The Death of Life?

      One wants to break free from the past: rightly, because nothing at all can live in its shadow . . . ; wrongly, because the past that one would like to evade is still very much alive.

      —Theodor W. Adorno, “The Meaning of Working through the Past”

      Reflecting in Remnants of Auschwitz, Italian political theorist Giorgio Agamben notes that “human beings are human insofar as they bear witness to the inhuman.”[1] Besides the value of such a perspective as regards the particularity of the Nazi genocide of European Jews as well as other serious historical crimes, such a consideration could be helpful in terms of the current predicament, for an examination of the degree of inhumanity threatened by prevailing society could perhaps aid humanity in protecting itself against a general lapse into barbarism.

      In what follows, climate catastrophe is compared with the horror posed by nuclear conflagration—a horror that is hardly a mere historical one. U.S. antinuclear writer Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth (1982) and The Abolition (1984) are used to navigate this exploration. While world-renowned anarchist philosopher Noam Chomsky is right to state that it is “not pleasant to speculate about the likely consequences if concentrated power continues on its present course,” it is also true that the chance for overcoming brutality and unreason can be helped along by critical inquiry, as Chomsky often stresses.[2]

      The central question examined in Schell’s The Fate of the Earth and The Abolition is the implications raised by the existence of nuclear weapons in relation to Earth’s very habitability. The mere existence of such weapons threatens the “murder of the future,” in Schell’s words.[3] In a world imperiled by the factual existence of nuclear arms, the primary responsibility is to reverse the conditions that threaten human survival, because there can self-evidently be no value without human existence, as Schell rightly argues. Just as the right to food is “the first right,” as utopian socialist Charles Fourier asserts—one that underpins all others—human survival is a precondition for all aspects of human social life, not least of these the very “self reflection” Adorno finds to be necessary for the protection of survival itself.[4]

      Schell’s harrowing account of nuclear annihilation places future generations, whose potential existence would quite simply be canceled by the death of humanity resulting from nuclear holocaust, at the center of concern. Voiceless and disregarded, future generations thus share much with the nonhuman world and ecosphere, generally understood. Schell movingly expresses the gravity of the situation faced by a nuclear-armed humanity in his reflections on Arendt’s notion of natality—the various beginnings made possible by life. He writes that the annihilation risked by nuclear weapons threatens the “root of life, the spring from which life arises”: birth, or the “power of communities composed of mortal beings to regenerate and preserve themselves in history.” Clearly, such a predicament is far more serious than that posed by individual death, for extinction, in threatening natality, jeopardizes “the continuation of the world in which all our common enterprises ­occur and have their meaning.”[5]

      The threat of extinction for Schell is a systemic evil. It follows the legacy of terror and genocide as practiced by the Nazis and other fascist forces—including as a matter of course the U.S. government, the first and only force to have directly employed nuclear weapons against human populations. The existence of these weapons jeopardizes, in the first place, the lives of billions of human beings and the very underpinnings of global ­human society, but their being also threatens a total assault on Earth’s systems taken as a whole. Nuclear arms in this sense amount to the single most advanced weapon in humanity’s general assault on nature. Given that the support systems allowing for the biological existence of the millions of species on Earth would essentially be dismantled by a war involving nuclear arms—that is, a possibility that follows from the very existence of such arms—a nuclear-devastated planet Earth would be capable of supporting only radically simplified life-forms, if any life at all is to survive such an event. Indeed, the extent of human knowledge regarding the effects that can be expected from the hypothetical future event of nuclear war is both vast and alarming, says Schell.[6]

      In light of the knowledge available to humans regarding the risks implied by the development and possession of nuclear weapons, the lack of conscious action on humanity’s part designed to resolve the problem of nuclear weapons—abolition—is to Schell a manifestation of social insanity. At times mirroring the critiques of social democracy and other reformist political philosophies raised by Benjamin and others, Schell writes with concern on the tendency to repress reflection on the existence of nuclear weapons. The “normality” sought by ideologies and practices that distract from as well as actively subvert the project of resolving the nuclear threat is in this sense “mass insanity,” since it defends the iron cage that has “quietly grown up around the earth, imprisoning every person on it.” Statist nuclear policy, which seeks to prevent the employment of nuclear weapons by threatening total destruction of a would-be nuclear aggressor by means of nuclear weapons, is drastically bereft of reason, as its effectiveness results precisely from its stated commitment to bringing about nuclear hostilities—an eventuality that could well end in nuclear annihilation. Such a development would be self-evidently absurd and totally unjust. As the destruction of humanity can never be an ethical act—for the drowning of “all human purposes” for “all time” would be the supreme negation of ethical action—it follows that no justification can be had for postures and acts that threaten humanity’s collective suicide by means of nuclear annihilation—conditions that rationally can be expected to “transform the world into a desert,” as Arendt fears, and thus deliver what German philosopher Günther Anders terms “sheer nothingness”: a “rotating globe without any life on it.”[7] That humanity in fact came to endanger itself through the invention, development, and maintenance of nuclear arms constitutes, in Schell’s view, the “greatest collective failure of responsibility by any generation in history.” Under such conditions, “self-congratulation is certainly out of order,” however much people in general may seem to have adjusted to and accepted the monstrousness implied in the threat nuclear weapons hold for life.[8]

      The political arrangements Schell analyzes, then, threaten the institution of what he terms the “absolute and eternal darkness” of human extinction.[9] Were there to be a nuclear war, no escape would be possible; that a given society were consciously to have elected to ban nuclear weapons within its territory, for example, would matter little for its fate in light of the possibility of nuclear annihilation originating elsewhere. Under such conditions, writes Schell, there is within the corridors of power “no one to speak for man [sic] and for the earth,” even if both are threatened with destruction.[10] As P. D. James has her character Theo in The Children of Men lament, it would seem that there exists “no security or home for [our] endangered species ­anywhere under the uncaring sky.”[11]

      For Schell, the prospect of resolving the terminal threat posed by nuclear destruction can begin only through reflection on this very question—a process likely serving as the basis for his The Fate of the Earth and The Abolition. A means to “salvation” could be made possible if humanity were to “permit [itself] to recognize clearly the breadth and depth of the peril—to assure [itself] once and for all of its boundlessness and durability,” for if the profundity of the threat were to be generally acknowledged, consideration of the “peril of self-extinction” could take the place Schell claims it deserves within our conceptions of being—that is to say, central. Humans may of course choose to “ignore the peril,” though such a position would be patently absurd and grossly irresponsible, writes Schell, given the “danger of imminent self-destruction.” Echoing Marcuse, Schell notes that it is necessary for the possibility of nuclear annihilation to repress any contemplation of the “magnitude and significance of the peril,” since the means that