In an interview shortly before his death, J. Robert Oppenheimer said, "There is no meaningful responsibility without power."
I, of course, immediately interpreted this in the light of our debate over who deserves a statue or whose name can be given to a school. These days the people we think are worthy of a statue are overwhelmingly those who never held any political office. Only they can meet our standards of purity, because they never had the responsibility that comes with wielding power. Holding office means compromising your principles, because only the vaguest principles can survive contact with the messiness of the world. Furthermore, it means doing, most of the time, what your constituents want, and you can hardly count on the voters of any period to meet the moral standards of the future.
Our current moral standards therefore exclude the powerful from celebration, and therefore many of those who have done the most good for humanity.
1 comment:
Who might you propose be celebrated?
Because when I think "those who have done the most good for humanity", I think people like Jonas Salk, Louis Pasteur, Alexander Fleming, Edward Jenner, William Cullen, Wilhelm Röntgen, Charles Darwin, Johannes Gutenberg, etc.
Not a lot of outrage or controversy surrounding figures like those...
I will note, though, that as I am mostly thinking of scientists (who better to serve as someone "whose name can be given to a school"?). Most such figures were never holders of formal power - they never governed over other people. So would you imagine, then, that they held and bore "no meaningful responsibility"?
Oppenheimer himself was a scientist, though. And his own work was such that it's clear he had tremendous responsibility (and he himself thought so), despite having no formal power. So I think you're perhaps taking too narrow a view of "power".
I will note the irony that it was Oppenheimer's very lack of formal power that caused him so much grief. He felt there was a responsibility to stop the nuclear arms race before it even began (and potentially put a stop to the Cold War entirely in the process) by willingly giving away the technology he helped create to the Soviets as a goodwill gesture. But it was the actual "power" holders - generals and politicians - who balked at his proposal, and saw it as a reason to view him with distrust and suspicion.
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