Within that lifetime, our planet has shrunk to Lilliputian proportions, so that instead of Jules Verne's Eighty Days, it can be orbited in eighty minutes. But as to the second curve -- the bridging of the distance between nations did not bring them 'closer' to each other -- rather the opposite. Before the communications-explosion, travel was slow, but there existed no Iron Curtain, no Berlin Wail, no mine fields in no-man's-lands, and hardly any restrictions on immigration or emigration; today about one-third of mankind is not permitted to leave its own country. One. could almost say that progress in co-operation varied in reverse ratio to progress in communications. The conquest of the air transformed limited into total warfare; the mass media became the demagogue's instruments of fomenting hatred; and even between close neighbours like England and France, the increase in tourist traffic has hardly increased mutual understanding. There have been some positive advances such as the European Common Market; they are minute compared to the gigantic cracks which divide the planet into three major and countless minor, hostile, isolated camps.
The point of labouring these obvious facts is to make them fall into the general pattern. Language, the outstanding achievement of the neocortex, became a more dividing than unifying factor, increasing intra-specific tensions; progress in communications followed a similar trend of turning a blessing into a curse. Even from the aesthetic point of view we have managed to contaminate the luminiferous ether as we have contaminated our air, rivers and seashores; you fiddle with the dials of your radio and from all over the world, instead of celestial harmonies, the ether disgorges its musical latrine slush.
Of all exponential curves, that referring to progress in destructive power is the most spectacular and the best known. To sum it up as briefly as possible: after the First World War, statisticians calculated that on the average ten thousand rifle bullets or ten artillery shells had been needed to kill one enemy soldier. The bombs dropped from flying machines weighed a few pounds. By the Second World War, the block-busters had acquired a destructive power equal to twenty tons of T.N.T. The first atomic bomb on Hiroshima equalled twenty thousand tons of T.N.T. Ten years later, the first hydrogen bomb equalled twenty million tons. At the time of writing, we are stockpiling bombs the equivalent of one hundred million tons of T.N.T.; and there are rumours of a 'gigaton bomb' -- a 'nuclear weapon packing the power of a billion tons of T.N.T. that could be detonated a hundred miles off the U.S. coastline and still set off a fifty-foot tidal wave that would sweep across much of the entire American continent . . . or a cobalt bomb that would send a deadly cloud sweeping forever about the earth.' [10]
The New Calendar
I have said that there are two reasons which entitles us to call our time 'unique'. The first is quantitative, expressed by the exponential increase of populations, communications, destructive power, etc. Under their combined impact, an extra-terrestrial intelligence, to whom centuries are as seconds, able to survey the whole curve in one sweep, would probably come to the conclusion that human civilisation is either on the verge of, or in the process of, exploding.
The second reason is qualitative, and can be summed up in a single sentence: before the thermonuclear bomb, man had to live with the idea of his death as an individual; from now onward, mankind has to live with the idea of its death as a species.
The bomb has given us the power to commit genosuicide; and within a few years we should even have the power to turn our planet into a nova, an exploding star. Every age has had its Cassandras and Get-Ready Men, and mankind has managed to survive regardless of their sinister prophecies. But this comforting argument is no longer valid, as no past age, however convulsed by war and pestilence, had possessed our newly acquired power over life on the planet as a whole.
The full implications of this fact have not yet sunk into the minds of even the noisiest pacifists. We have always been taught to accept the transitoriness of individual existence, while taking the survival of our species axiomatically for granted. This was a perfectly reasonable belief, barring some unlikely cosmic catastrophe. But it has ceased to be a reasonable belief since the day when the possibility of engineering a catastrophe of cosmic dimensions was experimentally tested and proven. It pulverised the assumptions on which all philosophy from Socrates onward was based: the potential immortality of our species.
But new insights of a revolutionary nature cannot be assimilated at once. There are periods of incubation. The Copernican theory of the earth's motion had to wait eighty years before it took root. The unconscious mind has its own clock, and its own ways of digesting what the conscious mind has rejected as indigestible. The leaders of the French Revolution were well aware of this fact; to hasten the process of assimilation, they introduced a new calendar, starting on the day of the proclamation of the Republic: September 22, 1792, became the 1st of Vendémaire of the year 1. It would perhaps not be a bad idea if we all kept a second calendar, at least in our minds, starting with the year when the new Star of Bethlehem rose over Hiroshima. Calendars imply convictions about the fundamental importance of certain events: the first Olympiad, the founding of the city of Rome, the birth of Jesus, the flight of Mohammed from Mecca. The positing of a year zero provides a time scale, a measure of an age, of the distance covered from the real or assumed starting point of a given civilisation.
