There's a little Prometheus in all of us

There's a downside to our prowess as human animals

The catalyst for this morning’s train of thought is a Variety article about the new movie Oppenheimer. The gist is that it’s drawing pretty much favorable assessments, save for a few misgivings about its three-hour length.

And it’s refreshing to see such a positive consensus about a new Hollywood offering that’s about an actual historical figure of great depth, magnitude and impact, rather than a comic book character. That that is usually what garners the fuss does not speak well for the state of our culture.

Robert J. Oppenheimer was, of course, the theoretical physicist who spearheaded the development of America’s first atomic bombs.

I would imagine this moment is included in the movie, but it’s worth noting here:

As he witnessed the first detonation of a nuclear weapon on July 16, 1945, a piece of Hindu scripture ran through the mind of Robert Oppenheimer: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”. It is, perhaps, the most well-known line from the Bhagavad-Gita . . .

The Variety article explains that the movie was inspired by a 2005 book about Oppenheimer entitled American Prometheus.

And that turned my thoughts to Prometheus himself.

There were several versions of the Prometheus myth floating around ancient Greece. In some, his curse goes on eternally. In others, he is rescued and goes on to have other noteworthy experiences.

What was his transgression, and what was the punishment?

Prometheus is best known for defying the Olympian gods by stealing fire from them and giving it to humanity in the form of technology, knowledge, and more generally, civilization . . .

The punishment of Prometheus for stealing fire from Olympus and giving it to humans is a subject of both ancient and modern culture. Zeus, king of the Olympian gods, condemned Prometheus to eternal torment for his transgression. Prometheus was bound to a rock, and an eagle—the emblem of Zeus—was sent to eat his liver (in ancient Greece, the liver was thought to be the seat of human emotions). His liver would then grow back overnight, only to be eaten again the next day in an ongoing cycle.

Prometheus is one of those mythological figures, like Sisyphus, Hercules and Perseus, who have been used to convey certain aspects of life we encounter from time to time. A literary example is the subtitle of Mary Shelly’s 1818 novel Frankenstein. That accursed medical student is deemed The Modern Prometheus.

It seems that in most tellings, Prometheus was motivated by the best of intentions. He saw the potential for advancement in the human species and wanted to get that ball rolling.

But advancement’s been a double-edged sword, hasn’t it? We have bestowed on ourselves air conditioning and nuclear weaponry, unlimited access to the world’s body of accumulated knowledge and soul-deadening bureaucracy, lung transplants and “gender-affirming” surgery.

Much of the content here at Precipice has to do with attempting to determine just when the West eschewed the notion of a transcendent order. To that end, I’ve referred repeatedly to the work of theologian Carl Trueman. He traces our abandonment of an architecture to the universe that demands our compliance to Rousseau, and sees a consistent line of development from Rousseau through the Romantic poets (particularly Shelly, who was outspoken in his view that marriage was an outmoded and useless institution), Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and John Dewey and Richard Rorty.

After digesting Trueman’s thrust, I began to look at the contexts in which these people made their mark. The Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution unfolded in succession. The sum total effect was to take people off the land and their feudal lives, create far more cities than there ever had been, familiarize them with previously nonexistent devices that quickly became indispensable accoutrements, and focus human attention on practical, material concerns such as extraction, measurement, shaping of raw material into objects of greater utility, and transporting objects and people faster and to places farther away than had ever been possible.

A lot of good things came out of it all. Luther, Calvin and Wesley gave us spiritual insights we’d probably not have had under a monolithic Catholic denomination. What Adam Smith saw about economic activity - that it occurs organically between individuals and organizations if the state leaves it alone - greatly expanded our understanding of freedom. Ditto for what Locke and Montesquieu bequeathed to us regarding how to establish a government that maximizes freedom. Galileo and Newton opened new realms of inquiry that helped us feel at home in a universe that had been hard to comprehend.

But that last point is the sticky one. We came to think we could endlessly manipulate anything we encountered in this universe, and that if we ran into a problem, our powers of reason would provide a solution. We not only lost respect for the fact that this magnificent creation was all here before we could quantify it and shape it. we lost sight of the fact that it was creation, which implies a creator.

With no authority higher than ourselves, we distorted its given contours and in some ways rendered it unrecognizable.

Now, a climate alarmist might think he or she had found a point here at which to make an “aha!” insertion along the lines of, “Yes! Exactly so! Our headlong determination to plunge into mass production has befouled our Earth so badly, we must now completely reassess our way forward.”

Um, thank you, but I think we ought to pass on the way forward the alarmist proposes. It is yet more of the assumption that materialistic tinkering is going to once and for all resolve the human dilemma.

It’s not. the presumptuousness of that view is borne out by the outlandish schemes we occasionally see for deflecting sunlight or controlling ocean temperature. Nature‘s power is greater than our arrogance.

The same goes for the tinkering we’ve been doing in recent decades with human sexuality. Gross deviations from our millennia-old understanding that there are males and females and that they come together and form families that perpetuate our kind and make for a livable social order have not increased the sum total of meaning in our experience.

No, the first step back from the wreckage of Promethean excess is to allow a realization that we’re mere creatures and not gods to once again sink into our thick skulls.

Whether Prometheus foresaw the consequences of what he did, divine power had to call him out on his gumption.

Divine power shall do so again if we continue to disregard its sovereignty.