A couple weeks ago, the New York Times ran a piece asserting that NASA engineers now believe we may be able to live on the moon by the year 2040. I, like most people, think this sounds awesome. I'm not against it. Still, the techno-utopian grandiosity of the proposal strikes me, and it seems to crystallize in a way the fundamental ambivalence of our current relationship with technology. We live in an era of unbounded excitement and optimism about the future potential of novel technologies, of a kind we have not experienced for at least several decades; yet at the same time we are perhaps more uneasy and perturbed by the direction and rapidity of this change than we have been in at least as long a time.
I thought it was strangely apt, for instance, that Oppenheimer was the blockbuster hit of the summer. Obviously, it tapped into the zeitgeist—yet it was such a grand undertaking that Christopher Nolan must have been planning it years before he could have known how well it would suit our moment. One therefore has the sense that he was building better than he knew. And I don't just mean that we are experiencing an episode of renewed anxiety and concern about nuclear weapons—conflicts involving nuclear-armed powers in Ukraine and now in the Middle East obviously have a lot to do with this. But also, we are at a moment when the promethean powers of scientists in general are facing renewed skepticism.
Likewise with the twinned novels that Cormac McCarthy published shortly before his death this summer at age eighty-nine: The Passenger and Stella Maris. The author could not have known that this would be the summer of the Oppenheimer film phenomenon. Still less could he have foreseen, when drafting these books over many years, that their final publication would coincide with the rise of generative AI. Yet the two books concern the offspring of a scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project, and their resonance with the concerns of our time about the growth of frightening and dangerous new technologies is therefore unmistakeable. After all, even the creators of the new AI invoke the Oppenheimer parallel themselves.
Across multiple forms and genres, therefore, we seem to be in a cultural moment that is particularly fascinated by the apocalyptic potential and fear of new technologies; yet, at the same time, here comes NASA to tell us that, even if new technology might kill us all or render our planet uninhabitable someday, it might also prove our salvation. It might mean we can get off this increasingly inhospitable and ever-warming world and branch out into the solar system. Here, then, is the ambivalence: we fear the new technology, we find that it only creates problems for us—whether global warming or nuclear risk or the unknown complications of artificial intelligence—and yet, once it has created these problems, we find that it is only in the invention and production of more and better technology that we can hope to solve them.
The protagonist of Saul Bellow's 1970 novel Mr. Sammler's Planet calls this the "homeopathic principle" of technology. He is referring to the fact that, even as the new technology in our lives provokes fears of a computerized dystopia or apocalyptic inferno—it also holds out the promise that we can transcend these risks by applying more of the same sorts of technology. Only technology can fight the evils of technology: hence, the homeopathic remedy. As Mr. Sammler describes it: "it is perhaps for the same human activities that had shut us up like this to let us out again. The powers that made the earth too small could free us from confinement. [...C]onceivably there was no alternative but to push further in the same direction."
Interestingly, Bellow had in mind lunar colonization specifically in writing the book. In the course of the novel, Mr. Sammler is given a manuscript from a visiting lecturer at Columbia University who proposes an engineering scheme to make life on the moon possible. And although Sammler tends to be a pessimist, disturbed by the direction of cultural entropy in the United States, he is smitten with this idea as a promise of spiritual renewal. To leave the planet behind, to branch out into the stars. There is hope there at last. It is this manuscript that persuades Mr. Sammler of the possibility of successfully applying the homeopathic remedy: the solution to technology is more technology—more and better of the same.
This interest in lunar colonization is one of only several ways in which Bellow's book is eerily contemporary, despite being published more than fifty years ago now. Its themes across many dimensions overlap with the angst of our present political and cultural moment: frustrations with self-righteous campus radicals, for one. (Mr. Sammler is at one point heckled by a student protester at Columbia University who denounces him for praising Orwell. The student deems Orwell to have been a "fink" and a "counterrevolutionary." One is reminded of the students who pointedly walked out on Hillary Clinton last week at that same august institution. Their protest had something to do with the university's position on student expression related to Israel and Palestine—though it's not clear what Clinton was supposed to have done about that.)
