BY THE NUMBERS

 

Jerry Harkins

 

On March 21, 1927, Werner Heisenberg published an early version of a paper with the unpromising title “On the Perceptual Content of Quantum Theoretical Kinematics and Mechanics.”  Seven months later, the basic idea expressed in that paper was the subject of an intense discussion among 29 of the world’s most brilliant physicists who ultimately agreed that what came to be known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle stood to revolutionize theoretical physics.  It did much more.

The Uncertainty Principle holds that the precise position and momentum of a subatomic particle can never be known simultaneously.  Any attempt to measure them both at a single moment is subject to an error of at least Planck’s Constant, h, divided by 2pi.  This is an infinitesimal number.[1]  But in the world of the subatomic particles of which the universe is made, it is very significant.  Moreover, it became a philosophical issue well beyond the realm of theoretical physics.  Artists and academics in many disciplines came to think that it implied that at the core of reality there is an important, inherent and invincible element of ignorance.[2]  Coupled with Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, it profoundly shaped our understanding of reality in a way that was not flattering.

Throughout our history, ignorance and its alter ego, curiosity, have inspired both fear and attraction like the moth and the flame.  But Uncertainty raised the ante.  In essence it claimed that ignorance is, ultimately, at the heart of all knowledge.  It is King Solomon’s vanity of vanities, Plato’s Cave, Sartre’s nothingness, Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems and E.E. Cummings’ “no of all nothing” written large.  It seems to alienate us from our history and culture and from every human construct of art, science, philosophy and religion.  If you can never know anything for sure, reality may be only a dream of which we are merely an illusory part.  As King Solomon laments:

 I applied my mind to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under the heavens. What a heavy burden God has laid on mankind.  I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

Uncertainty bothered Einstein[3] who challenged it at the Fifth Solvay Physics Conference with one of his famous “thought experiments.”  At one point he went to the blackboard to correct what he thought was an error in Heisenberg’s equations but he wound up devising a mathematical proof of the theory which carried the day.[4]  Perhaps without realizing it, he also highlighted  the fact that Uncertainty and quantum mechanics itself were not so much laws of physics as they were of mathematics.  Subsequent history has witnessed a similar phenomenon in every branch of physics and in several of the social sciences such as anthropology and psychology.  Economics and finance have been dominated by mathematical modeling for many decades.  Practitioners of both hard and soft sciences have been drawn to mathematical analysis, some for its supposed precision and others for its ability to deal with imprecision.  This represents the flowering of a discussion that goes back to the debates of the ancient Arabic philosophers who invented (or discovered) many of the foundational methods of mathematical analysis.

A good example of these debates was the trial of Galileo Galilei for heresy by the Holy Inquisition in 1633.  Like most stories from history, this one is usually oversimplified as  merely a contest between science and religion.  More importantly, it hinged on what the principals thought about the nature of mathematics.  Galileo believed that mathematics is more than a tool useful for describing nature but is actually the ultimate reality or at least as close as we can come to that.  It can be thought of as the Platonic pure idea behind all other pure ideas.  His chief Inquisitor, Cardinal (later Saint) Robert Bellarmine, took an almost opposite position.  To him, mathematics was a human artifact, a tool useful for measuring certain aspects of things but always with the caveat that the Bible was the repository of all truth as revealed by the creator of all truth.  The Bible, of course, seemed to teach that the sun revolves around the earth.  To the modern reader, this may seem primitive but, in 1633, most people still relied on the common sense observation of the sun “rising” in the east and “setting” in the west.  Bellarmine knew that Galileo might prove to be right and worried about how theology would cope with the consequences. 

The great German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss referred to mathematics as "the Queen of the Sciences” by which I think he meant that science could not exist without mathematics.  Gauss was also one of the Enlightenment thinkers who laid the groundwork for modern probability theory and statistical analysis which, of necessity, became the principal mathematical tool for quantum theory.  If the Uncertainty Principle is correct, then the best we can do is describe the probability that that an event is occurring, has occurred or will occur or, in other words, to assert or predict reality.  So, in a sense, probability is reality.  To the poor benighted creatures who are restricted exclusiveley to the world of their senses, this proposition is absurd.  An apple released from its tree will fall down with a probability of +1.  It will not ever fall up.  Moreover, if it is subject only to gravity, its acceleration will accelerate by 32 feet with each succeeding second so that at the end of the second second it will have travelled 96 feet.  In exactly the same way, so will a cannon ball and so will a feather.  Of course, all these objects will be subject to more than gravity, for example, to air resistance which will affect them differently. 

Now you will be forgiven if you think the law of acceleration is every bit as weird as the notion that two particles can communicate with and affect each other instantly (that is, infinitely faster than the speed of light) even if they are at opposite ends of the universe.  But you can verify acceleration while the kinetic behavior of particles cannot be seen or heard but must be inferred from indirect evidence.  You can’t see a Higgs boson.  Sir Peter Higgs couldn’t either but he was able to detect the trail it left.  That trail had been predicted mathematically.  So the boson itself is “real” only at two removes, the trail and, ultimately the mathematics that predicted the trail. 

In the not-too-distant past, physics was a branch of metaphysics but it has now evolved almost entirely into a branch of mathematics which is why the default photograph (or cartoon) of a physicist shows him or her standing by a blackboard filled with abstruse formulas.  It has also extended its compass to include phenomena that lie outside both the sensory universe and realm of traditional logic and even conventional language.  It traffics in theories that are incomprehensible to non-specialists because ordinary language is not suitable for describing them.  Mathematics works because it is the language of abstraction.  Like language, every kind of math is a system for combining symbols.  But while the word “porridge” symbolizes a nutritious dish, you cannot eat the word.  Of course, you can’t eat a scientific theory either but, increasingly, you can’t even conceptualize it unless you understand its language.  Once more, you are left with the brilliant but infuriating insight of Marshall McLuhan, “The medium is the message.”

