Dave's Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?

Dave's latest effort, Worse Than A Crime (which we recently reviewed), is perhaps the clearest example of "wishful fiction," the genre that Dave and Sarang developed in a hash-fueled overnight session when the two crashed the 2012 Pulitzers (recall that in 2012, the prize board, deadlocked, didn't award the Pulitzer for fiction to either Dave or Sarang).  But in all truth, Crime is a relatively straightforward, almost obvious application of the approach.  More interesting, I think, is Dave's 2013 novella Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?.  The book imagines a not-so-far-fetched near-future in which Congressional politics have become so dysfunctional that it is impossible to pass traditional legislation.  Instead, Congress votes on general statements of policy, which are then translated into law by an advanced computer algorithm.  The change is of course highly disruptive, but as legislation starts moving again, after a long freeze, an uneasy equilibrium emerges.

But all hell breaks loose when a hurricane inflicts severe damage on Houston and incapacitates a large amount of the nation's oil infrastructure.  Congress, swept up in the national outrage over the resulting economic slowdown, passes a resolution declaring that the U.S. should spend "whatever it takes to secure the most crucial natural resource in the greatest country on the face of the earth."  The measure passes unanimously and is hugely popular . . .  until it comes time to translate the policy into statutory law.  The legislative computer carefully assesses the Congressional resolution and allocates $175 billion to fund maple syrup infrastructure in Canada.

Leaders of both parties are in a bind.  On one hand, the measure is hugely unpopular, since most Americans had assumed the funds would be used to strengthen the petroleum industry in the U.S.  On the other hand, no one wants to acknowledge any flaw in the drafting of the Congressional resolution (which literally every member of Congress voted for), and no one can afford to be seen as anti-science by suggesting that the computer misconstrued the legislation.  (When the Republican governor of Texas suggests that the computer program should be tweaked and re-run, Neil deGrasse Tyson slams him for injecting politics into the scientific method.  "If you change algorithms every time you don't like the results, then you're doing politics, not science," the astronomer points out.  The governor quickly backs down.)

The problem is not just political and technological, though.  A debate breaks out as to what it means for "the greatest country on the face of the earth" to refer to one nation or another.  How does a phrase "reach out" into the world and "attach" to a particular entity?  Can reference be fixed by some sort of objective rule?  Is a causal chain necessary?  Could, for instance, an accidental blotch of paint refer to a tree that it happens to resemble?  Does it matter in what causal relation the viewer stands with the tree?  And what is causation, anyway?

Disturb the Universe thus becomes much more philosophical than Crime, and because of the way the plot unfolds it does not fit comfortably within "wishful fiction."  But for exactly that reason, it is a bolder and more profound exploration of the genre's outer bounds than any of Dave's other books, and it is also a cri de coeur, the opening salvo in Dave's passionate argument for the ongoing relevance of philosophy.  The future of the country may not be at stake—yet.  But the future of philosophy and the public intellectual is very much in play, and Disturb the Universe is right in the middle of it.