Read Billions & Billions Online

Authors: Carl Sagan

Billions & Billions (23 page)

Habitual enmity is corrupting and self-sustaining. If it falters, it can easily be revived by reminding us of past abuses, by contriving an atrocity or a military incident, by announcing that the adversary has deployed some dangerous new weapon, or merely by taunts of naïveté or disloyalty when domestic political opinion becomes uncomfortably evenhanded. For many Americans, communism means poverty, backwardness, the Gulag for speaking one’s mind, a ruthless crushing of the human spirit, and a thirst to conquer the world. For many Soviets, capitalism means heartless and insatiable greed, racism, war, economic instability, and a worldwide conspiracy of the rich against the poor. These are caricatures—but not wholly so—and over the years Soviet and American actions have given them some credence and plausibility.

These caricatures persist because they are partly true, but also because they are useful. If there is an implacable enemy, then bureaucrats have a ready excuse for why prices go up, why consumer
goods are unavailable, why the nation is noncompetitive in world markets, why there are large numbers of unemployed and homeless people, or why criticism of leaders is unpatriotic and impermissible—and especially why so supreme an evil as nuclear weapons must be deployed in the tens of thousands. But if the adversary is insufficiently wicked, the incompetence and failed vision of government officials cannot be so easily ignored. Bureaucrats have motives for inventing enemies and exaggerating their misdeeds.

Each nation has military and intelligence establishments that evaluate the danger posed by the other side. These establishments have a vested interest in large military and intelligence expenditures. Thus, they must grapple with a continuing crisis of conscience—the clear incentive to exaggerate the adversary’s capabilities and intentions. When they succumb, they call it necessary prudence; but whatever they call it, it propels the arms race. Is there an independent public assessment of the intelligence data? No. Why not? Because the data are secret. So we have here a machine that goes by itself, a kind of de facto conspiracy to prevent tensions from falling below a minimum level of bureaucratic acceptability.

It is evident that many national institutions and dogmas, however effective they may once have been, are now in need of change. No nation is yet well-fitted to the world of the twenty-first century. The challenge then is not in selective glorification of the past, or in defending the national icons, but in devising a path that will carry us through a time of great mutual peril. To accomplish this, we need all the help we can get.

A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable.
We are all fallible, even leaders. But however clear it is that criticism is necessary for progress, governments tend to resist. The ultimate example is Hitler’s Germany. Here is an excerpt from a speech by the Nazi Party leader Rudolf Hess on June 30, 1934: “One man remains beyond all criticism, and that is the Führer. This is because everyone senses and knows: He is always right, and he will always be right. The National Socialism of all of us is anchored in uncritical loyalty, in a surrender to the Führer.”

The convenience of such a doctrine for national leaders is further clarified by Hitler’s remark: “What good fortune for those in power that people do not think!” Widespread intellectual and moral docility may be convenient for leaders in the short term, but it is suicidal for nations in the long term. One of the criteria for national leadership should therefore be a talent for understanding, encouraging, and making constructive use of vigorous criticism.

So when those who once were silenced and humiliated by state terror now are able to speak out—fledgling civil libertarians flexing their wings—of course they find it exhilarating, and so does any lover of freedom who witnesses it.
Glasnost
and
perestroika
exhibit to the rest of the world the human scope of Soviet society that past policies have masked. They provide error-correcting mechanisms at all levels of Soviet society. They are essential for economic well-being. They permit real improvements in international cooperation and a major reversal of the nuclear arms race.
Glasnost
and
perestroika
are thus good for the Soviet Union and good for the United States.

There is, of course, opposition to
glasnost
and
perestroika
in the Soviet Union: by those who must now demonstrate their abilities competitively rather than sleepwalking through lifetime tenure; by those unaccustomed to the responsibilities of democracy; by those in no mood, after decades of following the norms, to be
taken to task for past behavior. And in the United States too, there are those who oppose
glasnost
and
perestroika:
Some argue it is a trick to lull the West, while the Soviet Union gathers its strength to emerge as a still more formidable rival. Some prefer the old kind of Soviet Union—debilitated by its lack of democracy, easily demonized, readily caricatured. (Americans, complacent about their own democratic forms for too long, have something to learn from
glasnost
and
perestroika
as well. This by itself makes some Americans uneasy.) With such powerful forces arrayed for and against reform, no one can know the outcome.

