Avoiding Ethics: Infallibility and the Religion of Science

             It is to Oppenheimer's credit that he had some remorse for Hiroshima: he said that "we were hideously uncomfortable about being associated with such a slaughter".[1] But one would have wished that his discomfort would have led his drawing out the consequences of his participation by questioning his drive for power through science. He did not question his fundamental beliefs after Hiroshima and continued to seek Government positions and to support atomic build up.

             What little remorse there was expressed in strangely Christian terms. He said that the scientists had "known sin" by their involvement with the bomb that killed so many people.[2] Oppenheimer is here reverting, as he did when he saw the first explosion, to earlier mythologies of knowledge/power. These reversions to earlier mythological constructions of knowledge/power enabled him to by pass the immediate ethical problem of his complicity in mass murder. With the explosion of the first bomb he sees himself as a Hindu God and the bomb as a spiritual panacea that will end the war. But after he learns of his complicity in the burning mutilation of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he speaks in a quasi-Christian manner of his guilt.

            His guilt was suffered merely as a Christian sense of sin, not as a question that would implicate science. Science allowed him to remain safely detached from the blame of Hiroshima, as if were not really he who made the bomb. Indeed, the amoral nature of science insulated Oppenheimer, as it does other scientists and science itself, from ethical reproach. The doctrine of scientific disinterestedness confers virtual infallibility upon science,  in a manner closely reminiscent of the doctrine of Papal infallibility by which the Church attempted to make itself immune to ethical reproach.

Oppenheimer used science to exclude ethical concerns from himself and the knowledge and power he sought. But totalist systems are dangerous not only for what they exclude but for what they include.  Oppenheimer excluded ethics from his science, but he also included a vaulting, or even a deifying ambition as an intrinsic part of his science.  The myth of scientific neutrality enabled Oppenheimer to avoid ethical blame at the same time as it enabled him to pursue ultimate power. Descartes' dream of a total science, as well as Newton's, was intrinsic to Oppenheimer's quest for the power over life and death he hoped the bomb would bring mankind. By managing the production of the bomb Oppenheimer appears to have felt he was at the summit of the Empire of the Intellect and the entire world stretched out beneath his feet. It was his moment of glory.

            Only by questioning science itself could he have questioned his own drive for glory and infallibility. But he appears to have been unable to allow himself to do this to any depth. Himmler couldn't question his primary drives either. But Oppenheimer seems to have had at least minimal inklings that something was rotten in the infallibility of science. R.J. Lifton observes that Oppenheimer's statement that the scientists had "known sin", "was by no means a simple confession of wrong doing". indeed,  he seems to have thought it was a necessary evil suffered to happen in the interests of knowledge and scientific progress. This of course, echoes Himmler's justification for his atrocities.[3] Himmler must kill for the Fatherland, just as Oppenheimer must kill for the civil religion of  Science and the American National Security state. But the important difference between Oppenheimer and Himmler is that the former seems to have some regret. Himmler seems to have felt much less remorse than Oppenheimer.

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