Lecture to the Political Science Club
Rumson-Fair Haven Regional High School
Rumson, New Jersey
November 22, 1982
In November 1982, New Jersey voters passed a referendum calling upon the United States government to negotiate a moratorium or `freeze’ on nuclear weapons production in both the United States and the Soviet Union. The `freeze’ movement had a short, intense life, fueled by such books as Helen Caldicott’s Nuclear Madness and Jonathan Schell’s considerably more thoughtful and interesting The Fate of the Earth, along with a televised film depicting the devastation of nuclear war. Although it was hard to ignore the timing of these referenda, which were held in several states during an off-year election, in an apparent effort to increase voter turnout for candidates on the `left,’ the movement activists themselves were often sincere and the fears they tapped into were real. I had been active in New Jersey as one of the very few people willing to oppose the `freeze’ in public (there had never been any question that the referendum would be approved); after the election, I was invited to speak at the local high school.
The question before us is clear: How can we, as Americans, avoid destruction by nuclear war–preserve our lives–while perpetuating the institutions that enable us to make our lives worth living, worth preserving? this is the same as asking, `How shall we perpetuate peace?’ because Americans know that peace does not mean simply the absence of war with another country; it also means liberty, the absence of internal war that tyrants wage against their own people.
In this century we find ourselves in a circumstance that previous generations also knew. No need to list the obvious at much length: We live in a country with extensive territory, fertile soil, temperate climate. Our political institutions encourage civil and religious liberty, enabling us to pursue happiness. No one in this room can claim much credit for this circumstance. It was given to us.
It was given to us by those who defended liberty in three major wars. The Revolutionary War gave Americans the chance to establish a regime based on liberty; the Civil War tested if that regime could long endure in the face of those who denied liberty to their fellow men; the World War of this century determined the immediate fate of that regime against a new birth of tyranny, totalitarianism, which remains the most comprehensive denial of liberty ever attempted. If our generation seeks to defend liberty, we can do so out of gratitude to those who came before us and gave it to us. And we can do so out of a sense of justice for ourselves, of duty to posterity, and of care for our species in general.
But we also find ourselves in a new circumstance. There is no need to list its features at much length, either. In 1929, a decade after the war that broke Europe and some fifteen years before the invention of nuclear weapons, Winston Churchill wrote: “Mankind has never been in this position before. Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wise guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination. This is the point in human destinies to which all the glories and toils of men pause and ponder upon their new responsibilities. Death stands at attention, obedient, expectant, ready to serve, ready to shear away the peoples en masse; ready, if called on, to pulverize, without hope of repair, what is left of civilization. He awaits only the word of command.”
This circumstance, too, was given to us. Modern technology, which brings economic abundance, also brings humanity the chance for unprecedented destruction. No one here invented this technology; no one alive today originated the philosophy that made it possible. Our task is to seek a way of enduring with it.
Perpetuating peace, the absence of both war and tyranny, of course requires more than the desire for peace. It requires us to examine ourselves. Nuclear devastation or a regime of tyranny in American could be accomplished by the Soviet Union, but the preparations for that accomplishment would have to be made, in large part, here. Abraham Lincoln wrote, “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author…. As a nation of freemen, we must lie through all time or die by suicide.” He means that precisely because we are at liberty, we will make the decisions that eventually save or ruin us.
The traditional cause of the ruin of mixed and democratic regimes is mob rule, properly called misrule. A contemporary writer has observed that “It is the great fiction of this new generation that the mass movement is the highest manifestation of democracy, democracy’s triumph…. This is a misconception. Far from elevating `ordinary people’ to the stature of self-governing human beings, the mass movement is threatening in our age to reduce democratic citizens to the level of a mob–albeit well-educated.” [Patrick Glynn: “Nuclear Politics.” Journal of Contemporary Affairs, July 19, 1982]. “In the end,” he continues, this more or less genteel mob reduces itself to the lowest common denominator–to “that cowering, fearful creature inside every man and woman that is indifferent to all concerns but comfortable self-preservation.”
We sees this ourselves. One year, the fever is for text cuts; the next year, for balancing the budget. One year, we hear demands for rebuilding our national defense; this year, for a `freeze’ on nuclear weapons. This is not to say that none of these demands is right. It is to say that the mass movements accompanying them rarely add anything more than commotion to our public dialogue, loosening the attachment of Americans to the institutions that perpetuate peace. While encouraging those who tend toward hysteria (whether by nature or by art), mass movements alienate those who are not hysterical, the people who may eventually demand that liberty be abridged in order to silence the agitators.
In order to know ourselves better, let us examine pacifism, the doctrine of today’s most fervent mass movement. To be sure, the large numbers of Americans who voted in favor of nuclear arms `freeze’ resolutions on election day were very far from endorsing pacifism. They believed the question before them a general one, asking them to favor arms control and to avoid nuclear war. But the specific language of the question was promoted by the pacifists, in alliance with certain economic and political interest groups that had their own, rather more practical, aims to promote. But pacifism is the phenomenon to examine here.
