NUCLEAR GUARDIANSHIP FORUM, On The Responsible Care of Radioactive Materials
Issue # 3, Spring 1994, p. 15.
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"Atomic Priesthood" is Not Nuclear Guardianship
A Critique of Thomas Sebeok's Vision of the Future
by Susan Garfield
In 1981 Thomas A. Sebeok, consultant to the Bechtel Group's Human
Interference Task Force,[1] developed the notion of an "atomic priesthood."
The report he made to the Task Force addresses the potential dangers of
human interference during the next 10,000 years at the deep burial sites for
radioactive waste envisioned by the government. Sebeok is quick to point out
that 10,000 years is not a long enough period to consider, given the much
longer term toxicity of the wastes. Although he does not question the
premise of deep burial directly, his preamble does convey the mind-boggling
severity of the unsolved problem of disposal, and the dismal accumulation of
"awesome mountains of such wastes." Having in a sense made his disclaimers,
he proceeds to his assignment, arriving at several recommendations for the
first 10,000 years.
Values and Assumptions
While Professor Sebeok's report does include brilliant
contributions to the challenge of communicating effectively with
those of the far future, a close reading reveals some disturbing
values and assumptions. Foremost is an implicit mistrust of human
nature -- dangerous because it is implicit and assumed to be well
founded. He never openly addresses the issue of whether we can
trust humanity now and in the future to face up to its problems
and so does not envision the conditions that would allow this
confidence to be well founded. The consequences of trust -- or
mistrust -- need consideration.
Instead, Sebeok's reliance on secrecy, manipulation and deceit --
and the accompanying perceived need to create an elite he calls an
"atomic priesthood" that holds the secrets and does the
manipulating -- suggest lack of respect for human capabilities.
Such assumptions reflect the political era in which this report
was written and critiquing them may help clarify the radically
different values and assumptions of nuclear guardianship.
Several excerpts from "Pandora's Box in Aftertimes,"[2] a 1982
version of Sebeok's 1981 report to the Bechtel Group, convey what
Professor Sebeok addressed as an expert in semiotics, the
discipline that studies both verbal and averbal systems of
communication.
"The objective is to minimize the possibility of future
human intrusion at the site; therefore, a disposal
strategy needs to be developed that takes cognizance of
the soundest knowledge currently available in the field
of general semiotics...[which] is relevant to the
problems of human interference and message exchanges
involving long periods of time, over which spoken and
written languages are sure to decay to the point of
incomprehensibility, making it necessary to utilize a
perspective that goes well beyond linguistics..."
Thus far Sebeok seems to be addressing the problem of warning
those of a vastly different time and culture of the existence of
waste depositories so that no one underestimates their toxicity.
He gives considerable space to the fascinations of theoretical
semiotics, explaining the encoding, transmittal and receiving of
various forms of messages and emphasizing redundancy, which means
utilizing as many ways possible, both verbal and averbal, to
convey the same information so enough will survive the millennia
without errors. Yet some of Sebeok's actual recommendations then
appear to go beyond the realm of semiotics altogether. Unwittingly
perhaps, he enters that of depth psychology, although once there
he does not delve deeply at all. Perhaps that is because he is
still thinking technically, stressing expediency and oblivious to
the most basic need of the human spirit: for meaning. It is here
that his oddly dispirited vision of what he calls `aftertimes'
becomes troubling with its social and political assumptions.
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As more and more people
identify with the task of
nuclear guardianship,
the less we need fear
the loss of vitality and
the broken psychic connection
that so incapacitate our times.
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If the term "aftertimes" suggests somehow a discontinuity, nuclear
guardianship assumes a profoundly intimate relationship with those
not yet born. An age-old sense of continuity has always provided
sanity and meaning for humankind. To belong to the great sweep of
life in nature has been to bequeath our hopes to our descendants'
children's children down through time, based on confidence in, and
therefore participation in, a living future.
The urgent need now is to redeem the anguish and even despair due
to the loss of that confidence by making every effort to protect
future beings from our radioactive legacy, with its threat to the
genetic coding of all species. As more and more people allow
themselves to become informed, and identify with the task of
nuclear guardianship, the less we need fear the loss of vitality
and the broken psychic connection that so incapacitate our times.
A New Cultural Institution
A past issue of the Nuclear Guardianship Forum proposed
"structures...involving people who teach about, help remember, and
even monitor nuclear repositories." Such structures could evolve
an entirely new institution, one nonetheless expressive of
humankind's oldest and deepest values, openly maintaining at
guardianship sites an ongoing cultural tradition down the
centuries. At these facilities the commitment to rigorous service
of well trained nuclear guardians, whose specific tasks and
functions would be highly visible to everybody, could perhaps only
be realized in a civilization that had faced up to the nuclear
issue and affirmed principles such as those suggested in the
Nuclear Guardianship Ethics [see page 10].
Sebeok's recommendations, however, while also pertaining to the
formation of new cultural institutions, seem devoid of an ethos.
The pervasive condescension towards the populace, kept in
ignorance about radioactive burial sites millennium after
millennium, expresses assumptions of the past fifty years of the
nuclear age. But these have now fallen into disrepute.
