© 1982 The New York Times Company
June 13, 1982

Avoiding the Big Bang
By Kurt Vonnegut

''Death Before Dishonor'' was the motto of several military formations during the Civil War - on both sides. It may be the motto of the 82d Airborne Division right now. A motto like that made a certain amount of sense, I suppose, when military death was what happened to the soldier on the right or the left of you - or in front of you - or in back of you. But military death now can easily mean the death of everything, including the blue-footed boobies of the Galapagos Islands.

The webbed feet of those birds really are the brightest blue. When two blue-footed boobies begin a courtship, the show each other what beautiful, bright blue feet they have.

If you go to the Galapagos Islands, and you see all the strange creatures, you are bound to think what Charles Darwin thought when he went there: How much time Nature has in which to accomplish simply anything. If we desolate this planet, Nature can get life going again. All it takes is a few million years or so, the wink of an eye to Nature.

Only humankind is running out of time. My guess is that we will not disarm, even though we should, and that we really will blow up everything by and by. History shows that human beings are vicious enough to commit every imaginable atrocity, including the construction of factories whose only purpose was to kill people and burn them up.

It may be that we were put here on Earth to blow the place to smithereens. We may be Nature's way of creating new galaxies. We may be programmed to improve and improve our weapons, and to believe that death is better than dishonor.

And then, one day, as disarmament rallies are being held all over the planet, ka-blooey! A new Milky Way is born.

Perhaps we should be adoring instead of loathing our hydrogen bombs. They could be the eggs for new galaxies.

What can save us? Divine intervention, certainly. We might pray to be rescued from our inventiveness. But the inventiveness which we so regret now may also be giving us, along with the rockets and warheads, the means to achieve what has hitherto been an impossibility, the unity of mankind. I am talking mainly about television sets.

Even in my own lifetime, it used to be necessary for a young soldier to get into the fighting before he became disillusioned about war. His parents back home were equally ignorant, and believed him to be slaying monsters. But now, thanks to modern communications, the people of every industrialized nation are nauseated by war by the time they are 10 years old. America's first generation of television viewers has gone to war and come home again -and we have never seen veterans like them before.

What makes the Vietnam veterans so somehow spooky? We could almost describe them as being ''unwholesomely mature.'' They have never had illusions about war. They are the first soldiers in history who knew even in childhood, from having heard and seen so many pictures of actual and restaged battles, that war is meaningless butchery of ordinary people like themselves.

It used to be that veterans could shock their parents when they came home, as Ernest Hemingway did, by announcing that everything about war was repulsive and stupid and dehumanizing. But the parents of our Vietnam veterans were disillusioned about war, too, many of them from having seen it first hand, before their children ever went overseas. Thanks to modern communications, Americans of all ages were dead sick of war even before we went into Vietnam.

Thanks to modern communications, the poor, unlucky young people from the Soviet Union, now killing and dying in Afghanistan, were dead sick of war before they ever got there.

Thanks to modern communications, the same must be true of the poor, unlucky young people from Argentina and Britain now killing and dying in the Falkland Islands.

When I was a boy, it was unusual for an American, or a person of any nationality, to know much about foreigners. Those who did were specialists - diplomats, explorers, journalists, anthropologists. And they usually knew a lot about just a few groups of foreigners - Eskimos, maybe, or Arabs, or what have you. To them, as to the schoolchildren of Indianapolis, large areas of the globe were terra incognita.

Now look what has happened. Thanks to modern communications, we have seen sights and heard sounds from virtually every square mile of the land mass on this planet. Millions of us have actually visited more exotic places than had many explorers during my childhood.

So we now know for certain that there are no potential human enemies anywhere who are anything but human beings almost exactly like ourselves. They need food. How amazing. They love their children. How amazing. They obey their leaders. How amazing. They think like their neighbors. How amazing.

Thanks to modern communications, we now have something we never had before: reason to mourn deeply the death or wounding of any human being on any side in any war.

It was because of rotten communications, of malicious, racist ignorance that we were able to celebrate the killing of almost all the inhabitants in Hiroshima 37 years ago. We thought they were vermin. They thought we were vermin. They would have clapped their little yellow hands with glee, and grinned with their crooked buck teeth, if they could have incinerated everybody in Kansas City, say.

Thanks to how much the people of the world now know about all the other people of the world, the fun of killing enemies has lost its zing. It has so lost its zing that no sane citizen of the Soviet Union would feel anything but horror if his country were to kill practically everybody in New York and Chicago and San Francisco. Killing enemies has so lost its zing that no sane citizen of the United States would feel anything but horror if our country were to kill practically everybody in Moscow and Leningrad and Kiev.

Or in Nagasaki, for that matter. We have often heard it said that people would have to change, or we would go on having world wars. I bring you good news: People have changed. We aren't so ignorant and bloodthirsty anymore.

I dreamed last night of our descendants a thousand years from now. If there are still human beings on Earth, every one of those human beings will be descended from us - and from everyone who has chosen to reproduce.

In my dream, our descendants are numerous. Some of them are rich, some poor, some likeable, some insufferable. I ask them how humanity, against all odds, managed to keep going for another millennium. They tell me that they and their ancestors did it by preferring life over death for themselves and others at every opportunity, even at the expense of being dishonored. They endure all sorts of insults and humiliations and disappointments without committing suicide or murder. They are also the people who do the insulting and humiliating and disappointing.

I endear myself to them by suggesting a motto they might like to put on their belt buckles or tee shirts. I give them a quotation from that great 19th century moralist and robber baron Jim Fisk.

Jim Fisk uttered his famous words after a particularly disgraceful episode having to do with the Erie Railroad. Fisk had no choice but to find himself contemptible. He thought this over, and then he shrugged and said what we all must learn to say, if we want to go on living much longer: ''Nothing is lost save honor.''

Kurt Vonnegut, the novelist, delivered these remarks, excerpted here, in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

© 1982 The New York Times Company

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