There are two kinds of pacifism: the secular and the religious. Secular pacifism is morally trivial and easy to dismiss, an exercise in escapism. “I believe that the Russian people are so frightened of nuclear war,” writes Dr. Helen Caldicott, “that they would heave a momentous sigh of relief and would want their own leaders to follow America’s moral initiative toward nuclear disarmament.” Dr. Caldicott fails to suggest what the Russian people would do if “their own leaders” declined to follow these earnest desires. Mr. Jonathan Schell, author of a widely-distributed book title The Fate of the Earth, claims that “the defense of our nation, or the defense of liberty, or the defense of socialism, or the defense of whatever we happen to believe it” are morally negligible in contrast to the possibility–and he admits that it is only a possibility–of human extinction after nuclear war. In so arguing, he ignores an argument nearly three centuries old, made by one of the philosophers who formulated the modern doctrine of human rights. John Locke wrote, “I have no reason to suppose, that he, who would take away my liberty, would not when he had me in his Power, take away everything else.” “[H]e who attempts to get another Man into his Absolute Power, does thereby put himself into a state of war with him; It being to be understood as a Declaration of a Design upon his Life.” In this century, millions of Russians, Chinese, and others have learned that. Some of our most respected authorities on totalitarianism have not. A distinguished former State Department official would prefer to sacrifice liberty in the hope of preserving life. “Rather Red than dead,” he has insisted. He overlooks the power of modern technology, far more formidable than any known in Locke’s time, to destroy life after liberty is abandoned. So do our secular pacifists. While we wait for them to learn, we an home that their learning comes from peaceful consideration of history and not from violent experience.
Religious pacifism can be equally trivial and escapist. It can also rest on sincere faith and a courage fortified by faith. We have all heard numerous statements, made by clergymen, that partake of triviality and escapism. A local minister spoke at a forum shortly before the election; unwittingly imitating a well-known television `personality,’ he informed us that “Nuclear war is insane.” Having delivered himself of that insight, he went on to belabor it, insisting on what all of us have known for some time, namely, that a nuclear attack would devastate any country that suffered it. He concluded with an endorsement of the nuclear `freeze,’ without troubling to examine whether or not that policy would contribute even slightly to a lessening of the chances for nuclear war. Another minister was quoted in a local newspaper as endorsing an even more spectacular proposal: “I wish I could have just two hours alone with President Reagan. Someone has to have the courage to say, `Dismantle the Army, dismantle the Navy and the Air Force,’ and then stand ready to be martyrs before the world for the survival of the human race.” One can only hope that the minister will get his wish, as it would probably take at least two hours for the President to straighten him out. Mr. Reagan could begin by explaining to his reverend guest that a government has no right to make unwilling martyrs of its people as a gesture (and surely a preposterous one) toward human survival.
Nor does Christianity itself recommend martyrdom for the sake of human survival. Quite the contrary: Jesus rejects the fear of apocalypse. Recall the story told by Matthew: After condemning the scribes and Pharisees of Jerusalem, Jesus speaks privately to his disciples, a private speech made public by the written account of it. The disciples ask about the Second Coming, and Jesus replies, in part:
And you will be hearing of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not frightened, for those things must take place, but that is not yet the end.
For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and in various places there will be famines and earthquakes.
But all these things are merely the beginning of birth pangs.
Then they will deliver you up to tribulation, and will kill you, and you will be hated by all nations on account of My name.
And at that time many will fall away and will betray one another and hate one another.
And many false prophets will arise, and will mislead many.
And because lawlessness is increased, most people’s love will grow cold.
But the one who endures to the end, it is he who shall be saved. [Matthew 24.6-13]
Christian martyrdom is for the survival of souls, not for the physical survival of the human race. When clergymen preach fear of violent death to worried suburbanites, they imitate not Jesus but the noted seventeenth-century atheist, Thomas Hobbes.
Somewhat more sober Christians quote the Sermon on the Mount, which blesses peacemakers. “I say to you, do not resist him who is evil; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also” [Matthew 5.39]. But to bless peacemakers surely does not mean to curse the peace won by military deterrence. Nor does the Bible ever justify treating a military attack as if it were a slap on the face, teaching that would confuse slaughter with petty humiliation. Moreover, the New Testament speaks to individuals, not to nations. It does not claim to guide nation as a whole in their political conduct. As one writer puts it, “As a Christian, I am told to be read to turn the other cheek in response to aggression; I am not told to turn the other cheek of my neighbor when he is struck by someone else. If I myself choose to make a sacrifice, that may well be honorable. If I choose to sacrifice my wife and my child, who depend on me for their security, that certainly is not honorable.” [Philip Lawler: “The Bishops and the Bomb: The Morality of Nuclear Deterrence.” Washington, D. C.: The Heritage Foundation, 1982, p. 3].
Understanding Christianity as a primarily individual, not political religion in no way denies the prophesy of Isaiah:
They shall hammer their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not lift up sword against nation,
And never again will they learn war. [Isaiah 2.4]
This prophecy refers to the time when God intervenes directly in human events, the days of the Messiah when divine power overthrows the rule of human kings. While our religious pacifists are sometimes very nice people, we not confuse their interventions in human events with the interventions of God.