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Notes

 

[1] Planck’s Constant is 6.62607015 X 10-34 joule seconds.  A joule second is the energy of one watt over a period of one second.  Pi, of course, is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.  It is an irrational number commonly given as 3.14 or 22/7.

 

[2] The influence of Uncertainty on a wide range of artists is discussed in two earlier essays.  “The Gentle Joys of Maybe” and “The Gnostic Glow” which can be accessed respectively at my blog, Jerry’s Follies. 

 

[3] Einstein was strongly committed to the idea that all knowledge is knowable.  The quotation attributed to him to the effect that God does not play dice with the universe is probably apocryphal but he did say, “Raffiniert is der Herr Gott, aber Boshaft ist er nicht”  (“God is subtle but not malicious”).  

 

[4] As a statistician, I am hugely attracted to the Uncertainty Principle but, lurking in the back of my mind is the heretical suspicion that it may not be true.  I believe I could devise a thought experiment in which a particle at rest is energized in a collider.  The collision would simultaneously activate a double switch that instantly measures both the mass and the momentum of the target particle at the moment it moves.  Of course, the clinker in this fantasy is hidden in the word “instantly.”  But “almost instantly” would at least reduce the error so that it might ultimately be less than Planck’s Constant.  As the instruments got closer and closer to instant, the error might become negligible.  (Another problem with my fantasy is the notion of a particle at rest which may be a state antithetical to the particle’s nature.  True, Hans Dehmelt and Wolfgang Paul won the Nobel Prize in 1989 for their creation of a “magnetic trap” which held an electron still for ten months but there is no evidence the electron enjoyed being held.)

 

PUTIN IN RETIREMENT

 

Jerry Harkins

 

 

Praskoveevka, Russia, October 7, 2040.  As the afternoon sun warmed the stunning scenery of this Black Sea town, I sat down for a one-on-one interview with Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the recently retired President of the Russian Federation.  My Russian is good as is his English but we agreed to use a translator to help with the idiomatic parts.  After forty-one years at its helm and still vigorous at 84, he has begun work on his memoirs which he plans to publish posthumously.

 

JPH:  Happy Birthday, Mr. President.  I trust you are enjoying retirement in good health.

 

VVP:  Yes, yes.  Of course.  It is naturally an adjustment and there are times when life seems a bit too bland but that is to be expected.

 

JPH:  This is the first interview you have given since your retirement.  Why did you choose to talk to an American reporter?

 

VVP:  My compatriots are not as interested in my reflections at this moment as are the foreign media.  They have other things to worry about.  Also I think it may have something to do with our attitude toward history.

 

JPH:  How do Russians regard history?  And how does that differ from the Americans?

 

VVP:  We understand the importance of history differently.  To us, history is a relatively small collection of mostly unimportant facts and a great deal of mythology.  Perhaps not so much myth as reconsideration.  Not so obsessed with the way things happened as the way they should have happened.  History, then, can serve as the foundation of our communal life, our social contract.  For Americans, I think, law, not history, fills that role.

 

JPH:  It has been said that what people believe happened is of more practical importance than what may have actually happened.

 

VVP:  Which is true.  Americans believe in what they call the rule of law.  But the interpretation of law must change as society changes.  The American Constitution never claimed that separate is not equal.  Some of your judges have admitted as much while at the same time saying that segregation is not unconstitutional.  But most know that segregation has outlived its usefulness and is simply no longer tenable.

 

JPH:  Let me turn to what I hope is an easier question.  Looking back, what do you consider your most important achievements and what are your regrets, if any.

 

VVP:  Two achievements come to mind and they are related.  One, I restored the political and cultural genius of Russia and, two, I brought about an historical improvement in its economic system.  Our country had suffered from generations of leadership that was too weak or too brutal or too ideological, often all three at the same time.  In addition, I achieved a workable balance between traditional Russian culture, especially its religious aspect, and the imperatives of this technological age.  This was not so much my achievement as the outcome of a process initiated by Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev

and Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin.  I only nurtured it and helped realize their vision.  Are there any regrets?  Yes, naturally.  But I do not dwell on them.  I and all Russians know from birth that serenity is to be found in vodka.  But as long as I was part of the government, I felt I must not drink.  A great sacrifice for my country.

 

JPH:  Some people were surprised when you also encouraged the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church.  Have you always been a religious person?

 

VVP:  No, I am not personally very religious.  But I have always known that Orthodoxy is the foundation of Russian culture.  Lenin erred when he set out to destroy it.  Like many others inside and outside Russia, he misinterpreted Marx.  Russians feel their religion as consolation in a harsh climate.

 

JPH:  Lenin erred?  The Father of Communism?  Or have you parted ways with Communism?

 

VVP:  No, not at all.  But even Communists are fallible and Lenin made errors.  With regard to religion, he mis-understood Marx.  Like many others, he remembered only one phrase of his famous statement on religion.  “Religion is the opiate of the people.”  In fact, these words are part of a remarkable and insightful paragraph that ends with the observation, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

 

JPH:  Why did Marxist Communism fail?”

 

VVP:  Communism did not fail.  Communists failed.  Especially Stalin.   As Khrushchev said, the essence of Stalinism was the cult of the personality.  In his Secret Speech he was very clear about it.  “It is impermissible” he said, “ and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism to elevate one person, to transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics akin to those of a god.”  The Russian preference for strong government was carried to a terrible extreme.

 

JPH:  In your farewell address, you said that you had hoped to achieve a more fruitful partnership with the United States.  You also said this was unfinished business.  What stood in the way?

