A BRIEF RESPONSE TO A MULTI-PART COMMENT

No sooner had I lifted the moratorium then MS posted a three-part comment of considerable length. I really do not want to get into a discussion of whether the comments section of a blog is more like a dinner party or a town square but since the three-part comment was an extended discussion of my little book In Defense of Anarchism I feel called upon to respond.

 

Somewhat more than the first third of the comment is taken up by a series of quotations from the book. Then MS begins with what I must confess I found a rather puzzling paragraph. MS writes “Neither you nor I, nor any other readers of your blog, can know to what extent Trump’s actions are intended, in his mind, to maximize his autonomy, at the same time as conforming to what he regards as his moral imperative. Moreover, none of us can know that of anybody else.” My immediate response is: of course I can know that, either about Trump or about other people. I may in fact not know it because I lack sufficient information in this particular case, although quite frankly I think I have more than enough information about Trump to make a reasoned judgment about the matter. But unless one wants to embrace an extreme position with regard to what used to be called in philosophy “the problem of other minds,” it seems to me obvious that all of us go through life making judgments of this sort all the time about the intentions, beliefs, plans, desires, reasons for action, self justifications, self deceptions, and motivations of other people. Indeed, that is most of what we do in our social life.

 

It is clear that MS agrees with this because he begins own his discussion by saying  “I believe that I, as a sentient being, have an obligation to respect the needs and aspirations of other sentient beings – as long as those needs and aspirations also respect the needs and aspirations of other sentient beings, e.g., do not cause others pain, do not without legitimate justification (i.e., commission of a crime) deprive them of their physical freedom - and that this requires compromise and coordination, which in turn requires acceptance of the authority mutually reached through the exercise of compromise and coordination.” But if you think you have an obligation to respect the needs and aspirations of other sentient beings, then you obviously think you can know what those needs and aspirations are, and if you can know that, then why on earth cannot you also know the extent to which Trump’s actions, or those of anybody else, are intended to do this or that or the other thing. I mean, you cannot have it both ways.

 

MS then drifts off into a discussion that does not really engage at all with my argument regarding autonomy. My question in that extended essay was this: is there ever a de jure legitimate state, in the sense of a state whose commands I have some obligation to obey merely because they have been issued? My answer is quite simply, no. I go to some lengths in my little book to make it clear that this has nothing to do with the question whether in some circumstances – whether in fact in most circumstances – I have an independent moral obligation as an autonomous agent to conform myself to certain of the commands of those who claim legitimate authority because in my judgment my conforming to those commands is, taking everything into account, best. To give a deliberately trivial example, if I am driving on the roads of a country ruled by a group of people who claim – incorrectly on my view – to have legitimate authority, I will in most cases drive on whichever side of the road they command me to drive on because to do otherwise would put myself and other drivers in jeopardy and that, I judge, would be wrong of me.

 

My little book is so short that rather than rehearse its arguments I will simply suggest that anyone interested read it. All of this is so simple and straightforward that it need not be elaborated at great length but let me make one final observation. Perhaps I can tie it to one of my favorite quotations from Shakespeare, a line by Owen Glendower in Henry IV part one. The conspirators are making their plans and Glendower rather grandly says “I can call spirits from the vasty deep.” To which one of the characters replies “why so can I, and so can any man/but do they come when you do call them?” Trump or anyone can claim to be acting for the purpose of expanding or solidifying his or her autonomy. That by itself is not much of a response to an accusation of self-interest.

 

One final point. There are rules, which MS knows better than I, regulating what evidence must be placed into the record in a legal proceeding to establish motivation. There are also professional restrictions placed on psychiatrists regarding public speculations concerning the psychological condition of persons who are not their patients and whom indeed they have never met. But at least for 4 or 5 thousand years and probably for much longer, people have been making judgments about the motivations of others. I think it is perfectly sensible for them to do so and that has nothing whatsoever to do with the questions I discussed in my little book.

 

I hope this clears things up a bit but if not, I urge MS to restrain himself from extended  responses on this blog.

 

 

RHE RETURN OF THE USUAL SUSPECTS

The natives are getting restless so I will cancel the timeout and welcome back the usual suspects. Thank you for taking a week off. It gave a number of people a chance to comment who do not usually show up on the blog and I think that was a good thing.

THINGS YOU LEARN FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES CROSSWORD PUZZLE

Spoiler alert: if you have not yet done the New York Times crossword puzzle do not read this post.

The Thursday puzzle always has a gimmick. Today's puzzle is built around Beethoven's Fifth.  One of the clues reveals that this month is the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth. Who knew? Somehow it seems like only yesterday. But of course Bach was born 335 years ago! So was Handel, by the way.

