of submission.

How necessary are traffic lights?  Scott told how Hans Moderman, a traffic engineer in the city of Drachten, the Netherlands, noticed that traffic flow improved when electrical failures put traffic lights out of commission.  In 1999, he replaced traffic lights at the city’s busiest intersection with a traffic circle, an extended bicycle path and a pedestrian area.  The number of traffic accidents fell dramatically.  Relying on drivers to use good sense was more effective than demanding they obey signs.  In fact, the traffic signals may have been counterproductive, because they distracted drivers from the road, and they created a false sense of safety.

Many Dutch towns now advertise themselves as “free of traffic signs.”  The lesson learned from this experiment can be applied to other things besides traffic.

That is one of Scott’s examples of mild anarchism in action.  Another is a children’s playground in Denmark in 1943 which, instead of building swings, seesaws and sliding boards for the children to use, simply opened up a raw building site with lumber, shovels, nails and tools and left them to the children to do as they wished.  It was hugely popular, but soon ran into trouble.  Some children hoarded lumber and tools for their own use.  Fighting and raids broke out.  Adults were on the verge of closing the playground down when the youngsters themselves conducted a salvage drive to retrieve the hidden materials and organized a system for sharing tools and lumber.  The children learned a valuable lesson in self-government, which they would not have learned from adult supervision.

“Adventure playgrounds” have since become popular in many parts of the world.  Scott pointed out that to the casual observer, they look messy and disorderly, but in fact are not.  That is the planner’s disease—to impose external order for the sake of appearances, and disregard the hidden order that already exists.

James C. Scott

Scott said the limitations of hierarchy and top-down planning are shown by the fact that one of the most effective forms of labor union action is “work to rule”—to simply carry out orders and follow procedures as given, rather than use individual judgment.   Bureaucrats and executives think they are in charge, and do not realize how much they depend on the initiative and knowledge from below.

In government, he wrote, it is better to put up with the messiness of democracy than to abdicate to supposedly neutral experts and technocrats.   Sometimes it is better to put up with the even greater messiness of direct action than to insist that people work within the system.  Most of the great reform movements in American history—abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, the labor union movement, the civil rights movement—were achieved by people who were willing to break laws and defy authority.

Scott devoted a section of his book to praise of the “petty bourgeosie”—independent farmers, craft workers and shopkeepers, who are not subject to bosses.  This social class has a bad name among left-wing radicals, but, as he pointed out, it is during the periods of history that the petty bourgeosie have been in the majority that society has come closest to worker ownership of the means of production.

He entitled his book Two Cheers for Anarchism instead of three cheers because he does not think it really is possible to do without government.  Nor does he think authority is always wrong or the masses are always right.  When the federal government imposed school desegregation against the wishes of the majority of the people of the South (that is, the overwhelming majority of the white people), it promoted liberty.  But such examples are rare, he said.

Click on The American Conservative, The Coffin Factory, The Los Angeles Review of Books and The Wall Street Journal for other reviews of the book and The New York Times for a profile of Scott.

The survival of Riverbend

Some years ago I used to follow a web log called Baghdad Burning by a young Iraqi woman who called herself Riverbend.  She started the blog in 2003 when she was 24, a few months after the U.S. invasion, as a chronicle of her experiences and thoughts.  For me, it was a window into how Iraqis experienced the occupation.

She was well-educated, fluent in English and part of a close-knit middle-class Sunni Muslim family in Baghdad.   She was a faithful Muslim, but had much in common with people her age in Britain, France and the USA.

Her blog conveyed what it was like to live in a society that had broken down.  Her family was in danger from sectarian militias and criminal gangs and without protection by the occupation forces and their government.  Saddam Hussein, like Asad in Syria, was a ruthless dictator, but he did not engage in religious persecution.  People who were able to keep on the good side of the dictator could lead normal lives.

