The following is the first Chapter of an interesting online book called: Living Ethics: The Way of Wholeness
Donivan Bessinger, MD
It was after midnight. In the tropical night, I climbed to the rooftop of the hospital. The glow of the city below me created a distracting glare, but in the fronds of a tall palm extending just above roof level I found an eyeshield. I moved to the left to let my eyes adapt to the darker view of the sea horizon extending west beyond Pearl Harbor. The distorted sound of the tiny transistor radio had announced a delay, but now I repositioned, checked the bearing, and listened carefully as the local announcer resumed his squawky countdown. In a very few moments, I would witness one of the last atmospheric tests of a hydrogen bomb.
“Six … five … four … ”
From Johnson Island far to the west of my safe vantage point in Honolulu, some seven hundred miles away, I expected to see only a faint gray glow above the mushroom.
” Two … one … zero … ”
Silence. Then, despite the distance, a ball of light on the horizon brightly glowed in yellow, orange, red. A new sun began to rise briefly in the west, then set again into the midnight sea.
It is midwinter now, one year and a half later. The sun has been gone for three months, and will not reappear for three months more. The clear sky shows faint stars. The early moon reflected on bright snow gives the world a monochrome glow– not silver, but pewter. Midwinter noon and midwinter midnight are the same. It is cold, but now there is no wind. The flag pole that marks the South Pole site makes an adequate landmark, approximately a kilometer from camp. It is a good time for an afternoon walk around the world.
Once there, total stillness. Once the back is turned to the distant light at the entrance to the under-snow station, there is no sign of other life at all. Cold seeps in, even under the many layers of carefully engineered clothing, pulling out body heat, clawing at life.
Totally alone. Totally isolated. Minimal light. No other life. Bacteria? Only if buried in the ice as frozen inactive spores, or those traveling with me as my personal colonies. No plants. No insects. No birds. No life but my life, an alien life. How long can life last here, totally alone?
Life-alone. The cold claws at life-alone. Will-to-live pulls life back to the distant light, to rejoin warmth, to affirm life, to link to other life.
Is life-alone sustainable? Is life-alone conceivable?
Twenty-nine years ago, my young spirit of adventure led me far from my Carolina roots. Immediately after medical school, I went to Honolulu for internship. Following that, my two-year obligate duty with the Navy led me as a new medical officer to become officer-in-charge of South Pole Station in Antarctica, as part of Operation Deepfreeze.
We departed for Antarctica just as Kruschev’s missile-loaded ships approached Cuba, but they turned back, and we proceeded west and south. Very south. Then before the final leg of the trip to the South Pole, I saw the new nuclear power unit at McMurdo Station, Antarctica.
It had not been so many years since a summer job as a nuclear medicine research technician at Oak Ridge. The institute had still been treating some victims of a small nuclear accident earlier that year, and to a young medical enthusiast that was a disconcerting lesson. Yet despite the Cuban missile crisis and the other concerns and the problems, it seemed that in those still-early years of the nuclear era, there remained an optimistic echo of the theme “atoms for peace.”
During the next quarter of a century, as optimism about atom and optimism about peace both seemed to fade, the years merged my several images of early experience into a single metaphor, contracted but compelling, of future midnight sunrises and deadly winters. Just as time and probability magnified the little-remembered Oak Ridge accident into the starker more recent reality of Chernobyl, so did a nuclear apocalypse ever loom as a growing probability.
In the global psychosphere, as each nation in its collective psyche projected its own fear and power drive on the others, suspicions spiralled and logic inevitably convoluted, to the point of perceiving not reality but delusion. Only thus could each side have come to see in the nuclear danger the instrument of its own safety.
But the full manic breakdown did not happen, at least in the twentieth century. A glimmer of sane reflection and stark fear brought the superpowers to an agreement on intermediate range weapons. Social restructuring and new openness in Soviet society, then the opening of Eastern Europe with the unification of Germany gave renewed hope for further progress toward the lessening of tensions. There remained serious internal difficulties in the Soviet Union which led ultimately to its collapse. Yet, as the fearful scenarios of “Y2K” computer glitches remined us at the turn of the year 2000, the problem of strategic nuclear weapons remains unsolved.
Even as relationships improved between the super-powers, warring fundamentalisms in the Middle East spawned new terrors for the world. Small nations raced to gain or further secure nuclear and chemical warfare capabilities, and some have clients who bomb randomly in the air and on the ground around the globe. The nuclear threat remains. As nuclear arms come to be held by more nations, the world drifts further toward greater nuclear instability, allowing much less confidence than in the early 1990s that we are about to achieve a stable “new world order.”
There are other instabilities. We proceed on a concerted campaign to destroy our primary means of producing oxygen, by destroying our forests. Deforestation has already led to famine, often in the very areas where human reproduction is most rampant. We continue to poison and heat the atmosphere with effluents of our smoke stacks and exhaust pipes. We still poison our waters with pesticides, and our own tissues with carcinogens. These “environmental” problems are less frightening perhaps because they are more insidious, but they are no less serious in their ultimate implications for world life.
If the nation-gods of our modern mythic Olympus could come to lie on a cosmic counselor’s couch, seeking one more time to settle their household struggle without throwing nuclear thunderbolts, and seeking anew a tranquil global domesticity, what would a mythic analyst say? Wherein may a cosmic counselor prescribe healing?
