Science After Sunclipse

I was poking around the Intergrid the other day, looking up stuff about the early days of American political parties — back when we had the Federalists and the (Jeffersonian) Republicans, and other such stuff nobody has had to remember since high school. While trying to find something else, I came across the following passage in Federalist No. 10, which is the document people trot out to show that James Madison wouldn't have been at all happy with partisan politics. The bold emphasis is mine:

A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.

I think James Madison mentioned Richard Dawkins' latest whatever on the wrong blog.

Either that, or he tried to defend the virtue of an odd-numbered Star Trek movie. . . or he wandered into an Avatar fan club and insisted that Zuko and Katara should have ended up together.

Appropriately enough (or not), this reminded me of a passage from Isaac Asimov.

One of the fascinating things about Asimov's autobiography is that it begins with his family history in Czarist Russia, on the borders of Belarus, then follows his nuclear family through Ellis Island into slum living in Brooklyn, then public school during the Depression, on through World War II. . . right the way to Watergate and, in the third volume, to glasnost and the TRS-80. One human life can cover a great deal of territory. Then come the odd moments of synchrony, when a bit of 1930s New York springs out at you and gains a strange relevance. To that end, here is In Memory Yet Green (1979), p. 209, describing the background to the Greater New York Science Fiction Club's splitting into the Queens Science Fiction Club and the Futurian Science Literary Society, all the way back in 1938:

Though science-fiction clubs were small, they were contentious. The membership tended to consist of intelligent, articulate, argumentative, short-tempered, and opinionated young men (plus a few women) who got into tremendous power struggles.

You might wonder how power struggles can possibly arise in small clubs devoted to something as arcane as science fiction, and I wonder, too — but it happens. There are arguments over what happened to the thirty-five cents in the treasury, who is to run the fanzine, and other equally momentous problems. I believe there were even arguments as to how best to "control fandom," or, on a lesser scale, the world.

When the arguments overflowed the possibilities of word-of-mouth, letters flew from fanzine to fanzine — long, articulate, venomous, libelous letters, which often degenerated into threats of lawsuit that never materialized (largely because no lawsuit could ever result in substantial damages when no one being sued was worth more than $1.65, clothes, pocket change, blood chemicals, and all).

Naturally, it didn't take a club long to split up into two clubs, with each then proceeding to put out competing fanzines. The main task of each fanzine was to vilify the other group with an intensity and a linguistic fluency that Hitler might have studied with profit.

This may sound as though I'm exaggerating but, honestly, I'm not. If anything, I lack the words (competent writer though I am) to describe the intensity of the tempests brewed in the microscopic teapots of science-fiction fandom.

Let me refer you instead to something else. Back in 1954, Sam Moskowitz, one of the most active of the fans of the 1930s (and a dear friend of mine for many years), recalled those days and wrote a book the subtitle of which was A History of Science-fiction Fandom. It dealt with the period from 1935 to 1938 chiefly, and yet Sam found enough to say to fill a closely printed book of 250 pages.

In that book, endlessly and (forgive me, Sam) unreadably detailed, are all the feuds and quarrels of the period among people known only to themselves, over issues unexplainable to others. The title Sam gave the book, without any intent of satire at all, I believe, was The Immortal Storm.

I can only imagine that if someone like Bora Zivkovic wrote a history of science blogging, the outcome would be much the same.

Asimov goes on to explain how his friend Sprague de Camp had a hypothesis about human factionalism, which ran something like this: a band of humans (or proto-humans) fifty members strong couldn't cover any more territory than a band of twenty-five, and at some scale, the extra food brought in by the additional people cannot meet the higher needs for consumption, so the larger band will starve while the smaller could survive. Therefore, evolution favours the splitting of large groups into smaller, and the presence of a certain fractiousness in human nature. (Exercise: restate the hypothesis in terms of kin selection.) Whether true or not, this hypothesis matters here because, according to Asimov, the required text which de Camp suggested as the basis for studying human contentiousness was — you guessed it — The Immortal Storm.

Although any ScienceBlogs discussion thread more than four hundred comments long could probably qualify, too.

The Asimovian portion of this note was edited from a post originally published here.