DEALING WITH THE NUCLEAR THREAT
Sandel, Michael J.
There are many things wrong with destroying humankind—the lives lost, the suffering and pain, the futures denied. But these terrible things are also wrong with wars that spare the species....
...meaning depends on memory...
...In the individualist view, the extinction of the species can only be another case, a bigger case, of murder...
...Indeed, even the threat to use nuclear weapons, implicit in the doctrine of deterrence, is at odds with legitimate government, and gives rise to the right to resist...
...But what does this difference consist in...
...It diminishes our humanity by effacing one of its distinctive expressions...
...The idea that we should cherish the common worlds we inhabit draws Kateb's emphatic rebuke...
...The memories they bear draw their resonance from local references and traditions...
...The language of individual rights does not help us say what is wrong with nuclear war...
...Nor does Kateb say enough about his individualistic alternative to show whether it can overcome such familiar difficulties as sustaining a scheme of rights without appealing to a sense of community beyond the social contract...
...The idea of a people is a pernicious atavism," the very thing modern individualism is meant to cure...
...he makes it difficult to see how extinction could be, so to speak, a fate worse than death...
...Once we believe that a people outlives the individuals who at any moment comprise it, we are more likely to prefer our own kind, to fight for abstractions, to travel down the road of massive ruin...
...This explains why genocide is a crime more heinous than the many murders it entails...
...A second case against extinction appeals to those particular common worlds defined by peoples and nations, cultures and communities...
...To care for the fate of a community is to care for a way of life more enduring than an individual life, but less expansive than humanity in general...
...According to Arendt, the permanence of the common world is essential to the possibility of human meaning...
...Kateb seems to concede as much when he writes, "The emphasis is on the death of millions of individuals...
...By destroying a world, even one more bounded than the world of humankind, genocide intimates the ultimate extinction...
...This he calls "the no-use doctrine...
...What is the moral difference between the loss of human lives and the end of human life...
...There are at least two ways of accounting for the special loss of extinction...
...But as George Kateb rightly insists, policy must answer to philosophy, even a policy so powerfully governed by military and technological imperatives as nuclear deterrence...
...What is puzzling is not his enterprise but his answer...
...it threatens the continuities that situate us in the world...
...What makes the nuclear nightmare different is not simply the scale of suffering or the number of deaths, but the possibility that human history could come to an end...
...Those who use nuclear weapons forfeit their right to govern, and can justifiably be overthrown, by violence if need be, by their fellow citizens or others...
...And as Kateb reminds us, it is the peril of extinction that makes the nuclear world "utterly distinct...
...The events they recall have meaning for their members even when they lack universal significance...
...To destroy not only persons but also a people is to extinguish a language and culture, a distinctive way of being...
...As 362 Hannah Arendt writes, The common world is what we enter when we are born and what we leave behind when we die...
...The suggestion that solidarity as such is a slippery slope to statism, however, is a caricature of vast proportions...
...Without some kind of communal language, the distinctness of the nuclear age is likely to defy description...
...But this denies our sense that the loss of the world is a loss beyond the loss of lives...
...But leaving aside these broader questions of political theory, the question remains how Kateb can cast extinction as a special kind of peril, while at the same time denying any notion of a common world worth preserving...
...It is alien, "Old World," "folk-mystique," a piece of superstition...
...Only by engaging in significant action can mere mortals aspire to an "earthly immortality...
...The nuclear peril is different because it threatens us whole...
...363...
...If individualism teaches us to outgrow all solidarities, what reason does it leave to love the world...
...But to escape the ruin of time, such acts must be remembered...
...Such speculation may seem as idle as it is grim...
...According to Kateb, the moral crux of the nuclear peril consists in the fact that nuclear war violates individual rights...
...Why should we worry about the survival of the world, apart from the reasons we have to worry about the survival of the millions who comprise it...
...The first appeals to the common world we share as human beings...
...Unlike other instruments of destruction, nuclear war introduces the possibility of extinction, and this possibility makes a moral difference...
...By tying his case to an individualistic ethic, Kateb obscures the distinctness of the peril he would confront...
...It is what we have in common not only with those who live with us, but also with those who were here before and with those who will come after us...
...But why, from the standpoint of individualism, is the destruction of humankind a loss beyond the loss of lives...
...Kateb's hard line against nuclear war seems to offer a firmness appropriate to the peril...
...Such a way of conceiving a people does not answer to the American experience...
...Far from an argument against annihilation, the conviction that cultures and peoples are worth preserving "constitutes a fertile source of the possibility of extinction...
...It is from this point of view that Jonathan Schell describes the nuclear predicament as "a crisis of life in the common world...
...And if we have no reason, why worry so about extinction...
...neither fits well with the individualism Kateb defends...
...Those who prize communal ties need to guard against the decay of pride into chauvinism, especially where the community commands, as it sometimes does, the power of a state...
...Kateb believes that individualist principles rule out the use of "any nuclear weapon, of any size, for any purpose, by any country...
...As the common world is the carrier of memory, no less than the possibility of human meaning depends on its survival...
...Since the only end of legitimate government is to protect individual rights, and since nuclear war violates those rights, no use of nuclear weapons is morally permissible...
...If this seems a small complaint for so fateful an event, Kateb claims nonetheless that the doctrine of individualism is "the most adequate idealism" for the nuclear age, the moral philosophy best suited "to see the nuclear predicament truly and to protest and resist its perpetuation...
Vol. 33 • July 1986 • No. 3
