This scratches the surface of an unmatched essay by Harold Goddard called Atomic Peace. Both pieces seek a virus (or a chain reaction) that could end war, but Adams falls short. Indeed, education is not enough and can actually encourage war. Although I'm hesitant to omit even a piece of Goddard's essay, I've reproduced excerpts from the beginning below.
The Atomic Bomb is the outstanding fact of our time-- not just as a scientific triumph and military weapon but as a symbol of what our so-called civilization has brought us to. As Emerson remarked, "Civilization crowed too soon." How shall we meet the menace of modern scientific war-- not the menace of atomic attack but the menace of the bomb itself, of the ugly fact of its existence? The fission of the atom is an intellectual achievement of the first order.... we can understand what Emerson meant when he declared that "pure intellect is the pure devil". Over the entrance to Plato's Academy at Athens was the inscription, "Let none ignorant of geometry enter here." If I could choose a similar inscription for the entrance of all the colleges and universities int he world today I would pick that great sentence of Montaigne's "All other knowledge is hurtful to him who has not the science of honesty and goodness."
WANTED: a force for good as potent as the atom bomb is for evil, a force, preferably, to complete the analogy, that produces a vast result out of a chain reaction of little forces each of apparently negligible amount-- a result, however, not of disintegration and destruction, but of integration and creation.
It its widest manifestation life itself as revealed in the process of organic growth is such a force and it is not chance that the bomb came into existence for the express purpose of defeating that process, as if it recognized in it its natural and opposite enemy. For what is cellular proliferation but a chain reaction of millions of tiny forces each contributing to a tremendously disproportionate total result of integration and creation? This chain reaction of the tiny into the mighty may be observed, though on a smaller scale, in the mental and spiritual life of man even more convincingly and often at a more rapid tempo than in his physical development....
Goddard goes on to explain this mental and spiritual force in detail. I simply cannot do his work justice with with excerpts from the rest of the essay. You'll have to go read it. It may be the most important thing you ever read.
It was republished in a collection of essays in 1971, so imagine it's still under copyright. Hrm.... I'll take a look at what the collection says when I get home.
The Atomic Bomb is the outstanding fact of our time-- not just as a scientific triumph and military weapon but as a symbol of what our so-called civilization has brought us to. As Emerson remarked, "Civilization crowed too soon." How shall we meet the menace of modern scientific war-- not the menace of atomic attack but the menace of the bomb itself, of the ugly fact of its existence? The fission of the atom is an intellectual achievement of the first order.... we can understand what Emerson meant when he declared that "pure intellect is the pure devil". Over the entrance to Plato's Academy at Athens was the inscription, "Let none ignorant of geometry enter here." If I could choose a similar inscription for the entrance of all the colleges and universities int he world today I would pick that great sentence of Montaigne's "All other knowledge is hurtful to him who has not the science of honesty and goodness."
WANTED: a force for good as potent as the atom bomb is for evil, a force, preferably, to complete the analogy, that produces a vast result out of a chain reaction of little forces each of apparently negligible amount-- a result, however, not of disintegration and destruction, but of integration and creation.
It its widest manifestation life itself as revealed in the process of organic growth is such a force and it is not chance that the bomb came into existence for the express purpose of defeating that process, as if it recognized in it its natural and opposite enemy. For what is cellular proliferation but a chain reaction of millions of tiny forces each contributing to a tremendously disproportionate total result of integration and creation? This chain reaction of the tiny into the mighty may be observed, though on a smaller scale, in the mental and spiritual life of man even more convincingly and often at a more rapid tempo than in his physical development....
Goddard goes on to explain this mental and spiritual force in detail. I simply cannot do his work justice with with excerpts from the rest of the essay. You'll have to go read it. It may be the most important thing you ever read.