Victim of bombing of Hiroshima                                                                                                           (credit: Onuka Masami, via Wikimedia Commons) 

                                      Bulldozing mounds of bodies at Bergen-Belsen

                        (credit: Imperial War Museums, via Wikimedia Commons) 

             (We've done these things before. We will again if we don't solve us.)  

1. Our Human Dilemma Now

To millions in the world in the world today it is obvious that  we humans are in an unsustainable position. We’re the biggest threat in existence to our own continued existence on earth. We’re poisoning our world with pollution on all fronts. In addition, more nations are learning to build nuclear weapons all the time. The odds that a rogue state somewhere is going to start a nuclear war grow daily. And war itself? It’s only what we have always done. All nations. All lands. All eras. Thus, the risks of a cataclysmic disaster are getting too high.

We’re facing self-inflicted disaster because we don’t have a moral code that we could use to resolve disputes at global levels as well as to guide us effectively in daily life. We need a universal moral code with no unbridgeable gulfs between what we believe is right in daily life and what we believe is right for nations. It must fit the definition of universal or it won’t be accepted and practiced by all people. One code of right and wrong for us all or a global bloom of atom bombs: those are our choices. (“We must love one another or die.” – W. H. Auden)

In short, our finding a universal moral code is the most desperately important task before us. Beside it, all our other tasks pale into insignificance.

 

                   

        

                  W. H. Auden (credit: Carl Van Vechten, Wikimedia Commons)