Six Blank Pages?

May 21, 1990

Just before Columbus’ momentous voyages, some thinking Europeans believed the world was crumbling. THE NUREMBERG CHRONICLE dwelt on the “calamity ... in which iniquity and evil have increased to the highest pitch” and at the end of the book gave its readers six blank pages to record events from 1493 to the end of the world. (Source: THE EUROPEAN DISCOVERY OF AMERICA, THE NORTHERN VOYAGES, Samuel Eliot Morrison).

How would you record the events of the ensuing 500 years on six blank pages?

World-ending predictions have been frequent. For centuries enthusiastic religious prophets have been eloquent doom-sayers and always wrong.

Six blank pages? How many millions of pages have been printed since that gloomy foreboding. Consider only:

The Industrial Revolution
The terrible wars
The age of the automobile and airplane
The nuclear age
The electronic and computer age

The list is long and has filled many encyclopedias, histories and biographies. On my shelves are two feet of books dealing just with Thomas Jefferson.

Today we have our varieties of THE NUREMBERG CHRONICLE:
The world will end because we have destroyed the air, the forests, the ozone layer. The world will end because we have not solved the sad and scary inequalities between “haves” and “have-nots”. The world will end because we seemingly cannot solve the problems of not only nuclear weapons but also biological and chemical warfare, even though the “Great Powers” seem more and more aware of what it means to possess the deadly weapons they have devised and made.

One can be Chicken Little and predict the sky is falling. Any number can play the old erroneous game of putting a modern “spin” on the books of Daniel and Revelation. Handsomely-groomed prophets of Armageddon can be seen on the tube at almost any hour. Why must they be so expensively tailored and beg for so much money if the world is going to end so soon? Maybe they want to have a well-stuffed wallet when they meet Jesus “in the sky.”

The ecologists and peace-makers are more realistic and scientific. We could drown in our own garbage and nuclear waste. Cut down all the forests and we would suffocate. There are still madmen who would touch off nuclear or biological war just to satisfy their irrational impulses of revenge or paranoia. It could happen. Sympathetic as I am and supportive as I am toward ecological and peace-making ways, it is possible we are heading down the road to universal catastrophe.

Nevertheless, I am hopeful, with a dollop of pessimism, that we will need a great many more than six blank pages to record world history from this moment on. I don’t know how much more or to what depths suffering must be endured, but I believe the human venture will survive.

Why do I believe this? Certainly not from any theological prediction; and not because of any scientific crystal ball. But in the annals of humankind one can discover kindness as well as cruelty, justice as well as injustice, mercy as well as revenge, hope as well as despair.

There is an infinite number of pages still to be written. Always I have resonated to the closing lines of Carl Sandburg’s “The People, Yes”:

“This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers,
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in the fire,
The stars make no noise.
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?

In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march
In the night and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps,
the people march.
‘Where to? What next?’”