I remember one blog post in particular, which conveyed in a nutshell what was wrong with the U.S. occupation.  She had a cousin who was a civil engineer and worked for a company whose specialty was bridge design and construction.  They repaired many bridges during the Clinton administration’s bombings and sanctions.  The cousin drew up a bid proposal to restore a certain Baghdad bridge for $300,000.   But the contract was given to an American company for—wait for it—$50,000,000.

In 2007, Riverbend wrote a post telling how her family fled Iraq to Syria, and then stopped posting.  But last week she wrote a new post, saying that she is alive and well and living in a different country.   In her post she described lessons learned.  Here is part of what she wrote.

We learned that you can be floating on a sea of oil, but your people can be destitute.  Your city can be an open sewer; your women and children can be eating out of trash dumps and begging for money in foreign lands.

We learned that justice does not prevail in this day and age.  Innocent people are persecuted and executed daily.  Some of them in courts, some of them in streets, and some of them in the private torture chambers.

We are learning that corruption is the way to go.  You want a passport issued?  Pay someone. You want a document ratified?  Pay someone.  You want someone dead?  Pay someone.

We learned that it’s not that difficult to make billions disappear.

We are learning that those amenities we took for granted before 2003, you know—the luxuries—electricity, clean water from faucets, walkable streets, safe schools—those are for deserving populations.  Those are for people who don’t allow occupiers into their country.

***

We’re learning that militias aren’t particular about who they kill.  The easiest thing in the world would be to say that Shia militias kill Sunnis and Sunni militias kill Shia, but that’s not the way it works.  That’s too simple.

We’re learning that the leaders don’t make history.  Populations don’t make history.  Historians don’t write history.  News networks do.  The Foxes, and CNNs, and BBCs, and Jazeeras of the world make history.  They twist and turn things to fit their own private agendas.

***

But it wasn’t all a bad education…

We learned that you sometimes receive kindness when you least expect it.  We learned that people often step outside of the stereotypes we build for them and surprise us.  We learned and continue to learn that there is strength in numbers and that Iraqis are not easy to oppress.  It is a matter of time…

***

For those of you who have been asking about me and wondering how I have been doing, I thank you. “Lo khuliyet, qulibet…” Which means  “If the world were empty of good people, it would end.”  I only need to check my emails to know it won’t be ending any time soon.

I recommend reading her entire post and, if you’re interested in what life was like in Baghdad from 2003 to 2007, dipping into her archives.   Click on Baghdad Burning for both.   A collection of her posts was published in book form.  I haven’t read it or seen it; all her posts are available on-line.   Her post about the bridge contract is dated August 28, 2003.

When I followed her blog, I felt as if I knew her.  She is a good person.  I’m glad to know she is alive and well.

An atheist draws moral lessons from Bible stories

Herb Silverman, a retired professor of mathematics who lives in Charleston, S.C., is founder and past president of the Secular Coalition for America, which defends and promotes atheism.  He once ran for governor of South Carolina to challenge that state’s constitutional provision barring atheists from holding public office.

Openly being an atheist in the United States still takes moral courage, unless you’re in an academic or intellectual enclave shielded from society at large.  Atheists are subject to religious discrimination and even, in some places, physical violence.

Silverman was here in Rochester, N.Y., last week to address the Rochester Russell Set and promote his new book, Candidate Without a Prayer: An Autobiography of a Jewish Atheist in the Bible Belt.  One part of the book I liked was Chapter 12, in which he tells the moral lessons that he as an atheist draws from well-known Bible stories.

The Creation of Eve

Herb Silverman

Humans and other species are social animals.  Solitude has its rewards, but do does the company of others.  It’s good to associate with people whose values you share.  Learn about other kinds, but recognize those with whom you can communicate well and trust.

Adam, Eve and the Snake

God makes blind obedience the supreme virtue, assuming ignorance is bliss.  God either lied or was mistaken when he said humans would die on the day they received knowledge.  So don’t blindly believe, even if you pay a price for independent thought.  Better to have freedom without a guarantee of security than to have security without freedom.