Thus I am writing this in the year 22 p.H. -- post Hiroshima. For there can be little doubt that in that year a new era started. The human race is facing a challenge unprecedented in its history -- which can only be met by taking action of an equally unprecedented nature. The first half of the preceding sentence is now more or less generally accepted, but the second is not. Even the thinking minority still believes that a peril unique in its novelty can be averted by time-worn traditional remedies, by appeals to sweet reason and commonsense. But such appeals are powerless against the militant ideologies of closed systems, whose true believers are convinced as a professor at Peking University wrote recently -- that 'respect for facts and for other people's opinions must be exterminated from man's soul like vermin'. [11]
All efforts of persuasion by reasoned argument rely on the implicit assumption that homo sapiens, though occasionally blinded by emotion, is a basically rational animal, aware of the motives of his own actions and beliefs -- an assumption which is untenable in the light of both historical and neurological evidence. All such appeals fall on barren ground; they could take root only if the ground were prepared by a spontaneous change in human mentality all over the world -- the equivalent of a major biological mutation. Then, and only then, would mankind as a whole, from its political leaders down to the lonely crowd, become receptive to reasoned argument, and willing to resort to those unorthodox measures which would enable it to meet the challenge.
It is highly improbable that such a mental mutation will occur spontaneously in the foreseeable future; whereas it is highly probable that the spark which initiates the chain-reaction will be ignited sooner or later, deliberately or by accident. As the devices of atomic and biological warfare become more potent and simpler to produce, their spreading to young and immature, as well as old and over-ripe, nations is inevitable. An invention, once made, cannot be dis-invented; the bomb has come to stay. Mankind has to live with it forever: not merely through the next crisis and the next one, but forever; not through the next twenty or two hundred or two thousand years, but forever. It has become part of the human condition.
In the first twenty years of the post-Hiroshima era -- 1946-66 according to the conventional calendar -- men had fought, as already mentioned, forty 'minor' wars and civil wars tabulated by the Pentagon. [12] More than half of them were fought between Communists and non-Communists (China, Greece); the others were either 'anti-colonial' wars (Algeria, Indo-China), 'imperialist adventures' (Suez, Hungary, Bay of Pigs), or 'classical' wars between neighbours (India-Pakistan, Israel-Arabs). But this Pentagon list does not include crises like the Berlin blockade of 1948, and coups d'état like the defenestrations in Prague, 1948.
As a French diplomat has put it: 'There are no longer such things as war and peace, just different levels of confrontations.'
These wars and civil wars were fought with conventional arms, mostly by nuclear have-nots. But at least on two occasions -- Berlin, 1948, and Cuba, 1962 -- we were on the brink of nuclear war; and all this in the first two decades since the year zero p.H. If one extrapolates from these data into the future, the probability of disaster approaches statistical certainty.
A further aggravating factor is that nuclear devices, like other gadgets, will undergo the process of progressive miniaturisation: they will become smaller and easier to make, so that in the long run effective global control of their manufacture will become impracticable on these grounds alone; in the foreseeable future they will be made and stored in large quantities, from windswept Alaska to sunny Stanleyville. It is as if a gang of delinquent children had been locked in a room filled with inflammable material, and provided with match-boxes -- accompanied by the warning not to use them. Some social scientists have indeed estimated (to quote J.R. Platt again), that
our 'half-life'* under these circumstances -- that is, the probable number of years before these repeated confrontations add up to a 50-50 chance of destroying the human race forever -- may be only about ten to twenty years. Obviously this is not an objectively testable number. Nevertheless the idea is clear. This is the first time in the history of the human race that babies -- all babies everywhere, forever -- have had such a slim chance of survival. [13] * The term is borrowed from atomic physics: 'half-life' is the time taken for half the atoms of a radioactive isotype to disintegrate.
There is indeed no convincing reason which could lead us to believe that the conflicts, crises, confrontations and wars of the past will not be repeated in varying parts of the world in the years, decades and centuries to come. Ever since the Second World War, the ideological, racial, ethnic tensions have been on the increase in Africa, Asia, Latin America. In the United States, in spite of all genuine efforts to find a solution, the racial problem is becoming more intractable; even Israel, prime victim of racial persecution, has its own underprivileged majority of coloured Jews. The lessons of the past have been wasted; history not only repeats itself, it seems to be labouring under a neurotic compulsion to do so. Thus in 1920 a town named Danzig on the eastern fringes of Europe was made into an enclave which could only be reached by a narrow corridor through foreign territory. This absurd arrangement became the pretext for World War Two. While it was still on, a town named Berlin, in the heart of Europe, was made into an enclave which could only be reached by a narrow corridor through foreign territory. This absurd repetition became the pretext which has already once brought us to the brink of war, and will in all probability do so again. Hegel wrote: 'What experience and history teach us is this -- that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.'
It has been said that the blood of martyrs fertilises the earth. In fact it has been running down into the sewers, with a monotonously gurgling sound, as far as man can remember; and at whatever part of the world we look, there is scant evidence which would encourage us to hope that the gurgling will diminish or stop. If we discard the comforts of wishful thinking, we must expect that the motives and loci of potential conflict will continue to drift across the globe like high-pressure areas over a meteorological chart. And our only precarious safeguard against the ballooning of local into total conflict, mutual deterrence, will always remain dependent on uncontrollable psychological factors -- the restraint or recklessness of fallible key individuals. Russian roulette is a game which cannot be played for long.
