Virus: The Day of Resurrection (39 page)

“I … this is my own opinion, but … I believe that we in the latter half of the twentieth century must take up again the view of the universe—and of mankind—of Immanuel Kant, a genius who without putting on the grandiose airs of a prophet arrived at a most futuristic conclusion, believing only in Reason. He was a singular giant standing between the end of the modern age and the beginning of a new era.

“Two great geniuses: Hegel, a critic of Kant, and Marx, who was a critic of Hegel … As Karl Löwith so aptly pointed out, it was because they were unable to eliminate the dregs of salvation theory—including a vulgarized form of Christian eschatology—from their epistemological systems that they were ironically connected to the ‘medieval,’ while it is their predecessor Kant, oddly enough, who is connected to the modern, and to the future. Even Heidegger, that towering giant of our age … despite the high esteem he should certainly be held in thanks to his tremendous, painstaking work in ontology and the proposition of existentialism … it is as Vauvenargues said: in the vastness of its Gothic minuteness, the simplicity of Kant’s thesis holds powerfully fast to the things of all humanity.

“I … what was I trying to say just now? … I had better … hurry and state my conclusion … My voice is … can you still hear me? I can no longer feel my hands or feet. It’s dark, it’s black as midnight …

“To state … my conclusion, the intellectuals of the twentieth century, and above all the philosophers … should have cooperated with the scientists … to keep the scientists from becoming the slaves of authority, of capital, and to make it possible for them to serve only Reason, which should have been their lord and master from the start … also, if they had appealed directly to the masses, to the authorities, seeking to convince them and to expose them—telling the truth about the facts that are indicated by undeniable scientific knowledge, propounding the truth again and again, appealing to the
meaning
of those facts over and over—and if all the impeachers and the judges of the contradictions and roots of evil in the mechanisms of the establishment, and all the peacemakers between opposing forces had been able to perform their functions … maybe history could have been even stranger than it was. The intellectuals … if they had had unshakable conviction … It certainly would have not been impossible …

“Perhaps that was rather a task for the future. If there had just been something powerful enough to penetrate the human core of the brutal forces that give organized opposition to the convictions of the intellectuals—the soldiers and the mercenary capitalists—then maybe something could have been done. No, in order to do that, it would have required winning the release of the partial restrictions on the freedom of thought and speech in the dictatorships that were emerging in the Communist Bloc countries, and on the other hand the sublation of capitalism’s contradictions and the roots of its evils. If
something
could have soaked into the ruling class itself, and in so doing convinced the majority of capitalism’s fierce imperialist elements to put an end to their aggression, it might have been possible to achieve change …

“The chance for the intellectuals to gain such power was there in the blind promotion of education throughout the world. Greatly enlarging the numbers of the educated would have made it possible for the majority of the human race to leap from their status as mere employees of modern industry to that of the rational humanity of tomorrow, and this would have given us the possibility of overcoming both capitalism and the force that directly opposed it—namely, dictator-driven, militaristic socialism—
at the same time
. Because military fanatics and monopolistic capitalists deluded into thinking they are emperors are in the minority …

“Yet even so … the ones who foresaw that possibility, who moved to try to make it a reality … or rather, proceeding from the factual knowledge that thermonuclear war means the extinction of mankind, and were forced irresistibly into a global mindset … were not intellectuals, but outstanding individuals … realistic politicians. In our generation, they forced us to take a step forward, and after many twists and turns and dangers, should have been someday able to achieve this. But even so, the intellectuals were silent.

“Now, with everything … having been destroyed all at once in a short period … what can come of talking about such things? And yet—after all I … what a shame. From the bottom of my heart, it’s just such a shame. The intellectuals, and above all the philosophers, they were in a position to understand the shape of mankind and the universe that was being put forward by the natural scientists. They should have been able to communicate these discoveries—translate them for all of humanity, to interpret for the masses the meaning of those things for human beings. Then if they had been able to use that understanding to get the whole world to synthetically
transcend the modern world
 …

“But the fact was that we, the human race—and within the human race, the intellectuals who should be the specialists when it comes to utilizing their intelligence—during the period in which they existed, were unable to bring an end to the conflicts between nations, to the slaughter, to the exploitation, to the inequality, and to the poverty and tragedy. Come to think of it, this summer … that’s right … I just remembered. Everyone, if all had gone well, it would have been this week—the second week of August—that America, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union would have signed the Comprehensive Treaty for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons … but it’s too late now … even for that.

