The Scientist as Rebel (15 page)

My most recent trip to Russia was in October 2003. Another unexpected encounter, this time with a young woman tour guide at the
monastery of Sergiev Posad north of Moscow. Instead of talking about the churches and the famous works of art, she talked about her own spiritual experiences as a believer. She told how her life was changed when she came to one of the old tombs and smelled a holy scent emerging from the tomb. She knew then that she was called to be a guide and teach others about the mystical powers of the old saints. This is a religion very different from our Western versions of Christianity. It is a religion based on holy magic rather than Bible stories, mystical dreams rather than theological arguments.

THOUGHTLESSLY I SAID
to the Russian sailor in the coast guard station, “You should also come and see us in America.” He looked at me, laughing, with his broad young face. “How could we come to America? That’s impossible. We are warriors.” It was strange to hear him use that word,
voyenniye
—“warriors.” He looked so unwarlike, sitting with his friends around the table and chatting with us about pi-mesons and mu-mesons. And yet the word spoke truth. His trade was war. He belonged to that ancient brotherhood of warriors which Alexander Blok described in his poems, the horsemen riding by night over the field of Kulikovo, the twelve marching in the snowstorm through the desolate streets of Petrograd. All his friendliness, his intellectual curiosity, his boyish humor could not alter the fact that he was a willing tool of Soviet power. A warrior he was, and a warrior he would remain, even after he finished his term of military service and found his niche in civilian society. All his life, he would be proud to have been a part of the Soviet navy. If ever he was called to sail into battle and die for his country, he would hesitate no more than those who sailed with Nelson at Trafalgar. If ever he was called to launch the missile that would obliterate a city, he would hesitate no more than those who aimed the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When I imagine nuclear war, the nightmare begins with that young Russian
sailor pressing the button which blows us all to smithereens, and as he presses it, he says, “We are warriors,” with that same laughing voice of murderous innocence which I heard in Leningrad long ago.

Is there no other way? Is there no other tradition for our young men to follow than the tradition of warriors marching into battle to defend the honor of their tribe? Indeed there is another tradition, the tradition of pacifism, which also has a long and honorable history. For hundreds of years there have been religious sects which held warfare to be contrary to the will of God. Anabaptists and Quakers were preaching the gospel of nonviolence in the seventeenth century, and suffering persecution for their beliefs. This old tradition of nonviolence was personal rather than political. The Quakers allowed no authority to come between the individual conscience and God. They refused, as individuals, to bear arms or to take any part in the waging of wars. They did not seek political power for themselves or attempt to control the actions of governments. They simply declared that they would not take any action forbidden by their consciences. The tradition of personal pacifism which they established has proved durable. It has lasted for three hundred years and has taken root in many countries. Pacifism as a code of personal ethics has proved itself able to weather the storms of war and political change.

Pacifism as a political program is a more recent development. A political pacifist is one who advocates the ethic of nonviolence as a program for a political movement or for a government. Theorists of pacifism make a sharp distinction between personal and political pacifism. In the real world, this distinction is useful but never sharp. There is a continuum of pacifism, extending all the way from the private faith of the traditional conscientious objector to the modern rituals of nonviolent demonstration staged by political action groups in front of television cameras. Pacifism may be a matter of individual conscience or a matter of tactical calculation. Most commonly it is a mixture of both. If pacifism is ever to prevail in the modern world, it
must be both personal and political, cherishing the deep roots of the religious pacifist tradition and at the same time exploiting the opportunities provided by modern communications to mobilize public protest. Gandhi, the first and greatest of modern political pacifists, showed us how it can be done.

The Quakers stand in the middle of the pacifist continuum, not so fully engaged in politics as Gandhi, not so detached as the Amish of Pennsylvania, who try to withdraw altogether from the violence and evil of the world. Quakers live in the world of anger and power and seek to mitigate its evils. The Quaker ethic has always encouraged its adherents to concern themselves with other people’s sufferings. “Concern” in the Quaker vocabulary means more than sympathy; it means practical help for people in need and practical intervention against injustice. Large numbers of Quakers, following the example of their founder, George Fox, express their concern by campaigning in the political arena for humanitarian and pacifist ideals. But they act as individuals, not as an organized movement. Perhaps the main reason for the durability of the Quakers’ influence is the fact that they are tied to no government and no party. Their pacifism is a private commitment based on conscience, not a political tactic dependent on success or popularity. They are not, like the followers of Gandhi, liable to defect from their pacifist principles when the political winds change.