There is, nonetheless, a serious Christian pacifism discernible in this smog of fear, naïveté, and Scriptural misinterpretation. Perhaps its best contemporary formulation comes from the Mennonite scholar, John Howard Yoder, in his book The Politics of Jesus [Grand Rapids: William S. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1972].
Yoder argues that “God will fight for us.” He observes that for the ancient Israelites, to believe was “to trust God for their survival as a people.” [E]ven when Israel uses the sword, in a most fearsome and destructive way, the victory is credited not to the prowess of the swordsmen” but to the “help” of God. The Biblical holy war was “more a miracle than a calculating instrument of politics”; Yoder defines “miracle” as “a cause for wonderment,” sidestepping the question of whether or not the miraculous contravenes nature.
Turning to the New Testament, Yoder observes “a strand of Gospel teaching that holds secular government to be “the province of the sovereignty of Satan.” This, of course, includes democratic government. In this formulation, we have no right either to participate in government or forcibly to rebel against it. Caesar’s things are Caesar’s, as well as Satan’s, and Caesar is welcome to them. This teaching contradicts both the traditional Christian doctrine of the `just war’ and the leftist doctrine of the `social gospel.’ “[T]he cross and not the sword, suffering and not brute power determine the meaning of history.”
Yoder clearly understands the implications of his interpretation, speaking of “the inevitable suffering of those whose only goal is to be faithful to that love which puts one at the mercy of one’s neighbor, which abandons claims to justice for oneself and for one’s own in an overriding concern for the reconciling of the adversary and the estranged.” He goes still further: He rejects the pacifism that says you can get what you want in this world without violence–the pacifism of Gandhi and King. He insists that as a Christian you must be ready to sacrifice what you want in this life, no matter how legitimate what you want may be, in order to avoid coercion of any kind, violent or nonviolent.
To the question posed by classical political philosophers–`Who rules?’–Yoder replies that God rules. “The spiritual and providential laws which we expect to see at work in the system,” he writes, “are as solid for the believer as are the laws of dialectical materialism for the Marxist.” He understands the command to love one’s enemy as a command to ally oneself with the one truly absolute Power. Only that Power, he contends, a Power identical to love, will prevail at the end of days.
The theological question raised by this serious Christian pacifism is simple to ask, far from simple to answer: Do the commands to love one’s enemy and to depend on God’s power mean that we abandon the forceful means of deterring war, thus tempting our enemy to commit great evil? Shall we depend on God not only primarily but exclusively? The ancient Israelites evidently depended on God primarily but not exclusively. Should Christians? We must leave this question to those more learned in Scripture than I.
We can do so, knowing that there is not one pacifist in twenty who conceives of pacifism in Yoder’s way. Most contemporary pacifists do indeed follow the examples of Mahatma Gandhi and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. These men, pacifists say, embodied a pacifism that worked. But one must ask, `How long did it work?’ The lives of both were ended by the violence they condemned. The mass movements they inspired never recovered. The reason for this is not hard to see, One must have something better than a mass movement in order to defend justice. For that, we need institutions that can survive the inevitable mediocrity of the majority who rule. Pacifism cannot survive mediocrity. It requires the exceptional; it requires something that approaches a combination of saintliness and cunning. This is rare, and the defenseless nature of pacifism itself results in the eventual destruction of that rarity.
We can come away from our examination of pacifism with a renewed understanding of the worth of our political institutions. Without necessarily making a political religion of our esteem for them, we can esteem them for providing a defense against threats to our lives and our liberty.
Those of you familiar with mythology will know of a beast called the griffin, part lion and part eagle. In the Middle Ages the griffin symbolized absolute duality–Savior and Antichrist. We live today as never before under the sign of a new griffin, a griffin belonging to this world: the technology of modern science, which both enhances and threatens our lives and our liberty. Behind modern science we find modern political philosophy, a philosophy that commends to us the task of using nature to conquer nature, including human nature. Because a philosophy underlies the science that underlies technology, the passion of mass movements cannot get us very far. It is no substitute for reason. Most of the materials for our future support and defense must be furnished by the reasoned examination of ourselves–our policies, our thoughts, our institutions–and by the reasoned examination of our adversary’s policies, thoughts, and institutions.
You will recall that I began by asking, `How shall we perpetuate peace?’ In the larger sense, the perpetuation of peace requires the sort of examination I just proposed. In the immediate sense, one might say there is no peace to perpetuate, as a look at any map from 1945 and one of today will confirm. But there is peace in terms of nuclear weapons, and I see no means of perpetuating it beyond maintaining forces capable of deterring Soviet attack. What that will require is, of course, subject to debate.
2016 NOTE: Just to clear up a minor, and comical, feature of this talk, the joke about the “well-known television `personality'” whose catchphrase I parodied referred to a commercial for a bargain-basement electronics store called “Crazy Eddie’s.” The actor who played Crazy Eddie in the omnipresent TV spots always ended his pitch with the tagline, “At Crazy Eddie’s, the prices are insane!” My joke was actually much more apt than I knew. Several years later, Crazy Eddie’s was driven into bankruptcy for fraudulent business practices; as with the `freeze’ movement, sophistry had its day but finally went down to defeat.
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