Reading and listening to all that’s been flooding the news the last few weeks, I cannot help but wonder if we humans have indeed now managed to outsmart ourselves. I read back some of the warnings and concerns about the nuclear bombs during the mid-20th century, and it all feels eerily familiar. So are the almost flippant dismissal of these concerns by leaders who have power to actually do something about it. An utter failure of leadership, driven by greed and a failure of imagination about where power might shift in the future. And let me not even go to the mid-century warnings about the impact of fossil fuels on the climate – another case of history rhyming.
A small artifact that has travelled with me since my very early university years is a mounted clip from an engineering magazine, with an Einstein quote (I believe it came from a 1946 interview in the New York Times Magazine).
“Our real problem is in the hearts and minds of men.
It’s not a problem of physics, but of ethics ……
Man’s skills have outstripped his morals.
His engineering has leaped ahead of his wisdom.
We cannot cancel or call back this scientific advance, but we can, and we must, if the world is to survive, help man to catch up.
In God’s name, if you still believe in God,
Take Him seriously, and somehow get control of what science
Has given to the world,
Or else we shall likewise perish.”
Throughout my life, no matter what my work, this piece of text has sat on a bookshelf where I can see it. I have read and reread and pondered this so many times as I worked to make sense of the world I find myself in, and as I needed to navigate the many tricky twists and turns in my own smaller world. To remind myself about the source for good and evil found in the hearts and minds of humans.
Now, maybe more than ever, this call to get control of what we have created for the sake of our own survival feels deeply relevant. Whether or not we believe in God, this has become an imperative if you care about humanity at all.