Cillian Murphy  (actor who played Oppenheimer in 2023 movie) 

                                                   (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

                                                     Robert Oppenheimer (1947) 

                                                (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Oppenheimer

A young guy near me smelled of marijuana. But he watched. Focused. Along with two hundred or so other young people. He just kept going for snacks.

Christopher Nolan put care into this film. David Lean-kind of care. Care with visual detail, shot after shot. Resonant themes – both private and political. An ensemble cast, given room to deliver fine performances (Robert Downey’s slimy villain, especially). Scene after scene edited with skill. The movie cooked.

On the other hand, as I was buying tickets, I saw on a computer screen near me that Barbie – in the next theater – was sold out. Ah, well. Not my cup of complacency.

And me? I came out at 9:15, intensely ambivalent. Impressed and angry, both at once. Burning. God damn the postmodernist cynicism of this era!

Our human situation is not anything like as hopelessly, inexorably doomed as Oppenheimer, the movie, is saying. Yes, saying. Saying as bluntly as it possibly could be saying. Witness the main character’s final lines.     

(Flashback to early social meeting between Oppenheimer and Einstein.)

Oppy: … with our calculations, we believed we might start a chain reaction that might destroy the entire world.

Einstein: What of it?

Oppy (grimly fatalistic): I believe we did.

(Cut to high earth orbit shot, nulear-tipped ICBMs streaking toward targets, mushroom clouds blooming all over the earth. Fade to credits.)

Damnation, Nolan, don’t do that! These kids trust you! Don’t do that!

Why? He’s filling the world’s future with a cynicism worse than despair. I say again, our situation is nowhere near that hopeless. Yes, we are facing some dire threats, but we are not blind and helpless.

Moral realism is telling us there are things that we can do. To prevent nuclear Armageddon? Yes. Hard. Not impossible. Might we, in our efforts, even make matters worse? We might be risking that. But Moral Realism is telling us that the odds – which are all we really have in any matter, and all we have ever really had – the odds can be altered. Toward what? Obviously, toward our coming through this dangerous time. Toward out-guessing and out-maneuvering Armageddon.

We can do real, substantive things to alter those odds in favor of our surviving.

The biggest of these is to build school systems that exhort the kids coming up to keep learning to get along. Live and let live. Put that goal at the very top of your list of priorities. Every day, every way, work to make pluralism grow. Every bit helps.

Be firm and explicit about your belief in not human perfectibility, but human improvability. Actively spread belief in a picture of a pluralistic global society.

Learn and practice mediation skills. In your community and in the world.

Work to build a more and more complex, balanced social ecosystem. Why? Because we know now how a vigorous society is composed. It gets stronger the more it fosters many kinds of people, in many widely varied roles, interacting, cooperating, and competing, in ways that fit inside the bounds of the rule of law.

And tell the cynics to stfu. They’re hypocrites. If they truly believed the doom-sayer nonsense, they wouldn’t be here. They’d have offed themselves long ago.  

Oppenheimer did not know that increasing social diversity makes us strong. We do. He was a physicist, not a social scientist. He did not live to see how much data we would gather, from recent, ancient, and pre-historic times. This data no longer looks random or opaque. Patterns are beginning to emerge. Pluralism really works.

What he did not know is that as quantum theory means there are no hard, fast rules for predicting what is going to come next, it also means that there are probabilities for every one of those possible futures. And culture-driven, knowledge-accumulating animals like us learn, sometimes over generations, to recognize patterns as they are emerging. Then, we often can intervene, make provisions for or against them as fits our survival needs. By observing, thinking, planning, and acting, we can improve the odds for the scenarios in which we survive and thrive, and reduce the odds for the ones in which we do not.

We are, to a high degree, free. Not caught in the grip of inexorable forces.

In short, quantum theory’s upside is that we can now see that having more different kinds of people in our tribe makes us stronger: pluralism enhances our odds. It makes us nimbler. Resourceful. The evidence supports democratic pluralism. Being respectful toward others, in everyday ways, is not “nice”; it’s smart business.  

In the face of the terrifying evidence of how warlike we have been in the past and of what nuclear weapons could potentially do, many cynics put the two together and say our plans and efforts are doomed to be feeble, and ineffectual.

I say again: “Stop this pretentious, pseudo-cerebral, pseudo-sophisticated manure. You’re flat out wrong.”

To sum up, then: I believe in, and reiterate, this thesis for three grounded reasons.

In the first place, we’ve changed before. In fact, every worthwhile social change moving us away from barbarism – for example, away from rape as normal practice (in pre-history), gladiator games (ancient times), trial by combat (more recent times), and slavery (even more recent times) – began in the same way. Chosen, volitional programming for change. Mead’s words guide us here: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world …it’s the only thing that ever has.”

In the second place, we know more about ourselves now. About our ideas of moral truth and even of physical reality. About what we think right and wrong are, and even about the physical details that we notice or miss. These are profoundly shaped by our upbringings, i.e., cultures. We know this and can show it. But with the roots of human thinking better identified, we have gained power to prune and graft the plant that grows from those roots. Yes, sometimes over generations. But the fact is that we have more understanding of us than any persons in Oppenheimer’s era did.

And finally, I argue, what is our alternative? Levels of consumerism, hedonism, isolation, depression, and substance abuse increasing relentlessly? Every one of those ways of life is as retrograde as it could possibly be.

No. Emphatically, no. We aren’t helpless, blind, and doomed.  

Love the kids. Support them. Do not abandon them. Teach, teach, teach them better. Exhort them not to despair, not to give in to negativity or vacuousness.

Children of the world, let’s build a better future. We can do this.

I can’t say I hate Christopher Nolan and his ilk, the disciples of gloom, ennui, and weltschmerz. But I do believe it is accurate to say that they know not what they do. And do without reasoning, evidence, or justification.

Would that Nolan had put his skills to making a life story of Mandela or King. Staunton. Nightingale. But discussing these is a post for another day.

Go and see Oppenheimer. Just don’t let it get you down. It’s not evil, just wrong. 

                                                  Nuclear bomb detonating 

              (credit: United States Department of Energy, via Wikimedia Commons)