A Copernican world

By Emery Reves (from "The Anatomy of Peace", June 1945)

Part 3

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The dramatic and strange events between the two world wars could be just as well described from the point of view of any other nation, large or small. From Tokyo or Warsaw, from Riga or Rome, from Prague or Budapest, each picture will be entirely different and, from the fixed national point of observation, it will always be indisputably and unchallengeably correct. And the citizens of every country will be at all times convinced - and rightly so - of the infallibility of their views and the objectivity of their conclusions.

It is surely obvious that agreement, or common understanding between different nations, basing their relations on such a primitive method of judgment, is an absolute impossibility. A picture of the world pieced together like a mosaic from its various national components is a picture that never and under no circumstances can have any relation to reality, unless we deny that such a thing as reality exists.

The world and history cannot be as they appear to the different nations, unless we disavow objectively, reason and scientific methods of research.

But if we believe that man is, to a certain degree, different from the animal and that he is endowed with a capacity for phenomenological thinking, then the time has come to realise that our inherited method of observation in political and social matters is childishly primitive, hopelessly inadequate and thoroughly wrong. If we want to try to create at least the beginning of orderly relations between nations, we must try to arrive at a more scientific, more objective method of observation, without which we shall never be able to see social and political problems as they really are, nor to perceive their incidence. And without a correct diagnosis of the disease, there is no hope for a cure.

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Our political and social thinking today is passing through a revolutionary era very much the same as were astronomy and abstract science during the Renaissance.

For more than fourteen centuries, the geocentric theory of the universe, formulated and laid down by Ptolemy in the second century AD in Alexandria, was paramount in the scientific world. According to this theory - as explained in Ptolemy's famous Almagest, the culmination of Greek astronomy - the earth was the centre of the universe around which revolved the sun, the moon and all the stars.

No matter how primitive such a conception of the universe appears to us today, it remained unchallenged and unchallengeable for fourteen hundred years. All possible experimentation and observation before the sixteenth century AD confirmed the Ptolemaic system as a rock of indisputable scientific truth.

Strangely enough, Greek scientists several centuries before Ptolemy had a concept of the universe far more advanced and nearer to our modern knowledge. As far back as the sixth century BC, Pythagoras visualised the earth and the universe as being spherical in shape. One of his later disciples, Aristarchus of Samos, in the third century BC, in his hypothesis deposed the earth as the centre of the universe, and declared it to be a "planet", like the many other celestial bodies. This system, called the Pythagorean system, plainly anticipated the Copernican hypothesis nineteen centuries later. It was probably not completely developed by Pythagoras himself, but it had been known several hundred years before Ptolemy.

Yet for almost two thousand years following the first insight into the real construction and functioning of the universe, people were convinced that all the celestial bodies revolved around the earth, which was the fixed centre of the universe.

The geocentric system worked perfectly as long as it could solve all the problems which presented themselves under the then existing methods of observation. Ptolemy himself appears to have sensed and suspected the transitory character of his system, as in his Syntaxis he laid down the general principle that in seeking to explain phenomena, we should adopt the simplest possible hypothesis, provided it is not contradicted in any important respect by observation.

The geocentric theory of Ptolemy was perfectly in harmony with the religious dogma concerning the story of the creation of the universe as told in the Bible and it became the doctrine approved by the Church.

But in fifteenth century Italy, under the light of new learning and observation and under the impetus of the revolt against the dictatorship of accepted philosophical scientific doctrines, there came a radical change. Several thinkers, particularly one Dominico Maria Novara denounced the Ptolemaic system and began spreading "Pythagorean opinions" - as they were called - about the universe. Around 1500, these old, yet revolutionary ideas, attracted and deeply interested Copernicus while he was studying at the universities of Bologna and Padua.

So new circumstances, new methods of observation, new needs, led to the birth of the Copernican system, one of the most gigantic steps of scientific progress in human history.

Through the Copernican system, man's outlook on the universe changed fundamentally. In this new concept the earth itself rotated. It was no longer a stable point. Our globe, just like the other planets, revolved in space around the sun and the new theory of planetary movement was founded on the principle of relativity of motion.

This heliocentric theory of Copernicus was by no means perfect. It solved many problems the Ptolemaic system could not solve, but certain outstanding anomalies compromised its harmonious working. It is also well known that for thirty-five years Copernicus did not dare publicly proclaim his discovery. When he finally decided to publish it (in the year of his death) he called his theory "Hypothesis" to forestall the wrath of the Church and public opinion.

The later experience of Galileo proved how justified were the fears of Copernicus. The heliocentric theory was not only condemned by the church authorities as heresy; it was rejected by the greatest astronomers and other scientists of the time. Indeed, it was impossible to prove Copernicus' hypothesis by the then existing methods of observation. Only later, through the work of Kepler and Galileo, was the heliocentric theory put on a solid scientific foundation.

At its inception, the Copernican system was nothing more than a daring speculation. But it opened a new world, pointed out the road to science and prompted new and more refined methods of observation which finally led to general acceptance of the revolutionary but correct outlook on the universe.

During the first half of the twentieth century, in so far as our political, social and economic thinking is concerned, we find ourselves in the same dead-end road as Copernicus during the jubilee of 1500.

We are living in a geocentric world of nation states. We look upon economic, social and political problems as "national" problems. No matter in which country we live, the centre of our political universe is our own nation. In our outlook, the immovable point around which all the other nations, all the problems and events outside our nation, the rest of the world, supposedly rotate, is our nation.

