Chernobyl's Philosophical Lesson

How to Slay the Nuclear Zombie? 

By Martin Cohen

Review article on the occasion of the publication of ‘Chernobyl’ by Emin Altan

Now here's a coffee table debate starting book with a difference. Emin Altan’s photographic tale of the nuclear power station that exploded on 26 April 1986 is both a grim journey and yet somehow a poetic one. Page after page of evocative images – black and white with just a hint of lost colour – speak not only about the folly of nuclear power, but of the greater folly of human conceit.

The images in the book for the most part fall into two categories. There are the are ones from the radiation-soaked exclusion zone that actually could be taken almost anywhere where human plans have been thwarted and decay has set in. A basketball court strewn with rubble, juxtaposed with a rediscovered photo – hopelessly mouldy – of children in gym gear exercising with sticks is an example that caught my eye. You sense that these children were imagining themselves as future world-beaters, and the reality of human transcience is brought home by the peeling decay of the abandoned gym.

There is a beauty in these decaying photographs that Altan’s book powerfully conveys. The book plays with images of life that are also images of death. This is a photographic essay that is about much more than Chernobyl. Better would be to say that it is about existential questions of human existence. Scenes of life abruptly halted blended with decades of inevitable decay But then, you might wonder, how does nuclear energy, always keen to claim to be the brave and the new, fit in? But it does very well, because, as I say in my contribution for the book, nuclear energy is a zombie technology… a technology that arises from the grave, if not every night, seemingly every decade, before stalking the Earth in pursuit of hapless victims.

Nuclear energy is eye-wateringly expensive, with effectively unlimited downstream costs for dealing with shuttered power stations and radioactive waste. It is the only human strategy for energy generation that also comes with a very real risk of one day destroying all human life on the planet.

Another paradox is that, in recent years the nuclear industry has sold its reactors not to wealthy countries - but to the world’s poorest: Sudan, Nigeria, Egypt, the Philippines, Indonesia… Why do such countries sign up for nuclear? The answer is finance deals, and dirty money for regimes. Which is why India and China, countries in which millions of people live below the poverty line and can’t afford electricity at all, are the world’s biggest spenders on nuclear.

However, the reasons why, once upon a time, all self-respecting environmentalists hated nuclear power are still there. It produces invisible pollution— radiation— with the potential to seep everywhere, causing genetic diseases that interfere with nature. After the explosion at Chernobyl, an invisible cloud slowly spread across the Earth poisoning food chains and leaving toxic residues in the seas and soils. Residues that would be toxic for thousands of years… And Chernobyl could have been far worse, had it not been for the heroism coupled with (ironically) the ignorance of the people who fought to prevent the plant exploding.

When I researched nuclear’s real share of the world energy pie for my book, The Doomsday Machine, a few years ago, what emerged very clearly was that renewables, including old technologies like hydroelectric, played a secondary but significant of the energy mix - but nuclear did not. It was, I wrote then, merely ‘the cherry’ on the top of the energy pie.

Because, while the technology of renewables steadily becomes cheaper and more efficient, nuclear energy steadily increases in cost, while efficiency gains remain purely speculative. Put another way, energy is a very complex issue, and simple one-size-fits-all solutions won’t work. It’s true, as as the nuclear lobby says, that renewables cannot easily replace nuclear for energy intensive industries and that their output is by nature erratic. It’s also true that for all the rhetoric, global primary energy consumption has not only increased over the last century, but has increased exponentially.

The conclusion, then surely, is that part of the solution to the world’s energy problem, the solution that removes the need for nuclear, is we have to stop the ever-increasing rate of energy consumption. However, this apparently virtuous aim is complicated, indeed made not virtuous at all, when it is realised that at the moment most of the world’s population already use rather modest amounts of energy, while it is a rich elite who gobble up the lion’s share. Yes, the careless consumption of the world’s rich has to be curbed, but on the other hand, a more equal distribution of income in the world must inevitably also create higher energy demand. Because, today, hundreds of millions of people lack access to sufficient energy, often with dire consequences for themselves and the environment. When people lack access to electricity for cooking and heating, they rely on solid fuel sources – mostly firewood, but also dung and crop waste. The use of wood for fuel often contributes to deforestation – even if in principle wood can be cropped sustainably. Electricity, on the other hand, allows refrigeration of food; washing machines for clothes; and light to read at night. In some countries today, children can be found sitting under street lights to do their homework. The energy problem of half of the world is energy poverty.

Fortunately, the kinds of energy needed by these families and individuals are increasingly within the ability of renewables to provide, while the demands of industry are flat or declining and possible to meet within the current energy mix – without needing nuclear. Without, likewise, needing us to answer all the existential questions. Which is just as well, as surely these have no easy answers.

A Suicidal Bias

by Tessa den Uyl

‘With men came suicide’ could have flown out of Pandora’s box, as well as, ‘I think therefore I suffer’. Even when our agonising states might seem incredibly real—just like the joyful ones—we might be slightly mistaking our perceptions. Once we recognise how we have become enslaved to believe in a cultural heritage, we also comprehend that our life is nourished by a language-shared involvement. Though this language might not hold (at) all what we are. If suicide could be archived as ‘an urgent need that once involved humankind’, we have to start to think in a different way. After all, to kill oneself out of despair, nobody was born.

