At present, however, owing to the remarkable concentration of power in the modern world, this is not true; on both sides of the iron curtain there are relatively few decision-making persons. We see now that something like two-thirds of the entire assets of the American manufacturing economy is in the hands of five hundred corporations and that, among these five hundred, a smaller number actually possess the decision-making power. Members of this corporate élite are to be found in decision-making positions at the head of the pyramid of rule in this country, where we see a sort of triumvirate of power: the highest political powers plus the highest military powers plus the highest economic powers represent an extraordinary concentration of force and economic power which makes it possible for us to imagine a way out of our difficulty.
It is quite clearly very dangerous when power gets into the hands of very few people. As Lord Acton said, ‘Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ But in another way the concentration of power is encouraging because it means that the problem of war is not out of our hands; it has not become a problem of completely inhuman forces, and human will can still play a very large part in it. If the people with the enormous powers are men of reasonably good will, and if it is possible to influence their decisions, then we are in a better position than we would be if we were wholly at the mercy of non-human forces pushing us inexorably in one direction.
Now we have to inquire, What can we do in the present situation? How are we to get out of this push towards catastrophe? We walk and walk, we know the precipice is going to be there. Are we going to fall over the edge? I don’t know; but I don’t think it is necessary. The most obvious means which presents itself whereby we can get out of this dreadful situation is moral exhortation, begging people to behave, to be good, and to be sensible. Unfortunately, moral exhortation doesn’t go very far in changing a political trend—although it would be quite wrong to disregard its value. It is terribly important that we should try to combat the strange kind of moral insensibility and indifference to the fact of large-scale violence which seems to have fallen upon so much of the world. We accept as natural and inevitable an immense wholesale destruction to be wreaked on entire populations. We accept as inevitable the existence of absolute weapons and of genocide, as though there were no alternative.
There seems to be in this matter of moral sensibility a kind of dual standard. I remember that just after the Korean War a number of articles appeared pointing to the fact that during the war a majority of American infantrymen never fired their rifles, and that the actual killing was done at long range by artillery and by aeroplane bombardment. This seems to show that there is an intense moral sensibility in face-to-face relationships which disappears when the relationship is distant and, so to speak, abstract and generalized. The age of saturation bombing and H-bombs is also the age of the welfare state; the age of massive preparation for biological warfare and the most dreadful kind of indifference to mass extermination is also the age in which violent protests occur when dogs are sent up in sputniks, and people are particularly alive to the dangers of cruelty to children.
It is very curious to see the difference between today’s attitude towards mass atrocities and what used to happen in the past. I remember during the Second World War, after the saturation bombing of the city of Magdeburg, which had been largely reduced to flaming ruins, being struck by the remark of a knowledgeable commentator that the last time this had happened to Magdeburg was during the Thirty Years’ War, when the armies of Tilly had sacked the town. I happened to have been reading something about it at the time, and I remember the account of the shudder of horror which went through Europe when the news of the sack of Magdeburg was published and became known in various countries of the West. How different that reaction was from the reaction during the Second World War, when similar destruction was regarded as something which had to be done—a standard procedure—and there was no particular object in being very much upset by it.
I feel that there has been a profound change even in my own lifetime. When I was a boy we still believed, with a kind of extreme Victorian optimism, that anybody who wore a top hat and took a bath every day and went to church on Sundays would be perfectly incapable of the sort of atrocities that the Turks had committed against the Armenians. But in the First World War we discovered that even people who took baths every day and wore top hats were capable of that kind of thing. The goodness of civilized man, which had been taken for granted while I was still a boy, was changed into a taken-for-granted native badness of man, for whom anything was possible. Since then we have been taking the destructive side of human beings for granted more and more, and talking in the most light-hearted way about large-scale destruction. Even children, with the kinds of toys they play with now, take it for granted. I was greatly struck the other day, meeting a group of children in the street—the smallest of them was crying bitterly, and I heard him say to the others, ‘Give me the machine gun.’ It gave me rather a turn.
It is extremely important for anybody connected with education and with writing and with religion to attempt to close this schizophrenic breach in our moral sensibility. We cannot go on separating the welfare state from the genocidal absolute weapon; we have somehow to bring the sensibility which works in the former into the area of the latter, where it doesn’t work. Although I don’t think its immediate effects are going to be very striking, this is a most important task to be done. We have to create the right kind of atmosphere in which suitable political action can be taken.
Now let us pass from morals to politics. Here we are confronted immediately by the fact that most of the people involved in the armaments race regard any alternative to it as utopian. But, after all, aren’t they being a little utopian? Isn’t a policy which everybody admits is a policy of complete destruction a utopian policy? They call themselves realists, but I would say that they are utopian realists. They are realistic about the means they employ—nothing could be more realistic than the way they approach the problem of the absolute weapon and the methods of delivering it—but nothing could be less realistic than the ends proposed, because there are no ends except the end of the human race. On the other hand, the utopian idealist lives in the stratosphere and implores everybody to be good and kind and sensible, but offers no practical method of implementing his good intentions. What we need is a kind of realistic idealism or idealistic realism which can offer some sensible alternative, to make it possible to transfer the conflict on to another level which does not involve these horrors.
Let me quote something which I wrote in 1946 in a small book called Science, Liberty and Peace, where I discussed these issues and pointed out that it was absolutely necessary to try to shift the whole attention of politics from the unsolvable problems of power to the solvable and even more urgent problems of human needs. This is what I wrote apropos the San Francisco conference:
At the San Francisco conference the only problems discussed were problems of power. The basic problem of mankind—the problem of getting enough to eat—was relegated to an obscure international committee on agriculture. And yet it is surely obvious that if genuine international agreement is ever to be reached, it must be an agreement with regard to problems which, first, are of vital interest to the great masses of humanity and which, second, are capable of solution without resort to war or the threat of war.
I still think this is true and I am glad to see that more and more people are taking the same line—that the only acceptable mode of conflict with the other great power bloc, which will be to the immense advantage of both power blocs and the great masses of humanity, will be precisely a conflict as to who can provide the two-thirds of the human race who now live in misery and undernourishment with the means of assuring some kind of decent life for themselves and their children.
Unfortunately, the decision-making people are always extremely well-fed and are not particularly concerned with the problem of subsistence. They subsist a great deal too well, probably, in many cases, and their first question is a question of power:
