Ideas Against Bombs

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 776, 4 June 1954, Page 4

Ideas Against Bombs

7HEN the Science Congress ‘ was being held in Auckland last month, Professor _Marcus Oliphant gave an address | -broadcast by 1YC-on "Science and Mankind." One of his many interesting statements was that he could find no evidence of any improvement in morality in five thousand years of recorded history. This may well be true, though the opinion will not be popular. Because political and economic freedoms have become wider, we like to believe that there is a sort of moral evolution. If there is, it is very gradual, and must be looked for in periods of time far greater than five thousand years. Social changes and improvements occur, but men who help to bring them about today are no better than the reformers among their distant ancestors. Goodness and evil are what they have always been. There were saints among the Greeks and Romans, and tyrants of ancient times were no worse than Hitler. Professor Oliphant seemed to believe that the moral nature of mankind is sufficient for its present task. Great reforms have their beginnings in the ideas of individuals and small groups who try to convince the majority by force of argument and example. It is true that their ideas cannot prevail until the world is ready for them. There were Greeks who preached against slavery; but an economic system~ without slaves seemed as unrealistic in those times as international government seems today. In the Roman Empire the decline of slavery, when at last it came, was the result of political and economic circumstances as well as humanitarian sentiment. Moreover, soon after slavery was abolished in Europe, it became rampant in Africa. The conscience of mankind had to be assaulted for more than two thousand years before there could be a final response. This tragic slowness might be used as an argu-

ment for inaction. The important fact, however, is that ideas can prevail in the end. When, therefore, Professor Oliphant went on to speak of the only certain way he could see of avoiding a world war, he was not indulging an empty idealism. This way, he said, "is to give up our own national rights to armies and weapons of destruction, and to endeavour to rule the world, in matters affecting all the worldand those only-through a single organ of government which alone possesses military power." He was saying, in other words, that members of United Nations should be ready to surrender a larger part of their sovereignty, and in so doing to make UN aan effective international body. It is not a new idea. Many thinkers said from, the beginning that the Charter of United Nations did not go far enough. The objections, of course, were based on what was thought to be feasible or practicable; and they are perhaps even harder to answer today than in 1945. Yet the need for security has surely become greater than, the difficulties. Some thinkers, conceding that a world state is inevitable, have gone on to say that it is most likely to be established by conquest. Until recently. history supported them; but the opinion ceased to be valid when a mushroom cloud was seen above Bikini. No nation will rule the world if war comes again. Our hope for the future must be found in the possibility that men are nearly ready to acknowledge the essential unity of the human family. There is little evidence today that this can be done in politics. Yet who can tell? Slavery was an evil which came directly from war; and men said often that it could not disappear until warfare ceased. They were wrong. In the way that men rejected slavery-the ideas of freedom and justice slowly gaining ground--the larger evil may eventually be overcome. But there is not much time.