 

VVP:  Several factors.  We and the Americans have much in common but we also differ in ways that make us incomprehensible to each other.  They look at us and see only a dictatorship.  We look at them and see chaos.  To us, they are unpredictable.  We are a moral people.  They are moralistic.  Also hedonistic.  I envy their successes but when I tried to experiment with their so-called free market capitalism, it failed in Russia because our oligarchs became as corrupt as theirs.

JPH:  Yet you were friendly with and supportive of more than a few of those oligarchs.

VVP:  Of course.  To paint every member of a class with the same brush is ideology and foolish.  I am not an ideologue and not a fool no matter what my wife might think on occasion.

 

JPH:  You took significant risks with your interference in American elections.  Why did you prefer Trump even after his disastrous first term?

 

VVP:  To ask that question is to answer it.  What leader in my position would not have preferred a buffoon as the leader of his principal competitor?

 

JPH:  Buffoon?

 

VVP:  Do you doubt it?  Trump was a man of no intelligence, no character, no sense of statecraft.  Given to ruling by childish temper tantrums.  He was easy to intimidate, to dominate in a meeting because he never prepared.  He didn’t read.  I thought maybe he couldn’t.  My life was much easier than it would have been under Mrs. Clinton or it had been under Mr. Obama.

JPH:  What about his successor?

VVP:  Mr. Biden.  Personally, of course, he was a charming man.  Personable, polite, honest.  Politically, he was very smart and very tough.  He inherited a difficult challenge from Trump the buffoon.  Of course, he understood our strengths and weaknesses much better than Trump and was, therefore, harder to deal with.  Harder but always pleasant.

 

JPH:  You have spoken of Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev who also played the buffoon, did he not?

 

VVP:  “Played” is exactly the right word.  With him, it was an act.  He was actually a very shrewd leader.  At least when he was sober.  When he got dressed in the morning, he donned that personality.  I was told by those who knew Eisenhower that he also liked to play a role.  In his case, it was of an average or slightly below average peasant.  You have an expression for this, I think.  Joe Sixpack.  Eisenhower was trying to hide the fact that he was a genius.  I myself have been accused of acting the part of a macho hero.  My wife thinks this is very funny.  But Trump, bah!  He really was a fool.  The vaunted American democracy was not immune to making stupid choices.

 

JPH:  Perhaps, but Trump was a serious danger to world peace.

 

VVP:  Yes, certainly.  But he was a bully and ultimately bullies are always cowards.  Trump avoided military service due to the agony of bone spurs.  Poor baby.  I guess his family could not afford to have a doctor remove them.  If he threatened to use his nuclear football, I was reasonably certain that there would have been a putsch in the White House.  Or maybe even in your Congress.  Although I have my doubts about the functionality of all legislative bodies.  Perhaps your military would have stepped in.  Our intelligence services took that possibility seriously.  I less so.  Like journalists, intelligence agencies have a vested interest in seeing the world in vivid colors.  I speak from personal experience.

 

JPH:  What attracted you to a career in the secret police?

 

VVP:  In the police, you mean.  “Secret” should go without saying.  Every police force has many secrets, some more than others.  But I really don’t know why I chose intelligence work.  My father, of course, spent some time in domestic intelligence.  Neither of us had a sterling record.  You know, I was never a committed Communist, any more than Trump seemed to be a committed Republican.

 

JPH:  Was Communism, then, a failure that you recognized early in life?

 

VVP:  Obviously, it was a failure as a practical matter.  Everyone knew that.  Each five year plan yielded worse results than the one before it.  More importantly, it failed as an ideology.  I think all ideologies are doomed to failure because they have an aversion to uncomfortable facts.  Capitalism is a repulsive idea.  Democracy is better as an idea but is vulnerable to human weakness.  I am happy when people call me a technocrat but not if they mean I am soulless.  I think of myself as soulful, what the Germans would call seelenvoll, fully human.  Vladimir Vladimirovich, the soulful technocrat!

JPH:  You say it failed as a practical matter.  Did it succeed in any other way?

VVP:  It would be difficult to succeed in any way if it failed in practical matters like feeding people.  Still, it is an attractive idea.  "To each according to his needs; from each according to his abilities."  It is humane whereas capitalism is "red in tooth and claw."  However, humanism should never include show trials, starvation and mass executions.  No ideology is immune from contradictions.  You cannot eat theory.

 

JPH:  Yet there are many who think of you as a leader who was willing to –– ah, I guess the polite word is “sanction” –– his opponents.

 

VVP:  Yes.  In the sense that I was the Russian leader, everything that happened on my watch was my responsibility.  I was reading recently about the English King Henry II who had a similar reputation after several of his men assassinated a troublesome archbishop.  It took centuries for him to weather the responsibility for that and to gain recognition as England’s greatest King.  So there is hope for me yet.  We had a similar situation in 1918.  When the Bolsheviks executed Tsar Nicholas and his family, the deed was actually done by a squad under Sverdlov.  Was he responsible?  He had orders from Yurosky who may have had orders from Lenin.  You see, we really don’t know or care about the historical reality.  Our history is better for the myths surrounding the deed as it is also in the almost mythical case of Rasputin.

 

JPH:  So much for history.  You have led an interesting and important life and will be remembered by future historians.  Do you think about how they will treat you?

 

VVP:  I suppose they are why I want to write my memoirs which the historians at least will have to read.  But really it will not mean much.  The era I represent –– say the era that began with the first world war –– has been a punishing one for humans.  Times of great confusion refuting any idea that history has an orderly narrative like a novel.  How will future scholars interpret my role in it?  I certainly do not envy them the task.

 

JPH:  Thank you, Mr. President.

