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November/December 2000
Civic
Responsibility in the New Millenium: An Address to Christians The world is at a critical point. For good or for ill, our ability to affect destiny is now a hundred times greater than it was a century ago. Technologically speaking, we could offer every man, woman, and child on earth a modicum of material prosperity, and technologically we have the means to extinguish all life on the planet. So we must avoid the mediocrity that shrinks from great issues. We must resist what de Tocqueville called "paltriness of aim." We need to think big, and I propose we try to do so about three challenges that loom too large for serious Christians to ignore. The first is the environment. Not long ago a British zoologist, Tim Benton, took a stroll along an uninhabited stretch of shoreline on Dulcie Island. Located 4,000 miles northeast of New Zealand, Dulcie is tiny. The nearest and barely settled place is Pitcairn Island, some 300 miles away. But despite the almost complete isolation of that mile-long beach on Dulcie, Tim Benton counted 953 light bulbs, shoes, toys, cars, bits of plastic that had washed up on the shore, and 171 glass bottles from fifteen different countries. We are littering the earth with garbage. And not only the earth: the average American car driven the average American distance10,000 miles a yearreleases annually into the atmosphere its own weight in carbon. When you tally up the number of cars in the world, not to mention refrigerators and air conditioners, it is small wonder the globe is warming. That's why the North Pole is melting, and why fewer champion ice skaters are coming out of Holland: the canals are not freezing over as once they did. That's why the fifty-odd ski resorts in Vermont are now down to twenty-six. (You can't make money if you can't make snow.) Add to the thinning of the ozone layer the loss of one-fourth of the world's topsoil, one-third of our forest cover, and our ever-increasing population growth, and you have to wonder if Mother Nature wouldn't be better off if human beings went the way of the dinosaurs. The world is at a critical point because we are embarked on a new era of megatechnology. Its dangers are immense. Let us not forget that 100 years ago the automobile was introduced as "clean, safe, convenient, private, fast, non-polluting (unlike horses)." At mid-century we were told that pesticides were going to save crops and feed a hungry world; no mention of poisoned wildlife, water, or growing rates of cancer. More recently, nuclear energy was promoted as a "clean, safe" energy source with not a word said about radioactivity lasting 250,000 years. Now we are faced with technologies to change nature itself: biotechnology, human eugenics, nanotechnology, robotics. I must admit the very thought of radically altering plants and animals and designing babies recalls a haunting question asked 150 years ago by a Russian philosopher deeply skeptical of technology. Asked whether he believed in progress, he answered, "Isn't progress a sign of the end?" Personally I am far from opposed to all technological progress. For instance I would love, with the wave of a wand, to declare the solar age "open," for using solar energy is living off income, using fossil fuel, off savings. When you think that the vast majority of poor people live in the southern tier of this planetin Central and Latin America, in Africa and Asia and that the one thing they all have in abundance is sunshine, it breaks your heart that we have poured so many of our resources into weapons research and so few into the development of what apparently will be, for billions of poor people, a cheap, benign, and endlessly renewable source of energy. Either we revere or ravish the earth. And I say "revere" because caution lest we exhaust our natural resources and destroy ourselves in the process that kind of caution is not enough. Only reverence can restrain violence, be that violence directed against nature or against each other. So serious Christians must become informed and publicly participate in what must become a public debate on every technological development beyond a certain scale. Too much is at stake. And as I see it, Christians have a special task. In church we recite "The heavens are telling the glory of God," "the firmament proclaims God's handiwork" and "The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof," but our adoration does not extend in any meaningful way to God's creation. I am convinced that unless in our minds we re-wed nature to nature's God, we are not going to save our environment. Once again only reverence can restrain violence. In this "age of information" let us remember Huston Smith: "The greater the island of knowledge the greater the shoreline of wonder." If we recall and implement this wisdom, the beach on the tiny island of Dulcie will one day again be pristine pure, a shoreline of wonder. The second great challenge concerns social justice. In 1939, when I was in high school, I heard President Roosevelt say, "My fellow Americans, progress is not measured by how much we add to the abundance of those who already have a great deal, but rather by how much we do for those who have too little." That thought was straight from the Bible: "What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the face of the poor" (Isaiah 3:14-15). "Let justice roll down like mighty waters" (Amos 5:24). Furthermore, Roosevelt's thinking was in line with centuries of Roman Catholic teaching on social justice. The early church fathers did not deny the right to private property but vigorously opposed its greedy misuse. A second-century manual on church discipline addressed well-to-do Christians in this manner: "if you are willing to share what is everlasting, you should be that much more willing to share things which do not last." More recently in 1891, Pope Leo XII in his celebrated Rerum Novarum spoke forcefully about