The conscience of the Hiroshima pilot

Without moral conscience there is no possible humanity. It was what the story William Wilson, by Edgar Allan Poe, showed us. Every time Wilson was about to commit an immoral act, another William Wilson, the personification of Wilson’s conscience, unexpectedly appeared to prevent it with a “barely perceptible whisper.”

But moral conscience always demands a high price. This is demonstrated by the story of Claude Eatherly, pilot of the Straight Flush, in charge of ensuring that the weather conditions were adequate in the mission to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. He gave the “go” signal to the bomber Enola Gay and did his duty as a soldier.

Hiroshima whispers

However, simply obeying did not exempt him from listening to the whispers of conscience. He couldn’t help but imagine the hell he had helped cause by obeying those orders. How could he remain impassive in the face of such barbarism? The strange thing would have been to sleep the sleep of the just.

In his nightmares, an inner voice reminded him of the horror of slaughtering eighty thousand people in an instant. In the days and months that followed, the firestorm that scorched the city and the radiation caused excruciating suffering to tens of thousands of people. How could Eatherly get around the anguish of his responsibility? How to get rid of the horrible images of thousands of bodies torn by fire?

In Japan, atomic bomb survivors were stigmatized, discriminated against because radiation was believed to be contagious. They were called hibakusha and were affected by physical disfigurements, mutilations and radiation diseases such as cancer. To make matters worse, the black rain spread radioactive particles and, given the scarcity of water, the desperate survivors opened their mouths to the sky to quench their thirst.

blind obedience

Sometimes duty is duty. And the whispers of conscience are silenced when justifications are found, however malicious. We could tell ourselves “I was simply following orders, therefore I am not responsible”. Or “it was impossible to act otherwise” and “the end justifies the means.” They are mechanisms to mitigate the psychological tension called cognitive dissonance, that is, the discomfort we feel because what we do contradicts our beliefs and moral values.

Blind obedience relieves us of moral responsibility for our actions. It is like taking a tranquilizer that anesthetizes the conscience and makes us insensitive to the pain of others. We end up becoming mere pieces of a great gear, as the writer Ernesto Sábato warned. And an interchangeable part must not have a moral conscience but simply function like an automaton.

Praise of bad conscience

Eatherly’s tragedy was that she couldn’t look the other way and stop being human. He faced his demons and his guilt. He did not allow himself to be drugged by the usual subterfuges to clear his conscience.

The price he paid was a life tormented by a guilty conscience. His anomaly was to preserve humanity and not seek refuge in self-delusion. For years he committed inexplicable crimes racked by guilt, like robbing stores without taking the money. What he sought was to reaffirm his moral responsibility. He attempted suicide several times and went through correctional facilities and military mental institutions such as Waco, Texas.

The poet Wislawa Szymborska titled one of her poems In Praise of Bad Self-Conscience. Allow me to quote it in full for its beauty and wisdom:

The buzzard has nothing to reproach himself with.

The scruples are foreign to the black panther.

The piranhas do not doubt the appropriateness of their actions.

The pit viper accepts itself without complexes.

There is no such thing as a self-deprecating jackal.

The horsefly, lobster, tapeworm and alligator

they live as they live and thus they are satisfied.

One hundred kilos weighs the heart of the orca,

but in another sense it is light.

There is nothing more beastly

than a clean conscience

on the third planet from the Sun.

declining morality

We can trick the mirror so that it does not show our miseries and divert our gaze, so that infamies plunge into the well of oblivion. Let it be the portrait of Dorian Gray, as Oscar Wilde wrote, the one that keeps secret the testimony of our vileness and we do not show others more than the feigned beauty of a made-up conscience.

The writer Robert Jungk observed that the Eatherly case exposed the hypocritical and decadent morality of his time: “Kindness is considered naive; integrity, stupidity; compassion, a weakness; love of neighbor, a sign of dementia».

Eatherly’s moral pain was considered little short of a betrayal, since it unmasked the miseries of her time. During his forced stay in the Waco psychiatric hospital he corresponded with the philosopher Gunther Anders. It was a kind of therapy in which both, pacifist activists, showed their concerns about the nuclear threat. In one of his letters, Eatherly wrote: “Society cannot accept my guilt without simultaneously acknowledging in itself a far greater guilt.”

The echoes of Hiroshima

In his own way, Eatherly was also one of the victims of the warmongering madness, the executioner turned into yet another victim of the suicidal delusion of war. The pacifist philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote with good reason: “Every suffering individual in the world represents a failure of human sanity and of common humanity.”

In Poe’s story, William Wilson puts his own conscience to death. Just before he dies, the other Wilson, his moral mirror, whispers to him:

«You have won and I surrender. But you too are dead from now on… dead to the world, to heaven and to hope. You existed in me… and by killing me, see in this image, which is yours, how you have murdered yourself!”

Echoed in Eatherly’s tormented mind the strident whispers of his conscience, of the other Eatherly, the infernal echoes of Hiroshima imagined by the composer Krzysztof Penderecki.

This article has been published in ‘
The Conversation‘.