Science and Tradition 



The question remains and we ask it with more anxiety than ever. 

 "How could such a complete perversion of humanity happen in one of 

 the most enlightened countries in the most enlightened age?" I have 

 thought long and often on that question and my answer is — I hope it 

 will not shock you too much — that the German scientists and engineers 

 were partly the victims of their "technical" infatuation. They were 

 "technocrats" with a vengeance, and one can see how some of Mr. Hit- 

 ler's problems may have excited their technical minds. Absolutely new 

 problems, such as this one "What is the simplest and cheapest way of 

 destroying human beings, not individually, nor by the hundred, nor by 

 the thousands, but by the millions?" The problem included enough 

 difficulties, with no precedents for guidance, to challenge the ingenuity 

 of the most resourceful technicians. For example, how could one sal- 

 vage precious metals? The managers of ordinary slaughterhouses need 

 not worry about that because cattle, hogs and sheep do not have gold 

 teeth. One of the main difficulties was to establish the human slaughter- 

 houses and make their functioning possible without causing too much 

 curiosity and without discommoding and infuriating the neighborhood. 

 (For after all the majority of Germans were not mad technicians, and 

 we may assume that they were not more cruel than the rest of us; more- 

 over, even ogres would dislike the smell of slaughterhouses.) German 

 technicians solved that problem and gave the means of destroying ruth- 

 lessly and unobtrusively millions of innocent people. Their technical 

 concentration and the benumbedness and insensibility which proceeded 

 from it were carried to such a point that their minds were closed to hu- 

 manity and their hearts dulled to mercy.^ 



I beg to apologize for awakening memories, which are perhaps the 

 most gruesome in the whole history of mankind. I would prefer to 

 drive them out of my mind, or rather out of reality but that cannot be 

 done. I feel we should try to forgive them if possible, but it is not desir- 

 able that they be forgotten. The past is not dead, it never dies; the 

 things that were ever done were done forever, nobody, not even God, 

 could undo them. I spoke of those unspeakable atrocities, because they 

 afiFord the most telling example of the inhumanity which can be created 

 or at least condoned by the kind of technicians who do not look back- 

 ward, who do not care for history ( they call it "irrelevant" ) and can no 

 longer be restrained by political or religious traditions. 



* The reader might stop me here and say "What about the atomic bomb?" The 

 atomic bomb is an instrument of warfare, the latest and deadUest weapon invented 

 by men. In a sense war is criminal; it is the greatest moral bankruptcy, yet when 

 we are involved in it, there are no alternatives but to beat the adversary or be 

 beaten. There is an immense difference between killing men in warfare and mur- 

 dering them as a civilian policy. The Nazi slaughterhouses were not instruments 

 of war, but instruments of civilian destruction. The fact remains that we have 

 many "technocrats" in our midst, an increasing number of technocratic brutes, with- 

 out sensibility and without imagination, who do not hesitate to make drastic deci- 

 sions on the grounds of technical efficiency alone without any regard for the feel- 

 ings of the individuals involved. 



