In September 1961, when atomic testing has started again, and when international tensions are mounting and mounting, even a fairly optimistic person must be compelled to recognize that, at this time, the future of man on this planet is in critical danger. And yet, I personally am amazed at the degree of apparent indifference to this crisis which exists among just ordinary people. Despite the cataclysm that seems to be facing us, there is an extraordinary atmosphere of “business as usual.” The foreboding headlines in the newspaper alternate quite easily with the usual headlines about the affairs of baseball, the current scandals, and murders, because the problem, in a way, is too big for anyone to think about. There seem to be complete limits to the powers of the individual to deal with this situation. And when the individual finds that it is absolutely beyond his scope to do anything about it, his only defense is to neglect it. And therefore we are living in the midst of an absolutely terrifyingly critical danger, and somehow being hypnotized into accepting it—almost as a bird is hypnotized by an attacking snake.

Now, there’s a great deal of difference between this kind of hypnotized indifference and what I might call philosophical acceptance of reality. Hypnotized indifference simply succumbs. But paradoxically, the philosophical acceptance of reality has power. It can change things. I think it was Jung who said that we can never change things until we first accept them. And I’d like to talk to you for a while about this curious paradox. It’s that there is a kind of acceptance of reality which is powerful and active rather than passive, transforming rather than simply submissive. And although these two things seem to be logically opposed according to a kind of low level of logic, they are not so in fact. For example, again, according to a kind of low level of logic, it would be absurd to think of light as something which is, on the one hand, a projection of particles, and on the other hand simply waves. But the modern physicist is able to think both ways at the same time. In some cases he finds it useful to think of light as particles, in some cases he finds it useful to think of it as waves. And although the two images are contradictory according to our ordinary everyday sensuous experience, they’re not necessarily contradictory in the mathematical thinking of the physicist. And, in the same way, it is necessary sometimes to be able to think in two ways at once in order to master a problem.

Now, in all these talks I’ve been very much concerned in pointing out what I’ve called sometimes hierarchies of reality. As, for example, there is a level of life which lies beyond human standards of good and evil. I’ve often said that nobody criticizes the arrangement of the stars as stars that are praised for being bright and stars that are blamed for being dim, constellations well or badly arranged. We never think of that. Because somehow they lie beyond those standards. And, in the same way, there is a level of reality at which human conduct surpasses the standards of good and evil; in which conduct is as it is seen in the vision of mystics. As the light and shadow, say, in a painting, for both the light and the shadow contribute to the artistic significance of the whole.

But then, you see, the person who is concerned with practical matters immediately jumps in and says, “But you can’t say that sort of thing, because it’s destructive of standards. It goes against all practical reason.” The difficulty is then twofold. On the one hand, it’s to reconcile what seems conflict and disaster at one level with what can be seen to be harmony at another. And on the other hand, to understand how, at the lower level, where one is conscious of conflict, that at that level a recognition of the harmony in which the conflict participates at a higher level can of itself be something which heals the conflict.

Now, let’s take the first of these two problems, the reconciliation of harmony at one level with conflict at another. This is something that is common knowledge to anybody who studies biology. We know very well that the healthy human organism is a raging conflict. There is a “law of the jungle” kind of existence going on within our veins and within our cells the whole time. Particles, corpuscles, cells are being born and being annihilated constantly. And if we can take down our level of magnification to concentrate on a very minute particle—say, upon a single cell—we can find that one cell, if we look into it closely enough, as complicated as a whole universe, or, if you will, as complicated as the whole of man’s civilization upon Earth. Complexity is, after all, one of our measures of intelligence and value. Where we find an exceedingly complicated pattern or structure, we say: there is something intelligent. There are no limits to the complexity which we can see in a single cell of the human body.

Very well, then. We could fasten our attention upon this one cell so that it becomes enormously important—its life and death, its fate, something of extreme moment. And we could see this thing being destroyed, being (shall we say) diseased, and because our concentration is upon that cell and that cell only, we should feel that the ultimate disaster had occurred. But then, when we look at the same situation in a larger perspective, we see that it is just precisely this birth and death of cells, this success and failure of cells, which constitutes the health of a larger organism.

And so, in the same way, it’s perfectly reasonable to argue that the success and failure of the organism as a whole, of the individual man, his sickness and his health, is something analogous to the fate of the cell in the context of the human body. The individual has perhaps the same sort of relationship to the life of the race as a whole. Of course, you can say that the race is an abstraction, it’s nothing but individual men. But then you also have to say that the human body, this man and that man, is an abstraction. It’s nothing but this and that individual cells. And these individual cells are, in turn, abstractions: they’re nothing but their component molecules, and so on and so on. That would seem to me to be a very unreasonable line of thought.

