Bigness and Democracy
GELBER, LIONEL
BIGNESS AND DEMOCRACY By Lionel Gelber Author, "The American Anarchy" The denial of clearance to Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer may be resented by most American scientists. It will, however, be the...
...It must somehow reaffirm, in that larger, more ambiguous social context, its own rooted values...
...Yet, in being consulted upon them and in carrying them out, new administrative types emerge...
...for a perspective view, though the case is not one for the courts, a Holmes or Brandeis would be needed...
...it is strangely at odds with Dr...
...But was it so sustained...
...At best, their responsibility is politically indirect...
...Abroad, the American system has, through coalition diplomacy, at last had to take a lead and to do this against an unexampled threat...
...The fort was held, in 1939-1941, until Russia herself had been embroiled and the United States had been attacked...
...Oppenheimer had to be settled in accordance with official decrees rather than political philosophy...
...But the crisis was grave and the issues were clear...
...Those who in academic halls and scientific laboratories cherish the free intellect in the 1950s should remember what their fate would have been if, with worldwide Communist assistance, the Germans had won in the early 1940s...
...For it establishes new centers of power which, by their impact, modify, when they do not challenge, old ones...
...Yet, if he was capable of moving toward the Communists when they were anti-Nazi, why, by the same token, did he not recoil from them when they began to promote Nazi purposes...
...Oppenheimer was concerned, did not get out of hand...
...Oppenheimer should have been pilloried...
...Oppenheimer's apologia pro vita sua laid stress on political naivete...
...if he is perplexing, so is it...
...But is there a line which can always be drawn ? The implications of that query go deep...
...Nazi persecution of the Jews, he claimed in his own autobiographical account, had roused him to fury...
...What the Oppenheimer case might illustrate, then, is the dimensions of the organizational power which bigness generates for a favored few, for an elite who are at once so gifted scientifically and yet so unschooled politically...
...American democracy is not what it was...
...Yet, a society of bigness is one in which irresponsibility, political and moral, lurks innately...
...and he, having done so much to win one, ought to have known...
...But such patronage was not only something more definite than any vague proof of guilt by association...
...Oppenheimer himself, were only feasible in a large-scale society...
...The Oppenheimer documents also reveal how, even in minds trained to achieve the highest objectivity, the subjective might still take over...
...Oppenheimer was donating substantial sums of money to the San Francisco branch of the Communist party—a party which, through the Russian agreement with Hitler, through the native Communist contribution to the fall of France, through its local efforts to immobilize America, was striving openly to facilitate a Nazi global triumph...
...But it is not this alone, in the present climate of fear and phobia, which gives the case its equivocal air...
...Sustained with consistency, it is an intelligible plea...
...Democracy in an era of bigness has, at any rate, not only to guard against an organizational power which, while technically enlightened, is politically self-willed...
...So complex is the structure of power in which such men must do their work that other questions are raised even for those who have nothing to explain away...
...Yet, what these really meant to him we still do not know...
...Today, as leader of the free world, the United States is playing for keeps...
...War, said Clemenceau, is too serious a business to be left to the generals...
...When these liberties were menaced, where did Dr...
...But can it be delimited, in accordance with the conventional prescriptions of the Legislative and Executive Branches, at each discretionary step...
...When the Gray Board submitted its report to the Atomic Energy Commission, it invoked "traditional and inviolable principles of American justice...
...The ingenuous in Dr...
...And this is a phase of Dr...
...Bigness has transformed American democracy...
...Oppenheimer may, in the words of the Gray Board, "have departed his role as scientific adviser to exercise influence in matters in which his convictions were not necessarily a reflection of technical judgment...
...Her capacity for world leadership nun well be determined by the character of her democracy But this is not merely tested by the treatment it grants a figure like Dr...
...What has, nevertheless, been illuminated is a problem of politics which the classic philosophers of democracy could never foresee...
...The control of irresponsible by responsible power remains, as ever, the task of democracy...
...Oppenheimer stand ? Other observers, scanning the record, have noted that during the Nazi-Soviet Pact, from the summer of 1939 to the summer of 1941, Dr...
...The charges against Dr...
...He acknowledges early pro-Communist sympathies...
...They apply to a host of lesser Oppenheimers who, with varying degrees of indispensability, must have a potent voice in running a large-scale order for us...
...Oppenheimer's admitted contacts, social and financial, suggest that in those years he could not have been entirely out of touch with events...
...In tackling it, the Atomic Energy Commission has, among other topics, had to conjure with the scope of the technician in modern society...
...A science that is amoral (as may be seen from the history of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and Soviet Russia) can be the undoing of democracy...
...Not only did he himself deserve better...
...Oppenheimer has, presumably, not yet told all...
...Oppenheimer should be understood and forgiven...
...A science that is apolitical begets a power which democracy must watch...
...Oppenheimer might be that while there is a hint of the latter, it is on the former that he staked his defense...
...After all he has done for his country, it is tragic that Dr...
...Matters, as far as Dr...
...The atomic-energy venture, the great services rendered by Dr...
...but he has been completely silent about his attitude during the crucial months of the Nazi-Soviet Pact...
...It will, however, be the business of political scientists to consider the case in a still wider setting...
...the latter's own part symbolizes that interaction of the national and international which, as large-scale technology extends to global affairs, is without precedent...
...Oppenheimer did not create the world in which he finds himself...
...the disingenuous, if such there be, is something else again...
...And yet, for weal or woe, certain facts have been brought to light...
...By the very nature of things, for top experts in major national undertakings there can be no watertight compartments...
...liberals, above all, must never forget them...
...are ideological elements about one feature of which Dr...
...But surely the dilemma has been precisely that of trying to cope in traditional terms with questions, administrative and ideological, that are un-traditional...
...the national interest will suffer if fellow-scientists feel, as did Voltaire after the English beheaded Admiral Byng, that the episode was staged pour encourager les autres...
...Those who wield instruments of power in a society of bigness can have an effect as novel as it is far-reaching...
...It is the essence of representative democracy that politicians, duly elected or appointed, should assume responsibility for decisions on policy...
...All this scarcely fits the prior self-portrait of one who, while politically misguided, was morally well-intentioned...
...From them it may not only be learned how, in a large-scale democracy, some people behind the scenes can exert a power which is more momentous than that of most who are rejected or accepted at the polls...
...A person's political outlook may be governed by utter simplicity or by a more sophisticated awareness...
...Valid answers for our time will have to be sought in terms of structural change or they may not be valid...
...at home, it does not function as traditionalists think it does...
...Oppenheimer's version of how he came to support the Communists in the first place...
...the paradox of Dr...
...at worst, they might, as individuals, be morally irresponsible...
...Oppenheimer's life to which, moreover, close heed should be paid by refugee scientists and critical opinion in Britain—a nation upon whose survival in that dark period hinged the liberties of the Western world...
...New, too...
Vol. 37 • July 1954 • No. 29
