The Scientist as Rebel

by Freeman J. Dyson

  The Quakers stand in the middle of the pacifist continuum, not so fully engaged in politics as Gandhi, not so detached as the Amish of Pennsylvania, who try to withdraw altogether from the violence and evil of the world. Quakers live in the world of anger and power and seek to mitigate its evils. The Quaker ethic has always encouraged its adherents to concern themselves with other people’s sufferings. “Concern” in the Quaker vocabulary means more than sympathy; it means practical help for people in need and practical intervention against injustice. Large numbers of Quakers, following the example of their founder, George Fox, express their concern by campaigning in the political arena for humanitarian and pacifist ideals. But they act as individuals, not as an organized movement. Perhaps the main reason for the durability of the Quakers’ influence is the fact that they are tied to no government and no party. Their pacifism is a private commitment based on conscience, not a political tactic dependent on success or popularity. They are not, like the followers of Gandhi, liable to defect from their pacifist principles when the political winds change.

  The great and permanent achievement of the Quakers was the abolition of slavery. This social revolution, with the accompanying profound changes in public morality, took centuries to complete and was not the work of Quakers alone. But the earliest agitators against slavery were mostly Quakers. All through the eighteenth century, in England and in America, Quakers were prime movers in the uphill struggle, first to put an end to the profitable trade in fresh slaves from Africa, and later to put an end to the profitable exploitation of slaves wherever they happened to be. My great-great-great-uncle Robert Haynes was a prominent citizen of the island of Barbados, owner of several sugar plantations and several hundred slaves. In his diary for the year 1804 he complained bitterly of the public agitation against slavery which was then gathering strength in England. He knew who his enemies were. “I am likewise minded,” he wrote, “to attribute a fair share of the blame to the underhand activities of a sect known as Quakers. These, from the very beginnings of the settlement of our island having played a very subtle—and in these days all too little heeded—part in the instigation of others to rebellion, at the same time openly avowing their detestation to any form of violence! Not scrupling, withall, to avail themselves fully of the safety and protection afforded them by the laws and defenses of this country. All this savouring of cant and hypocrisy such as I, for one, find hard to stomach.”

  The next item in Haynes’s diary explains the violence of his feelings. “Attempted rising of slaves in some parts of the Island. The above quickly suppressed—the immediate shewing of discipline taking excellent and speedy effect—but at the same time a general anxiety thus engendered by no means, even now, wholly allayed.”1 Four years later the British Parliament passed the act which put an end to the slave trade, with effective criminal penalties. Haynes continued for twenty-five years longer to enjoy an uneasy dominion over his slaves on the island. But he lived long enough to see the Quakers finally victorious, his slaves freed, and the old order of society on the island overthrown. Handsomely compensated with a cash payment for his slaves by the Act of Parliament of 1833, he moved to England and lived the rest of his life at Reading in comfortable retirement.

  What were the ingredients of the Quakers’ success? First of all, moral conviction. They never had any doubt that slavery was a moral evil which they were called upon to oppose. Second, patience. They continued their work, decade after decade, undiscouraged by setbacks and failures. Third, objectivity. A large part of their work consisted of careful collection of facts and statistics which both sides in the dispute came to accept as accurate. It was the fact-gathering activities of the Quakers in Barbados which particularly infuriated my great-great-great-uncle. Fourth, willingness to compromise. The Quakers were concerned to free the slaves, not to punish the slave owners. They accepted the fact that slaves were an economic asset and that the owners were entitled to fair compensation for the loss of their property. The slave owners were not to be humiliated. As a result, even my great-great-great-uncle in the end swallowed his pride and quietly pocketed his cash settlement. The willingness of the British abolitionists to buy out the slave owners made the crucial difference between the peaceful liberation of the West Indian slaves in 1833 and the bloody liberation of the American slaves thirty years later. The British government paid the slave owners twenty million pounds. The cost of the American Civil War was considerably higher.

