What would I do if I were in the place of Niccolo Machiavelli’s prince? It’s the most troubling question in politics. We can have our theories about power and the world. Ideologies, that kind of fast food thinking, help.
But the question that often matters, as Raymond Aron recalls, is knowing what we would do if we were the prince. What would I do if I sat in this chair, faced with these options and knowing that my actions would have certain consequences?
It is the moment when theory ends and reality begins.
Let’s look at the atomic bomb. Every humanist recoils in horror at its destructive potential. And he will say: I would never, at any time, allow such a bomb to be developed during my administration.
But then someone reports that the Nazis had been looking for the bomb since 1939, and the question changes. Your likes or dislikes on the subject coincide.
The question now is who will get there first: you or the Nazi troops? You better be, humanist.
The same applies to dropping the atomic bomb on Japan. It’s a frightening thought, and historically controversial as well.
Perhaps, without the need for such barbarism, Japan was on the verge of defeat. Perhaps the use of the bomb was just a demonstration by the Americans to intimidate the Soviets.
Or maybe it wasn’t.
Maybe Japan wasn’t on the way to surrender. Maybe it would keep fighting with the ferocity shown in Okinawa and Iwo Jima. Perhaps, as several historians claim, the bomb actually saved many more lives than it destroyed.
In 1945, being the prince wasn’t about whether dropping a bomb was morally right or wrong. The question was different: end the war immediately or continue fighting for months or years?
I don’t have an answer to any of the questions. So I was never tempted to sit in the prince’s place.
But one of the most notable moments in Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer occurs precisely when the scientist meets President Harry S. Truman.
J. Robert Oppenheimer is the man of today: father of the atomic bomb, cover of Time, wizard of Los Alamos. But Oppenheimer fears his creation and, as he tells Truman, feels like he has “blood on his hands.”
Truman, with cynical brutality, offers him a handkerchief. And then he says that nobody in Japan wants to know who the scientist who built the bomb was. Just whoever played it.
And he, Truman, made that decision. It is he, Truman, who takes the place of Prince.
And he will, contrary to Oppenheimer’s increasingly uncomfortable opinion, increase the stakes in the nuclear race. As? He kept looking for more and more powerful bombs, perhaps because he understood that the Soviet Union would not stand on the stands.
Much has been said about the Prometheus myth in the film’s reviews. The book the director was inspired to write, Oppenheimer: The Triumph and Tragedy of the American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, bears the comparison in its title.
I understand the temptation: Prometheus stole fire from Zeus to offer to humans; For this gesture he suffered a thousand torments. In this reading, “Oppenheimer” would be an actualization of the myth.
But this myth has a second meaning and that meaning is in the name Prometheus, “he who foresees,” the one who knows in advance.
This is Oppenheimer’s great tragedy: seeing too much. This is present in the foreground of the film: when the young physicist looks at the rainwater, he knows that in the face of the new physics, material reality is not what it seems.
This restlessness continues into sleepless nights in which he is carried away by visions of destruction that are a harbinger of the Manhattan Project.
And it peaks when, after its inception, Oppenheimer seeks to moralize leaders in favor of international control and cooperation on nuclear issues.
It will be punished for that. It was always like this: Plato believed he could civilize the tyrant of Syracuse. Thomas More tried the same thing with Henry VIII. The rest is history.
Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan’s best film because it combines astounding formal monumentality the bomb blast scene is a minor masterpiece with narrative skill that never overrides the essential: in politics, the prince is not always on the side of those who are not in his place.
It is the moment when the ancient virtues of the wise become intolerable sins.