40 years ago ... HUMANISM AND PEACE.

from the March/April 1961 issue

What have we, as human beings, to hope for? We suffer from attacks by the vectors of disease; from accidents, striking with the blind malevolence of chance; from the ills accompanying the deterioration of age; and also, in a sense the most viciously, from man's inhumanity to man, especially as expressed in the evil institution of war.

I believe that we can have hope and that we can win a great victory not only over the plague of man's natural condition, the physical ills that beset us, but also over the terrible plague of man's oppression by man, over the evil of war.

The world has been changing rapidly during recent decades. This change has involved especially a greater understanding by man of the causes of human suffering. We now know that certain combinations of genes, which in some cases can be predicted to occur with high probability, lead to gross physical or mental defects which cause great suffering for the person who is so afflicted and for his parents and others. We know now that the pool of human germ plasm is continually being changed by gene mutation, and that the natural process of removing deleterious genes from it in order to preserve its integrity involves much human suffering.

We are faced with an ethical problem, characteristic of the many that we shall have to face as our knowledge of the nature of human beings and of the world increases. Shall the deleterious genes that exist in the pool of human germ plasma, and that would otherwise continue to increase, be removed by the suffering and death of millions of children or by a procedure that attempts to recognize them and to prevent the conception of these defective children?

This question is one of ethics, of philosophy, in the sense expressed by Corliss Lamont, that philosophy involves the analysis and clarification of human actions and aims, problems and ideals. Many admirable statements have been made about these matters in the past by great philosophers and teachers.

I believe that there is great value in the philosophy of humanism--that the chief end of human life is to work for the happiness of man upon this earth (and we might soon have to add the moon and then Venus and other planets).

Humanism, as I understand it, is a rational philosophy. It rejects the mysticism and supernaturalism of the revealed religions. It rejects life after death and the idea that suffering in this world may, for the righteous, be compensated for by the bliss of an afterlife. Included in this rejection of the supernatural is the rejection of a belief in an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent god who watches over and cares for human beings, interfering, sometimes in response to prayer, with the ordered regularity of events as determined by natural laws.

Humanism is a philosophy of service for the good of all humanity, of application of new ideas, of scientific progress, for the benefit of all men--those now living and those still to be born.

Dr. Albert Schweitzer believes that not only man but also other forms of life should be included in the field of our concern. He has expressed this belief in his principle of Reverence for Life. I would like to go further: I advocate the principle of Reverence for the World.

This is a wonderful world in which we live. Yet some of its wonders are being annihilated, destroyed, so that our children's children will never be able to experience them. I do not like to think of the beautiful minerals, beautiful crystals, that are being removed from the ground and destroyed in order to make more copper wire or uranium rods, especially for the useless activities of preparation for war. There will never be a second crop of minerals.

Instead of the principle of maximizing human happiness, I prefer the principle of minimizing the suffering of the world. The difference between maximizing happiness and minimizing suffering requires weighting of the factors involved. On a scale of income, we may select a certain value as standard--one that is just enough for a satisfactory life, different, of course, according to duties and circumstances. An increase of 80 percent in income would give some added happiness, but the suffering caused by a decrease of 80 percent surely deserves a far greater weight--perhaps ten or 100 times greater.

THE EVOLUTION OF HUMANKIND

Man has reached his present state through the process of evolution. The last great step in evolution was the mutational process that doubled the size of the brain, about 700,000 years ago; this led to the origin of man. It is this that permits the inheritance of acquired characteristics of a certain sort--of learning, through communication from one human being to another. Thus abilities that have not yet been incorporated into the germ plasm are not lost until their rediscovery by members of following generations, but instead are handed on from person to person, from generation to generation. Man's great powers of thinking, remembering, and communicating are responsible for the evolution of civilization.

Yet a man or woman is not truly an organism in the sense that a rabbit or a lion or a whale is. Instead, he is a part of a greater organism, the whole of mankind, into which he is bound by the means of communication--speaking, writing, telephoning, traveling over long distances--in the way that the cells of a rabbit are interconnected by nerve fibers and hormonal molecular messengers.

This great organism--humankind--is now master of the earth but not yet master of itself. It is immature, irrational; it does not act for its own good but instead often for its own harm.

We must now achieve the mutation that will bring sanity to this great organism that is mankind. Must this be a mutation of some of the genes in the pool of human germ plasm? Perhaps such a genetic mutation, providing, for example, extrasensory perception and instantaneous communication among all human beings, would do the job. But I fear that we do not have time for this mutational process to be effective. The human race may cease to exist in a decade.

We must accordingly hope that the mutation can instead be in the nature of the giant organism, humankind, itself--a mutation in the means of communication, in the nerve fibers of the organization, that will transfer to this whole great organism some of the desirable and admirable attributes that are possessed by the units of which it is composed, the individual human beings. The attributes that must be transferred from the units, human beings, to the great organism, humankind, are sanity (reason) and morality (ethical principles).

I believe that this change will occur. I believe that we are now forced to this change by the development of weapons that could destroy the world and that will do so unless the nature of the great human organism changes in time.

One hundred sixty-nine years ago Benjamin Franklin said, in discussing the progress of science, "It is impossible to imagine the heights to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the power of man over matter. O that moral Science were in as fair a way of improvement, that men would cease to be wolves to one another, and that human beings would at length learn what they now improperly call humanity." ...

In 1960 the United States Senate spent fifty-five minutes in deciding to pass a $41 billion appropriation for arms. There are about forty million families in the United States. Accordingly in this short time of fifty-five minutes the Senate approved an expenditure for the year of $1,000 per American family for armaments. Then the Senate debated for five and one-half hours a bill for disarmament studies--studies of ways in which the economic dislocation that might follow disarmament agreements and a decrease in the military budget could be minimized--and after the long debate the bill was voted down as "extravagant."

Per United States family this is one cent for disarmament studies--debated for five and one-half hours and then rejected as extravagant!

We can no longer afford to evade our responsibilities. The time has come now when morality must win out in the world. The survival of the whole human organism now depends upon whether or not we can work together for the common good.

I believe that we can have hope. I believe that we can win the final victory over the immorality of war, that the nations of the world will give up war, will become moral; that the fine ethical principles that are now accepted by the units of humankind will be taken over also by that whole great organism itself; and that we, all the people of the world, who together constitute this greatest of all organisms, the whole of humanity, the culmination of the great process of evolution, will move forward together into the world of the future--a world of peace and morality and ever-increasing happiness.

Linus Pauling was a professor of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and a Nobel Prize recipient in 1954 for chemistry and 1962 for peace. This article is excerpted from his March 17, 1961, speech accepting the Humanist of the Year Award from the American Humanist Association.