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The concept of nuclear
deterrent is flawed Gen. Lee Butler retired in 1994 after 33 years in the U.S. Air Force. A former B-52 pilot, Butler was director of the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff, commander-in-chief of the Strategic Air Command, and commander-in-chief of its successor, Strategic Command. This article is based on his February 2 speech to the National Press Club. For many people, nuclear weapons retain an aura of utility, of primacy, and of legitimacy that justifies their existence well into the future in some number, however small. This faith in nuclear weapons was inspired and sustained by a catechism instilled over many decades by a priesthood who spoke with assurance and authority. I was for many years among the most avid of these keepers of the faith, and for that I make no apology. Like my contemporaries, I was moved by fears inspired by beliefs that date back to the earliest days of the atomic era. For us, nuclear weapons were the saviour that brought an implacable foe to his knees in 1945 and held another at bay for nearly half a century. We believed that superior technology brought strategic advantage, that greater numbers meant stronger security, and that the ends of containment justified whatever means were necessary to achieve them. These are powerful, deeply rooted beliefs. They cannot and should not be lightly dismissed. Strong arguments can be made on their behalf. Throughout my professional military career I shared them, I professed them, and I put them into operational practice. Nevertheless, these beliefs served us extremely ill. They accounted for the most severe risks and most extravagant costs of the U.S. — Soviet confrontation. They intensified and prolonged an already acute ideological animosity. They spawned successive generations of new and more destructive devices and delivery systems. They gave rise to mammoth bureaucracies with gargantuan appetites and global agendas. They incited primal emotions, stirred zealotry and demagoguery, and set in motion forces of ungovernable scope and power. Most important, these enduring beliefs — and the fears that underlie them — perpetuate Cold War policies and practices that make no strategic sense today. They continue to entail enormous costs and expose all mankind to unconscionable dangers. I find that intolerable. And thus I cannot remain silent. I know too much of these matters — the frailties, the flaws, the failures of policy and practice. At the same time, I cannot overstate the difficulty this poses for me personally. No one who ever entered the nuclear arena left it with a fuller understanding of its complexity, nor with greater respect for those who served the nation. I struggle constantly with the task of articulating the evolution of my convictions without denigrating or diminishing the motives and sacrifices of colleagues with whom I lived the drama of the Cold War. My purpose is not to accuse but to assess — to understand and to propound the forces that birthed the grotesque excesses and hazards of the nuclear age. For me, that assessment meant first coming to grips with my experience and then coming to terms with my conclusions. Messianic beliefs The opposing forces created vast enterprises that gave rise to a culture of messianic believers infused with a sense of historic mission and schooled in unshakable articles of faith. As my career progressed, I was immersed in the work of all of these cultures, either directly in those of the Western world or through the study of communist organizations, teachings, and practices. My responsibilities ranged from the highly subjective, such as assessing the values and motivations of Soviet leadership, to the critically objective, such as preparing weapons for operational launch. I became steeped in the art of intelligence estimates, the psychology of negotiations, the interplay of bureaucracies and the impulses of industry. I was engaged in the labyrinthine conjecture of the strategist, the exacting routines of the target planner, and the demanding skills of the air crew and the missileer. I was a party to their history, shared their triumphs and tragedies, witnessed heroic sacrifice and catastrophic failure of both men and machines. And in the end, I came away from it all with profound misgivings. Ultimately, as I examined the course of this journey, I came to these unsettling judgments: • From the earliest days of the nuclear era, the risks and consequences of nuclear war have never been properly weighed by those who brandish them. • The stakes of nuclear war engage not just the survival of the antagonists but the fate of mankind. • The likely consequences of nuclear war have no political, military, or moral justification and • The threat to use nuclear weapons is indefensible. Deceptive deterrence Their unbounded effects, if used, are a perfect companion to the urge to destroy completely. They play on our deepest fears and pander to our darkest instincts. They corrode our sense of humanity, numb our capacity for moral outrage, and make thinkable the unimaginable. These fears and enmities are no respecter of political systems or values. They prey on democracies and totalitarian societies alike, shrinking the norms of civilized behaviour and dimming the prospects for escaping the savagery so powerfully imprinted on our genetic code. That should give us pause as we imagine the task of abolition in a world that gives daily witness to acts of unspeakable barbarism. So should it compound our resolve. For much of my life, I saw the Nuclear Age differently. From the early years of my childhood and through much