The Lying Stones of Marrakech (48 page)

We may treat this botched experiment in biological warfare as light relief in a dark time, but the greatest evils often begin as farcical and apparently harmless escapades, while an old motto cites eternal vigilance as the price of
liberty. If Hitler had been quietly terminated after his ragtag band failed to seize local power in their Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 in Munich—even the name of this incident marks the derision then heaped on the protagonists—the history of our century might have unfolded in a much different, and almost surely happier, manner. Instead, Hider spent a mere nine months in jail, where he wrote
Mein Kampf
and worked out his grisly plans.

We humans may be the smartest objects that ever came down the pike of life's history on earth, but we remain outstandingly inept in certain issues, particularly when our emotional arrogance joins forces with our intellectual ignorance. Our inability to forecast the future lies foremost among these ineptitudes—not, in this case, as a limitation of our brains, but more as a principled consequence of the world's genuine complexity and indeterminism (see chapter 10 for a general discussion of our inability to predict coming events and patterns). We could go with this flow, but our arrogance intercedes, leading us to promote our ignorant intuitions into surefire forecasts about things to come.

I know only one antidote to the major danger arising from this incendiary mixture of arrogance and ignorance. Given our inability to predict the future, particularly our frequent failures to forecast the later and dire consequences of phenomena that seem impotent, or even risible, at their first faltering steps (a few reindeer with anthrax today, an entire human population with plague tomorrow), moral restraint may represent our only sure salvation. The wisdom of the Geneva Protocol lies in understanding that some relatively ineffective novelties of 1925 might become the principal horrors of a not-so-distant future. If such novelties can be nipped in the bud of their early ineffectiveness, we may be spared. We need only remember the legend of Pandora to recognize that some boxes, once opened, cannot be closed again.

The good sense in this vital form of moral restraint has been most seriously and effectively challenged by scientists who stand at the cutting edge of a developing technology and therefore imagine that they can control, or at least accurately forecast, any future developments. I dwell in the camp of scientists, but I want to illustrate the value of moral restraint as a counterweight to dangerous pathways forged either by complacency or active pursuit and fueled by false confidence about forecasting the future.

I told a story about aristocratic bumbling with ineffective biological weapons in World War I—but we might be in quite a fix today if we had assumed that this technology could never transcend such early ineptitude, and if we had not worked hard for international restriction. But a much deeper lesson may be drawn from the second innovative, and much more effective, technology
later banned by the Geneva Protocol: chemical weaponry in World War I. The primary figure for this lesson became one of the founders of my own field of modern evolutionary biology—J.B.S. Haldane (1892–1964), called “the cleverest man I ever knew” by Sir Peter Medawar, who was certainly the cleverest man I have ever known.

Haldane mixed so many apparently contradictory traits into his persona that one word stands out in every description of him I have ever read:
enigmatic
. He could be shy and kind or blustering and arrogant, elitist (and viciously dismissive of underlings who performed a task poorly) or egalitarian. (Haldane became a prominent member of the British Communist Party and wrote volumes of popular essays on scientific subjects for their
Daily Worker
. Friends, attributing his political views to a deep personal need for iconoclastic and contrarian behavior, said that he would surely have become a monarchist if he had lived in the Soviet Union.) Haldane held no formal degree in science but excelled in several fields, largely as a consequence of superior mathematical ability. He remains most famous, along with R. A. Fisher and Sewall Wright, as one of the three founders of the modern theory of population genetics,
especially for integrating the previously warring concepts of Mendelian rules for heredity with Darwinian natural selection.

J.B.S. Haldane in his World War I military outfit
.

But a different contradiction motivates Haldane's appearance as the focus of this essay. Haldane, a man of peace and compassion, adored war—or at least his role on the front lines in World War I, where he was twice wounded (both times seriously) and mighty lucky to come home in one piece. Some people regarded him as utterly fearless and courageous beyond any possible call of duty; others, a bit more cynically perhaps (but also, I suspect, more realistically), viewed him as a latter-day Parsifal—a perfect fool who survived in situations of momentary danger (usually created as a result of his own bravado and appalling recklessness) by a combination of superior intelligence joined with more dumb luck than any man has a right to expect. In any case, J.B.S. Haldane had a good war—every last moment of it.

He particularly enjoyed a spell of trench warfare against Turkish troops near the Tigris River, where, away from the main European front and unencumbered by foolish orders from senior officers without local experience, men could fight
mano a mano
(or at least gun against gun). Haldane wrote: “Here men were pitted against individual enemies with similar weapons, trench mortars or rifles with telescopic sights, each with a small team helping him. This was war as the great poets have sung it. I am lucky to have experienced it.” Haldane then offered a more general toast to such a manly occupation: “I enjoyed the comradeship of war. Men like war because it is the only socialized activity in which they have ever taken part. The soldier is working with comrades for a great cause (or so at least he believes). In peacetime he is working for his own profit or someone else's.”