What humankind has passed on for centuries eludes us all in who we are. The fashionable expression that there is just the now (or actually, no time at all) is plausible when we turn to quantum physics, biocentrism and ancient spirituality that envision the whole of reality as one single movement. Though emotionally speaking, to experience this oneness would mean to have burned the whole past within us. To put it briefly: on an emotional and intellectual level, unless one were unable to live a life in which memory has no decisive input on our emotions, thus our thoughts, each of us is intrinsic to ‘the reality’ of society rather than the ‘one Self” of the cosmos. If so, our daily reality is elusive in the face of the cosmos and real towards society.

Where does this leave us?

Society demands a certain attachment to those thoughts that fulfill specific images about life. How many are the thoughts which others think for you and you think others think? This is a forest where not everybody will walk quietly. People think and therefore have opinions, which serves communication. Though once people believe in their thoughts, as if they are the words they pronounce, life seemingly has a great deal to do with the submission to, and the manipulation of, other people’s requests. Not unpredictably, when life means a jar filled with expectations to be fulfilled, that jar is not unbreakable under its own pressure. Like stalkers in a spider’s web where thoughts continue a never-ending communication, most of all within ourselves, should one in this realm trace a self?

When the initial information which is handed one in life is to erect an idea of self with a tiny bag of thoughts as the available tools, to understand the boundaries of where your life starts and the requests of others end, is extremely difficult. Not uncommonly, the encounter with discrepancy in society is of no surprise. Especially when one comprehends that society itself is established in divergence, and each of us is therefore raised in conflict. A communication, which serves its own contraries, can only hand one to struggle as the outcome. And in such societies, to think that problems can end is nothing but a mediocre generalisation. Simultaneously thought-induced reality cannot be denied, it serves to stop in front of a stop sign or to pass the salad. Though if suicide is on one’s schedule, one has to be aware that killing oneself is as justified as not, like everything else, only in the barrel of thought that we have learned to think.

When we profoundly understand that nothing can ever be fixed in how our societies work today, until we continue to think the way we do, (cut everything into pieces as if division is truly possible) we can all comprehend that nobody will ever allow us to become who we are. Though what we are is exactly the same for every other being, which is a part of life and of this universe, in which no being is more or less important. Being foremost bundles of energy, when we make ourselves more important than something else, we have divided ourselves from everything else solely by ideas. We thus prefer thoughts above the energetic form of life itself. Without the latter, thoughts cannot be. Still, we are drilled to believe that thoughts (thus emotions) rule our reality.

Thought is a human social fiction, which is rather significant as a confirmation of our identity and completely insignificant to all else. Not being able to get rid of your-self is the same as trying to maintain that idea of self. In both cases there is a refusal to let go of what one thinks. Whether the package is pleasant or unpleasant, it satisfies the same mechanism. Though the problem is not about who one is, as a form of energy, we never can be a problem. Socially accepted ideas raise the illusion of hope to become what one is not yet or to lose what one thinks one is. If the tadpole announces that it will be an elephant tomorrow, we might have some doubts. Though only when there is hope attached to that exclamation, to fulfill a self in the face of society, language offers the unpleasant thought that hope equals suicide. Either as a tadpole or an elephant, for the tadpole this is the same. It is what it is. It cannot be more, nor less.

Embracing the thinking patterns that are bound to social logic, a state of being can easily switch and eventually become a fixation. Ideas intermingle with emotions and knowledge, social status; an incredible pressure of images bombards people daily. Embarrassment, lack, fulfillment, desire, humankind has made an incredible effort to narrow our perceptions. This makes the structure of the social illusion fragile, and meanwhile we were not raised to doubt its utilisation. Though what has not happened yet may certainly happen. Not in the affirmation of one’s identity, not in the utilisation of language to enhance oneself in front of society. This is the main point, to let go of which seems so implausible.

Once thoughts can be seen as a tool to not identify with, and to exploit one’s feelings continuously, there is some space to acknowledge that our consciousness surpasses all the social learned perceptions we’ve put into that feeling of ‘Me’. And this is the blind spot on which so many of us erect their convictions, on which societies build their bricks. At the same time it is this ‘Me’ which enfolds in everything. If there is a way to a more pleasant state of living for all of us, and everything that immeasurably surrounds us, this can be found in unfolding our illusions. We cannot truly get in or out, as is the case at the metro stop. We’re always in. Until and unless human beings profoundly understand that one for all and all for one is not just bound to three musketeers, suicide will only be one of the bigger outcomes of a dysfunctional humanity.

Talking about suicide is not about whether or not it is justified. The question is really how it got there in the first place, to occupy a person with such a thought. In the face of an immortal cosmos, understanding that we cannot truly set ourselves free, the question of being free is erased from the mind. We are more than what we’ve learned to be and less than what we think we are.