  The abolition of nuclear weapons is a task of the same magnitude as the abolition of slavery. Nuclear weapons are now, as slavery was two hundred years ago, a manifestly evil institution deeply embedded in the structure of our society. Most people nowadays, if they think about nuclear weapons at all, worry about nuclear bombs in the hands of terrorists. They imagine terrorists carrying one or two nuclear bombs in cars or trucks and exploding them in New York or Washington. One or two nuclear bombs exploding in a city would be a disaster much greater than the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001. People are right to worry about terrorist bombs. But they ought to worry much more about the thousands of nuclear weapons that are not in the hands of terrorists but in the hands of national governments. Terrorist bombs could kill millions of people, while national nuclear weapons could kill hundreds of millions. National nuclear weapons used in a major war could destroy whole countries, including our own. And since the United States maintains the largest and most powerful deployments of nuclear weapons, we carry the largest share of moral responsibility for their continued existence.

  People who hope to push the fight for the abolition of war to a successful conclusion must bring to their task the same qualities which won the fight for the abolition of slavery: moral conviction, patience, objectivity, and willingness to compromise. Those who fought against slavery two hundred years ago made a historic compromise which opened the way to their victory; they decided to concentrate their efforts upon the prohibition of the slave trade and to leave the total abolition of slavery to their successors in another generation. They saw that the slave trade was a more glaring evil than slavery itself and more vulnerable to political attack. They were able to mobilize against the slave trade a coalition of moral and economic interests which could not at that time have been brought together in the cause of total abolition. There is a lesson here for the peace movements of today. The ultimate aim of peace movements is the total abolition of war. All war is evil, but the use of nuclear weapons is a more glaring evil, and the abolition of nuclear weapons is a more practical political objective than the abolition of war. Modern pacifists, like the Quakers of the eighteenth century, would be well advised to attack the more vulnerable evil first. After we have succeeded in abolishing nuclear weapons, the abolition of war may become a feasible objective for later generations, but from here it is out of sight.

  Pacifism as a political cause has suffered from the fact that its greatest leaders have been men of genius. People of outstanding genius, transcending the beliefs and loyalties of the tribe in which they happen to be born, tend naturally toward pacifism. Unfortunately, people of genius do not usually make good politicians. Gandhi was one of the rare exceptions. Genius and the art of political compromise do not sit easily together. Except for Gandhi, the great historic figures of pacifism have been prophets rather than politicians. Jesus in Judea, Tolstoy in Russia, Einstein in Germany, each in turn has set for mankind a higher standard than political movements can follow.

  When Tolstoy wrote War and Peace, he was a Russian patriot, sympathetic to the martial spirit of his soldier characters and proud of their bravery. His skeptical realism belongs squarely, as Alexander Blok’s fevered romanticism does not, in the mainstream of Russian patriotic literature. But Russian patriotism was too narrow a frame for Tolstoy’s genius. At the age of fifty he experienced a religious conversion to the gospel of peace. He repudiated the sovereignty of all national governments, including his own. He cut himself off from the aristocratic society in which he had formerly lived.
And for the last thirty years of his life he preached the ethic of nonviolence in its most uncompromising form. He demanded that we not only refuse to serve in armies and navies but also refuse to cooperate in any way with coercive activities of governments. Revolutionary action against governments was forbidden too; those who oppose a government with violence cannot lead the way to the abolition of violence. He called us to follow a way of life based on strict obedience to the words of Jesus: “Ye have heard that it hath been said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth: but I say unto you, that ye resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”

  The Tsar’s government was wise enough not to lay hands on Tolstoy or to attempt to silence him. Only the young men who followed his teaching and refused military service were put in prison or exiled to Siberia. Tolstoy himself lived unmolested on his estate at Yasnaya Polyana with his faithful disciples and his disapproving wife. He corresponded with the young Gandhi. He became a prophet and spiritual leader for pacifists all over the world. Wherever he saw cruelty and oppression, he spoke out for the victims against the oppressors. He warned the wealthy and powerful in no uncertain terms of the explosion of violence to which their selfishness was leading: “Only one thing is left for those who do not wish to change their way of life, and that is to hope that things will last my time—after that, let happen what may. That is what the blind crowd of the rich are doing, but the danger is ever growing and the terrible catastrophe draws nearer.” The wealthy and powerful listened politely to his warning and continued on the course which led to the cataclysms of 1914 and 1917. The situation of Tolstoy at the end of his life was similar to the situation of Einstein fifty years later, the venerable white-bearded figure, wearing a peasant blouse as a symbol of his contempt for rank and privilege, universally respected as a writer of genius, disdained by practical politicians as a cantankerous old fool, loved and admired by the multitude as spokesman for the conscience of mankind.