 

 

 

 

 

 

GOD AND THE ATOM REVISITED

 

Jerry Harkins

 

 

 

The world recently observed the seventy-fifth anniversary of the first (and so far only) use of the atomic bomb which was dropped by American forces on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and on Nagasaki three days later.  Both cities were virtually obliterated and it is estimated that between 129,000 and 226,000 Japanese civilians – men too old to be drafted, women and children – and approximately 20,000 soldiers were killed. The horror and the agony did not come as surprises.  When the bomb had been tested three weeks earlier, the chief scientist on the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer, murmured the words of the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

 

Almost immediately, the bomb triggered a global debate about the morality of its use.  A year later, John Hersey published “Hiroshima” in The New Yorker.  It is the story of that morning as recorded in the memories of six survivors interviewed less than a year after the event.  It is remarkably free of overt moralizing but it quickly became one of the most influential books of its century, shaping attitudes toward war and peace all over the world.  In a way, this was strange.  Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not, by any means, the most horrific events of World War II.  They were eclipsed by the Holocaust and roughly equivalent in both casualties and destruction to the fire bombings of Dresden and Tokyo.  In pure brutality, they ranked with the Japanese “Rape of Nanking” and the German slaughter of the citizens of Lidice.  But in both Japanese cities, the horror was compounded because it was the result of a single bomb that wreaked all the death and destruction.  Some victims disappeared entirely from the face of the earth, literally leaving only their shadows.  For many, there had been no escape, no time even to realize that escape was needed.  For those left behind, whether in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, New York, Paris or Cairo, there was only the certainty that the world had changed in an instant.  It was now a more dangerous, more frightening place in which to live.  The new world was replete with questions including moral ones.

 

A friend of mine built an elaborate bomb shelter for his family on their 13-acre home in rural  Connecticut.  After much thought, he installed a doorbell and a welcome mat concluding that hospitality in a disaster was more important than survival.  Built for seven, he estimated it might accommodate twenty more.  He spent the next ten years worrying about what he would do when the twenty-first neighbor rang his bell.  

 

All of a sudden, everybody was a moral philosopher.  The influential Ban the Bomb movement grew up in the United States and elsewhere.  The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was founded in 1945 as, in the words of its founders, “…an emergency action, created by scientists who saw an immediate need for a public reckoning in the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  One mission was to urge fellow scientists to help shape national and international policy. A second mission was to help the public understand what the bombings meant for humanity.”  The debate has continued down to the present day but, from the beginning, it has been bootless and largely irrelevant as far as the use of the bomb in World War II is concerned. 

 

Moral philosophy can be defined as the study of the rationale for societal standards of moral conduct and the definition and application of those standards to contemporary issues.  Its practitioners sometimes make it sound dense, as though most of its conclusions were not obvious.  But it is important because it deals with the mechanisms that make human community possible.  It is difficult because those conclusions are always changing, evolving to accommodate new situations and new understandings.  And it is contentious because it runs counter to the individualistic disposition that has come to characterize modern thinking.

 

The basic question is this:  was President Truman’s decision to employ the two bombs a moral one? Which is to say, did it meet contemporary standards of what is permissible in waging a just war?  The broader question of whether or not there is such a thing as a just war need not be addressed in this context.  It is sufficient to recall the observation attributed to Ernest Hemingway that one should “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”  War may be, as Carl von Clausewitz said,  “…the continuation of politics by other means” and in some cases – the American Civil War and World War II come to mind –  it may be necessary, but it is hard to imagine any war being properly described as just.  At a minimum, every war inevitably does great harm to innocent bystanders and is therefore unjust.  General Sherman had it exactly right on one occasion when he told a class of cadets, “I’ve seen cities and homes in ashes.  I’ve seen thousands of men lying on the ground, their faces looking up at the skies.  I tell you, war is Hell!”

 

The rationale for deciding to drop the bomb was based on the belief that the only alternative for ending the war would have been to invade the Japanese home islands at a cost estimated to be between 500,000 and 1,000,000 American lives and many more Japanese lives.  This was a conclusion based on the “fanaticism” of the Japanese.  The allies had had good evidence of this in the fight-to-the-death spirit which they witnessed during the island-hopping campaigns of 1943 and 1944.  They had suffered greatly from the suicidal kamikaze attacks on their warships.  Of the 3,912 young men trained as kamikaze pilots, at least 3,800 died in combat.  Similar suicidal attacks were made by specially designed torpedo boats and by the banzai charges of ground forces.  By western standards, these experiences were conclusive evidence of fanaticism.  So the question becomes whether or not there really was no alternative to the bomb.

 

The most common suggestion, both before and after the bomb had been used, was to have demonstrated its awesome power by exploding one over some unoccupied area on or near the Japanese homeland.  But there was little belief that such a strategy would alter the determination of the Japanese government to prevail or die trying and there was the practical problem that there was enough plutonium to make only one more bomb in the short term and not nearly enough uranium for many months.

 

The only realistic alternative, it seemed, was to “starve out” Japan by interdicting its supply lines.  But, if successful, would starvation have been preferable to fire bombing and atomic bombing of civilians?  In theory, it would have been because it would have been gradual and would have given the enemy an opportunity to stop the suffering at any point.  In practice, however, the American Navy had already done an effective job in cutting Japan’s crucial supply lines and much of its manufacturing capability as well but without diminishing its defensive capability significantly.  This was not surprising.  The history of warfare is replete with various kinds of blockade strategies, most of which had bleak records of success.