To the credit of the Department of Energy under Secretary Hazel
O'Leary, the public is finally learning how, for decades,
unsuspecting populations were exposed to radioactivity in the name
of highly classified medical research and weapons testing.
Implicit in the Secretary's decision to declassify state secrets
and reveal governmental deceit and harmful acts there is a
confidence in human nature to respond appropriately. This
confidence can help us come to terms with the nuclear mess that
has been created. To reveal violations of the nation's most
cherished principles while also committing to a transformative
vision might seem too daring, even naive, to some. But in fact the
energy released by this very faith in human capabilities may
actually allow to happen what would not be dreamed possible
otherwise.
Transformation...
or a Diminished World
In sharp distinction, Sebeok's lack of confidence in human nature
actually requires a diminished world characterized by deliberate
deception on the part of the recognized experts, the "atomic
priesthood." There, in "aftertimes," manipulation extends even to
the sacred. Sebeok specifically recommends:
"that information be launched and artificially passed on
into the short-term and long-term future with the
supplementary aid of folkloristic devices, in particular
a combination of an artificially created and nurtured
ritual-and-legend...
"The legend-and-ritual, as now envisaged, would be
tantamount to laying a `false trail,' meaning that the
uninitiated will be steered away from the hazardous site
for reasons other than the scientific knowledge of the
possibility of radiation and its implications;
essentially, the reason would be accumulated
superstition to shun a certain area permanently.
"A ritual annually renewed can be foreseen, with the
legend retold year-by-year... The actual `truth' would
be entrusted exclusively to an -- as it were -- `atomic
priesthood', that is, a commission of knowledgeable
physicists, experts in radiation sickness,
anthropologists, linguists, psychologists, semioticians,
and whatever additional administrative expertise may be
called for now and in the future. Membership in this
elite `priesthood' would be self-selective over time."
------------------------------------
The energy released by this faith in
human capabilities may actually
allow to happen what would not be
dreamed possible otherwise.
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To deal with the fact "that information tends to decay over time",
Sebeok arrives at his most creative recommendation, useful only if
winnowed out from his notion of an atomic priesthood. His three
generational relay system directly addresses the dilemma of how to
communicate with the far, far future.
"What is being proposed here is a so-called `relay
system' of information transmission, which rests on a
very simple scheme: to divide the 10,000 year epoch
envisaged into manageable segments of shorter, and,
presumably, reasonably foreseeable periods. Assuming
that 10,000 years is equivalent to 300 generations of
humankind, it is recommended that the messages at the
burial site be designed for only three generations
ahead, to wit, our children, grandchildren and
great-grandchildren...
"This message, however, would have to be supplemented by
a meta-message -- coded in the same combination of
familiar verbal/averbal signs -- incorporating a plea
and a warning that the object-message at the site be
renewed by whatever coding devices seem to be maximally
efficient, roughly, 250 years hence. That future
object-messages should, in turn, incorporate a similar
meta-message for the generation 500 years from now to
act comparably, and so on, and on, up to 10,000 years
ahead..."
Having presented the generational legacy so compellingly, Sebeok
then betrays his own vision, seemingly unaware that exclusive
control of information can become an insidious form of holding
power over others.
"The disadvantage of the relay system is, of course,
that there is no assurance that future generations would
obey the injunctions of the past. The `atomic
priesthood' would be charged with the added
responsibility of seeing to it that our behest, as
embodied in the cumulative sequence of meta-messages, is
to be heeded -- if not for legal reasons, then for moral
reasons, with perhaps the veiled threat that to ignore
the mandate would be tantamount to inviting some sort of
`supernatural retribution'."
Culminating with this peculiarly amoral notion, "Pandora's Box in
Aftertimes" can perhaps be read as a morality tale on the failure
of secrecy and denial. It demonstrates that the very premise of
"out of sight, out of mind" deep geological burial of radioactive
materials leads inevitably to procedures in the social, political
and spiritual life of the people that are not any less destructive
because they are absurd.
The Oslo Conference, convened to consider the same problem, [see
box page 14] pointed out that "[Myths] are expressions of deep
human patterns [that] can never be deliberately or consciously
created... It is questionable if an `artificial' myth will last
long if not supported by some evidence." Rich with meaningful
symbols that spring spontaneously from deep, knowing layers of the
human psyche, the function of myth and ritual is to relate
individuals to the ultimate conditions of their existence. Perhaps
the greatest danger of Sebeok's vision of the future is its
trivialized perception of human nature, one that has no confidence
in the individual's capacity for a relation to reality itself.
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Susan Garfield. is a Jungian psychotherapist in private practice
in San Francisco. The spiritual / ecological crises and the quest
for meaning are addressed in her PBS film currently in
development.
1. A study conducted under the auspices of the National Waste Terminal
Storage Program for submission to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory
Commission via the Department of Energy. As of 1982 Sebeok stated it
was not endorsed by the DOE.
2. Chapter 13 in I Think I Am A Verb: More Contributions to the Doctrine
of Signs, Thomas A. Sebeok, Plenum Press, 1986.