Thinking Aloud

...Thus, while the apocalyptic vision is that of the world's death, the immediate vision is a limited apocalypsethat of the death of England as a chosen first victim...

...The political reasoning behind this view rests on a high valuation of survival in itself and a low valuation of the differences between the open society and the totalitarian one, as compared with the difference between the life and death of mankind...

...To take the most dramatic incident, the pacifism of the Oxford Pledge before World War I led to an unready Britain and doomed many of its undergraduate generation to a needlessly wasteful death when the war did come...

...Yet the choice of political and moral strategies is still a hard one...

...There is also a considerable element of risk in counting upon the overthrow of a well-entrenched and consolidated system of Communist power, especially when no alternative system is left to challenge it...

...that people who wish to build or live in a sane society must first wash themselves clean of the guilt of the radioactive shadow now resting on mankind...

...In Freudian terms, fear can recall a people to the reality principle...

...I fall back upon the very considerable possibility that we shall be able to buy time enough for a meeting of minds which will avoid both evils...

...Similarly, every Yes has a No potential in it...

...THINKING ALOUD Fear and Conscience in Atomic Man By Max Lerner When the news came of the Los Alamos bomb Winston Churchill called it the "Second Coming in wrath," and Robert Hutchins spoke of the "good news of damnation...

...It is this differential which is used as one of the effective weapons of psychological and political war by the Communist leadership...

...yet there is more trust to be put in them than in the ideologists of either camp...

...Yet it is hard to call the fear of world destruction a phantom...

...The anxieties and fears out of which pacifist absolutism grows are world-wide, and the potentials of the movement are also world-wide...

...Much of the Soviet nuclear diplomacy, in underscoring rather than minimizing the terror of Russian nuclear weapons, has been directed against this prevailing fear of man's destruction, especially in Western Europe...

...This is not peculiar to Great Britain, or to the equivalent American movement, which at present writing has not gone much beyond a "graduated unilateralism," deriving from a more subtle psychological analysis than is to be found in the dry and rationalist thinking of Bertrand Russell...

...they are not made dramatically manifest in mass demonstrations and sit-downs...

...Yet, the moral absolutism on which the position of unilateralism is based is a fact and a force in the world today-at least, among the nations of the free world...

...Sir Charles P. Snow, in a speech to a convention of American scientists, spoke of the "moral unneutrality of science" and called, in effect, for a syndicalist rebellion of scientists against the arms decisions of the state which run counter to their moral values and their sense of humanity...

...Some say that only the scientists who created these nuclear weapons have it in their power to prevent their use...

...What is new about the present fears is that for the first time they are ultimate and all-inclusive...

...Woodrow Wilson tried to use the war weariness and pacifism of the Germans toward the end of World War I as a revolutionary weapon and partly succeeded...

...If world destruction were a certainty it might be arguable ("better Red than dead") that man might gamble with the chance of being ultimately able to reform or overthrow a coercive Communist world-state from within, and that he should prefer that gamble to the certainty of human extinction...

...that no sane and humane man can tolerate the thought of using them...

...What is most lacking in all these movements is a tragic sense about the human condition...

...One may apply to our time the great sentence of William Blake, "The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction...

...Because the shadow of death today is a total one-not just the weak and helpless minorities nor the subject peoples, but man himself, caught for once in the full democracy of death as a leveler-the response must be sharp and strong, but it must be a response in the total context of world forces...

...Like a condemned prisoner in a death cell, man has had to face the imminence of the worst...

...With the same knowledge, a man like J. Robert Oppenheimer said No to the H-bomb, while a man like Edward Teller said Yes...

...Instead of pursuing abstractions, they are likely to act in a real world, and they are likely to act with less absolutism and greater prudence...

...The difference is that these drives of fear and conscience cannot be politically challenged and expressed in the Soviet Union as they are in the free world...

...Max Lerner is Professor of American Civilization and World Politics at Brandeis University...

...It serves thereby to strengthen the critique of this kind of moral absolutism-a critique which would be valid without it...

...One needs no technical knowledge today to understand the consequences of the weapons...

...The trouble with his reasoning is that the scientist has no monopoly of the knowledge of what the overkill weapons mean...

