Interlude I: Why did he do it?
Note: This entry is one in a series that tells a part of the story of General George Lee Butler. Quotations in this piece will be cited to the page numbers where the material appears in Volume II of George Lee Butler’s memoir, Uncommon Cause: A Life at Odds with Convention, Outskirts Press (2016).
After more than thirty years serving in the United States Air Force, George Lee Butler became the Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command. That put him in operational control of the thousands of strategic nuclear weapons being stored around the country at the time and of the bombers on bases and missiles in underground silos that had been built to deliver them.
In 1994, he retired from the Air Force.
In 1996, he was invited to give a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. In it, he declared to an astonished audience that he now believed that nuclear weapons should never be used and should finally be eliminated.
How had this change happened?
It had not happened while he was in the Air Force. There is no reason to doubt that if General Butler had received from the President the order to execute our general nuclear war plan while he was the Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command, he would have executed the order.
Nor, after he retired, had it happened all-at-once, in an experience like the one St. Paul is reported to have had on the road to Damascus. Before that moment he had been a devoted persecutor of Christians.
In December 1996, on his way in to give the speech at the National Press Club that put him in the spotlight as now arguing for the elimination of nuclear weapons, now retired General Butler offered a kind of explanation of how it had happened. As he was being escorted to the banquet room to deliver the talk, an Air Force officer he knew stepped directly into his path. “General Butler,” he said, “I hope you understand the consequences of what you are about to do. Are you not concerned that you will give comfort to our enemies and insult the men and women you used to command?”
“Yes, of course I am concerned, on both counts,” Butler replied. “I thought long and hard before taking this course. And, in the end, I decided to follow the dictates of my conscience. Now if you will excuse me, I have a speech to give.” 244
Some months later, in a speech he gave in New Zealand to the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, he expanded somewhat on this account of what had dictated the change.
After laying out to the group just how deeply involved he had been in many aspects of the nuclear enterprise, he said,
Ultimately, as I examined my life’s journey, as the lessons of decades of intimate involvement [in the nuclear enterprise] took greater hold on my intellect and my conscience, I came to a set of deeply unsettling judgments [and finally to the conclusion] that the threat to use nuclear weapons is indefensible.” 263
Again “conscience,” but now also “intellect.”
In New Zealand, Butler also said,
I cannot overstate the difficulty this [argument I am now making] poses for me. No one who ever entered the nuclear arena left it with a fuller understanding of its complexity or greater respect for those with whom I served its purposes. I struggle constantly with the task of articulating the evolution of my convictions without denigrating or diminishing the motives and sacrifice of countless colleagues with whom I lived the drama of the Cold War. I ask them and you to appreciate that my purpose is not to accuse, but to assess, to understand and to propound the forces that birthed the grotesque excesses and hazards of the nuclear age. For me that assessment meant first coming to grips with my experience and then coming to terms with my conscience. 262
So the exercise of “intellect” and “analysis” was a crucial part of the process. But “conscience” was still the kicker.
Butler had reached this point, then, without having become ashamed of his actions while in the Air Force or accusatory of those who still served believing, as he had all those years, that they were and are protecting the country (even in a world where the Soviet Union had ceased to exist) from mortal danger.
Where does conscience come from? That’s a hard one. Conscience can be real, as it was for Butler, but it is not a thing. Not something that can be bought or taught in the usual sense. It is not something that can be got from a manual. Not a lesson that can be learned. It might be possible to teach someone how to pretend to have a conscience. But to have one? I doubt it.
Are we born with one? Or without one? That doesn’t seem likely either. Having a conscience is not mere innocence. Or naivete. It seems in some important way to be the product of experience. But only of experience that is experienced in a certain way. An open, receptive way.
Certain kinds of experience can prevent or impede the development of a conscience, that’s clear enough. Abuse in childhood. Chronic stress. Psychopaths, who by definition don’t have a conscience, seem almost always to have been made, not born. Just how they are made is not understood. Not every abused child becomes a psychopath. We don’t understand either why not.
Is conscience a luxury? A product of privilege? Of insulation from experience? Those who pride themselves on being hard-headed realists may take that position. But I don’t see how that could be the case. First of all, many “privileged” people seem not to have a conscience, or much of one. There is some evidence that “privilege” impedes the development of conscience as much as childhood abuse.
Many who grew up in other-than-privileged circumstances do have one. George Lee Butler grew up poor as a undersized kid in rural Mississippi with a father who was often absent because he was in the military.
Just what is conscience, anyway, when you do have it? What does it do?
The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates (as given to us by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato) claimed to have a daimon that he could trust. Daimon can be translated as “tutelary spirit” and yes, “demon” is a word that comes from the same root. Socrates claimed, however, that his daimon told him only what not to do, not what he should do. In The Apology, he said it “always forbids me to do something which I am going to do, but never commands me to do anything.” Our idea of “conscience” shares that feature, I’d say.
The idea of a “sense of duty” can be distinguished from “having a conscience” in this respect. “Duty” connotes an obligation to act in particular ways. Interestingly, one person’s sense of duty may carry an obligation to execute an order to deliver nuclear bombs while another person’s sense of duty may carry an obligation to oppose that action in every way one can find.
Conscience, however, does not carry an obligation to act. It does not come from a rule book, nor is it a plan of action. It is better, I think, to see it as emerging from a disposition, a kind of listening, an openness to the whole of experience.
Conscience does not arise from argument or dogma. It may arrive in something like a “still, small, voice.” The phrase “still small voice” is found in the Christian Bible in 1 Kings 19:11-13. Modern translations have it as “the sound of a low whisper” (ESV), “a gentle whisper” (NIV, NLT), “a soft whisper” (CSB), or “the sound of a gentle blowing” (NASB). The King James version reads:
And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord. And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. And it was so, when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped his face in his mantle, and went out, and stood in the entering in of the cave. And, behold, there came a voice unto him, and said, What doest thou here, Elijah? (1 Kings 19:11-13).
Notice that the voice that came unto Elijah does not command an action. It asks a question.
To figure out what we may need to do in a given set circumstances, we likely need the other part of our brains, the part that supports what Butler in New Zealand called the “intellect” and the actions of “analysis” and “assessment.”1
But it seems clear that “analysis” and “assessment” cannot get us all the way to where we may be delivered by “conscience,” by the “still small voice.” In fact, it can block the way. Blind us to what we are missing.
In New Zealand, Butler quoted a famous statement attributed to Albert Einstein, said to have been made by him shortly after the end of World War II. That is, shortly after the first (and so far only) actual use of nuclear weapons in war:
[T]he unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. 258
And just what are the new “modes of thinking” needed? Einstein never said. It may not be possible to say in so many words. Clearly no argument, no rule book, no dogma will suffice to get us there. Openness to the whole of experience won’t either, by itself. But it does seem to be a sine qua non.
Some readers may recognize echoes in the argument here from the astonishing work of Iain McGilchrist, especially his The Matter with Things (2 vols.), Perspectiva Press, 2021.