I would like to spend the next few minutes reflecting with you about the biggest challenge I feel the world is facing: our ability to learn to live together. We live in very dangerous times where we can destroy each other totally if we do not manage to find ways to co-exist peacefully.
Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front is about 19 year old Paul Bäumer who fights in the German army on the French front in World War I. Paul spends some time at a training camp near a group of Russian prisoners-of-war. Paul feels that the Russians are people just like him and wonders how war can make enemies of people who have no grudge against one another.
In a battle, Paul is forced to hide in a shell hole. A French soldier jumps into the shell hole with him, and Paul instinctively stabs him. As the man dies a slow, painful death, Paul is overcome with remorse for having hurt him. He feels again that this enemy soldier is no enemy at all but rather a victim of war just like himself: “I see you are a man like me.” But his friends tell him that war is about killing enemies: “After all, war is war.”
By the fall of 1918, Paul is the only one of his circle of friends who is still alive. Soldiers everywhere whisper that the Germans will soon surrender and that peace will come. Paul is poisoned in a gas attack and given a short leave. He reflects that, when the war ends, he will be ruined for peacetime; all he knows is the war. In October 1918, on a day with very little fighting, Paul is killed. The army report for that day reads simply: “All quiet on the Western Front.” Paul’s corpse wears a calm expression, as though relieved that the end has come at last.
Forgiveness and recognising each other’s humanity is only possible after we have killed and destroyed each other, Wilfred Owen says in his poem ‘Strange Meeting’ written in 1918, before being killed while fighting in World War I, also on the Western Front.
Two soldiers meet up in a dark tunnel which they come to realise is Hell, the first having killed the second in battle. Most of the poem is a dialogue between the two soldiers. Enemies in war, the two become friends only after death: “I am the enemy you killed, my friend.”
Wilfred Owen took the title of his poem ‘Strange Meeting’ from Shelley’s poem ‘Revolt of Islam’ written a century earlier. Shelley writes against organised religion and religious wars where two sides clash with each other in a war between good and evil with each side believing that God is on its side and that the other side is evil. Shelley makes the point that good and evil reside within each and every side and within each and every one of us. He also makes it clear that even ‘freedom wars’ are not wars between tyranny and liberty and that even liberators are potential tyrants.
Thomas Schutte calls his sculptures ‘United enemies’. He brings down monumental bronze figures from the pedestal and puts them on the ground on our level. He puts together two pairs of men, who hate each other and want to get away from each other but cannot as they are bound to one another with rope. They have to find ways of living together, even against their will. Schutte makes us feel that, whether we like it or not, all people and states on this planet are bound together with one rope and whenever we are hating and hurting others we are also hurting ourselves.
Yet we are still not ready to admit that like Schutte’s ‘United Enemies we are bound to each other. However much we want to kill each other we have to find ways of living together if we are to save our planet and humanity.
Distrust and cynicism have replaced automatic authority and respect. His colossal figures “do not stand heroically atop a classical pedestal but seem to stagger, earthbound, on tripods of bundled poles. Struggling to be rid of its mate, each figure is nevertheless incapable of standing alone.”
On 14th February 1990 NASA’s Voyager 1 took a picture of planet earth in space. The image inspired Carl Sagan’s book, “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space”: “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their
lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us…. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
Speech at the MBA Graduation of London School of Commerce, 21 November 2024
