ABSTRACT
The Russell-Einstein Manifesto was issued in 1955 on the tenth annivsersary of the dropping of the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. Anticipating psychological factors, they wrote:
We have to learn to think in a new way … to ask ourselves…what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must be disastrous to all parties … Here, then, is the problem which we we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war? People will not face this alternative…They can scarcely bring themselves to grasp that they, individually … are in imminent danger of perishing agonizingly … But what perhaps impedes understanding of the situation more than anything else is that the term ‘mankind’ feels vague and abstract … We appeal, as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.
But have we learned to think in a new way? The answer must be a resounding ‘NO!’. I will try to show that our ‘old ways of thinking’ have causal, not merely casual, relation to our failure to solve mankind’s objective problems.