How the world’s greatest saviour became its greatest villain

Welcome to the first issue of Minor Insight

“You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”

If you’ve ever read my writing before, you’ll know how much I like to overuse this quote.

It comes from Chris Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises. A surprisingly philosophical film, considering its genre.

And given this is the very first issue of Minor Insight, I thought it would be a good place to start.

So in this issue, we’re going to look at the most quintessential example of this quote. A man named Fritz Haber.

The story of his life is incredible. Literally incredible. As in, almost impossible to believe.

As you read on, I can virtually guarantee you’ll first see him as one of humanity’s greatest heroes, and later as one of its arch villains.

So, in this issue we’re going to take a look at his life, and then take a look at how we think about the ideas of “good” and “evil”.

What a nice, light topic for our first issue, eh?

Humanity’s greatest hero

Fritz Haber was born in what is now Poland in 1868.

His gift to the world was food.

He developed a chemical technique called the Haber-Bosch process in 1909.

It allowed people to produce nitrogen for farming on a scale never before seen. People called it creating “bread from air”.

Without it, the world could only produce enough food for roughly 4 billion people. So, half the people alive today would not be here without his invention.

That’s why the Haber-Bosch process is known as the greatest scientific discovery of the 20^th century, if not ever.

And it unsurprisingly won Haber the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1918.

As a result of his discovery Haber is credited with saving more lives than anyone in history, past or present.

But he certainly didn’t die a hero. And there are not many who would call him a “good man” today.

How Haber became “the father of chemical warfare”

Being a world-leading chemist, and a proud German, when the First World War broke out, Haber was eager to help.

So shortly after his lifesaving “bread from air” discovery, at the request of the state, he turned his genius towards the science of killing.

He developed the world’s first chemical weapons: poison gas.

And he was right there on the battlefield when the Germans released their first poison gas attack at the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915.

It killed 1,100 people and injured around 7,000.

Haber was happy with his invention, believing it would bring a faster end to the war and ultimately save more lives.

But poison gas is a horrible way to die. Essentially, your lungs melt and you drown in your own blood.

And because this new weapon had never been seen before, people didn’t initially run from it, they stayed in the trenches as it floated in.

Haber’s wife was also a brilliant chemist. She was the first woman to ever be awarded a chemistry PhD in Germany. And she didn’t share his thoughts on weapons of mass mutilation.

She called the development of poison gas a "perversion of science".

She was also a women’s rights activist and became increasingly depressed at the loss of her livelihood after her marriage to Haber. At the time, wives were not expected to have careers.

So when Haber came back from that first poison gas attack, upon hearing about the deaths he had inflicted, she killed herself with his service revolver.

Haber seemed unphased and returned to duty almost immediately to oversee gas attacks against the Russians.  He reportedly didn’t even attend her funeral.

But this wasn’t the end for Haber. Far from it.

The Jew who helped create the death camps

Anti-Semitism was rife in Germany at the turn of the 20^th century, and as we know now, it would only get worse.

In 1933 the Nazis came to power. And although Haber had already converted to Christianity decades before, this didn’t help him.

Even though he had been monumental in Germany’s war effort, and created “bread from air”, the Nazis didn’t care.

In the eyes of the state, he was still just a Jew.

Everything he had done in his life he had done with service to Germany in mind. And now Germany wanted him gone.

One day when he arrived to work, he was greeted by a sign, which read: “The Jew, Haber, is not allowed in here.”

He went into exile and died of a heart attack in a hotel in Basel one year later.

So, he would never know the role another one of his inventions, a pesticide called Zyklon B, would play in the second world war.

Zyklon B was the gas the Nazis used to murder more than one million people in death camps, including members of Haber’s family.

What message can we take from Haber’s life?

On the one hand, you have a brilliant, patriotic chemist responsible for saving more lives than any other person, living or dead.

On the other, you had a war criminal who invented poison gas used in the First World War and was monumental in creating the gas used to murder one million people in the holocaust.

