The Laws of Life and Political Responsibility

Emory University, 11 May 1992

Most esteemed President Laney and Mrs. Laney!

President Carter!

Ladies and Gentlemen!

My first words must be ones of gratitude to the Emory University Council for conferring on me an honorary degree. It is a great honor to receive such recognition from one of the oldest universities in America.

Permit me also to state that I am sincerely happy to meet the citizens of Atlanta. I am also delighted that, thanks to the kind invitation of Mr. Laney and President Carter, I am able to participate in this graduation ceremony and speak before you.

From the bottom of my heart I congratulate this year's graduates -- the B.A.s, M.A.s, and Ph.Ds who acquired their degrees differently from me, but for whom, I am sure, it was still not easy and demanded much hard work.

You have partaken of the treasure-house of knowledge, one which has been replenished by generations of scholars, researchers, and practitioners. Genuine knowledge is not the possession of any one nationality and is not enclosed within any state boundaries. It may be that you will have to work not only in America but outside it. You will contribute to the growth of knowledge there, will convey it to others, and persons in various corners of the Earth will make use of it. In this way you will be multiplying the common intellectual wealth of mankind.

In this context, addressing you, the graduates of a famous university who will be working into the 21st century, let me recall that knowledge can be used for good and for evil. In our days moral values are not less significant. They are just as universal as knowledge.

Never before has the thrust of education, its ethical aspect, been more significant than today, as we confront the global challenges facing humanity on the threshold of a new century.

The ancients said: primum vivere, deinde philosophari -- meaning, first live and then philosophize. The coming era will prompt us to turn this maxim upside down and state: First philosophize! At least, that is how I think we should put it today.

Not everyone, of course, can be and should be a philosopher. But every thinking person should reflect on the future, and meditate about the destiny of mankind here on earth.

The place of the individual has changed. The totality of the results of human activity is provoking global processes which threaten the very existence of civilization, even of life on Earth. The individual can become, indeed, is becoming, hostage to his own technological prowess, the uncontrolled consequences of his activities.

Is there full awareness of the seriousness of this threat? Warnings have long been voiced, and with increasing urgency. Alas, we tend to become reconciled to warnings and to bad news, failing to take them too seriously when they refer to the more or less distant future.

Most people live, as is normal, for their everyday concerns -- the worries of today and tomorrow. They are not much inclined to gaze too far into the future. We leave that up to visionaries, who help distract us from thoughts about everyday matters.

There is broad acceptance of fatalism about the future. Many people feel it to be unpredictable: that people as such are impotent to alter the implacable course of events, or even to affect it in any substantial way.

Here they refer to history. But in a new epoch such as ours, arguments "from the past" are hardly justified. The world has changed and continues to change with amazing rapidity. Technical progress compresses space and accelerates the march of time. If negative processes were allowed to develop exponentially, catastrophe would be inevitable. This suggests that we must adopt a different approach to the future than we had before.

Fortunately, the present generation of leaders of the Great Powers had the wisdom to overcome the logic of fatalism. Consequently, they succeeded in preventing a slide into nuclear catastrophe; they managed to end the "Cold War" and halt the arms race.

But we are still far from stability in the world. We have evaded a major war, but, as it appears, are sinking into a chaos of conflicts of a different order.

The immediate causes of conflicts may seem varied, at least from the outside, but they always involve giving full vent to extremism and separatism, furious armed clashes and terror, many deaths, and streams of refugees.

This catastrophe has even affected my own country. As President of the USSR I warned against giving in to the thoughtless and emotional urge to declare sovereignty. Where peoples and countries are so interdependent, making sovereignty an absolute value leads to tragedy. One can hardly disagree with those who equate the cult of sovereignty with worshipping a god who demands human sacrifices.

It is especially dangerous that this should be occurring at a time when the world community is confronted with mortal threats on a global scale. What is happening with us? Are people capable of rising above their private, group, and local interests? Today, the fate of humanity depends on it.

And, is there a paradox here? Do not these conflicts signal a troubled world situation generally? What seems to be happening is the socio-political externalization of such global problems as ecological deterioration, the congestion of populations in large cities, tension over energy resources, inadequate food supplies, insufficient fresh water, undernourishment and hunger, increased crime and violence. These "local" protuberances, taken together, signify deterioration of the overall situation and undermine international stability.

This definitely leads to one conclusion: the roots of the crisis of civilization are found in the individual, in the failure of his intellectual and moral growth to keep pace with the altering circumstances of existence, in difficulties of psychological adaptation to the increased pace of change.

Centuries of cultural evolution have led to the emergence of an ego-based morality. Personal interest, personal initiative and enterprise have become powerful driving forces of material progress. But healthy egoism has also degenerated into greed, hard-heartedness, and an exploitative attitude to nature.

Is this not one of the principal causes of the present spiritual crisis? and of such phenomena as the loss of moral bearings, the weakening of the family and of religion, the feeling that everything is allowed, licentiousness, violence, and cruelty.

If these dangerous tendencies are to be altered, we must in many respects change ourselves. We must become aware of our own unique role in this world and our own unique responsibility. We must develop an awareness which enables us to evaluate any deeds, actions, or purposes from the viewpoint of their global consequences. We must assimilate the ethic of common responsibility and self-limitation, the ethic of solidarity and cooperation for the sake of survival and progress for all.

