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a third world war fought with nonnuclear arms that would otherwise
almost certainly have broken out and proved vastly more destructive
than its two predecessors . I found myself having to spell this out in
detail a year or so ago to, of all people, a young Berliner who had
real trouble grasping the point.
Schell fails to tell us how an international authority would
prevent local territorial groups from secretly rearming, even with
nuclear weapons, for ethnic and ideological differences would
presumably not conveniently vanish along with national
sovereignties and existing nuclear armaments. Might not a world
police force of totalitarian reach and proportions be required to
control such conflicts? Schell says he will leave the details to others,
but he clearly believes that removal of the present nuclear threat will
unleash all sorts of positive and "life-affirming" forces in human
nature that are now held in check by the numbing fear of extinction.
Although he claims that both political realism based on the "law of
fear" and idealism affirming the "law oflove" counsel an end to the
balance of terror, his own commitment to the latter is unmistakable.
And nowhere is it more obvious than in his utter misunderstanding
of the famous last paragraph of Freud's
Civilization and Its Discontents,
which he cites in full.
Writing in 1930 before the invention of nuclear arms, Freud
presciently observed that meri had now mastered nature "to such an
extent that . . . they would have no difficulty in exterminating one
another to the last man." This made them deeply uneasy with the
result that "now it is to be expected that the other of the two
'Heavenly Powers,' eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert
himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary." Schell
proceeds to attribute to Freud the perception that "now the greater
danger to man came not from rampant, uncontrolled instinct
breaking down the restraining bonds of reason and self-control but
from rampant reason oppressing and destroying instinct and
nature." He concludes that Freud's lesson is that the time has come
when "reason must sit at the knee of instinct and learn reverence for
the miraculous instinctual capacity for creation."
Schell sounds here like a flower child of fifteen years ago and
makes Freud sound like one too. But Freud's view could scarcely be
further removed from any trusting confidence in the ultimate
goodness and peacefulness of original human nature. His major
theme in
Civilization and Its Discontents
is a theory of instinctual
dualism in which an autonomous instinct of destruction is locked in
