In his autobiography, Bertrand Russell, writes, "There is a motive (in human beings) which is stronger than self-preservation: it is the desire to get the better of the other fellow." He is writing this as a reflection of his effort to rid the world of atomic weapons and the proliferation of nuclear bombs. I do not know the current state of the "Nuclear Arms Race." Are we still racing toward some grand superiority--constructing even more weapons after having already amassed enough destructive power to kill every man, woman, and child on the face of the Earth a 1000 or 10,000 times over? Are we reversing that absurd process in any way? We certainly hear less made of the situation than when I was a kid, being trained to secure myself against a Soviet attack of Hydrogen Bombs by hiding beneath my school desk. I was never quite certain whether the adults who lead us through those exercises were joking or not. I had see the photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My school desk seemed to me kind of inadequate, especially since the bombs coming at us might be 20 or something time more powerful than those used on Japan.
Lord Russell ends that paragraph with"...whether mankind will think itself worth preserving remains a doubtful question." And despite the fact that the whole subject is quite out of the news I fear we have not progressed much further than that day when Lord Russell, in his eighties, was imprisoned for the offense of suggesting that we were worth preserving. The clarity and wit and brilliance and humanity of Bertrand Russell will out live him (if we don't destroy ourselves first) by at least 10 million years.
In his autobiography, Bertrand Russell, writes, "There is a motive (in human beings) which is stronger than self-preservation: it is the desire to get the better of the other fellow." He is writing this as a reflection of his effort to rid the world of atomic weapons and the proliferation of nuclear bombs. I do not know the current state of the "Nuclear Arms Race." Are we still racing toward some grand superiority--constructing even more weapons after having already amassed enough destructive power to kill every man, woman, and child on the face of the Earth a 1000 or 10,000 times over? Are we reversing that absurd process in any way? We certainly hear less made of the situation than when I was a kid, being trained to secure myself against a Soviet attack of Hydrogen Bombs by hiding beneath my school desk. I was never quite certain whether the adults who lead us through those exercises were joking or not. I had see the photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My school desk seemed to me kind of inadequate, especially since the bombs coming at us might be 20 or something time more powerful than those used on Japan.
Lord Russell ends that paragraph with"...whether mankind will think itself worth preserving remains a doubtful question." And despite the fact that the whole subject is quite out of the news I fear we have not progressed much further than that day when Lord Russell, in his eighties, was imprisoned for the offense of suggesting that we were worth preserving. The clarity and wit and brilliance and humanity of Bertrand Russell will out live him (if we don't destroy ourselves first) by at least 10 million years. 
No comments:
Post a Comment