From Hiroshima to Fukushima

(Published in Le Monde, March 20, 2011)

In 1958, the German philosopher Günther Anders traveled to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to take part in the Fourth World Conference against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs. After many conversations with survivors of the catastrophe, he noted in his diary: "Their steadfast resolve not to speak of those who were to blame, not to say that the event had been caused by human beings; not to harbor the least resentment, even though they were the victims of the greatest of crimes— this really is too much for me, it passes all understanding." And he added: "They constantly speak of the catastrophe as if it were an earthquake or a tidal wave. They use the Japanese word, tsunami."     At about the same time as Hannah Arendt, a fellow student at Marburg whom he later married and divorced, Anders sought to identify a new regime of evil. Arendt spoke of Auschwitz, Anders of Hiroshima. Arendt had diagnosed Eichmann's psychological infirmity as a "lack of imagination." Anders showed that this was not the failing of one human being in particular, but a weakness common to all human beings when their capacity for acting, which includes their ability to destroy, becomes disproportionate to the human condition. In that case evil acquires a power that is independent of the intentions of those who commit it. Both Anders and Arendt probed the scandalous reality that immense harm may be caused by a complete absence of malignity; that a monstrous responsibility may go hand in hand with an utter absence of malice. Our moral categories, they discovered, are powerless to describe and judge evil when it exceeds the inconceivable. "A great crime offends nature," Arendt observed, quoting the legal scholar Yosal Rogat, "so that the very earth cries out for vengeance; that evil violates a natural harmony that only retribution can restore." The fact that European Jews have substituted for "holocaust" the Hebrew word shoah, which signifies a natural catastrophe— specifically, a tidal wave, or tsunami-attests to the urge to naturalize evil when human beings become incapable of imagining the very thing of which they are the victims and the cause.     The tragedy that has struck Japan seems suddenly to have stood this image on its head: an actual tidal wave, the most tangible and unmetaphorical wave imaginable, now awakens the nuclear tiger. In this case, of course, the tiger is caged. An electronuclear reactor is not an atomic bomb; indeed, it is in a sense the opposite of one, since it is meant to control a chain reaction that it itself has triggered. In the realm of the imagination, however, a negation affirms what it denies. In reality, the other realm that we inhabit, the tiger escapes from its cage from time to time. And in Japan, more than elsewhere, the military and peaceful uses of nuclear energy cannot help but be linked in the public mind. "The earthquake, tsunami, and the nuclear incident have been the biggest crisis Japan has encountered in the sixty-five years since the end of World War II," the prime minister, Naoto Kan, told the nation. Sixty-five years ago, there were no nuclear reactors. But two atomic bombs had already been used against civilian populations. In uttering the word "nuclear," this, no doubt, is what the prime minister meant his listeners to recall.     It is as though nature rose up before mankind and said to it, from the terrible height of its forty-five-foot surge, "You sought to conceal the evil that lives inside you by likening it to my violence. But my violence is pure, impervious to your conceptions of good and evil. How should I punish you? By taking you at your word when you dare to compare your instruments of death with my immaculate force. By tsunami, then, you shall perish!"     The human and physical destruction in Japan has not come to an end. To a large extent the tragedy is being played out on the stage of symbols and images. Among the places first to be evacuated in the Pacific were the Mariana Islands. The name of one of these, Tinian, should remind us that it was from there, in the early hours of 6 August 1945, that the B-29s took off on their mission to reduce Hiroshima to radioactive ashes, followed three days later by another wave of bombers that was to visit the same devastation on Nagasaki— as if the gigantic tide unleashed by the earthquake last month was sent to wreak vengeance on this speck of land for having given sanctuary to the sacred fire.     