In both countries, what passes for public debate is still, on closer examination, mainly repetition of national slogans, appeal to popular prejudice, innuendo, self-justification, misdirection, incantation of homilies when evidence is asked for, and a thorough contempt for the intelligence of the citizenry. What we need is an admission of how little we actually know about how to pass safely through the next few decades, the courage to examine a wide range of alternative programs and, most of all, a dedication not to dogma but to solutions. Finding any solution will be hard enough. Finding ones that perfectly correspond to eighteenth- or nineteenth-century political doctrines will be much more difficult.

Our two nations must help one another figure out what changes must be made; the changes must help both sides; and our perspective must embrace a future beyond the next Presidential term of office or the next Five Year Plan. We need to reduce military budgets; raise living standards; engender respect for learning; support science, scholarship, invention, and industry; promote free inquiry; reduce domestic coercion; involve the workers more in managerial decisions; and promote a genuine respect and understanding derived from an acknowledgment of our common humanity and our common jeopardy.

Although we must cooperate to an unprecedented degree, I am not arguing against healthy competition. But let us compete in finding ways to reverse the nuclear arms race and to make massive reductions in conventional forces; in eliminating government corruption; in making most of the world agriculturally self-sufficient. Let us vie in art and science, in music and literature, in technological innovation. Let us have an honesty race. Let us compete in relieving suffering and ignorance and disease; in respecting national independence worldwide; in formulating and implementing an ethic for responsible stewardship of the planet.

Let us learn from one another. Capitalism and socialism have been mutually borrowing methods and doctrine in largely unacknowledged plagiarisms for a century. Neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union has a monopoly on truth and virtue. I would like to see us compete in cooperativeness. In the 1970s, apart from treaties constraining the nuclear arms race, we had some notable successes in working together—the elimination of smallpox worldwide, efforts to prevent South African nuclear weapons development, the
Apollo-Soyuz
joint manned spaceflight. We can now do much better. Let us begin with a few joint projects of great scope and vision—in relief of starvation, especially in nations such as Ethiopia, which are victimized by superpower rivalry; in identifying and defusing long-term environmental catastrophes that are products of our technology; in fusion physics to provide a safe energy source for the future; in joint exploration of Mars, culminating in the first landing of human beings—Soviets and Americans—on another planet.

Perhaps we will destroy ourselves. Perhaps the common enemy within us will be too strong for us to recognize and overcome. Perhaps the world will be reduced to medieval conditions or far worse.

But I have hope. Lately there are signs of change—tentative but in the right direction and, by previous standards of national behavior, swift. Is it possible that we—we Americans, we Soviets, we humans—are at last coming to our senses and beginning to work together on behalf of the species and the planet?

Nothing is promised. History has placed this burden on our shoulders. It is up to us to build a future worthy of our children and grandchildren.

THE CENSORSHIP

Here in chronological order, keyed to the sequence of paragraphs, are some of the more egregious or interesting changes inflicted on the article as it appeared in
Ogonyok
. The censored material is shown here in boldface, ordinary type indicates excerpts from the original article, and bracketed italic type, comments by me.

  
3.…
that lie at the base of a poorly understood food chain—at the top of which precariously teeter we
.
[Without this phrase, the danger of ozone depletion seems much less.]

4.… enough nuclear weapons each year to destroy
every sizable city on the planet
.
[The last six words are replaced by any city. But this defocus from the number of bombs produced each year to the power of a single bomb minimizes the nuclear threat.]

4.…
in an already burdened national leader
.
[Does it diminish confidence in the government to think that the leader may be burdened?]

4.…
intimidation and
war.

7.…
wounded pride and
professed moral rectitude.

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