MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
1 N the striking contribution which he made to the B.B.C. sym-
posium on Atomic Energy, Bertrand Russell drew a sudden picture of an England from which all industry and commerce had vanished and in which a few remnants of the population sought to revive a local agriculture in those regions where the soil had not been poisoned. I had a vision of a haggard family clad in sheepskins driving a few goats through the ruins of Oxford on their way to the uncontaminated levels of the Severn valley ; they had a Cromagnon look in their eyes. Something of the same sort must have occurred in that dark century and a half between the withdrawal of the Roman legions and the coming of St. Augustine. We do not know exactly what happened to people during those hundred and fifty years. At the beginning there were roads and garrisons, suburban villas and large farms ; there were cities such as Silchester, with their temples and forum, with their baths and amphitheatre ; thereafter darkness descends, and when the light of history again illumines the scene we find a raw agricultural society, speaking a Germanic tongue and worshipping Odin. All that remained of the provincial townsman of the Roman empire were his pavements and his hypocausts ; Minerva's temple at Aquae Sulis was no more. What happened to the human remnants of Roman civilisation? Were they exterminated utterly by the Jutes, the Saxons and the Angles? Or did they drive their goats to the Welsh mountains, being absorbed as the centuries passed among the Celts? We do not know with any certainty. But our very ignorance must persuade us that in a disorderly world it is possible for a whole civilisation to perish utterly. The simultaneous explosion of six or seven atomic bombs, previously deposited in the main centres of industry and commurication, might produce a similar elimination: precise meaning would then be given to the words " wiped out."
* * * * It is interesting to observe the effect of this possibility upon different temperaments. There are those who do not possess the imagination or the courage to envisage total disaster, who exclude it from their thought, and who seek somewhat pitiably to gather the sparse rosebuds while they may. There are those who, being fully aware of the calamity which threatens, seek to exorcise it by the repetition of formulas about world government and the surrender of national sovereignty. There are those who, having scant hope of survival either in this world or the next, have come to disbelieve in all per- manent or universal values and seek only to preserve and better their own interests before the storm descends. And there are those who, with greater realism, place their only hope in a central Atomic Development Authority having powers of inspection and control. It is obviously the duty of philosophers, such as Bertrand Russell, to remind people that if our brains were dearer and our characters more noble atomic energy could be employed for the benefit rather than for the destruction of mankind. Political theorists are quite justified in pointing out that if a world government were established the control of atomic energy would be immensely simplified. But the awkward fact remains that so long as there exists a single country capable of manufacturing atomic bombs,, and at the same time unwilling to surrender national sovereignty or to accept outside inspection and control, all formulas regarding world government or even A.D.A. are premature. The sceptic asserts that the world will never achieve unity until it finds itself at war with Mars ; our main hope is that the atomic bomb may itself represent this Martian menace ; and that once the potentialities of this new weapon are fully realised, then even the most obstinate country will prefer the advantages of co-operation to the alternative of mass calamity. It is for this reason that the B.B.C. symposium was of such influence and value.
* * * * It may be, therefore, that the inherent dreadfulness of atomic war- fare, even as the inherent dreadfulness of poison gas and bacterio- logical attack, will impose its own limitation. It may be that our European, or Hellenic, civilisation will not be swept from the earth
in a few seconds of blinding flash, but that generation by generation it will lose its delicacy and its values. What happened to-the merchant of Silchester or the Treasury official at Aquae Sulis when the bar- barians came? We know that there have been twenty-one cases in which the experiment of civilisation has been attempted since the dawn of history, and that of these as many as fourteen have utterly disappeared. We do not suffer so much today from what Professor Arnold Toynbee has called " the egocentric illusion " ; we do not believe that " our own local and temporary movement is in the main line of evolution " or that it is " on the point of vindicating its claim to be the consummation of human history." The two wars have destroyed such illusions. But it is true that our Hellenic civilisation, although not the last word in human evolution, is quite certainly the most important phase which mankind has yet traversed. In the two thousand years of European civilisation we have enlarged immensely the areas of man's conscience and consciousness. The Greeks taught us the value of intellectual inquiry ; the Romans taught us the sanctity of law and contract ; the Christian religion brought us the benefits of human love and tolerance ; in eighteenth-century France there burst the full flower of human taste and reason ; and by our own example we have shown that it is possible to achieve political liberty without violence, and individualism without disorder. It is not to be thought of that these precious values can wholly disappear.
I believe that we in this country have afleast one further contribu- tion to make. I believe that even as during the nineteenth century we showed that liberty could be won without revolution, so also during the twentieth century we shall show that economic and social justice can be secured without totalitarianism. We shall not be able to, teach this lesson if we seek to imitate foreign methods ; we shall only succeed if we retain our own standards and our own habits of thought. The fact that our physical power has declined renders it all the more essential that our ancient values should not be allowed to decline. The fact that our standard of living will for long remain below the pre-war level implies that our standards of thinking and feeling should rise above that level. A civilisation is not estimated by the luxuries which it devises. Trimalchitt may have entertained his guests with iced Falernian of a hundred years old, with dormice rolled in honey and poppy seed, with wild boars stuffed with dates, with perfumes in alabaster vases : but such was not Rome's contribu- tion to the evolution of mankind. It was not on such a diet that the Athenians built the Parthenon or Plato wrote his dialogues ; hard crusts were theirs, and some stewed kid on feast days and garlic and a little olive oil. A civilisation is judged, not by the wealth which it accumulates, but by the values which it acquires. I see no reason why we should abandon our values merely because we have lost our wealth. Nor do I see why we should surrender to despair merely because our inventiveness for the moment has outstripped our intelligence.
I return to Bertrand Russell's striking talk. I am still haunted by the picture of a post-atomic family searching amid the ruins for some blade of unpoisoned grass. " Our problem," he said, " is to prevent great wars, for after they have broken out no previous agreement will prevent the use of the most terrible weapons available?' " I think," he .said, " that it is the duty of those who realise the implications of modern weapons to devote themselves to a campaign of enlightenment addressed to the peoples of the west and the governments of the east." That I believe is the most useful thing that we can do. Namely, to convince people in every country that an atomic war would be something more than a menace to this country or that country ; that it would be a menace to the globe itself ; that it would, in fact, be that Martian war which, according to the cynics, is the only menace which can force humanity to unite.
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