by Carl Sagan
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
THE SEARCH
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 investigation into the nature of the world and the nature of our selves is, to a very major degree, I believe, what the human enterprise is about.
Our success as a species is surely due to our intelligence, not primarily to our emotions, because many many different species of animals surely have emotions. Many, many different species of animals also have varying degrees of intelligence. But it is our intelligence-our interest in figuring things out, our ability to do so, coupled with our manipulative abilities, our engineering talents-that is responsible for our success. Because surely we are not faster than all other species, or better camouflaged, or better diggers or swimmers or fliers. We are only smarter. And, at least until the invention of weapons of mass destruction, this intelligence has led to the steady-in fact exponential-increase in our numbers. And in the last few thousand years, our numbers on this planet have increased by much more than a factor of a hundred. There are human outposts not just everywhere on the planet, including Antarctica, but in the ocean depths and in near-Earth orbit. And it is clear that if we do not destroy ourselves, we will continue this progressive, outward movement until there will be human settlements on neighboring worlds.
It seems to me also clear that historians of a thousand years from now, if there are any, will look back on our time as being absolutely critical, a turning point, a branch point in human history. Because if we survive, then this time will be remembered as the time when we could have destroyed ourselves and came to our senses and did not. It will also be the time in which the planet was bound up. And it will also be remembered as the time when, slowly, tentatively, haltingly, we first sent our robot emissaries and then ourselves to neighboring worlds.
Now, all of these are extraordinary and unprecedented activities. Never before have we had the capability of destroying ourselves, and therefore never before have we had the ethical and moral responsibility not to do so. A way of looking at the time we happen to inhabit is as follows: We started hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago as itinerant tribespersons, in which the fundamental loyalty was to a very small group, by contemporary standards. Typical hunter-gatherer groups are maybe a hundred people, so the typical person on the planet had an allegiance to a group of no more than a hundred or a few hundred people.
The names that many of these tribes give to themselves are touching in their narrowness. All over the world, people call themselves "the people," "the men," "the humans." And all those other tribes, they aren't people, they aren't men, they aren't humans. They are something else. Now, that doesn't mean that a state of constant warfare existed among these tribes, as Thomas Hobbes, for example, imagined. A sign
ificant fraction of those early groups, there is reason to think, were benign, calm, peace-loving, not interested in systematic, bureaucratized aggression, which is the function of states at a later time.
As time passed, groups have merged, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes involuntarily, and the unit to which personal identification and loyalties are due has grown. The sequence is known to all of those who take courses in the history of civilization at universities, in which we pass through allegiances to larger groups, to city-states, to settled nations, to empires. Today the typical person on the Earth is obviously a patchwork quilt of political, economic, ethnic, and religious identifications, owing allegiance to a group or groups consisting of a hundred million people or more. It's clear that there is a steady trend, if the trend continues, there will be a time, probably not so far in the future, when the average person's typical identification is with the human species, with everyone on Earth.
The more we view the Earth from the outside, the more we come to see it as an exquisite, tiny world, everyone dependent upon everyone else, the sooner that general perception will come into being. Despite all the faults of international organizations, it is nevertheless striking in our time, in this century and the last few, but especially in this century, that organizations of global purview, involving essentially every nation on Earth, have grown up, have persisted, and we would, of course, not expect them to be perfect. Their imperfections are a function of the newness of the organization and the fact that human beings are imperfect. But it is a trend, a token, of the direction in which we are headed, provided we do not destroy ourselves.
One way to think of our time is as a race between these conflicting tendencies: one to bind up the planet, preserving, it may be, some of its ethnic and cultural diversity, and the contrary trend to destroy the planet, not in the geophysical sense but the planet in the sense of the world that we know. It is by no means clear which of these two conflicting tendencies will win out, in the lifetime of you who are among the first to be hearing these words.
Now, another way of looking at this is as a conflict within the human heart, as a conflict between the bureaucratic, hierarchical, aggressive parts of our nature, which in a neurophysiological sense we share with our reptilian ancestors, and the other parts of our nature, the generalized capacity for love, for compassion, for identification with others who may superficially not look or talk or act or dress exactly like us, the ability to figure the world out that is focused and concentrated in our cerebral cortex. Our survival is (how could we have imagined it to be anything else?) a reflection of our own nature and how we manage these contending tendencies within the human heart and mind.
Since the times are so extraordinary, since they are unprecedented, it is in no way clear that ancient prescriptions retain perfect validity today. That means that we must have a willingness to consider a wide variety of new alternatives, some of which have never been thought of before, others of which have, but have been summarily rejected by one culture or another. We run the danger of fighting to the death on ideological pretexts.
We kill each other, or threaten to kill each other, in part, I think, because we are afraid we might not ourselves know the truth, that someone else with a different doctrine might have a closer approximation to the truth. Our history is in part a battle to the death of inadequate myths. If I can't convince you, I must kill you. That will change your mind. You are a threat to my version of the truth, especially the truth about who I am and what my nature is. The thought that I may have dedicated my life to a lie, that I might have accepted a conventional wisdom that no longer, if it ever did, corresponds to the external reality, that is a very painful realization. I will tend to resist it to the last. I will go to almost any lengths to prevent myself from seeing that the worldview that I have dedicated my life to is inadequate. I'm putting this in personal terms so that I don't say "you," so that I'm not accusing anyone of an attitude, but you understand that this is not a mea culpa; I'm trying to describe a psychological dynamic that I think exists, and it's important and worrisome.
