The Making of the Atomic Bomb - Richard Rhodes

The minds which made up the international physics community became, in the early half of the twentieth century, a seemingly rootless and stateless society. Moving across international, political, and ideological boundaries, this group of transformative and revolutionary thinkers created what Niels Bohr conceived as a transnational community of science. Seemingly organized around a common pursuit of truth, the only hierarchies here, so we might be lead to believe, were meritocratic. Powerful idealists, as well as great thinkers, scientists like Oppneheimer, Bohr, Fermi, Szilard, and Rutherford would come to impact the world of politics, social and human justice, and war and peace, more than any one person would dare to imagine. While it was through the political and military application of their discoveries that the atomic bomb came to wreck previously unimaginable swift destruction upon two cities of Japanese men, women, and children, Rhodes looks into the moral wrestling of these deep thinkers, and finds them not unaware of the havoc they were unleashing upon the world. Though the international physics community could not be said to have begun the Pacific War, the efforts of men and women physicists spanning back to the beginning of the century would conspire to end it, and thrust international politics and the prospect of world order into an entirely new arena.

Throughout Rhodes rich work, the international and collaborative nature of the scientific community is juxtaposed to the national, and therefore seemingly narrow, politics and conflicts between states. With the chaos of two world wars behind him, Rhodes looks to this same community as a potential paragon of hope for a world in which mutually assured destruction is replaced by the open exchange of our most important resource: ideas and knowledge. While he goes to great lengths to trace the political, material, and contextual intricacies of scientific discovery and application, Rhodes remains convinced that our deepening knowledge of reality, and the possible leveling effects of information diffusion, will be our saving grace. He is able to do this, while telling the story of the most terrible of human contrivances, specifically because he believes in the possible future the bomb has helped to create. Extending the logic of state-sponsored violence to the nth degree, atomic weapons demand a recalculation of human morality in light of international conflict. When no amount of armaments, wealth, or man-power can entirely protect a society from the threat of nuclear annihilation, the world must be thrust into a new paradigm of cooperation. Or so the argument goes. It the over-arching terror, the complete destruction, which these weapons assure, that forces us into a post-war world.

History would seem to suggest that Rhodes, and Bohr before him, are on to something. There has never been an atomic bomb dropped in anger since those fateful days in August, 1945. The Cold War shrank to an end, and the prospect of another world war seems remote indeed. Along the way the world has become more overtly interconnected, and seemingly smaller - perhaps we are moving closer to a truly international community. That the full realization of the depths of our man-made horrors might ensure a world in which such devastation is in retreat is certainly an inversion of the obvious lines of thought. In the balance, I wonder if we are truly saved by the development and application of human knowledge? Does such exploration necessarily breed the wisdom to use it? Must we have known our most terrible demons before we become acquainted with our better angels?

The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845-1849 - Cecil Woodham-Smith

By the mid-nineteenth century, the Irish peasantry had become so dependent upon the potato for their survival and livelihood that poor Irish women scarcely knew how to prepare other foods. According to historian Cecil Woodham-Smith, when the crop failed it was inevitable that a people, who annually dealt with lean times verging on a starvation-lifestyle, would suffer mightily. What was entirely avoidable, was that the depths of the famine would reach such biblical proportions that perhaps 1.5 million Irish would die, and that the peasantry would be essentially forced to emigrate, thus altering the country's history such that effects were still felt a hundred years hence. While soil chemistry and agricultural pathology may have birthed the Irish Potato Famine, it was the work of men which turned hunger into a veritable holocaust. The disregard of British politicians and Irish landholders for the peasantry verged upon acts of willful genocide.

Woodham-Smith casts the most destructive impacts of the famine as those caused by an adherence to illusions of market economic theory. Relying upon forces of price and the ability of labor to jump-start spending and economic activity, during the first two years of the famine British policy makers cast about for ways to productively employ the peasantry. Road construction programs (terminating in the middle of nowhere), measures to combat soil erosion (for untended fields), and other manual labor attempts fell short for want of basic skills, but, more importantly, for a lack of affordable goods to sustain livelihoods. Policy makers and government officials, from their seat of power in London, saw the problem not as one of sustenance, but of economy; all-too-often providing food for the Irish meant helping them procure employment so as to partake in the economy. Once it became universally understood that a people without food cannot hope to work to earn food, it was for so many Irish, simply too late.

