C.S. Lewis "On Living in an Atomic Age"

C.S. Lewis wrote his essay "On Living in an Atomic Age" back in 1948, just three years after the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought an abrupt end to World War II and at time when the Cold War was in its infancy. Lewis's essay could just as easily have been penned today, as the heightened threats of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism weigh on us more heavily than ever before.

I wish I could print the whole thing, or at least provide a link where it could be found someplace else on the web; however, copyright laws are much more readily enforced than nonproliferation treaties, so I'll have to make do with just the introductory paragraphs.

If Lewis's introduction seems somewhat fatalistic, don't let that be discouraging. It contains the seeds of an argument that leads to a supremely hopeful conclusion. You can read the essay in its entirety in the book Present Concerns: Essays by C.S. Lewis, available from Amazon here.

Here are the first three paragraphs:

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. "How are we to live in an atomic age?" I am tempted to reply: "Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents."

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors - anaesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things - praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts - not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.