A man who served the state over anything else. Over himself, his family and his tribe. I’m sure in his view, this was the right thing to do.

And I’m sure in his position, many, if not most people would do the same thing. Evil people rarely set out to be evil. Most genuinely believe they are doing the right thing.

Haber genuinely thought his poison gas would bring a faster end to the war. And let’s not forget, this war was unlike anything anyone had ever seen. It was almost indescribably horrific.

So anything which could bring an end to it sooner, Haber probably thought was a good thing.

As for his work on Zyklon B. Well, that brings up a more difficult question.

He could never have known that a pesticide he helped develop would be used to systematically murder more than a million people – including members of his own family.

It wasn’t like he developed Zyklon B with mass murder in mind – even though he’d developed other poison gases for exactly that purpose in the past.

Was Fritz Haber good or evil?

Was Fritz Haber good or evil? It’s a hard question, right?

And I guess it depends on our own personal worldview.

If you subscribe to the utilitarian worldview – that “the right action is the one that produces the most good for the greatest number of people” ­– then you may conclude Fritz Haber was a good man.

His actions – directly and indirectly – led to roughly 1.2 million deaths and 4 billion lives.

And it’s not like utilitarianism is some tiny, irrelevant branch of philosophy.

Utilitarian principles shape all aspects of modern society – from healthcare to transportation to infrastructure to the environment to education to the rule of law.

(Here’s a link to the history of utilitarianism, if you’re interested in reading up on it.)

Most governments form their policies with the aim of doing the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

(Note the use of “aim” there.)

And I’m sure many politicians believe that’s what they are devoting their lives to – doing the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

(Before they become jaded and later corrupt, that is.)

So, despite all the suffering you could… could argue Fritz Haber was a good man.

But, come on! He doesn’t really seem like a good man, does he?

So, what if instead of utilitarianism, you take a different worldview?

I’ve always liked the Christian quote: “Whatever you have done to the least of my brethren, you have done to me."

And I recently heard a similar one from Judaism: “In every person is the whole world.”

These basically mean every life matters immeasurably.

And if you believe that, then it’s pretty hard to justify directly killing thousands of people and indirectly killing more than a million – no matter how many lives your discovery allowed the planet to sustain.

Or how about this…

Maybe I’ve just seen too many films and read too many books. But, when it comes to morality, what if it’s a person’s narrative arc that matters?

Imagine that Haber’s first big breakthrough wasn’t the Haber-Bosch process, but chemical weapons…

And imagine that after releasing them on the battlefield he realised he had done a terrible thing and spent the rest of his life trying to atone for it…

And this attempt to atone led to his creation of the Haber-Bosch process, which went on to save 4 billion lives.

I think then it would be much harder to say if he was a “good” or “bad” person.

The actions are the same, but the order and the reasons behind them are different.

So maybe, we aren’t just defined by our actions, but by the order we did them in. And by our intentions as well.

It’s like my old favourite Dostoevsky said: "Judge [people] not by what they are, but by what they strive to become."

Of course, you could always take the nihilistic view that there is no inherent meaning in anything and so it doesn’t matter how many lives or deaths you enabled.

But then, you wouldn’t subscribe to the concepts of good or evil either. So that’s kind of a moo point.

Was Fritz Haber good or evil? Honestly, I think you could make good arguments either way.

But one thing is for sure, he certainly had an incredible life of both good and evil.

And I don’t think anyone fits our opening quote better than him.

Okay, that’s all for today.

The next issue won’t be as heavy, I promise.

I’m actually thinking of writing about Michael Saylor’s “infinite money glitch”.

I think it’s interesting that his company, MicroStrategy, is credited with triggering the dotcom collapse, due to illegal accounting practices…

And now, he’s created a new kind of accounting, by borrowing billions and filling his company’s coffers with Bitcoin.

I’m seeing a lot of talk about how the next big crypto or stock market crash could be triggered by Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy – for the second time.

Might be a fun thing to look into.

Okay, that really is all for today.

Thanks for reading.

Harry