TS Eliot wrote: “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started /And know the place for the first time”. I recalled these words when reading your report I recalled these words when reading your report on the work of Prof Stephen Reicher, a leading expert in the psychology of leadership (“People prepared to inflict suffering ‘for higher cause’”, The Herald, January 5) .
His work refined the classic Stanley Milgram experiments which demonstrated that people apparently focus on doing what is asked of them, disregarding the consequences of their actions. But Reicher finds that “the reality is even more disturbing: we can harm others despite caring for them, because we think it is justified in furtherance of a worthier cause”
Which, bang on cue, takes us up to our present nightmare. In July 2016, George Kerevan asked Theresa May if she would press the button and kill 100,000 men women and children. She answered without hesitation, “yes”. This from a vicar’s daughter and a professed Christian. a woman who (whatever other faults she may have) would probably never harm another human being.
For all that we are dealing with a uniquely contemporary question (nuclear genocide) the issue is primitive in its simplicity. A good end does not justify an evil means. We cannot do evil that something good may come of it. This is why Hiroshima is the greatest single-act war crime in history, for all the (historically nonsensical) rationalisation that “it shortened the war and saved allied lives”.
We are back to where we started, literally. In the Old Testament we are told “I call heaven and earth to witness this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing. Choose therefore life, that both you and your children may live”. (Deut. 30 19.) But we have chosen death. In the New Testament, Jesus tells us: “Love your enemies; do good to them that hate you; and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you.” (Matthew 5.) If only we stopped acting as if he was kidding when he said this and could find the courage to grasp the awesome truth that he meant what he said, then peace and justice might reign on earth.
But we have learned nothing. That’s why we bless Trident, and will fire it in the name of the Prince of Peace – and don’t die laughing hysterically.
Brian Quail,
2 Hyndland Avenue, Glasgow.
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