of my military service, I saw the Soviet Union and its allies as a demonic threat, an evil empire bent on global domination. This was a desperate time that evoked on both sides extreme responses in policy, in technology, and in force postures; bloody purges and political inquisitions; covert intelligence schemes that squandered lives and subverted governments; atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons with little understanding or regard for the long-term effects; threats of massive nuclear retaliation to an ill-defined scope of potential provocations; the forced march of inventive genius that ushered in the missile age, arm in arm with the capacity for spontaneous global destruction; reconnaissance aircraft that probed or violated sovereign air space; the menacing practice of airborne-alert bombers loaded with nuclear weapons. By the early 1960s, a superpower nuclear arms race was under way that would lead to a ceaseless amassing of destructive capability. Central Europe became a powder keg, trembling under the shadow of Armageddon, hostage to a bizarre strategy that required the prospect of nuclear devastation as the price of alliance. The entire world became a stage for U.S. — Soviet rivalry. International organizations were paralyzed by its grip. East-West confrontation on dominated the nation-state system. Every quarrel and conflict was fraught with potential for global war. Like millions of others, I was caught up in the holy war, inured to its costs and consequences, trusting in the wisdom of succeeding generations of military and civilian leaders. The first requirement of unconditional belief in the efficacy of nuclear weapons was early and perfectly met for us. Our homeland was the target of a consuming evil poised to strike without warning and without mercy. What remained for me as my career took its particular course, was to master the intellectual underpinning of America’s response — the strategic foundation that still stands as the central precept of the nuclear catechism. Reassessing its pervasive impact on attitudes toward nuclear weapons goes directly to my second conclusion regarding the willingness to tolerate still the risks of the nuclear age. For all of my years as a nuclear strategist, operational commander, and public spokesman, I justified America’s massive nuclear arsenal as a consequence of deterrence. Bound up in this singular term — this familiar touchstone of security dating back to antiquity — was the deceptively simple justification for taking the most extreme risks and for spending trillions of dollars. Deterrence was our shield and , by extension, our sword. The nuclear priesthood extolled its virtues and bowed to its demands. Allies yielded to its dictates, even while decrying its risks and costs. We brandished it at our enemies and presumed they embraced its suicidal corollary of mutual assured destruction. We ignored, discounted, or dismissed its flaws and even today we cling to the belief that it remains relevant in a world whose security architecture has been transformed. A dialogue of the blind
with the deaf While we clung to the notion that nuclear war could be reliably deterred, Soviet leaders became convinced that such a war might be thrust upon them and, if so, it must not be lost. Driven by fear, they took Herculean measures to fight and survive no matter the odds or the cost. Deterrence was a dialogue of the blind with the deaf. It was largely a bargain we in the West made with ourselves. Deterrence was also flawed in that the consequences of its failure were intolerable. While the price of undeterred aggression in the age of uniquely conventional weaponry could be severe, history teaches that nations can survive and even prosper in the aftermath of unconditional defeat. Not so in the nuclear age. Nuclear weapons give no quarter. Their effects transcend time and space, poisoning the earth and deforming its inhabitants for generations. They leave us without defences, expunge all hope for meaningful survival. They hold in their sway not just the fate of nations but the very meaning of civilization. Deterrence failed completely as a guide for setting rational limits on the size and composition of military forces. The appetite of deterrence theory was voracious, its capacity to justify new weapons and large stocks unrestrained. Nuclear deterrence hinges on the ability to mount a devastating retaliation under the most extreme conditions of war initiation. Perversely, the redundant and survivable forces required to meet this exacting test were readily perceived by a darkly suspicious adversary as capable of executing a disarming first strike. Such advantage can never be conceded between nuclear rivals. It must be answered, reduced, nullified. Fears were fanned. The rivalry intensified. New technology was inspired. New systems rolled from production lines. The bar of deterrence was ratcheted higher, igniting new cycles of trepidation, worst-case assumptions, and ever-mounting levels of destructive capability. The treacherous axioms of deterrence made nuclear weapons stockpiles, numbering in the tens of thousands seem reasonable. A succession of leaders on both sides of the East-West divide directed a reckless proliferation of nuclear devices tailored for delivery by a vast array of vehicles to a stupefying array of targets. They nurtured, richly rewarded, even reveled in the industrial base required to support production at such levels. I was part of that. I was present at the creation of many of these systems, directly responsible for prescribing and justifying the requirements in technology that made them possible. I saw the arms race from the