 

A variation of the blockade approach was to do nothing new, to continue pretty much  attacking military and industrial targets, “waiting out” the endurance of a suffering enemy.  There was some evidence that some Japanese factions were already exploring ways to end the conflict honorably, that is with as many conditions attached as could be negotiated with an enemy tired of the war.  After the fall of Germany, discrete approaches had been made to the Soviet Union to act as an intermediary in seeking such a settlement with the Allies.  American policy wanted the Russians to open another front against the Japanese in Manchuria but did not want Russia to have any influence in the post-war Japanese government.  Its entry as an intermediary would have been seen as a threat to both these objectives.  Meanwhile, the Americans and British had made it clear, first at Casablanca in 1943, that there would be no settlement without “unconditional surrender” which, in effect ruled out any negotiated settlement such as happened with disastrous results in World War I.  When the Germans had balked at this, Eisenhower gave them a 54-hour ultimatum to which they acceded.  A similar demand was made to Japan at the Potsdam Conference on July 26, 1945, eleven days before Hiroshima.  They, too, balked.  As late as August 10, four days after Nagasaki, the Japanese government said it would accept the Potsdam demands but added, “the understanding that said declaration does not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a sovereign ruler.”  The Japanese capitulated after another four days.  In the event, the Emperor was allowed to stay on his throne after renouncing his divinity and accepting a symbolic but face-saving role.

 

It is impossible to say with certainty that the bomb ended the war, that the war could not have been ended by more humane means or even that more humane means were available.  But, on the ground at the time, a decision had to be made.  Foresight was dim at best and the stakes were immense.  The challenge confronting President Truman was stark: to weigh the moral value of the lives of a large number of Japanese civilians against a much larger but still uncertain number of American and Japanese combatants.  He listened carefully to a wide range of opinions and options, made his decision and slept well for the rest of his life.

 

Not so for some others.  Among the disaffected were many of the key members of the scientific group that developed the bomb including Oppenheimer himself.  Prominent among the religious dissenters was the Oxford educated British classicist, translator, satirist and poet Monsignor Ronald Knox, the author of God and the Atom which was published only months after the war came to an end.  I first read the book as a high school sophomore and developed a dislike for the author, his writing and his logic all of which struck me as pretentious.  I pictured him as an English snob, a member of the petit aristocracy.  He had an intimidating arsenal of obscure words and antiquated references which made it difficult to decide exactly where he came down on any part of the subject he was writing about.  Especially annoying to me was his habit of spending a few paragraphs telling the reader he had no qualifications in science, philosophy, psychology, sociology and a host of other things and then pontificating about them at length.  He seemed to think his ignorance gave him special license to sneer at those who had expertise which he regarded as narrow-minded.  

 

Reading the book again many decades later, I realize that my judgment was harsh and perhaps a bit defensive.  I now think Knox realized he was inadequate to the task he had taken on and was writing around the question of morality instead of writing on it.  He felt strongly about it but was reluctant to share his emotions.  So, for example, he devotes considerable attention to drawing a distinction between right and wrong on the one hand and good and bad on the other.  He is right that there are differences.  In fact, they are so obvious that the attentive reader must be wondering if he is going to conclude the bombing was right but evil or wrong but good.  Fortunately, his logic is not quite that warped and his prose is not as clear.  Sixty-two pages into a book of 142 pages, the author makes his case as clearly as he can:

 

Theologically speaking, my thesis is that it would have been a more perfect thing not to bomb Hiroshima.  Or, if I must needs talk the language of common life, let me dig up a phrase from an almost forgotten, but not altogether unregretted past, and say that bombing Hiroshima was not cricket.

 

Now, personally, I am appalled by the description of a city’s ruination as being “not cricket.”  Nor do I sympathize with Knox’s being forced to descend to the language of common life.  But his real problem is his logic.  He offers biblical support for his position that restraint would have been “more perfect” (he meant more nearly perfect) by recalling that King David twice had the life of his predecessor and sworn enemy, King Saul, in his hands but, in spite of his good reason for vengeance, spared him.  Knox says, “But we shall all agree that he did a better thing.”  It seems he thinks vengeance would have been a moral action, good but not better or best.  I think he had forgotten Paul’s instruction in Romans 12:19,  “Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord.”  Instead Knox says : 

 

And, granted that we had a right to destroy Hiroshima, I say we would have done a better thing if we had emptied that fatal cargo, in the first instance at any rate, by way of demonstration, upon some untenanted mountainside.

 

This is slipshod logic.  To begin with, it is hard to imagine what he meant by a “right” to destroy Hiroshima.  More importantly, his biblical exegesis is pure fiction.  David does not spare Saul on either occasion out of a desire to be better but rather because, unlike Knox, he remembered the same injunction Paul was referring to which appears first in Deuteronomy 32:35.  As he tells his companion, Abishai, (1 Samuel 26:9) “Do no violence to him.  For who can reach out his hand against the Lord’s anointed and be guiltless?”  

 

Monsignor Knox applies his garbled version of the David story to Hiroshima by way of implying that President Truman might have done better by refraining from the use of the bomb except as a non-lethal demonstration.  The President, however, was aware of the fanatical nature of the Japanese militarists and had reason to believe that a mere demonstration would not impress them.  In fact, he dropped the bomb specifically because he was worried that such a minimalist action would only encourage them to fight on resulting in massive American casualties.  In a sense, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were demonstrations.  They were meant to persuade the militarists that Japan could and would be annihilated unless they accepted the terms issued at Potsdam.  And they worked, not that the end justified the means.

 

But the real failure of Knox’s analysis is his underlying assumption that every act must be subject to some universal test of morality that America had failed in Japan.  There is a vast literature on this and related questions but, ultimately, it is not so that morality can or must always be served.  For one thing, throughout history, most wars have been fought by nations that believed their cause was just.  Perhaps the case for a necessary war is best buttressed by looking to conflicts that should have been fought but were not. 

