Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [157]
Indeed, I believe we are witnessing something of the same phenomenon now in the treatment of Israel at the U.N. compared with its tolerance of Arab attacks. Anti-Semitism is very old, very convenient, latent in states as well as people, and evidently impossible to exorcise. I suspect the Jews will survive if only because the world needs them as the scapegoat of guilt of one kind or another. If they disappeared, the world would feel obliged to re-invent them.
A historian needs, I think, a perspective of at least twenty-five years, and preferably fifty, to form an opinion of any value, so I shall go no further into the present. Except for a quick look at science, or rather applied science—that is to say, technology, which is what the layman mainly sees. The four chief technological agents of change in the last twenty-five years or so have been the bomb, the tube, the computer, and the pill—that is, nuclear power, television, electronics, and contraception. As regards the revolution in sexual morality that is partly a result of the pill (although it is also a cyclical phenomenon that recurs in history), the aspect that is genuinely shocking is the careless breeding of unwanted children in increasing numbers. High-school adolescents often seem to regard pregnancy as a condition affecting only themselves, with no thought of it as a condition that brings to life another human being. Damaged and resentful as they grow up, these children will be a mounting charge upon society. Under the circumstances, it hardly seems rational to impose restrictions on contraception and abortion. When there are already too many people, no unwanted child should be born into the world.
The computer and the tube are beyond my scope for today, and even more so the bomb. Being quite properly scared of what we have wrought, we have not used it again since its first employment, but its strategy has reached the extremity of deterrence known as Mutual Assured Destruction, which carries the blunt acronym M-A-D, Mad. We seem to have pinned a label on ourselves in case some future historian should need a hint.
Meanwhile we use incessantly that equally lethal weapon, the automobile, which kills fifty thousand annually in the United States, not counting the thousands maimed—a self-inflicted Hiroshima every year. If one adds to the human casualties the land the automobile has destroyed by highways and parking lots, the pollution of air by its fumes, the horrors perpetrated upon the countryside by its gas stations, the choking of cities by its traffic, it can be reckoned easily the most destructive instrument ever devised by man. Yet at its inception it was a wonderful instrument of freedom that whirled people at exhilarating speeds and opened up new realms of movement and travel. Now it has become a monster of which every person needs one or more, usually twice the size and horsepower necessary for utility. The proliferation and evil effects could be controlled, but are not. Everyone suffers, but no one calls a halt.
The same unstoppable momentum seems to characterize other products of technology. What of a society that uses expensive and dwindling fuel to heat buildings in winter to eighty degrees because sixty is too cold, and then cools them in summer to sixty degrees because eighty is too hot? There is a craziness about all this, a sense of forces getting out of control, of the machine running away with man, which is another source of the general uneasiness