A child standing on the shore of the Mediterranean and a child standing on the shore of the Pacific should share the same bright hope for their future and for the future of mankind. Humanity has conquered mountains and mastered sea and air, but it has yet to grasp, and spread universally, the hope of a harmonious future.
I recently lived through a conflict between two states in South Asia (Pakistan and India), being a resident of one, and then again saw this volatility unfold in my neighbourhood, i.e., Iran and Israel. There is nothing worse than finding yourself in the ravages of war. Being in war makes you question not only your future but also mankind’s.
There are events in history compared to which the conflict I experienced amounts to not much. I came across an article titled “Hiroshima,” which was published in The New Yorker in 1946 and written by John Hersey.1 It covers details of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It reveals unimaginable human suffering in a way that few others have captured in writing. It’s a powerful piece of writing, and it appears to be one of the most seminal pieces ever published in The New Yorker. According to Wikipedia,2 it was later published as a book, which never went out of print and sold millions of copies. After reading it, you walk away with sober reflection on how much horror and suffering human minds are capable of inflicting on each other.
According to this New Yorker piece, as a result of the bombings, around one hundred thousand people lost their lives: “They reported that 78,150 people had been killed, 13,983 were missing, and 37,425 had been injured. No one in the city government pretended that these figures were accurate—though the Americans accepted them as official—and as the months went by and more and more hundreds of corpses were dug up from the ruins, and as the number of unclaimed urns of ashes at the Zempoji Temple in Koi rose into the thousands, the statisticians began to say that at least a hundred thousand people had lost their lives in the bombing.”
The helplessness and suffering that people had to endure in bombings of this scale is, I think, among the starkest examples modern history offers. The few who survived were so helpless they couldn’t help those who needed help, because the latter far outnumbered the former. Consider this excerpt from the piece:
“Under many houses, people screamed for help, but no one helped; in general, survivors that day assisted only their relatives or immediate neighbors, for they could not comprehend or tolerate a wider circle of misery. The wounded limped past the screams, and Mr. Tanimoto ran past them. As a Christian he was filled with compassion for those who were trapped, and as a Japanese he was overwhelmed by the shame of being unhurt, and he prayed as he ran, ‘God help them and take them out of the fire.’”
The details of the suffering were horrifying. I’ll never forget this part of the piece: “Mr. Tanimoto found about twenty men and women on the sandspit. He drove the boat onto the bank and urged them to get aboard. They did not move and he realized that they were too weak to lift themselves. He reached down and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge, glove-like pieces. He was so sickened by this that he had to sit down for a moment.”
After reading this piece, and realising thatWorld War II claimed an estimated 70-85 million lives,3 and then surveying the wars of the past few years, one cannot help but ask: Have we learned from history? What is the future of mankind?
Today, many nation-states have a lot of power and it looks like these states want to dominate one another, and indiscriminate violence against innocent and guilty alike is a price they do not hesitate to pay.
As I grow older, I find myself more worried about all this. I am not glued to the news, I try to limit how much I consume, but I do read headlines and sometimes a weekly magazine. And while I am by no means an expert on these matters, living through a war with your loved ones is the kind of experience that forces you to think.
Why do I get more worried now than when I was younger? Maybe because now I have a family and children whose future I worry more about than mine, and I want them to live in peace. I do not want to live to see fear of life in their eyes because there is no situation in life in which you feel more helpless. Or maybe the worry is an outcome of wishful thinking on my part, that mankind can make more progress in peace than in chaos.
Chaos has also created conditions for progress, as the cycle of peace after World War II suggests. Such progress, however, has also led to more chaos, as technological advances have produced even more terrifying weapons of destruction. Humanity’s wisdom should not rest on creating such weapons; it should be used to prevent destruction I believe. Is that wishful thinking? I hope not. Just as imagining a world of total violence paints too dark a picture, imagining total peace may also be too naïve. Still, too many wars in a single decade is not something one can take comfort in.
What, then, is the future of mankind?
