Making bombs will only destroy. It doesn’t matter whether or not we use them. They will destroy us either way.
— Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy, 2013
With that remark, first published in 1998, Indian writer Arundhati Roy shows herself to be walking along the same path German thinker Martin Heidegger walked more than fifty years earlier. In his “Memorial Address” of October 30, 1955, at the 175th anniversary of the composer Conradin Kreutzer, his regional predecessor, in Heidegger’s hometown of Messkirch, Germany, Heidegger at one point said (in my own translation):
For the time being, to be sure—we don’t know for how long—humanity finds itself on this earth in a dangerous situation. Why? Only because, unexpectedly a third World War could break out, one that could have the complete annihilation of humankind and the destruction of the earth as a consequence? No. In the Atomic Age a far greater danger threatens—exactly then, when the danger of a third World War is averted. A bizarre assertion. To be sure, but strange only so long as we do not reflect.
To what extent does the just spoken claim hold? It holds insofar as the revolution of technology that unfolds in the Atomic Age can so enchain, bewitch, bedazzle, and blind humanity that one day only calculative thinking will continue to matter and to be exercised.
What great danger would then draw near? Then the best and most efficiently skillful intelligence for planning and invention would go together with indifference toward reflection—that is, total thoughtlessness. And then? Then humanity would have denied and thrown away what is most proper to it, namely, the reflective thinking that is its definitive nature. Thus, what matters is to save this definitive human nature. Thus, what matters is to keep reflective thinking awake.
Indeed, insofar as the bombs we make remain in their hangers, that very fact becomes our most effective soporific. It keeps us locked in the delusion that everything is just fine, so long as we somehow—through international conferences, treaties, brinksmanship, mutual threats, or whatever other means we come up with—manage not to blow ourselves up, along with the earth we all jointly inhabit. The more deeply we sink into that delusion, however, the less chance remains that we can salvage anything human in our once shared humanity.
That, in short, is truly our greatest danger: the danger of all of us human beings, collectively and individually, losing our very humanity.
So, at any rate, thought Heidegger, back in 1955—a thought that is at least echoed by Roy’s remark in 1998.
Conradin Kreutzer
Lithograph by Joseph Kriebhuber,1837
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Here we are today, in the fall of 2021, twenty-three years after Arundhati Roy first published her warning above and sixty-six years since Heidegger voiced his concern in his memorial address at his birthplace, and the situation has in no way improved. To be sure, the bombs have still not dropped. Indeed, since the end of the Cold War and the ensuing global spread of triumphant capitalism—and despite the accompanying global spread of nuclear weapon capacity to nation-state after nation-state—concern about the danger of nuclear global annihilation has actually plummeted.
In truth, concern about the potential of “nuclear winter” has been in our day replaced by concern about “global warming” (or “climate change,” for those who prefer that even less truthful term). Concern about pending ecological catastrophe has already for a long time now altogether overshadowed concern about pending nuclear disaster.
So, haven’t things gotten better in that process? No. They have not gotten better.
Rather, things have gotten far worse. They have gotten far worse, precisely because our truly greatest danger is thereby buried ever more deeply under the façade of far more manageable worries. Indeed, it is the very manageability of the ecology—at least in principle if not so far at all in fact—by sharp-witted intelligence making appropriate plans and taking effective action, that keeps our greatest danger masked. If only we can get our collective act together, so the dominant popular opinion presents itself as believing, we can avert global ecological collapse. Then we can all rest easy as we watch billionaires go on spaceflights, and even take the likes of Captain Kirk with them. We can most certainly rest especially easy once the current global Covid pandemic is also brought, through skillful application of the same sort of intelligent planning and action, to its end. When that happens, as surely and inevitably it eventually will, then we can all just relax and sit back, enjoying all our social media connectedness with one another around the whole earth—and even beyond, since our digital devices will even keep us on touch with all the rich explorers and exploiters on Mars and elsewhere, throughout infinite space.
At least that way we will never again feel any need to reflect!
* * *
That is, in truth, our greatest danger.