The Corruption Of Science By Politics
Been to the movies lately? Maybe you are trying them out again. They seemed to have improved under the desperate desire to get audiences back.
We should talk about “Oppenheimer.” It’s about many things but ultimately the theme concerns the use and abuse of science in service of state power.
The U.S. government tapped a promising physicist to build a better bomb. Once two years and $2 billion were consumed in the great project, it needed to be deployed, whether necessary to win the war or not. Germany was already defeated and Japan was ready to surrender but the chance to demonstrate to the world the superior military might of the United States was too good to pass up.
J. Robert Oppenheimer swallowed his moral scruples about the bombings in Japan—he thought the bomb would be used against Nazis—that cost hundreds of thousands of innocent lives. But he drew the line at pushing for the hydrogen bomb or building even more of the bombs he built. He became an advocate for arms control in order to avoid an escalation with the Soviet Union.
At this point, he was hounded by Washington for his personal Russian relationships that included dalliances with communists. So yes, his benefactor the state turned on him, exactly as the film depicts Albert Einstein predicting to him.
Later of course his reputation was restored. And this movie goes a very long way to memorialize him as a complicated but brilliant man.
One feature of the film I found particularly valuable was explaining the extremely strange relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union in these years. Following the Great War, there was a massive Red Scare in this country from 1918 to 1923, and that included Congressional hearings, censorship, and new sedition legislation that is today being used by the Biden administration against Trump and his supporters.
During the New Deal, which amounted to a rejection of free-enterprise dynamics of the American spirit, President Roosevelt brought into his administration many admirers of Soviet “achievements” in agriculture and housing. Among them was the hugely influential Rex Tugwell, an economist who embraced central planning and crafted much of the legislation in those years that cartelized industry, controlled prices, and embarked on Soviet-style projects.
This is one reason that champions of freedom in those days despised the New Deal. Reds were all over Washington. And despite the legend, their policies did not release the United States from the grip of depression but only prolonged it with controls, spending, regulation, and subsidies.
No comments:
Post a Comment