The goddess of Wisdom must doubtless prescribe a new way of thinking. She must draw from the collective unconscious of mankind the energies for a new synthesis of the world of knowledge. She must bring into the collective consciousness a new pattern of thinking, an ethic that is true to human nature and to life process itself, that moves away from conflict, and that sparks mankind toward a new creativity in thought and action.
The nuclear problem and the environmental problem are only the global dimension of a more immediate personal one. How will I and my family survive? How will I relate to myself and to all others, at all the levels of my life? As Einstein said,
The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one. (1)
In Christopher Burstall’s film The Greeks, Socrates says,
The question that concerns us is no ordinary question. It is: How should men live? (2)
That question, as old as mankind, today looms larger still. That question defines the central problem of all human relationships and decisions, be they simple and personal, or be they global. It is the question that defines ethics: How ought we to live?
In its broadest sense, ethics is the complete enterprise of making correct decisions. (3) In a complex world, ethics must take into account interactions at many levels. Actions must be right in all their effects. An ethic is only as valid as the worldview on which it is based. To be adequate, an ethic must be based on a correct view of the world as it is. One of our most basic “ethical problems” is that we have lost confidence that there can be a “correct view.” Yet, even though twentieth century philosophy has left us the legacy that truth is indeterminate, it can still be “correct” to seek dynamically the best view based on the most coherent integration of current knowledge.
In our patterns of thinking to date, we have emphasized the rigid compartmentalization of knowledge. Confronted with problems, we typically go to some particular aisle in the stacks of mankind’s library, and hide there in search of rules on which to base our decision-making. Confronted with today’s complexities, however, we must bring the books from many shelves into the large central reading room of knowledge, and into the collective consciousness.
Individually and collectively we must synthesize a new worldview that is consistent with all knowledge and is harmonious with human nature and human aspirations. At the personal level, we must deal with the dichotomy between the aspirations of our inner selves and our achievements in the outer world. At the level of the cosmic analyst’s couch, we must deal with the serious neurotic dichotomy between the human aspirations of civilization and the outer world of global conflicts and predicaments.
Unfortunately, instead of a new way of thinking, the conventional wisdom has called for a collective faith in economic, political or strategic theory, and the world has continued to draw into a deeper neurosis—albeit at the century’s turn, an economically vigorous one. As the alienation of our basic inner aspirations continues, we work harder for solutions in the realm of Ego, the realm of theory and consciousness.
We are left only with a resurgence of fundamentalist fervor in all of the major religions, and political fervor drawing us into greater polarities, away from a balanced center, away from a common understanding, and away from a common creative vision.
In the process, we have on the one hand jettisoned “traditional” values, while at the same time we challenge each other for the ascendency of our own traditions. The teaching of values in the schools and universities has been rejected as too religious or too political, and we are left with a vacuum of values and an absence of consensus about relevant ethical systems. We are left with the absence of an ethical foundation. We should not be surprised that the world seems evil.
In a 1952 speech, Adlai Stevenson said,
Nature is neutral. Man has wrested from nature the power to make the world a desert or to make the deserts bloom. There is no evil in the atom; only in man’s souls. (4)
That is the problem we must come to terms with. In deciding “How should we live” we must re-examine the nature of nature.
In determining the ethical solution to problems in the system that is our own individual organism, we must work from a realistic view of human nature, taking into account biological and psychological needs. Yet increasingly, we are realizing that we cannot make a reductive distinction between the biological and the psychological, as though there were some concrete boundary defining those as separate territories. The concept of health is the concept of wholeness: the orderly functioning of the whole person.
Similarly, if we are to solve problems in the global system, we must work from a realistic view of the multi-level inter-workings of the whole life system, taking into account the needs of all life, for we depend on the orderly functioning of the whole biosphere for individual and societal survival. The answer to “How should we live?” must be based on a global worldview.
Despite our fears and misgivings, we can learn to recognize in ourselves and in each other across the globe the will to survive, the common will to live. Each of us is strongly directed toward an inner balance, both metabolically and psychologically. Similarly, all creation works as a system seeking its balance. That is the common bond.
In the remaining chapters we will scan the world of knowledge looking for new meaning and a “new way of thinking.” We will not inquire in great technical depth as specialists, but we will draw from many specialists a view of an interrelated creation-in-progress which can best be understood in terms of its unity. We will seek to provide a basic primer for understanding the wholeness of creation.
In that systems view of wholeness we will find not a doomsday view, but an optimistic worldview for survival. We will find a sense of purpose. We will find ourselves. We will find a living ethic and a prescription for healing.
Copyright 2000 by Donivan Bessinger. All rights reserved.
Next Chapter: Ethics and Civilization
More by Donivan Bessinger, MD
References:
(1) “THE RELEASE OF ATOMIC ENERGY”—Albert Einstein. Quoted in: Peter’s Quotations, Ideas for Our Time. L.J. Peter (editor). New York: Bantam, 1979. p. 32.
(2) “THE QUESTION THAT CONCERNS US”—The Greeks, a film by Christopher Burstall. BBC, 1980. Translation by Kenneth Dover.
(3) ETHICS IS THE COMPLETE ENTERPRISE—The word ethics may be construed as singular or plural, according to the Random House unabridged dictionary. Since I cannot discern any basis for a consistent rule, I will simply follow my personal sense of what sounds best in the particular sentence.
(4) “NATURE IS NEUTRAL”—Adlai Stevenson speech at Hartford, Connecticut on September 18, 1952. Quoted in: Familiar Quotations by John Bartlett, 13th Edition. Boston: Little Brown, 1955. page 987.