The great and permanent achievement of the Quakers was the abolition of slavery. This social revolution, with the accompanying profound changes in public morality, took centuries to complete and was not the work of Quakers alone. But the earliest agitators against slavery were mostly Quakers. All through the eighteenth century, in England and in America, Quakers were prime movers in the uphill struggle, first to put an end to the profitable trade in fresh slaves from Africa, and later to put an end to the profitable exploitation of slaves wherever they happened to be. My great-great-great-uncle Robert Haynes was a prominent citizen of the island of Barbados, owner of several
sugar plantations and several hundred slaves. In his diary for the year 1804 he complained bitterly of the public agitation against slavery which was then gathering strength in England. He knew who his enemies were. “I am likewise minded,” he wrote, “to attribute a fair share of the blame to the underhand activities of a sect known as Quakers. These, from the very beginnings of the settlement of our island having played a very subtle—and in these days all too little heeded—part in the instigation of others to rebellion, at the same time openly avowing their detestation to any form of violence! Not scrupling, withall, to avail themselves fully of the safety and protection afforded them by the laws and defenses of this country. All this savouring of cant and hypocrisy such as I, for one, find hard to stomach.”

The next item in Haynes’s diary explains the violence of his feelings. “Attempted rising of slaves in some parts of the Island. The above quickly suppressed—the immediate shewing of discipline taking excellent and speedy effect—but at the same time a general anxiety thus engendered by no means, even now, wholly allayed.”
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Four years later the British Parliament passed the act which put an end to the slave trade, with effective criminal penalties. Haynes continued for twenty-five years longer to enjoy an uneasy dominion over his slaves on the island. But he lived long enough to see the Quakers finally victorious, his slaves freed, and the old order of society on the island overthrown. Handsomely compensated with a cash payment for his slaves by the Act of Parliament of 1833, he moved to England and lived the rest of his life at Reading in comfortable retirement.

What were the ingredients of the Quakers’ success? First of all, moral conviction. They never had any doubt that slavery was a moral evil which they were called upon to oppose. Second, patience. They continued their work, decade after decade, undiscouraged by setbacks
and failures. Third, objectivity. A large part of their work consisted of careful collection of facts and statistics which both sides in the dispute came to accept as accurate. It was the fact-gathering activities of the Quakers in Barbados which particularly infuriated my great-great-great-uncle. Fourth, willingness to compromise. The Quakers were concerned to free the slaves, not to punish the slave owners. They accepted the fact that slaves were an economic asset and that the owners were entitled to fair compensation for the loss of their property. The slave owners were not to be humiliated. As a result, even my great-great-great-uncle in the end swallowed his pride and quietly pocketed his cash settlement. The willingness of the British abolitionists to buy out the slave owners made the crucial difference between the peaceful liberation of the West Indian slaves in 1833 and the bloody liberation of the American slaves thirty years later. The British government paid the slave owners twenty million pounds. The cost of the American Civil War was considerably higher.

The abolition of nuclear weapons is a task of the same magnitude as the abolition of slavery. Nuclear weapons are now, as slavery was two hundred years ago, a manifestly evil institution deeply embedded in the structure of our society. Most people nowadays, if they think about nuclear weapons at all, worry about nuclear bombs in the hands of terrorists. They imagine terrorists carrying one or two nuclear bombs in cars or trucks and exploding them in New York or Washington. One or two nuclear bombs exploding in a city would be a disaster much greater than the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001. People are right to worry about terrorist bombs. But they ought to worry much more about the thousands of nuclear weapons that are not in the hands of terrorists but in the hands of national governments. Terrorist bombs could kill millions of people, while national nuclear weapons could kill hundreds of millions. National nuclear weapons used in a major war could destroy whole countries, including our own. And since the United States maintains the largest
and most powerful deployments of nuclear weapons, we carry the largest share of moral responsibility for their continued existence.

