Our Collective Madness
GRUBER, HOWARD E.
A PSYCHOLOGIST EXAMINES Our Collective Madness by HOWARD E. GRUBER TALK OF THE psychopathology of war may conjure up images of frankly psychotic individuals, themselves lost to the world,...
...Such discussions are more than an intellectual exercise...
...But the moral problem is not so simple...
...If we abandon that fundamental unit of moral analysis it is only to provide ourselves with a rationalization, an intellectual facade, because no matter how tough we are, we have not yet learned to look squarely at the human horror of thermonuclear war...
...We cannot avoid social evolution, but we can have some influence on its course...
...One difficulty in rejecting such arguments, however, is the intimidating way in which they are invested with the trappings of science—theoretical models, statistical assumptions, and computer technology...
...In this sense, moral codes—such as the prohibition of genocide—are not mere emotionalism...
...Just as historians today describe the decline of feudalism and the evolution of mercantile capitalism, historians a few hundred years from now—if there are any—will describe the evolution of new social orders out of today's struggles...
...Disarmament must become a national objective...
...We check and re-check our work, we test the same idea in a variety of ways, and we examine its plausibility in the light of larger conceptions...
...Those who have learned to think in terms of megaton bombs have also learned to think of survival and death in terms of megapersons...
...There is a kind of Gresham's Law about moral behavior...
...Now, in defending a principle with your own life, the presumption is made that you preserve the principle for other men to enjoy...
...The political system that would emerge from the shelters with the survivors would be determined not so much by our political heritage as by the emergency conditions of life they would face for many years...
...Imagine, if you will, an electronic computer printing out the conclusion that the earth was blown up yesterday...
...HOWARD E. GRUBER is associate professor of psychology at the University of Colorado...
...Its essence is the failure of civilized man to evolve appropriate new social institutions to manage a powerful new technology...
...For me, an individual life is not a small fraction of a megaperson, it is an individual life...
...But that is hardly the main problem...
...We would automatically decide, on the basis of larger considerations, that something had gone wrong with the computer...
...This is a profound change in the unit of strategic analysis...
...Social scientists spend relatively little effort thinking about the future of social evolution...
...What is the essence of this pathology...
...The failure to recognize and resolve this dilemma has led to the pathologically one-sided morality which sees thermonuclear war as a potential solution to political problems...
...Much of the discussion of acculturation is overly static, in that it presupposes culture change from primitive beginnings to a fixed endpoint: the way We live now...
...The world inhabited by any species is always changing: Only those species that can continue to change to meet new conditions can be expected to survive...
...The world has been playing an international game of blindman's buff, with two blind men...
...There are more alternatives than We—or—They, and we need to set about looking for them...
...They are rational checks on the correctness of intellectual operations...
...In scientific work, these errors are part of the game, but they are not fatal...
...I spoke of the danger that our civilization might perish even though some individuals would survive...
...This unbalanced growth is especially marked today, when vast sums are spent on research to find new ways of changing technology, but those in charge of spending these funds, the political leaders of each country, have no desire to provoke important changes in the societies they enjoy governing...
...Or, we can recognize that We and They are both but transitory phases in the social evolution of man, thus enabling ourselves to take a more detached and flexible look at the problem of international conflict...
...The individuals are sound, but the combination is sick...
...We need to dismantle the thermonuclear military establishment, and if that means total disarmament, so be it...
...We can help them to broaden their perspectives by injecting into the public discussion a much wider range of possibilities...
...The scientists on both sides are sound, the military men are sound, and so are the statesmen—I repeat, for the most part...
...But theoretical models almost always contain errors, statistical assumptions are at best approximations, and computers often go wrong...
...The military men examine seriously only a narrow range of alternatives, from Limited War to Unlimited War...
...Our belief in the value of every human, life is not mere liberal softness: It is the theoretical framework that tells us whether or not a strategic conclusion is within the bounds of reason...
...If, however, your struggle takes a form that kills other men by the millions and creates conditions that make the principle meaningless, your death is worthless...
...Sober estimates of the number of deaths occurring in the first two months following a one or two day thermonuclear war run from twentyfive per cent to seventy-five per cent of our population, the higher estimates being the more plausible...
...So long as we maintain the thermonuclear military establishment, we perpetuate the threat of thermonuclear war...
...We do not yet know how to achieve it...
...In the thermonuclear age, the morality of human survival confronts most sharply the morality of struggle for principle...
