Ethics Review: Oppenheimer (movie)

 

Oppenheimer Is Not the Most Important Person Who Ever Lived

In the eponymous movie Oppenheimer, the great physicist is called “the most important man [sic] who ever lived,” because he spearheaded the Manhattan Project, the successful effort to create the first nuclear bomb.  A few hundred such weapons could destroy an entire large country, like the United States.  Several thousand could wipe out human civilization.  The appearance of such weapons is undoubtedly momentous.  It is terrifying that tens of thousands of them are poised and ready to launch across the globe.

Even so, it seems weird to single out Oppenheimer for credit, or to saddle him with the curse, depending on how you look at it.   Another related issue is whether the invention of nuclear weapons is the ‘most important’ in human history.  If not, then Oppenheimer’s purported status is untenable.

 

Most Important

Oppenheimer’s primary role was as a manager of a team of scientists at Los Alamos and Oakridge.   He didn’t invent the atomic bomb. The team did, with many individuals providing original and critical insights.  In accord, the claim of Oppenheimer as “most important” seems suspect.  A coach is important for a successful team but so are the players. 

Let’s take a step back.  What about Einstein?  Why isn’t the person who theorized e =mc2, and who first conceived the genesis of the hellish weapon, the central figure?

Taking yet another step back, maybe we should emphasize the evolution of technology across millennia.   Way back somewhere, perhaps wary of a mammoth, someone invented the atlatl.  Someone invented steel.  Someone came up with a periodic chart that included uranium.  Why spotlight a sole individual as “most important” while divorcing the chosen figurehead from the buildup they needed and received, both contemporaneous and historical? 

Here’s yet another lens.  Oppenheimer made an (un)ethical decision to lead the Project.  But perhaps the most important decision was made by Harry Truman.  The President himself ordered  the deployment of Little Boy and Fat Man, the euphemistic names given to the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

(A special shout out of disgust to the US Army for its teddy-bear-like rebranding.  Not only is truth stranger than fiction, it is more evil, and certainly more gaslit)

In the movie, Truman makes the case for his own singular importance.  It is the precedent he set, one could argue, that makes it far more likely nuclear weapons will be used in our future:

 

Truman [character]:  “You think anyone in Hiroshima or Nagasaki gives a shit who built the bomb? They care who dropped it. I did.”

 

Why Are Weapons The Biggest Deal?

 Are nuclear weapons actually the most important invention--ever?  And, if not, why then would Oppenheimer be the most important person in history? 

Somewhere I read that the only great event of our time that will be remembered, down the trail, is that humanity first entered outer space in 1961.  I get the obvious response:  “The invention of atom bombs means there might not be any down the trail.”  

And yet maybe power of death isn’t as important as quality of life (see below).

My person choice for the greatest invention is human rights.  Or the ancient bedrock on which such rights rest, namely, the Golden Rule:  do to others, as you would them to you.  Someday, if reason progresses over ignorance, rights will extend to animals, as well as ecosystems and certain of their elements.

This is a good moment to underscore that ideas, or systems of ideas, can be inventions.  It’s a mistake to think that a tool or technology must be physical:  “What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Nuclear weapons are considered the most important invention because of their unparalleled ability to kill, even to end us.  But there’s a dangerous assumption here:  that the ability to inflict massive cruelty and death is more important than the ability to bring about healing and health.  This is the kind of thinking that appeals to tyrants and which passes for culture under their oppressive rule.

We should not tag ultimate importance with the infliction of mass death.  More generally, historians like to focus on guns being a game-changer or steel swords or bows and arrows.  From this predilection, embedded in our violent culture, we get to a biased conclusion:  the most effective weapon must be the greatest invention and, correspondingly, the inventor must be the most important person.

Let me make a brief case for an entirely different sort of invention.  One that would be far greater than any weapon.

On November 11, 1948, soon after WWII and the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Omar Bradley gave an Armistice Day speech.  He said:

We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.

 

I am not pushing Christian values, which have many flaws.  The Good, ultimately, transcends any one religion (all religions draw on the Good, yet in distorted ways).  Bradley, however, is right to say that we, as a civilization, are “ethical infants.”  We have a long way to go in respect to the development of ethics technology.

There is much more to know about peace.  How to nurture it, maintain it, and foster its advance.  We can develop better systems of governance, healthy norms of acculturation.   The invention of human rights and democracy was essential, but only a starting point. 

The most profound invention of all time would be a practical system, a multidimensional loom of ethical ideas, that allows us to step beyond the rubicon of war.  Not only is this plausible, it is a matter of imperative necessity.  If we don’t end war, war will end us.  Soon. 

Imagine a new kind of freedom:  freedom from war in a context of advancing the quality of our lives as measured by the Good.  Instead of an explosion of bombs which ends us, we could foster an explosion of human and environmental flourishing.

There are a lot of cynics and skeptics out there.  I’ve dealt with them in other essays on this blog, and I’ll sure that I’ll do so again.  Cynics and skeptics are as fixated today on the inevitability of war as they were on ‘a woman’s place’ a hundred years ago.  If ‘common wisdom’ of the 19^th century had never been challenged, women would still be unable to vote; still exist as legal property of their husband or closest male relative.

Try to imagine a Project that reaches toward the Light, a Light beyond any one religious or superstitious belief system.  A Light based in rights, dignity, honor and flourishing, both human and environmental.  It is the Light, the Good, that is approachable through scientific and philosophical scholarship, married in an ongoing, adaptive task.  How, for instance, do we civil-engineer a beautiful, hale city that integrates with a healthy ecosystem? 

A synergy of many scholarly hats would be required to advance a Project of Light.  Psychologists, sociologists, environmental scientists, ethicists, zoologists, to name a few.  The standards of truth would be:  science (verifiable experimentation) and critical thinking (per the field of philosophy).

Surely the invention of a means to approach the Light, and escape war, is infinitely better than an invention that leads us into the Dark.

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