People who hope to push the fight for the abolition of war to a successful conclusion must bring to their task the same qualities which won the fight for the abolition of slavery: moral conviction, patience, objectivity, and willingness to compromise. Those who fought against slavery two hundred years ago made a historic compromise which opened the way to their victory; they decided to concentrate their efforts upon the prohibition of the slave trade and to leave the total abolition of slavery to their successors in another generation. They saw that the slave trade was a more glaring evil than slavery itself and more vulnerable to political attack. They were able to mobilize against the slave trade a coalition of moral and economic interests which could not at that time have been brought together in the cause of total abolition. There is a lesson here for the peace movements of today. The ultimate aim of peace movements is the total abolition of war. All war is evil, but the use of nuclear weapons is a more glaring evil, and the abolition of nuclear weapons is a more practical political objective than the abolition of war. Modern pacifists, like the Quakers of the eighteenth century, would be well advised to attack the more vulnerable evil first. After we have succeeded in abolishing nuclear weapons, the abolition of war may become a feasible objective for later generations, but from here it is out of sight.

Pacifism as a political cause has suffered from the fact that its greatest leaders have been men of genius. People of outstanding genius, transcending the beliefs and loyalties of the tribe in which they happen to be born, tend naturally toward pacifism. Unfortunately, people of genius do not usually make good politicians. Gandhi was one of the rare exceptions. Genius and the art of political compromise do not sit easily together. Except for Gandhi, the great historic figures of pacifism have been prophets rather than politicians. Jesus in Judea, Tolstoy in Russia, Einstein in Germany, each in turn
has set for mankind a higher standard than political movements can follow.

When Tolstoy wrote
War and Peace
, he was a Russian patriot, sympathetic to the martial spirit of his soldier characters and proud of their bravery. His skeptical realism belongs squarely, as Alexander Blok’s fevered romanticism does not, in the mainstream of Russian patriotic literature. But Russian patriotism was too narrow a frame for Tolstoy’s genius. At the age of fifty he experienced a religious conversion to the gospel of peace. He repudiated the sovereignty of all national governments, including his own. He cut himself off from the aristocratic society in which he had formerly lived. And for the last thirty years of his life he preached the ethic of nonviolence in its most uncompromising form. He demanded that we not only refuse to serve in armies and navies but also refuse to cooperate in any way with coercive activities of governments. Revolutionary action against governments was forbidden too; those who oppose a government with violence cannot lead the way to the abolition of violence. He called us to follow a way of life based on strict obedience to the words of Jesus: “Ye have heard that it hath been said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth: but I say unto you, that ye resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”

The Tsar’s government was wise enough not to lay hands on Tolstoy or to attempt to silence him. Only the young men who followed his teaching and refused military service were put in prison or exiled to Siberia. Tolstoy himself lived unmolested on his estate at Yasnaya Polyana with his faithful disciples and his disapproving wife. He corresponded with the young Gandhi. He became a prophet and spiritual leader for pacifists all over the world. Wherever he saw cruelty and oppression, he spoke out for the victims against the oppressors. He warned the wealthy and powerful in no uncertain terms of the explosion of violence to which their selfishness was leading: “Only one thing is left for those who do not wish to change their way of life,
and that is to hope that things will last my time—after that, let happen what may. That is what the blind crowd of the rich are doing, but the danger is ever growing and the terrible catastrophe draws nearer.” The wealthy and powerful listened politely to his warning and continued on the course which led to the cataclysms of 1914 and 1917. The situation of Tolstoy at the end of his life was similar to the situation of Einstein fifty years later, the venerable white-bearded figure, wearing a peasant blouse as a symbol of his contempt for rank and privilege, universally respected as a writer of genius, disdained by practical politicians as a cantankerous old fool, loved and admired by the multitude as spokesman for the conscience of mankind.