inside, watched as intercontinental ballistic missiles ushered in mutual assured destruction and multiple-warhead missiles introduced genuine fear of nuclear first strike. I was responsible for nuclear war plans with more than 12,000 targets, many of which would have been struck with repeated nuclear blows. Deterrence is a slippery conceptual slope. It is neither stable nor static. Its wiles cannot be contained. It is both master and slave. It seduces the scientist yet bends to his creation. It serves the ends of evil as well as those of noble intent. It holds guilty the innocent as well as the culpable. It gives easy semantic cover to nuclear weapons, masking the horrors of employment with veils of infallibility. At best, it is a gamble no mortal should pretend to make. At worst, it invokes death on a scale rivalling the power of the creator. We cannot remain silent I see with painful clarity that from the very beginnings of the nuclear era, the objective scrutiny and searching debate essential to adequate comprehension and responsible oversight of its vast enterprises were foreshortened or foregone. The cold light of dispassionate scrutiny was shuttered in the name of security, doubts dismissed in the name of an acute and unrelenting threat, objections overruled by the incantations of the nuclear priesthood. Vitally important decisions were routinely taken without adequate understanding. Assertions too often prevailed over analysis. "Requirements" took on organizational biases. Technological opportunity and corporate profit drove levels and capabilities. And political opportunism intruded on calculations of military necessity. Authority and accountability were severed, policy dissociated from planning, and theory invalidated by practice. Over time, planning was increasingly distanced and ultimately disconnected from any sense of scientific or military reality. In the end, the nuclear powers, great or small, created astronomically expensive infrastructures, monolithic bureaucracies, and complex processes that defied control or comprehension. Only now are the dimensions, the costs, and the risks of these nuclear nether worlds coming to light. What must now be better understood are the root causes and the belief systems that brought them into existence. They must be challenged, refuted. But most important, they must be let go. The era that gave them credence, accepted their dominion, and yielded to their excesses is fast receding. But it is not yet over. The Cold War lives on in the minds of those who cannot let go the fears, the beliefs, and the enmities born of the nuclear age. They cling to deterrence and shake it wistfully at bygone adversaries and balefully at new or imagined ones. What better illustration of misplaced faith in nuclear deterrence is there than the persistent belief that retaliation with nuclear weapons is a legitimate and appropriate response to post-Cold War threats posed by weapons of mass destruction? What could possibly justify our resort to the very means we properly abhor and condemn? Who can imagine our joining in shattering the precedent of non-use that has held for more than 50 years? How could America’s irreplaceable role as leader of the campaign against nuclear proliferation ever be rejustified? What target would warrant such retaliation? Would we hold an entire society accountable for the decision of a single demented leader? How would the physical effects of the nuclear explosion be contained, not to mention the political and moral consequences? In a singular act, we would martyr our enemies, alienate our friends, give comfort to the non-declared nuclear states and impetus to states who seek such weapons covertly. We cannot at once keep sacred the miracle of existence and hold sacrosanct the capacity to destroy it. We cannot hold hostage to sovereign grid-lock the keys to final deliverance from the nuclear nightmare. We cannot withhold the resources essential to break its grip, to reduce its dangers. We cannot sit in silent acquiescence to the faded homilies of the nuclear priesthood. It is time to reassert the primacy of individual conscience, the voice of reason, and the rightful interests of humanity. Muslim philosophy: its impact on religion The philosophical movement in Islam and its achievements constitute one of the richest treasures of the Islamic intellectual culture whose influence on the Western thought was deep, palpable and enduring. It was a continuity of Mutazilies' (rationalist) experiences of thinking during the second, third and fourth centuries of the Islamic era. The first Muslim philosopher was al-Kindi (d. 873 A.D.) With the Muslim philosophers a wholly new era of Muslim civilization opens and one of the most brilliant chapters of human thought as well. Absolutely free activity of human reason extends its field at once to all corners of existence and life. It studies unfettered analyses and judges the data of all physical, biological and human sciences. The Muslim philosophers include in their philosophical works, treatises on movement of space, the soul, the plants and the animals, astronomy, mathematics, music and metaphysics. Very often a philosopher is also a great doctors and a scientist like al-Razi, Ibn-Sina (Latinized Avicenna) Ibn-Rush (Latinized Averroes). The physical sciences studied by the philosophers - unless they happened to be experimental scientists as well are not strictly speaking, "scientific" but rather philosophical. Nonetheless, their works in these fields are masterpieces of fine speculative and strictly logical reasoning and they accepted whatever conclusions seemed to follow from this rational activity. Our concern just now, however, is