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The Church of the Secular Apocalypse: The Litany of the Long Good-bye
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20366 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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6 / 1992 |
6,145 Words |
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John Tagg
John Tagg is associate professor of English at Palomar
College. |
With the collapse of communism we have not only lost our favorite enemy, we have also lost the only opponent capable of engaging us in a major nuclear war.
While nobody in his or her right mind wants to have a major nuclear war, a lot of people have taken a great deal of satisfaction in talking, writing, chanting, and singing about it, dramatizing it, and meditating on it. The assertion that nuclear weapons would inevitably be used in a major war that would destroy the human race has been in the forefront of the argument against the deployment of nuclear weapons.
Jonathan Schell spelled out the assumption implicit in the view in his 1982 book The Fate of the Earth:
"The fundamental origin of the peril of human extinction by nuclear arms is not in any particular social or political circumstances of our time but in the attainment by mankind as a whole, after millennia of scientific progress, of a certain level of knowledge of the physical universe. As long as that knowledge is in our possession, the atoms themselves, each one stocked with a prodigious supply of energy, are, in a manner of speaking, in a perilously advanced state of mobilization for nuclear hostilities."
Thus, so the argument goes, just by understanding the atom "we are preparing our own extermination." We shall "go on piling up the instruments of doom year after year until, by accident or design, they go off."
For the past forty years, much popular argument on the issue of nuclear weapons grew out of the--usually unstated--assumption that nuclear weapons were bound to "go off" and that the more of them there were and the longer such weapons existed, the greater the likelihood of an explosion.
This way of characterizing the world is, precisely, apocalyptic. The end is near. The end will be absolute and irrevocable, not part of a cyclic process but the termination of the cycle, not local but universal. Almost every advocate of the cause, from Bertrand Ressell to Carl Sagan, had a clear, a priori commitment to the apocalyptic vision. As W.B. Gallie, emeritus professor of political science at Cambridge, observed: "All less bad cases--all possibilities of forestalling or moderating the danger before it reaches its climax--are dismissed as delusive, as if on the principle that only the worst is bad enough for
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