Instead of this, what we need is a honing of the skills of explication, of dialogue, of what used to be called logic and rhetoric and what used to be essential to every college education, a honing of the skills of compassion, which, just like intellectual abilities, need practice to be perfected. If we are to understand another's belief, then we must also understand the deficiencies and inadequacies of our own. And those deficiencies and inadequacies are very major. This is true whichever political or ideological or ethnic or cultural tradition we come from. In a complex universe, in a society undergoing unprecedented change, how can we find the truth if we are not willing to question everything and to give a fair hearing to everything? There is a worldwide closed-mindedness that imperils the species. It was always with us, but the risks weren't as grave, because weapons of mass destruction were not then available.
We have Ten Commandments in the West. Why is there no commandment exhorting us to learn? "Thou shalt understand the world. Figure things out." There's nothing like that. And very few religions urge us to enhance our understanding of the natural world. I think it is striking how poorly religions, by and large, have accommodated to the astonishing truths that have emerged in the last few centuries.
Let's think together for a moment about the prevailing scientific wisdom on where we come from. The idea that nearly 15,000 million years ago the universe, or at least its present incarnation, was formed in the big bang; that for some 5,000 million years thereafter even the Milky Way Galaxy was not formed; that for some 5,000 million years after that, the Sun and the planets and the Earth were not formed; that 5,000 million years ago, on an Earth not identical by any means to the one we know today, a large-scale production of complex organic molecules occurred that led to a molecular system capable of self-replication, and therefore began the long, tortuous, and exquisitely beautiful evolutionary sequence that led from those first organisms, barely able to make vague copies of themselves, to the magnificent diversity and subtlety of life that graces our small planet today.
And we have grown up on this planet, trapped, in a certain sense, on it, not knowing of the existence of anything else beyond our immediate surroundings, having to figure the world out for ourselves. What a courageous and difficult enterprise, building, generation after generation, on what has been learned in the past; questioning the conventional wisdom; being willing, sometimes at great personal risk, to challenge the prevailing wisdom and gradually, slowly emerging from this torment, a well-based, in many senses predictive, quantitative understanding of the nature of the world around us. Not, by any means, understanding every aspect of that world but gradually, through successive approximations, understanding more and more. We face a difficult and uncertain future, and it seems to me it requires all of those talents that have been honed by our evolution and our history, if we are to survive.
One thing that seems especially striking in contemporary culture is how few benign visions of the immediate future are offered up. The mass media show all sorts of apocalyptic scenarios, ghastly futures. And there tends to be a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy to these prognostications. How rarely is it that we see a projection twenty or fifty or a hundred years into the future into a world in which we have come to our senses, in which we have figured things out? We can do that. There's nothing that says that we will inevitably fail to meet these challenges. We have solved more difficult problems, and many times. For example, there was once a doctrine called the divine right of kings. It held that God gave kings and queens the right to rule their people. And at that time it really meant rule. "Rule" was not so very different from "own." And eminent clergymen argued that this was clearly written in the Bible. It was the will of God. Eminent secular theologians, Thomas Hobbes, for example, argued just the same thing. And yet there was a stirring sequence of worldwide revolutions-the American, the French, the Russian, and a number of others-that have now produced a planet in which no one, ex
cept an occasional atavistic emperor of a short-lived, small country, no one believes in the divine right of kings. It's now a kind of embarrassment. It's something that our ancestors believed but we in this more enlightened time do not.
Or consider chattel slavery, which Aristotle argued was intended, it was in the natural order of things, the gods required it, that any movement to free the slaves was against divine intention. And slaveholders throughout history have pointed to passages in the Bible to justify the holding of slaves. Yet today, in another stirring sequence of events worldwide, legal chattel slavery has been essentially eliminated. And again it is something from our past that we are embarrassed about, that we surely should still think of as an important insight into a dark side of human nature that should be resisted. Surely the depredations visited on peoples who were once enslaved have not been balanced, but we have made remarkable progress.
Or look at the status of women, about which finally the planet is coming to its senses in our own time. Or even things like smallpox and other disfiguring and fatal diseases, diseases of children, that were once thought to be an inevitable, God-given part of life. The clergy argued, and some still do, that those diseases were sent by God as a scourge for mankind. Now there are no more cases of smallpox on the planet. For a few tens of millions of dollars and the efforts of physicians from a hundred countries, coordinated by the World Health Organization, smallpox has been removed from the planet Earth.
The vested interests in favor of the divine right of kings, or slavery, were very large. Kings had a vested interest in the divine right of kings. Slaveholders had a vested interest in the continuation of the institution of slavery. Who has a vested interest in the prospects of nuclear war? It's a very different situation. Everyone is vulnerable today. And therefore I think it's important to remember that we have dealt with and solved much more difficult problems than this.