Alternatives to the H-Bomb

...Mumford suggests again and again that a world government would make the relations between America and its weaker allies more tolerable...

...He takes it for granted that all the natibns would welcome this proposal, and he thinks that it would transmute the struggle and give the free world something more than "capitalism" to fight for...

...Mumford on the legitimacy of this dread, nor with his conviction that "capitalism" is not the cause to arouse the devotion of the awakening masses of Asia, particularly when democratic justice in our society is obscured by self-appointed interpreters of the "American way of life...

...Considering the vanity of these schemes dreamed up by the intellectuals, one is almost persuaded to thank God for the common-sense wisdom of the traditional "man in the street...

...But vain dreams are never harmless if the\ prompt us to evade pressing duties or if the\ induce an attitude of contempt for people who do not share our illusions...

...Therefore, let us relax, fear not, and as best we can do our duty to God and to our fellow men...

...The point is that we can avoid such a war only if we are wise enough not to stumble into it and strong enough not to tempt the Russians to embark upon it...

...We may not have the time for this common experience...

...William I. Nichols is the Editor of This Week magazine, which is distributed each Sunday by 34 newspapers with a net circulation of ten million...

...No, all these things are "Little Alternatives," signifying nothing...

...To quiet our fears of it, he would beguile us with a harmless vision...

...We even have the nerve to feel angry and "frustrated" if someone dares to suggest that such dreams may never come true...

...In any event, it does not become intellectuals to speak so contemptuously of the practice of statesmanship, particularly because their own record since the eighteenth century has been so dismal...

...A review of the history of the British Commonwealth of Nations might instruct him that the so-called Statute of Westminster regularized Commonwealth relationships long after common experience had established the mutual trust without which il would not have been possible to spell out explicitly what life had made implicit...

...but it is frivolous to offer an anxious people a simple panacea for the problem of integrating the free world, when even a cursory review of the problems must convince even the naive that this panacea is an evasion of our real duties and a poor consolation for our anxieties...

...3. How would the non-committed nations, India for instance, react to the proposal for a tighter alliance...

...Hasn't man, acting on his own initiative and in his own image, made mischief enough already...

...Evil...

...Probably that is what Christ meant when He spoke of losing one's life to find it...

...It is an odd thing, isn't it, that the minute you are not afraid to die you begin to know how to live...

...What we need above all at this stage of history is to understand the Big Alternatives of Good vs...

...But he does not tell us how our "tired" statesmen could have offered the world this boon without violating our Constitution, or how they could have sufficiently electrified a weary and anxious world by this offer to persuade either the U. S. Senate or the other nations to surrender national sovereignty in favor of world government...

...This situation is not due to our statesmen's lack of imagination, to their "frozen minds" or their "tiredness...

...I would substitute the taxi-driver for the man in the street to make the simile more vivid...

...No one would quarrel with Mr...

...Neither of them will be ideal or adequate...

...In the face of such illusion, Captain Flagg, a simple man, speaks with the firm voice of history...

...when there is neither sufficient community nor enough organs of communication available to make election contests across national boundaries possible...

...World government therefore means to him the constitutional organization of the non-Communist world...

...All this is very remote from the dread prospects of an atomic war...

...But I think of it as coming from Captain Flagg, the tough Marine ex-noncom in What Price Glory...

...Mumford seems to know nothing of the "organic" processes of history, as contrasted with the abstract conceptions which a simple rationalism invents to contain the stream of history or to direct its course...

...Similarly, we actually hope that social and political miracles (some super-improved version of the League of Nations or UN) can be developed to bring us perpetual peace and prosperity...

...We actually think that miracle drugs will bring us eternal youth...

...What constitutional arrangements would be made to relate the weaker to the stronger nations and to allay the Asians' fear of America's dollar power or America's fear of Asia's teeming millions...

...Mumford...

...There are some hard questions which Mr...

...And atomic destruction is the price we must pay if our strength, our wisdom and our patience should not be adequate...

...Contemporary statesmen, with the exception of Mr...

...But it is just possible that they cannot follow Mr...

...Why we should persist in making pictures of ourselves which conform to, and seem to justify, the Communist caricature of us is surely one of the minor mysteries of the day...

...his regular monthly articles for The New Leader will be resumed this fall...

...Mumford's advice because they are responsible, and not because they are stupid...

...There is every indication that they would resist it...

...Conflicts of interest can be composed within a constitutional system only if a sufficient degree of mutual trust persuades the prospective minority to entrust its destiny to the prospective majority...

...Mumford does not even consider the ordinary perplexities which would confront a "constitutional convention," assuming that the nations could be beguiled into it...

...And if mankind is not moral, what difference does it make whether our society endures or blows away...

...In Captain Flagg's voice, rough as it is, profane as it is, we hear a recall to manhood and a reminder of basic morality...

...It is the cheapest of all illusions to think that political, legal and constitutional arrangements integrate a community, when in fact they merely regularize the integration which takes place by common experience...

...We must face the fact that we are fated to have something like a century or more of coexistence with a dreaded tyranny based upon Utopian illusions...

...Reinhold Niebuhr is Professor of Applied Christianity at Union Theological Seminary and author of Christian Realism and Political Problems...

...His estimate of Communist intransigence is, in fact, the only hard-headed element in his analysis...

...Well, borrowing from Captain Flagg, I think we could put it as simply as this: "If we don't die by the H-bomb, then sooner or later we are bound to die of something else...

...A Republican internationalist, he has traveled widely abroad and has served in the past as a consultant to the Department of State...

...Moral Courage By William I. Nichols On the opening page of my own magazine, there is a regular feature called "Words to Live By...

