[Greetings from Santa Teresa, Costa Rica, where this coming weekend I will be co-hosting a group of 10 men as part of a retreat called “Metamen”—a transformative (and restorative) retreat for changemakers that started as a quarterly reset in Austin, Texas but has since expanded. It’s hard to believe that, by the end of the year, I will have worked with over 100 men. I continue to be blown away that people want to listen to anything I have to say. And I’m grateful for every second. Blessed is an understatement. Anyway, let’s get to the topic of the day.
Oppenheimer… er, kind of. More like Oppenheimer-inspired. After seeing the masterpiece of a movie on Friday, many scenes stuck with me. You might even say they went so far as to haunt me. Such is the genius of Christopher Nolan, and I firmly believe he will be remembered as such in the ages to come. Nolan is our Aeschylus. A man who makes productions that stay with us long after we leave the theatre.
And like the great Greek tragedian Aeschylus (who wrote “Prometheus Bound”), Nolan weaves Prometheus into his latest work: Oppenheimer. Influenced by the novel, “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” the movie opens with a reference to Prometheus, the titan of Greek mythology who stole fire from the gods and gave it to man only to be eternally chained to a rock as punishment. The implied parallel that then plays out in the movie is that Oppenheimer is Prometheus of the modern age—a man who gave the world a tremendous power and then was persecuted for it.
As someone not terribly familiar with Oppenheimer before the movie, I left slightly disoriented, conflicted, and with many things to think about. His life and legacy are complicated—we can never simulate a parallel universe to test if we would be better off without the atomic bomb. He is morally ambiguous at best. But for whatever we take of Oppenheimer as a person, he was, without question, a genius (if he was anything like how he is portrayed in the movie).
At one point before developing the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer describes the process of an imploding star. How nature includes this remarkable process of gravity collapsing in on itself, swallowing light, and eventually creating an extremely violent reaction. It wasn’t made explicit in the movie, but I can’t help wonder whether the atom bomb is just another example where men of science were attempting to replicate something they saw in nature. Just as we watched birds fly and made planes to join them; saw animals swim and made ships to sail alongside; and witnessed lightning bolt down to Earth before we discovered how to bottle it with electricity. Oppenheimer was just the next in a long line of geniuses capable of making it happen.
But my musings on the edge have gone on for far too long and our arrival at the point of this essay is long overdue. So let me cut to the relevant scene:
As Oppenheimer discusses theory with his mentor, his mentor interjects with a reminder as relevant today as it ever was: “genius is no guarantee of wisdom.” Therein lies the issue.]
The march of humanity over the last 5,000 years has involved a great many developments. One of the more regrettable costs of “progress” during this span has been how efficient technology has made it to destroy each other. With the introduction of the atomic bomb, nations were given the power to level entire landscapes with the push of a button. Since then, the rapid acceleration of technological advances has only placed the means of destruction in more and more hands.
Not just in its nuclear form. Internet trolls and hackers with a vendetta now have the power to take down entire networks upon which we are horrifyingly dependent. Artificial intelligence will soon remove the loss of human life from the calculus of war (on the invader side of the ledger). Bombs will only continue to get less expensive, easier to wield, harder to detect, and exponentially more destructive. The number of people carrying the power to destroy worlds is climbing. The speed of learning made possible by the internet is unprecedented. Genius seems to be on the rise while we’ve made little discernible progress regarding our wisdom.
Our eventual destruction has always been inevitable. But whether we and our weapons will accelerate the collapse of our star remains to be seen.
