In the shadow of Hiroshima, Günther Anders argued for a renaissance of the imagination over mere perception:
“Not only has imagination ceased to live up to production, but feeling has ceased to live up to responsibility. It may still be possible to imagine or to repent the murdering of one fellow man, or even to shoulder responsibility for it; but to picture the liquidation of one hundred thousand fellow men definitely surpasses our power of imagination. The greater the possible effect of our actions, the less are we able to visualize it, to repent of it or to feel responsible for it; the wider the gap, the weaker the brake-mechanism. To do away with one hundred thousand people by pressing a button is incomparably easier than to slay one individual.
The “subliminal,” the stimulus too small to produce any reaction, is recognized in psychology; more significant, however, though never seen, let alone analyzed, is the “supra-liminal”: the stimulus too big to produce any reaction or to activate any brake-mechanism.”
If this was true in 1959, how much truer is it today, with more and more of our reality black-boxed and parceled out across webs of distanciation between button pusher and shock receiver?
Who is even pushing the buttons in the post-atomic age of AI?
Anders called this distance between cause and effect “the Promethean discrepancy,” where “he [technological] “abolition” of time and space distances does not amount to abolition of distances altogether, for today we are confronted with the daily increasing distance between production and imagination.”
It amuses me to read that one of the American Nuclear Society’s monographs is titled “Redemption of Prometheus.”