only with that part of their teachings which impinges directly on religion and therefore interacted at points violently with the orthodox creed with tragic results immediately for philosophy but in the long run for orthodoxy itself. Hence let us turn to the religious aspects of the philosopher's thought. The most fundamental fact about the religious thought of the philosophers Ð especially of Ibn-Sina whose doctrines have been historically the most important, is that on all the points where the frontiers of religion and rational thought met, the two neither reached utterly different results nor yet were they identical but seemed to run parallel to one another. This happened not just on one point but all along the line where the traditional theology and philosophy faced one another. From this fact of systematic parallelism the philosophers concluded that philosophy and religion were tackling exactly the same questions, dealing exactly with the same facts and in exactly the same way. The prophet was therefore primarily a philosopher, but since the Prophet's audience was not the intellectual elite but the masses who could not understand the philosophic truth, the Prophetic revelations naturally, catered for their needs and "talked down" to their level in terms intelligible to them. Religion had taught that the world was created by God by sheer command "Be" (KUN). Man's reason has for ages, being vexed by trying to understand how the world could be created out of nothing and how it could have been created - in time. Although Aristotle is the first philosopher to have actually declared the cosmos as such to be eternal i.e. uncreated, other philosophers too have usually assented to this view. Rationally speaking, however, an eternity of the world in the past is also quite inconceivable and full of absurdity. In medieval times therefore a process started in philosophy, which culminated in Emmanuel kant, declaring the problem of the eternity of the world to be rationally insoluble, al-Ghazali, Ibn. Rushed and Thomas Aquinas had made no small contributions in their own way towards this conclusion. Ibn-Sina had elaborated his own solution however, to this problem by a very intricate process of thought. He effected a fundamental change both in the Aristotelian concept of the movement of the universe and the Neoplationic concept of emanation and having arrived at this theory of existence, he declared that both the universe as a whole and everything therein derived its existence directly from god and that the world as a whole was, nevertheless eternal and not "created" by God at any moment of time, although it depends on God. He contended that the genuinely religious stake in this whole problem was not that the world should be "created' out of nothing and - in time, but that the world should be contingent (Kitab-al-Najat. pp 213-14). Ibn Sina thereby explicitly accused the orthodox the theologians of lack of discernment of the genuinely religious demands and of confusing the issue rationally. Whatever the philosophical mechanics of this theory of Ibn-Sina, its net result is that God is the "ground" of the universe and explains the latter; without Him the world would be 'groundless", unintelligible and irrational. This problem and its solution provided Ibn-Sina with the guiding and crucial experience for the philosophic thought on all the problems, of traditional religion and proved decisive for his philosophic attitude to this whole sensitive region which he took very seriously. He came to realize that religion was not at all wrong, as against atheism and "naturalism", in asserting the idea of a God as a Supreme Being. Further, it was also essentially right in asserting that this world depended on this god. And yet - Ibn-Sina was equally led to believe that religion was most certainly incorrect if it literally asserted, as it seems to do, the creatio exnihilo (Created out of nothing) of the world. Therefore the perilous belief, became finally implanted in his mind that religious and philosophical truths are identically the same; religion, since it is not limited to the few but is for all, necessarily accommodates itself to the level of mass intelligence and is therefore a kind of philosophy for the masses and does not tell the naked tough but talks in parables. Once the principle of parallelism between religion and philosophy was apparently accepted, it did not fail to be confirmed on many other points. Religion had taught that there would be a Day of Reckoning when bodies shall be resurrected. The philosophers, especially al-Farabi and Ibn-Sina, rejected the idea of physical resurrection on several grounds. Ibn-Sina who accepted physical resurrection in his ordinary philosophical works "on the basis of Shariah", wrote a special esoteric treatise al-Risalah Al-adhawiyah (so called because he wrote it in one morning) where he declared the whole idea of a physical resurrection "to be impossible". But the philosophers firmly believed in the survival of the soul and therefore in a spiritual hereafter with its psychic pleasures and pains. Here again Ibn-Sina was struck by the philosophy-religion parallelism: his philosophy has confirmed that there was an after-life; religion taught resurrection of the Flesh in the Hereafter; religion had to do this because it is aimed at the masses of the "dullards"; otherwise religion is no more than philosophy. It must of course, be borne in mind that parallelism that seems to emerge on all these fateful points between philosophy and religion is the result of the conscious approach of the philosophers towards religion. On the other hand, if the philosophers had been a little more bold