Russ Roberts: belief

Transcript context

…Note also the middle paragraph, where he’s talking about humans. He cites, first, childhood memories, and a bit later on, a mother’s tenderness, thoughts of death. The main themes of the novel are being echoed by this interlude, where he is contrasting humans to the machine. The machine, for him, eventually becomes all-powerful. It becomes a kind of god and can create humans in its image that are in a way superior, and I think he’s terrified by this. Yes. Just like I am a little bit. Fair enough. I didn’t mean to suggest it didn’t belong at all. It’s just a wonderful little interlude. I think I was overwhelmed by the fact that it seems like most of it could have been written yesterday. The other part that I just was fascinated by was his comparison of fascism to quantum mechanics and the cutting edge of physics. What were your thoughts on that analogy and how . . . Forgetting this particular example — I want your thoughts on that — but this idea that scientific metaphor and scientific narrative and the way we see our role in the universe doesn’t just affect the progress of science. It comes into our culture in all kinds of ways. That’s a very provocative idea. I think it’s the same theme. I read him as basically a humanist, like Chekhov, fairly skeptical about science. Viktor, yes, you could say he’s the hero or, certainly, center of the novel, but what ends up happening is, Viktor — this is not too much of a spoiler because we know what did happen — ends up helping Stalin build nuclear weapons, and he can’t be too thrilled by that. He may see a positive side that the motherland could be defended against future fascists, but I think he has strongly mixed feelings about that. Viktor is co-opted by something that Grossman himself does not quite believe in, and the scientific mentality is part of the problem. The way science operates in the novel and in this society — there’s more betrayal in science than anywhere else. You’re highly at risk in science. I don’t think he feels that’s entirely accidental to science or fully the fault of Communism.…

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