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Human Rights: the Flight from the It to the I and the We Einstein's response is instructive here: he appears to have drawn some of the ethical consequences of Hiroshima. He told a close friend that "I could burn my fingers that I wrote that first letter to Roosevelt",[1] that recommended the building of the bomb. On March 25, 1945 Einstein wrote a second letter to Roosevelt, warning of the bomb's terrible consequences and implying it should not be used. Roosevelt died with the letter still unopened on his desk. Einstein drew the conclusion that the scientific mentality which he had helped create was itself partly to blame for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He wrote:
Einstein had laid much of the basic ground work for the physics of nuclear weapons and it is certainly of himself, and other scientists that he is speaking here. It is not clear if Einstein recognized his own rather Platonistic drive for total knowledge as a causal factor in the devaluation of the cosmos that results from Physics. It is implied in the above quote however. A younger Einstein, at the height of his glory and transcendent enjoyment of the dilating exaltation of universal knowledge, had written that he had "fled" from the messiness of the personal world into the impersonal. He says " I sold myself body and sold to Science- the flight from the I and the We to the It". [3]The denial of the "I" and the "We", is a denial of democracy and humanity. It is a denial of fundamental human rights and reality, implicitly if not explicitly. The older Einstein seems to have recognized the terrible, inhuman consequences of this denial: "we are guilty" is a statement that applies both to science, scientists and those who plundered the world for gold, god and the state. |