And so, if that would be unreasonable, it would also be unreasonable to deny that individual human beings compose larger wholes than themselves, and that the health of wholes larger than themselves in some way is connected with conflict among the parts in just the same way as it happens in our own bloodstreams. And that we could even go so far as to say that the human race as a whole is simply a subordinate unit in some much larger organism altogether. In other words, it’s becoming more and more apparent, I think, to physicists and ecologists and scientists of various kinds, that the universe in which we live is not just some sort of dead chemical construction working on mechanistic principles, but that it is a living environment. And we’re beginning (very, very dimly) to see ourselves as members of an organism, a cosmic organism, much greater than our own lives. And therefore, looking at the thing simply from the standpoint of this sort of logic, we could say that our fate, our success, our failure—not simply as individuals, but as a race—is in terms of a very, very large context, simply comparable to the fate of the individual cells that compose our own bodies.

Now, that is reasonable enough, but of course it isn’t very comforting, it isn’t very consoling to people involved in the conflict, and especially to people threatened with catastrophe. It is no great consolation to the human race at this moment to say, “Well, cheer up everybody! You’re blowing yourselves up. It’s contributing to the health of a much larger organism than yourselves.” And so we come to the second part of the problem: as to how the recognition of the existence of a harmony at a higher level can resolve conflict at a lower level. In other words, if human beings were thoroughly to understand that their quarrels were in some way meaningful and creative, and not merely destructive and nihilistic in some larger context, would it make any difference?

Well, I think it would. And for this reason: that, as a matter of fact, our conflicts exist to a very great degree because we feel ourselves not to be members of anything greater than ourselves. We feel ourselves, say, to be members of this nation or of that nation, we feel ourselves to belong to this creed or that creed, this ideology or that ideology. But we have absolutely—or people in general—have no consciousness of belonging to anything larger which transcends and synthesizes these various differences. Hence the intensity of the quarrels.

Now, this sense of meaninglessness, of not belonging, is (as almost everybody recognizes) one of the great diseases of our time. We are so identified with small areas of life; so identified with a self defined as living within the bounds of a skin; so identified, say, with a particular family, with a particular community, township, county, or nation. And then, when we see the fate, the destiny, of this individual unit with which we are identified threatened, the bottom seems to drop out of life. And therefore we react to this threat with extreme anxiety, and this does not make for any kind of wisdom. Anxiety—the fear of one’s own death, the fear of the bottom dropping out of one’s universe—has a kind of vertiginous attraction. The prospect is so terrifying that we can’t face it with any uncertainty as to the issue.

What I mean by that is this: that if we see that there is a very real prospect of our whole world being destroyed, this has the same sort of effect on us as looking down over a steep precipice and feeling the effect of its vacuum sucking us into it. And we are very likely to jump over the edge and end it all simply to get rid of the unpleasant sensation of doubt and anxiety. Many people, for example, in Europe—when I visited Europe in 1958 and 59, and talked with many people about the situation of international tension at the present time—many, many people seemed to be afraid that, in the so-called Cold War, the United States will be the one that first breaks down. People in the United States, they seem to feel they will not be able to stand the uncertainty and the tension, and will start the war on some pretext simply because they cannot bear the uncertainty. “Let’s get it over with,” in other words. “We would rather commit suicide than live in a state of doubt.”

Now, a person, you see, who lives in a state of doubt and lives in a state where he cannot stand this uncertainty, when he has a limited sense of his own identity, and a limited sense of the constellation which gives him reality—by “constellation” I mean whether it be his own individual organism, whether it be his family, whether it be his community, his nation, so on and so forth—whenever he sees the limits of his identity threatened very seriously, he will either fight aggressively to defend it or else feel this vertiginous attraction of suicide. In other words, when he feels that the defense of himself can’t be successful—and we all know that under the conditions of atomic war as we know today, there is no successful defense, so our identity seems to be completely in jeopardy—then suicide is the good alternative to this state of anxiety.

The only cure, then, for this kind of disease is a larger sense of identity. And here we can see, then, why there are very good reasons for understanding that discord at one level is contributive to harmony at a higher level—can, in turn, react back to the lower level and bring the harmony of the higher level down to the lower level. Now, you might say that’s a contradiction because, after all, if the discord at the lower level is contributive to the harmony at the higher level, then let it go, let it be discord. Nothing should be done about it; it shouldn’t be improved.

But, as a matter of fact, this is not necessarily the case, because it isn’t simply discord at lower levels—say, in the levels of the individual cells of the human organism—which promotes harmony at the higher levels. It’s also concord. In other words, there are organic formations at the lower level which perish and contribute to harmony at the higher level of the organism as a whole. But there are, on the other hand, organic formations which do not perish, which flourish, and are also contributive to harmony at the higher level. And therefore, it isn’t a question that there is some sort of necessity about the human race demolishing itself in order to contribute to the welfare of the cosmos. There’s no necessity about that at all. The point is that if we can see that whether the race of man, the natural experiment of man, succeeds or whether it fails doesn’t make any difference at the higher level.