Cain and Abel

The first worship ceremony is followed immediately by the first murder, which shows we must not put our love and worship of a God above our love for human beings, especially when God’s favoritism can be so arbitrary.  Cain belatedly learns that humans should look out for one another, making each of us our brother and sister’s keeper.  God recognizes his culpability in the first murder, and puts a mark on Cain as a sign to those he meets that they must now do to Cain what Cain did to Abel.

Noah and the Flood

God learns that his expectations for humans were unrealistic and genocide solves nothing.  Never indiscriminately destroy the innocent along with the guilty.  God should have been concerned about a compliant Noah who showed no empathy for the lives of others.  Older doesn’t necessarily mean wiser, even with 600 years of experience.

The Tower of Babel

Leaders must not become as insecure as God, who prevented others from cooperating and moving upward together.  Also, there is value in diversity.  Each of us must decide when to go along with the crowd and when to set out on a road not taken.

Sodom and Gomorrah

Abraham is morally superior to Noah, since he tried to talk God out of mass destruction.  It takes courage to stand up to authority, especially one bent on genocide.  God teaches the value of looking forward to a fresh start without dwelling on the past, but what he did to Lot’s wife for a brief look backward was, shall we say, overkill.  People in new and frightening environments are likely to act in ways formerly unthinkable.  Lot’s motherless daughters, believing all other men dead, chose what they thought was the most practical path for the survival of the species—make love, not war.

The Binding of Isaac

God tests Abraham, who fails the test.  Nobody should commit an atrocity, no matter who makes the request.  Abraham’s willingness to kill his son creates a dysfunctional family.  Neither Abraham’s son Isaac nor his wife Sarah ever speak to Abraham again in the Bible.  It is better to do good than have faith.

Jacob and Esau

We shouldn’t prey on the weaknesses of family members, as Jacob and Rebekah did.  On the other hand, a future leader should be a thinker and planner like Jacob, rather than prone to foolish choices, as Esau was.  Esau makes the wise decision to forgive his brother, rather than seek revenge.  Violence breeds violence.

Joseph and the Coat of Many Colors

As often occurs in families, Jacob picks up some of the bad habits of his father, and suffers for opening preferring one child over another.  We learn about degrees of horrendous behavior, with Judas appearing the most reasonable brother because he favors selling Joseph into slavery instead of killing him.  Joseph, similarly, feels the need to torment his brothers before eventually disclosing his identity and dropping trumped-up charges.  We learn in this fable not to flaunt a favored status, as Joseph does, and not to overreact with envy, as Joseph’s brothers do.

Judah, Onan and Tamar

Marriages arranged by authority figures for the sole purpose of increasing property can lead to death and destruction.  Couples should be honest with each other about their sexual relationships, which Onan was not.  Judah, at least, is willing to admit his error when confronted with proof.  Tamar is the most admirable character because she is not a hypocrite and attains her goal the only way possible in a culture ruled by men.

Click on Secular Coaltion for America for that organization’s web page.

The necessity for error, stress and risk

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a successful options trader on Wall Street, is one of the most interesting and original writers of our time.  In Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, he wrote of how luck is mistaken for skill.  In The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, he wrote about how frequently people are blindsided by the unpredictable, which is important precisely because people don’t prepare for it.

How do you prepare for the unpredictable?  In his newest book, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, he tells how.   Antifragile sparkles with wit and is a delight to read.  Taleb invents dialogues about life and high finance between two fictional characters, the intellectual Nero Tulip and the street-smart Fat Tony.  He tells fascinating anecdotes about his personal life, starting with his boyhood in the Christian community in Lebanon and continuing to the present day.  He insults his enemies and boasts of his accomplishments with readable gusto.

In his philosophy, everything falls into one of three categories—fragile, robust and anti-fragile.  A delicate wine glass is fragile.  In mythology, the fragile is symbolized by the Sword of Damocles.  Nobody knows when it is going to fall, but it can fall at any time.  The robust is symbolized by the Phoenix.  No matter what you do to the Phoenix, it keeps being reborn.  The anti-fragile is Taleb’s original idea.  It is symbolized by the Hydra.  When you whack off its head or limbs, it grows more.  Attacking the Hydra makes it stronger.