Blame for the worst impacts of the famine thus rests at the feet of a men who subjected humane ways of thinking to an economic calculus. Woodham-Smith suggests that a veritable perfect storm of pre-capitalist land tenure, combined with market economic forces, so greatly alienated the Irish masses from the land which they relied upon, that a tenuous position must yield widespread hardship. That it would lead to large-scale ruin and death need not have been inevitable, however, it has come to seem unavoidable. The greatest tragedy is perhaps that the famine never really ended. Concentrated land-holdings did not disappear, rather the Irish struggled on and continued to similarly suffer throughout the nineteenth century. Woodham-Smith places a great deal of emphasis on the iterative character of the natural and economic feedbacks, which would doom so many. Preceding the development of the welfare state, and, to some extent, the welfare global community, Ireland's Great Hunger demonstrated the all-too-real implications for a purely economic manner of treating human life.

The Philosophy of Social Ecology - Murray Bookchin

Murray Bookchin pursues a philosophy consisting of man and nature, within a unified continuum. It is through the notion of becoming - that things are in the process of fulfilling their potential, as created by their interactive growth within a co-produced world - that Bookchin finds the unifying thread between ecology and society.

Crucial to Bookchin's concept is the assertion that potentiality exists in the here and now, as not only part of any thing's being, but as the fundamental aspect of it. Because potentiality has a history in the things that preceded it, its creation in the world can be traced as an arrival of interactions (emergence, it would seem, guarantees existence). This potentiality is of central import because the interactivity of reality continually builds towards complexity and subjectivity, and it is in relation to this development that an objective ethics becomes feasible. What fosters such complexity and variety of cognition must too, according to Bookchin, be an intrinsic good, as it encourages development towards the fulfillment of evolution. We therefore have the beginning point for an ethic which consists of both man and nature - to Bookchin's thinking one of the insuperable cleavage points in western philosophy. Because our reasoning and increasing subjectivity finds its origin in the natural world, we are given a grounding for an ethics which encompasses both.

The foremost problem with the myriad conclusions from Bookchin's application of a certain brand of dialectics, is the narrowness of his purview concerning concepts of development. Bookchin's assertion that more complex and subjective phenomena are increasingly arising from the natural, groundlessly imputes a specific teleological thinking onto the natural world. That phenomena have become more complex and subjective in historical time, whether a supported assertion or no, does not guarantee the primacy of this particular characteristic. Assessing reality based-upon the presence, absence, or differing shades of a developing continuum of consciousness becomes problematic when other manners of assessment are marginalized by a specific epistemology-cum-ontology. Ignoring other aspects of being threatens to straight-jacket reality. As the adage goes, "when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." How we assess the world dramatically impacts what we are able to see.

Bookchin's dialectical leanings, and his assertions that evolution and ecological interactions foster differentiation and complexity, are insights in need of broader social sympathy. Nevertheless, the notion that the pontential created by dialectical processes is an expression of objective morality remains a groundless teleology favoring human ways of being in the universe. While a historical development, from a "metabolic self-maintenance" to more rational self-expressions, may emerge from natural processes, the occurrence of such transformations does nothing to suggest their relationship to the good, whether social or metaphysically defined. Positing such undermines the value of the dialectic from the start: the dialectic itself becomes simply a manifestation of supra-mundane phenomena. We risk an interactive reality driven primarily by some illusory Other - beware the realm of Forms. While Bookchin has certainly made headway towards a more integrated perspective on people and things, his insistence upon the cumulative nature of the dialectic remains problematic.

The Great Transformation - Karl Polanyi

Daily our lives enact the hopes of a stark utopia. The free market system aims at achieving 'the greatest good for the greatest' through the market's ability to measure, and respond to, the needs and desires of individuals. While we may think of the market as nested within society, Karl Polanyi inverts this notion to suggest that society has become nested within market logics. This so-called "Great Transformation" renders men and women as economic entities. This is an assessment not only of the primary interests of the individual, but the extent to which each of us ought to be measured. It is the agglomeration of individual goods, transformed into the broader good of society, which is supposedly the goal of the free market approach. Polanyi argues that this utopian ideal is impossible. The total extension of the free market, he argues, would achieve no more or less than the destruction of society.

