"Toward clarity in justice and peace"--June 22, 2000--Richmond, Virginia

Human beings have long been a rich mix of godliness and greed, compassion and cunning, just as the world, ever beautiful, has always been rife with wrongs. And since that time when, as they were being cast out of the Garden, Adam said to Eve, "Don't worry, darling, it's only a transitional period" from that time forth change has been as certain as death and taxes.

That being recognized, I still believe we live in momentous times. Today we have a stunning ability to affect destiny - for good or ill. Technologically speaking, there is no reason why the world cannot provide a modicum of material prosperity to the planet's every inhabitant. And technologically speaking, there is nothing to prevent all these inhabitants from going up in nuclear flames.

A moment of such promise and peril obviously calls for visionary clarity. But instead of large visions we are succumbing to what de Toqueville warned America against - "paltriness of aim". With more and more money we are less and less generous. A rampant selfishness combined with a fascination with trivia have rendered us spiritually incapable of reading the handwriting on the wall. Like Jonah we are fleeing to Tarshish leaving Nineveh trembling on the brink.

We could talk about the environment - environmental warnings are everywhere: the thinning of the ozone layer, the loss of topsoil, our forest cover, how in America alone from 1992 to 1997 we converted land to development at the rate of 3 million acres per year, 6 acres per minute. Obviously nature would be better off if humans joined the dinosaurs.

But the threats I want to talk about today imperil not only a sustainable earth, but more directly social justice and peace. The two are Siamese twins - neglect one and you endanger the other. There is no peace without justice, no justice without peace.

Let's start with justice. Writes Yale historian Paul Kennedy: "our collective wealth has risen astronomically but the difference between rich and poor countries and rich and poor individuals seems as skewed in the year 2000 as it was in 1901 - and this after generations of efforts to create equity."

Early in the last century, J. P. Morgan, no stranger to greed, said company executives should make no more than 20 times the salary of their average employee. Today most CEO's in the United States make something closer to 400 times as much. Michael Eisner recently received 25,070 times the average of a Disney employee, and Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Warren Buffett have a net worth larger than the combined GNP of the 41 poorest nations with their 550 million people.

When the top 1% of US households exceeds the combined wealth of the bottom 95% we do not have free enterprise democracy. To Jeff Gates it's more like "people-disconnected capitalism" made possible in large part by "the legalized bribery that now masquerades as representative democracy."

Last July the Census Bureau proposed raising the American poverty threshold to $19,500 for a family of four. Were that level accepted, 46 million citizens would still just scrape by - in the richest country in the world. As William Penn wrote: "It is a reproach to religion and government to suffer so much poverty and excess." Said Justice Brandeis: "We can have a democracy or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few. We cannot have both."

I suggested that technologically there was no reason why a modicum of material prosperity could not be offered every inhabitant on the planet. The World Health organization lists six core ingredients as everywhere essential:

* Safe drinking water

* sufficient nutrition

* adequate sanitation

* primary health care

* basic education

* family planning for willing couples

The United Nations Development Program calculates the cost of providing these six ingredients to be $35 billion each year for 15 years. That's about the equivalent of what the US spent in `99 maintaining our nuclear capability.

Turning now to the other Siamese twin, we find peace in need of the same attention as justice. I mentioned our nuclear capability. Let us not forget that nuclear weapons are designed to commit indiscriminate mass murder. Hiding this reality behind innocuous terms like "nuclear capability" or "nuclear option" hides nothing. Reagan was right: nuclear weapons should never be used. But deterrence demands a willingness to use them; the only question being the number needed. While the Russians are prepared for greater reductions, our Joint Chiefs, according to two recent Times articles, are loathe to go below 2,500, or at the most 2,000.

Several years ago Herbert York, founder of the famous Livermore nuclear labs in California, returned for a visit. Thousands of workers gathered to hear their aged icon. He asked: "How many nuclear weapons would it take to deter a nation rational enough to be deterred? Would it take 10 or 1? I tell you the answer is near to one."

