Reflecting on Humanity 80 Years After the Bombing of Hiroshima

The flash of the A-bomb that flattened Hiroshima 80 years ago was bright enough to burn silhouettes of its victims into the surrounding infrastructure. It was one of those moments that deeply impacted postmodern thinking. Despite all the so-called advancements that humanity had achieved, we used our best scientists and researchers to produce human casualties on a level never before seen. War is not something new, and has been with us since our departure from Garden of Eden, but in the twentieth century we advanced it all the way to the point of evaporating cities in a matter of seconds.

During the nineteenth century humanity was advancing and brimming with optimism. Advances in technology—as primitive as they seem to us now—had convinced people that we were on the verge of solving our very worst problems once and for all. From exhibits at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair to the speeches made in legislative assemblies all over the world, we seemed to have convinced ourselves that we were about to step into a much-enlightened era inwhich pain, trauma, and suffering would fade into the background.

Ellen G. White challenged that optimism at the time. “There seemed to be a little time of peace,” she wrote. “Once more the inhabitants of the earth were presented before me; and again everything was in the utmost confusion. Strife, war, and bloodshed, with famine and pestilence, raged everywhere. Other nations were engaged in this war and confusion. War caused famine. Want and bloodshed caused pestilence. And then men’s hearts failed them for fear, ‘and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth.’ “*

Two world wars deflated our optimism, and when troops walked into such places as Auschwitz at the end of World War II, it destroyed much of our belief in human potential. The wars displayed some of the darkest aspects of who we were, and suddenly the views of postmodern philosophers—who claimed life had no meaning other than the narrative we chose to lay over it—made more sense. Many people, especially in the West, despaired of finding meaning.

And then, in a matter of seconds, we proved that we had harnessed the atom, not to provide cheap and easy energy, but to cause mass destruction. There are arguments on both sides of the moral issue of dropping the nuclear bomb, some insistent that the act saved countless lives by ending the war quickly, but no matter where one stands on it, it still underscores that our biggest problem as human beings is not technological but heart-based. We are fallen, vividly illustrated by macabre silhouettes on a sidewalk.

*Ellen G. White, Testimonies for the Church (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press Pub. Assn., 1948), vol. 1, p. 268.