the rights of workers, and later Pope Pius suggested among these rights a share in ownership and profits. And in 1963, Pope John XXIII (whom I always felt was the man the world could least afford to lose), in Pacem in Terris, introduced the concept of economic rights. His "right to life" included adequate food, clothing, housing, rest, medical care, and social services. I believe Christianity is a worldview that undergirds progressive thought and action. I believe the church doesn't so much have a social ethic as it is a social ethic. How can churches the world over remain indifferent or indecisive faced by refugees and displaced persons, now numbering millions, fleeing war and famine, crowding into cities to escape poverty, only there to confront rampant unemployment, environmental degradation, urban violence, and pockets of dizzying wealth and privilege? Here at home I thank God for Christians who want the plight of the poor in America to be a national priority, and who understand that what the poor need is wholesale justice, not piecemeal charity. (Why are the churches long on charity and short on justice? Because charity in no way affects the status quo while justice inevitably leads to political confrontation.) I thank God for every Christian who sees that the lack of material well-being for the poor reflects a lack of spiritual well-being for the rich. I suggested at the outset that technologically there was no reason why a modicum of material prosperity could not be offered every inhabitant on the planet. And it wouldn't cost that much. The World Health Organization lists six core ingredients as everywhere essential:
The United Nations Development Program calculates the cost of providing these six ingredients to be $35 billion each year for fifteen years. That's about the equivalent of what the US spent in ‘99 maintaining our nuclear capability. And that leads us to our third large challenge peace. Actually social justice and peace are Siamese twins: neglect one and you endanger the other. There is no peace without justice, no justice without peace. It is estimated that 149 million people have died in war since the first century. Of these, 100 million were killed in the century just passed, and in the 1990s ninety percent of the victims were civilians. Clearly peace demands serious disarmament overseen by international inspection. Let us not forget that nuclear weapons are designed to commit indiscriminate mass murder. Hiding this reality behind innocuous terms like "nuclear capability" or "nuclear option" hides nothing. Reagan was right: nuclear weapons should never be used. But deterrence demands a willingness to use them; the only question being the number needed. While the Russians are prepared for greater reductions, our Joint Chiefs are loath to go below 2,500, or at the most 2,000. Several years ago, Herbert York, founder of the famous Livermore nuclear labs in California, returned there for a visit. Thousands of workers gathered to hear their aged icon. He asked: "How many nuclear weapons would it take to deter a nation rational enough to be deterred? Would it take ten or one? I tell you the answer is nearer to one." More recently another aged icon, Reagan's hawkish arms negotiator Paul Nitze, wrote in the New York Times, "I find no compelling reason why we should not unilaterally get rid of our nuclear weapons." In saying so he joins former SAC commander General Lee Butlerfor twenty-seven years steeped in nuclear targets, weapons, and delivery systemsformer supreme commander of NATO forces General Goodpaster, and sixty-three other generals and admirals from seventeen countries, all of whom have called for the abolition of all nuclear weapons under strict rules of inspection on the grounds that they are illegal and immoral, costly to maintain, and add nothing to national security. There is something darkly comical about conventional wisdom regarding national security. "Military security has become our highest priority, our greatest expenditure, and our scarcest commodity." So observes an acute nun, Sister Joan Chittister. Personally I think helping poorer nations out of poverty could be our best defense. It's now ten years since the Berlin Wall collapsed. We say we won the Cold War, but the United States won't lead the world in disarmament. We would rather be a superpower than part of a disarmed world. But we and the world must disarm, and far beyond our weapons of mass destruction. Small arms are a large problemjust how large we have seen in Angola, Mozambique, Somalia, Sudan, Liberia, Sri Lanka, East Timor, and former Yugoslavia. Arms for such wars come from a huge international market, the leading arms merchant being the United States. Personally I think it criminal to sell arms abroad for commercial profit. It's bad enough that we do it at home. Just as the first step toward the abolition of slavery was the abolition of the slave trade, so now the first step toward the abolition of national military arsenals should be the abolition of the arms trade. Common security must replace national security. It's time to think of national disarmament and of an international police force to counter the depredations of nationalism, tribalism, and racism. "War is a coward's escape from the problems of peace." Peace, long a desirable option, is now a compelling imperative lest we resemble those dinosaurs, extinct because they suffered from too much armor and too little brain. I am well aware that in pretending to an unattainable truth we perpetuate a lie. Is it utterly absurd to think war might some day be buried in history alongside of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid? That more than three billion people will not have to live as they do today, on less than two dollars a day? That we might yet save the transcendent majesty and beauty of God's creation? I don't know. But I do know the following:
So rise up, O people of God!
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