When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

No One Does Evil Willingly

Is life on Earth getting more or less humane? Are those we consider heroes of humanity really worthy of adulation? Do our ideals of professional excellence, choice informed by scientific fact, and intellectual progress stand up to scrutiny? It depends, of course, on the criterion used to measure what’s going on. But whatever measure employed, it seems there is always another lurking in the wings of history to bite our collective ass. Here are summarised several examples provided by Benjamin Labatut in this marvellous little book of factual fiction in the manner of Borges.

The Jewish scientist Fritz Haber won the Nobel Prize for his 1914 discovery of a chemical process for the extraction of nitrogen from the air. This process provided synthetic fertiliser for crops and thereby promoted a dramatic increase in world population. Haber also directed the creation and use of chemicals for warfare, including that of a cyanide-based pesticide, known as Zyklon B, that was used to kill millions of Jews, including Haber’s own relatives.

Karl Schwarzschild, also Jewish, was an astrophysicist. He was also a genius who was first to provide a complete mathematical formulation of Einstein’s theory of relativity. He predicted the existence of black holes a quarter century before they could be confirmed - incidentally, while he was an artillery officer in the German Army. Inspired by intense patriotism for the Fatherland Schwarzschild had abandoned academia in order to calculate trajectories for barrages of poison gas. He died on the Eastern front, convinced that black holes were a cultural as well as physical phenomenon, and that he and the rest of the German people had fallen into one.

Alexander Grothendieck (only half Jewish) was arguably the most important mathematician of the 20th century. He was incarcerated in Vichy France and at one point escaped with the intention of walking to Berlin in order to kill Hitler. He failed but survived his ordeal. In 1958 a mathematical research institute was founded in Paris devoted solely to him and his students. During the next twelve years this group revolutionised much of mathematics and created the entirely new field of algebraic geometry. But in 1970 Grothendieck abruptly stopped not just his research but also any involvement with mathematics whatsoever. He had come to consider mathematics to be the single greatest threat to human existence. His reasoning was impeccable: “The atoms that tore Hiroshima and Nagasaki apart were split not by the greasy fingers of a general, but by a group of physicists armed with a fistful of equations.”

These and others equally fascinating vignettes in Labatut’s book are moral tales. They are also empirical evidence of the arbitrariness of human judgment. The existentialist philosophers were right: human life is absurd. Hegel was right: the world is built on contradictions. Jesus was at least partially right: the first are often last, and vice versa. The Buddha was probably right: the world is illusory; good becomes indistinguishable from evil. And Qoholeth from the Hebrew Bible was without question right: all is vanity.

Socrates believed that no one willingly commits acts of evil. Hegel thought that even the worst acts have good reasons.* Another way of expressing the same sentiment is that human beings are capable of rationalising any behaviour, thought, or desire as beneficial to the world at large. If there is any human trait that can be considered as downright sinful it is this ability. Yet we continue to confer Nobel Prizes, FA Cups, knighthoods to the likes of Jimmy Savile, and high political office to people of the caliber of Donald Trump, clearly hoping that all the accumulated wisdom of our culture is wrong.

* To quote him exactly: "You need not have advanced very far in your learning in order to find good reasons for the most evil of things. All the evil deeds in this world since Adam and Eve have been justified with good reasons."

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