September 11th, Hiroshima, Auschwitz, and Hans G. Furth

My grandfather, the late Hans G. Furth, left this world with an unpublished manuscript entitled Society Faces Extinction. It was fated, prophetic, that this would be his last book; who could write a book about society's extinction and survive it? The threat posed in the manuscript was too great even for its author.

Society Faces Extinction is not only the most broadly applicable and understandable of my grandfather's books, it is also the culmination, the apotheosis, the result of his intellectual life. A Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria at age 17, he lost most of his family to the death camps. Images of gaunt, expressionless captives in illfitting striped shirts and pants now seem as far from our well-indulged society as the gallows of the 18th century and the pyres of the 16th, but the reality is threateningly near. Many still live who saw the greatest crimes of human history perpetrated before their horrified eyes, against their very families. After a life in academia, my grandfather brought his studies back to the watershed of his young life, looking as dispassionately as possible at the passions of the war that engulfed his generation. In Society Faces Extinction, Dr. Furth lays out the dual apocalyptic threats of the 20th century in grim psychological terms. Auschwitz represents the ability of humanity to will its own extinction. Hiroshima gave inexorable power to that will. Shudder, reader, at the thought of that will and that power united in one man!

After Hiroshima, humanity held its breath. Two giants faced off across two oceans, each possessed of the power to begin the awful apocalypse. The power of self-preservation, however, won the Cold War, and humanity let out its breath in jubilant celebrations, tearing down the Berlin Wall and rejoicing that this terrible enmity had abated. Philosophers predicted a new world order and an end to history: humanity had faced up to its moment of truth. Stepping to the brink of the abyss, doubly armed with power and will, we turned away and saved our lives.

The New World Order ended on the second Tuesday in September in the heart of New York City. That day, those hours of awful suspense that seemed to drag into weeks of sleepless agony for so many, have become an emblem as enduring as Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Auschwitz is the will for extinction. Hiroshima is the ability. September 11th is the death of self-preservation.

The Cold War had united the weapons of extinction with an ideology almost as virulent and bellicose as Naziism. Yet the union of these two produced the unexpected ascendancy of self-preservation as the chief law of man, surpassing the will to dominance (which logically leads to will to extinction) that had been the engine of all prior history. Had we reached the limits of our own will to dominate? Did we, weak men, love our lives more than power?

September 11th brought a chilling new element to this equation of destiny, and immediately, utterly destroyed the desire for self-preservation as the last, best hope of mankind. Instead of emerging victorious from the dark battle of will for our own survival, we have merely glimpsed the sky for a moment, the twinkling of history's eye.

As we gazed into that blue sky, we saw four planes and nineteen men, who plunged our world into another tunnel of fate. Where and how we shall emerge is for our children, perhaps, or for their children.