The special fascination of the tragedy that continues to unfold in Japan today derives from the fact that it joins together three types of catastrophe that we have long been accustomed to keep separate: natural disaster, industrial and technological disaster, and moral disaster— Tsunami, Chernobyl, and Hiroshima, as one might say. This blurring of traditional distinctions, which can now be seen as the outstanding characteristic of our age, is a consequence of two countervailing tendencies that have collided in the Japanese archipelago. One of them, the naturalization of extreme evil that I mentioned in connection with Arendt and Anders, grew up with the horrors of the previous century. The other arose in the wake of the first great tsunami to leave its mark on the history of Western philosophy, the deluge following the earthquake that struck Lisbon on All Saints Day in 1755. Of the various attempts to make sense of an event that astounded the world, Rousseau's reply to Voltaire ultimately prevailed. No, Rousseau said, it is not God who punishes men for their sins; and yes, he insisted, a human, quasi-scientific explanation can be given in the form of a connected series of causes and effects. In Émile (1762), Rousseau stated the lesson of the disaster: "Man, look no further for the author of evil: you are he. There is no evil but the evil that you do and that you suffer, and both come from you."     Proof of Rousseau's triumph is to be found in the world's reaction to two of the greatest natural disasters in recent memory: the Asian tsunami of Christmas 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in August of the following year. For it is precisely their status as natural catastrophes that was immediately challenged. The New York Times reported news of the hurricane under the headline "A Man-Made Disaster." The same thing had already been said about the tsunami, and with good reason: had Thailand's coral reefs and coastal mangroves not been ruthlessly destroyed by urbanization, tourism, acquaculture, and climate change, they would have slowed the advance of the deadly tidal wave and significantly reduced the scope of the disaster. In the case of New Orleans it turned out that the levees constructed to protect the city had not been properly maintained for many years and that troops of the Louisiana National Guard who might have helped after the storm were unavailable because they had been called up for duty in Iraq. The same people who later questioned the wisdom of building a city on marshland next to the sea now wonder why the Japanese should have thought they could safely develop civilian nuclear power, since geography condemned them to do this in seismic zones vulnerable to massive flooding. The lesson is plain: humanity, and only humanity, is responsible, if not also to blame, for the misfortunes that beset it.     In addition to moral catastrophes and natural catastrophes, there are industrial and technological catastrophes. Here human beings are quite obviously responsible, unlike in the case of natural disaster; but, unlike in the case of moral calamity, it is because they wish to do good that they bring about evil. Ivan Illich gave the name "counterproductivity" to this ironic reversal. Illich foresaw that the greatest threats are now likely to come, not from the wicked, but from those who make it their business to protect the general welfare. Evil intentions are less to be dreaded than the good works of organizations like the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose mission is to promote "peace, health, and prosperity throughout the world." Antinuclear activists who believe they must accuse their adversaries of malevolence and perfidy fail to grasp the true situation facing the world. It is a matter of far graver concern that the managers of the immensely powerful systems and machines that threaten mankind are able and honest people. They cannot understand why anyone would think of attacking them, or blame them for doing anything wrong.     I have reserved for last the most grotesque of these catastrophes, which is economic and financial. The vast global market that dominates nations today is a dumb and craven beast that takes fright at the slightest noise and in this way brings about the very thing that it shrinks from in terror. The monster has already seized Japan in its grip. It knows Japan well. In the late 1980s, Japan's market capitalization accounted for half of the market capitalization of the world's economies. Some feared at the time that the land of the rising sun would soon rule over the entire planet. Yet the monster would not allow it, and two decades passed before its victim could lift its head again. Today it senses that the nuclear industry, perhaps the only industry on earth incapable of recovering from a major catastrophe, has been thrown back on its heels. The monster will not let go. Published in French by Le Monde, March 20, 2011 Translated by M. B. DeBevoise Jean-Pierre Dupuy, a philosopher teaching at Stanford, is the author of more than thirty works in French. His most recent book, The Mark of the Sacred, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press. He is a member of the French Academy of Technology and chairs Ethics Committee of the French High Authority on Nuclear Safety & Security.

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