  A hundred years have now passed since Tolstoy’s conversion, and the power of nationalism over men’s minds is as strong as ever. There was perhaps a chance, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, that the working people of Europe would unite in a common determination not to be used as cannon fodder in their masters’ quarrels. This was the dream which Tolstoy dreamed, and it was shared by many of the leaders of workers’ organizations in various European countries during the years before 1914 when these organizations were growing rapidly in membership and power. The dream was an international brotherhood of workers united in loyalty to socialist and pacifist principles. The dream was an international general strike that would become effective on the day of declaration of war and would leave the generals of the belligerent armies without soldiers to command. Among the leaders who believed in international brotherhood as a practical political program for the workers of the world, Jean Jaurès of France was outstanding. Jaurès was an experienced politician, representing the French Socialist Party in the Chamber of Deputies, and reelected repeatedly by his constituency of miners. He was a patriotic Frenchman and never advocated unilateral disarmament or unconditional pacifism. He knew personally the Socialist leaders in Germany and Austria and understood the ambiguities of their position. But he believed with passionate conviction in the possibility that an international general strike against war could be successful. This dream collapsed on July 31, 1914, when the German, Austrian, and Russian armies were already mobilizing for war, the workers in each country had forgotten their international brotherhood and were marching obediently to the frontiers to defend their respective fatherlands, and Jaurès, sitting disconsolate at his supper in a restaurant in Paris, was shot dead by a fanatical French patriot.

  Tolstoy’s radical pacifism never became a serious political force in Europe, and least of all in Russia, either before or after the revolution. The only effective action of workers against war occurred in 1917, when Lenin encouraged the soldiers of Alexander Kerensky’s government to desert from the front lines where they were fighting the Germans. But this desertion was not the fulfillment of Jaurès’s dream of an international strike against war; it was merely an opening move in the new war for which Lenin was preparing. As soon as Lenin had seized power, he organized a new army and used it to defend his territory against the remnants of the old army in the civil war of 1918–1921. Neither the Tsar before the revolution nor Lenin afterward hesitated to spill blood; neither had difficulty in finding an ample supply of young Russians willing to kill or to die for the defense of Russia against her enemies. The seeds of Tolstoy’s gospel of nonviolence fell mostly upon stony soil as they were carried all over the world, and nowhere was the soil stonier than in his native Russia.

  The great blossoming of nonviolence as a mass political movement was the work of Gandhi in India. For thirty years he led the fight for Indian independence and held his followers to a Tolstoyan code of behavior. He proved that satyagraha, soul-force, can be an effective substitute for bombs and bullets in the liberation of a people. Satyagraha, a word and a concept invented by Gandhi, means much more than nonviolence. Satyagraha is not merely passive resistance or abstention from violent actions. Satyagraha is the active use of moral pressure as a weapon for the achievement of social and political goals. Gandhi used satyagraha impartially to castigate the British governors of India and his own followers, whenever they strayed from the path of nonviolence. With his Hindu background and his London lawyer’s training, he understood the psychology of Indian peasants and of imperial government officials, and succeeded in bending them both to his will. The chief tools of satyagraha were civil disobedience, the peaceful but ostentatious breaking of laws imposed by the alien authorities, and the fast unto death, a personal hunger strike in which Gandhi repeatedly wagered his life in order to compel friends and enemies alike to attend to his demands. The tools worked. There were many setbacks and occasional lapses into violence, but the campaign of satyagraha succeeded in winning independence for India without any war between the native population and the occupying power. British administrators found Gandhi absurd and exasperating, but they could neither shoot him nor keep him permanently in prison. When he fasted unto death they dared not let him die, knowing that no one who might take his place would be able so well to control the violent temper of his followers. Satyagraha was an effective weapon in Gandhi’s hands because he was, unlike Tolstoy, an astute politician. For thirty years Gandhi was, in effect, collaborating with the British authorities in keeping India peaceful, while at the same time defying them publicly so that he never appeared to his followers as a British stooge. Successful use of satyagraha requires, besides courage and moral grandeur, a talent for practical politics, an understanding of the weak points of the enemy, a sense of humor, and a little luck. Gandhi possessed all these gifts and used them to the full.