...Life might be distinguishable from death, but victory would be indistinguishable from defeat...
...Or, of course, the way They live now...
...Early in this discussion I permitted myself to accept an important change in fundamental moral assumptions...
...Only through widespread discussion on an international scale will we find the way...
...Now, if the individuals engaged in strategic thinking are—as individuals— sane and moral men, this may suggest that they would not accept conclusions violating the extremely simple morality in question...
...It is probably safe to assume that the same moral and strategic confusion prevails in other countries as well...
...they can be a direct demonstration of how to take disagreements off the level of violent conflict and pursue them on the level of rational discussion among rational men...
...Faced with such prospects, it is totally irrational to contemplate thermonuclear war as a defense of our present way of life or as a solution to present political problems...
...The number of casualties acceptable in war is determined as much by the going moral standards as by military capability...
...But considering their short and troubled histories, it is foolish to behave as though either of the major contending systems—We or They—can lay any settled claim to the future...
...We should not entirely dismiss this possibility, for the history of political power—from Nero to Hitler—has never been free of the suspicion of outright individual insanity...
...Society changes fairly slowly...
...Technology changes rapidly...
...Social scientists and other intellectuals can contribute to that end by widening the scope of the discussion— by using their own tools of trade: reading, thinking, speaking, writing...
...A greater threat is a form of collective insanity in which we prepare to kill tens or hundreds of millions of people in other countries with no hope of gaining anything except, supposedly, a slightly lower casualty rate in our own country...
...The peculiar thing about this collectivity of death is that the individuals preparing it are, for the most part, individually sane and intelligent...
...Remember, when we prepare ourselves militarily to inflict twenty to sixty million casualities upon another country, we prepare them morally to inflict a like number on ourselves...
...This article is adapted from a paper he presented as part of a panel entitled "The Psychopathology of Thermonuclear War" at the American Psychological Association recently...
...In particular, by means of thermonuclear war, we can arrange matters so that future civilizations have little or no historical connection with Ours—or Theirs—which will have perished, leaving only remnants that no one will wish to preserve...
...George Bernard Shaw once wrote that a fanatic is a person who, having lost sight of his objectives, redoubles his efforts...
...One of the great social discoveries of man is -the need to struggle for what we believe, sometimes even at the cost of life itself...
...What will the area we now call the United States be like when it has a billion inhabitants, universal higher education, a twenty-hour work week, and an average longevity of 100 years...
...Similarly, in the process of social evolution, a society that becomes overcommitted to adaptations suitable for a single historical situation may lose that capacity for change which is essential to survival...
...If this game continues, they will eventually collide, and the game will be over...
...If a complex chain of thought leads to the conclusion that the wholesale destruction of human life and the reversion of human existence to the ugly aftermath of thermonuclear war is, under certain specified conditions, an acceptable solution to our problems, then there is something wrong with that chain of thought...
...In his book, The Uncertain Trumpet, General Maxwell Taylor has described the confused and shifting strategic thinking of our own security establishments—the National Security Council and the Joint Chiefs of Staff...
...I take it that our prime objectives are the preservation of human life and of the opportunity for man to evolve from where he is now to some unknown but enjoyable future...
...Therefore, forms of struggle must be found that defend the principle without destroying life itself...
...Instead, we ought to allow ourselves to think through alternative models of social evolution which combine the emergence of totally new social inventions with existing ones appropriately gathered from the totality of contemporary society...
...Although I like to think of myself as a modern man, I have not come that far...
...In the process of biological evolution the conditions favoring the extinction of a species are extreme evolution along some lines of development, coupled with loss of capacity for change along other lines...
...The study of the future is not much more speculative than the study of the past, and it might free our thinking so that we can escape from the dangerous crisis mentality in which the world is divided into two unchanging orders, We and They...
...A PSYCHOLOGIST EXAMINES Our Collective Madness by HOWARD E. GRUBER TALK OF THE psychopathology of war may conjure up images of frankly psychotic individuals, themselves lost to the world, suddenly possessed of the means to destroy it...
...In this case, mutual deterrence is mutual madness...
...Now if a computer tells us that we should blow up the world, or a large part of it, tomorrow, we have an equal need for a larger set of conceptions that tell us the computer is wrong...
...A great deal of our thinking about international affairs is dominated by the notion that the world is divided into two great social orders, We and They, one of which will prevail...
Vol. 25 • November 1961 • No. 11