“I … it’s such a pity, everyone … it’s just such a pity that we were unable to achieve that goal while we yet lived. We could not unify the world or even the inner consciousness of the human race. We simply folded our arms and just waited for the whole world to get sick of its increasing production, its overlong battles, its mass casualties … for it to naturally turn, in accordance with one mathematically probable destiny, so to speak, toward that necessary knowledge. Were we optimists who believed in historical inevitability—which no one has been able to prove exists—or had we taken up Henri Bergson as a shield, to let the dregs carry time as we waited in expectation of a latter-day Utopia without working to hasten its coming? … I see, it was because Bergson said that understanding is something that requires the passage of time; he likened it to waiting for sugar to dissolve. However, everyone … we should have started stirring that sugar sooner! The earlier the better. If we had done that then humanity could have already put away the age of exploitation and war, and on the whole, humanity’s psychological, intellectual, and material production power might have turned back to become something more effective, and more essentially human. If this human consciousness, which exists as a group of intelligent life-forms that sprang up by chance on a tiny lone island in this bottomless material universe, had been universalized sooner … then we humans, by more quickly attaining a consciousness of ourselves as a single race of beings, could have stopped acting from the impulses that come out of the darkness … the energy used for our mutual slaughters, for derision and hatred, could have been put into the battle for the true humanity—the battle against poverty and hunger and darkness and disease, and also into the battle for wisdom … and maybe we could have done something. Again, maybe this could have been our one-in-a-million chance against this great calamity, this unexpected end.

“In other words, only in the time of Armageddon is there but one road by which all humanity might avoid destruction, our ultimate chance in the face of this disaster … it may have been in the ‘reason and good sense’ which we should have worked more quickly and more forcefully to make a global standard.

“In a moment … inevitably … this final lecture must draw to a close, but … I must confess that I am being tormented by an embarrassing thought. Add to that my record as a scholar—my mortification at the human race dying out in such circumstances—and I can’t bear not to confess to one more embarrassment as well. These things … which in my everyday life as a scholar I had vague thoughts about … now at the end of the world … I feel like questioning them directly for the very first time.

“Up until three months ago, I too was completely caught up in the lifestyle of the vulgar world … that insignificant daily routine. This radio lecture … I started doing it in order to have my yacht repaired, so this autumn I could go on a trip in the Mediterranean with my wife again. I had intended to speak a number of times on the history of civilization, starting in the ancient Near East and going forward to the present age. I started this in a very slapdash manner, because I didn’t think many people would be listening anyway.

“Never did I dream that the final lecture would take the form that it has. On the brink of the end of humanity, with mountains of the corpses of our countrymen stacked up before our very eyes, and indeed even as I am about to die as well … It is with feelings of deepest regret that because of my lack of courage … for the first time … I feel like talking about what I should. In the depths of my shame, I couldn’t even raise my head up to look at you all if you were here. I was lacking … as a scholar, in the conviction and courage to take up my responsibility toward all humanity at every opportunity, and to remain unmoved at those times when scornful laughter would have come down upon me.

“I pretended to be everyone’s friend and abandoned my responsibilities, only performing my duties in a perfunctory manner. In addition to my regrets for the whole human race … on top of my mourning, I have no choice but to add my own entirely personal dishonor and regret … I must die in the torment of feelings of disgrace and humiliation. What can I call this repulsive death, so filled with dreary suffering? Three months ago—back in the midst of that eternal stay of execution—when I had a pleasant home, a new Italian sports car, a beautiful wife, and a promising future … when I received my due respect, when I was filled with that pleasant, self-satisfied feeling that I was just a little bit smarter than everyone else—who would have imagined that I would have to die tainted by such shame? However, this death, stained as it is with a double portion of embarrassment, is surely my punishment for being from the beginning cowardly and weak willed, both as a scholar and as an intellectual …

“My lecture … is finished.”

Summer’s End

As signs of the coming autumn began to appear in the mornings and evenings of the northern hemisphere, the electromagnetic signals emitted by the five continents were all disappearing one after another. It was August 29 when a small station in Novosibirsk, the last to continue transmissions, stopped.

Half a year earlier the five continents had been filled with all manner of noise, but this was the instant when perfect silence returned. Only half a year earlier, a startling commotion had filled the space between the ground and the ionosphere two hundred miles above—all manner of electromagnetic waves—long, medium, short, and VHF; the transmissions they carried: telegrams, telegraphs, international wireless telephone communications, radio and television broadcast signals, command signals for artificial satellites and experimental missiles; lasers for the observation of heavenly bodies; maser waves; the passenger planes, private planes, company planes, military planes, and patrol planes that traveled back and forth daily along flight paths that were bound together like netting; the rockets that were being launched somewhere every day; the countless uncrewed satellites flying back and forth far, far above them; the electromagnetic waves on which were borne the chatter and breathless emergency notifications of how many hundreds of millions of the world’s people, the countless multitudes who boarded airplanes and flew back and forth from one point to another.

And down on the surface—the people of the cities who constructed buildings that scraped against the sky, the smoke belched from giant factories, the exhaust fumes and the noise given off by all manner of vehicles, the water vapor and carbon dioxide exhaled by the animal life, the roar of the cities, the harsh sound of a power hammer driving in nails, and away in the distance, the reverberating explosions of atom bombs and TNT … Viewed from the perspective of the planet itself, perhaps these things were nothing more than faint whispers. The temperature of the atmosphere surrounding the earth had not been noticeably raised even by all of the many and varied noises that human beings had made. Even so, however, the clamor of 3.5 billion people had been the noisiest it had been since the beginning of the world. And now, the earth had returned to the silence that had existed before the arrival of the human race. Or more properly, to the same silence that had existed several tens of thousands of years ago.