Giving a speech between World War I (1914 - 1918) and World War II (1939 - 1945), Churchhill addressed the troubling expansion of the gap between technology and our nobility in his speech Fifty Years Hence. (Apologies for the length of this excerpt, but it’s too good not to include in its entirety!):
Certain it is that while men are gathering knowledge and power with ever-increasing and measureless speed, their virtues and their wisdom have not shown any notable improvement as the centuries have rolled. The brain of a modern man does not differ in essentials from that of the human beings who fought and lived here millions of years ago. The nature of man has remained hitherto practically unchanged. Under sufficient stress, starvation, terror, warlike passion, or even cold intellectual frenzy, the modern man we know so well will do the most terrible deeds, and his modern woman will back him up. At the present moment, the civilizations of many different ages co-exist together in the world, and their representatives meet and converse. Englishmen, Frenchmen, or Americans with ideas abreast of the twentieth century do business with Indians or Chinese whose civilizations were crystallized several thousands of years ago. We have the spectacle of the powers and weapons of man far outstripping the march of his intelligence; we have the march of his intelligence proceeding far more rapidly than the development of his nobility. We may well find ourselves in the presence of 'the strength of civilization without its mercy.' It is therefore above all things important that the moral philosophy and spiritual conceptions of men and nations should hold their own amid these formidable scientific evolutions. It would be much better to call a halt in material progress and discovery rather than to be mastered by our own apparatus and the forces which it directs. There are secrets too mysterious for man in his present state to know; secrets which once penetrated may be fatal to human happiness and glory. But the busy hands of the scientists are already fumbling with the keys of all the chambers hitherto forbidden to mankind. Without an equal growth of Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love, Science herself may destroy all that makes human life majestic and tolerable. There never was a time when the inherent virtue of human beings required more strong and confident expression in daily life; there never was a time when the hope of immortality and the disdain of earthly power and achievement were more necessary for the safety of the children of men. After all, this material progress, in itself so splendid, does not meet any of the real needs of the human race. I read a book the other day which traced the history of mankind from the birth of the solar system to its extinction. There were fifteen or sixteen races of men which in succession rose and fell over periods measured by tens of millions of years. In the end, a race of beings was evolved which had mastered nature. A state was created whose citizens lived as long as they chose, enjoyed pleasures and sympathies incomparably wider than our own, navigated the inter-planetary spaces, could recall the panorama of the past and foresee the future. But what was the good of all that to them? What did they know more than we know about the answers to the simple questions which man has asked since the earliest dawn of reason—'Why are we here? What is the purpose of life? Whither are we going?' No material progress, even though it takes shapes we cannot now conceive, or however it may expand the faculties of man, can bring comfort to his soul. It is this fact, more wonderful than any that Science can reveal, which gives the best hope that all will be well. Projects undreamed of by past generations will absorb our immediate descendants; forces terrific and devastating will be in their hands; comforts, activities, amenities, pleasures will crowd upon them, but their hearts will ache, their lives will be barren, if they have not a vision above material things. And with the hopes and powers will come dangers out of all proportion to the growth of man's intellect, to the strength of his character or to the efficacy of his institutions. Once more, the choice is offered between Blessing and Cursing. Never was the answer that will be given harder to foretell.1
If Churchhill got it right (and on this, I think he did), then the question remains: what are we to do about it? What can we do when genius outpaces wisdom in a way that inevitably leads to our destruction? How are we to live in an age where the threat of collapse always looms over our shoulder?
These are questions far above my pay grade to answer. But I would be irresponsible to leave you naked and afraid—stripped of comfort by questions without answers to re-cloak.
So let me suggest two ways we might respond: the first, to allay any fears we might hold, and the second, to play our part in determining the trajectory of our world. In his essay On Living in an Atomic Age, C.S. Lewis supplies the remedy to any fears we might hold in a nuclear age:
[D]o not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways… It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty. This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.2
The second way we ought to respond (at least in my view) has to do with what we do in our private lives. Unlike the ancient world, most of our academic institutions have largely turned away from the questions of the True, Good, and Beautiful and turned toward training for material progress and success. So it remains our responsibility to reinsert contemplation of the true and sublime in our conversations and our art. To contemplate the universe and fill our hearts with beauty. To seek discernment above riches. To cherish wisdom as much (if not more) than genius. To tend not just to the things that “improve” life but also to the things that make life worth living.
If we don’t, it’s only a matter of time before our overemphasis on the genius separate from wisdom destroys us. The universe will watch our collapse and see us as the engineers.
Even the stars will cry.
C.S. Lewis, On Living in an Atomic Age, included in Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays, p. 92.