There is also the issue of moral courage. Religions, because they are institutionalized and have many adherents, are able to provide role models, to demonstrate that acts of conscience are creditable, are respectable. They can raise awkward possibilities. The pope, for example, has raised (although not answered) the question about the moral responsibility of workers who develop and produce weapons of mass destruction.
Or is it okay as long as there is a local excuse? Are some excuses better than other excuses? What are the implications for scientists? For corporate executives? For those who invest in such companies? For military personnel? The archbishop of Amarillo has urged workers at a nuclear-weapons facility in his diocese to quit. So far as I know, no one has quit. Religions can remind us of unpopular truths. Religions can speak truth to power. It's a very important function that is often not carried out by all the other sectors of society.
Religions can also speak to their own sectarian eschatologies, especially where they run contrary to human survival. I'm thinking, for example, about the Christian fundamentalist view in the United States that the end of the world is unerringly predicted in the book of Revelation, that the details in the book of Revelation are sufficiently similar to those of a nuclear war that it is the duty of a Christian not to prevent nuclear war. The Christian who does so would be interfering with God's plan. Now, I know I have stated this somewhat more baldly than the advocates of such views, but I believe that is what it comes down to. Christians can play a useful role in providing a steadying hand on people with such eschatologies, because they're very dangerous.
Suppose someone with such a view were in a position of power, and there was a critical decision that had to be made in a moment, and that person had a little sense that maybe this was the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Maybe he shouldn't make the effort to avoid this, especially if he believed that he himself will be one of the first people to leave the Earth and appear at the right hand of God. He might be interested to see what that would be like. Why slow it down?
Religion has a long history of brilliant creativity in myth and metaphor. This is a field crying out for apposite myth and metaphor. Religions can combat fatalism. They can engender hope. They can clarify our bonds with other human beings all over the planet. They can remind us that we are all in this together. There are many functions that religion can serve in trying to prevent this ultimate catastrophe. Ultimate for us-I want to stress that we're not talking about the elimination of all life on Earth. Doubtless roaches and grass and sulfur-metabolizing worms that live in hot vents in the ocean bottoms would survive nuclear war. It is not the Earth that is at stake, it is not life on Earth that's at stake, it is merely us and all we stand for that is at stake.
Now, along these lines I should also say that at least some religions have specific suggestions on standards of moral behavior that conceivably could be relevant to this problem. (I don't guarantee it; I don't know. The experiment has not been carried out.) And in particular there is the issue of the Golden Rule. Christianity says that you should love your enemy. It certainly doesn't say that you should vaporize his children. But it goes much further than that. It says not just abide your enemy, not just tolerate him, love him.
Well, it's important to ask, what does that mean? Is this just window dressing, or do the Christians mean it?
Christianity also says that redemption is possible. So an anti-Christian would be someone who argues to hate your enemy and that redemption is impossible, that bad people remain forever bad. So I would ask you, which position is better suited to an age of apocalyptic weapons? What do you do if one side does not profess those views and you claim to be a Christian? Must you adopt the views of your adversary or the views advocated by the founder of your religion? You can also ask, which position is uniformly embraced by the nation-states? The answers to those questions are very clear. There is no nation that adopts the Christian position on this issue. Not one. There's 140- some-odd nations on the Earth. As far as I know, not one of them takes a Christian point of view. There may be some perfectly good reasons for that, but it's remarkable that there are nations that take great pride in their Christian tradition that nevertheless do not see any contradiction between that and their attitudes on nuclear war.
By the way, this is not just Christianity. The Golden Rule was uttered by Rabbi Hillel before Jesus, and by the Buddha centuries before Rabbi Hillel. It is involved in many different religions. But for the moment let's talk about Christianity. It seems to me that the admonishment to love our enemy must be something central to Christianity; it's that strong statement of the Golden Rule that sets Christianity apart. There were no qualifying phrases that said, 'Love your enemy unless you really don't like him.' It says love your enemy. No ifs, ands, or buts. Now, political nonviolence has worked wonders in our time. Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. achieved extraordinary, and for many people counterintuitive, victories. It might even be a practical, novel, certainly breathtakingly different approach to the nuclear arms race. Maybe not. Maybe it's flawed and hopeless. Maybe the Christian point of view on this issue is inappropriate to the nuclear age. But isn't it interesting that no nation of Christians has adopted it? The Soviet leaders do not profess to be Christians, so if they do not pursue the path of love, they are not inconsistent with their beliefs. But if the leaders of other Western nations profess to be Christian, then what course of action should they be engaged in? Let me stress I don't necessarily advocate such a policy. I don't know if it would work. It may be, as I say, hopelessly naive. But should not those who make conspicuous public displays of their devotion to Christianity follow what is certainly among the central tenets of the faith?
'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you' has a corollary. Others will do unto you as you do unto them. And that encapsulates, among other things, the history of the nuclear arms race. If this can't be done, then I think politicians who are practitioners of such religions ought to confess and admit that they are failed Christians or aspirant Christians but not full-fledged, unqualified, unhyphenated Christians.
I therefore think that the perspective of the Earth in space and time is something with enormous, not just educational but moral and ethical, force. I believe it is lucky for us that this is the time when pictures of the Earth from space are fairly routinely available. We look at them on the evening weather reports and hardly pause to think what an extraordinary item that is. Our planet, the Earth, home, where we come from, seen from space. And when you look at it from space, I think it is immediately clear that it is a fragile, tiny world exquisitely sensitive to the depredations of its inhabitants. It's impossible, I think, not to look at that planet and think that what we are doing is foolish. We are spending a million million dollars every year, worldwide, on armaments. A million million dollars. Think of what you could do with a million million dollars. A visitor from somewhere else-the legendary intelligent extraterrestrial- dipping down to the Earth and inquiring what we are about and finding such prodigies of human inventiveness and such enormous fractions of our wealth devoted not just to the means of war but to the means of massive global destruction- such a being would surely deduce that our prospects are not very good and perhaps go on to some other, more promising world.
When you look at the Earth from space, it is striking. There are no national boundaries visible. They have been put there, like the equator and the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, by humans. The planet is real. The life on it is real, and the political separations that have placed the planet in danger are of human manufacture. They have not been handed down from Mount Sinai. All the beings on this little world are mutually dependent. It's like living in a lifeboat. We breathe the air that Russians have breathed, and Zambians and Tasmanians and people all over the planet. Whatever the causes that divide us, as I said before, it is clear that the Earth will be here a thousand or a million years from now. The question, the key question, the central question-in a certain sense the only question-is, will we?
Nine
Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible. • Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina •
If we don't find life literally impossible without answering that question, at least its difficulties increase. It is very reasonable for humans to want to understand something of our context in a broader universe, awesome and vast. It is also reasonable for us to want to understand something about ourselves. Since we have powerful unconscious processes, this means that there are parts of our selves that are hidden from us. And this two-pronged