I just finished reading a book titled Unpopular Essays by Bertrand Russell4 (mathematician, philosopher, and a Nobel Prize winner in literature), which appeared in 1950. In the book, an essay titled “The Future of Mankind” made me think. Almost seventy years ago he was thinking about the future of mankind. I feel that, had he been alive today, he would still be asking the same questions.
To say that the human race has not made any progress in the last seventy years would be unfair, but have we, at the same rate, acquired the wisdom to make peace, to eradicate hunger, and to eliminate poverty? My life, liberty, and property are more secure than they would have been thousands of years ago, but I just wish we had less misery and more harmony.
Russell starts the essay by observing that:
“Before the end of the present century, unless something quite unforeseeable occurs, one of three possibilities will have been realised. These three are:
The end of human life, perhaps of all life on our planet.
A reversion to barbarism after a catastrophic diminution of the population of the globe.
A unification of the world under a single government, possessing a monopoly of all the major weapons of war.”
One can take some comfort in knowing that even a world-class mathematician and Nobel Prize winner can still be slightly off about certain things. Thankfully, we did not witness the end of humanity in the last century, nor did we see a catastrophic collapse of the global population, and the world order continues to shift. Yet this does not take away from the fact that much of his reasoning in the essay is thought-provoking and written in lively prose. And he was not entirely wrong, for peace and harmony still elude us.
On the first possibility, he observes that vastly improved technology may one day disintegrate life, and “the last survivor may proclaim himself universal Emperor, his reign will be brief and his subjects will all be corpses.”
Today the destructive power we hold in our hands is far greater than in the past. Its sheer scale makes us more vulnerable to catastrophe. Wars fought with nuclear weapons carry huge risk of extinction. How can such wars be deterred? Roger Fisher, a professor at Harvard Law School, once proposed a striking idea to prevent nuclear war: he suggested implanting the nuclear codes in a volunteer.5
“My suggestion was quite simple: Put that needed code number in a little capsule, and then implant that capsule right next to the heart of a volunteer. The volunteer would carry with him a big, heavy butcher knife as he accompanied the President. If ever the President wanted to fire nuclear weapons, the only way he could do so would be for him first, with his own hands, to kill one human being. The President says, ‘George, I’m sorry but tens of millions must die.’ He has to look at someone and realize what death is—what an innocent death is. Blood on the White House carpet. It’s reality brought home. When I suggested this to friends in the Pentagon they said, ‘My God, that’s terrible. Having to kill someone would distort the President’s judgment. He might never push the button.’”
What if Fisher’s protocol were taken further, not just one volunteer, but two or three, perhaps even someone close to the President himself? The point is not practicality or cruelty, but to make a decision carrying existential risk inseparable from its consequence, seen at the smallest, most immediate scale, right before your eyes.
The second possibility presents some optimism to Bertrand Russell, as he thinks “it would leave open the likelihood of a gradual return to civilisation, as after the fall of Rome.”
The third possibility he suggested could be realised in various ways, as he notes: by victory of the USA, or by victory of the (then) USSR, or by agreement, or by an alliance of governments that desire an international government. He notes that, “Any pretended universal authority to which both sides can agree, as things stand, is bound to be a sham, like UNO.” What worries me is that what looked like a sham seventy years ago is still, in many ways, a sham today. Institutions like the United Nations (UN) or the International Criminal Court (ICC) do exist, and they represent progress. But their failures and these recent wars are hard to ignore.
Russell’s third possibility, the unification of the world under a single authority, is difficult to imagine even today. And I am not necessarily endorsing it. But it raises some questions: What systems of accountability actually restrain the powerful today? When decisions that affect millions of innocent men and women are made by a few men, where can ordinary people turn for justice?
The author then explains why he preferred a victory for America. He believed that America respected values he cherished: freedom of thought, freedom of inquiry, freedom of discussion, and humane feeling. But one has to ask, does America, in its dealings with other states, always respect these values, or does it sometimes show contempt for them? It is true that world powers have helped other states progress. One feels it dodges freedom of thought, freedom of discussion, and humane feeling when decisions are made without diversity, intellectual rigor, empathy, or genuine debate, decisions that leave millions of people, young and old, trapped in ignorance, poverty, violence, and hunger. Should not there also be more transparency about debate and how much knowledge of history and culture the experts have when they make decisions that can shake the world?
