The Fog Of War: From Enlightenment to Romanticism 

Fog Of War and 258:

Robert McNammara As Ideal Enlightenment Figure: Applying Scientific Rationality to Social Issues

Renaissance/Enlightenment Science --> Technology --> Mankind's growing power over life and death.

Where does morality fit in???

Can Enlightenment/Rational Ethics cope with this new power?

In what ways does Robert McNammara represent Viktor Frankenstein, and how do both help us understand:  Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Romanticism?

“LeMay said ‘If we’d lost the war, we would have been tried as war criminals,’ and I think he was right. He, and I’d say I, we, were behaving as war criminals…. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”

“In order to win a war, is a nation justified in killing 100,000 civilians in one night?” “Would it be moral to not burn to death 100,000 Japanese civilians, but instead lose hundreds of thousands of American lives in an invasion?”

Resume:

1937 B.A. Economics, Minors in Mathematics Philosophy, UC, Berkeley
Member of the UC Berkeley Golden Bear Battalion, Army ROTC

1939 Masters Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration

1940 Returns to Harvard to teach in Business School (youngest, highest paid Assistant Professor of his time)

1943 - 1946 Army Captain, mainly under Army Air Force Office of Statistical Control

1946 Joins Ford Motor Company, hired as one of ten "Whiz Kids" to reform Ford

1960 First non-Ford family member appointed President of Ford Motor Company

1961-1968 Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson (responsible for running Viet Nam war)

1968-1981 Head of World Bank

Tracks on DVD:

14:00 Part Two "Rationality will not save us" just up to 16:22

Then start at 24:00 minutes up thru 43:00

 Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from Former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNammara