The courage to survive

The courage to survive

Winslow Myers

827 words

In his dense and challenging lectures gathered into a book called “The Courage To Be,” the late theologian Paul Tillich sorted our modern anxieties into three existential buckets: first, the anxiety of fate and death, experienced as dread; second, the anxiety of guilt and self-condemnation, that we have failed to become what we ought to be; and third, the anxiety of meaninglessness, where we feel nothing we do could make a difference. Tillich was talking about the individual, but these work also on the collective level.

His triple definition of our deepest fears comes to mind as the last arms control treaty between Russia and the United States expires. Putin offered to extend it for a year; Trump said no. The U.S. is concerned about having enough weapons to deter China and Russia at the same time. Establishment talking heads solemnly opine that deterrence requires a response (i.e., we need to increase the number of our warheads) to China’s present buildup so that the charade of our tottering assumptions about security can be maintained.

Which brings us directly to Tillich’s varieties of angst, all three of which coat with a thick paralyzing sludge the insane assumptions of nuclear deterrence. We assume nine nuclear powers can go on forever without making a fatal mistake. We assume that 900 nuclear weapons make us more secure than 600 nuclear weapons, and if another country has 1200 nuclear weapons, we cannot be secure unless we can field 1600. We build; they build. The masters of war achieve prosperous quarterly returns as the Union of Concerned Scientists keeps moving the Doomsday clock closer to zero. 

Meanwhile computers that model nuclear winter tell us that less than a hundred detonations over large cities would condemn the planet to a decade of freezing. At least that would result in one less mega-crisis—no more climate emergency from global warming—yet somehow that thought does not decrease dread.

The second Tillich anxiety, in the form of our collective guilt and self-condemnation, needs the air and sunshine of open dialogue, instead of being pushed into shadowy recesses of denial. The international community has known for 80 years that nuclear proliferation leads only to less and less security and more and more danger, greater confusion, increased probability of error. Average citizens, busy with making a living, let themselves off the hook, leaving it to the experts to ensure disaster will not occur. But some of us do feel uneasy that our tax dollars continue to prop up the madness of Mutual Assured Destruction.

It is challenging to maintain the courage to be, to bear the guilt and introspection that leads to responsible action—to say, no one can do everything, but everyone, including helpless little me, can do something.

Tillich thought the third anxiety was the most dangerous of all: the anxiety of meaninglessness and paralysis. We don’t get the impression that the diplomats of the great powers have searching conversations about alternatives. Are they saying to each other “We may have different political and cultural systems, but we have a huge shared interest in survival. How can we cooperate more effectively to ensure that all of us can survive?” They and their apologists in the think tanks want to continue the absurdity that deterrence, however tragic, is the only reasonable alternative. If they do not look for new possibilities, they will never find them. That is despairing helplessness—and a grievous failure of ethical imagination. To condemn ourselves to mass suicide is not worthy of our high destiny as descendants of a 13.85 billion year process. 

We find ourselves in the midst of a world that is dying and a world yet to be born. One sign of a dying world is that the leaders of nuclear powers have only minutes to decide the fate of the Earth once they receive indications that missiles are incoming. This bug in the system is not a bug, but an unavoidable feature of deterrence—so egregiously nutty that we just put up with its dysfunction and hope for the best—i.e., that it never comes to that. In another example, Putin knows he cannot “win” with nuclear weapons. Instead he falls back upon conventional bombs to destroy power stations, cruelly freezing the stalwart Ukrainians into capitulation. But Putin also knows that however territory is redistributed, no one will emerge victorious. There will be only suffering, loss, and an immense unquenchable resentment.

In the world that waits to be born, the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has gone into force, though none of the nine nuclear powers have signed on. That treaty expresses a response on the part of billions of people around the world to Tillich’s three anxieties. Billions dread mass death. Billions, however submerged their awareness of it, yearn to be relieved of collective guilt for a holocaust that would dwarf the Jewish Shoah. Billions want to make a difference in favor of life.

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Winslow Myers, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the co-author with Libby Traubman of One: One Humanity, One Earth, One Future, and serves on the Advisory Board of the War Prevention Initiative.