  Gandhi’s luck ran out at the end of his life, when the campaign against British rule was won and he was trying to bring India to independence as a united country. He then had to deal with quarrels between Hindu and Muslim, deeper and more bitter than the power struggle between European and Asian. Satyagraha failed to subdue Hindu and Muslim nationalism as it had subdued British imperialism. Five months after the violent birth of independent India and Pakistan, the scene of Jaurès’s death was reenacted in Delhi. Like Jaurès, Gandhi was shot by a nationalist who considered him insufficiently patriotic.

  With Gandhi, as with Jaurès, died the hope of a continent turning decisively away from war. Nehru, prime minister of newly independent India, had never been a wholehearted believer in nonviolence. The rulers of Pakistan believed in nonviolence even less. Within thirty years after independence, three wars showed how little Gandhi’s countrymen had learned from his example. India and Pakistan fought over the disputed province of Kashmir as France and Germany had fought over Alsace and Lorraine. Together with the regiments and warships of the colonial army and navy, the governments of India and Pakistan i
nherited an addiction to the old European game of power politics. Gandhi’s satyagraha was an effective weapon for a subject people to use against their oppressors, but his followers discarded it promptly as soon as they gained control of their own government and stood in the oppressors’ shoes.

  The moral of Gandhi’s life and death is that pacifism as a political program is much more difficult to sustain than pacifism as a personal ethic. Being himself a leader of extraordinary charisma and skill, Gandhi was able to organize a whole people around a program of pacifism. He proved that a pacifist resistance movement can be sustained for thirty years and can be strong enough to defeat an empire. The subsequent history of India proved that political pacifism was not strong enough to survive the death of its leader and to withstand the temptations of power.

  During the years between the two world wars, while Gandhi was successfully organizing his nonviolent resistance in India, political pacifism was also popular in Europe. European pacifists were encouraged by Gandhi’s example and hoped to revive Jaurès’s dream of an international alliance of nonviolent resisters against militaristic national governments. The pacifist dream in Europe failed disastrously. There were three main reasons for the failure: lack of leadership, lack of a positive objective, and Hitler. The European pacifists never produced a leader comparable to Gandhi. Einstein was a pacifist, and lent his name and prestige to the pacifist cause until the rise of Hitler led him to change his mind, but he had no wish to be a political leader. Like Tolstoy, he was more of a hero to the world at large than to his own countrymen. Pacifism, even at the peak of Einstein’s popularity, was never strong in Germany. It was strongest in England, where George Lansbury, a Christian Socialist with firm pacifist convictions, was leader of the Labour Party from 1931 to 1935. Lansbury was capable of courageous action in the Gandhi style. In 1930, when he was mayor of Poplar in the East End of London, he went to prison rather than submit to government policies which he considered oppressive. He remained a hero to his constituents in East London. But he never attempted to dominate the European scene as Gandhi dominated the scene in India. Gandhi had the tremendous advantage of a positive objective, the cause of Indian independence, around which he could mobilize the enthusiasm of his followers. Lansbury and the other European pacifists had no similar objective; they supported the League of Nations as an international peacekeeping authority, but the League of Nations was an inadequate focus for a mass political movement. The league was widely perceived as nothing more than a debating society for elderly politicians. Nobody could take seriously the picture of millions of Europeans defying their governments in a gesture of loyalty to the league. Gandhi was swimming with the tide of nationalism; Lansbury and his followers were swimming against it. As a result, the foreign policy of the British Labour Party under Lansbury’s leadership was wholly negative; no rearmament, no action against Hitler, and no wholehearted commitment to pacifism.