Shortly before his death, Arthur Miller asked: "How many times do we have to indulge the same idiocies for which we must later be ashamed?"

Brecht wrote The Life of Gallileo in Santa Monica, California in the 'forties, while Oppenheimer and his colleagues busied themselves just a little ways up the road. Brecht himself was 'shown the instruments' by the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities, and recanted his own theories. He fled for Europe next day, where he ended his career under the watchful eye of the East German Stasi.

Brecht's epic theatre asks the audience to engage with it on an intellectual level. There is no room for empathy with the characters. Sitting in the Project Arts Centre in Dublin last night, we smiled knowingly at references to seventeenth century idiocies, reminded of the current rise of Creationism, of those who are being 'shown the instruments' in Guantanamo Bay and Iraq, of individuals such as Aung Sung Suu Kyi, locked away in seclusion by smug, middle-ranking officials.

Two things struck me as particularly interesting. The first was the role of business in the play. As far as the merchants and mill owners of Italy were concerned, Gallileo could do what he liked so long as his innovations made them money. A mill owner even offers to smuggle him into the Venetian Republic, away from the influence of the Inquisition, and it is only Galileo's arrogance that loses him this opportunity to escape.

The second was the pertinence of the play to the great intellectual struggle underway in the USA at present. In a society created to provide freedom from religious persecution, it is terrifying that public opinion is being increasingly influenced by intolerant groups and individuals trying to suppress homosexuality and the works of Charles Darwin.

For me, these two issues raised a question I hadn't thought of before.

To what extent does business have a role in the current debates taking place in the USA, between Christian fundamentalism and liberalism? Diversity management is the new buzzword in European business circles, but it has been kicking around American corporations a lot longer. Is it contributing to the debate? Or is it sitting on the fence, save for a few individual 'mill owners', like it did with Galileo?