Oppenheimer and the Bomb in Your Child's Brain
Are We Allowed To Question The Science Again?
I need another pretentious, non-linear, relentlessly loud Christopher Nolan film like I need a gun to my head, so I won’t be lining up at the local IMAX this weekend. Maybe if I wait for the home video release, there’ll be an option to turn off the score so you can hear the dialogue. All that being said, I’m hip, I’m with it, so I bring you, my beloved readers, all the latest news on the pop culture front (as long as I don’t have to consume any of the latest pop culture to do so). Here goes nothing.
Perhaps Nolan’s latest film is a masterpiece, no doubt the performances are indeed captivating, but the reviews are going to drive me bonkers. Every single corporate media review* highlights Oppenheimer’s crisis of conscience upon contemplating the world-changing consequences of the race for atomic weaponry: “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” This is all well and good, and likely an accurate representation of the real man’s doubts. When you’re inventing nuclear war, I can understand a sleepless night or two. That’s not what infuriates me about the reviews. What does: we have spent the last several years up to our earlobes in scientific and medical hubris, and all these same media outlets have spent those same years as the biggest, most unthinking cheerleaders of “science.” How many of these same reviewers tried to do everything in their power to force your child to be injected with experimental technology chock full of completely unknown side effects, for no good reason other than that “the science” made it possible? And now we’re supposed to pretend like none of that ever happened? Christopher Nolan comes out with an atomic bomb movie and all of a sudden we’re supposed to nod along seriously with these supposed intellectuals as they inform us, oh-so-thoughtfully, that the film raises important questions about the moral dimensions of scientific innovation? To quote not Hindu scripture but American tennis, “You cannot be serious!”
Ok, ok, I calmed down. Let us return to the atomic bomb debate. You’ve heard both sides before. Perhaps there is no clear answer. Yet whatever your take, you must admit that the pro-bomb contingent at least had an argument. Yes, the bomb unleashed unimaginable destruction, but the alternative, many believed, was Hitler getting it first, the Allies losing the war, the Axis powers ruling the world. In short: big, big stakes. You may disagree, you may not, that’s not the point of my post today. My goal is simply to show that, in order to justify the tremendous potential downside of this apocalyptic invention, the scientists had to be convinced of the equally apocalyptic consequence of not inventing it.
Which brings me to my favorite soapbox. The field of ADHD, as we have discussed, has an Oppenheimer of its own. As much as I appreciate Dr. Conners’ eventual realization of the catastrophe his work unleashed and his sincere efforts to put the stimulant genie back in the bottle, there is one key difference between him and Nolan’s cinematic hero. Oppenheimer was willing to do the unthinkable… to defeat the Nazis. Conners was willing to do the unthinkable… to get Anne Shirley to talk less in third period French.
I suppose I would have a harder time objecting to drugging children with mind-altering, soul-deadening pharmaceuticals if that Ritalin use were somehow pivotal in winning a world war. But when the stated goal is not defeating the Axis but, instead, to get little Johnny to sit still and finish his kindergarten math worksheet – a worksheet that was unknown in the history of civilization until a couple decades beforehand – do we really need a multi-million-dollar blockbuster to prompt second thoughts? Before you get mad at me, of course pharmaceutically compelling children to pay attention to boring, woke lectures is not as bad as vaporizing them in an atomic explosion. I’m not invoking the comparison in order to trivialize nuclear holocaust; I am very much trying to trivialize a bad report card. My point is that at least with the nuclear arms race we can extend the scientists involved some grace because the alternative was unimaginable, whereas when Big Pharma set off meth-filled mushroom clouds in classrooms across the nation, the alternative was… normal life before 1990.
Oppenheimer’s legacy remains controversial, and that’s with the great benefit of having actual Nazis as his enemy. What will be the legacy of modern medicine, when it seems its only enemy is… childhood itself?
*For a wise, Biblical-worldview-based review of the film please don’t miss Spencer Klavan’s essay in The Federalist this morning.
Amen! How can you become my pediatrician?
It seems the proverbial baby has indeed been thrown out with the bath water. Common sense will cost you a lot these days.
Several years ago I accepted a job as a long term substitute in a 2nd grade class. They were particularly unruly. Part of their day right before lunch was a block of about 45 minutes for math. For both math and reading the teacher was to literally read from the teacher’s manual. These poor kid in a class of about 30 would lose it during math. I finally started bribing them if they could hang in for a short bit of time I’d take them outside for 5 or 10 minutes. Worked like a charm! Until the principal almost fired me. Because you don’t reward bad behavior with extra recess, you take away recess. I couldn’t convince her that the extra time fixed the “bad behavior “.
My 12 year old boy is like pigpen after school except instead of dirt, it’s all his stuff. His teachers at private Catholic school are not my biggest fans because I’m letting him grow out of it and trying to help him learn to do things himself. We work on it at home, but, with every passing day I’m more and more convinced we need to get on with the business of enjoying life.
My husband got a Purple Heart in Iraq in 2007. He recently found out it was produced in the 1940s during WWII. They produced 500,000 Purple Hearts in preparation for the American invasion of Japan because that’s the minimum number of casualties they expected. Every Purple Heart given since then was produced for that invasion. Those bombs were horrible, but they saved a lot of lives including the lives of millions of Japanese civilians that would have been killed in the invasion.