This article was published on Medium.com on 8/3/24
Do intelligent people always use their intelligence for the greater good?
It’s a belief embedded in American folklore that it takes a certain amount of intelligence and savvy to survive here in America. But I wonder about the details. Doesn’t it make sense to understand this adage in context? Intelligence of the sort that I have, which is to say, university bought, paid for, and certified, is wrapped up in an ability to ace tests, particularly written tests. And I do have that. But there’s also an aspect to intelligence that matters in how an intelligent person applies it. For good or not? For themself or someone else?
Silvie Baumgartel wrote an article reprinted in Best American Essays of 2023 in which she observes that “intelligence without empathy [is] incredibly dangerous.” Her essay is focused on Los Alamos, New Mexico where J. Robert Oppenheimer led the Manhattan Project to develop the atom bomb. That was in 1943 in the middle of World War II when prospects for an Allied victory was still iffy. The bomb was ready two and a half years later and two copies of it were detonated over Japan, obliterating the hearts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Baumgartel insinuates that the undoubted intelligence of the people working on the bomb might have made them insensitive to their complicity in the annihilation of 200,000 people over the course of a week in 1945. Not to mention, too, that the bombings left an indelible nuclear fingerprint on the survivors — many of whom would suffer the bomb creators’ apparent lack of empathy for generations to come.
Baumgartel’s focus narrows to the present day, where she contrasts the wealth and abundance of intellect of the inhabitants of present day Los Alamos against the poverty of the immediately adjacent towns, occupied by Latinos and Pueblo Indians. She wonders why the intellectual tradition of the Los Alamos bomb creators, which continues today in a community heavily weighted in PhD’s and millionaires, seems devoid of empathy for the precarious economic state of their neighbors.
The present day scientists of Los Alamos are people who must have demonstrated their intellectual smarts, but how do they manifest that endowment in the negative effects on their near neighbors? The Guardian in March, 2024 reported that Los Alamos, which is still engaged in nuclear weapon production, has left a nuclear fingerprint in the health of its workers. The workers rolled their own dice, of course, when they took jobs there, but they also rolled the dice for their unwitting, collateral neighbors.
The creators of the original bombs justified the death of 200,000 people because they hypothetically saved a million people in what would have been a devastating land war. It was nuclear war cost benefit analysis, a calculated return on investment. Does this claim exonerate them of the judgment that they lacked empathy for the actual victims? If not, then does the continued existence of creative weapons’ making in the labs there represent an unabating legacy of prioritizing intelligence over empathy? Does their work make them insensitive to the conditions of their neighbors and exonerate them of the likelihood that it increases the already high incidence of cancer in the surrounding area?
I thought about the birth of the nuclear bomb in connection with the MAGA movement (Make America Great Again) in Republican politics. MAGA people, including the initiator of the catch phrase and acronym, would count the creation and dropping of the bomb as events demonstrating how Great America once was.
From how I interpret the pronouncements of the MAGA gurus, it’s ironic that that they don’t seem to value the kind of university certified intelligence of the sort that Los Alamos scientists exemplify. Nor do they seem to have any easily identifiable undercurrent of empathy. Just what are they intending to recapture of the Great American past they want to return to?
Not to be too cynical about it, but it doesn’t seem that it has much to do with showing empathy for those who don’t fit the cultural mold outlined in their policy statements. This is especially so in the Project 2025 agenda pushed by Trump believers. The kinds of negativity they direct to intellectual elites makes it seem that they’ll be reliant on other forms of intelligence in order to recreate their Great America. In particular, that would be the intelligence needed to impose their will on all the collateral victims of their disregard and disdain. Get rid of the content experts in government and replace them with MAGA loyalists.
Given the details of the plan, their regard for intelligence consists entirely of the devious sort needed to get their way and impose it on others. Dissenters will be shunted aside or ignored. Intelligence of the last twenty five years that led to social and environmental advancement will be scorned, judged misconceived, and even criminalized. Think of the Dobbs decision.
This is not an idle opinion on my part. That is their promise. We will be forced to rely on the self-serving intelligence of the billionaires, who will apply it primarily for their still greater accumulation of wealth and privilege. So very few of them feel they already have enough. Greed will prevail and those who used their intelligence for the good of family, community, and country will be dismissed as losers and suckers, just as our felon former president labeled prisoners of war.
I wonder what happens to a country when it loses its empathy for those who don’t fit the mold and won’t kiss the ring.