 

In his memoirs, President Bill Clinton wrote of his decision not to intervene militarily in the Rwandan genocide of 1994:

 

Within one hundred days, 800,000 people in a country of only 8 million would be murdered…With a few thousand troops and help from our allies, even making allowances for the time it would have taken to deploy them, we could have saved lives.  The failure to try to stop Rwanda’s tragedies became one of the greatest regrets of my presidency.[1]

 

Addressing Congress, he spoke of the lesson he had taken from that tragedy, saying, “Genocide is no country’s internal affair.”  This is a very different calculus from the more common idea of a universal “natural law” as decreed by most moral philosophers and applied in the case of Hiroshima by Monsignor Knox.  “Laws of Nature and of Nature's God” are spoken of in the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence but there is no evidence that any such thing exists.  It is true that some activities are widely condemned and others are widely admired but there are no universal absolutes that admit of no exceptions.  The idea of a social contract is a prerequisite to living in community but it is a weak force, a fragile agent of peace and comity.  It requires enforcement by legal process including military or police force.  This, I believe, is exactly what President Clinton meant by his comment about genocide.

 

The atomic bomb was neither moral nor immoral.  It was tragic.  It was horrible.  But it was necessary in the sense that it promised to bring an end to the war more quickly and with less loss of life than any feasible alternative.  It was just in the sense that ending the war also put an end to Japanese colonialism and, indirectly, to the colonialism of the European Allies.  It extended the value of self-determination.  And it was productive in the sense that it brought about the understanding that nations must now seek to eliminate total war.  These ends may not have justified the means but the means enabled the ends which were certainly desirable.

 

---

Note

 

[1] My Life, Alfred A. Knopf, 2004, p. 593.

 

YOUR OFFICIAL INCOMPLETE GUIDE TO

 

HOAXES, CONSPIRACIES, WITCH HUNTS & FAKE NEWS

 

Jerry Harkins

 

 

 

Ideas and Institutions

 

Climate Change

 

Black Lives Matter

 

Immigrant Rights

 

#MeToo

 

Gun Control

 

Science

 

U.S. Intelligence Agencies (all)

 

U.S. Food and Drug Administration

 

U.S. Centers for Disease Control

 

U.S. Department of Homeland Security

 

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

 

U.S. State Department

 

Election Interference (Russian)

 

Election Interference (Chinese)

 

Election Interference (Wikileaks)

 

Election Interference (Democratic National Committee)

 

Collusion

 

Voting by Mail

 

Covid-19

 

Income Inequality

 

Poverty

 

Hush Money

 

NATO

 

NAFTA

 

World Health Organization

 

Canada

 

Africa

 

European Union

 

New York Times

 

Washington Post

 

The Atlantic

 

MSNBC

 

New York City

 

New York State

 

California

 

Individuals

 

All Democrats, Living and Dead

 

Soldiers Killed or Missing in Action

 

American Prisoners of War

 

Maryanne Trump Barry

 

Ivana Trump

 

Mary L. Trump

 

Jeff Sessions

 

John Kelly

John McCain

Cindy McCain

Meghan McCain

 

Rex Tillerson

 

Jim Mattis

 

John Bolton

 

Michael Cohen

 

Barack Obama

Joe Biden

 

Hillary Clinton

 

Bill Clinton

 

Nancy Pelosi

 

Robert Muller

 

Alexander Vindman

 

Yevgeny Vindman

 

Everyone with an IQ Higher Than Room Temperature

 

 

 

 

``BLOW THE MAN DOWN, BOYS”

Jerry Harkins

You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.

                                                                                                                  ––Exodus 20:4

In every nation through every age there have been some of God’s children who have taken the First Commandment very seriously.  The Bible is strong against the making and worshiping of graven images which it considers to be idolatry.  It makes a single exception in the Book of Numbers (21:8-9) where  God instructs Moses to make a bronze snake and put it on a poll so that people who are bitten by real snakes can gaze at it and be cured.  The commandment is otherwise crystal clear that realistic statues are forbidden.  The Catholic Church interprets this as meaning that believers must not worship statues but can use them to focus their thoughts and prayers.  The difference between adoration and contemplation of the divine seems superficial and statues are an important part of Catholic life.  Pope John Paul II was convinced that the Blessed Virgin had intervened to save his life in 1981 when an assassin shot him four times so he had one of the recovered bullets mounted in her statue at Fatima.  Eastern Orthodox Catholics are a bit more ambiguous.  Their icons are two dimensional images and they generally permit relief sculpture but statues in the round are extremely rare.  Muslims and Jews do not allow images of any kind and Protestants occupy every niche in between.  Southern Baptists are generally opposed to what they consider idolatry but each congregation is largely self-governing and exceptions can be readily found.  Quakers are also opposed to images of any kind, including crosses and even stained glass. Exceptions are rare.  History is replete with iconoclasts destroying images of every description but the main target has always been the three dimensional art of sculpture.

It is not only religious sculpture that is controversial.  For reasons that would probably delight practitioners of psychoanalysis, secular works, especially those placed in public spaces, have their own way of igniting battles royal.  The wide range of controversy and ferocity is suggested by some historical examples:

·  “The Greek Slave” of 1849 by the American sculptor Hiram Powers is a nude and chained maiden captured and sold into slavery by Turks.  Widely accepted by the American public because of its similarity to classical Greek and Roman sculpture, it nonetheless occasioned fierce opposition from proto-Comstockians.  This was met be a brilliant proto-PR campaign led by liberal clergymen which resulted in the adoption of the maidens as a symbol by both abolitionists and early feminists.  The debate continues to the present day.

