Shock and Awe

Sunday, Jan. 16, 2005 By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
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Our betters religious and??secular??like instruct us on the virtues of universal brotherhood. But it is hard enough to overcome selfishness; harder still to overcome ties of family and tribe and nation. How are we to feel for all humanity?

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Our efforts to institutionalize universalism have been disappointing. The U.N., intended to be the parliament of man, has instead become a cockpit of rivalries that often sharpen, not lessen, feelings of national and racial hostility. Our other famous attempt, the Olympics, has also fallen short. The opening and closing ceremonies can be sweet celebrations of our oneness. But sandwiched in between are two weeks of doping, cheating, clawing and jousting to earn you a flag-draped victory lap and gold to bring home to the tribe.

These noble failures suggest that self-conscious attempts at creating community simply don't work. Our divisions are too profound. True expressions of our common humanity are more spontaneous, if infrequent. And they generally emerge in response to two kinds of phenomena: disaster and discovery.

It is a particular kind of disaster, however, that moves us to recognize global solidarity. Epidemics are simply too slow. And localized catastrophes, such as the mudslides and floods in the U.S. last week or even the Iranian earthquake of 2003, are usually too parochial in their victimization to catch the attention of all humanity. It takes a multicontinental cataclysm--instantaneous, catastrophic, widely spread--to shake the world from its self-absorption. The tsunami that destroyed thousands of lives from Sumatra to Somalia engendered an instant, near-universal outpouring of concern, shared grief and charitable giving. Ronald Reagan once startled the U.N. by suggesting in a speech that humanity would unite and forget its petty divisions if we were attacked from outer space. This elicited widespread head scratching, but the point was unassailable: external threats do exactly that--not little green men but forces closer to home, forces we often assume we have tamed.

Comes the tsunami and we realize to our horror that Nature has merely to shrug, to flick a finger, as it were, and hundreds of thousands of us are broken, entire nations thrown into chaos and grief. It is the ultimate reminder of our common fragility, of just how precarious our species' ridiculously brief sojourn on this earth really is.

The other, more ennobling reminder of our common humanity is scientific discovery, which reveals not our vulnerability but our genius, not our weakness but our glory. The most universal of these inspirations have come, literally, from outer space, from our few distant glimpses of the uniqueness of our tiny earthly habitat and the brilliance of the species that could contrive to get up, out and beyond it. Indeed, the birth of our modern "whole earth" consciousness can be traced to a single act of exploration: Apollo 8's circumnavigation of the moon and the astonishing photo--Earthrise, that vision of a little blue planet--that it sent back.