Tyler Cowen: prediction

Transcript context

…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. Viktor’s character deals relentlessly and painfully with the ethical dilemmas of being a favored citizen of the state, very similar to In the First Circle, where the characters — they’re in a gulag, but it’s a privileged gulag because they’re doing research that benefits the state, which puts them, as the prisoners, in a very unpleasant ethical situation, which is really the essence of that book. In this case, another thing that Grossman captures, I thought, with such accuracy and lets you feel it, is the exhilaration of scientific discovery. Viktor makes a discovery. The exact nature of it isn’t described, but he’s clearly on the cutting edge. And as you say, it may lead to many things, but it’s mainly a theoretical discovery. And there’s an ego part to it, but most of it’s just, he’s just pushed out the frontiers of human knowledge, and it’s an incredible part of the human experience. He’s so alive after that, and his mood so oscillates with his ability to do that or not do it, depending on whether he’s in a favored status with respect to the regime. I think that’s just so much more part of his psychological trials and tribulations, the ability to have that freedom or lose it clashing with the pressure the regime puts him under to serve its own purposes. That, to me, is an enormous part of his character’s dilemma.…

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