The Counterpublic Papers vol. 4 no. 6

    Isaac Asimov is mostly known for his science fiction, but if you look at his catalogue what stands out is not his SF (which was literally genre defining) but his non-fiction. If this list is any indicator of the 500 books he authored or edited between the early fifties and the early nineties approximately half of them were non-fiction.

I stumbled on one of them while working on the basement. A CHOICE OF CATASTROPHES. Published in 1979, Asimov, who at the very least had enough of an imagination vis a vis human capacity to dream up the Foundation series, understood that human civilization was far more fragile than we’d care to admit. Subtitled “the disasters that threaten our world” Asimov classified five types of catastrophes, with the first class catastrophes being those that threaten the universe itself and fifth class catastrophes being those that were unnatural and man made. He wrote this at a time when the USSR still existed and the Cold War had—to my then young eyes at least—no end in sight. He doesn’t spend much time on it but this passage strikes me:

    (War was actually a fourth class catastrophe in as much as it appeared to be an essential part of human nature.)

    Asimov appeared to write this work with the goal of not only classifying catastrophes but getting citizens (elite and non-) to recognize the threats and then work on the ones they could control. There was nothing to be done about the heat death of the universe, but there was something that could be done about nuclear war.

    Perhaps understandably, Asimov doesn’t spend a great deal of time on the environment. He does mention greenhouse gas emissions a couple of times, and note the importance of moving towards clean sources of energy, but in stark distinction to other types he doesn’t give this any weight. But while I am struck by the fact that he didn’t spend as much time on this as he could or perhaps should have—by 1979 it was already clear to a scientists that our energy use was unsustainable—I am also struck that he didn’t spend a bit more time addressing the political and economic climate itself. When we think of “climate change” what we tend to think about is the fact that the world is getting physically warmer and then about the effect of this on weather patterns. But what we’re actually dealing with is two types of climate change. There is the weather. But then there’s the socio-political climate. To hear some tell it, the rates of certain types of crime are positively correlated with hot weather. If we extrapolate this a bit, before we even get to food shortages and the like, we can imagine hotter weather generating violent behavior more broadly.

    (oh. as i type this i realize that this can easily lead to deeply problematic assumptions about populations living near the equator—the work i’m referring to doesn’t suggest that people living in hot climates are more likely to commit certain types of crime than people who don’t. rather, it suggests that stark increases in temperature in a specific place are more likely to trigger certain types of activity. I believe that the weather during the Red Summer was hotter than average….)

I think we should be thinking of climate change in these two related ways. And any discussion we have about, not so much staving one of them off, but now it looks like we’re talking more about mitigating their consequences, should take the two in tandem. We could use more writers with Asimov’s imagination, and modern sensibilities about political and economic systems. Then again, this works on the assumption that we don’t have more. We do. But it just struck me. You’re far more likely to see them working on contemporary versions of AT&T’s “You Will” campaign than you are on these types of projects. Not sure how well Asimov’s book sold when it came out.

….

    We’re now only a few weeks away from the elections—maybe two weeks from Tuesday? And I know Ben Jealous, former NAACP President and current MD gubernatorial candidate, is making the rounds. Maryland’s Democratic Party appears to be weak enough for a candidate like Jealous, with no political experience other than the NAACP, to defeat its standard bearers….but it appears to be strong enough to keep him from winning.

    The party hasn’t thrown a great deal of weight behind Jealous. A number of prominent democrats outside of the DC and Baltimore regions have openly endorsed Governor Hogan. And Jealous doesn’t appear to have the resources to stave this off—I know that he was at a neighborhood festival in Baltimore yesterday, but by this time in the primary I’d already had at least one person come to my door to make sure I voted for him.

    In general, I think people who run for governor should have experience governing. But we appear to be in a situation where the members of the Democratic Party who have experience governing have little to no desire in promoting the interests of the constituencies the party seeks to represent. Now this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone following the party over the past decades. However to the extent we can view the Jealous candidacy as proof that an outsider with a progressive message can, with the resources, trump (sorry) party insiders….we still have to wrestle with the reality that unless there’s an institution behind the individual that individual is unlikely to win office.

    (And no, I don’t think third parties represent viable alternatives. Our government works on and reproduces a system of two-party government. Third parties can, in some local instances, elect individuals. But if we’re on a twenty year timeline—there are no twenty year timelines I’m aware of that has the Green Party, to use one example, taking anything other than a smattering of seats at the local, state, or federal level.)

    At some point a group of people are going to have to wage a concerted effort to take the Democratic Party at the local, state, and federal levels. There doesn’t appear to be a way around it.

…..

    A recent higher-ed report notes that approximately 3/4 of all faculty are not on the tenure track. The report focuses more on what this signifies for academic freedom, and I think they’ve cause for concern. However, given that the number of people who really use the academic freedom tenure confers is limited, I’m more concerned about the degree to which this growing gap is reflected in quality of life and in salary and benefits. Although this, combined with the fact that many top tier university political science departments are moving from a 2-2 teaching load (where faculty are expected to teach two classes a semester) to a 2-1 teaching load (where faculty are expected to teach two classes during one semester and only one class during the other), cements the notion that we’ve got two PhD processes. One process that steers people into a tenure track job, and then one that does not. Which is all to the good, except that few people come to schools like Hopkins to get a PhD thinking about alternatives outside of the tenure track.

….

    Speaking of two processes, both the University of Michigan and Johns Hopkins recently completed multi-year fundraising campaigns. Michigan raised over $5 billion and Hopkins raised over $6 billion. How should we understand these campaigns? According to the Wall Street Journal (using Center on Budget and Policy Priorities data), students at public universities are spending more in tuition than either federal or state governments give, a first time phenomenon. This reflects a set of political interests committed to incentivizing students to engage in the types of activities that reproduce the free market (can’t save the whales if you’re in debt). And this to an extent privileges the priorities of individuals with the ability to donate large sums of money over the priorities of taxpayers and regular citizens. This isn’t as bad as it could be I suppose—in the Michigan case a bit more than 20% of money is going to student financial support. And every now and then donors have decent ideas—a Hopkins trustee committed $150 million to create an institution designed to study and problem solve political polarization. But even as my check relies on the ability of Hopkins capital campaigns, I rue its necessity. And not just because they needed to close Hopkins’ gymnasium for what seemed like a week so they could host the closing event there.

    Anyway, didn’t expect this to be so much about work. Sometimes these things write themselves. (I was asked to write something on Trump and Kanye—so glad I passed that up. Those would’ve been words I couldn’t ever get back.) See you next week. Maybe it’ll still feel like an actual Fall?