Blogging Oppie

A friend of mine gave me a subscription to the New York Review of Books this year.  I recently decided to add the subscription to the online archives.  So I've been surfing the NYR archives lately, and blogging about some of them.  It's sort of like blogging the past.

One of their very first issues - Vol. 1, #3, to be exact - carried a review authored by a man whose name that is in the papers quite a bit this week: The Fire Next Time by Robert Oppenheimer New York Review of Books 09/26/63 issue (link behind subscription; sorry).

"Oppie" was reviewing a book called The Dawn of a New Age by Eugene Rabinowitch, longtime editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

He recalls the founding purpose of that publication:

The Bulletin was born of the sense, developed during the wartime atomic energy project, of the importance of this development for the political organization of the world, the urgent sense of a turn for peace, of concern for the fostering and for the wise application of the growing and the great discoveries of science. These concerns, very wide-spread at the time, early expressed themselves in the Franck Report—to which Rabinowitch contributed—prepared under the leadership of James Franck at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago and submitted to the Secretary of War before the use of the bomb, and eloquent in arguing against its use; again in the McMahon Act which governed and still largely governs our dealings with industrial and military aspects of atomic energy, and in the Acheson-Lilienthal proposals, which Baruch introduced as part of the United States position on the international control of atomic energy in the United Nations.

He writes that Rabinowitch returns in his book over and over to "the moral imperatives," which Oppie in the context clearly sees as moral imperatives himself: "to prevent world war, to unite the world, to encourage science and scientific cooperation."

In the concluding paragraph, he talks about some of the differences between Rabinowitch's general outlook and his own (Oppie's highlighted by me):

Throughout, the author looks to the enlightened interest of nations—and beyond it, obviously, to the enlightened interest of man—to move and to guide history; and the mechanical and somewhat determinist framework of his first prophecy persists through his commitment and his exhortation. He sees little of the hopes, the faiths, and the passions of men, and much of calculated self-interest. Thus he has need of the occasional unpredictable "Hitler," or madman. For this reviewer there are certain strains of madness, of love, and of devoition in most of us; he is thus more concerned with the national, historical, and cultural traditions which tend to embody, and often to civilize, them and whose reconciliation is today a terrible test of men's political and human skill: that we be just to what we hate as evil, and cherish what we love. Rabinowitch has a more monolithic, perhaps a more truly rational view of history, of which this volume of essays is a record, and to which it is a monument. I have not been able to read it without admiring again the high consistency, the moral fervor, the assiduity, and the ruggedness which have sustained him during the years that this book records.