and Islam-minded it might not have been altogether impossible to hold philosophically that the body is resurrectible in some sense and that without it the soul means nothing. Ibn-Sina sometimes almost comes close to asserting a quasi-physical resurrection for "undeveloped souls". But, it is not this particular theory or that of the philosophers that constituted the serious problem for Islam, even thought al-Ghazali apparently thought that the philosophical doctrine of the eternity of the world was the most serious problem for Islam raised by the rationalists and devoted quite a few chapters of his Tahafat al-Falasifah to this question. What was really most serious and something to which al-Ghazali devotes little space in his treatise referred to above, is what the phenomenon of religion - philosophy parallelism led the philosophers to believe with regard to the mutual relationship of religion and philosophy. In particular it would seem the most serious mistake made by al-Farabi and Ibn-Sina was to assimilate religious or moral truth to intellectual or "natural" truth. In their theory of knowledge, when the philosophers deal with religious cognition, their statements which are at points very profound and original, simply make no distinction whatsoever between higher religious-moral knowledge and other forms of intellectual cognition. For them a moral principle in its cognitive aspects is exactly like a mathematical proposition. They fail to realize that religo-moral experience although it has a cognitive element, radically differs from other forms of knowledge in the sense that it is full of authority, meaning imperviousness for the subject, whereas ordinary forms of knowledge is simply informative. A man who has a genuinely religious experience is automatically transformed by that experience. Because of the failure to recognise this difference and taking their stand firmly on the phenomenon of parallelism, the philosophers assimilated the Prophet to the philosopher, the prophetic experience to intellectual knowledge (plus of course, the capacity to influence people, which a philosopher does not possess). This line of thought further confirmed them in their thoroughly Hellenized (Greek) idea of God - as a principle which "explains" this world rather than a creator who directs this world; as an intellectual formula rather than as a moral and dynamic imperative. This was really and at bottom, the centre of conflict between Hellenizing philosophers and the representatives of the Islamic tradition. This conflict was felt and sensed by al-Ghazali and more especially by Ibn-Taymiyah in his Kitab al-Nubuwath where the philosopher's 'in active' principle is opposed to the acting, Commanding God of the Quran (p.168 II. 4-23) The truth however is that even the philosophers were not really aware of the centre of conflict between their thought and revealed religion. We have outlined just above their failure to develop a theory of knowledge that would do justice to religious facts and moral cognition. If only they had made the very assumption of the Sharia-law itself an object of serious study and thought, they might have come out with quite a different philosophy and the orthodoxy might have been the richer for it, instead of starving itself intellectually and ultimately spiritually by a one-sided unthinking attack on philosophy. Intellectuall liberalism is of the essence of a great and advancing culture. But for allowing latitude to the mind of man and trusting basically in its goodness, soundness and sanity, modern culture should perish not merely in its liberal aspects but also in its conservative side, should conservatism become unenlightened the entire culture must decay. This is what unfortunately happened in Islam. If an al-Farabi or an Ibn-Sina had outraged on certain points of dogmatic theology and perhaps exceeded in interpreting the Quaran, the orthodoxy in al-Ghazali and others afterwards, equally outraged humanity as such, by condemning all philosophy and its necessary instrument, the human reason. The orthodoxy after the attack upon philosophy by al-Ghazali, proscribed it completely and did not allow it to grow any further, or rather destroyed the very conditions for its growth. Just as the Ulema (theologians) had found the science of theology (Kalam) to counter Mutazilah rationalism, so now they expanded the contents of theology to reckon with the theses of the philosophers. At about the same time the orthodox also developed fully their system of education. Once they assumed firm control of education they established Theology into a kind of pseudo-substitute for the genuine intellectualism, which only philosophic thought could generate; philosophy was effectively outlawed from the Muslim world. The
New Man "My noble prince, this life is short. The vanities of the world are transient, but they alone live who live for others; the rest are more dead than alive." Swami Viveka-nanda once penned these lines to the then Maharajah of Mysore. The Rev. S. L. G. Knight, in his piece "Our Nation and Education," which appeared in the issue of ‘The Island’ of June 17, suggested that a ‘better’ Sri Lanka could be created if the country could create a ‘new’ person and a new mind-set. Now what is the yardstick by which it could be decided whether an ‘ordinary’ man has become a ‘new’ man? Without a doubt, it will be generally agreed on all sides that this country desperately needs a new leadership. That is axiomatic. I venture to think however, that this leadership must consist of ‘new’ men. And the essence of the ‘new’ man must be of the genre that Swami Vivekananda spoke of in his letter to the Maharajah of Mysore — living