How time flies when you are having fun…

NOW, NOW, DON'T DESPAIR

Well, as everybody knew he would, Biden is selecting a cabinet of Obama retreads sprinkled with token minorities, while he talks about reaching across the aisle to work productively with his old buddies in the Republican Senate caucus.Nobody should be surprised about this. It is why he was not at the top of our list of preferred candidates during the primaries. It may be that as a consequence of the pandemic and the strength of white privilege anxiety In broad swaths of the electorate, he is the only candidate who could actually have defeated Trump, but we will never know and now he is what we have.

What must we do? The answer is obvious, albeit depressing. First we do whatever we can to help Stacy Abrams in Georgia.Then we throw all of our support behind progressive Democrats in Congress and in state and local government while also supporting progressive nongovernmental organizations with money and with our time and effort if that is possible for us (as it no longer is, alas, for me.)

As I indicated the day before yesterday, the accident of when I was born and grew up gave me an irrational optimism about the possibility for progressive politics in America and since I seem to be a slow learner, it is taken me 40 years to realize the weakness of the foundations of that optimism. But we have no choice. Not for us the poetic exclamation "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven."

DOWN MEMORY LANE

A reader who knows something of my past sent me a link to this story in the New York Times. It concerns an effort to keep alive large numbers of little bugs, useful in scientific research, known colloquially as fruit flies. This story took me back to 1948 when my big sister, Barbara, was a senior at Forest Hills high school in Queens, New York. The chairman of the biology department, Paul Brandwein, had decided to make a run at the newly established national competition for high school science students sponsored by the Westinghouse Corporation. The competition was officially called The Westinghouse Science Talent Search. High school seniors all over America took a written science examination and did science research projects which they wrote up and submitted. 40 girls and boys (we talked that way then) were selected as national winners on the basis of their projects, having already made it to Honorable Mention status by their performance on the examination. They were then brought to Washington DC for a one-week all-expenses-paid trip where they were interviewed by scientists. A top boy and top girl in the competition each received a college scholarship of $2400, which in those days paid for four years of tuition.

 

Barbara was the grand national girl winner her year with a project on phenocopies in Drosophila Melanogaster – fruit flies. Fruit flies are beloved by geneticists because apparently they have enormous chromosomes, making them easy to study under the microscope (this is 72 years ago, remember.) Barbara irradiated fruit flies with ultraviolet light, causing them to produce somatic changes that mimicked genetic changes but were in fact not inheritable. She used a microscope that my father had kept in the basement, a relic of his long years as a high school biology teacher (and a friend of Brandwein.) Barbara did her best to confine her research to the basement but inevitably some of the little critters escaped and every evening as the family sat at dinner a little crowd of fruit flies gathered over the table.

 

As I think I have recounted in my autobiography, I as the little brother actually got in on the act at one point. Barbara was invited to make a presentation of her research at a science fair in Manhattan but the date coincided with her interview at Swarthmore College so I was deputized to take her place.

 

Ever since these events so long ago, fruit flies have had a special place in my heart and I was pleased to read that they are being looked after so well.

The Westinghouse, as we called it colloquially, was taken over by Intel and in 2007, AOC came in second in the microbiology category (by then they no longer had "girl" and "boy" divisions.) This fact inclined me to support her even before I had a clear idea of her politics.:-)

A LIFE

I was born at the very end of 1933, just too late to be around for FDR’s first victory. If you will give me that one, then I have been alive for a total of 23 presidential elections. They divide naturally into three sequences of nine, six, and eight: FDR, FDR, FDR, FDR, HST, DDE, DDE, JFK, LBJ is the first; RMN, RMN, JEC, RN, RN, GHWC is the second; and WJC, WJC, GWB, GWB, BHO, BHO, DJT, JB is the third. The Democrats won the popular vote in seven of the first nine elections, in one of the next six, and then in seven of the final eight. In all, since 1932, the Democrats have won the popular vote two thirds of the time during my life.

 

Inasmuch as I was 19 years old before I saw a Republican in the White House – and a RINO at that – it is perhaps understandable that I grew up thinking the only serious political question in American presidential politics was what sort of Democrat would be president. During the terrible middle years, from 1968 to 1992, I was primarily devoted first to being the father of two young boys and then to 15 years of immersion in the theories of Karl Marx, and although I was “political” during those years, parenthood and the study of Marx made a deeper impression on me than the larger events going on in the public world.

 

None of this has anything at all to do with what was and is happening politically but it has everything to do with how I have internalized and reacted to the events of the past 87 years. I grew up believing that unions were the wave of the future, not relics of the past. For me, the Civil Rights Movement and the protests against the Vietnam War were experienced as signs of the fundamental health of the American polity and harbingers of better times to come. My rational evaluation of modern American history is quite different from this, but I realize now that my emotional response has been powerfully affected by the accident of what was happening in America when I was growing up for those first 20 years or so.

