Watching Oppenheimer, the Christopher Nolan movie, this blogger was struck by the repeated, intertwining citations of paradox, in allusions to quantum physics, bureaucratic politics, World War Two, personal ambition, and beyond.
We are reminded that politics, projects, history, human nature, even the cosmos itself, are all soaked in paradox. As the 21st Century unfolds, any certainty now feels open to question; everyone faces a prospect of complete loss of factual and moral clarity. Any clarity has always carried more than one incompatible truth, in possible self-contradiction, at any time.
Did the U.S. A-bombs murder over 200,000 innocents, or save perhaps many more lives that would have been taken in an invasion of Japan? Have nuclear weapons placed the specter of violent extinction over the human race, or prevented all-out global war by making the potential consequences so catastrophic?
Columnist Peggy Noonan sees that Oppenheimer “wanted to be great, and won his greatness at what he fully understood was a grave cost to the world.” Was he a monster of ambition or a genius who made a hard decision? Could he be both? Was Lewis Strauss, the AEC chair who orchestrated the suspension of Oppenheimer’s security clearance, exacting bureaucratic revenge over personal issues, or securing America’s position for the Cold War? Can the motives really be separated?
Harry Truman is portrayed rebuking Oppenheimer – “no one will remember who made the bomb, they’ll remember who dropped it.” Strauss is told by an aide that an exchange between Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein may have had nothing to do with Strauss, but perhaps addressed something “more important.” Despite our actions’ great worldly consequences, and the deepest moral agonizing we may expend on them, they all could yet prove trivial, in society, and in history.
So also in cosmic meaning. Quantum physics, invoked as the film tracks Oppenheimer’s role teaching the new theories, revealed the paradox of matter and energy: stuff cannot be both, and yet is.
In an existence of inherent uncertainty, how do we, flesh and blood persons, living in complex societies and nations that may at once protect and oppress, choose our paths? The uncovering of deep uncertainty now means that we indeed choose, even if we choose to adopt our forebears’ truths. When discoveries undermine our assumptions, the fact of choice is unmasked. In a universe without bedrock, the paradoxes will always confound any search for some ordained certainty. The only moral constant will come in our own constant conviction.
For America, the question becomes: to what end do we concert our efforts and agonizing, and to what ends do we join our efforts together? For most of history, people have lived to preserve the tangible lives that they felt themselves living. And yet there are those who come up with other impulses, of curiosity, ambition, pique, and other motives that do not fit rational goals. There is something in the animal that carries our brains that still generates chaos. And that something just maybe makes us us, and maybe created a thing we refer to as meaning – or was the vehicle chosen by some force to reveal meaning.
Americans live in a nation conceived in an article of faith, that all persons have inherent and unalienable rights to their own pursuits as they may choose, and government that exists to secure those rights. This is a matter of commitment, not received truth, and we exist as a nation so long as we choose to commit to it.
And it may be that the very impulse to search, that capacity to ask “why?” is what humans need to value, nurture, protect, and even promote. That whole complex idea, to give it a name, just might be freedom, and its ethical bulwark just might be the rights of the person. Its living vessel just may be the nation conceived in unalienable universal rights.
Common Conviction 