Mr. Russell suggests he observed those values more in the USA than in Russia, hence his reasons for supporting America over Russia. He then notes American dynamism over Russian:
“One can hardly imagine the American army seizing the dons at Oxford and Cambridge and sending them to hard labour in Alaska. Nor do I think that they would accuse Mr Atlee of plotting and compel him to fly to Moscow. Yet these are strict analogues to the things the Russians have done in Poland.”
He further notes:
“In America, if you are a geneticist, you may hold whatever view of Mendelism the evidence makes you regard as the most probable; in Russia, if you are a geneticist who disagrees with Lysenko, you are liable to disappear mysteriously. In America, you may write a book debunking Lincoln if you feel so disposed; in Russia, if you write a book debunking Lenin, it would not be published and you would be liqui-dated. If you are an American economist, you may hold, or not hold, that America is heading for a slump; in Russia, no economist dare question that an American slump is imminent. In America, if you are a Professor of Philosophy, you may be an idealist, a materialist, a pragmatist, a logical positivist, or whatever else may take your fancy; at congresses you can argue with men whose opinions differ from yours, and listeners can form a judgment as to who has the best of it.”
It is hard to deny the freedom that scholars once enjoyed in American academia, but given recent events, can we as outsiders not hear the footsteps of powerful forces echoing through its corridors? Yes, academia in the U.S. still offers near-utopian freedom of thought compared to many of its counterparts in Asia, yet one cannot help but grow skeptical about the degree of freedom it truly allows today. In academia today, the simple act of speaking your mind can feel as if it puts your life at risk.
Russell’s argument for American scholarly freedom, I think, still has some merit, but there are a few more aspects of academia worth discussing in light of mankind’s future.
It seems that some, certainly not all, notable Western theorizing rests on distance. The thesis that the world is statistically safer may be true in aggregate, yet it ignores the lived experiences of those in war zones, refugee camps, or failed states. I have lived through conflict. I sometimes read analyses by outside experts that influence those in power, but some of them seem far removed from the reality on the ground. Without lived experience, deep roots, and knowledge of history, culture, and local ways of life, I find it hard to believe anyone could pose solutions with the intellectual rigor, empathy, and sincerity needed to honor both sides of suffering in a conflict. Also, scholarly studies should treat their subjects according to the principles of equality. When scholarly work is built on the assumption that the subjects of study are not equals, it naturally invites skepticism. If, as a scholar, you write about liberty and representative government but make it clear that such views cannot apply to your colonial subjects because they are civilizationally, if not racially, inferior, you fan the flame of the belief that Western scholarship often grows from the idea that the West must dominate while others must be dominated.6 I feel that close engagement with ordinary people, grounded in principles of equality and humility, could make one more hopeful about academia’s contribution to the future of mankind.
Another thing in academia and education policy that can help our souls, souls often caught in the extreme excitement stirred by algorithms engineered by the smartest minds of our generation for corporations driven by profit, is the promotion of humanism, literature, and debate. The absence of humanism and literature, especially in technical schools, is troubling (and I can say this with certainty about parts of South Asia). We need more literature and more humanism, especially in times when we are increasingly surrounded by technology, because it is literature and humanism that can bring a sympathetic touch to an argument. The discipline of humanistic study can temper the ecstasy and chaos unleashed by technology. After all, as Nietzsche once noted, is it not the arts and the aesthetic phenomenon that justify existence and the world?7
Further, the culture of tolerance and debate is something I believe schools should cultivate in students with more zeal. Today, academia should be worried, because even within the walls of schools, freely sharing your opinion carries life risks. The ability to debate with humility escapes many, even long after they have graduated. To digest and absorb a point of view completely opposite to your own, with respect and kindness, should be normal for anyone who has spent a few years in school. When educated men measure strength by the pitch of their voice and the harshness of their words, it shows that societies have allowed schools to raise them through an education system that has weakened, not strengthened, them. If academia could prepare mankind for better reasoning, meaningful debate, and greater tolerance, it would be a service for the future of mankind.
