During the thirty years I’ve lived here in Santa Fe, thirty-five miles from the nuclear labs on the “Hill” at Los Alamos, I’ve often wondered how I and most other comfortably-off citizens live free of worry under the shadow of our planet’s possible destruction.
This question became acute during the Trump years when a massive infusion of Federal funds is slated to produce sixty plutonium pits at Los Alamos—the trigger of nuclear bombs—rather than the thirty that have left us with radioactive waste since the Manhattan Project in 1945 birthed two bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki, causing at Hiroshima alone 135,000 civilian casualties and 66,000 deaths.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, The Father of the Bomb (there were many uncles), the New York-born Jewish physicist, was instrumental in choosing a beautiful spot for the labs in a beautiful state he had come to love during visits in the 1920’s, apparently unaware of the endless consequences for the people who live here, especially the Native Americans at Santo Domingo directly under the Hill, with poisoned water and cancer deaths continuing to this day.
I mention that Robert was Jewish because according to a fascinating biography by Ray Monk, Robert’s inability to accept his Jewishness, among other causes, led to a splintering of his personality.
Because Robert in his first two decades might have been called insane, I became fascinated to find how this “genius” was drawn from his path of destruction: two attempted murders of colleagues whose ability roused his jealousy and another attempt on a woman he’d found sexually alluring. Unable to overcome his physical clumsiness in the labs—a clumsiness familiar in the offspring of privilege for whom all physical tasks are handled by other people—he was in despair during his first year at Cambridge University, until it became clear to him in 1925 that the new discoveries of what would become quantum mechanics allowed him to shine in a purely theoretical universe.
His rapid advance in this field is well known, but what fascinates me is the way his passionate submersion in quantum mechanics “solved” his madness. No psychiatrist would give this idea credence, but having just finished the final version of Little Brother: The Short Life and Strange Death of Jonathan Bingham, a biography of my younger brother, I found some parallels.
From childhood, Jonathan was fascinated by science; prone to depression, as was Oppenheimer, he found relief and escape in experiments involving electricity. But lacking any academic or practical training in that field, he was not able to combine reality with his experiments, which led to his early death.
His education contributed to this outcome. Since Harvard was the only university his family found acceptable, Jonathan’s interest in MIT or Stanford received no support, and his high school education in math and science would never have won him acceptance. At the same time, in 1959, the British scientist C.P. Snow launched a lecture at Cambridge on what he saw as a dangerous divide, exemplified by “the inability of British humanists and scientists to communicate,” a failure Snow believed “threatened the ability of modern states to address the world’s problems.”
Our father was much impressed by Snow, but since no answers to the problem he described were provided, there was no hope for a solution—or for Jonathan’s career in the sciences. In the era of Sputnik and Cold War fears of Russian scientific advances, the only response to Snow’s criticism was fatalism. The humanities for upper-class white families in the U.S., based on early Greek and Roman writing, 19th century Romanticism and the Bible, could not be replaced by the confusing and conflicting theories of Quantum Physics, especially when the early explanation of the problem that worried Heisenberg depended on what was called “the magical ingredient H.” Magic and science, combined, seemed as unworkable to conventionally-educated people as science and poetry.
This particular problem was later replaced with more rational explanations, but whatever the early issues were for the British and American physicists around Robert, the result for him was a sudden sense of self-worth, new-found articulateness, and membership in an elite group of male scientists—no longer a lone wolf outsider consumed by fantasies of violence but an accomplished scientist “inside the center”—the subtitle of Ray Monk’s absorbing biography.
How often have those of us—and there are many—whose sharp intelligence and ambition have not provided an escape from unresolved psychological problems found a route to normalcy through intellectual achievement and acceptance?
It’s an unanswerable question, but since the wide-spread use of drugs and “talk therapy” has had little effect on the depressed and murderous boys and men in our midst, we must look to the failure of our public education system, especially in math and science, for a clue.
But Oppenheimer’s resolution of his psychiatric problems through intense intellectual activity did not result in teaching him empathy: he claimed, ” I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” All those who participate in the construction and use of lethal devices—including the guns this country cannot bring under reasonable control—have never learned empathy, either. In the end it’s the result of stunted imaginations: it would be difficult to murder strangers if one had any inkling of who these strangers are: their lives, their relationships, their passions. Few men who become absorbed in intellectual activity have the means to destroy worlds: handguns and automatic weapons are the tools of the shooters among us.
The excuse for teaching the humanities is that they perhaps aid the imagination of an individual in developing empathy. But the “perhaps” in the case of badly-taught, alienated young men is enormous. And the power we place in their hands, as we placed it in the hands of the physicists at Los Alamos, had and has the power to destroy our world.
Wonderful and thought-provoking post, Sallie. It seems to me to be a possible subject for your next book!