The inevitability question

By sheer coincidence, last week on August 6th, I bought Richard Flannagan's most recent book Question 7. Richard, one of Australia's most distinguished authors and a Booker Prize winner, has often talked about his father, who was a POW in Japan during the last part of the second world war and faced inhumane conditions in captivity. Had the war lasted a bit longer, he would not have survived the harsh conditions of the winter in the camp.

This genre defining book, which is part memoir, part history and part reflection on the state of the world, asks deep and difficult questions. Richard knows that his father was able to find freedom largely due to one of the most horrific acts of the 20th century - the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that killed well over a hundred thousand innocent people in an instant. Many more suffered for the rest of their lives. Richard wonders how his own existence, being born a decade and a half after August 1945, is derived from what transpired on August 6th, 1945.

I picked up the book exactly eighty years after the dropping of the atomic bomb not knowing much about its focus, except that I have tremendously enjoyed Richard's previous books. As I delved deep into the book, I got immersed in one of its main themes. Richard, who won the Baillie Gifford award for Question 7, and became the only author ever to win the both the Booker Prize (fiction) and Baillie Gifford Prize (non-fiction) asks his readers to reflect on the question of inevitability. Was the atomic bomb really inevitable? Was it an automatic consequence of decades of scientific discoveries that bend to the will of those in power? What does it say about scientific progress, the human tendency to create chaos and conflict? What about those who exploit science for the benefit of the few, while disregarding the pain and suffering of many? By extension, one can wonder that as science leads to newer discoveries and engineers come up with more sophisticated tools, whether development of newer and more lethal weapons is a given.

Eight decades after fire and fury was unleashed from the belly of Enola Gay up in the skies of Japan, and as we still try to avoid a nuclear war, an all-out march towards destruction of everything we hold dear, this is a question that we should be asking ourselves: as defence spending (read investment in newer weapons) increases in countries all around the world, often at the cost of life saving medicines, support of programmes for the poor, hungry and the vulnerable, should we simply throw up our hands and say that all of this is going to happen no matter what? Is science and technology a self-driving engine that charges forward anyway, and we are mere spectators, who choose to jump on it, or is it something whose direction we can control?

I believe that neither the atomic bomb, nor newer weapons or tools of conflict, are inevitable. These things do exist in nature in an organic sense. Science and engineering do not automatically generate a newer weapon, it is the people, who do it. People like us. It is our own endless race to have the latest machine, and our own imagination of who is ours and who does not have a right to exist, that creates this sense of inevitability.

In this moment of our time, we engage with complex and more sophisticated technologies all around us. These are extraordinary forces that can be deployed to address some of the most serious challenges of our time, or they could be used to deny us our most precious commodity - our collective humanity.