What In The World Are We Coming To?

June 19, 1960
Akron

I propose this question to you in the light of the world in which we live. Is our present hopeful, or shall we resign ourselves to despair, extracting some measures of comfort, amusement and distraction before the ultimate hammer blows of destruction create a wasteland? Any religion of vitality and meaning has to look with candor at the world as it is. Moreover any religion deserving the name has to cherish a view of the world that is to be. Time is relentless and the future is constantly becoming the present.

Universalism won its way into the hearts of the people nearly two hundred years ago because of its world-view. The future was assured because God was good and by his nature would condemn no living soul to everlasting punishment. All souls would be saved and “the final harmony of all souls with God” was a firm foundation of the faith of our fathers.

Universalism today must have a world view in the frame of our times.

There is no obvious evidence for easy assurance and light-hearted hope in the world.

What in the world are we coming to when there are such agonizing delays and postponements blocking the solution to the mad race for supremacy in weapons of nuclear blast, disease germs and whatever else may be secret in the laboratories of horror?

Little more than forty years ago we were introduced to the use of mass weapons when long-range artillery weapons, tanks and aircraft were used in World War I.

Then the second world war brought the ghastly innovations of saturation bombing, V2 bombs, the concentration and death camps, with the curtain of the mad war dance being rung down at the terrible atomic climax of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

As soon as we had company in the matter of possession of atomic weapons, the prospect of horror multiplied as the stockpiles of nuclear bombs grew relentlessly and research expanded for new applications of the demonic.

In Manila, Thursday, Pres. Eisenhower said that war had become “impossible and preposterous.” Who could disagree? Yet, what in the world are we coming to when the nation’s commander-in-chief announces that war is both impossible and preposterous but, 80% of all our country’s lavish expenditure of all money for scientific research is alloted by the war center, the Pentagon?

What in the world are we coming to when the unsaid conviction spreads infectiously that we cannot have both peace and prosperity?

Many people are convinced that the terrible depression of the nineteen thirties was never really solved, but rather has been successively postponed by the industry of wars and the preparations for threatened conflicts. There is a common belief that peace news depresses the stock market, and that when the temperature drops in the cold war, stocks begin to rise – particularly those industrial stocks representing the activities which would experience increased volume and greater profits from more billions for armament.

What in the world are we coming to if we are forced to chose between the Scylla of war or the Charybdis of peace-depressed economy?

In his monumental Study of History, Arnold Toynbee advances the proposition that civilizations have been toppled in the past, not from any technical deficiency but because of moral failure. We will neither be saved nor damned by our scientific knowledge and engineering skill but by the humane use and rational control of the gargantuan powers which have been disclosed.

What in the world are we coming to – sudden death or gradual growth in wisdom and moral stature?

Several years ago a dramatic event occurred which is a modern parable. A college ball team, traveling to an out-of-town game in the mountainous area of a Western state, climbed a grade for eleven miles and began the equally steep, sharply-curved down-grade. Hardly had the bus passed the crest when the driver applied the brake and found that the brakes were gone through some mechanical failure. He pulled the emergency brake only to find that defective also. Quickly he attempted to shift the transmission to the lowest gear in order to slow down the increasing downward momentum. But the gear shift broke off in his hand.

The members of the ball team had been relaxing – some playing cards, some reading or studying, others thinking of the game that awaited them at the destination. Suddenly they were trapped in a brakeless bus going too fast for them to jump, with the breakneck speed carrying them faster and faster toward what seemed certain, violent death. What could the helpless passengers do? What could the driver do? The only control he had remaining was the steering wheel. What in the world were they coming to?

Their plight had a remarkable likeness to the dilemma in which you and me, Mr. and Mrs. Average Citizens, find ourselves in the world. In a world where nuclear power and disease germs are the foundations for negotiations, what can average citizens do? Are we not trapped in a world speeding uncontrolled downgrade?

Despair is easy to come by and there is some basis for despondency. In Bible times, many of the prophets were equally pessimistic about the destiny of mankind. Our Jewish Christian heritage grew in the midst of calamitous circumstances. From 6 centuries before the time of Jesus until the Jews were dispersed and Jerusalem destroyed in 132 a.d., they were under foreign domination and control.

Out of those long years of captivity there grew a literature which despaired of any chance of human improvement. Portions of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and other O.T. books reflect the destruction of hope from human sources. The N.T. reflects this same disillusion with human nature, with its most complete and imaginative expression in the revelation of John. Humanity could not save itself, for man was evil and incapable of redeeming his corrupt nature. There was no help for man except in the supernatural help of God. God would come with his angels. Even the awful power of Rome would be utterly defeated. Those faithful chosen of God, supernaturally redeemed, would forever have the everlasting privilege and happiness of glorifying God forever.

This, too, was the theme of the Old Testament book of Joel. The despair of this prophet was so enormous that he likened the troubles of his time to a dreadful, irresistible destroying swarm of locusts:
(2/3)
“Before them a fire devours,
And after them a flame scorches.
Like the Garden of Eden was the land before them,
And after them it is a desert waste;
And nothing escapes them.”

Joel used a strikingly realistic simile. When the hungry locusts had devoured their way across the land there was nothing left but desolation. Joel was proclaiming from the depths of his despair that there was no prospect for man – his human strivings would produce only wasteland. Joel’s poetic language is so striking that probably he had experienced the ravaging destruction of an invasion of locusts. Many times locusts have bequeathed humans suffering and starvation.

