If they were consulted, if a referendum of the whole world population, a Gallup poll, were instituted, we could ask them the question: Do you prefer the present system of power politics and armaments races, or do you prefer to have enough to eat? You cannot have both, because it is quite clear that countries which are spending 40 or 50 per cent of their revenue on non-productive armaments are not in a position to improve the agricultural situation of the backward nations or to help to industrialize them. As long as the current system of power politics and of preparation for war within the context of nationalism goes on, so long will persist the misery of these two-thirds of the world, who are increasing at an enormously rapid rate, and who will soon be more than two-thirds.
In this context I would like to read a few passages from a letter which was sent by President Sukarno of Indonesia to the English periodical the New Statesman last summer. The New Statesman had carried a series of very interesting letters, the first from Bertrand Russell, then one from Nikita Khrushchev, and one from Secretary John Foster Dulles. Finally President Sukarno wrote:
We of Asia are but pawns in the game of nuclear powers … However, it would be most unwise to disregard Asian opinion. In all sincerity, I tell you that we are growing increasingly resentful of the present situation. Asians are the chief victims of the West’s failures and moral bankruptcy.
We in Asia do not see you as saviours of civilization or as forerunners of the future; we see you as agents of death—our death …
We utterly deny the right of the West to continue imperilling us and our future … It is past time for the West, Communist and anti-Communist alike, to draw back from the edge of complete moral bankruptcy. It is explicitly your task to utilize the skill and technique of your science for peaceful purposes. One tenth of the treasure and skill used in making your hydrogen weapons could transform my country …
There can be no question now of the West giving moral leadership to Asia. Your moral leadership has, for us, meant first colonialism and now the philosophical, moral, political and social bankruptcy of a nuclear arms-race …
You in the West are causing more gaps between humanity; you are also losing the battle for the hearts and minds of men.
I think it is very valuable for us to see ourselves as others see us, and to realize that this is what the leaders of the unfortunate two-thirds of the world think of us and what they expect of us.
I cannot go into the details of the kind of policy which should be pursued. Such a policy has been set out, lucidly and extremely well, in a very valuable book by Professor Wright Mills of Columbia University, The Causes of World War Three, which I heartily recommend to everybody. He sets out what he thinks an idealistically realistic policy for the West would be, and also guidelines for changes in American policy and modes of thought, which would permit pressure to be put upon what he calls the ‘power élite’, the decision-makers at the top of the social pyramid. Meanwhile, he calls upon his fellow intellectuals and educators and writers to do all they can to help prepare the moral atmosphere in which such a change could take place.
I will close these remarks by pointing out that perhaps now is a fairly propitious time to come to some kind of agreement, not because I think anybody has had a change of heart, but because the advances of technology are making the present situation exceedingly precarious, and they are making it precarious in a new way. As a recent article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists pointed out, it is now possible for at least twelve nations, some of them quite small, to produce the hydrogen bomb within five years or, if they carry out a crash programme, even sooner; and the last thing that any of the three great nuclear powers wants is for the hydrogen bomb to get into the hands of anybody else. Obviously the world situation would become fantastically precarious, and the power of the great powers would be very seriously compromised.
If Lichtenstein and Monaco had the bomb, they would be in a certain sense on a level with the United States and with the Soviet Union, which is obviously a situation which neither of these countries could possibly tolerate. For this reason I do think that there is a better chance for making a beginning in disarmament; this would consist in the banning of nuclear tests, which would make it very difficult or impossible for any other nation to produce a bomb. I think that such a test ban is now more likely to be negotiated than it has been recently, and it will become increasingly likely as the capacities of the small nations to reproduce the bomb at a cheap rate become greater.
I also think that if we attack this problem on all fronts at once—on the moral front, the political front, the persuasion front, the technological front—there is some considerable hope that we may get ourselves out of this dreadful situation into which we have, by our folly and also by our good intentions, alas, succeeded in putting ourselves. We can see some prospect of making the decision not to go to the edge of the precipice, but to draw back in time.
The World’s Future
Before beginning on any series of forecasts, I think it is worthwhile to say a few words about man’s different conceptions of the future. Most of us do not realize that our view of the future is a fairly recent phenomenon or that the ways the future has been looked at by people both within and outside our tradition are very different from the way in which we look at it. The Indians have a cyclical idea of time—the notion that there is an eternal recurrence and that time repeats the same pattern over and over again. According to the Indian idea, we are now at the last phase of one of the great cycles, in the Kali Yuga, the Age of Iron. We have been in it for about two thousand years, and apparently there are about thirty-five thousand years more to go, during which things will get worse and worse all the time—we ‘ain’t seen nothing yet’, according to the Indians. After that, there will be a general explosion, and we may then, after several million years, start again on an Age of Gold. A similar view of time was taken by the ancient Greeks: there was a great year which repeated itself continuously.
Our present view of the future is entirely different. The notion of an eternal recurrence, which as late as Nietzsche was preached by some philosophers, has really gone out of the picture altogether. We think of time not as going round and round, but as moving irreversibly in one direction. The whole idea is expressed in the scientific notion of increasing entropy: we are continually moving in one direction, and life is a temporary reversal of entropy within the larger system.
In the Christian tradition, instead of eternal recurrence there was the idea of a definite creation in time (according to Bishop Usher, in 4004 b.c.) and a definite ending, which would take place probably very soon—and hence, a complete lack of interest in the future. This is how Professor J. B. Bury, who has written perhaps the most interesting book on the subject, sums up the Christian idea: ‘According to the Christian theory, which was worked out by the Church Fathers, and especially by St Augustine, the whole movement of history has the purpose of assuring the happiness of a small portion of the human race in another world. It does not postulate a further development of human history on earth.’
We have also changed very much in relation to this Christian tradition. One can say that the early Christian notion of the future, in so far as it was a happier and progressive future, was a notion of what is vulgarly called ‘pie in the sky’. This changed profoundly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to a new conception of what might be called ‘pie on the earth’—the idea of a world improving through indefinite periods of time. This idea of a progress, which some thinkers regarded as absolutely inevitable while others regarded it as conditional, but which in any case goes forward and may be expected to reach a pitch of perfection in a distant time, replaces the ancient idea of an Age of Gold in the past with either a sudden fall (as within the Christian tradition) or a gradual deterioration (as within the Oriental traditions).
Just as in the past the old conception of ‘pie in the sky’ justified both resignation to an intolerable lot upon earth and persecution, so in exactly the same way this idea of ‘pie on the earth’ has fostered both resignation and persecution. Under the old dispensation, it was right, in St Augustine’s delicious phrase, to use ‘benignant asperity’ towards heretics in order to safeguard