We are well-served to remember that the creation of the market society was specifically a historical occurrence nested within certain political and social contexts. This transition away from the period of state formation in the 17th and 18th centuries, into one of increasing global interconnection, altered the logic and balances of power. As states became awash in broader contexts their interactions took on a decidedly more economic air. Economic liberalism suggested that trade between countries and regions held the power to deliver men wealth beyond what heretofore had been possible. Of course, with winners there are losers, and the backlash of protectionism fostered deepening institutional strains. The requirements of greater production demanded the transformation, not only of industry and economy, but of landscapes, geographies, and human interactions. These transformations rested upon contradictory balances which required the careful governance of society and economy to ensure the 'proper' functioning of markets. In Polanyi's estimation the free market has never, nor can it ever, truly exist. Rather, society is an arrangement of priorities favoring certain economic values at the expense of broader human and environmental concerns. The isolation of the market, as the nexus of society, from these varying concerns, is, perhaps, the strangest of movements in the modern world.

It is this isolation of man from his broader concerns, and standardization of interactions, that renders the modern world something new under the sun. The freedom of modern society is rightly conceived as primarily freedom within a narrowly defined economic sphere: as long as we don't threaten the proper functioning of the market (read: society), freedom is ours to explore. However, any social organization is a negotiation of freedom regarding certain expectations of contract. The question becomes if the balance of society forecloses the expression of our broader freedoms. Society has become the new reality, how we measure and balance our desires and the expression of our humanity within it potentially authors further transformations.

Ecology Against Capitalism - John Bellamy Foster

A series of essays critiquing the relationship between capitalism and the non-human world, John Bellamy Foster employs a marxist perspective to describe the contradictions wrought by our global economic system.  Modern, economic, attempts to measure the immeasurable, to bring nature into the balance sheet, are seen by Foster to be both necessary aspects, and  unavoidable difficulties for capitalism. Examining the environmental debates (crisis?) of the 1980s and 1990s, these short essays variously touch on contemporary issues of technology and human freedom, while integrating more scholarly examinations of economic and social theory.

Throughout, Foster emphasizes the necessity for broad-scale social transformation to address growing human-caused, environmental degradation and transformation. This is largely grounded upon what he sees as the inextricable linking of the dominant political powers to the economic levers of influence. The uninitiated is left to imagine that such ties have only strengthened in the ensuing years.

Latent in Foster's critique (and it seems in most marxist criticisms) is the notion that society as currently constructed sacrifices the many at the alter of the few. Though the alienation of people from the world may be an issue which obscures our true relationships amongst each other and the world, left unclear is why people are not more outraged? The insights of a marxist approach, though they may run contrary to numerous, dominant, western paradigms, are not that irreconcilable with different approaches to knowing and governance. Why then, do people not raise more vocal oppositions? Are we silenced more than we realize? Do we simply ignore the disconnects in the world around us? Maybe it is that the rhetoric has become so demonized, but such critiques always smack a bit of paranoia. If we cannot provide an adequate rebuttal, why do we not therefore change our own minds, expectations, and approaches? What is the passage through which concepts must navigate to become reality?

Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature - John Bellamy Foster

While it is universally accepted that the work of Charles Darwin has revolutionized the natural sciences, lesser known is the impact it had on another of the 19th century's most formative figures. The publication of The Origin of Species helped cohere Karl Marx's ideas about the dialectical principles within the world. Much like Marxism was a philosophy rooted in the interactive, joint production of people and the world, Darwinian thought struck at two of the fundamental tenets of contemporary western thought: essentialism and teleology. By grounding history and society in a "materialist ontology of emergence" (p. 233) both Darwin and Marx would transform how humans conceived of their relations with the world.