The locust is still a threat today. But, unlike the despairing resignation of Joel, there is a new approach being tried in the desert wastes of Bible lands (see National Geographic 4/53).

With technical assistance from the United States and other countries, there is a cooperative resistance to swarming locusts. Technicians are using powerful insecticides sprayed from airplanes and other methods of halting the locust plagues before they gain momentum in their swarming invasion. In order to work effectively to destroy the nests of locust eggs, old barriers had to be eliminated. Locusts play no favorites of race, creed or national interest. All lines had to be ignored in order to halt destruction.

In those desert wastelands, cooperation is more than a world – it is the way that people survive. There in the desert they call to us that no matter how insurmountable the odds, despair is not justified because cooperation can make the difference.

There are prophecies of hope as well as despair in the Bible. There was Micah who voiced a never-quenching human hope:

“And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks, nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig-tree; and none shall make them afraid.”

In the N.T. there is the parable of the Good Samaritan – man saving man. The hope for supernatural saving salvation expressed by John of Patmos is not the only expression of saving ways.

In the old scriptures of mankind, wisdom which has withstood the test of time has been a clue in the everlasting and undying things of the spirit. Perhaps the story of how the locusts are being halted has a clue for the larger issues of life-cooperation for survival between peoples of different government structures, different skin-color, even hostile nationally, halted the spread of wasteland, diminished the toll of human devastation.

What in the world are we coming to? Something fairer and finer than we have known – if we learn from the desert peoples and cooperate for survival. Cooperation between those who disagree violently is a fairer answer than mutual destruction.

But we did not complete the parable of the runaway bus which was rolling brakeless down the eleven miles of steep grade. They made it! Although the speed reached as much as 110 miles an hour, the bus did not hurtle off the road even when taking the sharp grades. A miracle? No, the hand of God did not intervene, in any direct way at least. The squad of boys, some of whom had been taking their ease in cards, conversation, or whatever, threw their weight around!

When the bus was swerving wildly in the centrifugal force caused by taking the curve at high speed, the boys unitedly would throw their weight against the other side of the bus. In a rapid sequence of hairbreadth adventures they slipped out of the hand of death again and again by throwing their weight around.

When they had passed the dangerous part and the grade began to level, the driver was able to bring the bus to a stop without human damage. To top off the adventure, after temporary repairs were made, the squad proceeded to the ball park, played the game, and won!

What in the world are we coming to? The chart of the future is both inscrutable and perilous. We may not be driving the bus, but we can throw our weight around, particularly when our plight is dangerous.

There is a great will to peace and brotherhood in the world.

If you have the current issue of LIFE magazine, you should read a brief but remarkable report by John D. Rockefeller, IV on the rioting in Japan. We have generally been informed that the riots against the Kishi government which led to the face-losing cancellation of our President’s visit were sinister politics, inspired by Communists. But, according to the first-hand observations of Mr. Rockefeller, there were many persons rioting against the Kishi government because of their faith, not in Russian or Chinese communism, but rather belief in the prime necessity of peace and the promotion of human liberties and civil rights. They were throwing their weight around to focus world attention on their situation.

We are being courted; we are being wooed for our votes. Whether you are a Republican, Democrat, Independent or disinterested voter, the political statisticians are computing the circumstances which will lead you to cast your vote this way or that in November. Millions and millions of dollars are going to be spent to get your vote.

Morality is involved in all political issues. Our constitutional foundations of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are essentially religious values. I cannot think of any vital, political issues which are not based on one or more of these noble premises of our government.

We may not yet have to resort to riot and violence, but we can add the weight of our convictions to the precarious balance of our times.

If every one of us threw our weight around by spending a little time and a four cent stamp to inform the leaders of the political party to which we normally give allegiance that we want a free and fair nation and a peaceful and cooperative world, it just might make a difference. Now, I’m enough of a cynic to be aware that political platforms, particularly in presidential years, are contrived masterpieces, seeking maximum eloquence in generalities with a minimum commitment in particulars. Nevertheless, if the party chieftains hear no uncertain sound that we the people were placing the value on our individual votes high – that we were not only interested in party personalities but also in peace, freedom and the pursuit of greater excellence in the distribution of the mammoth abundance for living of which the world is potentially capable, we might sharpen the planks in the platform.

You may well ask, what are my particulars beyond generalities? Here are a few:

The need for international control of mass weapons and specific steps which lead at some measured pace toward world disarmament.

The abolition of tests which in some degree are poisoning the atmosphere with radiation.

A program which will lead in the direction of greater measures of world law – the repeal of the Conally amendment as an immediate specific.

National economic alternatives to a war-geared industry. How would each political party provide leadership in maintaining our need to continuously expand our national economy without an enormously overweight armaments preparation?

Leadership to reduce now the discrimination against minority groups in employment, education, housing and civil rights. What steps should be taken to overtake the ever-widening gap between our young population and the educational facilities required to equip them intellectually and practically for satisfactory careers and productive lives in the world now breaking upon us.

The political voices you hear are more than verbal duels between party choices – they are pleas for your vote. Behind the sometimes subtle and sometimes vulgar strategies of party eggheads, glamor boys and political bullyboys are more efforts to lure money from the wealthy for political warchests. More importantly they are fishing tournaments for your vote and time.

Queen Elizabeth says to Richmond in King Richard, III, “an honest tale speeds best being plainly told.”

If we can add our weight, by greater demand that political platforms be plainly told, in sentences of less rather than greater fence-straddling, we will be throwing our weight around and the bus may ride out the dangerous curves of our times.