The play OPERATION EPSILON, is about the six months that an elite group of German scientists, including Werner Heisenberg and Otto Hahn, were confined in an English country house after the German surrender which ended World War Two’s European chapter. These scientists had spent their professional lives in Nazi Germany working on atomic research, each with different takes on the so-called neutrality/purity of their work—though most often we hear them proclaim to simply be scientists and not the politicians who made operational decisions about their findings. Although the play (based upon transcripts taken from the bugged house) presents an extreme set of circumstances, after I saw it, I began thinking about the issues of morality that follow us all in our professional and daily lives.
Two characters who really caught my attention were Werner Heisenberg and Otto Hahn. When Hahn is informed privately by their guard that the United States had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, he burst into heart-wrenching sobs, believing that, as the person who actually discovered the fission of uranium and thorium in medium heavy atomic nuclei, he was responsible for the hundreds of thousands of deaths. Later that night when all the scientists heard the news on the radio, their reaction was stunned disbelief, then an angry debate about how the Americans could have possibly done the science when they, the Germans, were supposedly the top dogs. Those who were overt Nazis quickly turned on Heisenberg since his work had commandeered most available research funding while his calculations suggested the creation of a bomb was impossible. Virtually nothing was said that night about the devastation wreaked by the atomic bomb.
Later in play, when news reached the house that Otto Hahn had won the 1944 Noble Prize for chemistry, a joyous party ensued among the scientists and there Hahn was, proud as a peacock, about the very discovery that had sent him into a paroxysm of tears about all those dead Japanese.
Morally speaking, is science a special category because its findings turned into reality can directly affect people? And, if so, are these ethical issues limited to wartime? Or do pharmaceutical researchers have the same burden when they see their employers short-cut their way to creating products suggested by their work? And what about all the research that might be considered “benign,” like infant studies. Should all scientists feel responsible or be held accountable for the effects of their studies despite not making the decisions about how their research is used?
From where I sit science is not a special category because I believe the same issues of neutrality or responsibility is an everyday question for damn near everyone.
For the most part we don’t ask our foot soldiers to shoulder the moral weight of killing. Further up the military food chain, it certainly comes into play. “Just following orders” didn’t fly at the Nuremburg Trials. Even Errol Morris’s documentary, The Fog Of War, basically a two hour interview with Robert McNamara, raises these concerns. At one point McNamara, who was part of the decision making process that unleashed the firebombing of Tokyo where around 100,000+ of men, women, and children were burned to death in about one day, remarks, {Curtis} LeMay said, ’If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’ And I think he’s right. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?
Once you step away from the obvious situations where people and their professions have live or die impact upon others, what happens to the question of our responsibility to identify our own moral imperatives? If the idea that “everything is political” and has humanitarian consequences, is it an artist’s responsibility to manifest his or her political/humanitarian point of view in their work? Certainly Picasso’s Guernica represented his as do many paintings by different artists, books by writers, plays by playwrights, and music by musicians.
But what of the artist who clings to the belief that it’s necessary to stand outside the society, culture, politics to genuinely express his or her vision? Or the journalist who believes it’s unethical as a neutral reporter to pull a child out of a fire? Are they simply refusing to acknowledge that morality is always embodied in their work, whether meant to be or not?
I imagine the issue of personal responsibility has raged throughout history. Certainly during wartimes, but not only. How many people felt an individual responsibility to publically condemn slavery? An individual responsibility to openly reject the oppression of children before child labor laws were passed?
Truth is, the list of issues is endless with no clear cut answers about the integration of morality into one’s daily life. We basically leave it up to the individual to decide their own responsibility to others on the planet. But I wonder if that’s really good enough to create a world without starvation, disease, and brutal wars.
And it cuts closer to home than that—albeit with different consequences. What about buying SodaStream from an Israeli company parked on Palestinian property? Or, the choice to abandon urban public schools by the middle and upper middle class? Or, our willingness to allow decent people to lose their houses because of institutional greed and avarice?
No one told us that being a responsible citizen would be easy. But difficulty can’t be used as an excuse. Had McNamara and his cohorts refused to fry Tokyo’s population, or refused to napalm the North Vietnamese, or if we refuse to allow the notion of amorality, despite morality’s incredible contradictions, might not the world be a better place?