...but where there is a threat of danger which will wreak harm unless you summon your will and resources to meet it, then the fear which jolts you into confronting the world of reality is to that extent a healthy force and can be beneficent of life and protective of the state...

...It is the task of leaders and people alike to move, as prudently as they know how, toward a future in which they will have a chance at these goods...

...Anyone with tragic depth will refuse to be caught in a death trap, but he will not accept as a likely solution the unilateral stripping by a nation of its weapons of resistance...

...In this sense, fear becomes an instrument for political maneuver, and the manipulation of the human conscience becomes one of the important facts of world politics today...

...Never in history has man been so completely threatened...

...there is the danger that the world will become a mound of radiated ashes, and there is also the danger that it will become an ant colony, under a commanding elite that is ready to rule it thus for the calculable future and does not hesitate to use the conscience of atomic man for its own power purposes...

...The difference does not lie between moral choices by scientists and nonscientists, but in the alternatives for moral choices offered to valuing men...

...It is not fantasy fears one must now oppose to reality in world politics, but panic fear...

...Both men saw that fear-like love and hope and the drive to power and the spur of need or greed-may have its uses in politics...

...They may have to pay heavily for both...

...Nor does history lack examples of such political instrumental use of attitudes toward war and peace...

...Fear as a force in world politics has not been adequately thought through...

...After World War II, the war weariness of the American people led to a haste in demobilizing their armies in Europe, a haste from which the Russians benefited, which their Communist partisans encouraged, and which laid Europe bare to the advance of the Communist armies...

...My own tendency, when confronted by the either-or of a world of radiated ashes or a world which has become an ant society, is to replace it with a neither-nor...

...We live in an era when the prevailing attitudes toward the weapons of the time have themselves become a form of weapon...

...It is in this sense that a glimpse of freedom becomes possible-the freedom to seek survival without abdication, in a mood at once compassionate, realistic, stoical...

...they are not debated in newspapers and magazines, in books, from lecture platform and pulpit...

...The fact of this use is, of course, not a decisive argument against the position itself in an open society...

...There are in actuality two great dangers, not one...

...The result is something that may be called a conscience differential between the two power systems...

...Scientists have to question and, if necessary, to rebel...

...Soldiers have to obey," says Snow...

...It is the fear that paralyzes because it is absolute, and in its absolutism it produces an incapacity to meet reality in its total context...

...At its deepest, the movement expresses a profound moral revulsion against the meaningless stupidity of mass death...

...For the reality includes not only the overkill weapons with all their destructive potential, but also the Communist power system with its domination effect...

...both are gambles...

...The Bertrand Russell who wrote A Free Man's Worship-who saw that man is only a tiny figure caught in a universe inhabited by billions of galaxies, spanning only a fraction of a second in an infinity of time, but who saw also that this man can assert his intellectual and moral freedom, understand his minuscule and transitory place in the universe, yet remain in command of that understanding-that Russell is still the more relevant one...

...Never, therefore, has it been so possible for him to weigh against possible death not only the trivia of party, property and power, but his freedom itself, and his chance to use that freedom in the fulfillment of his aims and dreams...

...He will use his nerve to sustain himself in danger and his will to keep the trap from closing while he contrives a way of getting free of it...

...they were unwilling to have the Germans solve the secret of the atomic bomb first, and so what they did at Los Alamos was a race against tyranny and a Yes-saying to freedom...

...If all men feel they are damned together, such knowledge may give perspective to their conflicts and bring about a new consensus of effort in the face of a common democracy of death...

...Although a single word, fear is a double agent: It can galvanize or paralyze a people...

...Scientists must use their knowledge and insight to guide them to their own best choices, but aside from their knowledge they have nothing unique to offer to the community as a whole...

...Thus, they are not translated into an active climate of political opinion, as they are where such debate and demonstrations are not banned...

...It would be curious if the Russians did not adapt their strategy in the political war to the fact of the agonized debate within the conscience of atomic man...

...I am not suggesting that conscience is any less operative in the minds of the Russians than in the minds of the British or the Americans...

