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.