It is not a question of ideology. I am speaking about what is human in the individual, about people's attitudes to one another and to Nature, about establishing conscious control over those spontaneous processes which threaten the existence of humanity.

Here, however, voices of warning can be heard: one should not meddle with the natural order of things; leave everything to the "invisible hand," to evolutionary mechanisms, and all will be for the best.

Should we really refrain from trying to exert intelligent control over objective processes? That would be a fatal mistake. The world community cannot neglect this task merely because rationality has often been abused. We should not be trapped by the false dilemma: either "total" spontaneity or "total" rationality.

Spontaneous development is full of inertia, reproducing the long-past negative consequences of day-to-day human activity, but on an expanded scale. What are needed are coordinated decisions which would adjust for these consequences, and such decisions cannot be postponed. The time allotted for them is running out. And the probable cost of postponements goes up each year and each decade.

Many processes such as environmental contamination, the greenhouse effect, and destruction of the ozone layer can become irreversible. Indeed, some of them are already heading that way. Alas, the people of my generation came very late to thinking about all these issues. Our energies were absorbed by the purely political problems we inherited from the past. International politics in the 20th century has been governed by irrationality, and much time was lost.

But how is the "global citizen" to emerge? Whence do we arrive at an ethic of the common good? Like many others, I put my hope in the educated younger generation. You are freer of stereotypes and more receptive to new ideas. From your ranks will emerge the formulators of policy in the 21st century. I feel that you will be leaders of a new type, thinking on a broad scale and without prejudices, leaders who are not thinking just about the next elections but about mankind's long-term goals and common interests.

The future is at stake. You, your children, and your grandchildren will live in the 21st century. It will be your century, and what kind of century it will be depends in large part on you. It will be your decisions which determine the conditions of life in the coming century.

You are entering professional, business, and political life at the beginning of an era. The confrontational atmosphere of the "Cold War" made it impossible for peoples and states to act in solidarity to achieve common goals. The opportunities opening up before you are completely new and unprecedented.

Of course, this all depends on avoiding a new and fateful division of the world -- whether economic, racial, religious, or ideological. This cannot be permitted to happen, and your generation must not allow it.

Yes, everyone in the world is different. The historical process has generated an enormous diversity of national and ethnic features, cultural traditions, psychologies, customs, and religious beliefs. No two peoples or nations have had an identical history. God has endowed each with different natural and climatic conditions, a different geographical location, and different levels of natural resources.

But we all live on the same Earth. It is our common home. And we must all give thought to its preservation. As it is, while we fight and quarrel with one another, cracks are appearing in its walls, and maybe even in its foundations.

There was a movie by Federico Fellini called "Orchestral Rehearsal" which was a warning to all of us. The plot is about the rehearsal of an orchestra in which everyone is a virtuouso. But something bizarre happens: the musicians start to quarrel with one another, stop obeying the conductor, and gradually the orchestra falls to pieces. Then, all of a sudden, you hear a muffled roar, cracks appear on the walls of the hall, and pieces of it start to fall out, threatening overall destruction. Only then do the shaken musicians again take up their instruments, the conductor returns to the podium, and the orchestra starts to play -- at first haltingly, then more and more harmoniously. But the music still sounds somewhat tentative and restrained. There is a threat somewhere nearby, but what sort of threat ...?

We cannot afford to wait until the walls start to fall down. Our world society does not have a conductor, but it does have common interests and goals. There is international law, there are democratic procedures and common human moral values. Finally, there is the United Nations, as I mentioned in my speech in Fulton.

Devotion to democracy is the necessary condition of a peaceful world order. Democracy is not only a political principle but also a moral standard. "Democracy without values," to use the words of Pope John Paul II, "is easily converted into open or disguised totalitarianism."

Freedom of conscience, respect for each individual, tolerance, sympathy, the ability to put oneself in another's place, preference for that which unites over that which separates, readiness for compromise -- are the qualities we need as we enter the new era.

Ladies and Gentlemen! Just prior to the start of the second millenium after the birth of Christ many people in Europe were seized by foreboding -- the Last Judgment, the end of the world. Thank God, such visions are not characteristic of our more enlightened times. But still the advent of a new era, and a new millenium, disturbs us and causes anxiety.

The future is a challenge. But mankind can find a worthy response. This response will be forthcoming if we recognize the unity of the world, that we have a common fate, that each bears personal responsibility for preserving life on Earth.

Education, especially university education, will play a special role. It must be expanded. We must train a new generation to comprehend an increasingly complex world. We must develop more advanced education. Education must become a school of thought. And thought means a continuing search, a continuous peering into the future, the ability to predict and to direct one's consciousness to what is of primary importance in life.

I wish the graduates of Emory University all happiness and success in life and in their professional activity. I hope your knowledge and enthusiasm will be put to work serving the noble cause of perfecting mankind in the spirit of those exalted intellectual and moral qualities which will be decisive for the realization of our common hopes for a brighter future.

Thank you.

Mikhail Gorbachev
President of Green Cross International