On War & The Hope For Peace...
Since we now know what a terrible evil war is, we must spare
no effort to prevent its recurrence. To this reason must also
be added an ethical one: In the course of the last two wars,
we have been guilty of acts of inhumanity which make one shudder,
and in any future war we would certainly be guilty of even worse.
This must not happen! Let us dare to face the situation. Man
has become superman. He is a superman because he not only has
at his disposal innate physical forces, but also commands, thanks
to scientific and technological advances, the latent forces
of nature which he can now put to his own use. To kill at a
distance, man used to rely solely on his own physical strength;
he used it to bend the bow and to release the arrow. The superman
has progressed to the stage where, thanks to a device designed
for the purpose, he can use the energy released by the combustion
of a given combination of chemical products. This enables him
to employ a much more effective projectile and to propel it
over far greater distances. However, the superman suffers from
a fatal flaw. He has failed to rise to the level of superhuman
reason which should match that of his superhuman strength. He
requires such reason to put this vast power to solely reasonable
and useful ends and not to destructive and murderous ones. Because
he lacks it, the conquests of science and technology become
a mortal danger to him rather than a blessing. In this context
is it not significant that the first great scientific discovery,
the harnessing of the force resulting from the combustion of
gunpowder, was seen at first only as a means of killing at a
distance? The conquest of the air, thanks to the internal-combustion
engine, marked a decisive advance for humanity. Yet men grasped
at once the opportunity it offered to kill and destroy from
the skies. This invention underlined a fact which had hitherto
been steadfastly denied: the more the superman gains in strength,
the poorer he becomes. To avoid exposing himself completely
to the destruction unleashed from the skies, he is obliged to
seek refuge underground like a hunted animal. At the same time
he must resign himself to abetting the unprecedented destruction
of cultural values. A new stage was reached with the discovery
and subsequent utilization of the vast forces liberated by the
splitting of the atom. After a time, it was found that the destructive
potential of a bomb armed with such was incalculable, and that
even large-scale tests could unleash catastrophes threatening
the very existence of the human race. Only now has the full
horror of our position become obvious. No longer can we evade
the question of the future of mankind. But the essential fact
which we should acknowledge in our conscience, and which we
should have acknowledged a long time ago, is that we are becoming
inhuman to the extent that we become supermen. We have learned
to tolerate the facts of war: that men are killed en masse -some
twenty million in the Second World War - that whole cities and
their inhabitants are annihilated by the atomic bomb, that men
are turned into living torches by incendiary bombs. We learn
of these things from the radio or newspapers and we judge them
according to whether they signify success for the group of peoples
to which we belong, or for our enemies. When we do admit to
ourselves that such acts are the results of inhuman conduct,
our admission is accompanied by the thought that the very fact
of war itself leaves us no option but to accept them. In resigning
ourselves to our fate without a struggle, we are guilty of inhumanity.
What really matters is that we should all of us realize that
we are guilty of inhumanity. The horror of this realization
should shake us out of our lethargy so that we can direct our
hopes and our intentions to the coming of an era in which war
will have no place. This hope and this will can have but one
aim: to attain, through a change in spirit, that superior reason
which will dissuade us from misusing the power at our disposal.
from Albert Schweitzer’s 1952 Nobel Peace Prize lecture.
Dr. Schweitzer was known for his starting of a leprosy clinic
in Africa, his writings, and his mastery of the organ works
of Bach
