Page 22 - The Drucker Lectures

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How Is Human Existence Possible?

1943

here has never been a century of Western history so far re-
Tmoved from an awareness of the tragic as that which be-
queathed to us two world wars. It has trained all of us to suppress
the tragic, to shut our eyes to it, to deny its existence.
Not quite 200 years ago—in 1755 to be exact—the death of
15,000 men in the Lisbon earthquake was enough to bring down
the structure of traditional Christian belief in Europe. The con-
temporaries could not make sense of it. They could not reconcile
this horror with the concept of an all-merciful God. And they
could not see any answer to a catastrophe of such magnitude.
Now, we daily learn of slaughter and destruction of vastly greater
numbers, of whole peoples being starved or exterminated, of
whole cities being leveled overnight. And it is far more difficult
to explain these man-made catastrophes in terms of our nine-
teenth-century rationality than it was for the eighteenth century
to explain the earthquake of Lisbon in the terms of the rational-
ity of eighteenth-century Christianity. Yet I do not think that
those contemporary catastrophes have shaken the optimism of
these thousands of committees that are dedicated to the belief
that permanent peace and prosperity will inevitably issue from
this war. Sure, they are aware of the facts and are duly outraged
by them. But they refuse to see them as catastrophes.

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