Haldane's contact with chemical warfare began in great disappointment. After the first German gas attack at Ypres, the British War Office, by Lord Kitchener's direct command, dispatched Haldane's father, the eminent respiratory physiologist John Scott Haldane, to France in a desperate effort to overcome this new danger. The elder Haldane, who had worked with his son on physiological experiments for many years, greatly valued both J.B.S.'s mathematical skills and his willingness to act as a human guinea pig in medical experiments (an ancient tradition among biologists and a favorite strategy of the elder Haldane, who never asked his son to do anything he wouldn't try on himself). So J.B.S., much to his initial disgust, left the front lines he loved so well and moved into a laboratory with his father.

J.B.S. already knew a great deal about toxic gases, primarily through his role as father's helper in self-experimentation. He recalled some early work with his father on firedamp (methane) in mines:

To demonstrate the effects of breathing firedamp, my father told me to stand up and recite Mark Antony's speech from Shakespeare's
Julius Caesar
, beginning “Friends, Romans, countrymen.” I soon began to pant, and somewhere about “the noble Brutus” my legs gave way and I collapsed on to the floor, where, of course, the air was all right. In this way I learnt that firedamp is lighter than air and not dangerous to breathe.

(Have you ever read a testimony more congruent with the stereotype of British upper-class intellectual dottiness?)

The Haldanes,
père et fils
, led a team of volunteer researchers in vitally important work (no doubt saving many thousands of lives) on the effects of noxious substances and the technology of gas masks. As always, they performed the most unpleasant and dangerous experiments on themselves. J.B.S. recalled:

We had to compare the effects on ourselves of various quantities, with and without respirators. It stung the eyes and produced a tendency to gasp and cough when breathed.… As each of us got sufficiently affected by gas to render his lungs duly irritable, another would take his place. None of us was much the worse for the gas, or in any real danger, as we knew where to stop, but some had to
go to bed for a few days, and I was very short of breath and incapable of running for a month or so.

J.B.S. Haldane engaged in physiological self-experimentation on the effects of various gases
.

Thus, we cannot deny Haldane's superior knowledge or his maximal experience in the subject of chemical warfare. He therefore becomes an interesting test for the proposition that such expertise should confer special powers of forecasting—and that the technical knowledge of such people should therefore be trusted if they advocate a path of further development against the caution, the pessimism, even the defeatism of others who prefer moral restraint upon future technological progress because they fear the power of unforeseen directions and unanticipated consequences.

In 1925, as nations throughout the world signed the Geneva Protocol to ban chemical and biological warfare, J.B.S. Haldane published the most controversial of all his iconoclastic books: a slim volume of eighty-four pages entitled
Callinicus: A Defense of Chemical Warfare
, based on a lecture he had given in 1924. (Callinicus, a seventh-century Jewish refugee in Constantinople, invented Greek fire, an incendiary liquid that could be shot from siphons toward enemy ships or troops. The subsequent flames, almost impossible to extinguish, helped save the Byzantine empire from Islamic conquest for several centuries. The formula, known only to the emperor and to Callinicus' family, who held an exclusive right of manufacture, remained a state secret and still elicits controversy among scholars of warfare.)

Haldane's argument can be easily outlined. He summarized the data, including death tolls and casualty rates, from gas attacks in World War I and proclaimed the results more humane than the consequences of conventional weaponry.

A case can be made out for gas as a weapon on humanitarian grounds, based on the very small proportion of killed to casualties from gas in the War, and especially during its last year [when better gas masks had been made and widely distributed].

Haldane based this conclusion on two arguments. He first listed the chemical agents used in the war and branded most of them as not dangerous for having only transient effects (making the assumption that temporarily insensate soldiers would be passed by or humanely captured rather than slaughtered). He regarded the few chemicals that could induce more permanent harm—mustard gas, in particular—as both hard to control and relatively easy to avoid, with proper equipment. Second, he called upon his own frequent experience with
poison gases and stated a strong preference for these agents over his equally personal contact with bullets:

Besides being wounded, I have been buried alive, and on several occasions in peacetime I have been asphyxiated to the point of unconsciousness. The pain and discomfort arising from the other experiences were utterly negligent compared with those produced by a good septic shell wound.

Haldane therefore concluded that gas, for reasons of effectiveness as a weapon and relative humaneness in causing few deaths compared with the number of temporary incapacitations, should be validated and further developed as a primary military tactic:

I certainly share their [pacifists'] objection to war, but I doubt whether by objecting to it we are likely to avoid it in future, however lofty our motives or disinterested our conduct.… If we are to have more wars, I prefer that my country should be on the winning side.… If it is right for me to fight my enemy with a sword, it is right for me to fight him with mustard gas; if the one is wrong, so is the other.

I do not flinch before this last statement from the realm of ultimate realpolitik. The primary and obvious objection to Haldane's thesis in
Callinicus
—not only as raised now by me in the abstract, but also as advanced by Haldane's
numerous critics in 1925—holds that, whatever the impact of poison gas in its infancy in World War I (and I do not challenge Haldane's assessment), unrestrained use of this technology may lead to levels of effectiveness and numbers of deaths undreamed of in earlier warfare. Better the devil we know best than a devil seen only as an ineffective baby just introduced into our midst. If we can squelch this baby now, by moral restraint and international agreement, let's do so before he grows into a large and unstoppable adult potentially far more potent than any devil we know already.