Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

BY WINSLOW MYERS

A generation ago South Africa looked into twin abysses: becoming a nuclear weapons state, and race war. Looking into the heart of darkness that lay at the bottom of these separate abysses, they chose the common sense route of dismantling their nuclear weapons. Under the visionary leadership of Nelson Mandela, they also dismantled apartheid. This history is relevant because in 2024 the world is staring into its own two abysses: the growing potentiality of nuclear war and the worsening climate emergency. 

In terms of where we choose to put our resources and creativity, these two abysses are really one. The “great powers” who possess nuclear weapons are the same countries whose constituents are responsible for the majority of carbon dioxide emissions. But they have not addressed either issue on the Mandela level of vision and determination. Nor have they begun to think about the intimate relationship between the two crises. 

Instead, a vain competition for military superiority continues unabated. Looking into that abyss yields a no-win scenario in which “deterrence” keeps us secure – until it doesn’t. Even setting aside nuclear weapons, the suffering of modern wars falls overwhelmingly on civilian populations – in Ukraine, in Palestine and Israel, in Sudan. “Victory” has become a phantom. 

Climate change, which deserves an international response along the lines of Franklin Roosevelt’s all-out domestic effort to lead the U.S. out of the Great Depression of 1929, remains mired in competitive values similar to those animating international military competition. Fly over any large city at night, and the jeweled sea of lights twinkling from office high-rises shows our complacency in the face of the climate challenge. 

The sun beats down ever more hotly on the throngs of men, many of them young, chanting slogans of revenge in Israel or Iran or Lebanon as they carry aloft the wrapped bodies killed in their endless tit-for-tat conflicts. Whether in Tehran or Tel-Aviv, rising temperatures will bring challenges in the Middle East at least as difficult to resolve as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In a world where we can be blown up at any second, deterrence is a polite euphemism for revenge on the nuclear level. All the many activists who seek to make nuclear weapons and power illegal – the Rotarians who want to build international networks of friendship, the doctors warning of the horrific effects of nuclear war, the ecological visionaries researching new ways of producing energy, the nonviolent resisters heading to jails and prisons – these are the realists, not the mandarins of Lockheed and McDonnell-Douglas whose profits are built upon the deterrence house of cards.

The paranoia of the competitive worldview paralyzes the decisions of officials as they drain their treasuries to pay for nuclear upgrades. The only force strong enough to begin to transform this fixation is a dual realization: (one) we are fighting wars with no positive outcome, and (two) the struggle to achieve coöperation to sustain our life-support-system can become the “good war.” 

On the level of values, the paired challenges come down to a race between competition and what might be called “coöperatism.” Coöperatism combines into one the challenge of getting along with each other and the challenge of stewarding and nourishing the ecosystem which supports us – referencing a familiar ethic common to the world’s major religions: the Golden Rule. The Jewish version is one of the clearest: “What is hateful to yourself, do not do to others.” That formulation throws the utility of revenge, either by crude Hamas rockets or sophisticated ICBMs, into the dustbin of irrelevance.

The personal workout for us as individuals is to adjust our thinking to the reality that everything has changed. An enlarged, enlightened sense of self-interest emerges from realizing that everything I do or don’t do affects everyone else and vice-versa, everywhere. When it sinks in that our fates are not separate, we start to act differently, even if only in small ways. And those small ways can add up. A culture which values personal forgiveness more, for example, might lead us to a national policy of apology. What unexpected effect might it have on the Middle East if the U.S. apologized for its unethical coup in 1953 that deposed Iran’s democratically elected head and installed the dictatorial Shah?

At the end of his final book, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” Sigmund Freud advanced the possibility of a new upwelling of Eros that might counter the nihilistic death-force which he witnessed in the Jewish Holocaust and we perceive in the horror of the October 7 attack on Israel, Israel’s disproportional slaughter in response, and in the 14,000 nuclear weapons that exist in the world, many on hair-trigger. By Eros Freud meant love in the broadest sense, whatever includes anything positive and constructive. One name for that “erotic,” creative force is the good will of coöperatism. Whatever we call it, may it flourish in our hearts, our deeds – and, for those of us who have the privilege, our votes.

(Winslow Myers is the author of “Living Beyond War: A Citizen’s Guide” and serves on the Advisory Board of the War Prevention Initiative.)