We've visited a half-dozen of the articles and essays in this issue but for the explorer, rather than pointing out what we read, we'll go with Lewis Lapham's preamble followed by the table of contents.
Volume XV, Number 2 | winter 2024
Power Outage
On the thermodynamics of history.
—William Ophuls
Signs of civilizational “decline or even collapse” show up in every morning’s headline, every evening’s newscast: mass killings in big cities and suburban shopping malls; children gunned down in elementary and high school classrooms. America’s democracy is divided resentfully against itself across the frontiers of race, gender, ethnicity, and class. Vicious slander streams through the hydra-headed portals of the internet, goading quorums of non-law-abiding citizens to hate instead of help, love, or talk to one another.
Reports of turmoil in society come in concert with news of worldwide environmental and geopolitical catastrophe: Covid-19 claiming one million American lives, six million elsewhere in the world. Rising sea levels on the coasts of California and Japan; the sperm whale under threat of extinction in the Atlantic, the giant sea bass in the Pacific; Australia’s northern hairy-nosed wombat on the list of endangered species with the California redwood and the Texas poppy mallow. Climate change burns the Amazon rainforest, melts the Arctic ice. Chinese gunboats encircle Taiwan, the Russian invasion of Ukraine annihilates city, citizen, and town, unlimbering the weapons of mutually assured nuclear destruction.
The uncivil behavior of both man and nature mounts the makers of America’s elite opinion on the pulpits of the media to promote a fear of the future with top-of-the-hour terror alerts—war, disease, flood, and famine fast approaching at all points of everybody’s compass. The keepers of the nation’s conscience meanwhile tour the think-tank and Sunday-talk-show circuits to tell sad stories of the death of kings, mourn the perishing from the earth of the ideals set forth in Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, lament the absence of Teddy Roosevelt’s snow-white teeth. The self-pitying cries of Old Testament alarm convert the signs of American decline into foretellings of the end of the world. The doomsday news attracts advertisers, yet we are confronted not with the Beast of the Apocalypse but with severe power outages imposed by the laws of thermodynamics and entropy on the worlds of mind and spirit created and re-created by mortal men.
The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry to equanimity, receptivity, andpeace is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes ofpersonal center of energy.—William James, 1902The first law of thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only change forms. Life on Earth springs from the light and heat of the sun. For all intents and purposes the massive radiance of the star is immortal. It cannot be deplatformed, at least not for another five billion years. What it can and does do is to be gainfully employed or uselessly squandered, which is the second law of thermodynamics—the tendency of entropy to increase as energy changes forms. The sun’s energy makes its way on Earth through a never-ending series of transformations. Matter into mind, mind into matter, acorn into oak tree, oak tree into log, log into fire, fire into smoke and ashes.
As was understood two thousand years ago by the Roman poet Lucretius, the laws of thermodynamics are the nature of things. Everything that exists—animal, vegetable, and mineral, man and woman, church and state, fish and fowl, mammal and microbe, cruise missile and paper hat—is composed of “atoms tiny and readily / Moving.” As are we all, spinning around the sun at 67,000 miles an hour, rotating on Earth’s axis at 1,000 miles per hour. The elementary particles of matter—“the seeds of things”—Lucretius knew to be eternal and indestructible, ceaselessly colliding and combining in an inexhaustible variety of life-forms. So also the atomic fairy dust was understood by Leonardo da Vinci to be the “marvelous power” of energy that is “born in violence and dies in liberty,” named by Nikola Tesla as “ever moving, like a soul animates” the inert void of the universe with the vast turmoil of creation and destruction that is the making and remaking of cabbages and kings, of customs, laws, and coastlines, of dance moves, barbarians, and pizza toppings.
Over time and endlessly repeated use and misuse, the abundant energy of the sun becomes so widely dispersed and idly wasted that it depreciates in value and force. The result is the dwindling into entropy, a term the dictionaries define as chaos, randomness, and disorder—i.e., the sets of circumstance in which America finds itself adrift and palely loitering a year prior to the 2024 presidential election and the likelihood of a choice between two entropic candidates.
By way of a best-guess answer to the question “How can such things be?,” this issue of Lapham’s Quarterly borrows from a book, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail, by the political theorist William Ophuls. Published in 2012, but eleven years later more readily understood as a canary in the mine, the book supplies the issue with its accounting for the price charged by nature for the use of its facilities and resources, lists the thermodynamic tolls and fees paid for the self-glorifying assumption that mankind’s wonder-working technologies subjugate nature, develop it into a colossal cash machine....
....MUCH MORE
And the contents:
Power Outage
Lewis H. Lapham
Along the Borderline
Marc Da Costa
Truth Actually
Tom Roston
What Is Human Energy?
Richard Cohen
Power Before PetroleumMiscellany
- Our friend the atom.
- King Coal
- The leftovers.
- Side effects may include.
- The magnet has a soul.
- Year without a summer.
- The beginning of curfews.
- Liberated energy.
- Furious revolutions.
- Hit the brakes.
- Waiting to mate in dimmer conditions.
- Blessing of heaven.
- Energy etymology.
- Well of nightmares.
Possessed by Fire
331 BC | Babylon
Morning Glory
c. 1350 BC | Amarna
Field of Dreams
c. 1910 | Beach City, CA
Everything Everywhere All at Once
1891 | New York City
Night Vision
1913 | Moscow
Shine Bright Like a Diamond
1849 | Berlin
Saint Catherine’s Oil
c. 1540 | Antwerp
Executive Energy
1788 | New York City
Where Is the Way to the Dwelling of the Light?
c. 550 BC | Uz
Little Bubble of Glass
1910 | Chicago
Machine Learning
2007 | Red Sea
A Murder of Quails
1885 | Rome
City Lights
1910 | New York City
Good Grease
c. 1885 | Lima, OH
No Wood, No Kingdom
1611 | England
Force Field
1492 | Milan
Radioactive Matters
1898 | Paris
Second Wind
1906 | New York City
Supply-Chain Disruption
537 | Rome
A Moment Like This
c. 370 BC | Athens
Habitation of Hell
1638 | Vesuvius
A Quiet Thing
1865 | Amherst, MA
Combined Energy
c. 500 BC | Wu
Postmortem
1803 | London
Power Dynamics
1865 | Manchester
Inner Feeling
1809 | Paris
Total Eclipse of the Heart
1878 | Denver
Earthquake
1755 | Lisbon
Degrees of Elevation
1751 | London
Eternal Delight
1790 | London
Things Flow Away
1956 | Yangtze River
Elements of Surprise
1910 | Edinburgh
Lightning in a Bottle
1752 | Philadelphia
Just Keeps Going and Going
1837 | New York City
Gristmill
c. 1190 | Bury St. Edmunds
Fountain of Youth
1924 | Paris
Renewable Energy
1912 | New York City
Propensity to Sloth
1588 | Aquitaine
A More Vindictive Energy
c. 1843 | Avoyelles Parish, LA
Living Land
1855 | The Netherlands
Ebb and Flow
c. 944 | Al-Fustat
May Cause Side Effects
2021 | Palo Alto
Geology Lesson
1842 | Lowell, MA
Civilization
1909 | Atlantic Ocean
Hit the Brakes
1945 | Washington, DC
The Best Charcoal
c. 320 BC | Athens
Taxes Due
2012 | Santa Barbara, CA
Charts and Graphs