·  “Liberty Enlightening the World” of 1886 by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, better known as the Statue of Liberty, was also well received by most but attacked on aesthetic, economic and, most vehemently, racial grounds.  A month after its dedication, an editorial in the Cleveland Gazette for November 27 insisted, “Shove the Bartholdi statue, torch and all, into the ocean until the ‘liberty’ of this country is such as to make it possible for an industrious and inoffensive colored man in the South to earn a respectable living for himself and family, without being ku-kluxed perhaps murdered, his daughter and wife outraged, and his property destroyed. The idea of the ‘liberty’ of this country ‘enlightening the world,’ or even Patagonia, is ridiculous in the extreme.”

·  “Civic Virtue” by Frederick MacMonnies has been denounced by feminists almost since it was installed in City Hall Park, New York in 1922.  It shows a naked male hero holding a sword while standing triumphantly over two beautiful naked women symbolizing vice and corruption.   His genitals are covered by the leaves of a vine and the women’s’ bodies below the waste are actually serpents’ tails.  Mayor LaGuardia had it exiled to Queens Borough Hall in the 1930’s where it resided until 2012 when, at the age of 90, and under renewed attack in the era of #MeToo, it was removed to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn at a cost in excess of $100,000.  A committee of Queens civic leaders wants it back so Green-Wood may not be its final resting place.

·  “Bird in Space” of 1926 is an abstract work by the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi said to represent not the bird but its flight.  It was purchased in Paris by the American photographer Edward Steichen.  However, when it arrived in New York, the Customs Bureau refused to believe it was a tax exempt work of art and imposed a $230 tax on it as a “manufactured metal object.”  This decision was appealed and the trial was followed avidly by the press.  One expert testified  “If that's art, hereafter I'm a bricklayer.”  The court decided it was art but that would not have impressed the American poet and critic John Ciardi who opposed distortion and abstraction of any kind.  He famously wrote, “Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.” 

·  “Chicago Picasso” of 1967 by Pablo Picasso is a monumental cubist work dominating the plaza of the Daley Civic Center in Chicago.  From the beginning, the critics loved it but most Chicagoans made their dislike loud and clear. In part, this was because they also disapproved of the artist’s alleged Communism and his sexual appetites.  The populist columnist Mike Royko opined, “… the fact is, it has a long stupid face and looks like some giant insect that is about to eat a smaller, weaker insect.  Its eyes are like the eyes of every slum owner who made a buck off the small and weak.” Over time, however, most citizens accepted the work as an icon of the city and became proud of it.

·  “Three Servicemen” was commissioned to create a representational tribute to the soldiers who fought in Vietnam specifically to assuage the outraged response of veterans and politicians to the austere minimalism of Maya Lin’s “Vietnam Wall.”  Dedicated in 1984, two years after the Wall itself, Ms. Lin objected strenuously and Mr. Hart responded in a similar vein.  The controversy raged for several years but quickly evaporated as the power of the wall became obvious. The Hart work and another by Glenna Goodacre depicting the women who served have also become highly admired by all but the most superannuated critics.

Of course, all the arts engender vehement criticism but sculpture, especially public sculpture, seems to bring out the worst in critics, artists and the citizenry.  There are certain sculptors who are particularly vulnerable.  Among contemporary artists these would include the aforementioned Frederick Hart who is thought to be too representational, S. Seward Johnson, Jr. too lowbrow, Richard Serra, too intrusive, Jeff Koons, too trivial, and Damien Hirst, too commercial.  At present, there is a new category of disdained work:  statues of historical figures whose lives did not, in some respects, accord with contemporary standards of morality.  Again, the range is wide, including:

·      Christopher Columbus for genocide against Caribbean natives;

·      Saint Junipero Serra for torture and enslavement of California Indians;

·      Robert E. Lee, for being a slaveholder and a traitor to the United States;

·      William Tecumseh Sherman for war crimes in his march through Georgia;

·      Theodore Roosevelt for being a warmonger and racist;

·      Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony also for racism;

·      Andrew Jackson for the Trail of Tears and the Long March;

·      Kit Carson for implementing the Long March;

·      Charles Lindberg for his Nazi sympathies and his promotion of eugenics;  

·      J. Marion Sims, the Father of Gynecology for experimentation on slave women;  and,

·      Joe Paterno, Penn State football coach, for a subordinate’s pedophilia.

All these people have been honored with one or more statues in one or more prominent locations.  Even today, all have their vociferous detractors and their staunch defenders.  Every single statue on the list has recently been defaced, destroyed or taken down and hidden except for that of the Mss. Stanton and Anthony whose larger-than-life monument (portrayed ahistorically with Sojourner Truth) was installed in New York’s Central Park only recently on August 26, 2020.  It is the first statue of real women gracing the park but is liable to attract attention because Stanton and Anthony did not welcome African-American women to their movement.  We shall see.

I make no claim on the merits or lack thereof of the persons on my list.  It is not that I am without opinions about them.  In the interest of full disclosure, I confess that I have often explained why I have never read the poetry of Ezra Pound by claiming that there are enough great poets to occupy me for life without wasting time reading the work of a crazy Nazi.  I would hate to see New York erect a statue to Mr. Pound in Bryant Park but there is little to fear on that account.  I do wonder, however, if I would join a mob tearing it down if it should come about.  I hope not.