Now, if we can see that, and if we can feel that our existence—whether we succeed or whether we fail—has meaning at a higher level, we become identified with something beyond our individual selves, our families, our community, our nations, and our race. And if we can possibly feel that sort of identity, we then do not feel threatened, fundamentally, at the prospect of the annihilation of our race. And because we do not feel threatened, we don’t say to ourselves, “Oh, for God’s sake, let’s get it over with!” With that greater sense of identity we have more strength to stand the tension of uncertainty.

Now, in all human situations, psychological strength is entirely a matter (it seems to me) of being able to support a tension to withstand an uncertainty. Not to have to rush into action in order to achieve a decision just to be able to stop oneself from being anxious. To be able to contain anxiety, to allow oneself to be anxious, and not to have to force a quick and easy solution, is the essence of strength. And this involves, then, the ability to be able to think on several levels at the same time, and to feel on several levels at the same time.

In other words, the logical contradiction between something being at the same time good and bad, or harmonious in discord, is only a contradiction if we think of the harmony and the discord, the good and the bad, as being on the same level. I’m talking of level in the sense of levels of magnification, as a human being at one level is a whole organism, at another level is a multiplicity of cells or molecules, or whatever. But to be able to see these things on their different levels, and to be able to see one’s own personal anxiety and conflict as part and parcel of a harmony at a higher level, that, to me, is the very essence of sanity. And in that lies the strength which would make it possible for us to look into the precipice without feeling the terrible, dizzy, sucking attraction to throw ourselves over the edge—or that you would use a kind of irony, such as I once tried my hand at, to draw your halting pupil on:

“Oh, what a dear old optimist you are, Socrates! I only wish the picture were as pretty as you paint it. But fond wishes are one thing, and cruel facts another. Lord knows we moderns have a lot to feel ashamed of. But at least we’ve dared to take the roasted spectacles off our noses and look at the universe in the face without flinching in the harsh light of reality. You may think the sight is a heart-warming one. I don’t. Planets and stars and galaxies aren’t in fact alive, much less human or divine. However interesting their potentiality, it is worlds apart from their actuality.”

“What exactly is potentiality anyhow? Does the world in that context mean anything definite at all?”

“I think the trouble, Socrates, is that we’re conversing with you across a vast gulf of time. It’s not easy, but I’d like to put over to you, if I could, some hint of the human situation as most men of education see it in the twentieth century. By some accident this universe and galaxy and star, this nest of cosmic dice boxes, has shaken out its pattern of particles called man. In the immense wastes of spacetime, something of the sort is bound to happen somewhere sooner or later. But it will all come back to the same thing in the end. The particles will jostle themselves back into normal futility soon enough. You’ve noticed how the bright rim of a cloud in the sky or a coal in the grate will now and then take on the shape of a man’s face, with every feature clearly outlined. Well, man is like that. He has about as much reason for putting on air as in the universe as a fleck of foam for lording it over the seven seas. He is far from being, as you seem to think, at home among the stars, at least if you want my opinion. The home sweet home you have to fight for your life in isn’t a home or even a prison, but a cockpit. Man is a stranger in a hostile world—or, more accurately, in a world that happens to be against him. It’s far too fat-headed to be against him intentionally.”

“But my dear fellow, the professor here has scarcely finished pulling me up for talking like that about man as a rank outsider, a stranger wandering in an alien country. Nonsense, I was told. He is every bit as much as the world’s natural offshoot as a leaf is the trees. Are you now saying I was right after all? Which of you am I to believe? What is the modern view? For myself, in my day, I never found myself fighting the sunlight that warmed me, or the air I breathed, or the water I drank, or the animals and plants I ate, or even the men who clothed and housed me. Quite the contrary. The whole world might have been designed for my soul, edification, and delight. How horribly it must have changed since then.”

“I’m not denying there have been some fortunate accidents with which man has won.”

“And what an accident! By heavens! It was a fortunate throw of the dice. Such a masterpiece of charm and intelligence as yourself, and the variegated life stories of all five of us here, and dear Athens, and the immense ferment of human history from Homer down to the Z-bomb, and the sustained improbability of all life, and the worlds that serve life, and everything in due sequence. What a run of luck! It’s just as if all things that ever lived spent all their time tossing coins, getting nothing but heads.”

“I would certainly vanish if anyone threw a tail. Perhaps the Z-bomb was just that.”

“Don’t you think we’ve turned out rather well, Archdeacon, all things considered? Aren’t you pleased with us? We may be excused a few shortcomings, and even the odd Z-bomb, it seems. Why, the continued existence of a paltry grain of sand for a split second amounts to the achievement of the almost impossible.”