Ovi Magazine Issue #24: Nationalism - Published: 2013-01-31

Articles
Rene Wadlow, President and Representative
to the United Nations, Geneva,
Association of World Citizens
thought with a strong ethical impulse. His reflections
in The Decay and Restoration of Civilisation trace in a
fundamental way the decay. He saw clearly that “the
future of civilization depends on our overcoming the
meaningless and hopelessness which characterises the
thoughts and convictions of men today, and reaching
a state of fresh hope and fresh determination.”
He was looking for a basic principle that would
provide the basis of the needed renewal. That
principle arose from a mystical experience. He
recounts how he was going down river to Ngomo, a
missionary station with a small clinic. In those days
there were steam boats on the Ogowé, and seated on
the deck, he had been trying to write all day. After
a while, he stopped writing and only watched the
equatorial forest as the boat moved slowly on. Then
the words “reverence for life” came into his mind,
and his reflections had found their core: life must be
both affirmed and revered. Ethics, by its very nature,
is linked to the affirmation of the good. Schweitzer
saw that he was “life which wants to live, surrounded
by life which wants to live. Being will-to-life, I feel
the obligation to respect all will-to-life about me as
equal to my own. The fundamental idea of good is
thus that it consists in preserving life, in favoring it,
in wanting to being it to its highest value, and evil
consists in destroying life, doing it injury, hindering
its development.”
Erfuct fur das Leben, — reverence for life — was
the key concept for Schweitzer — all life longs for
fullness and development as I do myself. However,
the will to live is not static; there is a inner energy
which pushes on to a higher state — a will to selfrealisation.
Basically, this energy can be called
spiritual. As Dr Schweitzer wrote “One truth stands
firm. All that happens in world history rests on
something spiritual. If the spiritual is strong, it creates
world history. If it is weak, it suffers world history.”
The use of Schweitzer’s principle of Reverence for
Life can have a profound impact on how humans
treat the environment. Reverence for Life rejects
the notion that humans can use the environment for
its own purposes without any consideration of its
consequences for other living things. It accepts the
view that there is a reciprocal relationship among
living things. Each species is linked to many others.”
Aldo Leopold in his early statement of a deep ecology
ethic, A Sand County Almanac, makes the same point.
“All ethics so far evolved rest on a single premise:
that the individual is a member of a community of
interdependent parts…The land ethic simply enlarges
the boundaries of the community to include soil,
water, plants, and animals, or collectively, the land.”
War and the potential of the use of nuclear weapons
is the obvious opposite of reverence for life. Thus,
in the mid 1950s, when the political focus was on
the testing in the atmosphere of nuclear weapons,
Schweitzer came out strongly for an abolition of
nuclear tests. Some had warned him that such a
position could decrease his support among those who
admired his medical work in Africa but who wanted
to support continued nuclear tests. However, for
Schweitzer, an ethic which is not presented publicly is
no ethic at all. His statements on the nuclear weapons
issue are collected in his Peace or atomic war? (1958).
The statements had an impact with many, touched by
the ethical appeal when they had not been moved to
action by political reasoning. These protests led to
the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty which bans tests in
the atmosphere — an important first step.
Schweitzer was confident that an ethic impulse
was in all people and would manifest itself if given
the proper opportunity. “Just as the rivers are much
less numerous than underground streams, so the
idealism that is visible is minor compared to what
men and women carry in their hearts, unreleased or
scarcely released. Mankind is waiting and longing
for those who can accomplish the task of untying
what is knotted and bringing the underground waters
to the surface.”
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