My other concern is whether powerful nations and leaders are truly fighting hunger, poverty, and disease with all the force and vigor they could gather. Yes, some health indicators over time show progress, but they could have been far better. You have to witness not only widespread poverty and sickness but also the helplessness of the poor and the sick to believe it. I have. You have to see the growing power and opulence of the rich alongside the decline of the poor in some places to grasp the full picture. I have. And then you realize that while statistical optimism may paint a rosy image, it can hide suffering behind it.
Russell in the same essay notes, “We all need to recognise the need to restrain murderers, and it is even more important to restrain murderous states. Liberty must be limited by law, and its most valuable forms can only exist within a framework of law. What the world most needs is effective laws to control international relations.”
If that need is met, the world will be a far better place, not just for us, but for our children and for generations to come. No conflict has ever been truly insurmountable for mankind, and I choose to remain hopeful that we will find ways to build a more harmonious future.
After all, as Emily Dickinson reminds us in her poem “Hope is the thing with feathers,” hope is the song that never stops, even when it has no words.
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
So what is the solution for a better future of mankind? I do not pretend to have one. I only wish we had more peace. But is peace possible without leaders accountable not just to their own people, but to humanity? Is it possible without treating war crimes as crimes rather than politics? Is it possible without better education, deeper historical awareness, and technology placed not only in the hands of the powerful but also the vulnerable? The journey toward peace is long and difficult, but not impossible.
What more can we do?
At the state level, powerful leaders must act with seriousness and sincerity. They should place the interests of ordinary men and women above their own egos. When a leader’s ego is bruised by benign questions from journalists, and he insists such questions may harm the nation the journalists represent,8 one begins to doubt his earnestness. Leaders of powerful states should bring order, not chaos. I know this may be wishful thinking, but the alternatives look frightening
At the state level, treaties can also help. Treaties like the Montreal Protocol,9 which were universally ratified, could provide some direction.
At the individual level, you have to remember that your voice is powerful. Vox Populi, Vox Dei (the voice of the people is the voice of God). Your voice can shape public opinion. Strong public opinion can fuel social movements, and social movements led with good conscience can make this world a better place. Forceful, reasoned public opinion and the movements it inspires can build a collective conscience capable of pressuring those at the top. If there is one thing the powerful are sensitive to, it is the collective voice, because once it reaches critical mass, it can rattle the citadels of power.
We have to be mindful that if seventy years ago the atomic bomb was the only threat, today we face additional ones: climate change and artificial intelligence (AI). AI comes with enormous promise, but even the “Godfather of AI” has warned that there is some chance it could wipe out humanity in the next three decades.10
As much as I wish we had no more conflicts, they will never disappear from the face of the earth. Endless pride, boundless ambition, feelings of revenge, and extreme nationalism will keep lighting the fuse. What we can do is strive for cultures where dignity is not tied to senseless domination, and where empathy means not just sympathy for those suffering on our side, but for those on the other side too. John Hersey’s piece in The New Yorker was not just a good work of art, it documented suffering with an almost unreal objectivity in some places and started a whole new discussion. We need to document suffering better, not only in data but in stories. Because statistics can comfort, but stories make injustice unforgettable. That is why your voice matters more than you think.
Endnotes:
Hersey, John. “Hiroshima.” The New Yorker, August 31, 1946. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima.
Hiroshima (book). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_(book).
World War II casualties. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties.
Russell, Bertrand. Unpopular Essays. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1950.
“Roger Fisher (academic) – Preventing Nuclear War.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Fisher_(academic)#Preventing_nuclear_war.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. 1872.
“Trump Clashes with Australian Journalist over Business Deals in Office.” BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9qn0zzqxvxo.
“Montreal Protocol.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol.
Hern, Alex. “Godfather of AI Raises Odds of the Technology Wiping Out Humanity over Next 30 Years.” The Guardian, December 27, 2024. http://theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/27/godfather-of-ai-raises-odds-of-the-technology-wiping-out-humanity-over-next-30-years.