Hate Mail - Science Is What Scientists Say Is Science They Have To Live With The Shame As Well As The Glory

Eugen Fischer was a scientist, he published science as science which was considered science by other scientists who also hired him to join science faculties at some of the most impressive scientific establishments of his time.  His work was cited as science by other scientists and read as science by other people.   He was consulted to give scientific advice by governments who provided him with resources to do science with.   That those resources were people and their bodies after they had been murdered did nothing to cause the scientists of his time to reject his results or even his means of obtaining those results.

No one can second guess those scientists who gave Eugen Fischer the status of scientist and his work the status of science,  I can see no evidence that another Eugen Fischer couldn't, in some places, today or in the future, have that kind of career in science and, like Fischer, suffer nothing for it.  He was hardly the only Nazi scientist, not even the only one who profited from the living bodies, the corpses and body parts of those held in death camps, his student, Dr. Mengele had those delivered on request from other scientists, fresh from the death camps, there are certainly university and other departments of science which have body parts of those murdered in Nazi genocides on their shelves.  It isn't that long ago that the skulls Eugene Fischer took from his work in the death camps in East Africa in the first decade of the last century were, finally, returned for burial.

I think in the grotesque superstition that science is anything but a human invention, governed by human choices and decisions of what to do and how to do it, it was a huge danger to exempt scientists and their work from considerations of morality.   I have thought of the scenario for a story in which very advanced beings from elsewhere come and try to convince people at the end of the line that it is only by forcing morality onto science that will save us and our planet.  That it was the stupidest thing human beings ever did, to allow our most potent and effective methods to be exercised in the absence of a controlling consideration of the moral consequences of its powerful discoveries and creations.   That anyone, looking at the horrors that science practices and unleashes, eugenics, nuclear weapons, carbon pollution of the environment, etc. who doesn't see the problem is too stupid to allow that much leeway or power.

No, I'm not putting science in quotes anymore when it's something scientists accepted as science.  Maybe they should consider the truth that confession and repentance are prerequisites for learning from your sins as well as your mistakes.   It's stupid for non-scientists to allow them to avoid living up to what they've sold as science, to take moral responsibility and shame for what they do as well as reap the profits and the glory.

Update:  Noting that Bruno Bettelheim criticized the use of the word "Holocaust" and acting as if the mass murder of Jews was more important than the mass murders of other groups was in no way a "shout out" it was a citation of someone who said something before I did.  I tend to try to acknowledge where I got ideas from.   I'm surprised you don't just adore him because he was in one of Woody Allen's movies, that usually absolves all sins for you.

Since I'm on the record as being entirely skeptical of psychology, psychiatry and, especially, psychoanalysis (look what it did for Woody and his, um, ... family) I am certainly not endorsing Bettelheim's professional work and, considering what I said above, I would not hold it or him above the same standard of criticism that I do anyone else.