The Inner Limits of Mankind Part 3

THE INNER LIMITS OF MANKIND

HERETICAL REFLECTIONS ON TODAY’S VALUES, CULTURE AND POLITICS

ERVIN LASZLO

One World Publications 1989

PART III

Chapter 3: Cultural Limits. The Atrophy of Positive Vision

Where there is no vision the people perish.

(Proverbs 29:18)

A tale of the power of positive vision

In ancient Arabia, Mamun inherited a city on the verge of ruin. The young prince set forth a new code of law, but disputes multiplied, the citizens were impoverished and traders avoided the city. He brought together foreign craftsmen to secretly make am image of a surpassingly beautiful city that he concealed behind a curtain in the chief mosque. He then issued an edict that every traveler and trader must first be brought to this mosque to worship, and be pledged to silence. The image was revealed to them and it became evident to the citizens that they had seen a noble vision of which they could not or dared not speak. The citizens demanded to see it also – which was what Mamun had desired: they were admitted one by one. Now it began to appear that the ruler of the artists was more successful than the ruler of the lawmakers; for, changed by the sight of the image, the people carried our their business in peace. Order, gaiety, and wealth returned to the place. And in its rebuilding, the city which Mamun inherited resembled the city of his dream.
It is hard to think of a theme more inspiring than the exploration of the possibilities open to mankind for building a world worthy of the finest attainments of civilization. If the creative genius still available in our cultures would focus on positive visions of the future of humanity, and explore the myriad aspects of personal, social and technical entailments and possibilities connected with them, they would leave tales of Persian princes as far behind as a supersonic jet leaves behind the horse and buggy.
We have all but forgotten the importance and power of positive ideas and images of the future. We look upon the few remaining visionaries of a better world as naïve optimists or harmless fools. Our societies suffer from an overdose of pragmatism combined with generalized but vague pessimism.
In England during the last century, as in most other centers of the Western world, it was considered fashionable and ‘modern’ to deprecate all ideals of human society, even those of the great liberal thinkers of the centuries immediately preceding.
Following World War II, a period of rapid economic growth made debate on ideals and visions seem abstract and unnecessary.
Business-as-usual appeared bright enough for most people and societies to replace theoretical visions of the future with concern about how to make more money and gain more influence today.
But there was also a series of shock waves from the Soviet ‘sputnik’ to environmental problems to frightening projections of world population growth and the world oil crisis. The mood of pragmatic optimism vanished, and there was nothing to replace it with.
In 1972 the first computerized ‘model’ of the world made its appearance, created by MIT at the instigation of the Club of Rome. This machine-generated future turned out to be catastrophic for mankind.
The investigators concluded that, ‘If the present growth trends continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.’
Fear brought about changes (although not necessarily improvements) in policies. Powerful economic and financial interests took measures to consolidate their operations, cutting risks and attempting to create – sometimes through dubious means – more favorable business environments.
Governments and intellectuals of developing countries increased their demands for industrialization and economic growth.
Large corporations invested in their own long-range forecasting systems and governments did the same. This resulted in more forecasts, but not more consensus.
Faced with a future turned suddenly unpredictable, mankind became defensive. Ideals and visions of more just and humane futures quickly evaporated. Only a handful of social scientists and humanists raised warning cries.
The atrophy of positive visions of the future still constrains the creative adaptability of societies.

The challenge to contemporary cultures

Reorienting our vision

If mankind is to stop operating reactively and become truly proactive it needs a good compass with ideals and visions which set the standards by which we direct our steps and which can be immediately and fully attained.
The great ideals of the world religions and the ethics and world views of more recent times embody perennial values that should be reaffirmed and divorced from the often questionable political practices, encrusted with obsolete practices and ancillary beliefs, associated with them.
To those who look to secular values and ideals, liberal democracy offers a vision of a free society where all may do as best suits their wishes and temperament, and where each can find the best chances of happiness.
Until future generations come up with adequate new visions of life and society, our existing ideals will have to serve as guides to create enough employment and equity to ensure the survival and prosperity of all individuals and protect their collective diversity, rights and liberties.

And revising our practices

The rigid application of outdated practices becomes an artificial and entirely unnecessary source of conflict.
Respect for the differing views of others, and a readiness to learn from them are among the most difficult human virtues; they are, however, among the most needed as people tend to weigh the ideals of others on a scale which has their own values as the counterweight.
The biblical warning – “Where there is no vision the people perish” – needs to be modified; the people perish where there is no vision, but also where there is no positive vision and where there is no timely and adequate revision.

Chapter 4: Political Limits: The Crisis of International Political Will

The international community now talks increasingly about world problems, but it is not getting down to really doing anything about them. The crisis of international political will is the most urgent and serious crisis of all.
These problems do not take care of themselves; they can be vanquished only through what U Thant called a global partnership of all nations and peoples in the pursuit of mutually beneficial global goals, such as peace and security, adequate nourishment for all populations, accessible and sustainable flows of energies and resources, a sustainable environment and more equity among nations and populations rich and poor.
Scores of declarations and resolutions specify the goals and objectives and arrays of plans of action describe the ways and means of achieving them.

