I have known people who saw unheard of things in their youth. There is a generational reason for that: I was born when only 17 years had passed since the end of the Spanish Civil War, and barely 11 after the Second World War. Most of those who had passed through those times lucidly enough to remember were still vigorous adults when I began to be curious to listen to them. They had participated in the war, and they remembered the time of Primo de Rivera, and the arrival of the Republic, and they had heard the veterans of the war in Africa, and even some of the one in Cuba. The stories of others extend living memory and imagination into regions of the past that would otherwise be inaccessible in their most valuable details. That is why it is not difficult for me to imagine the joy and astonishment of Pérez Galdós when in the first scores for the National episodesAround 1873, he met an old man who as a boy had been a cabin boy at the Battle of Trafalgar. The historical account suddenly acquired the vehemence of a human voice. Under the eyelids of that very old man there were lively eyes that had seen what for Galdós were old engravings and pictures of battles. It would have been like talking to Cervantes and asking him to evoke his memories of Lepanto.
People who have already died bequeathed me stories that as I listened to them awakened in me the purpose of being able to tell others myself. My regret is that I did not ask as much as I should have, and that many times, especially when I was very young, I neither asked nor paid much interest in what they told me, telling myself that there would be time, that those people who are so repetitive in their evocations would always be available. But death comes, or memory deterioration, and that possible oral library disappears as after a sudden fire.
In 1998 Professor Roger Shattuck told me in Madrid about the day in August 1945 when he flew over the still smoking ruins of Hiroshima with the fighter plane he was flying. He was very young then, and had just participated as an aviator in the battle of the Pacific. They had known since the month of July that the final assault on Japan was being prepared, that it was going to be extremely bloody, and in which young Shattuck was sure that he was going to die. Then came the news of the nuclear explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the surrender of the Japanese. Thanks to the atomic bomb, Robert Shattuck had the certainty that he was going to live beyond his first youth. He said it so many years later with the same stupor that he must have felt that day in August.
The memory of the apocalyptic devastation of Hiroshima never left him. Half a century later it was that mixture of horror and unrelieved shame that led him to write the book through which I met him, forbidden knowledge. A great essay editor, María Cifuentes, published it in Spain, and thanks to her, that conversation in Madrid was possible for me. Shattuck had had a prestigious career as a specialist in early modern French literature, between Baudelaire and Proust. In forbidden knowledge he turned away from philology to investigate an idea that had not stopped obsessing him since he flew over Hiroshima and was fully aware that thanks to the atomic bomb, Japan had surrendered before the final battle and he had saved his life. The mastery of nuclear energy was an extreme consequence of the human capacity for knowledge, disciplined by science. Until then no one had questioned the goodness of scientific progress. Thanks to him, to Einstein’s initiative, to Robert Oppenheimer’s leadership of the Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb had given overwhelming supremacy to the United States and hastened the defeat of fascism and the end of the war.
And at the same time he had unleashed a capacity for destruction the like of which had never existed before, one that could annihilate life on Earth. Shattuck spoke in his book of the horror that had turned Oppenheimer’s life ever since, remorseful and horrified at his own scientific prowess. He is said to have said, quoting a sacred Hindu text, upon seeing the images of the explosion over Hiroshima: “Now I have become death, destroyer of worlds.” Beginning in Hiroshima, Shattuck explored the ancient tradition of suspicion of the uncontrolled possibilities of knowledge, reflected in the double myth of Prometheus and Pandora. Prometheus, especially since the Enlightenment, is a hero of human emancipation, because he steals fire from the gods and gives it to men, thus ensuring the improvement of their lives, thanks to the control of nature that fire allows them, an example and symbol of technological progress. The gods impose an even more cruel punishment on Prometheus because he is eternal, and the hero also becomes a martyr. But the punishment in the form of a poisoned gift that the gods give men is the jar, not the box, of Pandora: curiosity leads them to open it, and what was inside it is the flow of all misfortunes.
For Roger Shattuck, the great oversight of modernity was, is, embracing the myth of Prometheus and forgetting that of Pandora: the arrogance of assuming that any scientific or technological advance is unconditionally beneficial, and any limitation or caution an unacceptable burden, a display of cowardice, in accordance with what is known, of obscurantism. What ancient myths and tales warn of is that human initiative and curiosity can sometimes be catastrophic, because there is knowledge and techniques that have more destructive than beneficial effects, and because there are acts that are initially neutral or promising that in the medium or long term end up having consequences that are as unpredictable as they are devastating.
Professor Roger Shattuck died many years ago, not without publishing an admirable book on Marcel Proust in his old age. I remember him these days, reading the terrifying predictions that are being made not by ignoramuses always intimidated by technology, as is my case, but by some of the world’s leading experts in artificial intelligence. Until recently, the tycoons of digital innovations were kindly and aseptic gurus who appeared priestly on bare, light-bathed stages announcing the good news of universal happiness that their new devices would bring us, which were seen descending like celestial apparitions on said stages. Now the speakers have not changed in appearance, with their pale faces of virtual theocracy and their tight-fitting turtlenecks, but they do not spread promises of happiness but predictions of an imminent apocalypse, imploring a limit, a pause in the development of that technology that can, literally, they say, run out of control and destroy humanity. There are discoveries that it would have been better not to have made. There are others in which it is not known whether the undoubted benefits they bring outweigh the damage they are causing at the same time. Once its seal is broken, Pandora’s box or jar can no longer be closed. Experts speak, for or against such prophecies, but they manage so that no one can understand them. The advantage of primitive myths and tales, as Professor Roger Shattuck well knew, is that they contain wisdom that is expressed in the simplest words and can be understood by everyone.
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