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This symposium, entitled Psychoanalysis and Moral Values, is being conducted under the sponsorship of ACAAP and has been arranged by the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis in response to a most urgent need.
All decent feeling and thinking people who are intently looking for, propounding and fostering solutions to the world's ills come to one conclusion. They all agree that the answer is not in a wall of material protection, in the amassing of armaments alone. Material power alone will not give a rational security, but an illusory safety. From such implements of force, such death-dealing weapons, there is safety neither for military groups nor civilian populations.
Raymond Swing, in his article “Prescription for Survival,” in the February 18, 1950, issue of The Nation, stated that the greatest revolution of our times is not that of atomic fission but “the revolution caused by the fact that there no longer exists effective primary military defense of civilian population and areas against destruction from a foreign enemy.” Mr. Swing pleads for world government on the basis of human and humane moral codes of governance for individual and group benefit. He suggests that America take the lead in attempting to work for world law even though the Russians may reject such a program. For if we say, “‘The effort is not worth making’ … it is to declare that we are absolved from seeking safety for ourselves and all mankind since we have no advance assurance that the Russians will match us in morality and wisdom. If that is what we have come to, the hydrogen bomb may well be our measure as a moral people.”
This last statement of Mr. Swing's is a question and a challenge. Is the hydrogen bomb our measure as a moral people? Is our moral toughness, our clarity on moral issues and our allegiance to them so low that we must have assurance of success before we try? Is our spirit so crushed, our mentality so diseased that we can only think of safety in terms of the defensive