 

All of this is by way of saying that the Trump presidency and the Republican Party’s response to his loss in this last election has deeply shaken my quite irrational confidence in the basic political health of the American electorate. It is just as well that I have declared a one-week moratorium on comments from the usual group because I really do not need to be told about all the bad things that were done by Roosevelt, by Truman, by Eisenhower, by Kennedy, by Johnson, by Clinton, or by Obama, or about the terrible things that will be done by Biden. I know all that. I am talking about the way in which the accidents of my time of birth have shaped my emotional responses to the world, not about my mature political judgments of that world.

FYI

Since questions arose, just before I declared a moratorium, concerning the conditions under which a nuclear weapon will explode I thought I would say a few words of explanation. I am no kind of physicist but back in the day when I spent a good deal of my time as part of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament I had to learn some of this stuff up and it sort of stays with you.

 

The crucial point to remember is that the mass of an atom is determined both by the number of protons and neutrons it contains and also by the amount of energy, in the form of mass, required to hold it together. Some atoms either in their standard form or in their isotope form are sufficiently unstable to break down periodically, giving off an amount of energy determined by the famous formula e=mc². Since the constant c stands for the speed of light which is 300,000 km/s, the energy equivalent of even a very small bit of mass is obviously very large.

 

Very heavy atoms like uranium and plutonium are unstable and break down into their component parts regularly without external prodding. Sometimes when one of those atoms spontaneously breaks down, it gives off an alpha particle that hits another atom of the same material and causes it to break up as well. But since, contrary to intuition, most of supposedly solid matter is actually empty space, the likelihood of this happening is rather small. If you cram enough uranium or plutonium into a small enough space you can raise the likelihood of a series of such break ups, called a chain reaction.

 

All of this was well understood theoretically at the time during the second world war when both the allies and the axis had a go at creating a weapon out of nuclear materials. All the physicists involved knew that the amount of energy that could be released by such a chain reaction was enormous but the engineering problem was how to get the chain reaction to start and carry on for some period of time (a microsecond, actually) before the explosion produced scattered the material and stopped the chain reaction.

 

The amount of energy produced by even a primitive so-called atomic bomb was beyond anything human beings had ever produced. The super big conventional bombs carried by Allied bombers in the air raids over Germany were as large as 1 ton or 2000 pounds of TNT. That is a monster big bomb but the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were rated not in equivalent thousands of pounds of TNT but in equivalent thousands of tons of TNT – hence the invention of the term kiloton.

 

The secret of making the damn thing work turned out to be creating a sheath of conventional explosive around two components of uranium or plutonium, neither one large enough all by itself to produce a chain reaction, and then exploding the sheath inward, or imploding it, so that the two components were jammed together by the explosion and held there just long enough to produce a chain reaction of enormous explosive power.

 

Blowing up a functional atomic bomb by hitting it with a missile would scatter the material harmlessly (setting aside for the moment the effect of the radiation produced by the components). The likelihood that such a missile attack would literally trigger the explosive mechanism and cause the atomic bomb to explode as intended is virtually nil.

 

So what on earth is a hydrogen bomb? Well, it turns out that if you arrange all the elements in order of their atomic weight from the very lightest, which is hydrogen, to the very heaviest which is uranium or plutonium, in each case the heavier atom is a trace heavier than the combined component atoms resulting from a breakup, the additional weight consisting of the mass form of the energy holding the parts of the atom together.

 

Except one case. If you break up one atom of helium, which has an atomic weight of four, which is to say two protons and two neutrons, into two atoms of so-called heavy hydrogen, which is to say an isotope of hydrogen with one proton and one neutron, the two atoms of heavy hydrogen weigh more than the one atom of helium! This means that if you could find a way of combining two atoms of heavy hydrogen into one atom of helium, energy would be released. The amount of energy, it turned out, is enormous even by atom bomb standards. But there is a problem: this process of combining hydrogen atoms into helium – the same process, by the way, that generates the energy of the sun – requires enormous temperatures. But the yield is vast – measured not in thousands of tons of TNT equivalent but in millions of tons. Hence the new term “megaton.”

 

Heavy hydrogen exists in nature in very small quantities in ocean water and if you are willing to take the trouble of processing huge amounts of that ocean water you can extract heavy hydrogen and use it to make an H – bomb, with an A-bomb trigger. During the second world war the scientists gathered at Los Alamos undertook to create a uranium bomb, and they solve the problem of how to trigger it with a covering of conventional explosive (this was of course an international group of scientists and it turns out that the shape of the conventional explosive that is optimally effective is roughly that of a soccer ball!) The Germans made the mistake of trying to create a fusion bomb, not realizing that it would require an atomic bomb trigger. They had a big plant processing ocean water at Peenemünde, which was raided by the allies in an important air raid.

 

Well, that just about exhausts my understanding of these matters but readers of this blog might find this interesting.