Beyond Armageddon
Garvey, John
Of several minds: John Garvey BEYOND ARMAGEDDON THE POSSIBILITY OF WISDOM THE MOST distressing moral feature of the age is our ability to become numb. I don't mean to say that other ages were...
...At its worst a work of disturbing art leaves the participant (at either the creative or receiving end) satisfied that he or she, at least, has kept faith and responded with the proper outraged or horrified emotion...
...One could lament that it has taken six years to relearn that there is no alternative to these summits, but the lament should not detract from support for a process which must be encouraged on all fronts...
...It's more like a warning shot...
...What we need is a determined remembering, a return of reason to its source, a recovery of wisdom...
...It is easy to imagine villagers along the Irish coast not caring after the third or fourth Viking raid, however high the level of rape and murder...
...At this level, judgments of success must pass the test of principles agreed upon, decisions made, and treaties signed and ratified...
...Apparently a third of the people in the world afflicted with the black plague died of it, and fear of the plague and an inability to control it produced predictions of the end of the world and weird religious excesses...
...This inclination to settle for a meeting of the superpowers as an accomplishment in itself is understandable...
...Rome recalls the twentieth anniversary of Vatican II...
...Such people are not just running loose in Washington and Moscow, they're running things...
...This calls for an awakening, what some Eastern Christian writers have called "the descent of the mind into the heart...
...There is, with all the anger and near desperation, a hope for wisdom...
...The political dialogue must continue because the standards of success at the strategic level are much higher...
...Paul seems to have acknowledged (when he recommended a hymn which says, "Sleepers, awake...
...Lewis and Walker Percy...
...We are, as a species, as awful now as we ever were Ha our history...
...At its best it is like the irritant which creates the pearl in the oyster...
...Joan of Arc's murderous pedophile friend Gilles de Rais...
...The summit should be evaluated at two levels: political and strategic...
...The Psalms that rejoice in the murder of the enemy's children, the passions that any war unleashes, seem to be constants...
...One myth the myth of progress has us getting better...
...Miller's Abigail McCarthy will resume her column after a leave of several months...
...Miller traces our problem to the defeat of compassion (identified with the original wholeness pointed to in the Tao Te Ching) by Logos, or reason a rending of reason from its divine source...
...Both the summit and the synod should be seen as moments in a larger historical setting...
...Miller's introduction to Beyond Armageddon is as angry as A Canticle for Leibowitz was, but, I think, exhibits less hope...
...book appeared to good reviews in the general press and was praised, quite deservedly, by C.S...
...Although the rest of us watch the proceedings from afar, those two meetings and the historical issues they address will shape our fate and future...
...The test here is not personal encounters or atmosphere or facility of communication, but specific issues of arms control...
...Works of imagination are ways of wrenching the artist and the artist's audience awake...
...I prefer one which St...
...The anger which informs Miller's work first A Canticle for Leibowitz, and now the introduction to Beyond Armageddon, and the stories collected there makes it unlike ordinary writing, even ordinary polemical writing...
...Some of that is here...
...On the political level a consensus judgment of approval of the summit is easy to achieve for two reasons: expectations were very low and specific agreements were not needed to claim a success...
...The evil which sets in with becoming numb about thisand it is very hard given the onslaught of bare desperate data not to become numbis the fact that we are distracted from our own responsibility...
...JOHN GARVEY Commonweal: 696 AS THIS COLUMN is written, the summit in Geneva has just ended and the synod in Rome is about to begin...
...That mixture of sanctity and murder always struck me as monstrous...
...In Miller's anthology there are stories by J.G...
...The significance of the summit and the synod extends far beyond the lives of the participants...
...After six years of deafening silence between the superpowers, punctuated only by derogatory comments, the two heads of state met like statesmen...
...With this background, expectations were so minimal that the meeting was hailed as "historic" before the event occurred...
...Fine, Inc., $18.95), and has written an introduction...
...Geneva reminds us that 1985 marks the fortieth anniversary of the nuclear age...
...That is the myth (the story we explain ourselves to ourselves with) which compares ordinary waking human consciousness to a form of dreaming or sleepwalking or drunkenness...
...Miller ends the collection with this chilling fable one which begins on a deceptively easy, even whimsical note and he couldn't have made a more disturbing, or more appropriate, choice...
...But it is useful to think of the two summit and synod in tandem...
...There is another myth, an ancient one, which sees humanity as a species fallen from a golden age...
...It is a responsibility not only in the political sense that is, in some ways, the numbest end of the spectrum but one which involves outrage and imagination, a sensitivity and intelligence and anger which should precede politics...
...As someone who is convinced that we were 20 December 1985:695 never any good, I find the golden age myth silly...
...They may very well have been worse...
...the "once" may have been during the Apostolic or Victorian or pioneer era, but it was better than now, whenever it was...
...it is enough to know that something has been started...
...But it really isn't possible to say that the human race has become worse in recent years, given its past of pious slavers and people like St...
...The book is about what nuclear war would do to us or rather, it is about the mythology, since Megawar (a term Miller prefers to the too-easy "holocaust," with good reason) will not leave any life around to record itself...
...The worst science fiction is like the worst of O. Henry too pointed and sentimental...
...Still there is a hope that wisdom might be possible...
...It seems true to our experience, especially to all the forms of self-deception which inform our personal and public lives, and the numbness which surrounds so much of our waking awareness is an increasing indication that the metaphors of dream and sleepwalk are accurate enough...
...Regular meetings at the highest level should be a standard operating procedure...
...Ballard and Jim Aikin which prove the point...
...Someday someone should do a comparison of Ray Bradbury and O. Henry, the best and the worst stuff of both...
...Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz told of a post-atomic world, determined to destroy itself all over again after one total war...
...It isn't up to anyone to say exactly what such art should do...
...The forms the mythology takes are spelled out here in science fiction and fantasy, not all of it of equal quality, but all of it deserving some attention...
...and which some early Christians, gnostics among them, found compelling...
...The only hope is that wisdom might still be a collective human possibility...
...Neither is capable of settling the issues on its agenda...
...Monstrosity, like the poor, we will have always with us...
...Now Miller has joined Martin J. Greenberg in editing an anthology, Beyond Armageddon (DonaldI...
...In A Canticle for Leibowitz, Miller tells of an order of monks who preserve what knowledge they can salvage from the ruined civilization which preceded them, but do it with a wisdom and balance which the cultures surrounding them lack...
...We really can bring many of our darkest dreams to life...
...In 1959 a fine, strange, powerful book appeared...
...Our age is horrible, in some ways uniquely so...
...The best science fiction (I think especially of the writing of the late Philip K. Dick, and of classics like A Canticle for Leibowitz) is ignored by people who should be reading it...
...We were better once...
...So will we have our ability to become numb...
...WalterM...
...The occasion for his anger is clear and right: When human extinction (as a result of a decision) is assigned a probability, however small, and a finite negative value, however large, and these two quantities are multiplied, and added to a list of other such products to obtain the expectation for a given political or military decision, the statistician and his employer should be detected, apprehended, and led away in strait jackets to the nearest lobotomy ward...
...Not caring is one way of dealing with horror...
...I don't mean to say that other ages were good at paying attention to horror...
...In these terms, Geneva high20 December 1985: 697...
...What makes our age unique is not how horrible we are that is the constant but the fact that our worst self-deception and delusion have a demonic technological echo now...
...It is possible for the human race to end all life on earth, at least its own (and I am enough of a species-centered sort to find that tragedy enough...
...The Aikin story, "My Life in the Jungle," is particularly good...
Vol. 112 • December 1985 • No. 22