The world problematique

Security

Security – more exactly, insecurity – has become a global problem. Rooted in the logic of a bygone age – the logic of national sovereignty – nation states have no eternal friends, only eternal interests and their security must be assured through force of arms and by threats of aggression and deterrence.
Rich states need their arms to preserve and enhance their privileges, and poor states to gain access to them; each nation needs its arms to assure its own perceived interests.
Insecurity, being a global problem, has only global solutions. This means a coordinated, simultaneous change in all national security policies. Neither rich nor poor nations will beat their swords into ploughshares if they have to do it alone – they may as well beat them into shovels to dig their own graves.
If and when the logic changes, and the commonality of interests is perceived, national governments can make real progress towards ending the arms race, halting nuclear proliferation, controlling trade in conventional weapons and creating a collective peace keeping machinery with adequate capabilities of arbitration and sufficient powers of enforcement.
Nothing prevents the achievement of these goals but the will of national governments and their supporters.

Food

The problem of food and nourishment is not simply an aspect of the population problem: adequate food could be made available to as many as 8 -12 billion people if policies were coordinated to ensure proper production and distribution.
If grain were universally accessible, the current world grain produce could provide well over the 200 kilo subsistence minimum for every man, woman and child in the world. But it is not – and more than a thousand million people subsist on the edge of starvation.
However, the yield of world food production does not reach all people equitably; its distribution and forms of production are skewed in favour of the rich.
Grain is fed to cattle which wastes it at a ratio of 7:1 in converting it into expensive beef; wastefully produced meat is fed to household pets and much grain is lost in transport and storage.
Developing countries need the most appropriate new agricultural technologies, a better system of land ownership, more and cheaper energies and fertilizers, a world food bank for emergency supplies and stable prices, while the rich should reform their dietary habits and the international system needs to be restructured.

Energy and resources

The 1972-73 oil crisis was but a polite dress rehearsal compared to the forthcoming crisis if there are not alternative energy supplies available when available oil supplies begin to fall off or cannot match increasing world demand.
It is questionable whether mankind is mature enough to handle plutonium without mishaps, organized aggression and maverick terrorism. Abundant and universally accessible energy sources that exploit water flow, wind currents, the oceans and the sun could be economically competitive as the technology exists. Planning for the exploitation of these sources must start now.

Economic development

Cutting waste and improving efficiency would not, in themselves, overcome the major problem of world development: poverty, and the gap between rich and poor nations.
Underdevelopment, protectionism, dependence, debt, population growth, and the ‘brain drain’ combine to rob the developing countries of the opportunities for real economic growth.
Currently one-fifth of the world’s population generates four-fifths of the global GNP – and owns four-fifths of the world’s wealth.
It is not charity that is needed but more long-lasting forms of assistance.

The environment

Underlying the global problems of security, food, development, and energy and material resources there is the problem of the environment.
This problem is basic: without a liveable environment there can be no security, no food, no use and consumption of energy and resources, and of course no development.
Yet we seem to be seriously impairing the environment, reducing its liveability at the same time as we put greater demands on it.
It is not simply that humanity is more numerous today than ever before in history; it is also that within this century our demands for food, for energy and other resources and for a host of often unnecessary goods and technologies have increased beyond reason and expectation.
We not only extract and consume vast amounts of metals, minerals and fuel and use up more of the biosphere’s forest cover and other vegetation than nature, forestry or agriculture can regenerate, we also pollute air, water and land.
We inject into the living fabric of the biosphere an estimated 70,000 different chemical compounds. Their impact, combined with that of deforestation, overcropping, overgrazing and overfishing, is usually serious and sometimes irreversible.
The changes we are wreaking in the world climate provide especially clear evidence of the seriousness of the problem.
The years 1980, 1981 and 1983 were the hottest on record. Greenhouse gases have accumulated to such an extent that if we were to continue to emit them at the projected rate, the earth’s average air temperature would rise by some 5°C.
A 10°C cooling of the average global temperature spells an Ice Age. A mere 2.8°C cooling changed the prehistoric climate, depriving the dinosaurs of their essential wetlands. The current warming trend would produce equally dramatic consequences.
It seems very likely that an increase of 1.5°C in the global heat balance would recreate the climate of the first millennium AD, when Nordic Vikings settled a land of green vegetation named Greenland.
At the 2.8°C warm-up level, the North Sea would take on many of the characteristics of the Mediterranean, with balmy waters and palm-lined shores.
While some cold spots would become vacation paradises, global agriculture would suffer.
The US Midwest would be transformed into a dustbowl, monsoons would miss the Indian subcontinent and irrigate the deserts of Central Asia, while tropical Africa would dry out as water fell on the sands of the Sahara.
Some of the polar ice-caps would melt and raise the level of the oceans, flooding coastal areas and submerging many of the world’s major cities.
The changed weight distribution in the oceans would tip the earth, slightly shifting the angle of its rotation. This would be enough to change the location of the polar regions and increase the havoc with the weather.
Not only agriculture but the very basis of human life would be severely impaired.
The continued pollution of the atmosphere would also create health hazards. Skin cancer would become widespread as the protective ozone shield became thinned by the accumulation of chlorofluorocarbons, allowing dangerous levels of ultraviolet radiation to penetrate the atmosphere.
At least two billion people still use fuel-wood for heating and cooking; some 80% of the world’s rapidly vanishing forests end up in smoke.
Slash and burn agriculture in the poor regions is responsible for another 50% of the tropical rain forests we lose each year.
Our negative impact on the environment ha complex roots; it is connected with values and lifestyles as well as with concrete economic realities.
Our impact could be brought under control if the rich became less wasteful, the poor became less destitute, and both rich and poor became a good deal wiser.
None of this is impossible, but bringing it about would call for a global partnership in spreading the relevant insight, the necessary techniques and technologies and, of course, the required portion of global wealth.
As of now, the nations and governments of the world do not have the political will to achieve such objectives. The leap from proclamation of concern to concerted action is yet to be accomplished.