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Around the end of January 1968, a friend suggested that I write an article on the role of the intelligentsia in today's world. The idea appealed to me, and soon I was writing at the Installation from 7 p.m. to midnight. My wife Klava was ambivalent: she knew full well the potential consequences for us and our three children, but she allowed me complete freedom of action. By this time her health was beginning to deteriorate.
My essay laid a theoretical foundation for virtually the entire range of my future public activities. I wanted to alert readers to the grave perils threatening the human race -- thermonuclear extinction, ecological catastrophe, famine, an uncontrolled population explosion, alienation and dogmatic distortion of our conception of reality.
I argued for convergence, for a rapprochement of the socialist and capitalist systems that could eliminate or substantially reduce these dangers. Economic, social and ideological convergence should bring about a scientifically governed, democratic, pluralistic society free of intolerance and dogmatism, a humanitarian society that would care for the earth and its future and would embody the positive features of both systems.
I wrote about thermonuclear missiles -- their enormous destructive power, their relatively low cost, the difficulty of defending against them. I wrote about the crimes of Stalinism and the need to expose them fully and the vital importance of freedom of opinion and democracy. I stressed the value of progress but warned that it must be scientifically managed and not left to chance. I outlined a program for mankind's future; my vision was somewhat Utopian, but I remain convinced that the exercise was worthwhile.
Later on, life -- and Lusia ((Elena Bonner, his second wife)) -- would teach me to pay more attention to individual victims of injustice, and a further step followed: recognition that human rights and an open society are fundamental to international confidence, security and progress.
I prefaced Reflections with an epigraph taken from Goethe's Faust:
Of freedom and of life he only is deserving
Who every day must conquer them anew.
The heroic romanticism of these lines echoes my own sense of life as both wonderful and tragic. Another aspect of the truth that complements Goethe's metaphor is contained in these lines by the postwar poet Alexander Mezhirov,
I lie in a trench under fire.
A man enters his home, from the cold.
Mezhirov understands that heroic exploits are not ends in themselves but are worthwhile only insofar as they enable other people to lead normal, peaceful lives. Not everyone need spend time in the trenches. The meaning of life is life itself: the daily routine that demands its own unobtrusive heroism. Goethe's lines are often read as an imperative call to revolutionary struggle, but there is nothing peremptory or fanatical in them once they are stripped of their poetic imagery. Reflections rejected all extremes, the intransigence of revolutionaries and reactionaries alike. It called for compromise and for progress moderated by enlightened conservatism and caution. Marx notwithstanding, evolution is a better "locomotive of history" than revolution: the "battle" I had in mind was nonviolent.
"For God's Sake, Don't Do That"