British Army bulldozer burying bodies at Bergen-Belsen (Apr. 1945)

 

                 

                                       British soldiers forcing German guards to load bodies

Following the First World War, to exacerbate the moral confusion and despair, the man-made horrors of the twentieth century began to mount. They are so many and so ugly. The Russian Revolution and Civil War. The worldwide Depression. World War II, six times as destructive as World War I. Hitler’s camps. Stalin’s camps. And on and on. But we don’t need to describe any more. The point is that these were the actions of a species that had gained great physical power at the same time as it lost its moral compass or, more plainly, its ability to handle that power responsibly.

 

The big question, “What is right?” keeps echoing in an empty hall, and the big fears that go with it have only grown. Where will the code that we need to guide our behaviour in international affairs, business, or even everyday matters come from now?

From the nation to the person, some coherent code must be in place in order for us to function, even if that code is mostly programmed into the subconscious. People without any basic operating code in place can’t act at all. They are called catatonic. The problem today is that, for millions of people all over the world, the old moral codes that used to guide all human thought and action are fading. World War I was the first in a series of real-world shocks that have deeply rocked all of our beliefs—beliefs about the value of our science and, even more deeply, beliefs about our codes of right and wrong.

So let me reiterate: the worst fact about our moral dilemma in the twenty-first century is that, collectively, the gurus of science, though able to achieve amazing things in the realms of machines, chemicals, medicines, and much more, have had nothing to say about how we should or should not be using these technologies. Many of them even go so far as to claim that should is a word that has no meaning in science.

It seems bitterly unfair that the same science that eroded our moral beliefs offered nothing to put in their place. But what seems far more cruelly, diabolically ironic is that at the same time as science was destroying our religious and moral beliefs, it was putting into our hands technologies of such destructive power that the question that arises is whether any individual or group of individuals could ever be moral enough to handle them responsibly.