A delicate wine glass is fragile.  You don’t know if it will break tomorrow or last a thousand years, but you do know that any little thing can break it.  A granite block is robust.  Few things can damage it, but over time it is going to be ground down.  A roaring fire is antifragile.  Whatever you throw into it or do to it (within limits), it is going to grow stronger.

The reputation of writers is antifragile.  Any attack on a writer’s book will stimulate interest in the book.  It doesn’t matter how many people dislike a writer, only how many are admirers.  Taleb noted that few people saw any merit in the work of the young Ludwig Wittgenstein, but it didn’t matter, because two who did were Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes.

Living things are antifragile (up to a point).  Exposing yourself to error, stress and risk can make you smarter, stronger and safer.  If you spend a month in bed, you grow weaker.  If you spend a month doing hard physical work in the out of doors, you grow stronger.

Taleb tells of twin Greek Cypriot brothers who settled in London at the same time.  One became a taxi driver, the other went to work for a bank.  The taxi driver’s income varied quite a bit from day to day, week to week and month to month, while the bank employee’s income was completely predictable.  Although over time, they earned roughly the same amount of money, it would have seemed that the taxi driver was less secure—that is, until the current banking crisis, which has left the bank employee in jeopardy of being laid off and having to start over in middle age.

Click to enlarge.

The banker brother is an example of what Taleb calls the turkey problem—inspired by the empirical chicken in Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy.  The turkey, noting that it is fed every day at 9 a.m., decides this is a law of nature, right up until the day before Thanksgiving.

The problem with the modern world, according to Taleb, is the illusion that life can be planned and controlled.  The result is fewer minor setbacks and more big crises.  Putting out every little forest fire allows flammable material to accumulate until there is enough for a really big fire that goes out of control.  The illusion by “fragilista” Alan Greenspan and others that they could eliminate the boom-and-bust economic cycle resulted in problems building up into a major economic crisis.

The alternative is trial and error, provided the errors are small and the potential gains are great.  Taleb, an immigrant said the greatness of the United States is that it encourages people to attempt new enterprises, with little penalty and no disgrace for failure, but big rewards for success.

Intellectuals put too much stress on the ability to articulate knowledge, Taleb says.  He wrote a Platonic dialogue between Socrates and Fat Tony, in which Fat Tony refutes Socrates’ contention that he lacks understanding unless his actions are based on clearly-defined terms and theory.  Taleb says the fact is that practice is seldom based on theory, but rather theory is an attempt to explain practice after the fact.  Theorists want to “teach birds how to fly.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s five rules for policy

Rule 1.  Think of the economy as more like a cat than a washing machine.

Rule 2.  Favor businesses that benefit from their own mistakes, not those whose mistakes percolate into the system.

Rule 3.  Small is beautiful, but it is also efficient.

Rule 4.  Trial and error beats academic knowledge.

Rule 5.  Decision-makers must have skin in the game.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a successful Wall Street options trader and author of a new book, ANTIFRAGILE: Things That Gain from Disorder.  In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, he laid down those five wise rules for economic policy-makers.

The economy is organic, like a cat, and not mechanical, like a washing machine.  Every kind of stress on a machine causes it to wear out faster.  But a living animal thrives on stress, up to a point.  Animals and other organic systems are best left alone, except in dire emergency.

One of Taleb’s examples of businesses that learn from their own mistakes is the airline industry.  Every time there is an airplane crash, the airline companies study the causes of the crash and incorporate that information into their practices.  In a sense, every airline crash makes the airlines safer.  Another example is Silicon Valley, where failure is not regarded as a disgrace and the idea is to “fail quickly” so you can go on to try something.   The opposite of this is the Wall Street banking industry, where every bank failure weakens the overall system.