So long as we believed that our species as such was virtually immortal, with an astronomical lifespan before it, we could afford to wait patiently for that change of heart which, gradually or suddenly, would make love, peace and sweet reason prevail. But we no longer have that assurance of immortality, nor the unlimited time to wait for the moment when the lion will lie down with the lamb, the Arab with the Israeli, and the Commissar with the Yogi.
The conclusions, if we dare to draw them, are quite simple. Our biological evolution to all intents and purposes came to a standstill in Cro-Magnon days. Since we cannot in the foreseeable future expect the necessary change in human nature to arise by way of a spontaneous mutation, that is, by natural means, we must induce it by artificial meam. We can only hope to survive as a species by developing techniques which supplant biological evolution. We must search for a cure for the schizophysiology inherent in man's nature, and the resulting split in our minds, which led to the situation in which we find ourselves.
'Tampering with Human Nature'
I believe that if we fail to find this cure, the old paranoid streak in man, combined with his new powers of destruction, must sooner or later lead to genosuicide. But I also believe that the cure is almost within reach of contemporary biology; and that with the proper concentration of efforts it might be produced within the lifetime of the generation which is now entering on the scene.
I am aware that this sounds over-optimistic, in contrast to the seemingly over-pessimistic views just expressed on the prospect ahead of us if we persist in carrying on in our paranoiac ways. I do not think these apprehensions are exaggerated, and I do not think that the idea of a cure for homo sap. is utopian. It is not inspired by science fiction, but based on a realistic assessment of the recent advances in several convergent branches of the life sciences. They do not provide a cure, but they indicate the area of research that may produce it.
I am also aware that any proposal which involves 'artificial tampering with human nature' is bound to provoke strong emotional resistances. These are partly based on prejudice, but partly on a healthy aversion against further intrusions into the privacy and sanctity of the individual by the excesses of social engineering, character engineering, various forms of brainwashing, and other threatening aspects of the air-conditioned nightmare surrounding us. On the other hand, ever since the first hunter wrapped his shivering frame into the hide of a dead animal, man has been tampering with his own nature, creating for himself an artificial environment which gradually transformed the face of the planet, and an artificial mode of existence without which he can no longer survive. There is no turning back on housing, clothing, artificial heating, cooked food; nor on spectacles, hearing aids, forceps, artificial limbs, annesthetics, antiseptics, prophylactics, vaccines, and so forth.
We start tampering with human nature almost from the moment a baby is born, for one of the first routine measures is the universal practice to drop a solution of silver nitrate into the baby's eyes to protect it against ophthalmia neonatorum, a form of conjunctivitis frequently leading to blindness, caused by gonococci which, unknown to her, may have lurked in the mother's genital tract. This is followed, later on, by preventive vaccinations, compulsory in most civilised countries, against smallpox, typhoid and so on. To appreciate the value of these tamperings with the course of Nature, let us remember that the prevalence of smallpox among Red Indians was one of the main causes which made them lose their continent to the white man. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it constituted a hazard to which everybody was exposed. Its ravages might have been even worse but for that intrepid lady, Mary Wortley Montagu who learnt the ancient oriental practice of 'inoculation' from the Turks, and introduced it to England at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It consisted in infecting the person to be immunised with matter taken from mild smallpox cases -- a rather dangerous procedure, but with a much lower fatality rate than 'natural' smallpox (the risk vanished only when Jenner discovered that vaccination with the attenuated virus of cowpox gave immunity against smallpox).
A less well-known case of tampering is the prevention ofgoitre and of a certain variety of cretinism associated with it. When I was a child, and was taken for the holidays to the Alps, the number of inhabitants of mountain valleys who had monstrous swellings in front of their necks, and the n
umber of cretinous children in their families was quite frightening. Today there is not a single case of goitre in the Tyrolean village where I spend part of the year, nor in the neighbouring valleys. It has been found that goitre is associated with a deficiency of iodine in the thyroid gland, and that the water in regions where the disease used to be endemic was hard and poor in iodine. Thus iodine was periodically added in small quantities to the drinking water or diet of the children, and goitre became virtually a thing of the past.
Evidently man, or a certain breed of man, was biologically not equipped to live in environments with iodine-poor water, or to cope with the virus of smallpox, and the deadly micro-organisms of malaria or sleeping sickness. If we reverse the situation, we find that some microbes are equally ill-equipped for resisting other species of micro-organisms which we call antibiotics. Now microbes seem to have an enormous mutation rate (or some other method of hereditary adaptation), for, within a few years, they have evolved new drug-resistant strains. We humans cannot perform such evolutionary feats. But we can simulate major adaptive mutations by adding iodine to the drinking water, or by putting drops into the eyes of the newborn, to protect them from enemies against which our natural defences are inadequate.