...2. How does he know that the fear of American power, the envy of American wealth and the resistance to American leadership would be mitigated by a tighter constitutional arrangement...

...None of these questions seem to have occurred to Mr...

...His was the courage, the manly gift, to stand up and be counted on the side of right as God gave him to see the right...

...Being responsible will prompt a statesman to confront the intractable forces of history and the perennial problems which the irresponsible idealists can dismiss so airily...

...Often, while editing these pieces, I have wondered what my own "Words to Live By" would be...

...I know of no more pessimistic appraisal of our situation, because the possibility of establishing world government is practically nil...

...Does not a constitutional system aggravate, rather than mitigate, the fear of the strong by the weak because it raises the peril of the domination of a minority by the majority...

...Churchill, are not very bright or great...

...Our strength must consist primarily of the economic health and political unity of the non-Communist world...

...I find the scornful references to statesmen of our era particularly distasteful in Mr...

...But now, once again, it jumps to mind...

...Are we so blind as to think that now someone, somewhere, will invent some new kind of pill, or pass a law, or write a treaty, or call a conference, which will fix things up and leave the world all hunky-dory...

...These, if I may say so, are words which can help to keep us sane if we grow sicklied o'er with too much talk about the H-bomb...

...When the moment comes, he leaps to the parapet and, looking down on his men, cries out: "Come on, you sons of bitches—do you want to live forever...

...After Munich and Panmunjom, are there still people who hope for some new and improved brand of appeasement, some patented parliamentary trick or gimmick, to stifle and outwit the H-bomb...

...He sums up the centuries-long rhythm of all societies, of rise and fall, of ebb and flow, of comings and goings...

...For by affirming that he was not afraid to die, Flagg showed that he knew how to live...

...these in turn assume a common taxation policy, which in turn assumes a common economy...

...But I find it almost intolerable that he should use our major perplexities and minor irritations and confusions as a pretext for launching the idea of "world government" as the only alternative to mutual annihilation...

...Would such an eventuality really protect us against the dreaded atomic conflict...

...On all these points I agree with Mumford...

...and was the present Court not also wise in sensing that there had been sufficient progress in race relations to permit the rejection of this device and to challenge the community to a fuller realization of its ideals of equality...

...He is so obsessed with the peril of anarchy among the free nations that he has forgotten that communities always face the twin evils of tyranny and anarchy, and that they fall into the one if they are too concerned with the other...

...But no ideal constitutional measures can save us from the exercise of sufficient political patience and wisdom which the inadequacy of our strength forces upon us...

...I recall a scene where Flagg watches his company trembling in a dugout and waiting for the call to go over the top...

...Here, each week, a contributor selects some quotation or saying, and then comments on it in terms of his experience and of our times...

...How many years would it take to arrive at solutions roughly comparable to the American solution which gave the states equal representation in the Senate and representation according to population in the House of Representatives ? There are further difficulties which suggest that a constitution can only perfect a community and cannot create it, because constitutional measures must presuppose community...

...The merit of the present loose arrangements is that they do not confront nations with irrevocable choices which they are not prepared to make...

...These suggestions would seem to assume common welfare policies in the world community...

...Nor does he indicate any awareness of the historical fact that sovereignty has been eroded and has been destroyed by the superimposition of superior power, but that there has never been a case of conscious abnegation of sovereignty...

...Some of them are: 1. Has he any evidence that the nations, many of which are still celebrating their recently acquired independence, would welcome a supra-national sovereignty...

...This particular saying originated in the real life of World War I. Perhaps it was spoken on many occasions...

...It has consisted in dreaming up both harmless and dangerous Utopias...

...Mumford believes we would have world government now if our statesmen had been alert enough to offer this panacea in the three-year breathing space after the war, when, in his opinion, fatigue and fear would have disposed every nation to accept such a gift...

...Nor has Mumford considered the peril of tyranny in a successful supra-national experiment...

...Mumford is revolted by the dangerous Utopia...

...One of the worst features of the age just ending is that many of us have actually come to believe in our own propaganda about "inevitable progress...

...Mumford's piece...

...This is not a cheerful prospect, but we have to face it without illusions...

...Was not our Supreme Court wise when it invented the "separate but equal" doctrine in 1896, so that there should not be too great a hiatus between the requirements of law and the moral standards of the community...

...Mumford speaks of "world government," but he has no confidence in the possibility of beguiling the Communists into this scheme...

...For if a man is not a moral being, what good is he...

...And if this seems a vague answer to the question of today, what other answer can there be...

...5. How can we speak of effective world government Here are the sixth and seventh articles in the series Lewis Mumford launched in our June 28 issue...

...This is what counts more, much more, than personal survival...

...It is only natural that we should all experience this dread, particularly since we are a generation which was promised heaven on earth and therefore find it difficult to adjust ourselves to the prospect of such a hell...

...It is, in the words of Rebecca West, to so live that we say "Yes" to Good and "No" to Evil...

...The effort to anticipate common experience by explicit law which has no basis in the mores of the community will retard rather than advance community building...

...And, in his own way, his is the voice of morality, too...

...4. Would not "world government" for the non-Communist world destroy the present bridge between the two worlds which we have in the United Nations...

...Mumford does not answer about the difficulties of his proposal...

...Without knowing it, he reminds us of the findings of Gibbon, Petrie, Spengler and Toynbee...

...The topic for this symposium is "Alternatives to the H-Bomb...

...For the taxi-driver is superior to the ordinary intellectual in dealing with the complexities of politics, including international politics, because a shrewd awareness of human foibles prevents him from engaging in vain dreams or self-pity...

...Somewhat shamefacedly, I confess that one of my most frequent choices would not look well on the Sunday-morning pages of This Week...

...Understanding this, our choice becomes simple and clear...