...As with all moral absolutisms, this one evokes a passionate commitment to its cause, with a readiness for personal sacrifice and a demand that others should also subordinate everything else to human survival...

...As a vulnerable isle, studded with American missile sites and Polaris bases, Britain would be a natural first target for the Russians in a nuclear war...

...it is real enough...

...In the course of its history, mankind has known many fears, genuine and spurious alike...

...But they will have no wisdom unless they can awaken the conscience of atomic man-not only American and British and French, but Russian as well-to the necessary means for his salvation...

...Moral leaders must use their best wisdom, and they can do much to clarify the nature of the choices, as men like Jaspers and Barth, Buber and Niebuhr have done...

...If this confronting of reality can move world opinion to the kind of operative moral code on which world law can be based and a collective policing agency can be established, then the "Second Coming in wrath" may have served man well...

...there is little question that most of the American scientists working on nuclear weapons today would lay down their work if a ruthless fascist government were to come to power in Washington...

...This knowledge, says Snow, enables the scientist to make his moral choice...

...One might wish that they had a more piercing vision of the future and a more tragic perception of man's plight...

...There is a moral absolutism that has developed toward the overkill weapons, based on the proposition that they are an expression of the dehumanizing of mass capitalist-democratic culture...

...Actually, however, there is no certainty in either term of the contrast...

...Not all fear is destructive-only fear as a pervasive drive, the habitual fear of the fearing personality...

...But again the conscience differential enters...

...It is simply a fact of life in the unremitting struggle of the political war...

...To whom can we turn for the decisions which may save mankind...

...There is an element of considerable risk in pushing the political war over a protracted period of time, with all the chances of war by accident or miscalculation...

...There is no way of transferring the burden of decision from the political leaders and the men upon whose expertise they call...

...Lenin was even more successful with the war weariness of the Russian peasant, whom he wooed away from both the war and the state with the slogan, "Peace, Bread and Land...

...I agree with Snow that the scientist, like the rest of us, must be able to say No to those whom he regards as the powers and principalities of evil...

...that is the foundation of their morality...

...For what is needed is not so much moral absolutism as a prudent morality which will serve man's purpose both for survival and freedom...

...Nothing can any longer terrify him, because he has endured the utmost terror that hangs over him...

...One might, I suppose, contrast with the fear of real dangers a fear of phantoms arising from one's own neurotic drives and anxieties...

...It is then not a question of knowledge but of values, and when it comes to values, the scientist is no more expert than anyone else...

...This article is adapted from his book, The Age of Overkill, to be published December 7 by Simon and Shuster...

...One may ask why this movement should have come up first and most strongly in England, especially since the British tradition, with its historical talent for compromise, has not been as much given to moral absolutisms as the cultures of continental Europe or of Asia...

...Even if it were possible for the philosopher to become king, he might be less sensitive to all the pulls and pressures of a real world than the man who is specialized to them and fuses his feel for the common experience with his feel for power...

...In the end, I suspect, the decisions must be essentially political ones...

...One further word on No-saying: Pushed far enough, every No has a Yes potential in it, as shown by the willingness of the atomic scientists to work at Los Alamos, even though they knew what might result from their task...

...Yet, in political terms, whatever the underlying moral energy, it adds up to a will to surrender...

...Perhaps it is because, after losing some of the best elements of their youth in a succession of wars, along with their power base, the British have been receptive to absolutism in the form of antiwar conviction...

...Seen thus the truly radical morality is that of freedom, human development and the good life...

...But the final decision must be made by the people through their political leaders...

...and that only a unilateral laying down of the overkill weapons, in the absence of an agreed disarmament, can save man either physically or morally...

...The important element to be salvaged from any humanist tradition is the stress on man's moral capacity to will his destiny and keep himself from being trapped in a mass death...

...I suspect that the Western scientist who says No will scarcely be able to reach the Russian scientist who has no will to say No, and no way to say it even if he had the will...

...Certainly, the Russians, with the devastation and death of World War II still fresh in their memories, have a passion for peace with which their leaders must reckon, just as the free-world leaders must reckon with pacifism among their own people...

...He goes on to point out that the basis of the morality of the scientist is his knowledge of the consequence of his weapons...