Likewise with the novel's other major themes: the fear that liberalism will fail to protect itself against the rise of totalitarianism at both ends of the political spectrum ("liberal beliefs did not seem capable of self-defense" mourns Mr. Sammler), debates over Palestine and the State of Israel breaking out on campuses nationwide, causing a rift in the Democratic coalition that may extend well beyond the present violence. In a world where opposition to any form of U.S. support to Israel is fast becoming a litmus test for membership in both the progressive movement and the far-right "America First" wing of the Republican coalition, Mr. Sammler would well have reason to fear for the future direction of American politics. His warning, discussed in the previous post, about the possibility that the "world [...] might collapse twice," just as it did during World War II and the Holocaust, deeply resonates with our time.
But it is in its grappling with the ambivalence of modern technology that the book seems especially prescient. Obviously, Bellow had both nuclear weapons and lunar exploration to think about, writing the book in the late-Sixties: it is no surprise that both found their way into the work. But, it is fascinating and perhaps unexpected that even in our present moment, more than fifty years later, these same two technologies would still serve so well as symbols of the double-sided Janus face of modern engineering.
On the one hand, we have the fear of self-annihilation: the dread that human technological achievement will become so powerful that we will effectively destroy ourselves, and all because of the blinkered imperialism of governments. As Mr. Sammler observes in another passage: "very mediocre people have the power to end life altogether. These representatives—not representatives of the best but Calibans or, in the jargon, creeps—will decide for us whether we live or die." One is reminded today of nuclear-armed Putin. Or of the increasingly pro-Putin Elon Musk and his power over global space launches and satellite networks—no one should have that power, let alone such unimpressive individuals. "Creeps," if ever there were any!
Sammler also acknowledges that there is a kind of fascination, though, with the prospect of this universal destruction that is not unrelated to the idea of evacuating the planet for the moon or Mars. Both appeal to the suppressed death wish. Should we just give up on the world as we have made it? Have we ruined this planet so thoroughly that it's time to leave and try again elsewhere? Or should we just take ourselves out along with the planet? Sammler, who is perhaps channeling Heine here, as the latter offers the same insight in his poem "Morphine," asserts that anyone who has truly known pain might well conclude that "not to have been born is better." But, having been born as we were, perhaps we can still live—if not here, then on the moon. The same modern technology that dooms us therefore promises us life, salvation.
At the haunting end of Oppenheimer, the great physicist is troubled by a vision of the world catching flame. As if viewing the planet from space, he seems to see a wall of fire spreading across the continents. Mr. Sammler's eschatology evokes the same image: is it humanity destroying itself and taking the planet with it? Or it is consuming a vessel we no longer need? Have we used the planet up and prepared ourselves to launch outward into space—to join the exodus to the moon—so we can safely torch what we leave behind?
Obviously the world did not in fact catch fire in Oppenheimer's lifetime. It was not destroyed fifty years ago either, when Bellow was writing his novel. The apocalypse, so often foreseen, has still not come. (Though the world keeps heating and more and more of it is indeed catching fire each summer!) Technology keeps threatening to doom us, but then saving us in the end. Maybe the optimistic side of Sammler's ambivalence, then—the homeopathic theory, that technology can still fix the problems for which it is itself to blame—is the one destined each time to be proven right. Still, though, for all the apocalyptic prophecies that have failed to materialize—for all the dire warnings about new technologies that ultimately do not prove true—there have been some that are all too prescient.
I am reminded of the end of Italo Svevo's famous novel, Zeno's Conscience, which I read this summer—long before I planned to see Oppenheimer, and without expecting the novel to have anything at all to say about nuclear weapons. The book, after all, deals mostly not with questions of war or technology, but with the domestic and psychological travails of its endearing middle class protagonist. Yet, the final chapters of the book witness the outbreak of the first world war, and even humble Zeno Cosini is swept up in the conflagration. On the book's final page, he utters a prophecy that eerily presages the development of atomic weapons, even though these would not come along for another twenty years (Svevo's novel was published in 1923). In the William Weaver translation, Zeno's prophecy reads:
Perhaps, through an unheard-of catastrophe produced by devices, we will return to health. When poison gases no longer suffice, an ordinary man, in the secrecy of a room in this world, will invent an incomparable explosive, compared to which the explosives currently in existence will be considered harmless toys. And another man, also ordinary, but a bit sicker than others, will steal this explosive and will climb up at the center of the earth, to set it on the spot where it can have the maximum effect. There will be an enormous explosion that no one will hear, and the earth, once again a nebula, will wander through the heavens, freed of parasites and sickness.
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