The view from life's nadir

In his 2011 book “ Hiroshima Nagasaki” Paul Ham juxtaposes a point life arrived at in 1945, where United States President Harry Truman is part of a process which readies itself to drop the first atomic bomb on a human population. Ham writes:

“The remaining questions were: when, how and where (that is, which Japanese targets). Truman was expected not to meddle in or obstruct the process; rather to listen, understand and wave the juggernaut on, a role he performed as exactingly as the military-industrial complex expected of the man who had led the Truman Committee. ‘The final decision,’ the President later wrote in his memoirs , ‘of where and when to use the atomic bomb was up to me. Let there be no mistake about it. I regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt it should be used.’”

Ham continues:

“How mankind arrived at the creation of such a weapon is an epic scientific and industrial story, which began with a hypothesis about the constitution of matter, by an ancient Greek 2500 years ago. The philosopher Democritus coined the word atomos to describe solid, indivisible, unchanging particles that, he supposed, constituted the building blocks of matter.” (Ham 2011:88)

We too should pause at this juncture of life on this planet.

The question we must pose is “How on earth did life arrive at this point, where one man, the President of the United States, was in a position to decide the fate of 100,000 people going about their daily business (even though that business was embedded in a country at war)?”

Rather than looking at the origins of atomic theory, our inquiry must be directed at the social origins of systems of power which – as Ham makes clear in regard to the use of fire bombing of cities – eventually numb us to the next acts of mass homicide.

It is very telling that, when the scientific experts who were necessary to create the nuclear explosive device campaigned to invoke other social considerations in its use, and to share scientific knowledge to create a world based on trust, they were marginalised, ignored, told that they had no place in politics.

“Einstein’s reply to Truman naively presumed that the bomb might end wars of ‘nationalism’ and clearly misjudged the enduring power of the idea of the sovereign state. ‘The most important things we intellectuals can do’ Einstein wrote, ‘is to emphasize over and over again the establishment of a solidly built world-government and the abolition of war preparations (including all kind of military secrecy) by the single states.” (Ham 2011:493-494)

“In sum 155 Manhattan project scientists registered their moral opposition to dropping the bomb without warning a Japanese city. These dissenting voices – many of whom worked in the lab that had built the bomb – so irritated the White House that Truman issued a press statement about the merits of the weapon ‘because so many fake scientists were telling crazy tales about it.” (Ham 2011:314)

By allowing the masters of war to define the situation, the logic of the situation justifies more mass homicide. (Paul Ham makes reference to an essay - “The Construction of Conventional Wisdom” by Uday Mohan and Sanho Tree. An essay which may be worth tracking down.)

Those scientists (who accept the division of labour as defined by the modern nation-state) have failed to transcend their own conditioning and be part of a transformation of life which would re-integrate human cosmology with a well-tempered cosmos.

We need to achieve a form of planetary sense of Being so that when we consider destroying other forms of life we are checked by the understanding at all life is one – we are the horror life encounters when we are also cast in the position of victim.

But a planetary sense of Being may not be the single world government which Einstein invokes. Rather than concentrating power in few privileged places, we need new arrangements which re-centre Being everywhere.

Life in ‘paleolithic’ times seems to have been informed by a global wisdom of this kind. And it is also marked by means which prevent concentrated forms of power.

Moiety systems, based of forms of complementary opposition in which two halves are required for life to be whole, work to ensure that relative differences are not allowed to become absolute differences (as found on both side of modern wars where the enemy are demonised).

There can be no legitimate monopoly of coercive power (of the kind associated with the modern nation state) within such complementary opposite moiety systems.

When one moiety presumes that it is absolutely superior to the other part of life, all manner of destructive games come into play in order to attempt to coerce life to confirm to that unearthed vision.