Chris Hedges is a Dolt

One week ago, Chris Hedges' Truthdig post began with,

On this day in 1945 the United States demonstrated that it was as morally bankrupt as the Nazi machine it had recently vanquished and the Soviet regime with which it was allied. Over Hiroshima, and three days later over Nagasaki, it exploded an atomic device that was the most efficient weapon of genocide in human history. The blast killed tens of thousands of men, women and children. It was an act of mass annihilation that was strategically and militarily indefensible. The Japanese had been on the verge of surrender. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had no military significance. It was a war crime for which no one was ever tried. The explosions, which marked the culmination of three centuries of physics, signaled the ascendancy of the technician and scientist as our most potent agents of death.

 As a scientist, I have gone through a range of emotions and responses to this condemnation. But, the most appropriate is Carol Kane's line from Annie Hall, “I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype.”

Battling stereotypes often comes down to accountancy.  I could counter Hedges' block condemnation of scientists by enumerating science's triumphs starting with victories against communicable disease. Smallpox is estimated to have killed at least 300 million people in the 20^th century. Overall fatality rates were 1-in-3, and as high as 80% for children. Now the disease is gone. Polio, measles, and pertussis were also heading to near extinction, until anti-science, anti-vaxers kicked public health to the curb and watched children die. Who, in these examples, are the moral idiots?

Assaying science's benefits misses the point, though. Instead, Hedges' essay is really the mystery of the dog that barked in the night. He condemns scientists, technicians, communists, and fascists by name, and rapacious capitalists indirectly. Who else is left? World War I, he tells us, negated three hundred years of Enlightenment. He brings in Freud to describe the dark side of human nature and lists writers, artists, and musicians who explored that darkness. (Why did sourpuss include Henri Matisse? Where is the gloom in fauvism or his large canvases or the vast colored-paper collages that characterized Matisse's final work? And, how could anyone be gloomy who created a household that included both wife and mistress?) But, Hedges omits the guides who can bring us to the light. We get plenty of villains; where are the moral geniuses?

I infer from Chrs Hedges other writing that religion is the missing piece. Unfettered science dooms us all; only religion can save us. We must not drink freely from the fountain of knowledge because it is polluted with powerful poisons and tainted with hubris and deification delusions. Holy men must carefully separate and distill, then only they will fill our cups with the good and hide the bad. This approach may not eliminate “ancient lusts for war, violence and death,” but, thank god, those passions will remain unamplified. Eliminating atomic weapons and missiles and aircraft, transforms mass murder into hard slow work. Death tolls will be minimized by inefficiency.  We must look elsewhere for "the most potent agents of death."  Rwanda in 1994 is a key example. (Okay, so I'm heading back to using numbers.)  Limited to knives, machetes, and hand-held weapons, the killing rate averaged only 5000-to-10,000 people per day from early April through mid-July.

Just a small part of America's nuclear arsenal could kill two million people in a few seconds. In contrast, Pol Pot needed three long years to murder an equal number of Cambodians. His Khmer Rouge accomplices had to use starvation and executions with outdated guns. They sought an agrarian society free from intellectualism. Wearing eyeglasses was a sign of book learning, and grounds for execution. No totems to science there.

I lived in Los Alamos, NM, from 1980 to 1982. The town had 27 churches and 3 bars. Really.  At first, I just assumed that the scientists and engineers needed absolution from their weapons work.  There must have been, I thought, so much guilt and moral uncertainty that the town needed 27 churches to counsel all the worried souls.  Three bars also made sense.  Excessive drinking had to be done quietly in private because alcoholics or binge drinkers might lose their security clearances.  

After a few months, I realized my naivete and ignorance.  Piety and weapons work were comfortable partners in a long-term relationship.  God and country.  America's enemy was also, conveniently, religion's foe.  The message to Los Alamites from the pulpits was simple and clear:  you are doing righteous, good work.  Sure, a few outsiders showed up with protest placards every August 6th and 9th; but the local churches had no part in those barely noticed demonstrations. 

When I questioned one of the stalwarts about the need for a nuclear stockpile that could kill everyone on earth several times over, he pointed out that Mutually Assured Destruction had worked.  Thirty-five years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no country had again used a nuclear weapon against another country.  He and his colleagues believed they were protecting their families and country.  They were not amoral cogs in the vast military machinery.  They really believed their work to be good.  And, their churches -- all twenty-seven -- concurred.

Yes, the Los Alamos scientists and engineers were irrational in their weighing of benefits and risks.  They ignored the environmental destruction that the nuclear arms industry created at home, and downplayed the financial waste.  Those are human traits that we all share.  And, so, back to Chris Hedges, I wonder if he can identify a golden age when rational thought dominated science and technology, and when art, music, and literature were always uplifting. The scenario actually sounds horrible to me. Something like a Twilight Zone re-creation of Lake Wobegon. Hedges' doesn't identify a refuge – either historic or hypothetical – from his stereotype-filled dystopia.

Society's best hope is more knowledge, not less. Some of it can even protect us from self-delusion.