Page "religion" Paragraph 205

Mr. Philip Toynbee affirms at one point that if he shared the anticipations of Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, if he believed Communism was not only evil but `` also irredeemably evil '', then he might `` think it right to do anything rather than to take the risk of a communist world.

Even a nuclear holocaust is a little less frightful to contemplate than a race of dehumanised humans occupying the earth until doomsday ''.

No political order or economic system is so clearly contrary to nature.

But one does not have to affirm the existence of an evil order irredeemable in that sense, or a static order in which no changes will take place in time, to be able truthfully to affirm the following fact: there has never been justitia imprinted in social institutions and social relationships except in the context of some pax-ordo preserved by clothed or naked force.

On their way to the Heavenly City the children of God make use of the pax-ordo of the earthly city and acknowledge their share in responsibility for its preservation.

Not to repel injury and uphold and improve pax-ordo means not simply to accept the misshapen order and injustice that challenges it at the moment, but also to start down the steep slope along which justice can find no place whereon to stand.

Toynbee seems to think that there is some other way to give justice social embodiment.

`` I would far rather die after a Russian occupation of this country -- by some deliberate act of refusal -- than die uselessly by atomisation ''.

Would such an act of refusal be useful??

He does not mean, in fact he addresses himself specifically to reject the proposition, that `` if we took the risk of surrendering, a new generation in Britain would soon begin to amass its strength in secret in order to reverse the consequences of that surrender ''.

He wants to be `` brutally frank and say that these rebellions would be hopeless -- far, far more hopeless than was the Hungarian revolution of 1956 ''.

This is not a project for regaining the ground for limited war, by creating a monopoly in one power of the world's arsenal of unlimited weapons.

It is a proposal that justice now be served by means other than those that have ever preconditioned the search for it, or preconditioned more positive means for attaining it, in the past.

`` It is no good recommending surrender rather than nuclear warfare with the proviso that surrender could be followed by the effective military resistance by occupied peoples.

Hope for the future would lie in the natural longing of the human race for freedom and the right to develop ''.

This is to surrender in advance to whatever attack may yet be mounted, to the very last ; ;

it is to stride along the steep slope downward.

The only contrary action, in the future as in the past, runs the risk of war ; ;

and, now and in the future unlike in the past, any attempt to repel injury and to preserve any particular civilized attainment of mankind or its provisional justice runs some risk of nuclear warfare and the danger that an effect of it will, by human action, render this planet less habitable by the human race.

That is why it is so very important that ethical analysis keep clear the problem of decision as to `` permitted '' effects, and not draw back in fright from any conceivable contingency or suffer paralysis of action before possibilities or probabilities unrelated, or not directly morally related, to what we can and may and must do as long as human history endures.