Scarlet Letter In The Psyche

Nuclear Energy, and Germany, and the human spirit

On May 30, 2011, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced the decommissioning of all German nuclear reactors by 2022, saying “We will generate our own electricity from other sources.”¹ In 2021, 17.9% of Germany’s energy consumption was from coal, and 31.8% came from oil.² Merkel has often been referred to as the “climate chancellor,” a leader in the world’s green energy movement.

Nuclear power is far and away the cleanest³, and safest⁴ way to quickly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. To do away with their reactors, while Germany still relies on coal, while Germany destroys its own villages to mine said coal⁵, goes beyond irresponsibility. It is grotesque and irrational. It becomes logical only when  the collective psychology is recognized, acting to demonize any application of nuclear fission, at all. Nuclear energy has been avoided as a primary energy source, not for reasons of environmentalism or safety, but for unexamined values of good and evil. Because of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945, nuclear energy has been painted with the scarlet letter in our collective psyche.

Nuclear energy is the obvious energy-source stopgap, ending our addiction to oil and coal, moving us one step further towards the dream of sustainable energy worldwide: it is the next step of humanity’s fantastic, dangerous journey of ingenuity, triumph, failure, and discovery.

On New Year’s Eve, 2021, three of Germany’s six remaining nuclear reactors were shut down.⁶ This ongoing stupidity illustrates an unwillingness to continue on this path for fear of the potential harm awaiting us; it illustrates an unconscious belief that the path humanity treads could be evil. It communicates a basic renunciation of this wonderful human journey. Dependence on coal is the result, and even further stagnation and destruction.

It’s poetic that Germany should be the site of so drastic, and so moralistic a stance against nuclear energy. In the aftermath of Nazi-ism, Germany has overcorrected away from her own spirit–because of the potential harm, and potential evil, in continuing to develop it. Looking back through her history, we see Beethoven, Bach, Einstein, the world’s first car by Mercedes-Benz, the seeming fount of European ingenuity itself, choked off in modern years to a mere trickle of innovation since WWII’s end. Consciously or not, this achieved a nation’s apology to the greater world, while also achieving Germany’s death by her own hand. Was avoiding the risk of new evil worth the loss of a nation’s spirit, specifically a nation that most centrally displayed the potential, power, and creativity of Western Europe as a whole?

Further down the rabbit hole… to the Nietzschean pit, which the Scientific Revolution opened in the religious Western European psyche, vaporizing the foundations of tradition, meaning, and morality with all the destruction of an atom bomb. For better or worse, religious foundations provided a nation with immunity against totalitarian ideology. The Third Reich could only have gained a foothold in Germany’s heart and mind after the Death of God rendered her lost and adrift in the existential sea. They overcorrected away from religion for the dogmatic evil it created, and found even greater destruction. 

Renouncing dogmatic religion, thus helping to create 20th century totalitarianism, is a mistake cut from the same cloth as Germany decommissioning all its nuclear reactors. The Scientific Revolution was an opportunity to challenge and expand the Judeo-Christian tenets to include new objective truths. We could have affirmed religion’s basic goodness while also recognizing the need to advance its understanding. Instead, we threw away religion altogether, causing even worse destruction than that which we sought to avoid. In the rubble of the Third Reich there was a latent opportunity to further articulate the will to greatness within the German psyche, an opportunity to steer its immense power towards the good of the world. American-occupied Japan provided an example of this: they redirected their zeitgeist of Japanese superiority away from racial dominance towards capitalistic innovation. 

A spiritual affirmation is the answer in all these cases, a decision to highlight the good of the journey, and to discover better ways forward.

We now find ourselves firmly placed in the future described both in Plato’s utopianism and in dystopian sci-fi novels. We’re experiencing the crisis of Being more clearly and objectively than at any other time since WWII. Which direction history goes from here depends on a conscious affirmation of humanity’s inherent goodness, lest we veer away from risk towards even greater disaster by renouncing our inherent evil. 

We have the experience of these past mistakes. Over-correcting away from our established paths of development caused even worse disaster, and the cause of this mistake had its roots, as always, in man’s basic affirmation or denial of what he is and what he is doing.

Is it more important to think of Germany as a cradle of engineering and industrial genius, as the birthplace of monumental figures of art, or as the source of 20th century evil? Is the Industrial Revolution and the mastery of coal power, which led to petroleum and then to nuclear, a path to destroying the world, or a way to modernize and feed the entire human race? Is the human mind more importantly a sinful ugly thing, or a spark of creative divinity?

References

¹https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/30/germany-to-shut-nuclear-reactors

²https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts

³Per gigawatt hour of electricity produced, coal produces 820 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, oil produces 720 tonnes, and nuclear produces 3 tonnes. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

⁴Between 1969 and 2000, accidents in producing electricity from coal caused around 25,000 on-site deaths, accidents from oil caused around 20,000 on-site deaths, compared to the 31 immediate deaths from the single nuclear reactor accident at Chernobyl. https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_14538

⁵https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/10/23/germany-coal-climate-cop26/

⁶https://www.euronews.com/2021/12/31/germany-begins-nuclear-phase-out-shuts-down-three-of-six-nuclear-power-plants