Iconoclasm, like book burning, is always a brutal act even if the work celebrates, accepts or even merely ignores brutality.  It is true, as Shakespeare taught us, “The evil that men do lives after them; / The good is oft interred with their bones.”  But both good and bad are part of our history and our culture.  I am certain that the Taliban blew up the Bamyan Buddhas and ISIS threatened to blow up the Taj Mahal in the belief they were carrying out Islamic decrees.  I and, probably, most Muslim scholars disagree with any such rationale and I strenuously object to people blowing up other people’s history.  In the real world, of course, there are always exceptions.  I would be outraged if Germany erected a memorial to Hitler and I can hear myself saying that the monster was not just part of German history.  I watched with approval as the Iraqi Shiites toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein and the Russians tore down those of Lenin and Stalin.  But not so much Marx.  I wince every time Stalin seems to be making a comeback but, ultimately, it’s none of my business that he appeals to many Russians.

I’m not the only one who draws very fine lines.  America has a long and unattractive history of moralizing, of people trying to force other people to think and act as they do or purport to do.  The key word there is force.  You are welcome to try to persuade me that the earth is flat but not to outlaw condoms or the teaching of evolution.  I believe we all share the right to freedom of speech but Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has no moral right to preach nonsense about vaccinations.  

Human society is complex and often surprising.  When I think of all the art that has been attacked as somehow unacceptable or discomforting, I cannot help but think about the exceptions, the contrary examples.  Anthony Comstock did not live long enough to mount one of his trademark crusades against the last work of Daniel Chester French, the remarkable sculpture “Andromeda,” which is arguably one of the most erotic images

ever carved in marble.  Yet it has been widely praised by critics and the public ever since it was finished in 1929, in part because French was a beloved public figure and in part because the work has seldom been exhibited outside his studio in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.  However, thousands of people visit, photograph and post it on the internet every year without incident.  One wonders what would happen were it installed on the Boston Common or in the Smithsonian Institution.  Would it be thought to objectify a woman’s body?  Or, worse, be pornographic?  Would there be demands  to remove it?  The answers for Boston are maybe not.  For Washington, D.C., it would seem inevitable that congresspersons of various persuasions could not resist storming the ramparts.  You will have to forgive me for saying so, but it would be even more shocking if any of the solons could tell you who Daniel Chester French was, what the Greek myth of Andromeda and Perseus was about or how the sculpture was made.  Admittedly none of that is important to the success of the communication between the artist and the viewer, just as it is not important that Bird in Space has no feathers.  Indeed many contemporary artists do not give their works titles or give them titles unrelated to their creative intent.  French was an upright American of the Victorian era.  His intent was never salacious.  Rather, Andromeda is a hymn to beauty, a validation of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s axion that, “…if eyes were made for seeing, / Then beauty is its own excuse for Being.”

Sculpture may be the most powerful medium for capturing and communicating ideas that are nebulous, elusive or incompletely formed, as though seen through St. Paul’s glass darkly.  This is true whether the work is directly representational or highly abstract.  In either case, it can convey its message without the intermediation of words.  Robert Burns brilliantly defines love as like a red, red rose but the reader has to think about it.  Not so if you come upon a glass rose created by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, the father and son team of Czech artists who made the Ware Collection at Harvard. The dimensionality is more emotionally revealing and more immediate than the poem.  A David Smith geometric piece of industrial steel or a Henry Moore “Reclining Figure” in bronze may be a low definition or cool medium in Marshall McLuhan’s terms while Andromeda would be higher definition or hotter.  Each communicates with an immediacy that no other medium can match.  It merely takes the first two a little more time to sink in.  What exactly “sinks in” is non-verbal by its nature.

When protesters complain that the statue of Theodore Roosevelt outside the American Museum of Natural History makes them “uncomfortable” because of the supposed racism of the two other figures depicted, they are confirming its immediacy.  It is not necessary for them to know anything much about Roosevelt or his era, about the iconography of the other figures or about the intent of the sculptor, James Earle Fraser.  When the Mayor of New York says, “The statute clearly presents a white man as superior to people of color and that’s just not acceptable in this day and age and it never should have been acceptable,” he is trying to define the protesters’ discomfort in the words of a twenty-first century politician/art historian/critic.  That discomfort may not be inappropriate but is also not precise or even concrete.  By today’s lights, Roosevelt was a complicated man.  Among other things, he shared a degree of the racism most of us find immoral today.  Was his racism as evil as Hitler’s anti-Semitism?  Is his progressive leadership obliterated by his faults?  Are these even legitimate questions?  Discuss.  Of course, if you tear down his many statues, you obliterate the questions for yourself and everyone else.

As a general rule, people who do violence to public sculptures that discomfort them are the intellectual and moral heirs of Anthony Comstock and Jimmy Swaggart.  But, like all general rules, there are always going to be exceptions.  People of good will can disagree about whether Theodore Roosevelt was a bombastic racist or an admirable pilgrim who contributed greatly to making America a more perfect union.  Was he a patriot or jingoist, a peacemaker or warmonger, a conservationist or trophy hunter?  Of course, he was all of these things to one degree or another.  He was also the most popular man in America.  In the 1904 Presidential election, he defeated his principal opponent by a margin of twenty percent, one of the largest landslides ever.  In other words, his sins were the characteristic morality of a majority of Americans of his times.  Can we afford to expunge a man who did so much to shape and be shaped by those times from our history because they make us uncomfortable?

It is a legitimate question and one without a definitive answer.  On the one hand, as the philosopher George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  His words are engraved on a plaque at Auschwitz which was considered too evil to be leveled after World War II.  It was preserved to make people feel uncomfortable.  On the other, though, the historian Edward Gibbon concluded that history serves no purpose, follows no course, makes no promises, promotes no values.  It is, he said, “…little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.”  

The iconoclasts of old at least had empirical objectives.  Oliver Cromwell made no secret of his desire to erase Irish history.  The Taliban openly published their objective of erasing any history that did not comport with their understanding of Islamic law.  But the lives of individuals and nations are always to be understood as journeys, not destinations.  Those who would shape the future of our history would do well to understand where we have been.