An industry is strongest when it consists of many small units, where the failure of an individual business makes the survivors stronger.  Taleb cited the restaurant business, in which the failure of an individual restaurant is common but the failure of the restaurant industry as a whole is unimaginable.  Failures mean the best restaurants survive, and so the industry is ever-improving (assuming, I would add, that the big chain restaurants don’t drive the individually-owned restaurants out of business).  Government is least harmful, he wrote, when it is vested in the lowest and possible unit, as in Switzerland.

We should honor failed entrepreneurs in the same spirit that we honor warriors who fall in battle.  It is through their individual sacrifice contributes that society as a whole survives and prospers.

He is skeptical of top-down planning, whether done by government, corporations or some other form of corporation.  The best economic and social system is one that allows trial and error in which the errors are small and are a source of knowledge and improvement.  Experimentation and tinkering, not theory, is the source of technological and economic progress.

The trouble with most journalists, academics and government policy-makers is that they suffer no penalty for being wrong, not even a loss of reputation.  Even worse are Wall Street bankers, who are able to pocket the gains from their successes and push their losses onto the taxpayers.   He said the government in a humane society ought to provide for the weak and help the unlucky get back on their feet, but it should never bail out a failed business.  If a business is too big to fail, he said, nobody in that business should receive greater compensation than the most highly-paid civil servant.

Taleb admires Ralph Nader because he is the opposite of a Wall Street banker.  Nader accepts personal risks and sacrifices in order to confer benefits on society as a whole.

How to live in a world you don’t understand

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is the author of  ANTIFRAGILE: Things That Gain From Disorder,  which is about how to thrive in a world that is basically unpredictable.  Taleb said that individuals and societies become stronger when they expose themselves to moderate amounts of stress and risk, and become vulnerable when they try to eliminate stress and risk.   He said it is impossible and unnecessary to predict the future.  What is possible, on an individual and societal level, is to arrange things so that you have more to gain than to lose from change.

In this video he talks about his ideas to his friend Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, which is about how people make most of their decisions on the basis of intuition, and how thing can lead us astray, particularly when thinking about risk.

I give you fair warning that this video is an hour and nearly 20 minutes long.  I thought it was interesting and maybe you will, too.   Here are some quotes from the book which I hope will pique your interest.

My characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn’t introspect, doesn’t exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on.

He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.  And someone who has made plenty of errors—though never the same error more than once—is more reliable than someone who has never made any.

As a rule, intervening to limit size (of companies, airports, or sources of pollution), concentrations and speed are beneficial in reducing Black Swan risks.  These actions may be devoid of iatrogenics—but it is hard to get governments to limit the size of government.

My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.

The true hero in the Black Swan world is someone who prevents a calamity and, naturally, because the calamity did not happen, does not get recognition—or a bonus—for it.

Anything that needs to be marketed heavily is necessarily either an inferior product or an evil one.

If there is something in nature you don’t understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding.

An alternate apocalypse

My previous post was about Philip Wylie’s 1954 novel, Tomorrow!, about a nuclear attack on the United States, which ends with massive retaliation wiping out two-thirds of the population of the Soviet Union.  It reminded me of a 1947 short story, Thunder and Roses, by Theodore Sturgeon, a less renowned, but more gifted and original, writer, also about the United States in the aftermath of a nuclear attack.

In Sturgeon’s story, the United States was wiped out in a first strike, and the remnants of the population are doomed to die by radiation poisoning.  The means of retaliation still exist, however, if someone can find them.  The result, however, would be to raise the total level of background radiation to such a level as to destroy all life on other.  A beautiful and beloved singer and movie star is traveling across what’s left of the USA to try to persuade the survivors to not retaliate.

She begins her performance with her signature song, which is a reminder of all the reasons that life is worth living.

When you gave me your heart, you gave me the world

You gave me the night and the day

And thunder, and roses, and sweet green grass

The sea, and soft white clay

I drank the dawn from a golden cup

From a silver one, the dark

The steed I rode was the wild west wind

My song was the brook and the lark

With thunder, I smote the evil of earth

With roses, I won the right

With the sea, I washed and with clay I built

And the world was a place of light

She then makes her plea against taking justified revenge.