John Bellamy Foster sets out to reveal a forgotten history of Marx's (and Engels') ecological thought. Tracing the intellectual development of a young Marx through his dissertation examining Epicurean philosophy, Foster sows the materialist seeds that will blossom into Marx's central works. Overlooked in western recountings of Marxist thought, Foster argues, is an almost proto-ecological ethic. This is was not because Marx was some closeted, dreamy-eyed romantic, but rather because he drew sharp connections between the alienation of men from the landscape, and the domination of the capitalist. In Marx's estimation, the progression of capitalism relied on a double alienation of the worker both from himself (his human-ness) and from access to the land. Only the disconnect of town and country fostered a people abstracted from the world. In a passage that presages our own modern ecological concerns, Marx writes:

"Man lives, from nature, i.e. nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man's physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature."

It was, Marx thought, that only through such an awareness could the formative ensemble of relations between people and the world be adequately conceived. Attempts to separate Marx's political economy from his ecological theory will, Foster argues, incorrectly assess both the home-ground and the implications of Marxist thought.

For Marx, the true dialectic requires a proper situating of relations. Marx was a thoroughgoing materialist, one who saw the relational interaction of things as the constant reinvention of the world. In this materialism Marx was echoing the words of Epicurus and Lucretius: in materialism he too imagined the fundamental premise by which men could be freed to make their own history. For Marx, the materialist conception of nature and the materialist conception of history went hand-in-hand. As such, he and Darwin can be heard to speak the message, registering in different octaves.

What Hath God Wrought - Daniel Walker Howe

One can almost book-end what Daniel Walker Howe terms the formative years of the American republic with the political career of John Quincy Adams. As Secretary of State for President Monroe, Quincy Adams would pen the Monroe Doctrine, asserting the rights of the United States to the continent and setting the course for American expansion. On February 21, 1848, Old Man Eloquent would die serving at his post in the House of Representatives, speaking out against the country's continued insistence of celebrating the Mexican-American War, ambivalent about the expansion he had helped to nurture. Though he was only one of what might be considered the grandest generation of statesmen (including Webster, Clay, Calhoun and Hart Benton, among others), Adams cast a special shadow as the conscience of the young and fitful nation. His death was the final knell sounded for an older America, as it receded into history.

Interweaving growing industrialization, the increasing power of differing sects of Protestantism, and the advent of the two-party political system, Howe persuasively argues that the thirty years from 1815 - 1845 set the course for America beyond the Civil War and into the twentieth century. Though Howe's work sets itself the ambitious task of reviewing the entirety of the nation's history for the period, as an introduction and overview it ably casts a broad scope while pulling out salient and memorable details which provide a flavor of the politics and personages of the time. Throughout he emphasizes the speed and abilities of communication and the development of infrastructure as forces that would shrink time and space and bring the frontiers of empire to the door of civil-society.

The work succeeds as both a top-down review of political power and a bottom-up examination of the role that burgeoning social movements played in the growth of the empire and the American psyche. Howe's work is perhaps at its most insightful where these two concerns meet: the emergence of the modern US political party system. From virtual one-party rule under the Monroe Administration to the splintering of both the Whigs and Democrats in the run-up to the Civil War, the unsettled issues and contestations of debate are shown to interact within evolving nested contexts. Concepts of person-hood and rights, state versus federal power, and the privilege of the many versus the protection of the few, were far from settled by the Constitution and Bill of Rights. As the Congress and the Supreme Court struggled to enumerate the roles of government and the rights of citizens, the parties jockeyed for position and influence. With such uncertainty the political winds of influence blew in great gusts, swinging between seeming Democratic hegemony and Whig ascendancy. Shying away from simply defining all politics through the lens of slavery, Howe argues that the "peculiar institution" is better understood as one of a host of political (and ethical) concerns - though this too would evolve over the period. Yet it was often the cleavage point of slavery which continued to divide North and South, and served as the discursive shorthand for the opposition of different ways of life and conceptualization of the relationships between government and the people.

Here we see the adolescence of America in all its fits and starts. From the halls of the Capitol to the swamps of Louisiana. Within the percolations of such an era of global uncertainty we glimpse the formations of time and space; and are given room to imagine a world as it has been, as it would come to be, and, what did not come to pass.