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On Earth as It Is in Heaven
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10685 |
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BOOK WORLD
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1 / 1986 |
4,228 Words |
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Raymond Dennehy
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THE POLITICS OF HEAVEN AND HELL
Christian Themes From Classical Medieval
and Modern Political Philosophy
James V. Schall
University Press of America, 1984
41 pp., Paper
" Better dead than Red!" screeched the hawks. "Better Red than dead!" cooed the doves. You don't hear these slogans anymore, but the sentiments they express are just as much alive in the hearts and minds of mankind today as they were in the 1960s. The recent, eagerly awaited, media-hyped summit meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev accelerated these sentiments to a pinpoint of intensity not seen for a long time; spokesmen for citizens groups from the United States and Europe descended on Geneva pleading for a halt to the manufacture of nuclear weapons. There, for the entire world to see, was the Rev. Jesse Jackson, having gotten to Gorbachev before Reagan did, presenting the Russian leader with a disquisition on the advantages of a peaceful world. Then there was the scandal of the news leak of Secretary of Defense Weinberger's letter to President Reagan urging him to hang tough on arms negotiations in his tete-a-tete with Gorbachev. Weinberger was seemingly trying to get one-up on his opponent in the Administration, Secretary of State Shultz, who has recently persuaded the president that his colleague's hardline approach to the Russians borders on the imprudent. Did these events exert any influence on the summit meeting? Only God and the translators know for sure what the two world leaders said to each other amidst the elegance of a Geneva mansion. But you don't have to be a Harvard political analyst to realize that whatever they said and didn't say, Reagan and Gorbachev, for the time being anyway, control the destiny of the world.
In a way, the whole things is surreal and even stupid. Why can't rational beings act rationally and stop flexing their weapons before they blow themselves and the whole planet to bits?
This observation appeals to reason only if you ignore its oversimplification of the problem. For between the hawks and the doves there hangs a tale, and the tale is brilliantly discussed by James Schall in The Politics of Heaven and Hell. Schall argues that the difference between those who would rather be dead than Red and those who would rather be Red than dead is the difference between politics seen as a purely temporal activity and political theory as subordinate to metaphysics and religion, on the one hand, and politics seen as the beginning and end of all human existence, wherein political theory is the highest science, on the other. If you embrace the view that the destruction of the human species would be the greatest of all evils, you will certainly be consistent in holding that it is absolutely morally unjustifiable to engage in a nuclear war; the risk of exterminating the human race will be unconscionable, even when undertaken to defend democracy from an evil regime like totalitarian Russia. Morality dictates that a free people submit to enslavement, that the bastion of freedom and justice capitulate to the Marxist ambitions of world domination, if that is the only way to ensure the perpetuation of mankind on this earth. If, on the contrary, you regard submission to the "worst state" as an evil greater than the destruction of the human race, then you will certainly be consistent in holding that engaging in nuclear war to defend the just state from the "worst state" is a moral
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