Annihilation from Within

broken up and autocratic rule was displaced by political turmoil, they started to persecute and kill each other. Something similar happened in Indonesia, where Muslims and Christians had lived peacefully in the same communities until Suharto’s autocracy was replaced by democratically elected governments, at which point religious violence erupted in various parts of the country.
Economic policy and performance have followed a similar zigzag course. In the early nineteenth century, mercantilist economies steadily gave way to free market systems. Then, in the early twentieth century, the free market was partially displaced by socialist command economies. But at the end of that century, the command economies were themselves displaced by a successful global movement to restore free market economies. The course of free trade has been equally wobbly. Free trade prevailed throughout most of Europe during the last third of the nineteenth century until it ended in 1914, to be revived with the Common Market and free trade agreements forty years later. My interpretation of the divergence between the two cultural spheres—the scientific one and the ethical-religious one—is shared by John Gray, Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics: “The belief that scientific advance engenders social progress suggests that science and ethics are alike, when in fact they are very different. Once it has been acquired and disseminated, scientific knowledge cannot now be lost; but there is no ethical or political advance that cannot be reversed.”10
A fundamental difference between the two modes of human activity—and a source of tension between them—resides in their contrasting aspirations. In the scientific-industrial mode, human activity is devoted to a continuing progression of advances without a final goal. Science, properly pursued, does not seek to establish a definitive doctrine but to expand man’s never-completed comprehension and conquest of nature. But in the societal-political sphere, people have essentially finite goals. In Marxist thought, for instance, the communist society was not envisaged as a goal to be overtaken by some new form of capitalism. The Islamic movements that have established their theocratic states are not prepared to welcome “progress” that might lead to a religious reformation. America’s policy of promoting democracy and human rights is not intended to build a transitory political order to be replaced by new autocracies.
The encyclical Fides et Ratio, released by Pope John Paul II in 1998, addresses this cultural divergence. The “profound unity” in Medieval thought, the encyclical notes (§45), was
producing knowledge capable of reaching the highest form of speculation, [yet] was destroyed by systems which espoused the cause of rational knowledge sundered from faith and meant to take the place of faith.
The encyclical conveys the Pope’s appeal (§48),
that faith and philosophy recover the profound unity which allows them to stand in harmony with their nature without compromising their mutual autonomy.
At the present time, this “profound unity” does not seem within reach. Many democracies are painfully torn between the secular and the religious; and disparate faiths in the world remain deeply divided, within nations as well as between them. These irreconcilable disagreements often lead to violent conflicts which reveal—it is sad to say—the extraordinary savagery and cruelty of religious wars.
Since the eighteenth century, political leaders in Western democracies have sought to overcome these conflicts by instituting the separation of Church and State. Prominent thinkers in the nineteenth century even anticipated that the influence of religion in society would vanish. Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer, and others portrayed the importance of religion as merely a passing phase in the evolution of mankind, to be supplanted by some universal, rationalist philosophy. Several European nations have evolved along this path. But in other regions religion became more influential and even spawned fiercely militant groups. Religious resurgence has spread through Africa, lit fires throughout the Muslim world, and can be observed in the United States.
It is mankind’s destiny that its cultural split will become wider, unless the calamity of annihilation from within (see chapters 4 and 5) forces societies to close the chasm between the two modes of human activity. Short of such an upheaval, the societal and religious modes of human activity cannot catch up with the ceaseless momentum of science. This widening chasm is ominous. It might impair the social cohesion of societies, and of nations, by drawing the human psyche in two directions: to the personal and national identity that resides in acquired beliefs, memories, and traditions of the past; and to the promise of greater wealth and power offered by untrammeled technological progress. Also, mankind’s two cultural spheres are driven further apart by emotions—that basic ingredient in all human activity. In the scientific sphere, we are neither emotionally tied to our cultural and religious heritage, nor pining for a final redemption. But when animated by the world’s old soul, we seek to protect our identity by clinging to ancient artifacts from our ancestors and hallowed legends from the distant past.
In the 1990s, Hindus and Muslims in India killed each other in a dispute about the Babri Mosque, which is said to have displaced a Hindu temple half a millennium ago. In Jerusalem, Muslims and Jews kill and die for the Temple Mount, whose veneration by both faiths is based on even older legends. Perhaps it is our fear of mortality, that inescapable end of our earthly existence, which induces us to find solace by killing for a patrimony that has vanished long ago. A haunting thought, that Macaulay has captured:
And how can a man die better
than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods?

2
SCIENCE PUSHES US OVER THE BRINK
Men will acquire the power to alter themselves, and will inevitably use this power.
—BERTRAND RUSSELL (1931)
WE ARE AWESTRUCK by the continuing advances of science, yet often ambivalent about their impact on our world. Rightly so, because the nuclear age taught us the difficulty, nay the impossibility, of reining in threatening consequences of scientific breakthroughs. Today, it is the