for others, without any expectation of reward in return, I would add. Rev. Knight suggests that poetry and prose and a study of literature would help to create this new person. I am not so sure. Quite a large number of those in public life and in the bureaucracy and the business world today are those who have studied literature and prose and poetry in school and in the universities, but the country is in a chaotic state. I don’t blame prose and poetry and literature for that. It simply means that these studies have had no impact on the individuals who followed such courses. They lacked sensitivity without which nothing will have an impact on anyone. I remember my university days in the mid-forties. There were several who specialised in literature — some of them even imagined themselves to be budding poets with long hair flowing down their shoulders or stretching up to the skies. Their snobbery was the limit. They imagined they were part of a Herrenvolk. But, to my mind, their mediocrity was blatantly evident in the fact that all they aspired to was admission into the then Ceylon Civil Service. That was their Nirvana. I could have forgiven them if their desire to enter the civil service was prompted by the fact that membership of that elite cadre would have afforded them an opportunity of serving their fellowmen. No. Their sole motive was to acquire status, position and prestige in an already moribund society. Of course, several of them had ambitions of acquiring fat dowries by marrying into families with ill-gotten wealth. My own personal experience will not permit me to support Rev. Knight’s thesis that a study of the liberal arts, which world include prose and poetry, will help to create a ‘new’ man. It is a transformative experience alone that will lead to the creation of a ‘new’ man. Swami Vivekananda, in his letter to the Maharajah of Mysore has indicated what would be the hallmark of a ‘new’ man. He himself was said to be a brilliant student who, in time, questioned the basic pre-mises of traditional Indian philosophy. So much so that he was referred to as the David Hume (the leading exponent of scepticism in England) of India. One day he met a completely illiterate Indian who seemed a beggar. The man was none other than Rama-krishna Paramahamsar. The brief encounter transformed Viveka-nanda instantly. He threw his scepticism overboard and a ‘new’ Vivekananda was born. And the philosophy of life of the ‘new’ Vivekananda was set out in the brief sentence with which I have commenced this short essay. It is this country’s tragedy that it has not produced a single Ramakrishna, a Vive-kananda, a Chaitanya, a Ramanamaharishi or a Sankaracharya. The reason probably is that all of us are a nation of status-seekers, mediocrities and servile yes-men. Conformity is the badge of our tribe. The dinosaurs who have been entrusted with educational planning are, to use Swami Vivekananda’s words, "more dead than alive". I personally know quite a few of them. The way they play up to and cringe before authority is sickening. All they want is to continue drawing their fat salaries and be allowed to flaunt their high-sounding designations. To create a ‘new man’, one has to begin by educating the educators. In this exercise sensitivity plays a big role. If a man is born insensitive, it is just too bad. Even the sensitivity of a sensitive man must be that deep as would permit an event, say, the sudden death of a loved one, a poem, an inspired bit of writing, to make an impact on him as would so transform him that he would instantly become a stranger to the ways of the world. With the transformative experience a new man is born. It is also true, however, that some, a very few, are born with a propensity, as Vivekananda put it, "to live for others". That is their good fortune. A study of literature or similar subjects would then heighten that inborn endowment. The "better Sri Lanka" which Rev. Knight hopes to see created will not come into being through the efforts of "talented thieves" and "gentlemen rascals" of whom Mahatma Gandhi once wrote in an article he contributed to "Young India" of February 21, 1929. This country has a surfeit of such men at all levels of national life, because they lack the one thing that, matters for the birth of a ‘new man’ — sensitivity. The result — mediocrity and vulgarity reign supreme. Is there no way out, then? I venture to think there is and that is to awaken people at least to an intellectual perception of "the vanities of the world," as Swami Vivekananda put it, in the hope that thereafter they will live sensibly. This is what a few of us are endeavouring to do, basically, in Avadhi Lanka. But I am afraid that, in Sri Lanka, this is a formidable and Herculean task. There is something radically wrong with our psyche. I find that even some of the members of our movement are so superficial and vacuous that it is hard to think they have read any literature at all, although the Reverend Knight thinks that prose and poetry will help to create a ‘new man’. Whoever has power and authority, they will cringe and crawl before such men. It is unbelievable how they will abandon their self-respect and show servility to someone who is powerful, if by doing so, they could be appointed to some committee or commission. They will neglect to perform the duties of the jobs they have chosen to do to earn a living, if by doing so they can get close to the sources of power and authority in the land. What future is there for the country when some of them even belong to the teaching profession? (The writer is a founder member of the Avadhi Lanka Movement) |
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