Max-Born-Institut Berlin (MBI)

or were, the dogmas of dialectical materialism. Communist regimes claimed these to be scientific
in nature (Krieger, 1996). This claim was demolished by Max Born in his reply, unfortunately
unpublished, to a letter from the communist physicist Leon Rosenfeld (Born, 1955).
Liberation of the human mind from religious dogma began with my mother’s ancestor Martin
Luther [50] and some like-minded contemporaries. It was a prerequisite of the improvement
in the human condition during the last five hundred years (Born, GVR, 2002). Like Denis Healey
I am sure that the scientific revolution has created an irresistible demand for political freedom
(Healey, 1989). Berlin can thank the electronic media which the Wall could not keep out
[51] for causing its downfall and for re-unification.
The speed of scientific and technological advances makes it desperately clear that we are not
discarding the doctrinal shackles of history fast enough! In order to survive we have to storm
and sack – very quickly indeed – so many inherited mental prisons that, looking at and listening
to what is going on in the world, it seems an impossible task (Born, 2004). One also has to
contend with vested interests which ignore or falsify evidence, for example by the misleading
economists whom Bjorn Lomborg recently assembled in Copenhagen (Vidal, 2004). The curse
of gradualness – how imperceptibly your car’s fuel indicator creeps towards empty – is still hindering
worldwide awareness of global warming which already causes glacier meltdown and
hurricane build-up; climate change is happening too fast for the embattled and inadequate proposals
for slowing it down (Crutzen and Steffen, 2003; King, 2004; Lawton, 2004) [52, 53].
From this perspective, all the violent conflicts which dominate the World’s attention – always
somewhere, at present in Iraq and Dafour, however terrible for the people involved – are mere
distractions.
It is a sad thought that the flowering of rationality with its fruits in the conquests of disease,
discomfort and distance might still fail to win the battle against unshakeable dogmas. And it is
Fig. 51
Gustav Born’s family on the
Berlin Wall in 1982. From the
left: Sebastian, Sue with little
Lily, Carey and Max Jr.
Max Born • Gustav Born 27