The spark of humanity can still live and grow on this planet.  It will be blown and drenched and shaken and all but extinguished, but it will live if that song is a true one.  It will live if we are human enough to discount the fact that the spark is in the custody of our temporary enemy.  Some—a few—of his children will live to merge with the new humanity that will gradually emerge from the jungle and the wilderness.

The protagonist then discovers the secret missile installation from which massive retaliation can be launched.  His best friend tries to  fire the missiles.  The protagonist (apparently) kills him to stop him, destroys the installation so that the missiles can never be launched and then sits down to die.

“You’ll have your chance,” he said into the far future.  “And, by Heaven, you’d better make good.”

A decade later the anti-war Russell-Einstein manifesto called upon the peoples of the world to “remember your humanity and forget the rest.”   Philip Wylie’s novel Tomorrow!, which describes a U.S. victory through nuclear genocide, is a reminder that the best of us can forget our humanity.  Theodore Sturgeon’s novel reminds us that it is always possible to remember your humanity.

Apocalypse then

A friend of mine recently lent me a novel about World War Three as imagined in 1954 by Philip Wylie, an author who is virtually forgotten now, but famous in his time for his iconoclasm about American political, social and sexual taboos.  Tomorrow! was enjoyable to read, and a reminder of a very real danger which we escaped.

He wrote Tomorrow! to advocate for a better U.S. civilian civil defense program.  The characters live in twin fictional Midwestern cities, resembling Kansas City, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri.  One city has a functioning civil defense program; the other does not.

Wylie sketches his characters, and their struggles and hypocrisies, as in a Sinclair Lewis novel, and then the atomic bombs fall, and their reactions reveal their characters, as in a Hollywood disaster movie.   The characters who support and participate in civil defense are self-defined liberals.  The main opponent is a wealthy businesswoman who admires Senator Joe McCarthy and thinks the real Communist enemy is within.

The climax is that the surviving members of the U.S. government decide to unleash their secret Doomsday weapon against the Soviet Union—a superbomb in a nuclear submarine on a suicide mission in the Baltic Sea.

The rays, the temperatures, vaporized Finland’s Gulf in a split part of an instant.  The sea’s bottom was melted.  The Light reached out into the Universe.  Finland (!!) was not.  Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, they were not.  Kronstadt melted.  Leningrad.  …   On the wind currents … a thick dust that widened to a hundred miles and then five hundred, moving, spreading, descending, blanketing the land … The further it surged from the reshaped Finland Gulf, where the sea had come sparkling back, the longer men took to perish.  But they perished. … Men swallowed, ate, breathed, sickened and died in a day, a week, two weeks—men and women and children, dogs and cats and cattle and sheep, all of them. … There was no refuge from the death, it took them all, the birds of Arctic winter, the persistent insects who had survived geologic ages, the bacteria—all.

Everyone in the USSR dies except a remnant in its southern fringes.  Although this is a greater mass slaughter of human beings than carried out by Hitler, Stalin or Mao, it is regarded as a happy ending in the novel.

The last great obstacles to freedom had been removed from the human path.

We then see scenes of rebuilding, with Americans, instead of being condemned for having committed history’s greatest crime, receiving foreign aid from a grateful world.   Of course this was only fiction, but it is sobering to think about what was regarded as acceptable thinking back then, and how easy it is to accept enormities as normal.   I first read the novel back in the 1950s.  I don’t remember my exact reaction, but I was not as appalled as I should have been.

Theodore Sturgeon, another writer of that era, had a similar theme, but opposite conclusion in his 1947 short story Thunder and Roses.   I’ll write about this in my next post.

Books on paper are here to stay (I hope)

Double click to enlarge.

The other advantage of books on paper is that they can’t be deleted at the push of a button by Big Brother (in the form of Amazon, Google or Homeland Security).

Source: Daily Infographic.