At first blush, The Odyssey and Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s back-to-back smash hits, could not seem more different. The former stands on the cusp of history and myth at the end of the bronze age, while the latter is within living memory and takes place at the dawn of the atomic age. They do, however, share a focus on a protagonist who uses his intelligence to win a war and then must grapple with the destruction he has wrought. In exploring the twin creative and destructive tendencies contained within the power of intellect, Nolan’s movies can be read as an expression of Marxist cultural theorist Theodor Adorno’s concept of the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’ and a timely critique of the notion of progress.
Adorno and the Enlightenment
The Enlightenment was an early modern European intellectual movement with roots in the 18th century. Its leading thinkers include philosophers like Gottfried Leibniz and Rene Descartes and scientists like Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon. It sought to systematize knowledge and make the world knowable. Its clarion call, in Immanuel Kant’s famous turn of phrase, was sapere aude – dare to know.
The Enlightenment is often framed in contrast to the so-called dark ages of medieval Europe and its association with secularization and rejection of myth. These thinkers developed the scientific method and brought rationalism to bear on many different aspects of society, from physics to governance. They thought that, with each new discovery, they could create a society that was always improving – in a word, progress.
For Adorno and his collaborator Max Horkheimer, however, enlightenment presented an enigma. From their vantage point as Jewish Marxists amidst the ashes of Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Nazi Holocaust, claims of European enlightenment and progress could only be treated with great skepticism. In introducing their classic text Dialectic of Enlightenment, the two theorists state that their task was “nothing less than the discovery of why mankind, instead of entering into a fully human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism” . If enlightenment promised the perfectibility of man and society, why then do we live amidst horrors beyond any comprehension? How ought we understand “the indefatiguable self-destructiveness of enlightenment”?
Adorno and Horkheimer answer this question by pointing to a dynamic contradiction – a dialectic – that runs to the heart of enlightenment. By bringing rationality to bear on social problems like housing, sewage, medicine, and economics, the enlightenment promised a perfectable society. Yet, just as surely as enlightenment can be nobly aimed, so too can it serve the most destructive ends. For Adorno, nothing better epitomized this destructive element of enlightenment than the Nazi Holocaust, wherein scientific reason, industrial power, and modern logistics were used to create one of the most efficient killing machines that the world has ever known.
The dark side of progress
Enlightenment might mean progress, but progress is not inherently good. Adorno famously quipped that progress has not led us “from savagery to humanity, but … from the slingshot to the H-bomb” . Herein lies the connection to Oppenheimer. J. Robert Oppenheimer, another left leaning Jewish intellectual and contemporary of Adorno’s, was recruited into the Manhattan Project because of his fear of what a Nazi victory might mean and his desire to avert it. The bomb he developed, however, was never used against the Nazis, but instead against Japan, leveling whole cities and vaporizing tens of thousands of human beings in the blink of an eye. Rather than save humanity from destruction, he created the means by which humanity could destroy itself like never before. The atomic bomb represents simultaneously the pinnacle of scientific achievement and the basest of humanity’s destructive instincts. Splitting the atom has enabled us to power whole cities, or to raze them to the ground at the push of a button. There is, perhaps, no better example of the dialectic of enlightenment.
The Odyssey obviously predates the Enlightenment by several millennia, but Adorno and Horkheimer spend a considerable chunk of their book discussing the Homeric epic as a metaphor for the dialectic of enlightenment. If enlightenment has often meant the use of reason to overcome superstition and myth, then Odysseus is the enlightenment figure par excellence, using his cunning to outsmart the gods and fight against fate.
Adorno and Horkheimer position enlightenment in opposition to myth: “the program of the Enlightenment was the disenchantment of the world; the dissolution of myths and substitution of knowledge for fancy” . Enlightenment shines the light of knowledge in the dark of phenomena that previously could only be explained by mythology. Zeus’ lightning becomes knowable and explainable as electricity. The wrath of Poseidon is reduced to weather that can be tracked using a radar. Enlightenment thus seeks to liberate man from fear and produce a mastery over nature.
This mastery, however, comes at a cost and produces new myths of its own. Enlightenment makes all things quantifiable and subject to rationality. Just as capitalism reduces everything to the almighty dollar, so too does enlightenment, reducing everything to numbers, such that everything becomes the same as everything else. All that cannot be reduced to numbers – such things as love, beauty, justice, and hospitality – are expunged. Enlightenment, then, for Adorno and Horkheimer, “is mythic fear turned radical… Nothing at all may remain outside, because the mere idea of outsideness is the very source of fear” . Enlightenment, in its quest to banish myth, sets up a new totalitarian myth: that all of human experience is knowable and reducible to numbers, and that anything which isn’t is a lie.
Nolan’s Odyssey exhibits this dialectic just as much as the Homeric original. The story itself has one foot in myth and another in history, with the historicity of the Trojan War subject to much debate among scholars. Odysseus brings the cunning of reason to bear on the mythic problems that confront him. He outsmarts the cyclops, the sirens, and Circe, just as he outsmarts the Trojans. In doing so, Odysseus shatters the law of Zeus, the non-rational injunction to hospitality that governs his world. Nolan is clear – perhaps even putting too fine a point on it – that his use of reason leads not to civilization, but to a new barbarism and civilizational collapse.
Progress or barbarism?
Christopher Nolan has provided us with two profoundly Adornian tales about the power and limits of enlightenment. Oppenheimer shows us how enlightenment contains the seeds of its own corruption and can serve domination as easily as it can liberation. The Odyssey shows us what we lose when all is put in the service of rationality. At a moment when humanity stands amidst the wonders and destruction that technology has wrought – from ‘Artificial Intelligence’, capable of medical miracles and the devaluation of artistry, to industrial power capable of ending want and endless ecological destruction – these movies highlight the contradiction at the heart of enlightenment and remind us that progress can as easily lead to barbarism as it can to civilization.
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