More recently another aged icon, "Reagan's hawkish arms negotiator Paul Nitze wrote in the New York Times, "I find no compelling reason why we should not unilaterally get rid of our nuclear weapons." In saying so he joins former SAC commander General Lee Butler - for 38 years steeped in nuclear targets, weapons and delivery systems - former supreme commander of NATO forces General Goodpaster, and 63 other generals and admirals from 17 countries, all of whom have called for the abolition of all nuclear weapons under strict rules of inspection on the grounds that they are illegal and immoral, costly to maintain, and add nothing to national security.

There is something darkly comical about conventional wisdom regarding national security. "Military security has become our highest priority, our greatest expenditure, and our scarcest commodity." So observes an acute nun, Sister Joan Chittester. And over 40 years ago, General Omar Bradley said: "America has become a nation of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about killing than we do about living."

It's been 10 years since the Berlin Wall collapsed. We say we won the Cold War, but the United states won't lead the world in disarmament. We would rather be a superpower than part of a disarmed world. But the world must disarm and far beyond our weapons of mass destruction. Small arms are a large problem, just how large we have seen in Angola, Mozambique, Somalia, Sudan, Liberia, East Timor and former Yugoslavia. Arms for such wars come from a huge international market; the leading arms merchant being the United States. Personally I think it criminal to sell arms abroad for commercial profit. It's bad enough that we do it at home. Just as the first step toward the abolition of slavery was the abolition of the slave trade, so now the first step toward the abolition of national military arsenals should be the abolition of the arms trade. Common security must replace national security. It's time to think of an international police force to counter the depredations of nationalism, tribalism and racism. Peace, long a desirable option, is now a compelling imperative lest we resemble those dinosaurs, extinct because they suffered from too much armor and too little brain.

So what to do, especially today in our schools and colleges? Intellectual life in America is not disturbing enough to meet the great need the world has of it. Our schools and colleges mirror far more than they challenge our culture. What they discuss is theoretically important but not overwhelmingly urgent. They do not make the defining questions of human kind the centerpiece of education.

As far back as 1946 Leon Blum said: "Education geared to peace must be at the heart of everything we do."

Such a form of education would mean looking for meaning less in facts, more in relationships. It is in relationships that knowledge of morality is unlocked. A capacity for connectedness is at the heart of ethical life. Put differently, the mind's vision excludes the heart but the heart's vision includes the mind. We have to feel before we can see.

At the very least schools should offer courses in peace, colleges peace majors. Here are a few things I think we should ponder in our hearts:

* that an estimated 149 million have died in war since the 1 st century. Of these 100 million were killed in the century just passed, and in the 1990's 90% of the victims were civilians;

* that more than 3 billion human beings on this planet live on less than $2 a day, and every day that breaks sees 40,000 children succumb to diseases linked to chronic hunger;

* that not only do nations make war but war makes nations. What would England be without Trafalgar, and 400 years earlier Crecy and Agincourt? What would Russia be without the triumph of 1812? The French without Napoleon? Italy without Garibaldi, the US without Washington, Lincoln and Lee?

* That compassion and justice are companions not choices;

* that "God 'n' country is not one word;

* that Thomas Mann said "War is a coward's escape from the problems of peace":

* that Reinhold Niebuhr said "Nothing worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime."

* That there never was night or a problem that could defeat sunrise or hope.

I am well aware that in pretending to an unattainable truth we perpetuate a lie. Is it utterly absurd to think war might some day be buried in history alongside of slavery, colonialism and apartheid?

I don't know. I do know two things: In Luther's words, "God can carve the rotten wood and ride the lame horse"; and only those who attempt the absurd achieve the impossible.

Rev. William Sloan Coffin was the longtime pastor of Riverside Church of New York City and Chaplain of York University

Copyright The Human Quest Jan/Feb 2001
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