This is our basic and fundamental dogma.

According to this nation-centric conception of world affairs, we can solve political, economic and social problems within our nation, the fixed, immutable centre, in one way - through law and government. And in the circumambient world around us, in our relations with the peoples of other nations, these same problems should be treated by other means - by "policy" and "diplomacy".

According to this nation-centric conception of world affairs, the political, social and economic relations between man and man living within a sovereign national unit, and these very same relationships between man and man living in separate sovereign national units are qualitatively different and require two qualitatively different methods of handling.

For many centuries such an approach was unchallenged and unchallengeable. It served to solve current problems in a satisfactory way and the existing methods of production, distribution, of communications and of interchange among the nations did not necessitate nor justify the formulation and acceptance of a different outlook. But the scientific and technological developments achieved by the industrial revolution in one century have about in our political outlook and in our approach to political and social phenomena a change as inevitable and imperative as the Renaissance brought about in our philosophical outlook.

The developments creating that need are revolutionary and without parallel in human history. In one century, the population of this earth has been more than trebled. Since the very beginning of recorded history, for ten thousand years, communication was based on animal power. During the American and French revolutions, transportation was scarcely faster than it had been under the Pharaohs, at the time of Buddha or of the Incas. And then, after a static aeon of ten thousand years, transportation changed within a single short century from animal power to the steam and electric railroad, the internal combustion automobile and the six hundred-mile-per-hour jet propulsion plane.

After thousands of years of primitive, rural existence in which all human beings, with few exceptions, were exhausted from producing with their own hands just enough food, clothing and shelter for sheer survival, in less than one century the population of the entire Western world has become consumers of mass-production commodities.

The change created by industrialism is so revolutionary, so profound, that it is without parallel in the history of any civilisation. Despite Spengler, it is unique.

In this new and as, yet unexplored era we find ourselves completely helpless, equipped with the inadequate, primitive political and social notions inherited from the pre-industrialised world. Slowly we are coming to realise that none of our accepted theories is satisfactory to cope with the disturbing and complex problems of today.

We realise that although we can have all the machinery we need, we cannot solve the problems of production. We realise that in spite of the far-flung and tremendous scope of transportation, we cannot prevent famine and starvation in many places, while there is abundance elsewhere on the earth. We realise that although hundreds of millions are desperately in need of food and industrial products, we cannot prevent mass unemployment. We realise that even though we have mined more gold than ever before, we cannot stabilise currency. We realise that while every modern country needs raw materials that other countries have, and produces goods which other countries need, we have been unable to organise a satisfactory method of exchange. We realise that although the overwhelming majority of all people hate violence and long to live in peace, we cannot prevent recurrent and increasingly devastating world wars. We knew that armaments must lead to wars between nations, but we have learned the bitter truth that disarmament also leads to war.

In this confusion and chaos in which civilised nations are struggling with utter helplessness, we are bound to arrive at the inevitable conclusion that the cause of this hopelessness and helplessness lies not in the outer world but in ourselves. Not in the problems we have to solve but in the hypotheses with which we approach their solutions.

Our political and social conceptions are Ptolemaic.

The world in which we live is Copernican.

Our Ptolemaic political conceptions in a Copernican industrial world are bankrupt. Latest observations on ever-changing conditions have made our Ptolemaic approach utterly ridiculous and out-of-date. We still believe, in each one of the seventy or eighty sovereign states, that our "nation" is the immovable centre around which the world revolves.

There is not the slightest hope that we can possibly solve any of the vital problems of our generation until we rise above dogmatic nation-centric conceptions and realise that, in order to understand the political, economic and social problems of this highly integrated and industrialised world, we have to shift our standpoint and see all the nations and national matters in motion, in their interrelated functions, rotating according to the same laws without any fixed points created by our own imagination for our own convenience.

The Anatomy of Peace

This text is taken from the introduction to "The Anatomy of Peace", published in June 1945. In that book, Emery Reves makes the daring statement that there is only one cause for every war ever fought. And he points out the one and only condition that makes peaceful human relations possible. For the first time, a clearly-reasoned, practical method for attaining the peace we all want is put down in terms that everyone can understand.

In a book destined to startle by the very nature of its simply stated truths, Emery Reves analyses the cause of war and the nature of peace. He finds that the only condition that creates war is the unregulated relationship between sovereign states; and he does not believe that a three-power alliance, the San Francisco league or an international police force will work. Peace will exist, he declares, only when absolute national sovereignty, which causes anarchy in international relations. gives way to a universal legal order, and the decisions made at Dumbarton Oaks, Yalta and San Francisco ignore this basic principle. Reasoning brilliantly, Emery Reves elucidates the principles by which peace can be saved.

On its first publication, in June 1945, the sale of this book was only a steady one, interest being restricted to advanced opinion. Then on 6 August 1945, at 10.45 am, President Truman startled the world with news of the atom bomb raid on Hiroshima.

Suddenly it occurred to a good many of those who had read The Anatomy of Peace that it was the answer the whole world was seeking. To those "in the know", it suddenly became urgent business to tell as many people as possible as quickly as possible to drop everything and read this book.

Emery Reves studied in the Universities of Berlin and Paris, and received his degree of Doctor of Political Economy from the University of Zurich. In 1930, he founded and became president of Cooperation Press Service and Cooperation Publishing Company, based in Paris, London and New York City.

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